A funeral was winding its way through the Ditch. It was not the chauffeur’s, but a policeman’s. He had been shot a day before the chauffeur by a Ditch-dweller just let out of prison. In the Ditch they said it was a story of revenge. It was a large funeral. All the big city officials were there or represented, black-bearded, gray-haired men, black-clothed, decorated, beribboned and medaled. The most important ones had orated valiantly over the corpse, praising the valor and virtues of the force.

Obseques solennelles.

A full turnout of the force. And dutiful comrades in service actively making the way clear for the mourning officials and the immense crowd. Wreath-covered hearse and carriages following, chockful of flowers. From the church on the hill above the quarter, slowly, pompously, and solemnly the mournful army went marching through the Ditch and all the girls along the way crossed themselves and all the touts uncovered.

Directly in the line of march, Ray was sitting on the terrace of the African Bar. Not wanting to salute, nor be conspicuous by not saluting, a show stinking with insincerity and more loathsome to see than the obscene body of a crocodile, he got up and went inside, turning his back on the lugubriously-comic procession.

When the noble company had passed far and away out of the Ditch, Ray started off for Joliette to find Banjo and Goosey and give them the farewell hand. But in the Bum Square he met Goosey, who had spent all the morning hunting for Banjo. He had the consular letter from the captain of Jake’s ship on which they were to go home. But Banjo was missing. He had not returned to the hotel after last night’s feasting and merrymaking. Goosey had gone by all the familiar box-holes of the place, but Banjo was not to be found in any.

“Only thing to do is go back to Joliette and wait for him at the hotel,” suggested Ray. “Then if he doesn’t show up in time, you’ll have to go alone.”

They went to the hotel in Joliette and waited on the terrace over a couple bottles of beer. And when the impatient Goosey was becoming unbearably fidgety as the time of the boat’s departure approached, Banjo came rocking leisurely up to them.

“Good God, man, get some American pep into you and don’t act so African,” cried Goosey. “Don’t you know we’ve got to move by the white folks’ schedule time now? You think the skipper’s going to wait on us?”

“Don’t excite you’se’f, yaller boy. Go you’ ways without me. I ain’t gwine no place.”

“Not going!” cried Goosey. “After the consul paid for your board and lodging and gave you a free passage back home? You sure joking. You remember Lonesome Blue?”

Lonesome Blue had finally disappeared from the scene. When a ship was found for him he had vanished. The police could not have picked him up again, for he had been furnished papers that gave him immunity. Nobody knew where he had gone.

“Remember you’self, you,” said Banjo. “I ain’t studying you nor Lonesome nor no consuls when I done finish make up mah mind. There is many moh Gawd’s own consuls than theah is in Marcelles and this heah Lincoln Agrippa, call him Banjo, has got moh tricks in his haid than a monkey.”

Goosey looked bewildered and scared of going alone. He was shocked by Banjo’s sudden desertion and felt cheated of his strong support. His lower lip hung down in a mournful way.

“Well, I guess I’ve got to go back alone,” he said. “I’ve been sick near death’s door and would have been in the boneyard like Bugsy if the consul hadn’t helped me out. I’m going home.”

“Sure gwine back this time, eh?” Banjo grinned aloud. “Won’t take no chances telling another skipper to chase himse’f. Yo’ gwine back home to what you call them United Snakes after you done sweahs offer them. You was so bellyaching about race I knowed you’d bust. Ise a guttersnipe as you said, all right, and mah pardner done bury his brains in the mud and we ain’t singing no Gawd’s own blues⁠—”

“That hasn’t got a thing to do with my going back,” said Goosey. “I still hold to my opinion. I know what my race has got to buck up against in this white man’s world, if you don’t know and Ray with his talent don’t want to. I know what I was running away from and if I couldn’t make it over here⁠—”

“Couldn’t make the point of mah righteous nose!” exclaimed Banjo. “Red-nigger, you kain’t make nothing at all but the stuff you was made foh. You done got carried ovah heah by accident. And a li’l’ French luck carried you along upstate. But you done flopped so soon as you got left on you’ own, ’causen you ain’t got no self-makings in you. Get me? You go right on back to them United Snakes that you belongs to with you li’l’ pot a French dirt.”

“And you’ll hear from me, too, some day,” said Goosey. “Some day you’ll hear about me orating for my race and telling them about the soil of liberty.”

With a kind of prayerful gesture Goosey held up his sacred souvenir.

