“Gu‑ide, gentlemen? Will you have a gu‑ide?” he insinuated in a tone of the color of mustard and the smell of Camembert. “Show you all the sights of Marseilles. Hot stuff in the quarter. Tableaux vivants and blue cinema.”
Other guides were working the crowd, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek—an international gang of them, but none so outstanding as this oleaginous mass out of Egypt with his heavy, eunuch-like face with its drooping fish eyes that seemed unable to look up straight at anything.
There were a number of touring cars filled with sightseers. Cocottes, gigolos, touts, sailors, soldiers everywhere. The cocottes passed in pairs and singly, attractive in their striking frocks and fancy shoes. The Arab-black girl in orange went by arm in arm with a white girl wearing rose. They smiled at Ray, standing on the corner.
Brazenly the gigolos made their signs for the delectation of the tourists. Such signs as monkeys in the zoo delight in when women, fascinated, are watching them.
Two gentlemen in golf clothes, very English-looking and smoking cigarettes, were spending a long time before a shop window, apparently absorbed in a plaster-of-Paris advertisement of a little dog with its nozzle to a funnel. It was a reproduction of the popular American painting that assails the eye in all the shopping centers of the world; under it was the legend: La voix de son Maître. The gentlemen were intent on it. A short distance from them were two sailors with large crimson pommels on their jauntily fixed caps, extra-fine blue capes, and their hands thrust deep in their pockets. Glancing furtively at the gentlemen, who were tongue-licking their lips in a curious, gentlemanly way, one of the sailors approached with a convenient cigarette butt. As they were exchanging lights, two passing cocottes bounced purposely into them and kept going, hip-shimmying and smirking, looking behind. … Nothing doing.
A small party of English shouldered Ray against the corner, talking animatedly in that overdone accent they call the Oxford. Ray remarked again, as he often had before, how the pronunciation of some of the words, like “there” “here” and “where,” was similar to that of the Southern Negro.
Two policemen were standing near and as the party passed one of them spat and said, “Les sale Anglais.” Ray started and, looking from the policeman who had spewed out his salival declaration of contempt to the English group crossing the street, he grinned. Just the evening before (he had read in the morning newspaper) an Englishwoman and her escort were nearly lynched by a theater crowd. Police intervened to save them. The woman had tried to push her way too hastily through the crowd while talking English. Commenting on it, the local paper had said such incidents would not happen if the postwar policy of the Anglo-Saxons were not to treat France as if she were a colony.
In Paris and elsewhere tourists were having a hot time of it. The franc was tobogganing and the Anglo-Saxon nations, according to the French press, were responsible for that as well. The panic in the air had reached even Marseilles, the most international place in the country. Up till yesterday these very journals had been doping the unthinking literate mob with pages of peace talk. Today they were feeding the same hordes with war. And to judge from the excitement in the air the mob was as ready for it as the two white apes of policemen standing on the corner.
Ray grinned again, showing all his teeth, and a girl across the street, thinking it was for her, smiled at him. But he was grinning at the civilized world of nations, all keeping their tiger’s claws sharp and strong under the thin cloak of international amity and awaiting the first favorable opportunity to spring. During his passage through Europe it had been an illuminating experience for him to come in contact with the mind of the average white man. A few words would usually take him to the center of a guarded, ancient treasure of national hates.
In conversation he sometimes posed as British, sometimes as American, depending upon his audience. There was no posing necessary with the average Frenchman because he takes it without question that a black man under French civilization is better off than he would be under any other social order in the world. Sometimes, on meeting a French West Indian, Ray would say he was American, and the other, like his white compatriot, could not resist the temptation to be patronizing.
“We will treat you right over here! It’s not like America.”
Yet often when he was in public with one of these black élites who could speak a little English, Ray would be asked to speak English instead of French. Upon demanding why, the answer would invariably be, “Because they will treat us better and not as if we were Senegalese.”
Ray had undergone a decided change since he had left America. He enjoyed his role of a wandering black without patriotic or family ties. He loved to pose as this or that without really being any definite thing at all. It was amusing. Sometimes the experience of being patronized provided food for thoughtful digestion. Sometimes it was very embarrassing and deprived an emotion of its significance.
Nevertheless, he was not unaware that his position as a black boy looking on the civilized scene was a unique one. He was having a good grinning time of it. Italians against French, French against Anglo-Saxons, English against Germans, the great Daily Mail shrieking like a mad virago that there were still Germans left who were able to swill champagne in Italy when deserving English gentlemen could not afford to replenish their cellars. … Oh it was a great civilization indeed, too entertaining for any savage ever to have the feeling of boredom.
The evening
