Could he not see what Anglo-Saxon standards were doing to some of the world’s most interesting peoples? Some Jews ashamed of being Jews. Changing their names and their religion … for the Jesus of the Christians. The Irish objecting to the artistic use of their own rich idioms. Inferiority bile of non-Nordic minorities. Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color, wrapping themselves up in respectable gray, ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion (bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed for Ray. Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live instinct!
XIII
Bugsy Comes Back at Banjo
The Cairo Café in Joliette was packed full. An aged girl, her pale, tired features grotesque under the paint, was pounding out on the piano a tragic imitation of Raquel Meller’s song:
“Mimosa! Mimosa!
Elle n’a pas regarde chère petite,
Mais elle a vu bien plus vite
Que son coeur palpite,
Et qu’il lui tend les bras,
Mimosa! Mimosa!”
A slightly built Algerian rattled the drum and banged the cymbals. Young men, rigged out in fashionable regalia, burning colors from shoes to cap, danced with the girls of the quarter and with one another. Some wore proletarian blue. Egyptians, Maltese, Algerians, Tunisians, Syrians, Arabians, and Chinese bobbing up and down in ungainly jerks.
Chinese and Arab men are awkward in modern dances. They have nothing of the natural animal grace and rhythm of Negroes jazzing.
Although the Cairo was a colored bar, the Negroes hardly ever went there. Negroes and Arabs are not fond of one another—even when they speak the same language and have the same religion. There is a great gulf, of biological profundity, between the ochre-skinned North-Africans and the black dwellers below the desert. The Negro’s sensual dream of life is poles apart from the Arab’s hard realism.
Bugsy, passing the Cairo, saw Latnah inside and entered. Since his misunderstanding with Banjo, the wiry little fighter was walking very much by himself. And he enjoyed it. Bugsy was happiest when he was breathing some militant resentment. He did not speak to Latnah, not knowing with whom she had come nor what she was doing, but went to the bar and called for a glass of lemonade-menthé.
Latnah spoke to him. Although she was sitting at a table with white girls and brown men, she was really alone. She knew the proprietor, who was a brown man, and had stopped for a word with him. And then she had sat down and stayed, to listen, perhaps, to the language familiar to her, which Banjo mockingly called the Arabese.
Latnah called Bugsy and shifted, without getting up, to a small unoccupied table in the corner parallel to the one from which she moved. Bugsy went over to her, taking his drink.
“What you doing heah, taking that thing away from Banjo?” he asked her.
“Banjo!” Latnah sneered. “Me no never see him. Long time him no come sleep. Banjo dirty man and no good friend.”
Bugsy was very glad that Latnah was piqued and ready to hear him unburden himself about Banjo.
“You jest now finding out he’s a dirty spade and ain’t no good?” he said. “I knowed it long time. If Banjo had had plenty a money he’d never speak to a cullud person. I know that.”
“But why?” Latnah demanded. “He black man.”
“That ain’t nothing. Him is crazy ’bout white folks. He’s a Alabama nigger or cousin to one, and jest bohn foolish about that white skin. I tell you he’ll sooner give a white beachcomber a raise than one of his own color. And you know it’s easier for a white man to bum a good raise than us to. A white man can bum off his own color, and he think him is doing a colored man a favor when he pay him the compliment a bumming him, but often when we start bumming a white man, all we get outa him is ‘damned dirty nigger’ and his red moon in our face.”
“I know Banjo little mad, but I no think he love white more than colored. No, he just like everything without thinking. He Nègre; he can’t love the white.”
“You don’t know that nigger like I does. He ain’t lak me and you. He is a sore-back nigger and sure got white fevah. I done listen at him talking and I knows he ain’t got no use foh your kind. … Why, did you evah see him when he made that big raise off a them boys with the music on that City Line boat? You bet you didn’t. And now you ain’t seeing him, either, since Taloufa done paid and got his suit out and give him a big raise befoh going away—”
“Oh, Taloufa gone away?”
“Sure. He done take his tail away from this bum hussy.” (Bum hussy was one of Bugsy’s names for Marseilles.) “And all the money he done leave Banjo that nigger is spending in Boody Lane on that kelt that he done wasted all his duds on when he come here first. Same one that wouldn’t nevah so much as look at him when he done run through all his money and got him messed up in a fight.”
“He with her again?” Latnah asked.
“Sure. Ef you go ’long up to that there rendezvous café near Boody Lane Ise sure
