Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  “Whatever it is, I think we better get away from Marseille as soon as possible,” said Lafala. “Tomorrow I’m going to tell the official about it and ask him to arrange the passage for us. I was never sure in my mind about taking you, but I am now.”

  “There’s one thing we must look out for in the meantime,” said Aslima. “I don’t want Titin to know that you’ve made up with me. And if I’m at the Tout-va-Bien when you come there, don’t speak to me.”

  “But we’ve got to see each other.”

  “Sure, but Titin mustn’t know. I want to have him so that he’ll keep his tail down and eat out of my hand like a dog.”

  The dawn surprised them on the terrace. They arranged a rendezvous for the following evening in another part of the town. Aslima returned to her room. Lafala went in the direction of the cathedral.

  The incidents of the night had stirred him with a new victorious feeling and he felt that he could walk a long way on his artificial legs. He continued past the cathedral towards the docks. The dockers going to work brought to him thoughts of the near yesterdays when he himself often went with the early rising stream to take his place in the waiting line for a day’s work.

  Even minus his legs he felt fortunate with the fresh buoyant dawn in his face that he was free now to think about love instead of the depressing possibility of whether or not he would have today’s daily bread. How good it was to be able to live comfortably. And how ugly the thought of the thousands who lacked the barest civilized necessities.

  In the primitive life such as he had lived as a boy, civilized necessities were superfluous. But how depressing it had been to exist in the heart of civilization and be too poverty-stricken to afford them.

  He entered a little café. The bar was crowded with workers hurrying through coffee and rolls. He sat down to a little table in the corner and ordered a bowl of steaming coffee and milk. He had a little talent for drawing, and fishing out a scrap of paper and pencil, he made a sketch of his native village as he remembered it with a road cutting through the bush and a European house dominating the huts.

  He returned to his hotel at sunup. At ten o’clock he presented himself at the office of his official agent. The official’s sentiment towards Negroes was based upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin and David Livingstone.4 And he took a sort of patriarchal interest in the black boys drifting into Marseille—those who broke through the petty-clerking cordon and came under his notice—so long as they were good children.

  Lafala told the official that he was anxious to know when his affairs would be settled so that he could leave Marseille and also that he wanted passage to be reserved for two. The official looked bewildered. Passage for two! Perhaps it could be arranged, but would Lafala mind telling him who was the second person? Lafala said it was a girl. The official frowned, scenting a black-and-white romance. Lafala had perhaps become entangled with one of those lost white creatures of Quayside.

  He wasn’t to be encouraged. It would never do for a black man to take a white woman back to an African colony, especially a woman of Quayside who would certainly be a disgrace to the European colony and make it look morally small in the eyes of the natives. But—.

  “I suppose it can be arranged, Lafala. But we’ll have to make special arrangements. H’m, er—of course you know it isn’t as easy for Negroes to travel in and to Africa as it is here in Europe. But let me see. Do you have any objection to bringing the girl here so that I can talk to her? Who is she? Is she a—a—a European?”

  “No,” said Lafala. “She’s a colored girl, an old sweetheart.” The official relaxed, relieved from his embarrassing attitude, to all-smiling sentimentality, his imagination taken by a romance in color. “I think the best and easiest way is for you two to get married,” he advised Lafala. “Then your lady will have the status of a wife and so be protected against any untoward incidents on board.”

  Lafala said he had not thought of marriage, but it was a good idea. “Why, yes, my boy,” said the official. “Just the thing for a lad of your age to do . . . now you’re crippled . . . with your money . . . a nice colored girl to help you start life in your own home. . . . Just the thing.”

  The official said he had received good tidings about Lafala’s affairs and that perhaps he could leave in a short time.

  Lafala left the bureau with the intention of getting married quietly and as soon as possible to Aslima.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Besides its gorgeous breakwater and Quayside where all the drifters and bums, the outcasts and outlaws of civilizations, congregated like wasps together in hate and love feeding and buzzing over the scum of the Vieux Port, Marseille possessed also a Seamen’s and Workers’ Club.1

  This club was a very different affair from the sanctimonious British-bossed Seamen’s Mission down the breakwater way. Late in the decade following the era of the Russian Revolution,2 there began springing up in the principal European ports seamen’s clubs that were very different in spirit from the old-style missions and rests.

  The Seamen’s and Workers’ Club was situated—God knows why—in the drabbest and least interesting proletarian and factory quarter of Marseille. It was a fine large place with barroom, recreation rooms, reading room and theatre. The atmosphere was right. No sermonizing nor psalm-singing, neither of the old religious or the new radical brand. But not many seamen could be persuaded to go up there. At least those that frequented it did not seem to be anything like the healthy-rough body of seamen and dockers.

  The club was so far removed from the seamen’s haunts. Quayside was more attractive. Even though the sordidness of Quayside was stinking, there were broken bits of color in the dirt. The gnashing dogs and cats devoured the offal and incessantly by day and night the Mediterranean sprayed the pavements, the mistral wind3 blew through the gloomy houses and the meridian sun quickly burned away the stench.

