The West African cried out to the officer that he would show him what “niggers” could do if he came on the dock. “We know all you Americans hate Negroes,” he said, “but you’re not in America. This is France.”
The boys stood on the pier, frankly contemptuous. They had money among them, and as Banjo could go back to his hotel to eat, they did not really care about the ship’s food. In the meantime, unknown to them, the officer had sent a man to inform the police. They had just moved from the ship and were sauntering farther down the dock when two policemen on bicycles overtook them. The boys were taken to the police station on the Quai du Lazaret and given a merciless beating. Each of them was taken separately into a room by the policemen, knocked down and kicked. Then they were turned loose.
Banjo took the matter humorously. Sitting in a café that evening with Ray and the young American, whose name was Crosby, he said: “Ise lame all ovah. They didn’t do nothing if they didn’t bruise us with knuckle and boot heel, but they know their business so damn good you’d have to use one a them magicfying glasses to find the marks.
“They got us jest where they wanted, so we couldn’t do nothing. And they dusted us, pardner. Fist and feet they dusted us good and proper and didn’t miss no part but the bottom of our feets.”
Ray and young Crosby thought that the case should be reported. It seemed incredible to them that the boys should be so brutally treated without any charge against them, without a hearing, when they were innocent of any illegal act. Was it because they were friendless black drifters?
“I ain’t doing nothing at all about it, nor noneathem others, either,” Banjo said. “I done told you that time with Lonesome Blue, pardner, that them official affair ain’t nevah no good to get mixed up with. I jes keeps away from them. Especially the pohlice. I do mah stuff, but Ise always looking out foh them in every white man’s country and keeping a long ways off from them, ’causen them is all alike. We fellahs done drink up a mess a good wine down them docks without paying anything for it. If we ketch a li’l’ hell this day—well, you can’t get away with the stuff all the time.”
“Get away with the stuff nothing,” said Ray. “You fellows didn’t do anything.”
“But we have, though, pardner. Wese done a lot and didn’t get caught.”
Often Ray had heard the Senegalese say that the police treated them like cattle because they considered them mere blacks. But he had no proof that that was a general attitude. Nearly all the Negroes lived in the Ditch or contiguous to it, and amused themselves there. And as the life of the Ditch was so bloody brutal, the police could not be gentle. Every week there were rafles, and every ordinary person in the Ditch was searched, white, brown, and black. The touts and girls and bistro-keepers always knew in advance when a rafle would take place. Therefore the only people that were taken in the combing were newcomers to the Ditch, mostly seamen who carried blackjacks or revolvers to protect themselves against the touts. Ray had become used to being searched in the Ditch. The police were never polite, but he didn’t expect them to be. With the identity-card regulation and the frequent rafles the French police had unlimited power of interference with the individual and Ray had arrived at the conclusion that he had really had more individual liberty under the law in the Puritan-ridden Anglo-Saxon countries than in the land of “Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité.”
That evening he went with Crosby to see the second half of the Crystal Palace show. Afterward they looked in on two boîtes de nuit, which they did not like, and then went to a big café, where they sat on comfortable cushioned benches and talked. Crosby was younger than Ray. A young poet who had the fanatical faith of youth in the magic of poetry, he argued with Ray about his marked absorption in prose. Ray contended that it seemed a natural process to him that youth should pass from the colorful magic of poetry to the architectural rhythm of prose.
They parted after midnight. Crosby’s hotel lay west of the Canebière and Ray’s to the east. The east was more respectable in Marseilles than the west. The mail had arrived in the late evening, bringing the Paris morning newspapers. Ray took his way to his respectable quarter in his most respectable rags, armed with respectability—in the form of the Paris editions of the New York Herald Tribune, the British Daily Mail and Le Journal.
He was thinking about Banjo and the boys and of their beating-up and philosophically wondering if the boys had not done something to deserve the beating—something that Banjo had not revealed in telling about it—when passing two policemen in the street leading to his hotel (one leaning against the door of a house and the other standing carelessly on the pavement), he was suddenly grabbed without warning. The policemen started to search him roughly and thoroughly.
Ray protested. What was it and what did they want of him? he demanded. He had his papers and would show them immediately. This he was proceeding to do when the bigger policeman stunned him with a blow of his fist on the back of the neck. He forthwith arrested Ray, handcuffed him, and took him to the police station in the bawdy quarter. The handcuff was a special chain kind that could be tightened and loosened at will, and the policeman took great pleasure in torturing Ray on the way to the jail. There the two police wrote out and signed a charge against him. Ray also made a
