In the evening Ray and Crosby had dinner together. Afterward they sauntered along the Canebière. The metropolitan newspapers had arrived and a few proletarian enthusiasts were marching up and down the street, crying: “Humanité! Humanité!” Ray bought one, saying: “Let me try contact with the printed animal. It may be better than the natural.”

They went into a café where Crosby had made a few student acquaintances. The waiter came over to serve them and he said familiarly to Ray, “How is everything, Joseph?”

“Don’t call me Joseph,” said Ray. “I’m not a damned servant like you.”

Crosby, shocked, looked incredibly at Ray, as if his ears had belied him.

“What shall I call you, then?” asked the waiter, still pleasantly and using the familiar French tu.

“Don’t tutoyer me, either,” Ray said. “I don’t know you and I don’t want to. You speak to me as you do to any other stranger.”

The waiter turned sullenly away.

“Good God! Why were you so hard on him?” said Crosby. “He only meant to be friendly.”

“Not in the way you think,” replied Ray. “ ‘Joseph’ is the common French name for male servants in general, just as ‘George’ is for Negro servants in America. He meant to be friendly, yes, the way a child is with a dog.”

“But the way you jumped on him, saying you were not a servant like him. I was astonished⁠ ⁠… for you have worked as a servant yourself.”

“That’s no reason why I should be sentimental about stupid servants, Crosby. In fact, my experience puts me in a better position than you to understand and discriminate. I worked as a menial because I was obliged to, and I gave good service and was treated fairly enough without being either familiar or sycophantic. I was not a menial born like this fellow. Some people are born menial-minded and they are not limited to any one class of society. In America there are good darkies who find their paradise in domestic service. But there are Negroes who do it strictly from necessity and they are as different from the good darkies and your Swedish and Irish servant cows as I am from this slimy garçon. I think you’re a sentimental radical, Crosby⁠—”

“I thought you were a proletarian,” he cut in.

“Sure. That’s my politics. But you never have asked me why I prefer Proletarian to Liberal, Democrat or Conservative.”

“Well?”

“Because I hate the proletarian spawn of civilization. They are ugly, stupid, unthinking, degraded, full of vicious prejudices, which any demagogue can play upon to turn them into a hell-raising mob at any time. As a black man I have always been up against them, and I became a revolutionist because I have not only suffered with them, but have been victimized by them⁠—just like my race.”

“But you have no real faith in the proletariat,” said Crosby. “Then what can you expect from proletarian politics?”

“I’ve never confused faith with politics. I should like to see the indecent horde get its chance at the privileged things of life, so that decency might find some place among them. I am not fond of any kind of hogs, but I prefer to see the well-fed ones feeding out of a well-filled trough than the razorbacks rooting all over the place. That’s why I am against all those who are fighting to keep the razorbacks from getting fat and are no better doing it than fat swine themselves.”

“If that’s how you feel, your opponents may consider it their duty to protect the pearls from the razorbacks.”

“Pearls are accidental things. You don’t find one in every oyster and there may be many among the razorbacks that the fat swine are trampling on while they pretend to be protecting the few in their hands.”

“Your being politically proletarian from hatred’s got me stumped,” said Crosby. “I thought you loved the proletariat.”

“I love life⁠—when it shows lovable aspects.”

“The docks, for example, you seem so fond of them. And that day I went down with you I heard the white dockers tutoyer you and you didn’t mind.”

“Oh, that was different! That is the dockers’ natural language. They take me as one of them and don’t worry about distinctions. But this garçon does all the time. He has one way of talking to the girls who sit here a long time to sell themselves and pay him a fat tip for it; he has another for me and another for his respectable clients. He tutoyer me just like the herd of petty officials of the departments⁠—the post office, the hospital, the identity-card bureau, even in the stores. When I ask them not to tutoyer me, they become angry cats and want to scratch. You see, that’s their way with the Senegalese. They do it in the manner of the Southerners who ‘nigger’ the blacks in Dixie. In England all the common working-people say ‘darky,’ but it is friendly; you feel that, and don’t mind. But all the educated people say ‘nigger’ and I loathe them.”

“But perhaps they, too, don’t know better.”

“Well, they ought to. What’s all this modern education for, then? Is it to teach something of real decency in dealing with all kinds and classes of people or is it just to provide polite catchwords for the most-favored classes to use among themselves?”

The unpleasant incidents of the week, all crowding together upon him, had got Ray into an inside-boiling mood. Crosby rather irritated him because he could not readily comprehend his reactions. His white face and the privileges of his white inheritance in a white universe⁠—all fenced him off from that goblin world that did its mocking dance around Ray.

