“If you were sincere in your feelings about racial advancement, you would turn for example to whites of a different type. You would study the Irish cultural and social movement. You would turn your back on all these tiresome clever European novels and read about the Russian peasants, the story and struggle of their lowly, patient, hard-driven life, and the great Russian novelists who described it up to the time of the Russian Revolution. You would learn all you can about Ghandi and what he is doing for the common hordes of India. You would be interested in the native African dialects and, though you don’t understand, be humble before their simple beauty instead of despising them.”
The mulatto student was not moved in his determination not to go to the African Bar, and so Ray went alone. He loved to hear the African dialects sounding around him. The dialects were so rich and round and ripe like soft tropical fruit, as if they were fashioned to eliminate all things bitter and harsh to express. They tasted like brown unrefined cane sugar—Sousou, Bambara, Woloff, Fula, Dindie. …
The patron of the African Bar pointed out men of the different tribes to Ray. It was easy to differentiate the types of the interior from those of the port towns, for they bore tribal marks on their faces. Among civilized people they were ashamed, most of them, of this mutilation of which their brothers of the towns under direct European administration were free; but, because tattooing was the fashion among seamen, they were not ashamed to have their bodies pricked and figured all over with the souvenirs of the brothels of civilization.
It was no superior condescension, no feeling of race solidarity or Back-to-Africa demonstration—no patriotic effort whatsoever—that made Ray love the environment of the common black drifters. He loved it with the poetical enthusiasm of the vagabond black that he himself was. After all, he had himself lived the rough-and-tumble laboring life, and the most precious souvenirs of it were the joyful friendships that he had made among his pals. There was no intellectual friendship to be compared with them.
It was always interesting to compare the African with the West Indian and American Negroes. Indeed, he found the Africans of the same class as the New World Negroes less “savage” and more “primitive.” The Senegalese drunk was a much finer and more tractable animal than the American Negro drunk. And although the Senegalese were always loudly quarreling and fighting among themselves, they always made use of hands, feet, and head (butting was a great art among them) and rarely of a steel weapon as did the American and West Indian Negroes. The colored touts that were reputed to be dangerous gunmen were all from the French West Indies. The few Senegalese who belonged to the sweet brotherhood were disquietingly simple, as if they had not the slightest comprehension of the social stigma attaching to them.
At the African Bar the conversation turned on the hostile feeling that existed between the French West Indians and the native Africans. The patron said that the West Indians felt superior because many of them were appointed as petty officials in the African colonies and were often harder on the natives than the whites.
“Fils d’esclaves! Fils d’esclaves!” cried a Senegalese sergeant. “Because they have a chance to be better instructed than we, they think we are the savages and that they are ‘white’ negroes. Why, they are only the descendants of the slaves that our forefathers sold.”
“They got more advantages than we and they think they’re the finest and most important Negroes in the world,” said the student from the Ivory Coast.
“They’re crazy,” said the patron. “The most important Negroes in the world and the best off are American Negroes.”
“That’s not true! That can’t be true!” said a chorus of voices.
“I think Negroes are treated worse in America than in any other country,” said the student. “They lynch Negroes in America.”
“They do,” said the patron, “but it’s not what you imagine it. It’s not an everyday affair and the lynchings are pulled off in the Southern parts of the country, which are very backward.”
“The Southern States are a powerful unit of the United States,” said Ray, “and you mustn’t forget that nine-tenths of American Negroes live in them.”
“More people are murdered in one year in Marseilles than they lynch in ten years in America,” said the patron.
“But all that comes under the law in spite of the comedy of extenuating circumstances,” said Ray, “while lynch law is its own tribunal.”
“And they Jim Crow all the Negroes in America,” said the student.
“What is Jim Crow?” asked the Senegalese sergeant.
“Negroes can’t ride first class in the trains nor in the same tramcars with white people, no matter how educated and rich they are. They can’t room in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants or sit together in the same theaters. Even the parks are closed to them—”
“That’s only in the Southern States and not in the North,” the patron cut in.
“But Ray has just told us that ninety percent of the Negroes live in those states,” said the student, “and that there are about fifteen millions in America. Well then, the big majority don’t have any privileges at all. There is no democracy for them. Because you went to New York and happened to make plenty of money to come back here and open a business, you are overproud of America and try to make the country out finer than it is, although the Negroes there are living in a prison.”
“You don’t understand,” said the patron. “I wasn’t in the North alone. I was in the old slave states also. I have traveled all over America and I tell you the American Negro is more go-getting than Negroes anywhere else
