Ray laughed. Banjo’s rich Dixie accent went to his head like old wine and reminded him happily of Jake. He had seen Banjo before with Malty and company on the breakwater, but had not yet made contact with any of them.
Since he had turned his back on Harlem he had done much voyaging, sometimes making a prolonged stay in a port whose aspect had taken his imagination. He had not renounced his dream of self-expression. And sometimes when he was down and out of money, desperate in the dumps of deep problematic thinking, unable to find a shore job, he would be cheered up by a little cheque from America for a slight sketch or by a letter of encouragement with a banknote from a friend.
He was up against the fact that a Negro in Europe could not pick up casual work as he could in America. The long-well-tilled, overworked Old World lacked the background that rough young America offered to a romantic black youth to indulge his froward instincts. In America he had lived like a vagabond poet, erect in the racket and rush and terror of that stupendous young creation of cement and steel, determined, courageous, and proud in his swarthy skin, quitting jobs when he wanted to go on a dream wish or a love drunk, without being beholden to anybody.
Now he was always beholden. If he was not bold enough, when he was broke and famishing, to be a bum like Malty in the square, he was always writing panhandling letters to his friends, and naturally he began to feel himself lacking in the free splendid spirit of his American days. More and more the urge to write was holding him with an enslaving grip and he was beginning to feel that any means of achieving self-expression was justifiable. Not without compunction. For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist as a man and remained for him the most wonderful example of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.
It was strange to Ray himself that he should be so powerfully pulled toward Tolstoy when his nature, his outlook, his attitude to life, were entirely turned away from the ideals of the great Russian. Strange that he who was so heathen and carnal, should feel and be responsive to the intellectual superiority of a fanatic moralist.
But it was not by Tolstoy’s doctrines that he was touched. It was depressing to him that the energy of so many great intellects of the modern world had been, like Tolstoy’s, vitiated in futile endeavor to make the mysticism of Jesus serve the spiritual needs of a world-conquering and leveling machine civilization.
What lifted him up and carried him away, after Tolstoy’s mighty art was his equally mighty life of restless searching within and without, and energetic living to find himself until the very end. Rimbaud moved him with the same sympathy, but Tolstoy’s appeal was stronger, because he lived longer and was the greater creator.
Drifting by chance into the harbor of Marseilles, Ray had fallen for its strange enticement just as the beach boys had. He had struck the town in one of those violent periods of agitation when he had worked himself up to the pitch of feeling that if he could not give vent to his thoughts he would break up into a thousand articulate bits. And the Vieux Port had offered him a haven in its frowsy, thickly-peopled heart where he could exist en pension proletarian of a sort and try to create around him the necessary solitude to work with pencil and scraps of paper.
He too was touched by the magic of the Mediterranean, sprayed by its foamy fascination. Of all the seas he had crossed there was none like it. He was ever reminiscent of his own Caribbean, the first salty water he had dipped his swarthy boy’s body in, but its dreamy, trade-wind, cooling charm could not be compared with this gorgeous bowl of blue water unrestingly agitated by the great commerce of all the continents. He loved the docks. If the aspect of the town itself was harsh and forbidding, the docks were of inexhaustible interest. There any day he might meet with picturesque proletarians from far waters whose names were warm with romance: the Caribbean, the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the China Seas, the Indian Archipelago. And, oh, the earthy mingled smells of the docks! Grain from Canada, rice from India, rubber from the Congo, tea from China, brown sugar from Cuba, bananas from Guinea, lumber from the Sudan, coffee from Brazil, skins from the Argentine, palm-oil from Nigeria, pimento from Jamaica, wool from Australia, oranges from Spain and oranges from Jerusalem. In piled-up boxes, bags, and barrels, some broken, dropping their stuff on the docks, reposing in the warm odor of their rich perfumes—the fine harvest of all the lands of the earth.
Barrels, bags, boxes, bearing from land to land the primitive garner of man’s hands. Sweat-dripping bodies of black men naked under the equatorial sun, threading a caravan way through the time-old jungles, carrying loads steadied and unsupported on kink-thick heads hardened and trained to bear their burdens. Brown men half-clothed, with baskets on their backs, bending low down to the ancient tilled fields under the tropical sun. Eternal creatures of the warm soil, digging, plucking for the Occident world its exotic nourishment of life, under the whip, under the terror. Barrels … bags … boxes. … Full of the wonderful things of life.
Ray loved the life of the docks more than the life of the sea. He had never learned to love the deep sea. Out there on a boat he always felt like a reluctant prisoner among prisoners cast out upon a menacing dreariness of deep water. He had never known a seaman who really loved the deep sea. … He knew of fellows who could love an
