Banjo

For Ruthope

First Part

I

The Ditch

Heaving along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the magnificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand.

“It sure is some moh mahvelous job,” he noted mentally; “most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see.”

It was afternoon. Banjo had walked the long distance of the breakwater and was returning to the Joliette end. He wore a cheap pair of slippers, suitable to the climate, a kind much used by the very poor of Provence. They were an ugly drab-brown color, which, however, was mitigated by the crimson socks and the yellow scarf with its elaborate pattern of black, yellow, and red at both ends, that was knotted around his neck and hung down the front of his blue-jean shirt.

Suddenly he stood still in his tracks as out of the bottom of one of the many freight cars along the quay he saw black bodies dropping. Banjo knew box cars. He had hoboed in America. But never had he come across a box car with a hole in the bottom. Had those black boys made it? He went down on the quay to see.

The fellows were brushing the hay off their clothes. There were four of them.

“Hello, there!” said Banjo.

“Hello, money!” replied the tallest of the four, who was just Banjo’s build.

“Good night, money. What I want to know is ef you-all made that theah hole in the bottom a that box car? I nevah yet seen no hole in the bottom of a box car, and I’ve rode some rails back home in the States.”

“P’raps not. They’s things ovah heah diffarant from things ovah theah and they’s things ovah theah diffarant from things ovah heah. Now the way things am setting with me, this heah hole-in-the-bottom box car is just the thing for us.”

“You done deliver you’self of a mouthful that sure sounds perfect,” responded Banjo.

“I always does. Got to use mah judgment all the time with these fellahs heah. And you? What you making foh you’self down here on the breakwater?”

“Ain’t making a thing, but I know I’d sure love to make a meal.”

“A meal! You broke already?”

“Broke already? Yes I is, but what do you know about it?” asked Banjo, sharply.

“Nothing in particular, ole spoht, cep’n’ that I bummed you two times when you was strutting with that ofay broad and that Ise Malty Avis, the best drummer on the beach. Mah buddies heah bummed you, too, so if youse really broke and hungry as you say, which can be true, ’causen you’ lips am as pale as the belly of a fish, just you come right along and eat ovah theah.” He pointed to a ramshackle bistro-restaurant on the quay. “We got a little money between us. The bumming was good last night.”

“This is going some, indeed. I gived you a raise yestidday and youse feeding me today,” said Banjo as they all walked toward the bistro. “I don’t even remember none a you fellahs.”

“ ’Cause you was too swell dressed up and strutting fine with that broad to see anybody else,” said the smallest of the group.

They were all hungry. The boys had been sleeping, and woke up with an appetite. Before them the woman of the bistro set five plates of vegetable soup, a long loaf of bread, followed by braised beef and plenty of white beans. Malty called for five bottles of red wine.

Banjo got acquainted over the mess. The shining black big-boned lad who bore such a contented expression on his plump jolly face and announced himself as Malty Avis, was the leader and inspirer of the group. His full name was Buchanan Malt Avis. He was a West Indian. His mother had been a cook for a British missionary and from the labels of his case goods, for which she had had a fondness, she had taken his Christian names. The villagers dropped Buchanan and took Malt, which they made Malty.

Malty’s working life began as a small sailor boy on fishing-boats in the Caribbean. When he became a big boy he was taken by a cargo boat on his first real voyage to New Orleans. From there he had started in as a real seaman and had never returned home.

Sitting on Malty’s right, the chestnut-skinned fellow with drab-brown curly hair was called Ginger, a tribute evidently, to the general impression of his makeup. Whether you thought of ginger as a tuber in reddish tropical soil, or as a preserved root, or as the Jamaica liquid, it reminded you oddly of him. Of all the English-speaking Negro boys, Ginger held the long-term record of existence on the beach. He had lost his seaman’s papers. He had been in prison for vagabondage and served with a writ of expulsion. But he had destroyed the writ and swiped the papers of another seaman.

Opposite Ginger was Dengel, also tall, but thin. He was a Senegalese who spoke a little English and preferred the company of Malty and his pals to that of his countrymen.

Beside Dengel was the small, wiry, dull-black boy who had sardonically reminded Banjo of his recent high-flying. He was always aggressive of attitude. The fellows said that he was bughouse and he delighted in the name of Bugsy that they gave him.

