Some time after the operation Banjo left the hospital. Latnah volunteered to put him up until he felt strong enough to rough it.

Ray had suggested to Banjo that when he came out of the hospital he should go straight to the American consulate to inquire for mail, as that was the address he had given his aunt when he wrote to her. When Banjo presented himself at the consulate he found two letters from his aunt, and one contained a ten-dollar note neatly folded in a bit of newspaper. He was also given ten francs and sent to a Seaman’s Hotel, where his board-and-lodge would be paid by the consulate until a boat was found for his repatriation. He was not subjected to any questioning as to how he had come to Marseilles or how long he had been there.

Banjo changed the ten dollars and gave the boys of his group ten francs a piece. To Ray he gave fifty and kept a hundred for himself. They celebrated the evening big. Banjo, Ray, Malty, Latnah, Dengel, and some others who had recently landed on the beach; a stripling of a mulatto mess-boy, who was also put up in Banjo’s hotel, waiting for a ship; a Central American from one of those complicated little Tangier-like places, who was working all the consulates of the Latin republics as well as the British and American; an Egyptian black and three British West Africans. Bugsy was still missing, and Goosey was not with the gang.

Goosey had left the hospital before Banjo, but his illness had scared him into careful retirement. He had entered the hospital coughing and feverish, and had come out quite emaciated, like a skeleton with his nigger-brown suit hanging loose on him. The consul had put him in the same hotel where he sent Banjo, but Goosey did not get all that without being lectured for his obstinacy in quitting his ship when he was warned not to.

The gang fed at an Italian feeding-place. There was a grand pouring of red wine, plenty of black and green olives, pickles, and tiny salt fishes and saucisson, macaroni and tomato sauce, and veal à la Milanaise. From feeding they went to the African Café, with the roses of the Ditch in their wake. Music was supplied by a tinpanny pianola and half of the night was jazzed away to its noise. All through the feverish coughing-spitting jazzing there was restless movement of feet between Boody Lane and the bistro, and when the hot tumult was falling note over note from its high crescendo, the jazzers pairing off, Latnah did not find her Banjo. Chère Blanche had not vamped him this time, however, as his emotions were as indifferent to her now as to Latnah. Banjo was stuck in another hole of the Ditch.

Banjo bought a secondhand instrument at a bargain. He got it at one-half the amount that he owed at the restaurant where his original companion was held. He redeemed his clothes from the Mont de Piété. He made sweet music for the boys again, but the old spontaneous, carefree happiness was not in the new gang.

For one thing, Banjo was no longer a homeless drifter. He was safe. He had no need to worry about his keep. He would soon be sent back home. It was splendid that he had a few francs to help the boys during the cold days when ships were scarce and panhandling was worthless. But he could not share his eats at the hotel with them. If he ate outside, he could not let one of them have the benefit of his hotel meal. And he could not take any of them up to his room. When the mistral blew the freezing Atlantic gusts into the Mediterranean and it was too shivering cold in the box car for the boys, Latnah would sneak some of them up to her box on the roof and Ray allowed others the floor of his chambre noire, which he shared with the Egyptian who worked as a watchman on the docks. But Banjo could not help.

One afternoon Goosey, with Ray, Latnah, and Malty, was sitting on the terrace before his hotel when a tall, slim black boy with straight jet-shiny hair came up to them. He looked like a Somali. The boy was one of the gang with whom Goosey and Bugsy had gone to work in the upcountry factory. He spoke to Goosey and told him that Bugsy was very ill in a lodging-house in one of the alleys back from Boody Lane. They had both come back just that week to the Ditch. He had told Bugsy to go to the hospital, but he had refused, saying he didn’t like a hospital for he was afraid that they might make away with him there. The boy had been getting milk for him, which was all that he would take. But he had talked all night long the night before. The boy had been to the docks for a half a day’s work, and when he went home in the afternoon he had found Bugsy very quiet and strange. He thought he ought to be compelled to go to the hospital, and so he had come to ask Goosey’s help.

The boys and Latnah started off for the Ditch. On the way they picked up Banjo. Bugsy was lying in one of those little chambres noires that are among the distinctive human contributions to Mediterranean cities of blessed sunlight and beautiful sea and blue sky, where the tourists go for health and play. You find them in Marseilles in all the third and fourth class hotels. Rooms built, it would seem, particularly to exclude the sun. Rooms without windows open to the air and only a transom hole giving on the corridor. If you are too poor to take a room with a window, you might be able to afford one of these. They are suffocating enough in the center of the city, but in the Ditch, where the great army of dock workers live, and where the air is always humid and the alleys are never free of garbage, they are fetid dens.

