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.”