“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.
X
Storytelling
The beach boys were at the Senegalese café. It was afternoon of a rainy day. Ray was trying to get some of the Senegalese to tell stories like the Brer Rabbit kind or the African animal fables of the West Indies. But the Senegalese were not willing to talk. Banjo had said openly that Ray was a writing black, for Banjo felt proud of that. The Senegalese got the information from Dengel and became a little suspicious of Ray, imagining, perhaps, that he would write something funny or caustic of their life that would make them appear “uncivilized” or inferior to American Negroes.
Ray himself hadn’t the habit of exhibiting his unprofitable literary talent in the workaday world that he loved to breathe in, for experience had taught him that many common people, like many uncommon people, fearing or hoping to be used in a story, are always unnatural and apt to pose in the presence of a writer. And, apart from modesty, he enjoyed life better without wearing the badge. That the badge, indeed, might be useful he was too often made aware, in a world of impressive appearances. But that was another matter. If, when alone, writing, he lived in an unconsciously happy state, he was also inexpressibly happy when he was just one of the boys cruising the docks or in a drinking revel.
Banjo had thought that the boys would take Ray’s writing as naturally as he took it and everything else. But Goosey, for one, didn’t.
“You mean to say you’d write about how these race boys live in the Ditch here and publish it?” he asked Ray. In speaking of Negro people Goosey always avoided the word “Negro” and “black” and used, instead, “race men,” “race women,” or “race.”
“Sure I would,” answered Ray. “How the black boys live is the most interesting thing in the Ditch.”
“But the crackers will use what you write against the race!”
“Let the crackers go fiddle themselves, and you, too. I think about my race as much as you. I hate to see it kicked around and spat on by the whites, because it is a good earth-loving race. I’ll fight with it if there’s a fight on, but if I am writing a story—well, it’s like all of us in this place here, black and brown and white, and I telling a story for the love of it. Some of you will listen, and some won’t. If I am a real storyteller, I won’t worry about the differences in complexion of those who listen and those who don’t, I’ll just identify myself with those who are really listening and tell my story. You see, Goosey, a good story, in spite of those who tell it and those who hear it, is like good ore that you might find in any soil—Europe, Asia, Africa, America. The world wants the ore and gets it by a thousand men scrambling and fighting, digging and dying for it. The world gets its story the same way.”
“That’s all right. But what do you find good in the Ditch to
