A potato-skinned youth posed nonchalantly in the Bum Square, a flute in his hand, his features distinguished by a big beatific grin.

Banjo, passing through with Ray, saw him and remarked, “He’s a back-home, sure thing.”

“You think so?” replied Ray.

“Sure. Jest look at the pose he’s putting on. He’s South Carolina so sure as corn pone is Dixie. Watch me pick him up.⁠ ⁠… Hello, Home town!”

“Hello, you there!” The three came together.

“Jes’ arrive?” asked Banjo. “Youse sure looking hallelujah happy like a man jest made a fortune.”

“Fortune is me in a bad way,” said the flute-holder, “I’ve just gotten rid of all that I had.” And he turned his trousers pockets out.

“You mean they just done rid you,” laughed Banjo.

The flute-boy told his story. He had fine white teeth and red gums, and contentedly displaying them, he told his story of the “broad” and the Ditch, told it heartily as many other colored boys before him had done.

He began with how he had quit the “broad” after disputing with an officer. The “broad” was something like the one that brought Banjo to Marseilles. One of those rare slow-cruising American tramps that sometimes look in on Marseilles. The galley crew was Negro, with the flute-boy the only “blond” among them. Another of the crew was a West African deportee named Taloufa, who, slated to be paid off at a European port, had chosen Marseilles as the least troublesome.

The flute-boy and Taloufa were great chums. They were the most interesting persons of the ship. Taloufa came from a colony of British West Africa, had attended a mission school there, and was intelligent. The flute-boy came from the Cotton Belt country, but his people had moved to New Jersey when he was a kid. He went to school in New Jersey and had finished with a high-school diploma. It was his first trip away from the States. Before he had sailed only coastwise, between New York and New England and New York and the South.

In high school he had learned a little composition French. He was enchanted to reach Marseilles, having heard about its marvels from older seamen. He wished to have a good spell of the town, but his ship was staying just three days. He was serving in the officers’ mess and he maneuvered himself into getting a reprimand from one of the officers.

“I told him off,” the flute-boy said. “He called me a damned yaller nigger and I gave him a standing invitation to go chase himself.”

For this offense the captain had the flute-boy up before the American consulate, but there he was not granted the permission to finish with the boy’s services.

“American consul don’t want no seamen hanging around this heah sweet wide-open dump,” Banjo giggled, voluptuously.

“You bet he don’t,” agreed the flute-boy. “He told the captain to take me back to the ship and that I should watch my step. I told him I’d rather be paid off. But he said, ‘Not on your life, mah boy. You go back home to your sweet ’taters and wat’melon. Gee! I wish I was back home now biting into one mahself.’ He spoke that common darky language, kidding me, I guess.”

The flute-boy returned with the captain to the ship and was put in the crew’s mess. But before he had been given anything to do he was disputing with the donkeyman.

“I’m going to quit this dirty broad,” he cried, and the captain was delighted to see the flute-boy go down the gangway with his suitcase. Taloufa was still aboard, waiting to be paid off the next day. The flute-boy had ten dollars, which he changed into francs. He took a room in a hotel in Joliette and went from there straight to the Ditch.

The flute-boy loitered, fascinated, around the marvelous fish market of the place. Red fish and blue, silver, gold, emerald, topaz, amethyst, brown-black, steel-gray, striped fish, scaly fish, big-bellied fish, and curs and cats growling and spitting over the bowels of gutted fish. A great fish town, Marseilles, and here was the big central market which supplies (for nourishment and lotteries and whatnot) the little markets and sheds and bistros that stink all over the city, the slimy, scaly, cold-blooded things.

Fresh catches from the bay and fish transported from other ports. The fishermen tramped in in their long felt boots. The fish-women spread themselves broadly behind their stalls. And in bright frocks and thick mauve socks and wooden shoes, the fish-girls pattered noisily about with charming insouciant ease, two between them bearing a basket, buxom and attractive and beautiful in their environment, like lush water-lilies in a lagoon.

The stuff of the groceries thick around the fish market was exposed on the sidewalk: piles of cheeses, blocks of butter, dried fish, salt herrings, sauerkraut, ham, sausages, salt pork, rice, meal, beans, garlic. Stray dogs nosing by stopped near the boxes. Cats prowled around. A sleek black one leaped upon a keg of green olives, sniffing and humping up his back. A laughing boy grabbing at its tail; the cat leaped down, shooting into a dark doorway. A pregnant woman passing popped one of the olives into her mouth, smacked her lips with fine relish, and called the grocery boy to give her one hecto.

The flute-boy wandered among the mixed conglomeration of people, domestic beasts, and things. He had an air about him that, even amid that humid bustle, invited attention enough.

A roving-eyed fish youth, wearing proletarian blue, spotted him. He had an odd little stock of English words, just enough to serve the purpose of soliciting, but the flute-boy responded in French, happily proud to try out his high-school acquirement.

