“Leave him alone,” said Ray.
“You don’t understand this thing, Banjo,” said Goosey, angrily, “so it’s better you shut up.”
The chauffeur had been listening with sentimental interest and now he said to Goosey: “Vous avez raison. La France, c’est le plus joli coin du monde.”
“How do you know that?” said Ray. “You have never been out of it.”
“Yes I have,” responded the chauffeur. “I’ve been to North Africa and Spain and Italy and Constantinople. You forget I was a sailor.”
“Le’s quit arguing about dirt and find the first café where we can have wine,” said Banjo.
Later in the afternoon they all returned to the Vieux Port. After a parting drink with the boys the chauffeur drove off. Ray looked after him contemplatively and thought how differently he felt toward him now in comparison with the days when he knew him at Toulon. The chauffeur’s life at Toulon had been about the same kind of animal-cunning existence that it was at present.
He had once recounted to Ray how he had been arrested in a raid, when the police took from him a miniature ledger in which he kept a check-and-balance account of all the extra change he made, the places and persons (when he knew their names) that contributed to it.
The affair had been very amusing for Ray, just as it had been amusing for him to give the chauffeur all the tips and hints and cues he knew that he could follow up to gain something. In his picturesque uniform, old and overworked symbol of a free and reckless way of living, the chauffeur’s ways of eking out his means of enjoying life did not seem at that time unbeautiful.
Living the same life now with more freedom, he appeared loathsome to Ray. Perhaps it was what he was living for that made the difference. For as to how he was living … there were many luxury-clean people who had become high and mighty by traffic in human flesh. As a Negro Ray was particularly sensible to that fact—that many of the titled and ennobled and fashionable and snobbish gentry of this age have the roots of their fortunes in the buying and selling of black bodies. And had he any reason to doubt that the landlords of Boody Lane and the Ditch as a whole were collecting that prostitute rent to live respectably and educate their children in decency?
What made the chauffeur so unbearably ugly to him now was that he was trafficking obscenely to scramble out of the proletarian world into that solid respectable life, whence he could look down on the Ditch and all such places with the mean, evil, and cynical eyes of a respectable person.
“Just imagine that chauffeur paying eleven thousand francs foh that place!” said Banjo to Ray. “Only eleven thousand! I coulda bought it with what money I landed here with and have something left ovah.”
“You could, all right, and yet you couldn’t,” said Ray. “You and I were not made for that careful touting life. Did you ever meet, back home, a black p.i. that was saving up off his women to marry respectable? Or a brown sob-sister chippy whining that she was doing that to support an old mother? You bet you and I never did meet any of the black breed like that. They were all true-blue sports in the blood.
“That chauffeur will marry with a clear conscience from his scavenger money. He may chuck up the chauffeur job and buy a café—become a respectable père de famille—a good taxpayer and supporter of a strong national government, with a firm colonial policy, while you and I will always be the same lost black vagabonds, because we don’t know what this civilization is all about. But my friend the chauffeur knows. It took over a thousand years of lily-white culture to make him what he is. And although he has no intelligence, he has the instinct of civilization, Banjo, and you and I just haven’t got it.”
“I can’t make out nothing, pardner, about that instinking thing that youse talking about. But I know one thing and that is if I ain’t got the stink of life in me, I got the juice.”
Passing through the Place Sadi Carnot, the boys saw Sister Geter being conducted down a side street by a policeman.
“I wonder if they’ve arrested her?” said Ray. “Such a long time since I’ve seen her, I thought she’d gone home.” He was hesitating about going to see what was up, but Banjo said, “Let’s find out, anyway, what theyse doing with her, pardner.”
“She might start that ‘Black Bottom’ stunt on us again,” objected Goosey, “and then—good night!”
“Oh, come on. She kain’t make no moh ‘Black Bottom’ than her nacheral,” said Banjo.
The boys caught up with Sister Geter and the policeman and Ray spoke to her. The policeman asked Ray if he knew her and what she was doing raising such a racket in the streets. He couldn’t understand her, for she did not speak French. Ray told him that she was an evangelist. The policeman let her go and said he had only walked her away so that the big crowd that was collecting round her in the square should disperse. The people thought she was a high priestess of fetish Africa and would work magie noire. He told Ray to tell her not to preach in the streets. Sister Geter walked with the boys toward Joliette.
“I thought you were gone away,” Ray said, “so long since I never saw you.”
“No, chile, Ise right here deliv’ring that holy message. The Lawd Him done sent me heah with His wohd in mah mouf, and I ain’t thinking about moving nowheres else tell Himself gimme another marching order.
