“Plenty. I’m here, and mean to make a practical thing of the white proverb, ‘Let down your bucket where you are.’ ”
“You might bring up a lot of dirt.” Goosey turned up his nose in a tickling, funny, disdainful way.
“Many fine things come out of dirt—steel and gold, pearls and all the rare stones that your nice women must have to be happy.”
“Why don’t you write about the race men and women who are making good in Paris?”
“I’m not a reporter for the Negro press. Besides, I can’t afford to keep up with the Negroes of Paris. And as they are society folk, they might prefer to have a society writer do them, like Monsieur Paul Morand, perhaps.”
“You don’t have to sneer at race society because you are out of it. It’s a good thing. Our society folks are setting a fine example of a high standard of living for the race.”
“I can’t see that. They say you find the best Negro society in Washington. When I was there the government clerks and schoolteachers and the wives of the few professional men formed a group and called themselves the ‘upper classes.’ They were nearly all between your complexion and near-white. The women wore rich clothes and I don’t know whether it was that or their complexions or their teaching or clerking ability that put them in the ‘upper class.’ In my home we had an upper class of Negroes, but it had big money and property and power. It wasn’t just a moving-picture imitation. Schoolteachers and clerks didn’t make any ridiculous pretenses of belonging to it. … I could write about the society of Negroes you mean if I wrote a farce.
“Gee! I remember when I was in college in America how those Negroes getting an education could make me tired talking class and class all the time. It was funny and it was sad. There was hardly one of them with the upper-class bug on the brain who didn’t have a near relative—a brother or sister who was an ignorant chauffeur, butler, or maid, or a mother paying their way through college with her washtub.
“If you think it’s fine for the society Negroes to fool themselves on the cheapest of imitations, I don’t. I am fed up with class. The white world is stinking rotten and going to hell on it.”
“But since you’re a Negro, wouldn’t it be a good thing for the race if the best Negroes appreciate what you write?”
“The best Negroes are not the society Negroes. I am not writing for them, nor the poke-chop-abstaining Negroes, nor the Puritan Friends of Color, nor the Negrophobes nor the Negrophiles. I am writing for people who can stand a real story no matter where it comes from.”
“I don’t care what you do, brother,” said Goosey. “I was talking for the race and not for myself, for I am never going back to those United Snakes.”
“What’s that you call ’em?” Banjo filled the bar with a roar of rich laughter.
“You heard me.” Goosey was grinning and shaking all over at his witty turn.
“Why, Goosey, you’re all right!” cried Ray. “Where did you hear that? You didn’t invent it, did you?”
“Sure I made it up myself,” Goosey replied, proudly.
United Snakes. The simile struck Ray’s imagination, giving him a terrible vision of the stripes of Old Glory transformed into wriggling snakes and the stars poisonous heads lifted to strike at an agonized black man writhing in the midst of them.
“Now that one theah is a new exploitation in geography that will sure stand remembering,” commented Ginger.
“What about this story business?” demanded Banjo. “Ain’t noneathem cannibals gwine tell anything?”
Ray kicked his shins and whispered: “Watch out the patron doesn’t hear you. It’ll start a roughhouse and spoil everything and you know he hasn’t much time for you.”
Banjo growled a low-down defiance. “Well, I don’t care a raw damn who don’t want to tell anything, pardner. I gotta personal piece to tell without any trimmings at all and I don’t care ef you publish it in the Book of Life itself and hand it to Big Massa as a prayer.”
“You ain’t got any shame, not to mention race pride, for you don’t understand that,” said Goosey.
A discharged Senegalese sergeant told a weird tale of his shooting up a barracks in Syria, killing a white private and an adjutant and escaping on an officer’s mount into Turkey. From there he negotiated with his captain, who permitted him to return without standing trial or punishment.
A smiling scepticism greeting him blandly from all faces, he glanced round humorously, remarking: “You don’t believe me, eh? You don’t believe.” And he burst into laughter.
“I’ll tell one of the African folk tales we know at home,” said Ray. …
“Once upon a time there was a woman who lived in a pretty house in the midst of a blooming garden. It was the prettiest house and the best garden in the land. The woman was very old, unmarried, but she was stout and fresh. She had a stunted little girl in the house waiting on her. People said the girl was her grandniece. They said the grandaunt had bewitched the girl and taken her growth and youth for herself.
“The little girl’s mother had died when she was a child and left her to her grandaunt to bring up. The girl had had a tiny, tiny red mole on her throat, which her mother had tattooed on it as a charm. The mole was made of blood that came from the heart of a crocodile, and so long as it was on the girl’s throat she would be happy and young and beautiful and never want for anything. But when the girl’s mother died the grandaunt hoodooed the mole away and fixed it on her own throat.
“Before the girl’s mother died she had pledged her to be married to the son of a chief in another land. And when the son reached marrying age, the dead mother appeared to him in