The good sun of the Midi was splendid outside, but it was gloomy night in Bugsy’s room. Banjo turned on the thin electric light and there he was on the dirty bed. Strange and quiet he was indeed, as the boy had said. He lay there like a macabre etched by the diabolic hand of Goya. With clenched fists and eyes wide open, as if he were going to spring at an antagonist, even if he were God himself. He finished with life as he had lived it, a belligerent, hard-fisted black boy.

Latnah tried to close his eyes, but only one would stay shut, and so she tied a handkerchief over them. He had no clothes but the rags he had died in. The boys contributed things to bury him. Goosey gave his blue Charleston pants, Ray an extra blue coat that he had, Banjo a shirt and socks. The boys got together at the African Café, and subscribed the cost of the funeral⁠—fifth class or a class near to it. The cost was only one hundred and twenty francs, including the priest.

Latnah wanted a wreath. Ray objected. Why a wreath? It was nonsense and wasteful. Latnah insisted that it would look lovely to give what was once Bugsy a wreath of flowers. Why not a wreath? Why not, indeed? thought Ray. And he collected the money for a wreath. Nonsense and waste he had said. But nonsense was often pretty. Who shall gauge or determine the true spirit that lies between the proudest or humblest outward show and the inward feeling? And he really had no rooted objection to waste. Why not waste money on a tradition of flowers as on wine or non-utilitarian ornaments? Think of the fortunes the seamen wasted in the Ditch and the sums the beach boys bummed and spent for the pleasure of drinking, when there were even poorer people than they who might have used that money for necessary nourishment. No, he did not resent waste. He always loved to read of millionaires spending gorgeously. There was something sublime about waste. It was the grand gesture that made life awesome and wonderful. There was a magical intelligence in it that stirred his poetic mind. Perhaps more waste would diminish stupidity, which was to him the most intolerable thing about human existence.

So Bugsy had his wreath of flowers and the boys got together behind his hearse and marched to the cemetery. American, West Indian, Senegalese, British West African and East African blacks and mulattoes, a goodly gang of them, and one little brown woman.

A few days after Bugsy’s funeral Ray moved to a nice little hotel in the center of the town. He had a small, cheerful room, very clean, and a window overlooking a garden through which the morning sun poured. Just then he was beginning to do some of the scenes of the Ditch and he felt lifted out of himself with contentment to sit by a sunny open window and work and hear sparrows chirping in the garden below. It was a solitary delight of the spirit, different from and unrelated to the animal joy he felt when in company with the boys in the Ditch.

He had arrived at this state by one of those gestures that happened to spur him on at irregular periods when thought was in abeyance and he was mindlessly vegetating. A temperamental friend in Paris had sent him another life stimulant by the hand of a young American, who had decided to stay in Marseilles for awhile, and had persuaded Ray to move to a respectable quarter where they could keep in touch with each other.⁠ ⁠…

Ray had made the little move, although feeling that it would have made small difference if he had finished with the town in the Ditch. He would have to make a bigger move before long. Where, he didn’t know. Some point in Africa, perhaps, or back to Paris, or across the pond, following Banjo.

Soon Banjo and Goosey would be leaving. Two white fellows had been sent back and it was their turn next. Goosey was still rather weak, and reluctant and sad about returning. But Banjo was worried about nothing. He stayed on in the hotel and was happy to be taken care of. He ate and drank a plenty, bought wine for the gang with his extra francs, told big stories, and played the banjo.

One morning the Egyptian with whom Ray had roomed invited Goosey, Banjo, and Malty to take lunch on the ship of which he was watchman. It was an American ship and the steward was a Negro. The Egyptian had told the steward about the boys and the steward had said he would like to have them down to lunch. Goosey declined the invitation, saying that he did not feel up to walking down to the docks.

Banjo and Malty went. In the Joliette Square they met Dengel and a British West African and invited them along. But when they got to the ship an officer refused to let them go aboard and posted a man to see that they did not. The officer said to the white seaman: “Don’t let any of them niggers on here.” Calling the boys “niggers” made them angry.

The West African cried out to the officer that he would show him what “niggers” could do if he came on the dock. “We know all you Americans hate Negroes,” he said, “but you’re not in America. This is France.”

The boys stood on the pier, frankly contemptuous. They had money among them, and as Banjo could go back to his hotel to eat, they did not really care about the ship’s food. In the meantime, unknown to them, the officer had sent a man to inform the police. They had just moved from the ship and were sauntering farther down the dock when two policemen on bicycles overtook them. The boys were taken to the police station on the Quai du Lazaret and given a merciless beating. Each of them was taken separately into a room by the policemen, knocked down and kicked. Then they were turned loose.

