At noon the next day Ray went out, treading on air. His nature was buoyant. He went to a little Italian restaurant and fed. In the early afternoon he joined Goosey and Banjo on a café terrace.

His chauffeur friend, passing by, hailed him. He said he was going out to look at his suburban place and asked if Ray would like to go. Ray said he wouldn’t mind going, but that he was with Banjo and Goosey. The chauffeur said that he would take them all if they wanted to go. They did, but Goosey objected that the ship might arrive and the consul call for them.

“That won’t make no difference,” said Banjo. “No ship ain’t nevah gwine out the same day it put in at this heah hallelujah poht.”

“Yes, the Dollar Line boats do, too,” said Goosey.

“Well if it does the skipper has got to wait on us, his bum passengers, believe me,” said Banjo. “Come on, pardner, let’s go.”

Ray rode beside the chauffeur. The suburban route was melancholy. Before he went to the vintage he had gone out to another country place, and it had been refreshing then all along the way to see trailing bramble roses in the ripened green grass and marigolds and irises blooming in truck gardens of cauliflowers, and bunches of tempting grapes hanging from the fences. Now there was nothing but dead and rotting leaves everywhere and some withered blackberries.

The chauffeur’s place was like any of the common suburban lots owned by the great army of the lower middle class of modern cities. A cottage of three rooms and a kitchen, a young chestnut tree near the gate and a large fig tree in the rear.

Of the lots on either side of him, the chauffeur told the boys that one belonged to a bistro-keeper and the other to a policeman. Ray thought his neighbors were just right and told him so. The chauffeur smiled. He was proud of his neighbors, too. The other lots were worth a little more than his, he said, for they had their water supply and he hadn’t yet.

Banjo asked him how much he had paid for his place.

“Eleven thousand francs,” the chauffeur replied, and that he was still making periodical payments on it.

“Sometimes we have evening parties up here,” he told Ray.

“What kind?” Ray asked.

“If I pick up a tourist and a girl who want to take a joyride I bring them out here. Anything to help pay for the place. One night I had a gang, and it would have been fun to have you. But you’re so changed now from when I knew you at Toulon⁠—always with the Senegalese⁠—I didn’t trouble.”

“That’s all right,” said Ray. “Change is my passion. Can’t stay in one rut forever. Got to pull out and find something new.”

Goosey had detached himself from them and was in the act of digging under the fig tree.

“What you doing there, you?” Banjo called.

They went up and found Goosey filling a little squat glass jar with earth.

“What you doing with that theah dirt?” asked Banjo.

“To keep as a souvenir,” said Goosey.

“Oh, my Gawd, what a nigger, though!” Banjo horse-laughed. “It’s you should be making pohms and not Ray, for youse the sweetest cherry-diver I evah did see.”

Goosey held his jar of earth against his heart.

“It’s the soil of France,” he said. “I couldn’t make it, all right. I was outa luck, but I can always remember that I was here.”

“Kain’t you remember without that theah flask a dirt?” asked Banjo. “Better you tote back a flask a real Martell cognac on you’ hip, for that you won’t find back home in Gawd’s own, but you’ll find plenty a dirt. Dirt is the same dirt all ovah the wul’ cep’n’ for a li’l’ difference in color, maybe.”

“Leave him alone,” said Ray.

“You don’t understand this thing, Banjo,” said Goosey, angrily, “so it’s better you shut up.”

The chauffeur had been listening with sentimental interest and now he said to Goosey: “Vous avez raison. La France, c’est le plus joli coin du monde.”

“How do you know that?” said Ray. “You have never been out of it.”

“Yes I have,” responded the chauffeur. “I’ve been to North Africa and Spain and Italy and Constantinople. You forget I was a sailor.”

“Le’s quit arguing about dirt and find the first café where we can have wine,” said Banjo.

Later in the afternoon they all returned to the Vieux Port. After a parting drink with the boys the chauffeur drove off. Ray looked after him contemplatively and thought how differently he felt toward him now in comparison with the days when he knew him at Toulon. The chauffeur’s life at Toulon had been about the same kind of animal-cunning existence that it was at present.