“And you think we don’t care a damn about race, eh?” Banjo turned seriously on Goosey. “Listen and hear me, Goosey. You evah seen a lynching?”

“No.”

“I guess you hadn’t. Well, I seen one down in Dixie. And it was mah own li’l’ brother. Jest when he was a-growing out of a boy into a man and the juice of life was ripening a pink temptation kept right on after him and wouldn’t let be until he was got and pulled the way of the rope. You didn’t go through the war, neither?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I knowed. Because you was too young. I did because I was jest young enough. I was in Kenada when I joined up and I remember a buddy a mine calling me a fool for it. I remember he said that he would only wanta fight if they was calling him to go to Dixie to clean up foh them crackers. But I joined up all the same, and went through that war, for I was just crazy for a change. And the wul’ did, too. And one half of it done murdered the other half to death. But the wul’ ain’t gone a-mourning forevah because a that. Nosah. The wul’ is jazzing to fohgit.”

“Except the bloody politicians,” said Ray.

“They ain’t in our class, pardner. Yessah. The wul’ is just keeping right on with that nacheral sweet jazzing of life. And Ise jest gwine on right along jazzing with the wul’. The wul’ goes round and round and I keeps right on gwine around with it. I ain’t swore off nothing like you. United Snakes nor You-whited Snakes that a nigger jest gotta stand up to everywhere in this wul’, even in the thickest thicket in the Congo. I know that theah’s a mighty mountain a white divilment on this heah Gawd’s big ball. And niggers will find that mountain on every foot a land that the white man done step on. But we niggers am no angels, neither. And I guess that if evah I went down in the bushes in the Congo, even the cannibnals them would wanta mess with mah moon if I leave me careless, and if I runned away to the Nothanmost pole, the icebugs would squash me frozen stiff if I couldn’t prohect mahself. I ain’t one accident-made nigger like you, Goosey. Ise a true-blue traveling-bohn nigger and I know life, and I knows how to take it nacheral. I fight when I got to and I works when I must and I lays off when I feel lazy, and I loves all the time becausen the honeypot a life is mah middle name.

“You got a li’l’ book larnin’, Goosey, but it jest make you that much a bigger bonehead. You don’t know nothing when to use it right from when you should fold it up and put it away like you does a dress suit after a dickty party. You got a tall lot yet to larn, Goosey boy. You go right on back to them theah United Snakes and makem shoot a li’l’ snakebite wisdom into you’ and take somathat theah goosiness outa you’ moon.”

The noisy honk-honking of a horn dispersed an idly-gossiping group in the middle of the streets as a taxicab dashed through them and swerved to a stop before the hotel. Out of it jumped Jake.

“I done took it in mah haid to come and get you fellahs,” he said. “Because after that theah goodest of time last night, I got to thinking you-all might be feeling too sweet in you’ skin to get outa it for that unrighteous sea change. So here I is with taxi and everything to make sure you-all don’t get left.”

“Youse one most faithfully buddy,” Banjo grinned. “But Ise jest finish explaining to Goosey heah that Ise most gratiate to the consul foh hulpming me this far along, but I ain’t gwine no further. And I was a-telling him like a wise old-timer to dust his feets and make that boat alone befoh it miss him, foh this nigger ain’t gwine no place.”

“Ain’t going!”

Jake grinned. Banjo grinned. Ray grinned. Goosey only was glum. Jake understood Banjo too thoroughly to ask any questions. He enjoyed the situation. For a moment he felt strangely moved to throw himself in with Banjo and send Goosey back alone to the ship. But the next moment he reflected that he was no longer a wild stallion, but a draft horse in harness now with the bit in his mouth and the crupper under his tail, and⁠—that he liked it.

The taxicab slowly trailing them, the boys crossed down the street and into the Seamen’s Bar, where they stood at the counter, à l’Américaine, for the final drink together.

“When is you coming back to look us over?” Jake asked Ray.

“When the train puts me off,” said Ray. “I like this rolling along, stopping anywhere I’m put off or thrown off. Like Banjo. I may get off to see you one a these days if the train pass your way.”

“Well, when youse tired a rowling, if evah a broad evacuate you on any a them Gawd’s own beach, you point you’ nose straight foh Harlem. And if it is even in the middle of the night you get theah, we’ll put out that elevator runner that lodging with us and make room to take you on.”

They drove from the Joliette square down the docks to the ship, where they said goodbye. As Goosey went up the gangplank after Jake, Banjo called out again:

“Go’-by, Gawd blimey you, Goosey, and don’t fohgit what I done told you. Put it in you’ flute and blow it.”

