Latnah must have captured his thoughts psychically, for she suddenly said, “It no never haunt you?”
“No. I remember it as one of the strange and pleasant things in my life, just as another person might recall any interesting event. But when I quit I just put it out of my mind—forgot it and started in living differently.”
“You beaucoup Oriental,” said Latnah. “Banjo never touch anything strange like us. Il est un pur sauvage du sang.” She sighed.
Ray locked her to him in his elbow. Peace and forgetfulness in the bosom of a brown woman. Warm brown body and restless dark body like a black root growing down in the soft brown earth. Deep dark passion of bodies close to the earth understanding each other. Dark brown bodies of the earth, earthy. Dark … brown … rich colors of the nourishing earth. The pinks bring trouble and tumult and riot into dark lives. Leave them alone in their vanity and tigerish ambitions to fret and fume in their own hell, for terrible is their world that creates disasters and catastrophes from simple natural incidents.
A little resting from the body’s aching and the mind’s trouble in sweet dreaming. Ray’s hankering was for scenes of tropical shores sifted through hectic years. Salty-warm blue bays where black boys dive down deep into the deep waters, where the ships shear in on foamy waves and black youths row out to them in canoes and black pilots bring them in to anchor. Coconut palms like sentinels on the sandy shore. Black draymen coming from the hilltops, singing loudly—rakish chants, whipping up the mules bearing loads of brown sugar and of green bunches of bananas, trailing along the winding chalky ways down to the port.
Oh, the tropical heat of earth and body glowing in the same rhythm of nature … sun-hot warmth wilting the blood-bright hibiscus, drawing the rich creaminess out of the lush bellflowers, burning green fields and pasture lands to crispy autumn color, and driving the brown doves and pea doves to cover cooing under the fan-broad cooling woodland leaves.
But he dreamed instead of Harlem … the fascinating forms of Harlem. The thick, sweaty, syrup-sweet jazzing of Sheba Palace … Black eyes darting out of curious mauve frames to arrest the alert prowler … little brown legs hurrying along … with undulating hips and voluptuous caressing motion of feminine folds.
XXIV
The Chauffeur’s Lot
At noon the next day Ray went out, treading on air. His nature was buoyant. He went to a little Italian restaurant and fed. In the early afternoon he joined Goosey and Banjo on a café terrace.
His chauffeur friend, passing by, hailed him. He said he was going out to look at his suburban place and asked if Ray would like to go. Ray said he wouldn’t mind going, but that he was with Banjo and Goosey. The chauffeur said that he would take them all if they wanted to go. They did, but Goosey objected that the ship might arrive and the consul call for them.
“That won’t make no difference,” said Banjo. “No ship ain’t nevah gwine out the same day it put in at this heah hallelujah poht.”
“Yes, the Dollar Line boats do, too,” said Goosey.
“Well if it does the skipper has got to wait on us, his bum passengers, believe me,” said Banjo. “Come on, pardner, let’s go.”
Ray rode beside the chauffeur. The suburban route was melancholy. Before he went to the vintage he had gone out to another country place, and it had been refreshing then all along the way to see trailing bramble roses in the ripened green grass and marigolds and irises blooming in truck gardens of cauliflowers, and bunches of tempting grapes hanging from the fences. Now there was nothing but dead and rotting leaves everywhere and some withered blackberries.
The chauffeur’s place was like any of the common suburban lots owned by the great army of the lower middle class of modern cities. A cottage of three rooms and a kitchen, a young chestnut tree near the gate and a large fig tree in the rear.
Of the lots on either side of him, the chauffeur told the boys that one belonged to a bistro-keeper and the other to a policeman. Ray thought his neighbors were just right and told him so. The chauffeur smiled. He was proud of his neighbors, too. The other lots were worth a little more than his, he said, for they had their water supply and he hadn’t yet.
Banjo asked him how much he had paid for his place.
“Eleven thousand francs,” the chauffeur replied, and that he was still making periodical payments on it.
“Sometimes we have evening parties up here,” he told Ray.
“What kind?” Ray asked.
“If I pick up a tourist and a girl who want to take a joyride I bring them out here. Anything to help pay for the place. One night I had a gang, and it would have been fun to have you. But you’re so changed now from when I knew you at Toulon—always with the Senegalese—I didn’t trouble.”
“That’s all right,” said Ray. “Change is my passion. Can’t stay in one rut forever. Got to pull out and find something new.”
Goosey had detached himself from them and was in the act of digging under the fig tree.
“What you doing there, you?” Banjo called.
They went up and found Goosey filling a little squat glass jar with earth.
“What you doing with that theah dirt?” asked Banjo.
“To keep as a souvenir,” said Goosey.
“Oh, my Gawd, what a nigger, though!” Banjo horse-laughed. “It’s you should be making pohms and not Ray, for youse the sweetest cherry-diver I evah did see.”
Goosey held his jar of earth against his heart.
“It’s the soil of France,” he said. “I couldn’t make it, all right. I was outa luck, but I can always remember that I was here.”
“Kain’t you remember without that theah flask a dirt?” asked Banjo. “Better you tote back a
