“You good friend, Malty, very good friend.” And she did not change her position. “You more appreciate than Banjo.”
“Oh, he’s all right, though; but you know his way. … I ain’t got the price of a room to stay up this end tonight, and I feels too good and tired to walk way back to the box car. I wish you’d let me sleep on the floor here.”
Latnah gave no reply. Ray slipped out, saying he would see them tomorrow.
VII
The Flute-Boy
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