Banjo and Ray wandered casually along the docks. Workmen were busy completing the big new American warehouse. The hand trucks were noisy on the paving stones with the shifting of boxes and barrels and the loading and unloading of ships. The eternal harvest of the world on the docks. African hard wood, African rubber, African ivory, African skins. Asia’s gifts of crisp fragrant leaves and the fabled old spices with grain and oil and iron. All floated through the oceans into this warm Western harbor where, waiting to be floated back again, were the Occident’s gifts. Immense crates, barrels, cases of automobiles, pianos, player-pianos, furniture; sandpapered, spliced, and varnished wood; calico print, artificial silk; pretty shoes and boots; French wines, British whiskeys, and a thousand little salesmen-made goods. Composite essence of the soil of all lands.

Commerce! Of all words the most magical. The timbre, color, form, the strength and grandeur of it. Triumphant over all human and natural obstacles, sublime yet forever going hand in hand with the bitch, Bawdy. In all relationships, between nations, between individuals, between little peoples and big peoples, progressive and primitive, the two lovers spread and flourish together as if one were the inevitable complement of the other.

Ray was wondering if it could have been otherwise⁠—if it were madness to imagine the gorgeous concourse of civilization, past, present and to be, without these two creatures of man’s appetites spreading themselves together, when Banjo said:

“Wha’s working on you, pardner?”

“Me? Oh, just when are we going to get outa here?”

“Fed up with the ole poht, eh, scared of it gitting you now?”

“No fear. I’ve got this burg balled up with a mean hold on ’em.”

“Nuts is good dessert, pardner, but I ain’t seen no monkey antics yet.”

“You will when the exhibition is open.”

A Peninsular and Oriental boat had entered a basin farther up the docks and the boys rounded some warehouses to reach it. When they got there they found Malty and Ginger panhandling. The crew was Indian.

“Ain’t nevah nothing doing on a coolie-jabbering boat,” said Malty, deprecatingly, “but it ain’t costing us nothing noways to hang around.”

“The A‑rabs am the best of them people for a handout on a broad,” said Banjo.

There was a company of British soldiers on board and on the upper decks groups of tall, svelte, dignified Indians were conspicuous among the European passengers.

A knot of Senegalese were gathered a little way off to themselves, with their eyes on the galley. Three Indian boys of the beach were signaling to the Indian cooks against the railing above. The cooks seemed unheeding, looking down unsympathetically on the dark rabble beneath them. At last one of them went to the kitchen, returning with a paper packet which he threw down to the three Indian boys. The packet burst, scattering a mess of curried food in the dust. With nervous eagerness the boys seized the packet and scraped up the food from the ground.

The knot of Senegalese began stirring with excitement as their eyes turned the other way from the boat and saw a little cart rumble by them. It bore two scavenger-like whites and came to a halt near the gangway. They had come to get the garbage of the great liner, that was not dumped overboard, but brought into port and sold for the feeding of pigs.

Kitchen boys, two to each can, toted the garbage down the gangplank to dump it in the cart. The rank stuff was rushed and raided by the hungry black men. Out of the slime, the guts of game and poultry, the peelings of vegetables, they fished up pieces of ham, mutton, beef, poultry, and tore savagely at them with their teeth. They fought against one another for the best pieces. One mighty fellow sent a rival sprawling on his back from a can and dominated it until he had extracted some precious knuckles of bones with flesh upon them. Another brought up a decomposed rat which he dashed into the water, and wiping his hand on the sand, dived back again into the can. There were also two white men in the rush. A small Southern European was worsted in the struggle and knocked down, while a big Swede, with the appearance of a great mass of hard mildewed putty, held his own.

“Look at the niggers! Look at the niggers!” the passengers on deck cried, and some of them went and got cameras to photograph the scene.

Once when Ray was badly broke he had gone with Bugsy to sell an American suit and shirt to a young West African called Cuffee. Many of them, British and French black boys, clubbed together in a big room that took up half of a floor, for which each paid two francs a day. They were cooking when Ray got there; the smell of the stuff was good and he was hungry. They offered him some, but Bugsy whispered to him not to eat, because he had seen them picking over the garbage of the docks.

The Africans did not understand the art of panhandling as did the American and West Indian Negroes. When they could get no work on the docks they would not beg food of any ship that was not manned by their own countrymen speaking their language. Seamen who came in with money would help their fellows ashore. But outside of their own primitive circle the African boys were helpless.

