Banjo also asked Ray to let Chère Blanche know that he was in the hospital. Ray did so, but Chère Blanche never stirred from her post to visit him. Latnah would not go to see him, either. She swore that she was finished with him because he was a man who had no race pride. But Malty got money from her with which good things were bought for Banjo.
The boys kept him supplied with cigarettes and sweets, although the beach was not a place of plenty now. Wine was not allowed. Ships were few and they were having the most difficult of panhandling times. But Ray was in good luck. He had sold a poem, and a friend of poets had liked it so much that she had sent him a gift of money.
One Sunday, a week after Banjo had been admitted to hospital, Ray and Malty took him a chicken dinner. Ray had bought the chicken and Latnah had cooked it. She protested weakly when Ray said he was taking a part of the dinner to Banjo, but she did not try to prevent him, and it was she who provided a bowl.
The Hôtel Dieu (so the hospital is named) presented the aspect of a gloriously macabre picnic on this Sunday noon. It loomed like a great gray Rock of Refuge on the hill above the Ditch. The ultimate hope of salvation for the afflicted. Below it was a church with a wooden Christ nailed to a cross in the yard. Across the street opposite the church was the police force. Patients who were not bedridden flocked out on the two tiers of verandas. Girls of the Ditch with bandaged eyes and broken mouths and noses, and touts with knife wounds and arms in slings, hobbling on crutches, all victims of the bawdy riot; hollow-cheeked youths limping by; poor pimply children of leaky, squinting eyes; ulcerous middle-aged men and women, and old ones learning to creep again. From the beds against the windows, red naked stumps of arms and legs were stuck up like grotesqueries. Into this scene entire proletarian and bawdy families, as well as friends, had come to share the sacred Sunday dinner with the patients. Their children were with them and each group gathered around the bed of the patient to gorge and guzzle red wine amid the odors of ether and iodine.
Banjo enjoyed his chicken feed and asked what was new in the Ditch. Malty told of some Indian seamen (coolies, he called them) who had come straggling down to the African Café from one of the love shops the night before. They complained that all their money was taken away from them and that they were turned out of the place. They had approached the police in the street, who pretended they could not understand them. So they had gone to the African Bar to ask if any of the blacks would interpret for them.
“I acks them,” said Malty, “why they ’lowed them kelts to get holt a that good money a theirs. And the best explanation one (they all speaks a turr’ble jabberway) he says because the kelts was such good spohts, kidding and laughing with them.”
“Laugh,” said Ray. “Nobody in this Ditch knows how to laugh. These people can’t laugh. They smirk at the color of money and the fools think that is laughing. They can’t laugh, for their mouths are too tight and their lips too thin. We Negroes can throw a real laugh because we have big mouths.”
“That can be true,” said Malty, “but them Indians ain’t much different to me. When they show their teeth
it’s like a razor blade. I don’t like it noneatall and I don’t trust no coolie laughing.”
Malty’s metaphor was striking. He had often felt even more physically uncomfortable among Indians.
Next to Negroes, the Asiatic people with whom he always felt at ease and among whom he always loved to be, were the Chinese.
“I can’t forgive the mean cruelty of this Ditch,” continued Ray. “Why the licensed houses with the police marching up and down before them if the seamen can’t have any protection? Are the places licensed for the benefit of the touts or the clients? Men coming off a ship after days and weeks at sea must need women. And the Ditch is the most natural place for the average seaman. I can understand a man getting in a pickle by a bad pickup on the street. But when he is robbed in the licensed places I ask what’s the good of them? You might as well have no licensed place at all, as in John Bull’s and God’s own, so that if you get caught in a sex trap you could take it as a private affair and not blame it on the authorities, as the fellows do that get bitten here.”
“Ain’t all the fellahs blaming nobody, pardner?” laughed Banjo. “This heah Lincoln Agrippa, otherwise Banjo, is one no-blame business. Of cohse, someathem houses is jest a trap-hole and them pohlice no better’n a gang a cut thwoat p.i.’s. But it’s the mens them that make the stuff such hard business. I know more about it than you does, pardner, ’cause Ise been moh low-down roughhouse than you. And you don’t know nothing of all what a pants-wearing bastard will do between welching on a bargain and running off and not coming across. Tha’s why the womens carry guns in them ahmpits and keep a lot a touts foh protecting them. You mustn’t fohget that their business ain’t no picnic. It is hard labor.”
Ray could not reply to this. He felt that there was something fundamentally cruel about sex which, being alien to his nature, was somehow incomprehensible, and that the more civilized humanity became the more cruel was sex. It really seemed sometimes as if there
