“What you say, Billy?” Jake’s greeting.
“I say Ise gwineta blow. Toss off that theah liquor, you two. Ise gwineta blow champagne as mah compliments, old top.” …
“Heah’s good luck t’you, boh, and plenty of joy-stuff and happiness,” continued Billy, when the champagne was poured. “You sure been hugging it close this week.”
Jake smiled and looked foolish. … The second cook, whom he had not seen since he quitted the railroad, entered the cabaret with a mulatto girl on his arm and looked round for seats. Jake stood up and beckoned him over to his table.
“It’s awright, ain’t it Billy?” he asked his friend.
“Sure. Any friend a yourn is awright.”
The two girls began talking fashion around the most striking dresses in the place. Jake asked about the demoted rhinoceros. He was still on the railroad, the second cook said, taking orders from another chef, “jest as savage and mean as ever, but not so moufy. I hear you friend Ray done quit us for the ocean, Jakey.” …
There was still champagne to spare, nevertheless the second cook invited the boys to go up to the bar for a stiff drink of real liquor.
Negroes, like all good Americans, love a bar. I should have said, Negroes under Anglo-Saxon civilization. A bar has a charm all of its own that makes drinking there pleasanter. We like to lean up against it, with a foot on the rail. We will leave our women companions and choice wines at the table to snatch a moment of exclusive sex solidarity over a thimble of gin at the bar.
The boys left the girls to the fashions for a little while. Billy Biasse, being a stag as always, had accepted the invitation with alacrity. He loved to indulge in naked man-stuff talk, which would be too raw even for Felice’s ears. As they went out Maunie Whitewing (she was a traveled woman of the world and had been abroad several times with and without her husband) smiled upon Jake with a bold stare and remarked to Madame Mulberry: “Quel beau garçon! J’aimerais beaucoup faire l’amour avec lui.”
“Superb!” agreed Madame Mulberry, appreciating Jake through her lorgnette.
Felice caught Maunie Whitewing’s carnal stare at her man and said to the mulatto girl: “Jest look at that high-class hussy!”
And the dapper escort tried to be obviously unconcerned.
At the bar the three pals had finished one round and the barman was in the act of pouring another when a loud scream tore through music and conversation. Jake knew that voice and dashed down the stairs. What he saw held him rooted at the foot of the stairs for a moment. Zeddy had Felice’s wrists in a hard grip and she was trying to wrench herself away.
“Leggo a me, I say,” she bawled.
“I ain’t gwineta do no sich thing. Youse mah woman.”
“You lie! I ain’t and you ain’t mah man, black nigger.”
“We’ll see ef I ain’t. Youse gwine home wif me right now.”
Jake strode up to Zeddy. “Turn that girl loose.”
“Whose gwineta make me?” growled Zeddy.
“I is. She’s mah woman. I knowed her long before you. For Gawd’s sake quit you’ fooling and don’t let’s bust up the man’s cabaret.”
All the fashionable folk had already fled.
“She’s my woman and I’ll carve any damn-fool nigger for her.” Lightning-quick Zeddy released the girl and moved upon Jake like a terrible bear with open razor.
“Don’t let him kill him, foh Gawd’s sake don’t,” a woman shrieked, and there was a general stampede for the exit.
But Zeddy had stopped like a cowed brute in his tracks, for leveled straight at his heart was the gift that Billy gave.
“Drop that razor and git you’ hands up,” Jake commanded, “and don’t make a fool move or youse a dead nigger.”
Zeddy obeyed. Jake searched him and found nothing. “I gotta good mind fixing you tonight, so you won’t evah pull a razor on another man.”
Zeddy looked Jake steadily in the face and said: “You kain kill me, nigger, ef you wanta. You come gunning at me, but you didn’t go gunning after the Germans. Nosah! You was scared and runned away from the army.”
Jake looked bewildered, sick. He was hurt now to his heart and he was dumb. The waiters and a few rough customers that the gun did not frighten away looked strangely at him.
“Yes, mah boy,” continued Zeddy, “that’s what life is everytime. When youse good to a buddy, he steals you woman and pulls a gun on you. Tha’s what I get for prohceeding a slacker. A‑llll right, boh, I was a good sucker, but—I ain’t got no reason to worry sence youse down in the white folks’ books.” And he ambled away.
Jake shuffled off by himself. Billy Biasse tried to say a decent word, but he waved him away.
These miserable cockfights, beastly, tigerish, bloody. They had always sickened, saddened, unmanned him. The wild, shrieking mad woman that is sex seemed jeering at him. Why should love create terror? Love should be joy lifting man out of the humdrum ways of life. He had always managed to delight in love and yet steer clear of the hate and violence that govern it in his world. His love nature was generous and warm without any vestige of the diabolical or sadistic.
Yet here he was caught in the thing that he despised so thoroughly. … Brest, London, and his America. Their vivid brutality tortured his imagination. Oh, he was infinitely disgusted with himself to think that he had just been moved by the same savage emotions as those vile, vicious, villainous white men who, like hyenas and rattlers, had fought, murdered, and clawed the entrails out of black men over the common, commercial flesh of women. …
He reached home and sat brooding in the shadow upon the stoop.
“Zeddy. My own friend in some ways. Naturally lied about me and the army, though. Playing martyr. How in hell did he get hooked up with her? Thought he was up in Yonkers. Would never guess one in a hundred it was he. What a