“Ain’t you ashamed a you’ race?” Banjo asked Ray.

“Why you think? We’ve been down to the garbage line ourselves.”

“Not to eat it, though. I’d sooner do some’n’ inlegal and ketch jail.”

“It’s just a difference a stomach,” said Ray. “Some stomachs are different from others.” He remembered the time he had worked as a waiter in hotels and how the feeding of certain of the guests was always an interesting spectacle for him. They were those pink-eared, purple-veined, respectable pillars of society who in a refined atmosphere of service always stirred up in him an impression of obscenity. Their bellies seemed to him like coarse sacks that needed only to be filled up and rammed down with a multitude of foodstuffs.

It was a long way from them to these stranded and lost black creatures of colonization who ate garbage to appease the insistent demands of the belly. At night they would go to the African Bar and dance it away.

“Taloufa is right heah with us again,” said Malty.

“Taloufa back in this burg?” exclaimed Banjo.

“You betchu he sure is. And ef you got anything foh helping him, git it ready, for he ain’t nothing this time more’n a plumb broke nigger.”

The boys found Taloufa at the Seamen’s Bar in Joliette, with his guitar, and a bow of colored ribbons decorating it, broke but unbroken. He was talking to an Indian, a thin, gray-haired man.

“I thought you were in England,” said Ray.

“Wouldn’t let me in,” replied Taloufa.

“How you mean wouldn’t let you in?”

From a set of papers in his pocketbook Taloufa extracted a slip and handed it to Ray.

The paper bore Taloufa’s name and fingerprint and read:

“The above-named is permitted to land at this port on condition that he proceeds to London in charge of an official of the Shipping Federation, obtains document of identity at the Home Office, and visa (if required), and leaves the United Kingdom at the earliest opportunity.

When Taloufa arrived in England, the authorities would not permit him to land, but wanted him to go home direct to West Africa. Taloufa did not want to go there. Christian missionaries had educated him out of his native life. A Christian European had uplifted him out of and away from his people and his home. His memory of his past was vague. He did not know what had become of his family.

He tried to convince the authorities that he had a right to land in England. He had friends in Limehouse and in Cardiff. He had even a little property in the shape of a trunk and suitcase and clothes that he had left behind when he failed to return from his last American voyage. Nevertheless, he was permitted to land only to see about his affairs and under supervision.

Colored subjects were not wanted in Britain.

This was the chief topic of serious talk among colored seamen in all the ports. Black and brown men being sent back to West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian coast, and India, showed one another their papers and held sharp and bitter discussions in the rough cafés of Joliette and the Vieux Port.

The majority of the papers were distinguished by the official phrase: Nationality Doubtful.

Colored seamen who had lived their lives in the great careless tradition, and had lost their papers in low-down places to touts, holdup men, and passport fabricators, and were unable or too ignorant to show exact proof of their birthplace, were furnished with the new “Nationality Doubtful” papers. West Africans, East Africans, South Africans, West Indians, Arabs, and Indians⁠—they were all mixed up together. Some of the Indians and Arabs were being given a free trip back to their lands. Others, especially the Negroes, had chosen to stop off in French ports, where the regulations were less stringent. They were agreed that the British authorities were using every device to get all the colored seamen out of Britain and keep them out, so that white men should have their jobs.

Taloufa, under supervision, had crossed from England to Havre, had gone to Paris and, his money exhausted, had come to Marseilles to get a ship in any way he could. The Indian conversing with him was a unique case. Gray-haired, with a fine, thin, ancient, patient face, he was brown and brittle like a reed. He had left India as a ship’s boy when he was so small that he could not recall anything of his people or his home. He had been a steward on English ships for years, before and all during the war.

One day, he said, he came in from a voyage and the medical officer for the local Seamen’s Union put him on the sick list and took him off his ship. He said he was not ill, but he knew that the union officials were replacing colored seamen with white by any means. He went to a reputable private doctor and received a certificate attesting that he was not ill. He took it to the local official of his union, but that official ignored him. He had already put a white man in the Indian’s place as steward. In a fit of anger the Indian foolishly tore up his union card and left the local office.

Weeks and months passed and he did not get another job. One day he was persuaded to take a place on a boat that was going out to stay in service in the East. But when he reached Marseilles, where the crew was to sign on, the steward changed his mind about going to the Far East on a “Nationality Doubtful” paper. Then he came up against the fact that he could not get back into England where he had lived for over forty years. He was six weeks on the beach in Marseilles. He had a pile of foolscap correspondence with the British Home Office. He was a “Nationality Doubtful” man with no place to go.

