Crosby felt, naively, that in Europe, where there was no problem of color, Ray would be happier than in America. Ray refused to accept the idea of the Negro simply as a “problem.” All of life was a problem. White people, like red and brown people, had their problems. And of the highest importance was the problem of the individual, from which some people thought they could escape by joining movements. That was perhaps the cause of that fanatical virus in many social movements that frightened away sane-thinking minds.
To Ray the Negro was one significant and challenging aspect of the human life of the world as a whole. A certain school of Negro intellectuals had contributed their best to the “problem” by presenting the race wearing a veil with sanctimonious Selahs. There was never any presentation more ludicrous. From his experience, it was white people who were the great wearers of veils, shadowing their lives and the lives of other peoples by them. Negroes were too fond of the sunny open ways of living, to hide behind any kind of veil. If the Negro had to be defined, there was every reason to define him as a challenge rather than a “problem” to Western civilization.
As they were talking, a student acquaintance joined them at their table. The newcomer had shown a friendly regard for Ray. He had been in Paris and had heard black jazz players, and as he had liked the jazz musicians and Josephine Baker, whom he had seen at the Folies Bergère, he wanted also to like Ray. Upon seeing Humanité in Ray’s hand, he suddenly bristled and slammed down the Action Française on the table before him.
For the first time Ray noticed in the lapel of the student’s coat a fleur-de-lys button.
“Why do you read that?” he demanded. “It isn’t French! Why don’t you read a French newspaper?”
“Such as? Humanité is printed in French.”
“But it is not French, all the same.”
“I suppose you’d like to choose my French reading for me. Do you want me to read the Action Française?”
“I didn’t say that, but you might at least read a newspaper that is really French, like the Petit Parisien or Le Journal.”
“I hate Le Journal,” said Ray. “The best thing in it is the Contes du Jour, but I am tired of all of them smirking over a woman deceiving her husband or bourgeois lover with a gigolo. That has no meaning after Maupassant.”
“Well, you’d do better to read the Action Française than Humanité. You’re literary, and the editor, Daudet, is our greatest living littérateur. He writes the best and wittiest things about French writers, living and dead. If you read the Action Française you’ll be keeping in touch with the best things in French literature.”
“Perhaps,” said Ray. “I really read the Action Française—sometimes, but I can’t stand the paper when your Daudet makes political propaganda over the suicide or murder of his fifteen-year-old boy. That makes your Action Française an obscene thing for me. You know, although the Anglo-Saxon countries are so hypocritical, no editor or political leader could do that in England or America and put it over on his public. Maybe it is because the Anglo-Saxon publics are less intelligent and more sentimental than the French. Anyway, you couldn’t play party politics with them on such a morbid issue.”
“But you think that way because you don’t understand French politics,” said the student. “The boy’s murder was a political act. The police murdered him. You don’t know the French police.”
“Yes, I do, too,” said Ray, “and I think they are the rottenest in the whole world.”
“Don’t talk like that about our police,” said the student. “It is not nice. Why do you say that?”
Crosby laughed and Ray said, “Because that’s just how I feel.”
“I don’t think you appreciate the benefits of French civilization,” said the student, angrily. “We’re especially tolerant to colored people. We treat them better than the Anglo-Saxon nations because we are the most civilized nation in the world.”
“You use the same language that a hundred-per-cent American would use to me, with a little difference in words and emphasis,” replied Ray. “Let me say that for me there is no such animal as a civilized nation. I believe there are a few decent minds in every nation, more or less, yet I wouldn’t put them all through the test of Sodom and Gomorrah to find out. It is better to believe! You’re right when you say you’re more tolerant toward colored people in your country than the Anglo-Saxons in theirs. But from what I have seen of the attitude of this town toward Negroes and Arabs, I don’t know how it would be if you Europeans had a large colored population to handle in Europe. I hope to God you won’t ever face that. You Europeans have a wonderful record in Africa and I suppose you’re all proud of it. The only thing lacking is that the United States should have a hand in it too. And I hope she will. In spite of her traditional attitude toward black folks she may become as embarrassing to Europe in Africa as she is in China.”
The student abruptly left the table, and Ray felt happy that he had angered him. He was just crammed full of the much-touted benefits of French civilization—especially for colored people. His acquaintances, from workman to student, always parroted that, although he missed the true spirit of it in their attitudes. The cocotte was strikingly conscious of it, newspapers were full of it, and certain clever writers insisted that Paris was the paradise of the Aframerican.
Ray looked deeper than the noise for the truth, and what he really