Banjo took the matter humorously. Sitting in a café that evening with Ray and the young American, whose name was Crosby, he said: “Ise lame all ovah. They didn’t do nothing if they didn’t bruise us with knuckle and boot heel, but they know their business so damn good you’d have to use one a them magicfying glasses to find the marks.

“They got us jest where they wanted, so we couldn’t do nothing. And they dusted us, pardner. Fist and feet they dusted us good and proper and didn’t miss no part but the bottom of our feets.”

Ray and young Crosby thought that the case should be reported. It seemed incredible to them that the boys should be so brutally treated without any charge against them, without a hearing, when they were innocent of any illegal act. Was it because they were friendless black drifters?

“I ain’t doing nothing at all about it, nor noneathem others, either,” Banjo said. “I done told you that time with Lonesome Blue, pardner, that them official affair ain’t nevah no good to get mixed up with. I jes keeps away from them. Especially the pohlice. I do mah stuff, but Ise always looking out foh them in every white man’s country and keeping a long ways off from them, ’causen them is all alike. We fellahs done drink up a mess a good wine down them docks without paying anything for it. If we ketch a li’l’ hell this day⁠—well, you can’t get away with the stuff all the time.”

“Get away with the stuff nothing,” said Ray. “You fellows didn’t do anything.”

“But we have, though, pardner. Wese done a lot and didn’t get caught.”

Often Ray had heard the Senegalese say that the police treated them like cattle because they considered them mere blacks. But he had no proof that that was a general attitude. Nearly all the Negroes lived in the Ditch or contiguous to it, and amused themselves there. And as the life of the Ditch was so bloody brutal, the police could not be gentle. Every week there were rafles, and every ordinary person in the Ditch was searched, white, brown, and black. The touts and girls and bistro-keepers always knew in advance when a rafle would take place. Therefore the only people that were taken in the combing were newcomers to the Ditch, mostly seamen who carried blackjacks or revolvers to protect themselves against the touts. Ray had become used to being searched in the Ditch. The police were never polite, but he didn’t expect them to be. With the identity-card regulation and the frequent rafles the French police had unlimited power of interference with the individual and Ray had arrived at the conclusion that he had really had more individual liberty under the law in the Puritan-ridden Anglo-Saxon countries than in the land of “Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité.”

That evening he went with Crosby to see the second half of the Crystal Palace show. Afterward they looked in on two boîtes de nuit, which they did not like, and then went to a big café, where they sat on comfortable cushioned benches and talked. Crosby was younger than Ray. A young poet who had the fanatical faith of youth in the magic of poetry, he argued with Ray about his marked absorption in prose. Ray contended that it seemed a natural process to him that youth should pass from the colorful magic of poetry to the architectural rhythm of prose.

They parted after midnight. Crosby’s hotel lay west of the Canebière and Ray’s to the east. The east was more respectable in Marseilles than the west. The mail had arrived in the late evening, bringing the Paris morning newspapers. Ray took his way to his respectable quarter in his most respectable rags, armed with respectability⁠—in the form of the Paris editions of the New York Herald Tribune, the British Daily Mail and Le Journal.

He was thinking about Banjo and the boys and of their beating-up and philosophically wondering if the boys had not done something to deserve the beating⁠—something that Banjo had not revealed in telling about it⁠—when passing two policemen in the street leading to his hotel (one leaning against the door of a house and the other standing carelessly on the pavement), he was suddenly grabbed without warning. The policemen started to search him roughly and thoroughly.

Ray protested. What was it and what did they want of him? he demanded. He had his papers and would show them immediately. This he was proceeding to do when the bigger policeman stunned him with a blow of his fist on the back of the neck. He forthwith arrested Ray, handcuffed him, and took him to the police station in the bawdy quarter. The handcuff was a special chain kind that could be tightened and loosened at will, and the policeman took great pleasure in torturing Ray on the way to the jail. There the two police wrote out and signed a charge against him. Ray also made a signed statement. The police quarters stank much more than the dirtiest den of the Ditch with that odor peculiar to jails. Ray was locked up all night and in the early morning was told to go.

As to the why of his arrest and brutal treatment Ray could obtain no answer. He went home and wrote a statement of his case to the prefect. A couple of days later he received a notice to call at police headquarters. Crosby, who was particularly worked up over the incident, accompanied him. He was a Western-state lad of radical persuasion. His great-grandfather had been a frontiersman, an Indian-fighter in the struggle to win the West for civilization. His mother, a Southern woman, came from one of the proudest of the slave states.

