Bugsy’s Chinese pie was splendid stuff after the sandwiches. And when the boys finished it, they left the café, going through the docks toward Joliette. It was too late for them to sleep on the breakwater after their feed. So they straggled along, remarking the ships in the docks. There was a new Italian ship, a fine thing, moored where they were building the American-style concrete warehouse.
The boys stopped to admire her and the building. A little farther on they came upon a small pinch-faced white boy with a hunk of bread so hard that he was softening it under a hydrant to be able to eat it.
“Look at that poah kid!” said Banjo. “Starving, and we just done ate moh’n we could finish! Oh, Gawd! what a life! Some stuffing till they’re messing up themsel’s all ovah, and some drinking cold water to kill pain in the guts. … Heah! Come heah, kid!”
“Wachu gwina do? Don’t give the white bastard a damn thing!” Bugsy cried.
“Shet you’ trap, ugly mug,” said Banjo.
The boy saw Banjo beckon, and went to him. He did not understand English. Banjo gave him five francs, and the boy said “Merci” and started toward a little buffet shed near by.
“Youse a bloody sucker, you,” said Bugsy. “A white person can always make a handout, where you kain’t.”
“I don’t give a low-down drilling about that,” replied Banjo. “The kid was hungry and I done give him a raise. I know more’n you do, perhaps, Bugsy, that being black ain’t the same as being white, but—Ain’t I right, pardner?”
Banjo not finding words to express exactly what he felt, broke off and appealed to Ray.
“Sure you are. I was going to give the kid something mahself, but you were before me.”
“Last week,” said Banjo, “when Malty tried to bum a Englishman on that P. & O. boat, the bloody white hog said that he didn’t wanta talk to no black fellows. Today I kid a cracker gal outa five dollars for the bunch. It’s a funny life and you got to take it funny.”
“Youse a regular sore-back nigger,” remarked Bugsy. “I done said it some moh times and I’ll say it again, you nevah know when an American black man gwine show himself a white man’s nigger.”
“I’ll slap the sass outa you, you mean little coconut-dodger,” cried Banjo, “ef you call me any white man’s nigger,” and he gave Bugsy a poke in his jaw that sent him sprawling.
Bugsy got up frothy at the corners of his mouth, which was always a biological peculiarity with him, but now in his wrath it was more pronounced. He opened a large pocket knife and cried, “I’ll cut you all ways and don’t miss you throat.”
“Try it, nigger,” said Banjo, quietly enough. “Because you lick that theah South African Jew boy, you think youse got a chance against me?”
But the other boys put themselves between them and disarmed Bugsy. In the scuffle Ray’s wrist was cut and bled a great deal.
To Ray the incident recalled another, almost identical affair that happened in London. It was some time after the report of the Amritsar massacre had demonstrated that the mind of the world, shock-proof from the deeds of the great war, nevertheless could still be moved by tragic events. One evening Ray was strolling through a square with two Indians when a one-armed man stepped out of the shadow and begged alms. Evidently he was ashamed, for his hat was pulled down to hide his face. One of the Indians gave a harsh refusal, adding, as they walked on: “It is his kind the British use to make our people crawl before them in India.”
Ray felt ashamed. Ashamed that the man should be forced to beg. Ashamed of the refusal. Ashamed of himself. Ashamed of humanity. Instinctively he felt that the man who begged was not of the hateful type that does the sentry duty of the British Empire. Yet he could not feel that his Indian friend was wrong. He never gave alms in public himself, even when he could afford it. It made him feel cheap and embarrassed. But he would have liked to give something to that one-armed man. And he had not dared.
He hated the society that forced him into such an equivocal position. He hated civilization. Once in a moment of bitterness he had said in Harlem, “Civilization is rotten.” And the more he traveled and knew of it, the more he felt the truth of that bitter outburst.
He hated civilization because its general attitude toward the colored man was such as to rob him of his warm human instincts and make him inhuman. Under it the thinking colored man could not function normally like his white brother, responsive and reacting spontaneously to the emotions of pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, kindness or hardness, charity, anger, and forgiveness. Only within the confines of his own world of color could he be his true self. But so soon as he entered the great white world, where of necessity he must work and roam and breathe the larger air to live, that entire world, high, low, middle, unclassed, all conspired to make him painfully conscious of color and race.
Should I do this or not? Be mean or kind? Accept, give, withhold? In determining his action he must be mindful of his complexion. Always he was caught by the sharp afterthought of color, as if some devil’s hand jerked a cord to which he was tethered in hell. Regulate his emotions by a double standard. Oh, it was hell to be a man of color, intellectual and naturally human in the white world. Except for a superman, almost impossible.
It was easy
