Taloufa came from the Nigerian bush. He had attended a mission school where he learned reading, arithmetic, and writing. He was taken to Lagos by a minor British official. And when the Englishman was returning to England he took Taloufa along as a “boy.” Taloufa was thirteen years old at that time. For nearly three years he served his master in a Midland town. Then he got tired of it, full fed up of seeing white faces only. He ran away to Cardiff, where he found more contentment among the hundreds of colored seamen who live in that port. And young, fresh, and naive, he became a great favorite among the port girls. He shipped to sea as a “boy,” making Cardiff his home. He was there during the riots of 1919 between colored and whites, and he got a brick wound in the head.

He went to America after the riots and jumped his ship there. He lived in the United States until after the passing of the new quota immigration laws, when, the fact of his entering the country illegally getting known, he was arrested and deported. In America he had joined the Back-to-Africa crusade and was a faithful believer in the Black Star Line bubble, the great dream of commerce that was to link Negroes of the New World with those of Africa. He bought shares in it and, although the bubble burst with the conviction and imprisonment of the leader for fraudulent dealings, Taloufa still believed in him and his ideas of Back-to-Africa.

Taloufa maintained that the Back-to-Africa propaganda had worked wonders among the African natives. He told Ray that all throughout West Africa the natives were meeting to discuss their future, and in the ports they were no longer docile, but restive, forming groups, and waiting for the Black Deliverer, so that, becoming aroused, the colonial governments had acted to keep out all propaganda, especially the Negro World, the chief organ of the Back-to-Africa movement.

“The Black Deliverer has delivered himself to the ofays’ jailhouse,” said Ray.

“It’s the damned English that got him there,” said Taloufa.

Taloufa firmly believed the rumor, current among Negroes, that representatives of the British Intelligence Service had instigated the prosecution and conviction of Marcus Garvey in the United States.

However, Taloufa had no immediate intention of returning to West Africa. It was his first trip to this great Provençal port of which he also had heard and dreamed much. And after tasting it for a while he expected to go on to England.

He had at once fallen in with the idea of Banjo’s orchestra. Unlike Goosey, he was not squeamish about the choice of music. He loved all music with a lilt, and especially music that was heady with sensuousness. Banjo found it easy to work along with him. If Taloufa had a little word to say about Back-to-Africa, Banjo would listen deferentially, and for his answer refer him to Ray.

“I ain’t educated, buddy. Ask mah pardner, Ray.”

The day following their big musical night, Banjo took Taloufa down to look the breakwater over. Returning from Joliette to the Vieux Port in the afternoon, they stopped in a bistro of the Place de Lenche for a cool guzzle of wine. The Place de Lenche is midway between Joliette and the Bum Square. The Quartier Réservé slopes up a somber crisscross of alleys to its edge, where it ends.

Finishing their bottle, the boys started down one of the alleys into the Ditch, when they were attracted by a striking girl framed in front of a bistro. She was straight, boyish, and carrot-headed. And she stood right-arm akimbo and the left up against the jamb of the door, between her fingers a cigarette at which she whiffed with an infinitely bored mechanical manner. A young Chinese, leaning against a lamppost a little farther down on the opposite side of the alley, was beckoning to her. Lizard-like, excessively slim and hipless, his smooth buff-yellow countenance was rigidly immobile, but the balls of his eyes behind the curious little slits were burning with rage.

“Gawd on his golden moon! What a saucy-looking doll that one is!” Banjo exclaimed.

“I ain’t studying any kelts,” replied Taloufa.

“Watch her and that sweet chink. She’s scared a him.”

Not a muscle of the Chinese youth’s face twitched as the girl went slowly, reluctantly toward him. He stood fixed in his tracks until she came to him, her toes up to his toes, her face almost touching his face. Then he said something to her, his lips barely moving, and as she opened her mouth to reply he lifted his knee and drove a terrific kick into her belly. The girl fell backward with a shriek on the cobblestones.

A policeman then coming down from the Place de Lenche, bicycle in hand, rushed over, and apprehended the Chinese. Immediately the girl picked herself up and grabbed the arm of the youth, crying to the policeman: “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” The policeman left them a little shamefacedly as the gang of spectators that had quickly gathered laughed derisively.

“Sale vache au roulette,” said the Chinese boy, and putting the girl before him he said, “Go on,” and began kicking her all the way down into the Ditch. And subdued, without a whine, she went. A little knot of pasty-faced kids frisked about and, laughing, cried: “Chinois! Chinois!”

“She honors and obeys her boss all right,” Taloufa remarked, dryly.

“They’re the only real sweetbacks in this Ditch, them Chinese,” said Banjo. “The only ones kain bring you a decent change a suit and strut the stuff like a fellow back home.”

