“I don’t care. You know why I went with you? I did that to change mah luck.”
“I no understand.”
“You don’t?” Banjo explained. “When I was up against it, as if the ofays hadda done hoodoohed me, I thought that by changing color I might change mah luck.”
Now Latnah understood. It humiliated her. She crumpled under Banjo’s jibe. He had spoken in a bantering way, but his words were cruel; they ate into her.
“Bye-bye, mamma.” Banjo touched her shoulder playfully—“and don’t nevah you pull off no moh of that hen-scratching stuff on me.”
“Touch me again and I stick you!” She whipped her little dagger out of her bosom.
Banjo saw the silver-headed thing and recoiled quickly as from the sudden menace of a rattlesnake. His eyes and mouth popped open, his face wearing horror like an African mask.
XIV
Telling Jokes
There was one Southern black on the beach whom Banjo and his boys hated to see and always avoided. He had come to Marseilles from a North-African port, where he had been paid off on a foreign ship. When he arrived at Marseilles, like the boy of the “Don’t-light-it-afire” story, he was highly disdainful of the beach boys and would have none of them; but he allowed himself to be picked up by some insectile Corsican voyous who made their headquarters in a sewer hole of a hotel-bistro of the Ditch. When his money was gone he went to the American consulate, and it was arranged for him to be returned home by an American freighter. But when the day came for him to ship he refused to go. He had got a little money somewhere. He lived on it for a few days. After that was gone he again returned to the consulate for help, but the clerk in charge of the seamen’s department would have nothing to do with him.
Then he tried to get in with the beach boys, but they would not have him. Not merely because he had scorned their company at first, but because he was a dead thing with no spark in him of the vagabond flair for life which was the soul of the beach existence. The boys called him Lonesome Blue.
Lonesome Blue had been excited by the boys’ talk of raiding the good wine of the docks. And one fine afternoon he hiked down and bunged out a barrel on the breakwater, right under the eyes of the police. He was arrested and got prison for three months and a writ of expulsion from the country effective ten days after he was released.
If you have the hard luck to get expelled from France, the department of the Sûreté Générale does not worry itself about the manner of your going. The order is, Get out! and you yourself must find the way. Because of this, many criminals merely change their names and the scene of their activities in order to remain in the most fascinating of European countries. Some of them stay in the same place, if it is, like Marseilles, big enough to hide in, having faith in their cleverness to escape the toils of the police. Ginger, for example, having got into difficulties, had been sentenced to do a little time and then to be deported. That was long, long ago. But on coming out of jail he had destroyed the expulsion paper and was still enjoying Marseilles. That is not such a simple thing as it sounds, for the police are ever on the lookout for evaders, for whose arrest they get a premium of some ten francs per head. Ginger had been caught in many a rafle, but his little store of colloquial French and his good-natured wit had got him through the examination every time.
Poor Lonesome Blue was tongue-tied and witless. Since his first imprisonment, he had twice been in jail for disobeying the expulsion orders, and he had made souvenirs of the papers for the benefit of the police. He had just been let out again and entered the African café on seeing Banjo and the boys, who had assembled there after lunch.
“Here is ole Lonesome Blue again,” cried Banjo. “Always exposing himself when you least expect, scarifying like a haunts.”
“Why don’t you get outa it, mah boy?” said Ginger. “Seeing as youse messed up you’self in this Frenchman’s town, why don’t you ketch you a broad and get outa it? Look how you stand.”
Lonesome Blue was in a crumpled tangle of rags, his toes poking through a poor proletarian pair of Provençal pantoufles, his face scabby and wearing a perpetually soured expression, as if some implacable, invisible demon had a clutch on the back of his neck.
“Youse a sick nigger,” said Banjo. “You look in a bad way to me, lak somebody done got a passport for the boneyard.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know it,” replied Lonesome Blue. “I know it without you saying it. Only Gawd knows how I feel,” he finished with a belly-deep groan.
“Gawd won’t hulp you a damn sight mohn the debbil will, nigger,” retorted Banjo. “You better cut out the preaching Jesus stuff and get you a broad foh going back home. And when you git back you take you’se’f to a hospital and get some shots, for if you ain’t got the sip I ain’t nevah seen none.”
“Wha’ you wanta drink?” Ginger asked.
“Not a damn thing to drink with our gang,” said Banjo. “Ain’t none of us gwine encourage Lonesome Blue to lay around heah and die. If we got any money, let’s give it tohm. But let him keep to himself until he’s so lonely that he’ll sure get right outa this Frenchman’s town.