This was the way of civilization with the colored man, especially the black. The happenings of the past few weeks from the beating up of the beach boys by the police to the story of Taloufa’s experiences, were, to Ray, all of a piece. A clear and eloquent exhibition of the universal attitude, which, though the method varied, was little different anywhere.

When the police inspector said to Ray that the strong arm of the law was against Negroes because they were all criminals, he really did not mean just that. For he knew that the big and terror-striking criminals were not Negroes. What he unconsciously meant was that the police were strong-armed against the happy irresponsibility of the Negro in the face of civilization.

For civilization had gone out among these native, earthy people, had despoiled them of their primitive soil, had uprooted, enchained, transported, and transformed them to labor under its laws, and yet lacked the spirit to tolerate them within its walls.

That this primitive child, this kinky-headed, big-laughing black boy of the world, did not go down and disappear under the serried crush of trampling white feet; that he managed to remain on the scene, not worldly-wise, not “getting there,” yet not machine-made, nor poor-in-spirit like the regimented creatures of civilization, was baffling to civilized understanding. Before the grim, pale rider-down of souls he went his careless way with a primitive hoofing and a grin.

Thus he became a challenge to the clubbers of helpless vagabonds⁠—to the despised, underpaid protectors of property and its high personages. He was a challenge of civilization itself. He was the red rag to the mighty-bellowing, all-trampling civilized bull.

Looking down in a bull ring, you are fascinated by the gay rag. You may even forget the man watching the bull go after the elusive color that makes him mad. The rag seems more than the man. If the bull win it, he horns it, tramples it, sniffs it, paws it⁠—baffled.

As the rag is to the bull, so is the composite voice of the Negro⁠—speech, song and laughter⁠—to a bawdy world. More exasperating, indeed, than the Negro’s being himself is his primitive color in a world where everything is being reduced to a familiar formula, this remains strange and elusive.

From the rear room of the café came sounds of music, shuffling of feet, shrill feminine cackle, and Malty’s deep, far-carrying laughter. Banjo was at his instrument again. Presently Malty dashed in.

“For the love a life, Taloufy, come on in heah and play that holy wonderful new thing you done bring back heah with you.”

“Wait a minute⁠—”

“Wait you’ moon! You come right along and make that mahvelous music and fohgit the white man’s crap.”

Taloufa followed Malty with his guitar. His new piece was a tormenting, tantalizing, tickling tintinnabulating thing that he called “Hallelujah Jig” and it went like this:

“Jigaway, boy, jig⁠ ⁠… jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig
Jig, jig, jig, black boy⁠ ⁠… jig away⁠ ⁠… jig away⁠ ⁠…

“Lay off the coal, boy, and scrub you’ hide,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway,
Bring me a clean suit and show some pride,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway.

“Step on the floor, boy, and show me that stuff
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway,
Strutting you’ business and strutting it rough,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway.

“Show me some movement and turn ’em loose,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway,
Powerfulways like electric juice,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway.

“Up the ole broad, boy; good nite to the bunk,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway,
What you say, fellahs? I say hunky-tunk,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway.

“When the lights go out until the stars fade,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway,
For that’s the bestest thing in the life of a spade,
Jigaway⁠ ⁠… jigaway.

“Jigaway, boy, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig,
Jig, jig, jig, black boy⁠ ⁠… jig away⁠ ⁠… jig away⁠ ⁠…”

Above the sound of the music the Indian was emphasizing the necessity for all colored people to wake up and get together, for, he said, although Indians belonged to the white stock according to science⁠—the white people, particularly the British, were treating them like black people.

But Ray could not hear any more. The jigaway music was pounding in his ears. The dancing and singing and sugary laughter of the boys. It filled his head full and poured hot fire through his veins, tingling and burning. Such a sensual-sweet feeling. There was no resisting it.

“Pardon me,” he said to the Indian, and hurried into the rear room.

Slowly the Indian gathered up his bundle of foolscap, methodically assorting the letters according to date. Then he went to the partition and looked in on the boys. Against the glass pane he looked like an ancient piece of broken bronze, a figure from an Oriental temple leaning among indifferent objects in the window of a dealer in antiques.

It was dismaying to him that those boys with whom he had just been conversing so earnestly should in a moment become forgetful of everything serious in a drunken-like abandon of jazzing.