He had once recounted to Ray how he had been arrested in a raid, when the police took from him a miniature ledger in which he kept a check-and-balance account of all the extra change he made, the places and persons (when he knew their names) that contributed to it.

The affair had been very amusing for Ray, just as it had been amusing for him to give the chauffeur all the tips and hints and cues he knew that he could follow up to gain something. In his picturesque uniform, old and overworked symbol of a free and reckless way of living, the chauffeur’s ways of eking out his means of enjoying life did not seem at that time unbeautiful.

Living the same life now with more freedom, he appeared loathsome to Ray. Perhaps it was what he was living for that made the difference. For as to how he was living⁠ ⁠… there were many luxury-clean people who had become high and mighty by traffic in human flesh. As a Negro Ray was particularly sensible to that fact⁠—that many of the titled and ennobled and fashionable and snobbish gentry of this age have the roots of their fortunes in the buying and selling of black bodies. And had he any reason to doubt that the landlords of Boody Lane and the Ditch as a whole were collecting that prostitute rent to live respectably and educate their children in decency?

What made the chauffeur so unbearably ugly to him now was that he was trafficking obscenely to scramble out of the proletarian world into that solid respectable life, whence he could look down on the Ditch and all such places with the mean, evil, and cynical eyes of a respectable person.

“Just imagine that chauffeur paying eleven thousand francs foh that place!” said Banjo to Ray. “Only eleven thousand! I coulda bought it with what money I landed here with and have something left ovah.”

“You could, all right, and yet you couldn’t,” said Ray. “You and I were not made for that careful touting life. Did you ever meet, back home, a black p.i. that was saving up off his women to marry respectable? Or a brown sob-sister chippy whining that she was doing that to support an old mother? You bet you and I never did meet any of the black breed like that. They were all true-blue sports in the blood.

“That chauffeur will marry with a clear conscience from his scavenger money. He may chuck up the chauffeur job and buy a café⁠—become a respectable père de famille⁠—a good taxpayer and supporter of a strong national government, with a firm colonial policy, while you and I will always be the same lost black vagabonds, because we don’t know what this civilization is all about. But my friend the chauffeur knows. It took over a thousand years of lily-white culture to make him what he is. And although he has no intelligence, he has the instinct of civilization, Banjo, and you and I just haven’t got it.”

“I can’t make out nothing, pardner, about that instinking thing that youse talking about. But I know one thing and that is if I ain’t got the stink of life in me, I got the juice.”

Passing through the Place Sadi Carnot, the boys saw Sister Geter being conducted down a side street by a policeman.

“I wonder if they’ve arrested her?” said Ray. “Such a long time since I’ve seen her, I thought she’d gone home.” He was hesitating about going to see what was up, but Banjo said, “Let’s find out, anyway, what theyse doing with her, pardner.”

“She might start that ‘Black Bottom’ stunt on us again,” objected Goosey, “and then⁠—good night!”

“Oh, come on. She kain’t make no moh ‘Black Bottom’ than her nacheral,” said Banjo.

The boys caught up with Sister Geter and the policeman and Ray spoke to her. The policeman asked Ray if he knew her and what she was doing raising such a racket in the streets. He couldn’t understand her, for she did not speak French. Ray told him that she was an evangelist. The policeman let her go and said he had only walked her away so that the big crowd that was collecting round her in the square should disperse. The people thought she was a high priestess of fetish Africa and would work magie noire. He told Ray to tell her not to preach in the streets. Sister Geter walked with the boys toward Joliette.

“I thought you were gone away,” Ray said, “so long since I never saw you.”

“No, chile, Ise right here deliv’ring that holy message. The Lawd Him done sent me heah with His wohd in mah mouf, and I ain’t thinking about moving nowheres else tell Himself gimme another marching order. I been preaching that message right along. Sometime the pohlice com’n’ moves me along jest like that one done did. But they nevah hold me no time. They look at mah bible and turn me loose.”