At police headquarters Ray repeated his statement to an investigating inspector, who confronted him with the two policemen. They contradicted his story, asserting that Ray had tried to obstruct them in doing their duty, but he maintained his statement and further accused them of lying.

The inspector was naturally partial to his men. He read the statements again and then asked Ray what he wanted. Ray hesitated, and Crosby said, “Justice.” The inspector turned and said savagely he was not talking to him. The word “justice” had been the first to suggest itself to Ray, but as he did not believe in that prostitute lady who is courted and caressed by every civilized tout, he had not pronounced her name.

The inspector then admitted that if Ray prosecuted the case on the statement he had made, the policeman who had struck him would lose his job. Did he want to prosecute or not? Crosby was nudging him to prosecute, but Ray declared that what he really wanted was to know why he had been beaten and arrested. Was it because he was black? The inspector replied that the policemen had made a mistake, owing to the fact that all the Negroes in Marseilles were criminals.

“Oh!” Ray said, this was the first time he had heard that Doctor Bougrat was a Negro. The police clerk who had taken Ray’s statement hid a grin behind his palm.

(The Doctor Bougrat case had provided the excitable Provençal city with one of its most notorious crime sensations. The man had been a soldier during the war and was seriously wounded in the head. He was a drug addict and a hard drinker. One day the body of a cashier who had disappeared with an unimportant sum of money was found hidden in his office in a state of decomposition. Doctor Bougrat declared that the man had died accidentally after an injection. He was indicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment and banishment. The case had particularly impressed Ray from the way the public reacted to it. The newspapers tried the doctor and called him a murderer and a thief and charged him with every criminal activity before the case went to the courts. And on the day when the crime was reconstituted, according to French procedure, in the doctor’s office, an enormous crowd gathered in the street and along the Canebière prolongée and the army of touts and prostitutes who lived by the plunder of tourists and seamen joined their voices to that of the respectability of the city in calling for Bougrat’s blood: “Lynch him! Lynch him!”)

As he accepted his dismissal and started to go, Ray turned to the inspector and said that when he was a boy the French book that had moved him most was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Javert, typifying the police, had been particularly fascinating to him, and judging from the inspector’s statement about the Negroes of Marseilles the French police had not changed since those days. But had grown a little worse.

Crosby’s sense of injustice was strong. He resented the inspector’s insulting manner toward him and he reproached Ray for not following up the case.

“But I didn’t want to,” protested Ray. “Do you think I want to mess my time up fooling with the stinking law, just for a policeman to lose his job? Twenty-five francs a day and a family! That most sacred of French things⁠—a family on twenty-five francs a day. Can you wonder they are what they are? When I wrote to the prefect I didn’t write for revenge, but for knowledge.”

“But what good is that?” said Crosby. “You only wasted your time, since you had a chance to prosecute and didn’t. You haven’t gained anything.”

“Haven’t I? Don’t you think it was revenge enough for me that you, an American, half-Southerner, had to protest to a French official about French injustice to a Negro? The French are never tired of proclaiming themselves the most civilized people in the world. They think they understand Negroes, because they don’t discriminate against us in their bordels. They imagine that Negroes like them. But Senghor, the Senegalese, told me that the French were the most calculatingly cruel of all the Europeans in Africa.

“You heard what the inspector said in explanation. To me the policeman’s fist was just a perfect expression of the official attitude toward Negroes. Why should I prosecute him?”

“I think you’ve got a little Jesus stuff in you,” Crosby said.

“I don’t have any Jesus stuff, nor the stuff of any other Jew⁠—Moses or Jeremiah or St. Paul or Rothschild.”

“You don’t like Jews!”

“Not any more than I do the Christians. You mustn’t forget that the Christians were made by the Jews. Christian morality is the natural child of Jewish morality. When I think of the Jews’ special contribution as a people to the world I always think of them as obsessed by the idea of morality. As far as I have been able to think it out the colored races are the special victims of biblical morality⁠—Christian morality. Especially the race to which I belong.

“I don’t think I loathe anything more than the morality of the Christians. It is false, treacherous, hypocritical. I know that, for I myself have been a victim of it in your white world, and the conclusion I draw from it is that the world needs to get rid of false moralities and cultivate decent manners⁠—not society manners, but man-to-man decency and tolerance.

“So⁠—if I were to follow any of the civilized peoples, it wouldn’t be the Jews or the Christians or the Indians. I would rather go to the Chinese⁠—to Confucius.”

“That’s a long way,” remarked Crosby.