Ray laughed. “Justice, like equality, mon vieux, does not exist in the mathematics of life. It’s a man’s world, you might say a white man’s world and … ‘a man’s a man for a that.’ ”
Two sailors, arm in arm, their white caps set far back on their heads, came out of the British-American Bar and moved in a slow drunken roll across the square, chanting, as if they were rooting for a team: “We are Americans. … We are Americans. …”
The African Bar was jammed full when the boys got back there. Smoke hung in gray chunks in the hot, strong-smelling air. Under it the player-piano was spitting out a “Charleston” recently arrived in Marseilles, while Martinique, Madagascans, and Senegalese soldiers, dockers, maquereaux—and, breaking the thick dark mass in spots, a white soldier or docker—were jazzing with one another and with the girls of the Ditch.
A Senegalese, squeezed up against the bar, with his wrist in a sling, called to Banjo as the boys pushed themselves in:
“Hey! you see American sailor?”
“I seen plenty a them, but I don’t pay them no mind,” said Banjo. “Wha’s matter with you’ hand?”
The Senegalese related to the boys how a gang of American sailors had rushed a bistro-dancing in Joliette, where colored and white of the quarter were amusing themselves, and tried to break it up. He had got a sprained wrist, but for revenge he had landed a sailor a butt that skinned his forehead and clean knocked him out.
“How did it finish up?” Ray asked.
“The police came just when the patron got out his revolver.”
“Oh, Lawd!” Banjo began in a Negro prayer-meeting tone. “It’s a hellova life and all Gawd’s chilluns am creatures of the debbil, but, oh, Lawd, lawdy, don’t let a cracker cross mah crossings in this Frenchman’s town.”
The boys pushed into the dance.
XVI
The “Blue Cinema”
Ray had met a Negro student from Martinique, to whom the greatest glory of the island was that the Empress Josephine was born there. That event placed Martinique above all the other islands of the Antilles in importance.
“I don’t see anything in that for you to be so proud about,” said Ray. “She was not colored.”
“Oh no, but she was Créole, and in Martinique we are rather Créole than Negro. We are proud of the Empress in Martinique. Down there the best people are very distinguished and speak a pure French, not anything like this vulgar Marseilles French.”
Ray asked him if he had ever heard of René Maran’s Batouala. He replied that the sale of Batouala had been banned in the colony and sniggered approvingly. Ray wondered about the truth of that; he had never heard any mention of it.
“It was a naughty book, very strong, very strong,” said the student, defending the act.
They were in a café on the Canebière. That evening Ray had a rendezvous at the African Bar with another student, an African from the Ivory Coast, and asked the Martiniquan to go with him to be introduced. He refused, saying that he did not want to mix with the Senegalese and that the African Bar was in the bas-fonds. He warned Ray about mixing with the Senegalese.
“They are not like us,” he said. “The whites would treat Negroes better in this town if it were not for the Senegalese. Before the war and the coming of the Senegalese it was splendid in France for Negroes. We were liked, we were respected, but now—”
“It’s just about the same with the white Americans,” said Ray. “You must judge civilization by its general attitude toward primitive peoples, and not by the exceptional cases. You can’t get away from the Senegalese and other black Africans any more than you can from the fact that our forefathers were slaves. We have the same thing in the States. The Northern Negroes are standoffish toward the Southern Negroes and toward the West Indians, who are not as advanced as they in civilized superficialities. We educated Negroes are talking a lot about a racial renaissance. And I wonder how we’re going to get it. On one side we’re up against the world’s arrogance—a mighty cold hard white stone thing. On the other the great sweating army—our race. It’s the common people, you know, who furnish the bone and sinew and salt of any race or nation. In the modern race of life we’re merely beginners. If this renaissance we’re talking about is going to be more than a sporadic and scabby thing, we’ll have to get down to our racial roots to create it.”
“I believe in a racial renaissance,” said the student, “but not in going back to savagery.”
“Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people,” said Ray, “is not savagery. It is culture.”
“I can’t see that,” said the student.
“You are like many Negro intellectuals who are bellyaching about race,” said Ray. “What’s wrong with you all is your education. You get a white man’s education and learn to despise your own people. You read biased history of the whites conquering the colored and primitive peoples, and it thrills you just as it does a white boy belonging to a great white nation.
“Then when you come to maturity you realize with a shock that you don’t and can’t belong to the white race. All your education and achievements cannot put you in the intimate circles of the whites and give you a white man’s full opportunity. However advanced, clever, and cultivated you are, you will have the distinguishing adjective of ‘colored’ before your name. And instead of accepting it proudly and manfully, most of you are soured and bitter about it—especially you mixed-bloods.
“You’re a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find yourself in the roots of your own people. You can’t choose as your models the haughty-minded educated white youths of a society living solid on its imperial conquests.
