But traveling away from America and visiting many countries, observing and appreciating the differences of human groups, making contact with earthy blacks of tropical Africa, where the great body of his race existed, had stirred in him the fine intellectual prerogative of doubt.
The grand mechanical march of civilization had leveled the world down to the point where it seemed treasonable for an advanced thinker to doubt that what was good for one nation or people was also good for another. But as he was never afraid of testing ideas, so he was not afraid of doubting. All peoples must struggle to live, but just as what was helpful for one man might be injurious to another, so it might be with whole communities of peoples.
For Ray happiness was the highest good, and difference the greatest charm, of life. The hand of progress was robbing his people of many primitive and beautiful qualities. He could not see where they would find greater happiness under the weight of the machine even if progress became left-handed.
Many apologists of a changed and magnified machine system doubted whether the Negro could find a decent place in it. Some did not express their doubts openly, for fear of “giving aid to the enemy.” Ray doubted, and openly.
Take, for example, certain Nordic philosophers, as the world was more or less Nordic business: He did not think the blacks would come very happily under the super-mechanical Anglo-Saxon-controlled world society of Mr. H. G. Wells. They might shuffle along, but without much happiness in the world of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps they would have their best chance in a world influenced by the thought of a Bertrand Russell, where brakes were clamped on the machine with a few screws loose and some nuts fallen off. But in this great age of science and super-invention was there any possibility of arresting the thing unless it stopped of its own exhaustion?
“Well, what you say, pardner?” demanded Banjo. “Why you jest sidown theah so long studying ovah nothing at all? You gwine with a man or you ain’t?”
“Why didn’t you tell me before, so I could have signed on like you and make a getaway mahself?”
“Because I wasn’t so certain sure a you. Youse a book fellah and you’ mind might tell you to do one thing and them books persweahs you to do another. So I wouldn’t take no chances. And maybe it’s bettah only one of us do this thing this time. Now wese bettah acquainted, theah’s a lotta things befoh us we’ll have to make together.”
“It would have been a fine thing if we could have taken Latnah along, eh?”
“Don’t get soft ovah any one wimmens, pardner. Tha’s you’ big weakness. A woman is a conjunction. Gawd fixed her different from us in moh ways than one. And theah’s things we can git away with all the time and she just kain’t. Come on, pardner. Wese got enough between us to beat it a long ways from here.”
Colophon
Banjo
was published in by
Claude McKay.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced in by
Neal Caren
for
Crisis & Opportunity Books
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Banjo,
a painting completed in by
Aaron Douglas.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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