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All that Jake knew about the freighter on which he stoked was that it stank between sea and sky.

He was working with a dirty Arab crew. The captain signed him on at Cardiff because one of the Arabs had quit the ship. Jake was used to all sorts of rough jobs, but he had never before worked in such a filthy dinghy.

Back home he would have been spoiling for a fight. There he would rather hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt.

He preferred white folks’ hatred to their friendly contempt.

To feel their hatred made him strong and aggressive, while their friendly contempt made him ridiculously angry, even against his own will.

He found plenty of work there as a docker. He liked the West India Docks. He liked Limehouse. In the pubs men gave him their friendly paws and called him “darky.” He liked how they called him “darky.” He made friends. He found a woman.

He was happy in the East End.

The Armistice found him there. On New Year’s Eve, 1919, Jake went to a monster dance with his woman, and his docker friends and their women, in the Mile End Road.

The Armistice had brought many more black men to the East End of London. Hundreds of them. Some of them found work. Some did not. Many were getting a little pension from the government.

The price of sex went up in the East End, and the dignity of it also.

And that summer Jake saw a big battle staged between the colored and white men of London’s East End. Fisticuffs, razor and knife and gun play. For three days his woman would not let him out-of-doors.

Fisticuffs, razor and knife and gun play. For three days his woman would not let him out-of-doors. And when it was all over he was seized with the awful fever of lonesomeness.

He felt all alone in the world.

He wanted to run away from the kindheartedness of his lady of the East End.

He left his suitcase behind the counter of a saloon on Lenox Avenue. He went for a promenade on Seventh Avenue between 135th and 140th Streets. He thrilled to Harlem. His blood was hot.

His eyes were alert as he sniffed the street like a hound.

Seventh Avenue was nice, a little too nice that night.

Jake turned off on Lenox Avenue. He stopped before an ice-cream parlor to admire girls sipping ice-cream soda through straws. He went into a cabaret. …

A little brown girl aimed the arrow of her eye at him as he entered.

Jake was wearing a steel-gray English suit. It fitted him loosely and well, perfectly suited his presence. She knew at once that Jake must have just landed. She rested her chin on the back of her hands and smiled at him.

She was brown, but she had tinted her leaf-like face to a ravishing chestnut. She had on an orange scarf over a green frock, which was way above her knees, giving an adequate view of legs lovely in fine champagne-colored stockings. …

Her shaft hit home.⁠ ⁠…

Jake crossed over to her table. He ordered Scotch and soda.

“Sure, daddy. Let’s beat it.” …

Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away.

The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere, … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem.

Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it.

The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter.

The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere, … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem. … Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood. …

Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere, … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere!

Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem.

Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem. … Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood. …

Barron’s was still Barron’s, depending on its downtown white trade. Leroy’s, the big common rendezvous shop for everybody. Edmond’s still in the running. A fine new place that was opened in Brooklyn was freezing to death.

Brooklyn never could support anything.

Goldgraben’s on Lenox Avenue was leading all the Negro cabarets a cruel dance. The big-spirited Jew had brought his cabaret up from the basement and established it in a hall blazing with lights, overlooking Lenox Avenue. He made a popular Harlem Negro manager.

Oh, it was some wonderful sight to watch them from the pavement! No wonder the lights of Connor’s were dim. And Barron’s had plunged deeper for the ofay trade. Goldgraben was grabbing all the golden-browns that had any spendable dough.

But the Congo remained in spite of formidable opposition and foreign exploitation. The Congo was a real throbbing little Africa in New York.

It was an amusement place entirely for the unwashed of the Black Belt. Or, if they were washed, smells lingered telling the nature of their occupation. Pot-wrestlers, third cooks, W.C. attendants, scrub maids, dishwashers, stevedores.

“Crazy, plumb crazy about a man, mah man. …”

The saxophone was moaning it. And feet and hands and mouths were acting it.

Dancing. Some jigged, some shuffled, some walked, and some were glued together swaying on the dance floor.

Jake and Zeddy picked two girls from a green bench and waded into the hot soup.

The saxophone and drum fought over the punctuated notes. The cymbals clashed.