“Tu parle français très bien,” said the fish boy.

“Vraiment?”

“Mais oui. Tu a un bon accent, camarade.”

The flute-boy was overwhelmed with a peacock feeling. They were just a step from Boody Lane, which led inevitably into the fish market. A painted old girl, a fish in her hand, elbowed them purposely and went shaking herself mournfully into the alley.

“Ici on nique-nique beaucoup,” said the fishy white with a nasty smirk, bringing palm and fist together in a disgusting manner to emphasize his words. And he showed his find into Boody Lane.

It was a few yards of alleyway with a couple of drinking-dens, a butcher shop, and hole-in-the-wall rooms where the used-up carnivora of the city find their final shelter. Dismal, humid rooming-houses inhabited by youthful scavengers of proletarian life⁠—Provençales, Greeks, Arabs, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, and Corsicans.

A slimy garbage-strewn little space of hopeless hags, hussies, touts, and cats and dogs forever chasing one another about in nasty imitation of the residents. The hub of low-down proletarian love, stinking, hard, cruel. A ditch abandoned by the city to pernicious manure, harmless-appearing on the surface. Yet ignorant seamen tumbling into it had been relieved of hundreds and thousands of francs, and many of the stupid, cold-blooded murders of the quarter might be traced there. The little trick of hat-snatching was practiced there and the uninitiate, fancying a bawdy joke, might follow that gesture to the loss of his money or his life.

The white boy conducted the yellow toward one of the drinking-places where a pianola was rapidly hammering out a popular song. Near by were two policemen. One stood on the corner and the other paced slowly along the alley, eating peanuts. A young male, wearing rosy pyjamas and painted like a scarecrow, came smirking out of the bar and minced along beside the policeman.

“Ou tu vas?” asked a sloven woman, standing broadly in the door of the bar.

“Coucher,” the policeman flung back at her.

The woman cackled with the full volume of her raucous voice digging her hands into her flabby sides and agitating her clothes so that she displayed all of her naked discolored pillars of legs. “Peut-être, peut-être.⁠ ⁠… On ne sait jamais.” And she cackled again.

When the flute-boy entered the bar he ordered beer for himself and beer for his guide. The woman who served wanted a small bottle of lemonade-like drink for herself, and all the old girls of the place, crowding around the flute-boy, took the same drink. The flute-boy thought the stuff was cheaper than beer and said, with a grin, “Go ahead.”

But when he was ready to leave he received a bill for four hundred and seventy-five francs. He cried out that he would not pay. It was too much. The patronne showed him her price list. Forty francs a bottle for the lemonade-like drink. The flute-boy said he could not pay. They tried to take his purse. He hugged the pocket. They called the police. The two policemen that he had seen outside the place came in and told him he had to pay. They told him that if he was not satisfied he could lodge a complaint at the police station⁠—afterward. The flute-boy showed his pocketbook. It contained three hundred and fifty francs only. The patronne took that and told him to return with the balance when he got more money. The policemen turned him loose, one of them exchanging a sly wink with the patronne as they walked away.

While the flute-boy was telling his story to Banjo and Ray, Bugsy and Dengel came surreptitiously up behind them in the shadow of the little palm tree. Bugsy made a sharp noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers, and the flute-boy started apprehensively.

“Hi, but you sure is goosey,” laughed Banjo. And right there and thenceforth the flute-boy was dubbed “Goosey.”

“I wish the fire that was lit by that fellow that got six months for it had burned the damned Ditch down,” said Ray.

“Why, whatsmat pardner?” said Banjo. “The Ditch is all right. Nobody don’t have to go rooting in Boody Lane unless you want to. Let everything take its chance, says I.”

“Chance! What good is it, then, Banjo, when the people who should get some fun out of it⁠—the seamen⁠—are always the victims? Think of the police making this boy pay. It’s a crime and graft all round.”

“All the policemen in this Ditch are in league with the women and the maquereaux,” said Dengel. “Some of the police have women in the boxons.”

“Not possible!” exclaimed Ray.

“What will you?” responded Dengel. “The police are just like everybody else, except that they are perhaps the bigger hogs. Their pay is twenty-five francs a day. What will you?”

“We should worry, pardner,” said Banjo. “Look at Goosey. He’s happy about it.”

Goosey’s grin gave an ineffable expression to his features.

“D’you blow the flute?” Banjo asked.

“I sure think that I do.”

“If you blow it real good I can use you.”

“In what way?”

“It’s like this.”

Banjo explained his intention to form an orchestra. There was one thing that he was sure of about this town, and that was that the people loved music. All over the Ditch you never heard anything but bad music. If we could get a set of fellows together to turn out some good music we would sure make a success of the thing. But it was a hard job getting them. The fellows with instruments never stay long in port. Malty could play the guitar, but he had no instrument.