Taloufa went to the Antilles Restaurant for dinner. Banjo had taken a dislike for that restaurant and would not go there. Taloufa promised to meet him after dinner at the beach boys’ café on the other side of the Bum Square, where they would play.

Taloufa had not gone Back-to-Africa in ideas only, but also in principle⁠ ⁠… and nature. He put up at the Antilles because it was a hotel primarily for Negroes (although it did not at all exclude the little pinks of the Ditch who went there for chocolate trade and brought in business), owned by a Negro couple.

The Antilles Restaurant was right off the Bum Square. It was situated in one of the narrowest, dampest, and most rubbishy of the alleys, but as you entered it you were stirred by the warm cheerfulness of the little oblong place. With its high narrow benches and painted walls it had something of the aspect of a Greenwich Village den. And, if you knew anything of the cooking of the West Indies with its rice-and-Congo-peas dishes, fish fried in coconut oil and annatto-colored sauces, you would be charmed by the pepper-pot flavor of the place.⁠ ⁠…

The customers were colored seamen, soldiers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, a few from Madagascar, and three brown girls. During the dinner a brown, jolly-faced soldier played an accordion while a Martinique guide and sweetman, who was sweet in the Ditch for every purchasable thing, was shaking a steel pipe, about the size of a rolling-pin, containing something like beans or sand grains. The curious thing went beautifully with the accordion.

They played the “beguine,” which was just a Martinique variant of the “jellyroll” or the Jamaican “burru” or the Senegalese “bombé.” The tall, big-boned patronne started the dancing. She radiated energy like a boiler giving off steam. She danced with a whopping sergeant, talking all the time the Martinique dialect in a deep voice of the color and flavor of unrefined cane sugar. She was easily the central figure, making the girls look like dancing attendants. It was an eye-filling ensemble of delicious jazzing, and the rhythm of it went tickling through the warm blood of Taloufa, who was still smacking his lips over his sausage-and-rice, tempered with a bottle of old Bordeaux.

“Beguine,” “jellyroll,” “burru,” “bombé,” no matter what the name may be, Negroes are never so beautiful and magical as when they do that gorgeous sublimation of the primitive African sex feeling. In its thousand varied patterns, depending so much on individual rhythm, so little on formal movement, this dance is the key to the African rhythm of life.⁠ ⁠…

In company with a pretty Provençale, the Arab-black girl came in. Her hair stood up stiff, thick and exciting. Her mouth was like a full-blown bluebell with a bee on its rim, and her eyes were everywhere at once, roving round as only Arab eyes can. She had disappeared since the night of her glorious performance at the “Shake-That-Thing” festival and was just this day returned to Marseilles again.

Taloufa saw her for the first time and fell for her. Their eyes met, his a question, hers a swift affirmative, and he went to dance with her. There was no common language between them, but what did that matter? Taloufa’s swelling emotion was eloquent enough. And mingled with that emotion was the patriotic feeling of kinship with his pickup that made him do the “beguine” with a royal African strut.

After that dance they sat together, the girl choosing a bottle of mousseux for the treat.⁠ ⁠… Taloufa was filling the glasses from a second bottle when Banjo entered in search of him.

“For the love of a li’l’ piece!” Banjo cried. “Ain’t you coming to play noneatall tonight, buddy?”

Not understanding, but guessing that Banjo wanted to get Taloufa away, the girl looked at him in a hostile manner. She knew, of course, that Banjo was on the beach.

“You gotta carry on without me tonight,” Taloufa said in a thick, ripe-brown voice, slowly, pointlessly fingering his guitar.

“Get outa that,” said Banjo. “You ain’ta gwine to drop a fellah flat like that. Come and give us a hand. You got all the balance a the night foh sweet flopping. Kay’s got two ofays with him and I wanta turn loose some’n’ splendacious foh them. Them’s English and might hulp us some. A fellah nevah know his luck. Theyse done some moh running around the wul’ jest lak you and me and Malty, and they knows every knowingest place in this white man’s Europe.”

“But I’ve got this sweet business with me,” objected Taloufa.

“Man, tell her you’ll see it later. I’ll fix it up with her. This is Marcellus. Everything wait on you down to Time himse’f when youse gotta roll on you.”

It was not so easy to get Taloufa away from the girl, but Banjo managed it, making eloquent promises of returning him to the Antilles.

“You come back without fail,” said the girl as Banjo opened the door.

“Youse clean gone on her, eh?” remarked Banjo as they went along the Bum Square.

“She’s a bird of a brown,” was Taloufa’s response.

“Watch out! Our own color is the most expensive business in this sweet burg. Ise one spade can live without prunes when I ain’t in chocolate country. You see Latnah. I got her all going mah own way becazen Ise one independent strutter.”