Crosby felt, naively, that in Europe, where there was no problem of color, Ray would be happier than in America. Ray refused to accept the idea of the Negro simply as a “problem.” All of life was a problem. White people, like red and brown people, had their problems. And of the highest importance was the problem of the individual, from which some people thought they could escape by joining movements. That was perhaps the cause of that fanatical virus in many social movements that frightened away sane-thinking minds.

To Ray the Negro was one significant and challenging aspect of the human life of the world as a whole. A certain school of Negro intellectuals had contributed their best to the “problem” by presenting the race wearing a veil with sanctimonious Selahs. There was never any presentation more ludicrous. From his experience, it was white people who were the great wearers of veils, shadowing their lives and the lives of other peoples by them. Negroes were too fond of the sunny open ways of living, to hide behind any kind of veil. If the Negro had to be defined, there was every reason to define him as a challenge rather than a “problem” to Western civilization.

As they were talking, a student acquaintance joined them at their table. The newcomer had shown a friendly regard for Ray. He had been in Paris and had heard black jazz players, and as he had liked the jazz musicians and Josephine Baker, whom he had seen at the Folies Bergère, he wanted also to like Ray. Upon seeing Humanité in Ray’s hand, he suddenly bristled and slammed down the Action Française on the table before him.

For the first time Ray noticed in the lapel of the student’s coat a fleur-de-lys button.

“Why do you read that?” he demanded. “It isn’t French! Why don’t you read a French newspaper?”

“Such as? Humanité is printed in French.”

“But it is not French, all the same.”

“I suppose you’d like to choose my French reading for me. Do you want me to read the Action Française?”

“I didn’t say that, but you might at least read a newspaper that is really French, like the Petit Parisien or Le Journal.”

“I hate Le Journal,” said Ray. “The best thing in it is the Contes du Jour, but I am tired of all of them smirking over a woman deceiving her husband or bourgeois lover with a gigolo. That has no meaning after Maupassant.”

“Well, you’d do better to read the Action Française than Humanité. You’re literary, and the editor, Daudet, is our greatest living littérateur. He writes the best and wittiest things about French writers, living and dead. If you read the Action Française you’ll be keeping in touch with the best things in French literature.”

“Perhaps,” said Ray. “I really read the Action Française⁠—sometimes, but I can’t stand the paper when your Daudet makes political propaganda over the suicide or murder of his fifteen-year-old boy. That makes your Action Française an obscene thing for me. You know, although the Anglo-Saxon countries are so hypocritical, no editor or political leader could do that in England or America and put it over on his public. Maybe it is because the Anglo-Saxon publics are less intelligent and more sentimental than the French. Anyway, you couldn’t play party politics with them on such a morbid issue.”

“But you think that way because you don’t understand French politics,” said the student. “The boy’s murder was a political act. The police murdered him. You don’t know the French police.”

“Yes, I do, too,” said Ray, “and I think they are the rottenest in the whole world.”

“Don’t talk like that about our police,” said the student. “It is not nice. Why do you say that?”

Crosby laughed and Ray said, “Because that’s just how I feel.”

“I don’t think you appreciate the benefits of French civilization,” said the student, angrily. “We’re especially tolerant to colored people. We treat them better than the Anglo-Saxon nations because we are the most civilized nation in the world.”

“You use the same language that a hundred-per-cent American would use to me, with a little difference in words and emphasis,” replied Ray. “Let me say that for me there is no such animal as a civilized nation. I believe there are a few decent minds in every nation, more or less, yet I wouldn’t put them all through the test of Sodom and Gomorrah to find out. It is better to believe! You’re right when you say you’re more tolerant toward colored people in your country than the Anglo-Saxons in theirs. But from what I have seen of the attitude of this town toward Negroes and Arabs, I don’t know how it would be if you Europeans had a large colored population to handle in Europe. I hope to God you won’t ever face that. You Europeans have a wonderful record in Africa and I suppose you’re all proud of it. The only thing lacking is that the United States should have a hand in it too. And I hope she will. In spite of her traditional attitude toward black folks she may become as embarrassing to Europe in Africa as she is in China.”

The student abruptly left the table, and Ray felt happy that he had angered him. He was just crammed full of the much-touted benefits of French civilization⁠—especially for colored people. His acquaintances, from workman to student, always parroted that, although he missed the true spirit of it in their attitudes. The cocotte was strikingly conscious of it, newspapers were full of it, and certain clever writers insisted that Paris was the paradise of the Aframerican.

Ray looked deeper than the noise for the truth, and what he really found was a fundamental contempt for black people quite as pronounced as in the Anglo-Saxon lands. The common idea of the Negro did not differ from that of the civilized world in general. There was, if anything, an unveiled condescension in it that was gall to a Negro who wanted to live his life free of the demoralizing effect of being pitied and patronized. Here, like anywhere (as the police inspector had so clearly intimated by his declaration) one black villain made all black villains as one black tout made all black touts, one black nigger made all black niggers, and one black failure made all black failures.