They were all on the beach, and there were many others besides them—white men, brown men, black men. Finns, Poles, Italians, Slavs, Maltese, Indians, Negroids, African Negroes, West Indian Negroes—deportees from America for violation of the United States immigration laws—afraid and ashamed to go back to their own lands, all dumped down in the great Provençal port, bumming a day’s work, a meal, a drink, existing from hand to mouth, anyhow any way, between box car, tramp ship, bistro, and bordel.

“But you ain’t broke, man,” Malty said, pointing to the banjo, “when you got that theah bit a business. Ain’t a one of us here that totes around anything that can bring a little money outa this burg a peddlers.”

Banjo caressed his instrument. “I nevah part with this, buddy. It is moh than a gal, moh than a pal; it’s mahself.”

“You don’t have to go hungry round here, either, ef you c’n play a li’l’ bit,” drawled Ginger. “You c’n pick up enough change foh you’self even as much to buy us all a li’l’ red wine to wet our whistle when the stuff is scarce down the docks—jest by playing around in them bars in Joliette and uptown around the Bum Square.”

“We’ll see what this burg can stand,” said Banjo. “It ain’t one or two times, but plenty, that mah steady here did make me a raise when I was right down and out. Oncet away back in Montreal, after I done lost every cent to mah name on the racetracks, I went into one swell spohting-place and cleaned up twenty-five dollars playing. But the best of all was the bird uvva time I had in San Francisco with three buddies who hed a guitar and a ukulele and a tambourine between them. My stars! I was living in clovah for six months.”

“You’ll make yours here, too,” said Malty. “Although this heah burg is lousy with pifformers, doing their stuff in the cafés, it ain’t often you come across one that can turn out a note to tickle a chord in you’ apparatus. Play us a piece. Let us hear how you sound.”

“Not now,” said Banjo. “Better tonight in some café. Maybe they won’t like it here.”

“Sure they will. You c’n do any ole thing at any ole time in this country.”

“That ain’t a damn sight true,” Bugsy jumped sharply in. “But you can play all the time,” he said to Banjo. “People will sure come and listen and the boss will get rid a some moh of his rotten wine.”

“This wine ain’t so bad—” Ginger began.

“It sure is,” insisted Bugsy, whose palate had never grown agreeable to vin rouge ordinaire. He drank with the boys, as drinking played a big part in their group life, but he preferred syrups to wine, and he was the soberest among them.

“The wine outa them barrels we bung out on the docks is much better,” he declared.

“Why, sure it’s better, you black blubberhead,” exclaimed Ginger. “Tha’s the real best stuff we make down there. Pure and strong, with no water in it. That’s why we get soft on it quicker than when we drink in a café. In all them little cafés the stuff is doctored. That’s the profit way.”

Banjo played “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” He said it was one of the pieces that were going wild in the States. The boys began humming and swaying. What Bugsy predicted happened. Some dockers who were not working were drawn to the bistro. They seated themselves at a rough long table, across from the boys’ by the other side of the door, listened approvingly to the music, drank wine, and spat pools.

Malty ordered more wine. Ginger and Bugsy stood up to each other and performed a strenuous movement of the “Black Bottom,” as they had learned it from Negro seamen of the American Export Line. The patronne came and stood in the door, very pleased, and exhibited a little English, “Good piece you very well play. …”

Banjo played another piece, then suddenly stopped, stood up and stretched his arms.

“You finish’ already?” demanded Malty.

“Sure; it was just a little exhibition of my accomplishment foh your particular benefit.”

“Youse as good a musician as a real artist.”

“I is an artist.”

The workmen regarded Banjo admiringly, drained their glasses, and sauntered off.

“Imagine those cheap skates coming here jest to listen to mah playing and not even offering a man a drink,” Banjo sneered. “Why, ef I was in Hamburg or Genoa they woulda sure drownded me in liquor.”

“The Froggies am all tight that way,” said Malty. “They’re a funny people. If you’d a taken up a collection every jack man a them woulda gived you a copper, thinking that you make you’ living that way—”

“Hell with their coppers,” said Banjo. “I expected them to stand a round just for expreciation only of a good thing.”

“As for that, they ain’t the treating kind a good fellahs that you and I am used to on the other side,” said Malty. …

From the bistro on the breakwater, the boys rocked slowly along up to Joliette. Ginger had a favorite drinking-place on the Rue Forbin, a dingy tramps’ den. They stopped there, drinking until twilight. Ginger and Dengel became so staggeringly soft that they decided to go back to the box car and sleep.

Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy, “Let’s take our tail up to the Bum Square.”

The Place Victor Gelu of the Vieux Port was called by the boys on the beach the “Bum Square” because it was there they gathered at night to bum or panhandle seamen and voyagers who passed through to visit the Quartier Réservé. The Quartier Réservé they called “the Ditch” with the same rough affection with which they likened their ship to an easy woman by calling it the “broad.”

Avoiding the populous Rue de la République, Malty, Banjo, and Bugsy followed the little-frequented Boulevard de la Major, passing by the shadow of the big cathedral and the gate of the Central Police Building, to reach the Bum Square. They took two more rounds of red wine on the way, the last in a little café in the Place de Lenche before they descended to the Ditch.

Malty had a dinner engagement with a mulatto seaman from a boat of the American Export Line, whom he was to meet in the Bum Square. The wine had worked so hard on their appetites that all three were hungry again. Malty looked in all the cafés of the square, but did not find his man. A big blond fellow, his clothes starched with dirt, was standing in the shadow of a palm, looking sharply out for customers. Malty asked him if he had seen his mulatto.

“He went up that way with a tart,” replied the blond, pointing toward the Canebière.

“Let’s go and eat, anyway,” Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy. “I got some money yet.”

“Latnah musta gived you an extry raise; she is always handing you something,” said Bugsy.

“I ain’t seen her for ovah three days,” replied Malty.

“Oh, you got a sweet mamma helping you on the side?” Banjo asked, laughing.

“Not mine, boh,” replied Malty. “Is jest a li’l’ woman bumming like us on the beach. I don’t know whether she is Arabian or Persian or Indian. She knows all landwidges. I stopped a p.i. from treating her rough one day, and evah since she pals out with our gang, nevah passing us without speaking, no matter ef she even got a officer on the string, and always giving us English and American cigarettes and a little change when she got ’em. It’s easy for her, you see, to penetrate any place on a ship, when we can’t, ’cause she’s a skirt with some legs all right, and her face ain’t nothing that would scare you.”

“And none a you fellahs can’t make her?” cried Banjo. “Why you-all ain’t the goods?”

“It ain’t that, you strutting cock, but she treats us all like pals and don’t leave no ways open for that. Ain’t it better to have her as a pal than to lose out ovah a li’l’ crazy craving that a few sous can settle up here?”

They went up one of the humid, somber alleys, thick with little eating-dens of all the Mediterranean peoples; Greek, Yugoslav, Neapolitan, Arab, Corsican, and Armenian, Czech and Russian.

When they had finished eating, Malty suggested that they might go up to the gayer part of the Ditch. Bugsy said he would go to the cinema to see Hoot Gibson in a Wild West picture. But Banjo accepted the invitation with alacrity. Every chord in him responded to the loose, bistro-love-life of the Ditch.

Banjo was a great vagabond of lowly life. He was a child of the Cotton Belt, but he had wandered all over America. His life was a dream of vagabondage that he was perpetually pursuing and realizing in odd ways, always incomplete but never unsatisfactory. He had worked at all the easily-picked-up jobs—longshoreman, porter, factory worker, farm hand, seaman.

He was in Canada when the Great War began and he enlisted in the Canadian army. That gave him a glimpse of London and Paris. He had seen a little of Europe before, having touched some of the big commercial ports when he was a husky fireman. But he had never arrived at the sailor’s great port, Marseilles. Twice he had been to Genoa and once to Barcelona. Only those who know the high place that Marseilles holds in the imagination of seamen can get the feeling of his disappointment. All through his seafaring days Banjo had dreamed dreams of the seaman’s dream port. And at last, because the opportunity that he had long hoped for did not come to take him there, he made it.

Banjo had been returned to Canada after the general demobilization. From there he crossed to the States, where he worked at several jobs. Seized by the old restlessness for a sea change while he was working in an industrial plant, he hit upon the unique plan of getting himself deported.

Some of his fellow workmen who had entered the United States illegally had been held for deportation, and they were all lamenting that fact. Banjo, with his unquenchable desire to be always going, must have thought them very poor snivelers. They had all been thunderstruck when he calmly announced that he was not an American. Everything about him—accent, attitude, and movement—shouted Dixie. But Banjo had insisted that his parentage was really foreign. He had served in the Canadian army. … His declaration had to be accepted by his bosses.