“I’ve noticed all right you aren’t foolish about her,” agreed Taloufa. “Malty’s more that way. But I’m different from you. I haven’t got any appreciation at all for the kelts.”

“You’re joking,” exclaimed Banjo, laughing. “You ain’t telling me that you done gone all the way back home to Africa even by that most narrow and straitest road that a human mortal was nevah made to trod?”

“I’m not kidding at all,” responded Taloufa. “I’m foursquare one hundred percent African.”

At the hangout Bugsy, Goosey, Ginger, Dengel, Malty, and Ray with his two guests were waiting. They were two Britishers who lived uptown, but were frequently down in the Ditch. Ray had met them by one of the tourist bureaus of the Cannebière. Like himself, they were always traveling. But they had been staying for some length of time in Marseilles. Ray knew nothing about them yet⁠—what hobby they pursued and what they were doing in Marseilles. They spoke cultivated English and the taller of the two had a colonial accent that Ray could not place. At the hangout they treated the beach boys, and the girls that their presence attracted there, to the best liqueurs and fines in the place.

“He was just falling down for a wonderful brown,” cried Banjo as he entered with Taloufa, “but I carried him right off away from it.”

The old bistro shook with everybody’s laughter.

“Which one a them was it?” demanded Malty.

“That saucy-lipped, shakem-shimmying sweet mam‑ma.”

“The dawggonest, hardest, and dearest piece a brownness in this bum hussy,” said Bugsy.

“Now Ise got mah man, we’ll play ‘Carolina’ for yo-all,” Banjo announced.

“I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me.⁠ ⁠…”

Lustily Goosey fluted it and the boys charged mightily into the chorus.

“Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

The Britishers demanded champagne for the boys. The bistro-keeper had only vins mousseux, Clairette, and Royal Provence. They made her send her husband out for champagne. He returned with four bottles of white-label Mercier.

“That’s better,” said the taller white. “I hate the vile taste of those sickly-sweetish mousseux wines.”

Between intervals of champagne-swilling the boys played and danced. “Carolina,” “Mammy-Daddy,” “That’s My Baby,” “Shake That Thing,” “The Garvey Blues,” and all the “blues” that Banjo’s memory could rake up.

When the Britishers left the bistro there was still champagne in the bottles, and by the time the boys were finished, they were all posing in attitudes of soft ecstasy.

In the Bum Square, Latnah appeared and hung on to Banjo. The group began to break up, every man to his own dream! Taloufa was all in a haze of intoxication, but he remembered his rendezvous with the girl at the Antilles bar. Latnah and Banjo went along with him, but when they got there the Antilles was closed.

Returning to the Bum Square, they found Malty, Bugsy, and Ginger, undecided about their aims, swaying softly in their tracks.

“Let’s all have a chaser of some’n’,” suggested Banjo.

“No, no,” protested Latnah. “It too late and you-all saoul.”

“Shut up,” said Banjo. “This is a man’s show.”

They walked a little along the quay and into a café. And there was Taloufa’s girl disdainfully drinking beer with a white corporal, who seemed broke and quite fed up with the business of life, because a common soldier could not enjoy its pleasures when he was far away from pay day.

The girl brightened up with a smile and brusquely left the soldier to take charge of Taloufa, whose legs were like reeds under him. She had been much put out that he had not returned to the Antilles. She had even changed for the occasion and was wearing a wine-colored frock, all soft and gleaming. Her crinkly hair was done up in the shape of a bowl, and in her buxom beauty and the magnetic aura of fascination around her she looked like some perfect marvel of mating between amber-skinned Egypt and black Sudan.

Malty took Taloufa’s guitar. “I wanta play some moh,” he droned in a singsong. “I ain’t noways sleepy.”

The girl went off with Taloufa.

Outside, Latnah said to Banjo: “She no good girl for your friend. I know her. She very wicked.”

“Oh⁠ ⁠… she can’t kill him,” he replied. “Let’s allez to turn the spread back.”

Malty had reached that delightful attitude of inebriation when a man feels like staying the night through, tippling and fooling with boon companions. Bugsy, who had contrived to pass many of his glasses over to the other boys, was quite aware of what was happening, but Ginger was all enveloped in a brown fog.

“Let’s carry on, fellahs,” said Malty, “till the stars them fade out.”

He had some money and they went into a little open-all-night café. Malty strummed softly on the guitar and hummed snatches of West Indian “shay-shay” and “jamma.”

“When you feel a funny feel,
When you feel a funny feel,
When you feel a funny feel,
Get in the middle of the wheel.⁠ ⁠…”

“The daughter of Cordelia is going round the town⁠—
Sailor men in George’s Lane after the sun gone down,
Going round, going round Cordelia Brown.⁠ ⁠…”

“I love her oh, oh, oh.⁠ ⁠…
I love her so, so, so.⁠ ⁠…
I love the little-brown soul of her,
I love the classy-town stroll of her.
And every move she makes is like a picture to me,
I love her to mah haht and I love her on mah knee.”

