The thought of Banjo having money and spending it on that girl, together with Bugsy’s intimation that this was Banjo’s real preference, made Latnah crazy with anger.
“I no understand good,” she said. “I go with white man, but only for money. White race no love my race. My race no love white.”
“Banjo ain’t like us. Him is a sore-back nigger,” said Bugsy, vindictively. “Them that likes white folks riding them all the time.”
So, thought Latnah, he no like my kind. He no man. He no good. He no got no pride of race. Me give him sleep. Me give him eat. Me give him love. Me give him money for go buy that thing. Even my money he took and went off laughing and sailor-rocking like that, away from me to spread strange joy. She had never been jealous of his change of pillow. That she understood, Orientwise. But for him to lose good money to those things in the Ditch, and for what? For the benefit of their two-legged white rats. Banjo an ofay-lover. She was seething with that deep-rooted sexual resentment that the women of the colored and white races nourish against one another—a resentment perhaps even more profound among the women than among the men of the species, because it is passive, having no outlet for brutal expression.
While Banjo had temporarily got up strutting and looked good to the Ditch again, his first flame had fallen far down the scale to a box in the Ditch. After quitting her maison d’amour for picnic days with Banjo, she had found another when the strutter’s funds were exhausted. But she did not remain very long in the new place. Banjo’s grandiose way of doing things must have stirred to life dead romances in her and spoiled her for the discipline of the shuttered places. However, the change was not advantageous even if she lived now in more natural light, seeing more of the street, for she was merely a “leetah” girl and down at the very bottom.
And now, in her changed estate, she did not withhold a smile from Banjo passing by more dandified than ever and looking his handsomest. Banjo, who never bore rancor for any length of time against anybody or anything, fell again.
“Chère Blanche!” That was her name, and someone had chalked it up on the rough, weather-beaten gray door of her dark little hole-in-the-wall.
Bugsy, of course, had Banjo wrong. Banjo was no ofay-lover. He simply would not see life in divisions of sharp primary colors. In that sense he was color-blind. The colors were always getting him mixed up, shading off, fading out, running into one another so that it was difficult to perceive which was which. Any pleasing color of the moment’s fancy might turn Banjo crazy for a while.
Bugsy was wrong indeed. Banjo would put no ofay before Malty, much less Ray. If he had Latnah tangled up and lost in the general color scheme, it was because she was a woman, and he took all women as one—as they came—roughly, carelessly, easily.
Banjo with Ray was at the little bar not far from Boody Lane. They were playing American poker with a red-skinned tout from Martinique, and a group of Corsican and Provençal touts were playing a French game at another table. Chère Blanche had deserted the sill of her box, where she was a fixture on the lookout night and day now, and was talking to the patronne at the bar.
Two girls came in, one of them whistling Carmen’s song. The sharp features of the whistling girl were brown as an Arab’s, but she was Provençal. She wore a flaring pink frock and her face was smeared with rouge. She was an old and hard habitant of the Ditch, but her companion, who was new to it, was very pretty, pink-rosy and young, between fifteen and sixteen. She had just a little rouge on her lips and she had on a black frock, as if she were mourning somebody; but that was camouflage. She had not a yellow card to live the life of the Ditch, for she was too young to get one. And so she was being chaperoned and cautiously initiated into the ways by the older girl. She had been only two weeks down there, having run away, so they said, from some country place. She was very much admired, naturally, for her youth and fresh prettiness among the old girls gave her the air of a little princess among scrub-women. But there was not a latent spark of interest in her eyes. She was thin, and already a fever color was supplanting the rose of her cheek, and from the bones the flesh was sagging unpleasantly.
The boys of the Ditch who were not touts gossiped about her all the time. They said that if the police caught her they would send her away to some place of confinement and keep her there a good many years, giving her time enough to reflect. But such gossiping was merely slum sentimentality, for the ways of the Ditch were open to all eyes and police eyes, like touts’ eyes, were keen to see what they wanted to see and blind to what they wanted not to see.
It was just a month since a very interesting couple had been pounced upon and borne away. A boy of seventeen and a girl of sixteen from a little tourist town. They had come into the Ditch with something of the verve of the black beach boys. She, boy-bobbed, wearing a cerise frock, and he like a romantic apache in black, a red cloth around his neck, a bright cap pulled down sideways on his face and often a flower, fixed always in the corner of his mouth. The girl was usually reading Le Film Complet, Mon Ciné, and moving-picture novelettes. In the bistro where they lolled out each