“Just like niggers,” he muttered, turning away. “The same on the ships. Always monkeying and never really serious about anything.”

Yet the next day Taloufa stowed away safely for America, leaving the Indian on the beach, making his pathetic appeals to the English gentleman’s Home Office.

“It was Taloufa bring that cargo a good luck,” declared Banjo. “It’s the same with humans like with them stars ovah us. Good and bad luck ones. Now Lonesome Blue was sure hard luck. But Taloufa is a good-luck baby.”

It was indeed in every way a cargo of good luck that the boys were handling. They were no longer “on the beach.” A wealthy shipowner from the Caribbean basin, profiting by the exchange rate, had bought a boat, which he was overhauling to take back to the West Indies. And the boys were on the boat.

It was a formidable polyglot outfit. The officers represented five European nations. The crew were supposed to be Caribbean. Malty was chosen to find and recommend the men. He got his gang in first, including Dengel, who wished to cross the Atlantic by any means.

“Though youse French,” Malty told him, “you masticate that Englishman’s langwitch bettah than a lottah bush niggers back home.”

Malty also took West African boys, a “colored” South African, a reed-like Somali lad, and another Aframerican besides Banjo. They were all “going on the fly” and none of them was thinking of staying with the boat after the trip, but rather of getting to Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Ray worked with them, but said he was not going to sign up, as the very thought of returning to the Caribbean made him jumpy.

Ray teased Banjo about going as a seaman to the West Indies so soon after he had turned down a free trip to the United States. He predicted that Banjo would follow his nose to the States in quick time, for he would find the islands too small and sleepy for him.

“I’m gwine along with the gang, pardner, and tha’s a different thing from going back with Goosey. This heah is like a big picnic for all of us. If youse wise, you’ll join in with us.”

The boys scraped, scrubbed, painted. They got only twenty francs a day, although the regular wage for such work was over thirty francs. But they were beach boys and not union men. And the union bosses had no knowledge of what was going on on the little boat. There is sometimes much free-for-all work on the docks. However, the boys did not allow their work to push them hard. They made shift to get through it. It would be different when they signed on. Then they would get the union wages of British seamen.

The African Café, the Rendezvous Bar, the bistro-cabaret in the Rue Coin du Reboul⁠—all of them nightly did well with the boys. The Ditch looked at them differently, for they measured up to and above the “leetah” standards.

At last the boat was shipshape and ready to sail. The day came when the boys were called to sign on. Ray could have had an easy place, but he would not take it and he watched Banjo sign a little wistfully. They all had the right, under British Seamen’s Regulations, to take part of their month’s wages in advance. Each of the boys availed himself of this, that he might buy needful articles. Banjo took a full month’s wages.

They cashed their cheques with a seamen’s broker in Joliette. That night they had a big celebration. But Banjo was not with them. Nor had he used any of his money to buy new things. He invited Ray to go with him to a quiet little café in Joliette, and there he announced that he was not going to make the trip.

“And Ise gwine beat it outa this burg some convenient time this very night, pardner. Tha’s mah ace a spades so sure as Ise a spade. You come along with me?”

Not going on the ship.⁠ ⁠… Beat it.⁠ ⁠… Come along with me.

“But you’ve signed on and taken a month’s wages,” protested Ray. “You can’t quit now.”

“Nix and a zero for what I kain’t do. Go looket that book and you won’t find mah real name no moh than anybody is gwine find this nigger when I take mahself away from here. I ask you again, Is you going with me?”

Ray did not reply, and after a silence Banjo said: “I know youse thinking it ain’t right. But we kain’t afford to choose, because we ain’t born and growed up like the choosing people. All we can do is grab our chance every time it comes our way.”

Ray’s thoughts were far and away beyond the right and wrong of the matter. He had been dreaming of what joy it would be to go vagabonding with Banjo. Stopping here and there, staying as long as the feeling held in the ports where black men assembled for the great transport lines, loafing after their labors long enough to laugh and love and jazz and fight.

While Banjo’s words brought him back to social morality, they brought him back only to the realization of how thoroughly he was in accord with them. He had associated too closely with the beach boys not to realize that their loose, instinctive way of living was more deeply related to his own self-preservation than all the principles, or social-morality lessons with which he had been inculcated by the wiseacres of the civilized machine.

It seemed a social wrong to him that, in a society rooted and thriving on the principles of the “struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest” a black child should be brought up on the same code of social virtues as the white. Especially an American black child.