“But the people kain’t understand what you’re preaching to them, since you don’t talk French,” said Goosey.

“What you know ’bout understanding reeligion, yal’ boy?” demanded Sister Geter. “I belongs to the Pentecostal Fire Baptized Believers and I ain’t studying no lang-idge but the lang-idge of faith. I was fire-baptized in the gift of tongues and when I deliver this heah Gawd’s message” (she tapped nervously on the bible and humped herself up, while the boys glanced apprehensively at one another, thinking “Black Bottom”) “people heahs what I say and jest gotta understand no matter what lang-idge they speaks.”

“Funny I didn’t run into you again,” said Ray. “I was away for a little over a month at the vintage, but I’ve been a long time back.”

“Yo’-all don’t see me, mah chilluns, ’causen you don’t want to. For yo’-all know prexactly what’s holding you heah in this mahvelous poht, and that Ise a-preaching against all the most deadliest sins, and theah’s none moh deadly than fohnication. Ise warning you’-all now and straight that Gawd’s sure agwina git you for all them sins youse sweetening on and looking so good on it.”

“We ain’t so bad as you thinking, ma,” said Banjo. “Wese a hard-hustling bunch a regular fellahs. It’s them sweetmens back down in the Ditch you should go preaching to.”

“Yo’-all needs it, too. Mah message is foh you to take it and use. Git converted, git salvation, change you’ ways a living in sweet sin. For if you don’t the Lawd him will git hold a you and wrastle with you and throw you down on a bed a tribulation and give you the biggest shaking you evah did get.”

Banjo began softly whistling, “Shake That Thing.”

They had arrived in the Place de la Joliette before the Seamen’s Bar.

“Let’s go in here for a drink a soda-pop,” said Banjo.

Goosey and Ray grinned.

“Take a glass with us, ma?” Banjo asked.

“No. I ain’t putting mah feets in no gin shop with Gawd’s Wohd in mah hand. I sweahs off gin and any drink that’s sold in a bottle evah since I was fire-baptized, and tha’s seven years gone now.”

“But there might be a sinner in here needing conversion, ma,” said Ray. “The Salvation Army folk don’t mind going into a saloon.”

“Maybe it’s because they loves the smell a the gin they done sweahs off,” replied Sister Geter, “but I doesn’t.”

She waddled away.

The boys went into the Seamen’s Bar and there was Home to Harlem Jake drinking with a seaman pal at the bar. He and Ray embraced and kissed.

“The fust time I evah French-kiss a he, chappie, but Ise so tearing mad and glad and crazy to meet you this-away again.”

“That’s all right, Jakie, he-men and all. Stay long enough in any country and you’ll get on to the ways and find them natural.”

Ray introduced Banjo and Goosey.

“I guess youse the two gwine back home with us,” said Jake. “I heard the skipper say some’n’ about it when he got back from the consulate.”

“Well, chappie,” Jake said to Ray, “we just got in last night and wese pulling out tomorrow, so wese all gwina get together and spread some moh joy in this heah sweet poht tonight. What it takes to pay I’ve got, and I’m gwina blow mahself big foh this hallelujah meeting-up. Whachyu say?”

“I say OK,” replied Ray. “But how come you here? You remember you told me you were never going to fool with the sea again?”

“I did say that, yes. But some moh things done happen to me after you quit Harlem, chappie.”

Jake told Ray of his picking up Felice again and their leaving Harlem for Chicago. After two years there they had had a baby boy. And then they decided to get married. Two years of married life passed and he could no longer stick to Chicago, so he returned to Harlem. But he soon found that it was not just a change of place that was worrying him.

“I soon finds out,” he said, “that it was no joymaking business for a fellah like you’ same old Jake, chappie, to go to work reg’lar ehvery day and come home ehvery night to the same ole pillow. Not to say that Felice hadn’t kep’ it freshen’ up and sweet-smelling all along. She’s one sweet chile that sure knows how to make a li’l’ home feel good to a fellah. But it was too much home stuff, chappie. So it done gone a year now I think that I just stahted up one day and got me a broad. And now it’s bettah. I don’t feel like running away from Felice no moh. Whenevah I get home Ise always happy to be with her and feel that Ise doing mah duty by Ray.”

