“So—if I were to follow any of the civilized peoples, it wouldn’t be the Jews or the Christians or the Indians. I would rather go to the Chinese—to Confucius.”
“That’s a long way,” remarked Crosby.
XXII
Reaction
In the evening Ray and Crosby had dinner together. Afterward they sauntered along the Canebière. The metropolitan newspapers had arrived and a few proletarian enthusiasts were marching up and down the street, crying: “Humanité! Humanité!” Ray bought one, saying: “Let me try contact with the printed animal. It may be better than the natural.”
They went into a café where Crosby had made a few student acquaintances. The waiter came over to serve them and he said familiarly to Ray, “How is everything, Joseph?”
“Don’t call me Joseph,” said Ray. “I’m not a damned servant like you.”
Crosby, shocked, looked incredibly at Ray, as if his ears had belied him.
“What shall I call you, then?” asked the waiter, still pleasantly and using the familiar French tu.
“Don’t tutoyer me, either,” Ray said. “I don’t know you and I don’t want to. You speak to me as you do to any other stranger.”
The waiter turned sullenly away.
“Good God! Why were you so hard on him?” said Crosby. “He only meant to be friendly.”
“Not in the way you think,” replied Ray. “ ‘Joseph’ is the common French name for male servants in general, just as ‘George’ is for Negro servants in America. He meant to be friendly, yes, the way a child is with a dog.”
“But the way you jumped on him, saying you were not a servant like him. I was astonished … for you have worked as a servant yourself.”
“That’s no reason why I should be sentimental about stupid servants, Crosby. In fact, my experience puts me in a better position than you to understand and discriminate. I worked as a menial because I was obliged to, and I gave good service and was treated fairly enough without being either familiar or sycophantic. I was not a menial born like this fellow. Some people are born menial-minded and they are not limited to any one class of society. In America there are good darkies who find their paradise in domestic service. But there are Negroes who do it strictly from necessity and they are as different from the good darkies and your Swedish and Irish servant cows as I am from this slimy garçon. I think you’re a sentimental radical, Crosby—”
“I thought you were a proletarian,” he cut in.
“Sure. That’s my politics. But you never have asked me why I prefer Proletarian to Liberal, Democrat or Conservative.”
“Well?”
“Because I hate the proletarian spawn of civilization. They are ugly, stupid, unthinking, degraded, full of vicious prejudices, which any demagogue can play upon to turn them into a hell-raising mob at any time. As a black man I have always been up against them, and I became a revolutionist because I have not only suffered with them, but have been victimized by them—just like my race.”
“But you have no real faith in the proletariat,” said Crosby. “Then what can you expect from proletarian politics?”
“I’ve never confused faith with politics. I should like to see the indecent horde get its chance at the privileged things of life, so that decency might find some place among them. I am not fond of any kind of hogs, but I prefer to see the well-fed ones feeding out of a well-filled trough than the razorbacks rooting all over the place. That’s why I am against all those who are fighting to keep the razorbacks from getting fat and are no better doing it than fat swine themselves.”
“If that’s how you feel, your opponents may consider it their duty to protect the pearls from the razorbacks.”
“Pearls are accidental things. You don’t find one in every oyster and there may be many among the razorbacks that the fat swine are trampling on while they pretend to be protecting the few in their hands.”
“Your being politically proletarian from hatred’s got me stumped,” said Crosby. “I thought you loved the proletariat.”
“I love life—when it shows lovable aspects.”
“The docks, for example, you seem so fond of them. And that day I went down with you I heard the white dockers tutoyer you and you didn’t mind.”
“Oh, that was different! That is the dockers’ natural language. They take me as one of them and don’t worry about distinctions. But this garçon does all the time. He has one way of talking to the girls who sit here a long time to sell themselves and pay him a fat tip for it; he has another for me and another for his respectable clients. He tutoyer me just like the herd of petty officials of the departments—the post office, the hospital, the identity-card bureau, even in the stores. When I ask them not to tutoyer me, they become angry cats and want to scratch. You see, that’s their way with the Senegalese. They do it in the manner of the Southerners who ‘nigger’ the blacks in Dixie. In England all the common working-people say ‘darky,’ but it is friendly; you feel that, and don’t mind. But all the educated people say ‘nigger’ and I loathe them.”
“But perhaps they, too, don’t know better.”
“Well, they ought to. What’s all this modern education for, then? Is it to teach something of real decency in dealing with all kinds and classes of people or is it just to provide polite catchwords for the most-favored classes to use among themselves?”
The unpleasant incidents of the week, all crowding together upon him, had got Ray into an inside-boiling mood. Crosby rather irritated him because he could not readily comprehend his reactions. His white face and the privileges of his white inheritance in a white