A Chinese or Indian child could learn the stock virtues without being spiritually harmed by them, because he possessed his own native code from which he could draw, compare, accept, and reject while learning. But the Negro child was a pathetic thing, entirely cut off from its own folk wisdom and earnestly learning the trite moralisms of a society in which he was, as a child and would be as an adult, denied any legitimate place.

Ray was not of the humble tribe of humanity. But he always felt humble when he heard the Senegalese and other West African tribes speaking their own languages with native warmth and feeling.

The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested, and poised in the universal scheme. They inspired him with confidence in them. Short of extermination by the Europeans, they were a safe people, protected by their own indigenous culture. Even though they stood bewildered before the imposing bigness of white things, apparently unaware of the invaluable worth of their own, they were naturally defended by the richness of their fundamental racial values.

He did not feel that confidence about Aframericans who, long-deracinated, were still rootless among phantoms and pale shadows and enfeebled by self-effacement before condescending patronage, social negativism, and miscegenation. At college in America and among the Negro intelligentsia he had never experienced any of the simple, natural warmth of a people believing in themselves, such as he had felt among the rugged poor and socially backward blacks of his island home. The colored intelligentsia lived its life “to have the white neighbors think well of us,” so that it could move more peaceably into nice “white” streets.

Only when he got down among the black and brown working boys and girls of the country did he find something of that raw unconscious and the-devil-with-them pride in being Negro that was his own natural birthright. Down there the ideal skin was brown skin. Boys and girls were proud of their brown, sealskin brown, teasing brown, tantalizing brown, high-brown, low-brown, velvet brown, chocolate brown.

There was the amusing little song they all sang:

“Black may be evil,
But Yellow is so low-down;
White is the devil,
So glad I’m teasing Brown.”

Among them was never any of the hopeless, enervating talk of the chances of “passing white” and the specter of the Future that were the common topics of the colored intelligentsia. Close association with the Jakes and Banjos had been like participating in a common primitive birthright.

Ray loved to be with them in constant physical contact, keeping warm within. He loved their tricks of language, loved to pick up and feel and taste new words from their rich reservoir of niggerisms. He did not like rotten-egg stock words among rough people any more than he liked colorless refined phrases among nice people. He did not even like to hear cultured people using the conventional stock words of the uncultured and thinking they were being free and modern. That sounded vulgar to him.

But he admired the black boys’ unconscious artistic capacity for eliminating the rotten-dead stock words of the proletariat and replacing them with startling new ones. There were no dots and dashes in their conversation⁠—nothing that could not be frankly said and therefore decently⁠—no act or fact of life for which they could not find a simple passable word. He gained from them finer nuances of the necromancy of language and the wisdom that any word may be right and magical in its proper setting.

He loved their natural gusto for living down the past and lifting their kinky heads out of the hot, suffocating ashes, the shadow, the terror of real sorrow to go on gaily grinning in the present. Never had Ray guessed from Banjo’s general manner that he had known any deep sorrow. Yet when he heard him tell Goosey that he had seen his only brother lynched, he was not surprised, he understood, because right there he had revealed the depths of his soul and the soul of his race⁠—the true tropical African Negro. No Victorian-long period of featured grief and sable mourning, no mechanical-pale graveside face, but a luxuriant living up from it, like the great jungles growing perennially beautiful and green in the yellow blaze of the sun over the long life-breaking tragedy of Africa.

Ray had felt buttressed by the boys with a rough strength and sureness that gave him spiritual passion and pride to be his human self in an inhumanly alien world. They lived healthily far beyond the influence of the colored press whose racial dope was characterized by pungent “bleach-out,” “kink-no-more,” skin-whitening, hair-straightening, and innumerable processes for Negro culture, most of them manufactured by white men’s firms in the cracker states. And thereby they possessed more potential power for racial salvation than the Negro literati, whose poverty of mind and purpose showed never any signs of enrichment, even though inflated above the common level and given an appearance of superiority.

From these boys he could learn how to live⁠—how to exist as a black boy in a white world and rid his conscience of the used-up hussy of white morality. He could not scrap his intellectual life and be entirely like them. He did not want or feel any urge to “go back” that way.

Tolstoy, his great master, had turned his back on the intellect as guide to find himself in Ivan Durak. Ray wanted to hold on to his intellectual acquirements without losing his instinctive gifts. The black gifts of laughter and melody and simple sensuous feelings and responses.