Exceptions were not considered. Ray would have considered the white world an utterly contemptible thing from its attitude toward the black if it were not for his principle of stressing the exception above the average. The white mind in general approached the black world from exactly the opposite angle. He often pondered if an intellectual life could have been possible for him without that principle to support it.

Supposing he were to react to French or any other civilization solely from the faits divers columns of the newspapers. For one crazy month of the past summer he had read of nothing but crazy crimes: young couple dispatching their grandparents with a hatchet for a meager inheritance; mother holding her children under water until they were drowned; father seducing daughter at the time of her first communion; murderer shooting up street; and all the sordid crimes d’amour et de la passion that were really crimes d’argent.

It could have been easy for him, a black spectator of the drama, to seize upon and gloat over these things as evidences of the true nature of this civilization if he had allowed them to warp and rob him of his primitive sense of comparative values and his instinct to see through superficial appearances to the strange and profound variations of human life.

But life was more wonderful to savor than to indict. Leave the indictment to the little moral creatures of civilized justice. They had their little daggers sharpened for the victims who were white, and when they had the good luck to find a black victim, they made a club of him to slay the whole Negro race.

Ray had been specially entertained by one of these slaughterings, resulting from a terrible crime committed by a crazy Senegalese soldier and for which the entire black race was haled before the bar of public opinion.

It was authorized by a radical paper supporting the radical government under whose regime the West African Negroes were being torn out of their native soil, wrenched away from their families and shipped to Europe to get acquainted with the arts of war and the disease of syphilis. It was such an amusing revelation of civilized logic that Ray had preserved it, especially as he was in tacit agreement with the thesis while loathing the manner of its presentation:

“Un tirailleur sénégalais, pris d’on ne sait quel vertigo, a fait, à Toulon, un affreux carnage.

“On s’évertue maintenant à savoir par quelle suite de circonstances ce noir a pu fracturer un coffre et s’emparer des cartouches avec lesquelles il a accompli le massacre.

“Qu’on le sache, soit. Mais la question me semble ailleurs. Il faudrait peut-être se mettre la main sur le cœur et se demander s’il est bien prudent d’apprendre à des primitifs à se servir d’un fusil.

“Je n’ignore pas qu’il y a de belles exceptions; qu’il y a des ‘nègres’ députés, avocats, professeurs et que l’un d’eux a même obtenu le prix Goncourt. Mais la majorité de ces ‘indigènes’ à peau noire sont de grands enfants auxquels les subtilités de notre morale échappent autant que les subtilités de notre langue. La plus dangereuse de ces subtilités est celle-ci:

“Tu tueras des êtres humains en certaines circonstances que nous appelons guerre.

“Mais tu seras châtié si tu tues en dehors de ces circonstances.

“Le Sénégalais Yssima appartient à une catégorie humaine où il est d’usage, paraît-il, quand on doit mourir de ne pas mourir seul. Le point d’honneur consiste à en ‘expédier’ le plus possible avant d’être soi-même expédié.

“Si cela est vrai, on voit où peuvent conduire certaines blagues de chambrées. Pour tout dire franchement, il n’est pas prudent de faire des soldats avec des hommes dont l’âme contient encore des replis inexplorés et pour qui notre civilisation est un vin trop fort. Sous les bananiers originels, Yssima était sans doute un brave noir, en parfaite harmonie avec la morale de sa race et les lois de la nature. Transplanté, déraciné, il est devenue un fou sanguinaire.

“Je ne veux tirer de cet horrible fait divers aucune conclusion. Je dis que de semblables aventures (qui ne sont d’ailleurs pas isolées) devraient nous faire réfléchir sérieusement⁠ ⁠…”

Suddenly and strangely Ray felt a hard hatred for Crosby that seemed inexplicable, and yet was not. He had fallen into a mood in which the whole white world of civilization appeared like an obscene phenomenon. And Crosby sitting there by him was a freak because he was not indecent. He was too fine a type, something too real for Ray’s frame of mind. His presence became unbearable.

“I am going back to the Ditch,” Ray said. He frowned at Crosby and left him without any word of explanation.

He went to his hotel and got his bag and returned to the Ditch. It was moving out of the Ditch that caused the policeman to take me for a criminal nosing round the quarter of respectability, thought Ray. Better had I stayed down here with Banjo and the boys where the white bastards thought I ought to be. They always searched me like a criminal down there, but they never beat me up. I moved away from there and got myself messed up. It was all through Crosby persuading me to go respectable. Whenever I get mixed up with nice people I always catch it. Better to know nice people, if I must know them, in books, and me for living my own vagabond life. Maybe I would have felt better if the knuckle-dusting frogs had beaten me up by mistake down here. He felt that somebody ought to be blamed, ought to be hated, for what had happened to him, and he worked himself up against Crosby.