“What’s it all about?” Jake demanded, flattening down the book on the table with his friendly paw. The waiter was reading the scene between Fanny and Jean when the lover discovers the letters of his mistress’s former woman friend and exclaims: “Ah Oui … Sapho … toute la lyre. …”
“It’s a story,” he told Jake, “by a French writer named Alphonse Daudet. It’s about a sporting woman who was beautiful like a rose and had the soul of a wandering cat. Her lovers called her Sapho. I like the story, but I hate the use of Sapho for its title.”
“Why does you?” Jake asked.
“Because Sappho was a real person. A wonderful woman, a great Greek poet—”
“So theah is some Greek in the book!” said Jake.
The waiter smiled. “In a sense, yes.”
And he told Jake the story of Sappho, of her poetry, of her loves and her passion for the beautiful boy, Phaon. And of her leaping into the sea from the Leucadian cliff because of her love for him.
“Her story gave two lovely words to modern language,” said the waiter.
“Which one them?” asked Jake.
“Sapphic and Lesbian … beautiful words.”
“What is that there Leshbian?”
“… Lovely word, eh?”
“Tha’s what we calls bulldyker in Harlem,” drawled Jake. “Them’s all ugly womens.”
“Not all. And that’s a damned ugly name,” the waiter said. “Harlem is too savage about some things. Bulldyker,” the waiter stressed with a sneer.
Jake grinned. “But tha’s what they is, ain’t it?”
He began humming:
“And there is two things in Harlem I don’t understan’
It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man. …”
Charmingly, like a child that does not know its letters, Jake turned the pages of the novel. …
“Bumbole! This heah language is most different from how they talk it.”
“Bumbole” was now a popular expletive for Jake, replacing such expressions as “Bull,” and “blimey.” Ever since the night at the Congo when he heard the fighting West Indian girl cry, “I’ll slap you bumbole,” he had always used the word. When his friends asked him what it meant, he grinned and said, “Ask the monks.”
“You know French?” the waiter asked.
“Parlee-vous? Mademoiselle, un baiser, s’il vous plait. Voilà! I larned that much offn the froggies.”
“So you were over there?”
“Au oui, camarade,” Jake beamed. “I was way, way ovah there after Democracy and them boches, and when I couldn’t find one or the other, I jest turned mah black moon from the A.E.F. … But you! How come you jest plowing through this here stuff lak that? I could nevah see no light at all in them print, chappie. Eh bien. Mais vous compris beaucoup.”
“C’est ma langue maternelle.”
“Hm!” Jake made a face and scratched his head. “Comprendre pas, chappie. Tell me in straight United States.”
“French is my native language. I—”
“Don’t crap me,” Jake interrupted. “Ain’tchu—ain’tchu one of us, too?”
“Of course I’m Negro,” the waiter said, “but I was born in Haiti and the language down there is French.”
“Haiti … Haiti,” repeated Jake. “Tha’s where now? Tha’s—”
“An island in the Caribbean—near the Panama Canal.”
Jake sat like a big eager boy and learned many facts about Haiti before the train reached Pittsburgh. He learned that the universal spirit of the French Revolution had reached and lifted up the slaves far away in that remote island; that Black Haiti’s independence was more dramatic and picturesque than the United States’ independence and that it was a strange, almost unimaginable eruption of the beautiful ideas of the “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” of Mankind, that shook the foundations of that romantic era.
For the first time he heard the name Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black slave and leader of the Haitian slaves. Heard how he fought and conquered the slave-owners and then protected them; decreed laws for Haiti that held more of human wisdom and nobility than the Code Napoleon; defended his baby revolution against the Spanish and the English vultures; defeated Napoleon’s punitive expedition; and how tragically he was captured by a civilized trick, taken to France, and sent by Napoleon to die brokenhearted in a cold dungeon.
“A black man! A black man! Oh, I wish I’d been a soldier under sich a man!” Jake said, simply.
He plied his instructor with questions. Heard of Dessalines, who carried on the fight begun by Toussaint L’Ouverture and kept Haiti independent. But it was incredible to Jake that a little island of freed slaves had withstood the three leading European powers. The waiter told him that Europe was in a complex state of transition then, and that that wonderful age had been electrified with universal ideas—ideas so big that they had lifted up ignorant people, even black, to the stature of gods.
“The world doesn’t know,” he continued, “how great Toussaint L’Ouverture really was. He was not merely great. He was lofty. He was good. The history of Haiti today might have been different if he had been allowed to finish his work. He was honored by a great enigmatic poet of that period. And I honor both Toussaint and the poet by keeping in my memory the wonderful, passionate lines.”
He quoted Wordsworth’s sonnet.
“Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—
Oh miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen Thyself never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man’s unconquerable Mind.”
Jake felt like one passing through a dream, vivid in rich, varied colors. It was revelation beautiful in his mind. That brief account of an island of savage black people, who fought for collective liberty and was struggling to create a culture of their
