Thus he became a challenge to the clubbers of helpless vagabonds—to the despised, underpaid protectors of property and its high personages. He was a challenge of civilization itself. He was the red rag to the mighty-bellowing, all-trampling civilized bull.
Looking down in a bull ring, you are fascinated by the gay rag. You may even forget the man watching the bull go after the elusive color that makes him mad. The rag seems more than the man. If the bull win it, he horns it, tramples it, sniffs it, paws it—baffled.
As the rag is to the bull, so is the composite voice of the Negro—speech, song and laughter—to a bawdy world. More exasperating, indeed, than the Negro’s being himself is his primitive color in a world where everything is being reduced to a familiar formula, this remains strange and elusive.
From the rear room of the café came sounds of music, shuffling of feet, shrill feminine cackle, and Malty’s deep, far-carrying laughter. Banjo was at his instrument again. Presently Malty dashed in.
“For the love a life, Taloufy, come on in heah and play that holy wonderful new thing you done bring back heah with you.”
“Wait a minute—”
“Wait you’ moon! You come right along and make that mahvelous music and fohgit the white man’s crap.”
Taloufa followed Malty with his guitar. His new piece was a tormenting, tantalizing, tickling tintinnabulating thing that he called “Hallelujah Jig” and it went like this:
“Jigaway, boy, jig … jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig
Jig, jig, jig, black boy … jig away … jig away …“Lay off the coal, boy, and scrub you’ hide,
Jigaway … jigaway,
Bring me a clean suit and show some pride,
Jigaway … jigaway.“Step on the floor, boy, and show me that stuff
Jigaway … jigaway,
Strutting you’ business and strutting it rough,
Jigaway … jigaway.“Show me some movement and turn ’em loose,
Jigaway … jigaway,
Powerfulways like electric juice,
Jigaway … jigaway.“Up the ole broad, boy; good nite to the bunk,
Jigaway … jigaway,
What you say, fellahs? I say hunky-tunk,
Jigaway … jigaway.“When the lights go out until the stars fade,
Jigaway … jigaway,
For that’s the bestest thing in the life of a spade,
Jigaway … jigaway.“Jigaway, boy, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig, jig,
Jig, jig, jig, black boy … jig away … jig away …”
Above the sound of the music the Indian was emphasizing the necessity for all colored people to wake up and get together, for, he said, although Indians belonged to the white stock according to science—the white people, particularly the British, were treating them like black people.
But Ray could not hear any more. The jigaway music was pounding in his ears. The dancing and singing and sugary laughter of the boys. It filled his head full and poured hot fire through his veins, tingling and burning. Such a sensual-sweet feeling. There was no resisting it.
“Pardon me,” he said to the Indian, and hurried into the rear room.
Slowly the Indian gathered up his bundle of foolscap, methodically assorting the letters according to date. Then he went to the partition and looked in on the boys. Against the glass pane he looked like an ancient piece of broken bronze, a figure from an Oriental temple leaning among indifferent objects in the window of a dealer in antiques.
It was dismaying to him that those boys with whom he had just been conversing so earnestly should in a moment become forgetful of everything serious in a drunken-like abandon of jazzing.
“Just like niggers,” he muttered, turning away. “The same on the ships. Always monkeying and never really serious about anything.”
Yet the next day Taloufa stowed away safely for America, leaving the Indian on the beach, making his pathetic appeals to the English gentleman’s Home Office.
“It was Taloufa bring that cargo a good luck,” declared Banjo. “It’s the same with humans like with them stars ovah us. Good and bad luck ones. Now Lonesome Blue was sure hard luck. But Taloufa is a good-luck baby.”
It was indeed in every way a cargo of good luck that the boys were handling. They were no longer “on the beach.” A wealthy shipowner from the Caribbean basin, profiting by the exchange rate, had bought a boat, which he was overhauling to take back to the West Indies. And the boys were on the boat.
It was a formidable polyglot outfit. The officers represented five European nations. The crew were supposed to be Caribbean. Malty was chosen to find and recommend the men. He got his gang in first, including Dengel, who wished to cross the Atlantic by any means.
“Though youse French,” Malty told him, “you masticate that Englishman’s langwitch bettah than a lottah bush niggers back home.”
Malty also took West African boys, a “colored” South African, a reed-like Somali lad, and another Aframerican besides Banjo. They were all “going on the fly” and none of them was thinking of staying with the boat after the trip, but rather of getting to Cuba, Canada, and the United States. Ray worked with them, but said he was not going to sign up, as the very thought of returning to the Caribbean made him jumpy.
Ray teased Banjo about going as a seaman to the West Indies so soon after he had turned down a free trip to the United States. He predicted that Banjo would follow his nose to the States in quick time, for he would find the islands too small and sleepy for him.
“I’m gwine along with the gang, pardner, and tha’s a different thing from going back with Goosey. This heah is like a big picnic for all of us. If youse wise, you’ll join in with us.”
The boys scraped, scrubbed, painted. They got only twenty francs a day, although the regular wage for such work was
