Banjo quotes

“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.

… 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 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.”

Bistros and love shops and girls and touts and vagabonds and the troops of dogs and cats—all seemed to contribute so essentially and colorfully to that vague thing called atmosphere. No other setting could be more appropriate for the men on the beach.

It was as if all the derelicts of all the seas had drifted up here to sprawl out the days in the sun.

The men on the beach spent the day between the breakwater and the docks, and the night between the Bum Square and the Ditch.

“Don’t I know what Ise doing?” cried Ginger.

“Ise one commanding nigger who’ll always pay for a show.”

“You can have you’ show, but Ise sure gwine away from here, leaving you.” And he left.

And the highest to him was the Negroes of the port. In no other port had he ever seen congregated such a picturesque variety of Negroes. Negroes speaking the civilized tongues, Negroes speaking all the African dialects, black Negroes, brown Negroes, yellow Negroes.

It was as if every country of the world where Negroes lived had sent representatives drifting in to Marseilles.

A great vagabond host of jungle-like Negroes trying to scrape a temporary existence from the macadamized surface of this great Provençal port.

“I’m going back to the hotel,” said Taloufa. “I am tired.”

Dawn was just lifting the shroud of night from the face of the Ditch, turning silver-blue the shadows, lighting the somber fronts of love shops and bistros, the gray granite of the Mairie, the fish market, the fishing-boats, and the excursion boats in faint motion.

Toward the Catalan baths the horizon was suffused by a russet flush. A soft breeze floated gracefully like a sloping wave of sea gulls into the walled squareness of the calm Vieux Port.

“

Many fine things come out of dirt⁠—steel and gold, pearls and all the rare stones that your nice women must have to be happy.

”

“At first Sam was kinder downhearted and scared. But soon as he saw the coon he got his head up and chested himself and started to strut off just so big and just that proud.

“And from that time the American darky started in playing coon and the white man is paying him for it.”

“And who is paying the Wesht Indian foh playing monkey-chaser?” Banjo asked.

“I was beaten up in the fice at Pentonville Prison,” he said. “There’s little difference anywhere under the system.”

“I could better stand up to the Englishman’s fist in me face than the Frenchman’s spit in me face,” said the Irish lad. “It’s better to taste me own blood in me mouth than another man’s spit.”

Italians against French, French against Anglo-Saxons, English against Germans, the great Daily Mail shrieking like a mad virago that there were still Germans left who were able to swill champagne in Italy when deserving English gentlemen could not afford to replenish their cellars. …

Oh it was a great civilization indeed, too entertaining for any savage ever to have the feeling of boredom.

The evening before, an American acquaintance had remarked to Ray that when he had come to Europe he had cut loose from all the back-home strings and had come wanting to love it. But Europe had taught him to be patriotic;

Man loves individuals. Man loves things. Man loves places. And the vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in any one nation.

Man loves places and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him wherever he may go.

A patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.

Man loves places and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him wherever he may go.

A patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.

So … Ray had fallen into one of his frequent fits of contemplation there on the corner, alone with his mind and the traffic of life surging around him, when he was tapped on the shoulder and addressed by the smaller Britisher of Taloufa’s shirttail …

Inferiority bile of non-Nordic minorities. Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color, wrapping themselves up in respectable gray, ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion (bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed for Ray.

Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live instinct!

“That’s the truth,” said Goosey. “I quit my ship and have never gone to any consul since. And I don’t intend to. When the consul put you on that ship, Lonesome, it would have been better you had gone. You made a big mistake.”

“A nigger is a bohn mistake,” declared Banjo, laughing.

“When Gawd made the white man, he put a little stuff in his haid for him to correct his mistakes. And so when the white man invented writing and pencil, he put an eraser on that pencil to rub out mistakes.

On such occasions Negroes could assume a simple dignity as remote from white behavior as primitive African sculpture is from the conventionalism of a civilized drawing-room. He had never remarked a vulgar gesture. Primitive peoples could be crude and coarse, but never vulgar.

Vulgarity was altogether a scab of civilization.

The boys squeezed together round a table and had some drinks. The Senegalese was right. None of the girls wanted to dance with them. It was purely a matter of good business. Ray understood and he was glad to get away from the place.

Business! Prejudice and business. In Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, America, those were the two united terrors confronting the colored man. He was the butt of the white man’s indecent public prejudices. Prejudices insensate and petty, bloody, vicious, vile, brutal, raffiné, hypocritical, Christian. Prejudices.

Prejudices like the stock market⁠—curtailed, diminishing, increasing, changing chameleon-like, according to place and time, like the color of the white man’s soul, controlled by the exigencies of the white man’s business.

Back in the square with his comrades, Ray said he knew of one other place where he had been a few times with the two gentlemen bums, but he felt sure it would be no different from the rest on a night like that.

That ain’t no money. I done buy moh jobs than I can count up in the States. I buy them offn white mens and I buy them offn niggers. Them was big-money days when every man was after the other fellah’s skin. Oh, Lawdy!

Life is a game a skin; black skin, white skin, sweet skin and all skin and selling one another is living it.

