Ray returned to the Ditch, and at the African Bar Banjo was treating Malty, Ginger, Dengel, and some West African boys. Banjo had received notice from the consulate to prepare to leave in a day or two. Ray was boisterously welcomed. Girls and their touts were dancing to the continuous racket from the pianola. Banjo suggested that the gang should go to his old hangout, where he would play and they could kick up their own racket.

The long back room in the rear of the bistro was the boys’ for spreading joy. Banjo revived “Shake That Thing” for the party. Malty joined him blowing a little horn or whistling, while the boys kept up a humming monotone of accompaniment as they danced.

Front and rear the bistro was jammed⁠—girls and touts and beach boys. The girls helped themselves liberally to the boys’ wine on the tables. Dengel, who rarely danced, was dogging it with a boy from Grand Bassam. A vivacious girl pointed at them and cried: “Look at that Dengel dancing. I thought he didn’t do anything but booze.”

She cut in between them and, her feminine curiosity rising over her passion for gain, she ignored the boy from Grand Bassam, who was new to the Ditch and supposed to have money, and taking hold of Dengel, said “Dance with me.” Tall and very slim, Dengel looked like a fine tree fern. He bent over to the girl in that manner of swaying inebriation peculiar to him, and executed an African jig so wildly that space had to be cleared for them. Surprised at Dengel’s rough wildness, the girl laughed and shrieked and wiggled excitedly.

When Banjo stopped playing, she rushed up to him and asked for the same thing again. Just at that moment a tout entered and whispered something to the Jellyroll patronne of the bistro, who held up her hand and called: “Listen! If any of you have guns or any other weapons, give them to me, for there’s going to be a rafle tonight.”

The touts handed over their guns and knives to her. Of the colored men, only a mulatto, a Martiniquan, had a revolver, which he gave to the woman. She put the weapons in a drawer of the counter and locked it. A boy who was a stranger to the quarter asked her; “You always know when the police are going to operate down here?”

“Sure. That’s understood,” she said. She was near the entrance, and stepping out into the narrow alley she said, with a raucous laugh, “That for the police.”

She reentered the bistro heaving with laughter and, patting one of the Senegalese who was standing white-eyed by the door, said: “Tu as vu le clair de lune?”

Hearing that the police were coming, Ray felt that he could not stand being handled by them again just then. He might do something crazy and get into serious trouble. So he quietly slipped off. Just as he reached the corner the police entered the bistro. He had to cut across Boody Lane to reach the Bum Square, and as he was passing he saw a policeman coming out of one of the holes-in-the-wall and finger-wiping his long mustache as if he had just finished the most appetizing hors d’oeuvre in the world. Maybe.

In the Bum Square he met Latnah. Her manner was strangely preoccupied. Ray asked her if she knew the boys were celebrating in the Ditch. She knew, but did not care to go.

“I think you’re blue like me,” said Ray. “Maybe what we need to fix us up is a pipe dream.”

“You do that, too?” Latnah asked.

“I do anything that is good for a change. All depends on the place and the time and the second person singular?”

“Then I have stuff,” Latnah said. “We go.”

They went up to her little place. She spread the colored coverlet on the floor and threw down two little cushions for pillows. She brought out a basket of oranges and dates. And they sat down together on the rug. A little brass plate, lamp, tube and, the iodine-like paste strangely fascinating in its somnolent thickness. Latnah prepared for the ritual.

“Take fruit. It good with fruit,” she said.

“I know that,” Ray replied.

“You know all about it,” she smiled subtly. “I think is leetle Oriental in you.”

“Maybe. There’s a saying in my family about some of our people coming from East Africa. They were reddish, with glossy curly hair. But you have the same types in West Africa, too. You remember the two fellows that used to be at the African Bar during the summer? They looked like twins and they were heavy-featured like some Armenians.”

“I think they were mulattres,” said Latnah.

“No, they weren’t mixed⁠—not as we know it between black and white today. Perhaps way back. I heard they were Fulahs.”

“We all mixed up. I’m so mixed I don’t know what I am myself.”

“You don’t? I always wonder, Latnah, what you really are. Except for the Chinese, I don’t feel any physical sympathy for Orientals, you know. I always feel cold and strange and far away from them. But you are different. I feel so close to you.”

“My mother was Negresse,” said Latnah. “Sudanese or Abyssinian⁠—I no certain. I was born at Aden. My father I no know what he was nor who he was.”

Latnah picked an orange clean of its white covering and handed a half of it to Ray. He put his tube down and slipped a lobe into his mouth. The incense of the rite rose and filled the little chamber, drifting on its atmosphere like a magic canopy. Drowsily Ray remembered Limehouse and those days of repose in the quiet dens there.

Latnah must have captured his thoughts psychically, for she suddenly said, “It no never haunt you?”

“No. I remember it as one of the strange and pleasant things in my life, just as another person might recall any interesting event. But when I quit I just put it out of my mind⁠—forgot it and started in living differently.”

“You beaucoup Oriental,” said Latnah. “Banjo never touch anything strange like us. Il est un pur sauvage du sang.” She sighed.

Ray locked her to him in his elbow. Peace and forgetfulness in the bosom of a brown woman. Warm brown body and restless dark body like a black root growing down in the soft brown earth. Deep dark passion of bodies close to the earth understanding each other. Dark brown bodies of the earth, earthy. Dark⁠ ⁠… brown⁠ ⁠… rich colors of the nourishing earth. The pinks bring trouble and tumult and riot into dark lives. Leave them alone in their vanity and tigerish ambitions to fret and fume in their own hell, for terrible is their world that creates disasters and catastrophes from simple natural incidents.

A little resting from the body’s aching and the mind’s trouble in sweet dreaming. Ray’s hankering was for scenes of tropical shores sifted through hectic years. Salty-warm blue bays where black boys dive down deep into the deep waters, where the ships shear in on foamy waves and black youths row out to them in canoes and black pilots bring them in to anchor. Coconut palms like sentinels on the sandy shore. Black draymen coming from the hilltops, singing loudly⁠—rakish chants, whipping up the mules bearing loads of brown sugar and of green bunches of bananas, trailing along the winding chalky ways down to the port.

Oh, the tropical heat of earth and body glowing in the same rhythm of nature⁠ ⁠… sun-hot warmth wilting the blood-bright hibiscus, drawing the rich creaminess out of the lush bellflowers, burning green fields and pasture lands to crispy autumn color, and driving the brown doves and pea doves to cover cooing under the fan-broad cooling woodland leaves.

But he dreamed instead of Harlem⁠ ⁠… the fascinating forms of Harlem. The thick, sweaty, syrup-sweet jazzing of Sheba Palace⁠ ⁠… Black eyes darting out of curious mauve frames to arrest the alert prowler⁠ ⁠… little brown legs hurrying along⁠ ⁠… with undulating hips and voluptuous caressing motion of feminine folds.