Once when a friend gave him a letter of introduction to a Nordic intellectual, he did not write: I think you will like to meet this young black intellectual; but rather, I think you might like to hear Ray laugh.

His gift! He was of course aware that whether the educated man be white or brown or black, he cannot, if he has more than animal desires, be irresponsibly happy like the ignorant man who lives simply by his instincts and appetites. Any man with an observant and contemplative mind must be aware of that. But a black man, even though educated, was in closer biological kinship to the swell of primitive earth life. And maybe his apparent failing under the organization of the modern world was the real strength that preserved him from becoming the thing that was the common white creature of it.

Ray had found that to be educated, black and his instinctive self was something of a big job to put over. In the large cities of Europe he had often met with educated Negroes out for a good time with heavy literature under their arms. They toted these books to protect themselves from being hailed everywhere as minstrel niggers, coons, funny monkeys for the European audience⁠—because the general European idea of the black man is that he is a public performer. Some of them wore hideous parliamentary clothes as close as ever to the pattern of the most correctly gray respectability. He had remarked wiry students and Negroes doing clerical work wearing glasses that made them sissy-eyed. He learned, on inquiry, that wearing glasses was a mark of scholarship and respectability differentiating them from the common types.⁠ ⁠… (Perhaps the police would respect the glasses.)

No getting away from the public value of clothes, even for you, my black friend. As it was, ages before Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, so it will be long ages after. And you have reason maybe to be more rigidly formal, as the world seems illogically critical of you since it forced you to discard so recently your convenient fig leaf for its breeches. This civilized society is classified and kept going by clothes and you are now brought by its power to labour and find a place in it.

The more Ray mixed in the rude anarchy of the lives of the black boys⁠—loafing, singing, bumming, playing, dancing, loving, working⁠—and came to a realization of how close-linked he was to them in spirit, the more he felt that they represented more than he or the cultured minority the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race. And the thought kept him wondering how that race would fare under the ever tightening mechanical organization of modern life.

Being sensitively receptive, he had as a boy become interested in and followed with passionate sympathy all the great intellectual and social movements of his age. And with the growth of international feelings and ideas he had dreamed of the association of his race with the social movements of the masses of civilization milling through the civilized machine.

But traveling away from America and visiting many countries, observing and appreciating the differences of human groups, making contact with earthy blacks of tropical Africa, where the great body of his race existed, had stirred in him the fine intellectual prerogative of doubt.

The grand mechanical march of civilization had leveled the world down to the point where it seemed treasonable for an advanced thinker to doubt that what was good for one nation or people was also good for another. But as he was never afraid of testing ideas, so he was not afraid of doubting. All peoples must struggle to live, but just as what was helpful for one man might be injurious to another, so it might be with whole communities of peoples.

For Ray happiness was the highest good, and difference the greatest charm, of life. The hand of progress was robbing his people of many primitive and beautiful qualities. He could not see where they would find greater happiness under the weight of the machine even if progress became left-handed.

Many apologists of a changed and magnified machine system doubted whether the Negro could find a decent place in it. Some did not express their doubts openly, for fear of “giving aid to the enemy.” Ray doubted, and openly.

Take, for example, certain Nordic philosophers, as the world was more or less Nordic business: He did not think the blacks would come very happily under the super-mechanical Anglo-Saxon-controlled world society of Mr. H. G. Wells. They might shuffle along, but without much happiness in the world of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps they would have their best chance in a world influenced by the thought of a Bertrand Russell, where brakes were clamped on the machine with a few screws loose and some nuts fallen off. But in this great age of science and super-invention was there any possibility of arresting the thing unless it stopped of its own exhaustion?

“Well, what you say, pardner?” demanded Banjo. “Why you jest sidown theah so long studying ovah nothing at all? You gwine with a man or you ain’t?”

“Why didn’t you tell me before, so I could have signed on like you and make a getaway mahself?”

“Because I wasn’t so certain sure a you. Youse a book fellah and you’ mind might tell you to do one thing and them books persweahs you to do another. So I wouldn’t take no chances. And maybe it’s bettah only one of us do this thing this time. Now wese bettah acquainted, theah’s a lotta things befoh us we’ll have to make together.”

“It would have been a fine thing if we could have taken Latnah along, eh?”

“Don’t get soft ovah any one wimmens, pardner. Tha’s you’ big weakness. A woman is a conjunction. Gawd fixed her different from us in moh ways than one. And theah’s things we can git away with all the time and she just kain’t. Come on, pardner. Wese got enough between us to beat it a long ways from here.”