The excitement mounted. Couples breasted each other in rhythmical abandon, grinned back at their friends and chanted:

Zeddy, like a good understanding buddy, had slipped away. Another Scotch and Gordon Dry.

The glasses kissed. Like a lean lazy leopard the mulattress reclined against Jake.

The milk cans were sounding on the pavements and a few pale stars were still visible in the sky when Rose left the Congo with both hands entwined in Jake’s arm.

Jake was working longshore. Hooking barrels and boxes, wrestling with chains and cranes. He didn’t have a little-boss job this time. But that didn’t worry him.

He was one blackamoor that nourished a perfect contempt for place.

There were times when he divided his days between Rose and Uncle Doc’s saloon and Dixie Red’s poolroom.

The gaming went on with intermittent calls for drinks. Nije sat where he could watch Zeddy’s face. Zeddy also, although apparently intent on the cards, kept a wary eye on Nije. Sometimes their eyes met.

No one was aware of the challenge that was developing between the two men.

There was a little slackening in the games, a general call for drinks, and a shifting of chairs. Nije got nearer to Zeddy. … Half-smiling and careless-like, he planted his boot-heel upon Zeddy’s toes.

The proprietress let loose a bloodcurdling scream, but before Zeddy’s hand could achieve its purpose, Jake aimed a swift kick at his elbow.

The razor flew spinning upward and fell chopping through a glass of gin on the pianola.

The proprietress fell upon Zeddy and clawed at him. “Wha’s the matter all you bums trying to ruin mah place?” she cried. “Ain’t I been a good spoht with you all, making everything here nice and respectable?”

Susy was wonderfully created. She was of the complexion known among Negroes as spade or chocolate-to-the-bone.

Her eyes shone like big white stars. Her chest was majestic and the general effect like a mountain.

And that mountain was overgrand because Susy never wore any other but extremely French-heeled shoes. Even over the range she always stood poised in them and blazing in bright-hued clothes.

Her chest was majestic and the general effect like a mountain. And that mountain was overgrand because Susy never wore any other but extremely French-heeled shoes. Even over the range she always stood poised in them and blazing in bright-hued clothes.

The burning passion of Susy’s life was the yellow youth of her race.

Susy came from South Carolina. A yellow youngster married her when she was fifteen and left her before she was eighteen. Since then she had lived with a yellow complex at the core of her heart.

The burning passion of Susy’s life was the yellow youth of her race. Susy came from South Carolina. A yellow youngster married her when she was fifteen and left her before she was eighteen.

Since then she had lived with a yellow complex at the core of her heart.

Civilization had brought strikingly exotic types into Susy’s race. And like many, many Negroes, she was a victim to that. … Ancient black life rooted upon its base with all its fascinating new layers of brown, low-brown, high-brown, nut-brown, lemon, maroon, olive, mauve, gold.

Yet for all of her wages drowned in gin, Susy carried a hive of discontents in her majestic breast.

She desired a lover, something like her undutiful husband, but she desired in vain.

Her guests consumed her gin and listened to the phonograph, exchanged rakish stories, and when they felt fruit-ripe to dropping, left her place in pursuit of pleasures elsewhere.

“I know society, too, honey, even though I only knows it watching from the servant window. And I know it ain’t no different from us.

It’s the same life even ef they drink champagne and we drink gin.

”

And Jake was a high favorite wherever he went.

There was something so naturally beautiful about his presence that everybody liked and desired him.

Buddies, on the slightest provocation, were ready to fight for him, and the girls liked to make an argument around him.

That was his natural way, wherever he went, whatever new people he met. It had helped him over many a bad crossing at Brest at Havre and in London. … Take it easy … take life easy.

Sometimes he was disgusted with life, but he was never frightened of it.

Jake had never seen colored women so carefully elegant as these rich-browns and yellow-creams at Madame Suarez’s. They were fascinating in soft bright draperies and pretty pumps and they drank liquor with a fetching graceful abandon.

Jake had never seen colored women so carefully elegant as these rich-browns and yellow-creams at Madame Suarez’s. They were fascinating in soft bright draperies and pretty pumps and they drank liquor with a fetching graceful abandon.

