The African Café, the Rendezvous Bar, the bistro-cabaret in the Rue Coin du Reboul—all of them nightly did well with the boys. The Ditch looked at them differently, for they measured up to and above the “leetah” standards.
At last the boat was shipshape and ready to sail. The day came when the boys were called to sign on. Ray could have had an easy place, but he would not take it and he watched Banjo sign a little wistfully. They all had the right, under British Seamen’s Regulations, to take part of their month’s wages in advance. Each of the boys availed himself of this, that he might buy needful articles. Banjo took a full month’s wages.
They cashed their cheques with a seamen’s broker in Joliette. That night they had a big celebration. But Banjo was not with them. Nor had he used any of his money to buy new things. He invited Ray to go with him to a quiet little café in Joliette, and there he announced that he was not going to make the trip.
“And Ise gwine beat it outa this burg some convenient time this very night, pardner. Tha’s mah ace a spades so sure as Ise a spade. You come along with me?”
Not going on the ship. … Beat it. … Come along with me.
“But you’ve signed on and taken a month’s wages,” protested Ray. “You can’t quit now.”
“Nix and a zero for what I kain’t do. Go looket that book and you won’t find mah real name no moh than anybody is gwine find this nigger when I take mahself away from here. I ask you again, Is you going with me?”
Ray did not reply, and after a silence Banjo said: “I know youse thinking it ain’t right. But we kain’t afford to choose, because we ain’t born and growed up like the choosing people. All we can do is grab our chance every time it comes our way.”
Ray’s thoughts were far and away beyond the right and wrong of the matter. He had been dreaming of what joy it would be to go vagabonding with Banjo. Stopping here and there, staying as long as the feeling held in the ports where black men assembled for the great transport lines, loafing after their labors long enough to laugh and love and jazz and fight.
While Banjo’s words brought him back to social morality, they brought him back only to the realization of how thoroughly he was in accord with them. He had associated too closely with the beach boys not to realize that their loose, instinctive way of living was more deeply related to his own self-preservation than all the principles, or social-morality lessons with which he had been inculcated by the wiseacres of the civilized machine.
It seemed a social wrong to him that, in a society rooted and thriving on the principles of the “struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest” a black child should be brought up on the same code of social virtues as the white. Especially an American black child.
A Chinese or Indian child could learn the stock virtues without being spiritually harmed by them, because he possessed his own native code from which he could draw, compare, accept, and reject while learning. But the Negro child was a pathetic thing, entirely cut off from its own folk wisdom and earnestly learning the trite moralisms of a society in which he was, as a child and would be as an adult, denied any legitimate place.
Ray was not of the humble tribe of humanity. But he always felt humble when he heard the Senegalese and other West African tribes speaking their own languages with native warmth and feeling.
The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested, and poised in the universal scheme. They inspired him with confidence in them. Short of extermination by the Europeans, they were a safe people, protected by their own indigenous culture. Even though they stood bewildered before the imposing bigness of white things, apparently unaware of the invaluable worth of their own, they were naturally defended by the richness of their fundamental racial values.
He did not feel that confidence about Aframericans who, long-deracinated, were still rootless among phantoms and pale shadows and enfeebled by self-effacement before condescending patronage, social negativism, and miscegenation. At college in America and among the Negro intelligentsia he had never experienced any of the simple, natural warmth of a people believing in themselves, such as he had felt among the rugged poor and socially backward blacks of his island home. The colored intelligentsia lived its life “to have the white neighbors think well of us,” so that it could move more peaceably into nice “white” streets.
Only when he got down among the black and brown working boys and girls of the country did he find something of that raw unconscious and the-devil-with-them pride in being Negro that was his own natural birthright. Down there the ideal skin was brown skin. Boys and girls were proud of their brown, sealskin brown, teasing brown, tantalizing brown, high-brown, low-brown, velvet brown, chocolate brown.
There was the amusing little song they all sang:
“Black may be evil,
But Yellow is so low-down;
White is the devil,
So glad I’m teasing Brown.”
Among them was never any of the hopeless, enervating talk of the chances of “passing white” and the specter of the Future that were the common topics of the colored