“Ray?” exclaimed Ray.

“Sure, the kid. I done name him after you. Not that I want him to be like you in many ways. But Ise gwina give him what I neveh had and tha’s an edjucation. And p’raps he’ll learn to write pohms like you. He’s a smart-looking kid.”

“You’re a thousand times a better man than me, Jake. Finding a way to carry on with a family and knuckling down to it. I just ran away from the thing.”

“You! You din’t leave Agatha a li’l’ one, did you?”

“I leave more things than I want to remember,” replied Ray. “Come on, let’s have another drink and get outa here.”

Banjo and Goosey hurried off to the consulate to see what orders were there for them and Jake and Ray were left alone to gab about Harlem before and after Prohibition. Jake had found Harlem wonderfully changed when he returned from Chicago. The Block Beautiful had gone black and brown. One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was besieged and bravely holding out for business’ sake, but the invaders, armed with nothing but loud laughter, had swept around it and beyond. And higher up, the race line of demarcation, Eighth Avenue, had been pushed way back and Edgecombe, Jerome, Manhattan, St. Nicholas, and other pale avenues were vividly touched with color. The Negro realtors had done marvels.

In Chicago, Felice had begun reading the Negro World, the organ of the Back-to-Africa movement, and when they came back she was as interested in Liberty Hall as in Sheba Palace. She had even worried Jake to take a share in Black Star Line.

“Let’s get on to it too, dad,” she had said. “There can be some’n’ in it. Times is changing, and niggers am changing, too. That great big nigger man ain’t no beauty, but, oh, lawdy! he sure is illiquint.”

But Jake had resisted Felice’s new enthusiasm and it was only a few months after their return to New York that Liberty Hall lost Leader Marcus to the Federal jail.

At supper time the boys came together again in the Bum Square. Banjo, playing the square game according to the standards of the bum fraternity, had rounded up all the beach boys he knew to meet Jake and be treated to drinks or handouts. They went to the African Bar. Ray introduced Jake to the proprietor and the two chatted a little about Harlem. Jake stood a round of drinks for the picturesque black rabble.

Banjo, Goosey, Ray, and Jake were going to sup together. Ray suggested they should eat at an Italian chophouse in the quarter where he sometimes fed when he was flush with francs. The cooking there was always well done and moderately spiced as he loved cooking to be, and the wine one grade removed from the vin rouge ordinaire was superb for the price and mellow to the palate. And the proprietor could concoct the most delicious zabaione.

But when the boys came to the restaurant, Jake objected to feeding there because it was next door to a cabinet d’aisance⁠—so much next door that if you were a little gone in your cups you could easily mistake one entrance for the other.

“By the britches of Gawd, chappie!” cried Jake, “what done happen to you sence you show Harlem you’ black moon. After me telling you that I want to blow to the swellest feed there is, you bring me to a place with a big W.C. sign ovah it. I remember when you was a deal moh whimscriminate. When you couldn’t eat the grub on the white man’s choo-choo ’causen you was afraid the chef cook done did nastiness to it as he swoh he would. And now⁠—”

“But just look at that!” cried Goosey. “There’s the whole family setting down to eat right in there.”

Yes. At the lower end of the shop, flanked on either side by cabinets, the family dinner was spread. A long loaf of bread, two large bottles of red wine, and a great basin of soup with a ladle in it. And around the table sat husband and wife, a girl of about fourteen years, a boy a little less, and a shrunken gray grandmother. Clients were coming and going and the family were swallowing their soup amid the sounds and odors of the place, while the wife occasionally vacated her seat to attend to business.

“But don’t they have a home?” demanded Jake. “Sure they ain’t sleeping theah, then why does they wanta feed in it?”

“I wouldn’t let nobody see me do that work, much less eat in there,” said Goosey. “These people don’t know any shame.”