”

“I was fed up with everything and just had to have some human pusson close to me, pardner. I ain’t back home where I could find a honey-sweet mamma, so I just had to take what was ready and willing.

Life is a rectangular crossways affair and the only thing to do is to take it nacheral.

”

“Everything works out to a change.”

Banjo had said a right pretty thing. The grand rhythm of life rolled on everlastingly without beginning or end in human comprehension, but the patterns were ever changing, the figures moving on and passing, to be replaced by new ones.

He felt that time, circumstance, and chance had contributed to fill it full of a special and unique interest that he would never find there again, and he wanted the scene to remain always in his mind as he had reacted to it.

But life is so artistically uncompromising, it does not care a rap about putting a hard fist through a splendid plan and destroying our dearest artifice.

So the unwelcome reappearance of Lonesome Blue was the beginning of a series of events that enlarged and altered greatly the impression of the Ditch that Ray had hoped to preserve.

“I no could imagine you really love the white more than the colored,” said Latnah.

“Chuh! How could I evah love white moh’n colored?” cried Banjo. “White folks smell like laundry soap.”

And Banjo and Latnah laughed so contagiously that all the white patients in the ward joined them without suspecting in the least that they were laughing at themselves.

And

Banjo and Latnah laughed so contagiously that all the white patients in the ward joined them without suspecting in the least that they were laughing at themselves.

He lay there like a macabre etched by the diabolic hand of Goya. With clenched fists and eyes wide open, as if he were going to spring at an antagonist, even if he were God himself.

He finished with life as he had lived it, a belligerent, hard-fisted black boy.

Latnah tried to close his eyes, but only one would stay shut, and so she tied a handkerchief over them. He had no clothes but the rags he had died in. The boys contributed things to bury him.

No, he did not resent waste. He always loved to read of millionaires spending gorgeously.

There was something sublime about waste. It was the grand gesture that made life awesome and wonderful.

There was a magical intelligence in it that stirred his poetic mind. Perhaps more waste would diminish stupidity, which was to him the most intolerable thing about human existence.

… these things as evidences of the true nature of this civilization if he had allowed them to warp and rob him of his primitive sense of comparative values and his instinct to see through superficial appearances to the strange and profound variations of human life.

But life was more wonderful to savor than to indict.

Leave the indictment to the little moral creatures of civilized justice.

Ray locked her to him in his elbow.

Peace and forgetfulness in the bosom of a brown woman.

Warm brown body and restless dark body like a black root growing down in the soft brown earth. Deep dark passion of bodies close to the earth understanding each other. Dark brown bodies of the earth, earthy.

“That’s all right,” said Ray. “

Change is my passion. Can’t stay in one rut forever. Got to pull out and find something new.

”

“Kain’t you remember without that theah flask a dirt?” asked Banjo. “Better you tote back a flask a real Martell cognac on you’ hip, for that you won’t find back home in Gawd’s own, but you’ll find plenty a dirt.

Dirt is the same dirt all ovah the wul’ cep’n’ for a li’l’ difference in color, maybe.

”

“I can’t make out nothing, pardner, about that instinking thing that youse talking about.

But I know one thing and that is if I ain’t got the stink of life in me, I got the juice.

”

“

Ain’t a bumbole thing delicate about a man being particular what he’s putting away in his guts,

” said Jake.

I ain’t one accident-made nigger like you, Goosey. Ise a true-blue traveling-bohn nigger and I know life, and I knows how to take it nacheral.

I fight when I got to and I works when I must and I lays off when I feel lazy, and I loves all the time becausen the honeypot a life is mah middle name.

“You got a li’l’ book larnin’, Goosey, but it jest make you that much a bigger bonehead.

“They ain’t in our class, pardner. Yessah.

The wul’ is just keeping right on with that nacheral sweet jazzing of life.

And Ise jest gwine on right along jazzing with the wul’. The wul’ goes round and round and I keeps right on gwine around with it. I ain’t swore off nothing like you.

“When the train puts me off,” said Ray. “

I like this rolling along, stopping anywhere I’m put off or thrown off.

Like Banjo. I may get off to see you one a these days if the train pass your way.”

Immense crates, barrels, cases of automobiles, pianos, player-pianos, furniture; sandpapered, spliced, and varnished wood; calico print, artificial silk; pretty shoes and boots; French wines, British whiskeys, and a thousand little salesmen-made goods. Composite essence of the soil of all lands.

Commerce! Of all words the most magical.

The timbre, color, form, the strength and grandeur of it. Triumphant over all human and natural obstacles, sublime yet forever going hand in hand with the bitch, Bawdy.

Nevertheless, he was permitted to land only to see about his affairs and under supervision.

Colored subjects were not wanted in Britain.

This was the chief topic of serious talk among colored seamen in all the ports.

Black and brown men being sent back to West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian coast, and India, showed one another their papers and held sharp and bitter discussions in the rough cafés of Joliette and the Vieux Port.

The majority of the papers were distinguished by the official phrase: Nationality Doubtful.

Colored seamen who had lived their lives in the great careless tradition, and had lost their papers in low-down places to touts, holdup men, and passport fabricators, and were unable or too ignorant to show exact proof of their birthplace, were furnished with the new …