Banjo was a personality among the immigration officers. They liked his presence, his voice, his language of rich Aframericanisms. They admired, too, the way he had chosen to go off wandering again. (It was nothing less than a deliberate joke to them, for Banjo could never convince any American, especially a Southern-knowing one, that he was not Aframerican.) It was singular enough to stir their imagination, so long insensible to the old ways of ship desertion and stowing away. The officials teased Banjo, asking him what he would ever do in Europe when he spoke no other language than straight Yankee. However, their manner betrayed their feeling of confidence that Banjo would make his way anywhere. He was given a chance to earn some money across and they saw him go regretfully and hopefully, when he signed up on the tramp that would eventually land him at Marseilles.

Banjo’s tramp was a casual one. So much so that it was four months and nineteen days after sailing down through the Panama Canal to New Zealand and Australia, cruising cargo around the island continent and up along the coast of Africa, before his dirty overworked “broad” reached the port of Marseilles.

Banjo had no plan, no set purpose, no single object in coming to Marseilles. It was the port that seamen talked about—the marvelous, dangerous, attractive, big, wide-open port. And he wanted only to get there.

Banjo was paid off in francs, and after changing a deck of dollars that he had saved in America, he possessed 12,525 francs and some sous. He was spotted and beset by touting guides, white, brown, black, all of them ready to show and sell him everything for a trifle. He got rid of them all.

Banjo bought a new suit of clothes, fancy shoes, and a vivid cache-col. He had good American clothes, but he wanted to strut in Provençal style.

Instinctively he drifted to the Ditch, and as naturally he found a girl there. She found a room for both of them. Banjo’s soul thrilled to the place—the whole life of it that milled around the ponderous, somber building of the Mairie, standing on the Quai du Port, where fish and vegetables and girls and youthful touts, cats, mongrels, and a thousand secondhand things were all mingled together in a churning agglomeration of stench and sliminess.

His wonderful Marseilles! Even more wonderful to him than he had been told. Unstintingly Banjo gave of himself and his means to his girl and the life around him. And when he was all spent she left him.

Now he was very light of everything: light of pocket, light of clothing (having relieved himself at the hock shop), light of head, feeling and seeing everything lightly.

It was Banjo’s way to take every new place and every new thing for the first time in a hot crazy-drunk manner. He was a type that was never sober, even when he was not drinking. And now the first delirious fever days of Marseilles were rehearsing themselves, wheeling round and round in his head. The crooked streets of dim lights, the gray damp houses bunched together and their rowdy signs of many colors. The mongrel-faced guides of shiny, beady eyes, patiently persuasive; the old hags at the portals, like skeletons presiding over an orgy, with skeleton smile and skeleton charm inviting in quavering accents those who hesitated to enter. Oh, his head was a circus where everything went circling round and round.

Banjo had never before been to that bistro where Malty was taking him. It had a player-piano and a place in the rear for dancing. It was a rendezvous for most of the English-speaking beach boys. If they were spending a night in the Vieux Port, they went there (after panhandling the Bum Square) for sausage sandwiches and red wine. And when all their appetites were appeased, they flopped together in a room upstairs.

The mulatto cook from the Export Line boat was there, sitting between a girl and an indefinite Negroid type of fellow. There were two bottles of wine and a bottle of beer before them. The cook called Malty and Banjo to his table and ordered more wine. There were many girls from the Ditch and young touts dancing. One of the girls asked Banjo to play. Another made the mulatto dance with her. Banjo played “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” But as soon as he paused, a girl started the player-piano. The banjo was not loud enough for that close, noisy little market. Everybody was dancing.

Banjo put the instrument aside. It wasn’t adequate for the occasion. It would need an orchestra to fix them right, he thought, good-humoredly. I wouldn’t mind starting one going in this burg. Gee! That’s the idea. Tha’s jest what Ise gwine to do. The American darky is the performing fool of the world today. He’s demanded everywhere. If I c’n only git some a these heah panhandling fellahs together, we’ll show them some real nigger music. Then I’d be setting pretty in this heah sweet dump without worrying ovah mah wants. That’s the stuff for a live nigger like me to put ovah, and no cheap playing from café to café and a handing out mah hat for a lousy sou.