“Shame you’ trap,” said Jake. “It ain’t no being ashame’. Can we niggers cry shame about any kind a work to make a living in this big wul’ of the ofays? It ain’t doing the work, but what you make it do with you. You remember, Ray, when you and me was on the road together? When you done finished with that theah pantry hole and I got outa that steaming grave, we couldn’t even stomach them lousy quathers. We was crazy to go any place we could fohgit the whole push.”

“That was seven years gone, Jake,” said Ray. “And in seven years many things can change to nothing according to law. You haven’t changed any. You’re a good black American. Too American. We had a fellow in our gang called Bugsy. He died here⁠—died with his eyes wide open. He was the toughest black boy I ever knew. Yet when he found out he’d been eating horse meat in his cook-joint, thinking it was beef, he cried⁠—”

“He was a real nigger. I woulda puked,” said Jake.

“One day,” continued Ray, “one of my nice liberal friends ran into me here and I happened to tell him about Bugsy and the horse steak. And he was so surprised that a Negro should have prejudices⁠—especially such a delicate sort.”

“Ain’t a bumbole thing delicate about a man being particular what he’s putting away in his guts,” said Jake.

“All the same, Jake, this place, that family. You’re in the most civilized country in the world, and you aren’t civilized enough to understand.”

“I ain’t what’s that?” demanded Jake.

“You heard exactly what I said, ole-timer.”

“Well, whether I is or ain’t, you take me away from here and show me the swellest house-of-many-pans foh feeding in this heah poht of the frogs. Ise got enough a them francs to blow fifty face-feeders with the few dollars I done change. I don’t know what done happen to you in the seven years we ain’t seen one another. But foh the sake a good ole friendship, chappie, I hope you ain’t no stink-lover.”

“What kind a place you want?” asked Ray. “I don’t want to go to one a those places with a lotta stiff, hard-faced people stuffing themselves, and flunkies that don’t know what to do with you because you aren’t like them.”

“And I didn’t mean one a them sort,” said Jake. “I mean a clean place where we can get good eats and jolly one another and be nacheral without anybody being offended.”

They went to the other side of the Vieux Port on the Quai de Rive Neuve where the restaurants specialized in sea foods. A waiter brought them a basket of fine fish and told them to choose. Soles, dorades, loups, mullets⁠—some alive and twitching. Jake insisted on having champagne. And when the smiling head waiter submitted the wine list he chose an expensive brand, Duc de Montebello, because, he said, “the name sounded lak a mahvelous mouful.”

The boys had a gorgeous time feeding and sampling the sparkling liquor and swapping jokes, except for one little snag, which they swept grinning over. At the third table across from them there was a party of two women and three men, and one of the men, who looked like a middle-aged salesman, kept throwing phrases at the boys in English: “It’s good here, eh?⁠ ⁠… You like drink fine champagne.⁠ ⁠… I know many blacks. I been in America.⁠ ⁠… You get good treatment here. Eat good, sleep good.⁠ ⁠… Les filles.” He smirked and leered nastily at them and Ray told him in French:

“We don’t know you and we don’t want you to butt into our party.”

A look of mean hatred came into the man’s face and he replied, “You are not polite.”

“I know,” said Ray. “When we don’t let you condescend to interrupt us, we’re not polite, and if any of us had tried to do the same thing with your party we would be impertinent blacks.”

The man’s party paid their bill and left the restaurant a little after the incident.

Then Goosey remarked: “You didn’t have to trip him up so hard, Ray. You know in New York we couldn’t eat in a white restaurant like this.”

“I don’t give a white damn for that,” said Ray. “If we can’t eat downtown we can eat better in Harlem. I wouldn’t give Aunt Hattie’s smoky cook-shop for all the Childs restaurants whitewashed like a tomb. I guess that puss-faced Frenchman was thinking just like you. But all the same, if they let us into their white places, they’ve got to treat us naturally like other guests. This black boy won’t stand for any condescending crap.”

