As to the why of his arrest and brutal treatment Ray could obtain no answer. He went home and wrote a statement of his case to the prefect. A couple of days later he received a notice to call at police headquarters. Crosby, who was particularly worked up over the incident, accompanied him. He was a Western-state lad of radical persuasion. His great-grandfather had been a frontiersman, an Indian-fighter in the struggle to win the West for civilization. His mother, a Southern woman, came from one of the proudest of the slave states.
At police headquarters Ray repeated his statement to an investigating inspector, who confronted him with the two policemen. They contradicted his story, asserting that Ray had tried to obstruct them in doing their duty, but he maintained his statement and further accused them of lying.
The inspector was naturally partial to his men. He read the statements again and then asked Ray what he wanted. Ray hesitated, and Crosby said, “Justice.” The inspector turned and said savagely he was not talking to him. The word “justice” had been the first to suggest itself to Ray, but as he did not believe in that prostitute lady who is courted and caressed by every civilized tout, he had not pronounced her name.
The inspector then admitted that if Ray prosecuted the case on the statement he had made, the policeman who had struck him would lose his job. Did he want to prosecute or not? Crosby was nudging him to prosecute, but Ray declared that what he really wanted was to know why he had been beaten and arrested. Was it because he was black? The inspector replied that the policemen had made a mistake, owing to the fact that all the Negroes in Marseilles were criminals.
“Oh!” Ray said, this was the first time he had heard that Doctor Bougrat was a Negro. The police clerk who had taken Ray’s statement hid a grin behind his palm.
(The Doctor Bougrat case had provided the excitable Provençal city with one of its most notorious crime sensations. The man had been a soldier during the war and was seriously wounded in the head. He was a drug addict and a hard drinker. One day the body of a cashier who had disappeared with an unimportant sum of money was found hidden in his office in a state of decomposition. Doctor Bougrat declared that the man had died accidentally after an injection. He was indicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment and banishment. The case had particularly impressed Ray from the way the public reacted to it. The newspapers tried the doctor and called him a murderer and a thief and charged him with every criminal activity before the case went to the courts. And on the day when the crime was reconstituted, according to French procedure, in the doctor’s office, an enormous crowd gathered in the street and along the Canebière prolongée and the army of touts and prostitutes who lived by the plunder of tourists and seamen joined their voices to that of the respectability of the city in calling for Bougrat’s blood: “Lynch him! Lynch him!”)
As he accepted his dismissal and started to go, Ray turned to the inspector and said that when he was a boy the French book that had moved him most was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Javert, typifying the police, had been particularly fascinating to him, and judging from the inspector’s statement about the Negroes of Marseilles the French police had not changed since those days. But had grown a little worse.
Crosby’s sense of injustice was strong. He resented the inspector’s insulting manner toward him and he reproached Ray for not following up the case.
“But I didn’t want to,” protested Ray. “Do you think I want to mess my time up fooling with the stinking law, just for a policeman to lose his job? Twenty-five francs a day and a family! That most sacred of French things—a family on twenty-five francs a day. Can you wonder they are what they are? When I wrote to the prefect I didn’t write for revenge, but for knowledge.”
“But what good is that?” said Crosby. “You only wasted your time, since you had a chance to prosecute and didn’t. You haven’t gained anything.”
“Haven’t I? Don’t you think it was revenge enough for me that you, an American, half-Southerner, had to protest to a French official about French injustice to a Negro? The French are never tired of proclaiming themselves the most civilized people in the world. They think they understand Negroes, because they don’t discriminate against us in their bordels. They imagine that Negroes like them. But Senghor, the Senegalese, told me that the French were the most calculatingly cruel of all the Europeans in Africa.
“You heard what the inspector said in explanation. To me the policeman’s fist was just a perfect expression of the official attitude toward Negroes. Why should I prosecute him?”
“I think you’ve got a little Jesus stuff in you,” Crosby said.
“I don’t have any Jesus stuff, nor the stuff of any other Jew—Moses or Jeremiah or St. Paul or Rothschild.”
“You don’t like Jews!”
“Not any more than I do the Christians. You mustn’t forget that the Christians were made by the Jews. Christian morality is the natural child of Jewish morality. When I think of the Jews’ special contribution as a people to the world I always think of them as obsessed by the idea of morality. As far as I have been able to think it out the colored races are the special victims of biblical morality—Christian morality. Especially the race to which I belong.
“I don’t think I loathe anything more than the morality of the Christians. It is false, treacherous, hypocritical. I know that, for I myself