Gin and whisky seemed to lose their barbaric punch in that atmosphere and take on a romantic color.

The women’s coiffure was arranged in different striking styles and their arms and necks and breasts tinted to emphasize the peculiar richness of each skin.

One night Jake noticed three young white men, clean-shaven, flashily-dressed, who paid for champagne for everybody in the flat. They were introduced by a perfectly groomed dark-brown man, a close friend of the boss of the Baltimore.

Money seemed worthless to them except as a means of getting fun out of it.

Madame Suarez made special efforts to please them. Showed them all of the buffet flat, even her own bedroom. One of them, very freckled and red-haired, sat down to the piano and jazzed out popular songs. The trio radiated friendliness all around them.

The waiter smiled.

He was very friendly.

Jake half-sprawled over the table. “Wha’s this here stuff you reading? Looks lak Greek to me.” He spelled the title, “S-A-P-H-O, Sapho.”

Jake was very American in spirit and shared a little of that comfortable Yankee contempt for poor foreigners. And as an American Negro he looked askew at foreign niggers. Africa was jungle, and Africans bush niggers, cannibals. And West Indians were monkey-chasers.

But now he felt like a boy who stands with the map of the world in colors before him, and feels the wonder of the world.

The waiter told him that Africa was not jungle as he dreamed of it, nor slavery the peculiar role of black folk.

And Abyssinia, deep-set in the shoulder of Africa, besieged by the hungry wolves of Europe? The only nation that has existed free and independent from the earliest records of history until today!

Abyssinia, oldest unconquered nation, ancient-strange as Egypt, persistent as Palestine, legendary as Greece, magical as Persia.

There was the lovely legend of her queen who visited the court of the Royal Rake of Jerusalem, and how he fell in love with her.

Brawny bronze men in coal-blackened and oil-spotted blue overalls shadowed the doorways of saloons, poolrooms, and little basement restaurants. The street was animated with dark figures going up, going down.

Houses and men, women, and squinting cats and slinking dogs, everything seemed touched with soot and steel dust.

“So this heah is the niggers’ run,” said Jake. “I don’t like its ’pearance, nohow.” He walked down the street and remarked a bouncing little chestnut-brown standing smartly in the entrance of a basement eating-joint.

He flung himself, across void and water, back home.

Home thoughts, if you can make them soft and sweet and misty-beautiful enough, can sometimes snare sleep.

There was the quiet, chalky-dusty street and, jutting out over it, the front of the house that he had lived in. The high staircase built on the outside, and pots of begonias and ferns on the landing. …

They were all chain-ganged together and he was counted as one link. Yet he loathed every soul in that great barrack-room, except Jake. Race. … Why should he have and love a race?

Races and nations were things like skunks, whose smells poisoned the air of life.

Yet civilized mankind reposed its faith and future in their ancient, silted channels. Great races and big nations! There must be something mighty inspiriting in being the citizen of a great strong nation.

No. It was suffering, horribly real. It seized and worried him from every angle. Pushed him toward the sheer precipice of imagination. It was awful. He was afraid.

For thought was a terrible tiger clawing at his small portion of gray substance, throttling, tearing, and tormenting him with pitiless ferocity.

Oh, a thousand ideas of life were shrieking at him in a wild orgy of mockery! …

He was repulsive in every aspect From the elevated bulk of his gross person to the matted burrs of his head and the fat cigar, the constant companion of his sloppy mouth, that he chewed and smoked at the same time.

The chef deliberately increased his repulsiveness of form by the meannesses of his spirit.

“I know Ise a mean black nigger,” he often said, “and I’ll let you all know it on this heah white man’s car, too.”

“All this heah talk about chicken-loving niggers,” he growled chuckingly to the second cook, “The way them white passengers clean up on mah fried chicken I wouldn’t trust one o’ them anywheres near mah hen-coop.”

Broiling tender corn-fed chicken without biting a leg. Thus, grimly, the chef existed.

Humored and tolerated by the steward and hated by the waiters and undercooks. Jake found himself on the side of the waiters. He did not hate the chef (Jake could not hate anybody).