“Mah pardner is right, Goosey,” said Banjo. “For all you’ bellyaching talk about race, youse a white man’s nigger in the bottom. You got you’ haid so low down behind that white moon, believe me, that you kain’t see nothing clear.”

The Bum Square was a close, busy, bustling place when the boys returned there. There were many ships in port⁠—American, English, Norwegian, Italian, and others⁠—and all the common seamen had come to the quarter for amusement. It was like a pit with all things in it⁠—men, women, aged, infirm, boys, touts showing their girls with ghoulish gestures, children, dogs, and cats⁠—all boiling in desire. But there was no free, wild bubbling over. It was a boiling as of purchased food put in a cauldron and carefully fed with fire to a certain point. A boiling exhibition for a strong smell of change was in the Bum Square. Loveless eyes told and hounds’ voices barked without words the price of the circus⁠—boxes, balcony, gallery, parquet, pit, front and rear.

Automatically the piano-panning jumped madly out of the Anglo-American Bar to clash rioting in the square with that of the Monkey Bar.

“Gawd’s love!” exclaimed Jake. “Ain’t no wonder you fellahs stick in this sweet mud. Fust place I evah feel mahself in a jazzing circus some’n’ lak Harlem. It shoh smells strong.”

“Not like Harlem, though,” said Ray. “Harlem’s smell is like animals brought in from the fields to stable. Here it’s rotten-stinking.”

Jake grinned. “You remember you’ send-off feed in ole Aunt Hattie’s cook-shop, chappie? You ain’t fohgit how I done told you there was no other place like Harlem in the white man’s wul’. And now foh putting a li’l’ Harlem stuff in this jazzing.”

A young girl went by them, limping with a pathetic, half-resentful, half-terrified look in her eyes and a fever-hot color in her cheeks.

“See that gal?” Banjo said. “Jest a few months back she hit this Ditch the cutest thing in it. Comed from the country, they said, and, oh, Lawdy! if it wasn’t a rushing wild. And then blip-blap it was the hospital next and look at her now.”

They went to the Ditch to a bistro full of brown and black and Mediterranean seamen, automatic music, strenuously jazzing girls, loud, ready-made laughter, and vigorous swilling of liquor.

Ray’s friend, the chauffeur, was there, drinking and surrounded by an admiring group of pale touting youths. Ray went over to him for a moment. The chauffeur asked him to join the party, but Ray pointed out that he was with Banjo and Jake. He glanced a little inquiringly at the boys. The chauffeur smirked and said: “They are all my boys. They do everything you want them to do. Steal, murder, love in all ways, lie, and spy.”

The boys’ features wore a sickly smile as they listened to the chauffeur boosting them. Ray rejoined his group. A little later Latnah came in with Malty and Dengel. Latnah, peeved, unreconciled to Banjo’s going away, although she had not uttered a word about it, sat rather apart on the edge of the group. The girls of the circle glanced resentfully at her. They could never like the little brown woman. Although quite unobtrusive, the superiority of her difference from them was too eloquently obvious.

The chauffeur left his place and went over to where Latnah was sitting. Standing behind her, he put his arms around her.

Latnah said, “Take you’ dirty hands off me and leave me alone.”

The chauffeur laughed and said, “I am boss of everything here.”

“Except me,” replied Latnah. “I’m not like your Arab wench.”

This Arab girl was different from the Arab-black one. She was honey-colored, with flaky-soft shining coal hair, deeply curled. Her mouth was not cruel, but her eyes were mad. She was one of the chauffeur’s women.

The chauffeur said: “Don’t mention her any more. I’m through with her. We had a big row and I am finished.”

Latnah smiled and said, “You’ve got enough of her, eh?”

The chauffeur attempted to caress her again, but Latnah’s hand shot threateningly to her bosom and he backed away from her.

“You’d better leave that woman alone,” said Banjo.

Right then the Arab girl marched into the café. She bent down with a funny gesture, brought a revolver up from under her skirt and emptied it into the chauffeur. He crumpled to the floor, and she fell upon him and began keening: “I didn’t mean to kill him.⁠ ⁠… I didn’t mean to kill him.”