They had finished four bottles of white wine tempered with lemonade when Taloufa came rushing in in shirt sleeves, his shirttail flying.

“She gypped me! She gypped me!” he cried. “Took every cent I had and beat it.”

“All you’ money? Banjo said you had about three thousand francs!” cried Malty.

“How you mean rob you?” from Bugsy.

“Rob you⁠—rob you⁠ ⁠…” Ginger singsonged.

All three of them spoke together.

“Cleaned you outa all that money?” Malty questioned.

Taloufa explained that he had been long-headed enough to leave two thousand five hundred francs at his hotel, but the girl had got away with all he had⁠—over three hundred francs. Bugsy, scornful of his incompetence, interrupted him while he was talking:

“Git you’ shirt in you’ pants, mon, git it in. You ain’t in the African jungle with the monkeys in the trees now. Youse on the sidewalk of the white man’s big city. Git it in, I say.”

Taloufa was too agitated to pay any attention. Ginger reached over and arranged his clothes for him.

“I was so boozy and all in I fell asleep,” Taloufa said, “and when I woke up she was gone. I thought of my pocketbook right away, and looked in my coat pocket, but every nickel was clean gone.”

“So you done got rooked foh nothing at all!” exclaimed Bugsy. “My Gawd! The baboons them in the bush where you come from has got moh sense than you. And what youse gwine do about it?”

“I don’t know,” replied Taloufa.

“Don’t know?” repeated Bugsy. “Why, lock her up, man! Lock her up! You ain’t gwine a let that black slut pass all that buck to her white p.i., when we fellahs am hungry on the beach. Lock her up, I say.”

Taloufa hesitated about the police. Malty was indifferent, but Ginger was flatly for letting the matter rest.

“You shoulda leave the money with us. Now she done had it I wouldn’t mess with no police. Just as cheap be magnamisuch.”

“Crap on that magnamisuch!” retorted Bugsy. “ ’Causen you done make the same fool a you’self, you think everybody is a sucker like you.”

“I don’t want to arrest a girl of my own race,” said Taloufa.

“In the can with race!” cried Bugsy. “A slut is a slut, whether she is pink or blue. You don’t have to arrest her nohow. Jest get a policeman to get back that good money and let him turn her loose after you get it.”

But Ginger, who was the only one who could make himself intelligible in French, refused to budge in search of a policeman.

“Let the blighting thing be,” he said. “It’ll soon turn sewer stuff. When the maquereaux in the Ditch finish with it, they pass it to them cousins in the sea.”

Bugsy induced Taloufa to go with him to find a policeman. “You don’t have to lock her up. Jest get you’ money back.”

They found a policeman and brought him back for Ginger to explain. Ginger explained, but he and Malty refused to go along to search out the girl.

“You scared a them lousy maquereaux,” Bugsy taunted.

“Not a damn sight,” declared Malty. “I ain’t studying them babies. I was thinking personally of the principle of this heah algebra.”

“That’s some’n’ sure said,” Ginger applauded. “The principle of the thing is the supposition of its circumference. Now you, Bugsy, ef you was in that gal’s place⁠—”

“You fiddling, low-down, wut’less yaller nigger!” swore Bugsy. “What you think I is to put myself in her place? You think Ise gwine be everything like you because Ise on the beach? Not on you’ crack!”

He went off with Taloufa and the policeman. He knew the house where the Algerian girl lived in an alley above the Bum Square. They routed her out of bed. They searched her room thoroughly. They found nothing. She pretended to vexed amazement that they should molest her. She had left Taloufa, she said, simply because he had gone to sleep! Bugsy urged Taloufa to jail the girl, but Taloufa refused and told the policeman to turn her loose.

When they returned empty-handed to Ginger and Malty on the quay, Ginger sat right down on the pavement and gurgled.

“I knowed you wouldn’t find a dimmitty dime,” he droned. “When one a them gals make a getaway she pass that dough tutswit to her p.i., and he transfer it to a safe spot.”

“I’m going back to the hotel,” said Taloufa. “I am tired.”

Dawn was just lifting the shroud of night from the face of the Ditch, turning silver-blue the shadows, lighting the somber fronts of love shops and bistros, the gray granite of the Mairie, the fish market, the fishing-boats, and the excursion boats in faint motion. Toward the Catalan baths the horizon was suffused by a russet flush. A soft breeze floated gracefully like a sloping wave of sea gulls into the walled squareness of the calm Vieux Port.

“Let’s go down to the breakwater and sleep,” Ginger yawned.