… A pleasant house party, similar to any other among colored people of that class in Baltimore, New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, or even Washington, DC. Different, naturally, from New York, which molds all peoples into a hectic rhythm of its own.

Yet even New York, passing its strange thousands through its great metropolitan mill, cannot rob Negroes of their native color and laughter.

“Mah friend’s just keeping me company,” Jake said to the woman. “He ain’t regular—you get me? And I want him treated right.”

All so different from what he had expected. But something about the presence of the little boy there and his being the woman’s son disgusted him. He could not analyse his aversion.

It was just an instinctive, intolerant feeling that the boy did not belong to that environment and should not be there.

He went from Madame Laura and Jake over to the piano and conversed with the pianist. When he glanced again at the table he had left, Madame Laura had her arm around Jake’s neck and his eyes were strangely shining.

Ray felt alone and a little sorry for himself. Now that he was there, he would like to be touched by the spirit of that atmosphere and, like Jake, fall naturally into its rhythm. He also envied Jake.

Just for this night only he would like to be like him.⁠ ⁠…

They were dancing. The little yellow girl, her legs kicked out at oblique angles, appeared as if she were going to fall through the big-built black man.

“Ain’t she?” Jake showed his teeth. “I’d back her against some of the youngest. She’s a wonder, chappie.

Her blood’s like good liquor.

She gave me a present, too. Looka here.” Jake took from his pocket a lovely slate-colored necktie sprinkled with red dots. Ray felt the fineness of it.

Men working on a train have something of the spirit of men working on a ship. They are, perforce, bound together in comradeship of a sort in that close atmosphere. In the stopover cities they go about in pairs or groups.

But the camaraderie breaks up on the platform in New York as soon as the dining-car returns there.

Every man goes his own way unknown to his comrades. Wife or sweetheart or some other magnet of the great magic city draws each off separately.

It was what they called in print and polite conversation “the underworld.” The compound word baffled him, as some English words did sometimes. Why underworld he could never understand.

It was very much upon the surface as were the other divisions of human life.

Having its heights and middle and depths and secret places even as they. And the people of this world, waiters, cooks, chauffeurs, sailors, porters, guides, ushers, hod-carriers, factory hands—all touched in a thousand ways the people of the other divisions.

From them, by way of free-thought pamphlets, it was only a stride to the great scintillating satirists of the age—Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Anatole France, and the popular problemist, H. G. Wells.

He had lived on that brilliant manna that fell like a flame-fall from those burning stars.

Then came the great mass carnage in Europe and the great mass revolution in Russia.

And literature, story-telling, had little interest for him now if thought and feeling did not wrestle and sprawl with appetite and dark desire all over the pages.

Dreams of making something with words.

What could he make … and fashion? Could he ever create Art? Art, around which vague, incomprehensible words and phrases stormed? What was art, anyway? Was it more than a clear-cut presentation of a vivid impression of life?

Only the Russians of the late era seemed to stand up like giants in the new. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. When he read them now he thought: Here were elements that the grand carnage swept over and touched not.

The soil of life saved their roots from the fire.

They were so saturated, so deep-down rooted in it.

“But that’s the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing.

The things you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or race of people.

Nobody can pull that kind of talk now and get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our education like—like our houses.

When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of the old dead stuff.

Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”

Life burned in Ray perhaps more intensely than in Jake. Ray felt more and his range was wider and he could not be satisfied with the easy, simple things that sufficed for Jake.

Sometimes he felt like a tree with roots in the soil and sap flowing out and whispering leaves drinking in the air.

But he drank in more of life than he could distill into active animal living. Maybe that was why he felt he had to write.

Its brutality, gang rowdyism, promiscuous thickness. Its hot desires. But, oh, the rich bloodred color of itl The warm accent of its composite voice, the fruitiness of its laughter, the trailing rhythm of its “blues” and the improvised surprises of its jazz.

He had known happiness, too, in Harlem, joy that glowed gloriously upon him like the high-noon sunlight of his tropic island home.

How long would he be able to endure the life of a cabin boy or mess boy on a freighter? Jake had tried to dissuade him.