“He would put it in hock if he had one,” said Bugsy.

“If I get him one I’d sure see that he didn’t, though,” returned Banjo.

Goosey said that his friend Taloufa had a fine guitar.

“Oh, does he do? Jest lead me along to that darky. Where is he burying his head now?”

“He’s still on the ship,” Goosey replied, “going to be paid off tomorrow. He’ll fix me up so I don’t have to worry.”

“He’s a sucker, eh?” said Bugsy. “That’s why you done dumped all you hed in Boody Lane.”

“Lay off the kid, Bugsy,” said Banjo. “You got too much lip.”

“As much as a baboon,” added Goosey, laughing. “But where you get that ‘kid’ from?” he asked Banjo. “I don’t see my daddy in you.”

“Nevah mind, but youse a green kid, all the same,” replied Banjo. “Anyway, I think we c’n do some business together, you and the flute, you’ friend and the guitar⁠—”

“He’s got a little horn, too,” said Goosey.

“Sure enough? That’s the ticket and me and mah banjo.”

“Banjo! That’s what you play?” exclaimed Goosey.

“Sure that’s what I play,” replied Banjo. “Don’t you like it?”

“No. Banjo is bondage. It’s the instrument of slavery. Banjo is Dixie. The Dixie of the land of cotton and massa and missus and black mammy. We colored folks have got to get away from all that in these enlightened progressive days. Let us play piano and violin, harp and flute. Let the white folks play the banjo if they want to keep on remembering all the Black Joes singing and the hell they made them live in.”

“That ain’t got nothing to do with me, nigger,” replied Banjo. “I play that theah instrument becaz I likes it. I don’t play no Black Joe hymns. I play lively tunes. All that you talking about slavery and bondage ain’t got nothing to do with our starting up a li’l’ orchestra.”

“It sure has, though, if you want me and my friend Taloufa in with you. We aren’t going to do any of that blackface coon stuff.”

“Nuts on that blackface. Tha’s time-past stuff. But wha’ you call coon stuff is the money stuff today. That saxophone-jazzing is sure coon stuff and the American darky sure knows how to makem wheedle-whine them ‘blues.’ He’s sure-enough the one go-getting musical fool today, yaller, and demanded all ovah the wul’.”

“Hm.” Goosey reflected a little. “I’m a race man and Taloufa is race crazy. Pity he isn’t more educated. It’s a new day for the colored race. Up the new race man and finish the good nigger. I as much as told that captain that when he tried to monkey with me. I told him I was in France and not in the United States.”

“You were very foolish,” said Ray. “That wasn’t helping your race any.”

“That’s what you think, but I know I was right. France isn’t like the United States nor Africa⁠—”

“And what’s wrong with Africa?” demanded Dengel.

“Africa is benighted. My mother always advised me when I was a kid to get away as far as farthest from Africa. ‘Africa is jungleland,’ she used to say; ‘there’s nothing to learn from it but dark and dirty doings.’ That’s where I don’t go with my friend Taloufa. He’s gone Back-to-Africa. He thinks colored people scattered all over the world should come together and go Back-to-Africa. He bought a hundred dollars of Black Star Line shares.”

“He did!” exclaimed Banjo. “And what does he think now they got the fat block a that black swindler in the jailhouse?”

“Taloufa thinks better of him,” said Goosey. “Garvey is a bigger man among colored people since they jailed him. Taloufa was at Liberty Hall for the big manifestation. And all the speakers said that the British were back of Garvey catching jail. They were scared of him in Africa and wouldn’t let the Negro World through the mails. Taloufa can tell you all about it tomorrow. I don’t know much. I am no Back-to-Africa business. That’s a big-fool idea. But I’m a race man.”

“If you think about you’ race as much as you do about Boody Lane you’d be better off, maybe,” said Bugsy.

They all laughed heartily.

“Chuts! All that race talking,” continued Bugsy, “is jest a mess a nothing. That saloon-keeper is race talking all the time, and he is robbing his countrymen them, too, giving them more rotten stuff to drink than the white man. He’s wearing gold spectacles with a gold chain, and looking so like he can’t see natural; but mark me, when the white man done get through with him, he’ll sure enough find his own eyesight and be walking around here like any other nigger.”

More laughter, and Banjo asked: “Where do we go from here? The Ditch is getting ready to eat, and I feel like heavy loading. Whose the money guy tonight?”

“I got a little money today,” Ray said. “You can all come up to my dump.”

“Tha’s the ticket!” Banjo applauded. “There’s mah pardner for you, Goosey. Guess he could clean you up on that race stuff. Yet he ain’t nevah hunting down no coon nor bellyaching race on me.”

“But you’re interested in race⁠—I mean race advancement, aren’t you?” Goosey asked Ray.

“Sure, but right now there’s nothing in the world so interesting to me as Banjo and his orchestra.”