He was so exhilarated with the thought of what he would do that he felt like dancing. At that moment the girl of his first Marseilles days came in with a young runt of a tout. Banjo looked up at her, smiling expectantly. She was still going round in his head with the rest of the Ditch. She had left him, of course, but he had accepted that as inevitable when he could no longer afford her. Yet, he had mused, she might have been a little extravagant and bestowed on him one spontaneous caress over all that was bought. She had not. Because she only knew one way—the way of the Ditch. She did not know the way of a brown girl back home who could say with sweet exaggeration: “Daddy, we two will go home and spread joy and not wake up till next week sometime and want nothing but loving.”

Ah no! Nothing so fancifully real. Nevertheless, she was the first playmate of his dream port.

The girl, seeing Banjo, turned her eyes casually away and went to sit where she could concentrate her charms on the mulatto. Banjo had no further interest for her. He had spent all his money and, like all the beach boys, would never have more for a wild fling as long as he remained in port. It was the mulatto that had brought her there. For as soon as a new arrival enters any of the dens of the Ditch, the girls are made aware of it by the touts, who are always on the lookout. Banjo was vexed. Hell! She might have been more cordial, he thought. The player-piano was rattling out “Fleur d’Amour.” He would ask her to dance. Maybe her attitude was only an insolent little exhibition of cattishness. He went over to her and asked, “Danser?”

“No,” she said, disdainfully, and turned away. He touched her shoulder playfully.

“Laissez-moi tranquil, imbecile.” She spat nastily on the floor.

A rush of anger seized Banjo. “You pink sow!” he cried. His eyes caught the glint of the gold watch he had given to her, and wrenching it from her wrist, he smashed it on the red-tiled floor and stamped his heel upon it in a rage. The girl screamed agonizingly, wringing her hands, her wide eyes staring tragically at the remains of her watch. The little tout who had come in with her leaped over at Banjo. “What is it? What is it?” he cried, and hunching up his body and thrusting his head up and out like a comic actor, he began working his open hands up and down in Banjo’s face, without touching him. Banjo looked down upon the boy contemptuously and seized his left wrist, intending to twist it and push him outside, for he could not think of fighting with such an undersized antagonist. But in a flash the boy drew a knife across his wrist and, released, dashed through the door.

Banjo wrapped the cut in his handkerchief, but it was soon soaked with blood. It was late. The pharmacies were closed. The patronne of the bistro said that there were pharmacies open all night. Malty took Banjo to hunt for one.

As they were passing through the Bum Square a woman’s voice called Malty. They stopped and she came up to them. She was a little olive-toned woman of an indefinable age, clean-faced, not young and far from old, with an amorous charm round her mouth. It was Latnah.

“Ain’t gone to bed yet?” Malty said to her. “Ise got a case here.” He exhibited Banjo’s hand.

“It plenty bleed,” she said. She looked at Banjo and said, “I see you before around here.”

Banjo grinned. “Maybe I seen you, too.”

“I no think. Pharmacie no open now,” she answered Malty’s question. Then she said to Banjo: “Come with me. I see your hand. Tomorrow see you, Malty. Good night.” She took Banjo away, while Malty’s eyes followed them in a wistful, bewildered gaze.

She took Banjo back in the direction from which he had come, but by way of the Quai du Port. After a few minutes’ walk they turned into one of the somber side streets. They went into a house a little southwest of the Ditch. Her room was on the top floor, a quaint, tiny thing, the only one up there, and opened right on the stairs. There was a little shutter-window, the size of a Saturday Evening Post, that gave a view of the Vieux Port, where the lights of the boats were twinkling. A bright, inexpensive Oriental shawl covered the cot-bed. On the table was a washbowl, two little jars of cosmetics, and packets of different brands of cigarettes.

There was no water in the room, and Latnah went down two flights of stairs to get a jugful. When she returned she washed Banjo’s wound, then, getting a bottle of liquid from a basket against the foot of the cot, she anointed and bandaged it.

Banjo liked the woman’s gentle fussing over him. He thanked her when she had finished. “Rien du tout,” she replied. There was a little silence between them, slightly embarrassing but piquant.

Then Banjo said: “I wonder whereat I can find Malty now? I didn’t have a room yet for tonight.”

“You sleep here,” she said, simply.

He undressed while she found something to do—empty the washbowl, wipe the table, and when at last he caught a glimpse of her between her deshabille and the covers he murmured softly to himself: “Don’t care how I falls, may be evah so long a drop, but it’s always on mah feets.”