“

A wolf is all right ef he knows the jungle.

”

“Nobody knows, Jake. Anyway, you’re happier than I as you are.

The more I learn the less I understand and love life. All the learning in this world can’t answer this little question, Why are we living?

”

The lovely trees of Seventh Avenue were a vivid flame-green. Children, lightly clad, skipped on the pavement. Light open coats prevailed and the smooth bare throats of brown girls were a token as charming as the first pussy-willows.

Far and high over all, the sky was a grand blue benediction, and beneath it the wonderful air of New York tasted like fine dry champagne.

Jake loitered along Seventh Avenue. Crossing to Lenox, he lazied northward and over the 149th Street bridge into the near neighborhood of the Bronx. Here, just a step from compactly-built, teeming Harlem, were frame houses and open lots and people digging.

Jake sat down upon a mound thick-covered with dandelions. They glittered in the sun away down to the rear of a rusty-gray shack. They filled all the green spaces.

Oh, the common little things were glorious there under the sun in the tender spring grass.

Oh, sweet to be alive in that sun beneath that sky! And to be in love—even for one hour of such rare hours! One day! One night! Somebody with spring charm, like a dandelion, seasonal and haunting like a lovely dream that never repeats itself.

And to be in love—even for one hour of such rare hours! One day! One night! Somebody with spring charm, like a dandelion, seasonal and haunting like a lovely dream that never repeats itself. …

There are hours, there are days, and nights whose sheer beauty overwhem us with happiness, that we seek to make even more beautiful by comparing them with rare human contacts.

… It was a day like this we romped in the grass … a night as soft and intimate as this on which we forgot the world and ourselves. … Hours of pagan abandon, celebrating ourselves. …

The beautiful block was fast asleep. Up in the branches the little elfin green things were barely whispering. The Protestant church was softened to a shadow.

The atmosphere was perfect, the moment sweet for something sacred.

The burning little brown-skin cuddled up against Jake’s warm tall person: “Kiss me, daddy,” she said. He folded her closely to him and caressed her. …

A hen-fight was more fun than a cockfight, thought Felice, as she hastily threw her things into her bag.

The hens pluck feathers, but they never wring necks like the cocks.

And Jake. Standing on the corner, he waited, restive, nervous. But, unlike Felice, his thought was not touched by the faintest fear of a blood battle.

She was a prize to hold. Had slipped through his fingers once, but he wasn’t ever going to lose her again. That little model of warm brown flesh.

Each human body has its own peculiar rhythm, shallow or deep or profound.

Transient rhythms that touch and pass you, unrememberable, and rhythms unforgetable. Imperial rhythms whose vivid splendor blinds your sight and destroys your taste for lesser ones.

It was a scene of blazing color. Soft, barbaric, burning, savage, clashing, planless colors—all rioting together in wonderful harmony.

There is no human sight so rich as an assembly of Negroes ranging from lacquer black through brown to cream, decked out in their ceremonial finery.

Negroes are like trees. They wear all colors naturally. And Felice, rouged to a ravishing maroon, and wearing a close-fitting, chrome-orange frock and cork-brown slippers, just melted into the scene.

It was a scene of blazing color. Soft, barbaric, burning, savage, clashing, planless colors—all rioting together in wonderful harmony. There is no human sight so rich as an assembly of Negroes ranging from lacquer black through brown to cream, decked out in their ceremonial finery.

Negroes are like trees. They wear all colors naturally.

And Felice, rouged to a ravishing maroon, and wearing a close-fitting, chrome-orange frock and cork-brown slippers, just melted into the scene.

Negroes, like all good Americans, love a bar. I should have said, Negroes under Anglo-Saxon civilization. A bar has a charm all of its own that makes drinking there pleasanter. We like to lean up against it, with a foot on the rail.

We will leave our women companions and choice wines at the table to snatch a moment of exclusive sex solidarity over a thimble of gin at the bar.

The boys left the girls to the fashions for a little while. Billy Biasse, being a stag as always, had accepted the invitation with alacrity. He loved to indulge in naked man-stuff talk, which would be too raw even for Felice’s ears.