  One of the active workers of the new Seamen’s Club was a mulatto from Martinique, Etienne St. Dominique.4 He spent much of his time in Quayside trying to induce the seamen, especially the colored ones, to go to the club for recreation and reading and lectures.

  St. Dominique had formerly been a student. He had obtained a scholarship to study in France. He was very clever but not a good student. He was something of a philanderer and through an unfortunate incident he was compelled to leave college and forfeit his scholarship. His time for compulsory military service was overdue when he left college and he entered the army. There he met comrades of radical ideas which he assimilated. And upon the completion of his service his curiosity carried him into association with the proletarian intellectuals.

  St. Dominique had heard about Lafala, his misfortune and his return. But he had not had an opportunity of meeting him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lafala had drawn some money from his agent. On his way from the office, which was situated in one of the fine tree-shaded avenues of Marseille, Lafala stopped under a chestnut tree, spreading out over the sidewalk, and began counting and dividing up his money. He put some bills for debts and immediate use in his pocket book. The rest he thrust into a thick envelope. He was buttoning this envelope in his inside vest pocket when he was touched upon the shoulder. Lafala wheeled around, startled, knowing that Marseille was notorious for its daring hold-ups.

  He faced a tall and striking mulatto who introduced himself as St. Dominique. St. Dominique told Lafala that he had guessed his identity by his figure and his walk and had followed him down the street. He asked Lafala about his affairs, how long he intended to remain in Marseille. And invited him to visit the Seamen’s Club. He asked Lafala if he could go in the afternoon. Lafala said that he was free and St. Dominique said he would meet him after lunch at the Tout-va-Bien down in Quayside.

  “You don’t want to go to that hole down there, do you?” Lafala said. He was very much impressed by St. Dominique’s cultivated accent and his refined mann
ers. Even though Quayside was his rendezvous of pleasures the most delicious, the place and kind of life in which he was most at ease, he felt a little ashamed of it before St. Dominique.

  St. Dominique smiled and assured Lafala that he liked Quayside and the Tout-va-Bien. Lafala was just another of the many working folk he had known who were a little ashamed of proletarian places of amusement before respectable people. And it had always amused him that while bohemian radicals of the better classes were romantic or sentimental about common proletarian pleasures, the proletarians themselves were contemptuous of such and hankering after the better-class patterns.

  “I always go to the Tout-va-Bien especially to see the fellows when the boats arrive,” said St. Dominique. “I like it but I don’t think the proprietor likes me.”

  “He doesn’t like anything but brisk business,” said Lafala. “Awful yaller nigger.” Lafala said he was on his way to the Tout-va-Bien to pay the proprietor some money.

  They agreed to meet in a brasserie5 in the center of the town, as it was nearer to Lafala’s hotel and he was not going down to Quayside that morning.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lafala arrived at the brasserie before St. Dominique. And while he was waiting he noticed two men looking at him suspiciously through the fine mirrored front. Presently they entered the café taking seats at an oblique angle from Lafala. And he was uncomfortably aware of being the object of observation and comment, the men averting their eyes whenever they caught him. However, he betrayed no signs of uneasiness although he was very perturbed.

  He was relieved when St. Dominique appeared with another Negro, a shining ebony also from West Africa who was introduced as Falope Sbaye.6 Falope was St. Dominique’s dearest friend in Marseille, although intellectually they did not agree upon anything. Falope held some kind of minor clerical post in the town with a company that had extensive trade relations on the West African coast. Although of the same ebony as Lafala, he was a different type. His features, especially the nose, had more in common with the European than the African. He claimed Arab and Portuguese blood in his family.

  Because of Lafala’s impairment they took a taxicab instead of walking to the Seamen’s Club. The hall was a vast affair: lecture and reading room, billiard room, theatre, bar and restaurant, office, phonograph and piano. As one entered the reading room one faced an impressive magnified photograph of Lenin on the right of which there was a smaller one of Karl Marx.7 Under them was a drawing of two terrible giants, one white, the other black, both bracing themselves to break the chains that bound them. And under the drawing was an exhortation: “Workers of the World, Unite to Break Your Chains!”8 All over the walls there were drawings and photographs of workers and workers’ leaders from many countries, Soviet Russia taking first place. There were piles of pamphlets and newspapers in several languages, European and Asiatic.

  St. Dominique introduced Lafala to the president of the club. The president was a very polite person from the middle class. Before he came to preside over the Seamen’s Club he had been a professor. He was in no way ambitious. All he cared for was the devoting of his life to service—given a place where he could help serve the cause of the ignorant workers as conscientiously as he had once instructed young students.

  Shaking Lafala’s hand he told him that he was happy to see a black from Quayside interested in the new social truth.

  “We are trying to help your people here in Marseille,” he said. “And we want you all to help us help yourselves.” He showed Lafala all over the building talking to him as a teacher. . . . Lafala’s being there with his yellow and white comrades was a symbol of the all-embracing purpose of the new social ideal. Lafala’s race represented the very lowest level of humanity, biologically and spiritually speaking. But that was no hindrance to its full participation in the coming social order. For it would be a universal order including all peoples without difference of race and religion. Marx was a Jew but his vision transcended his race to become an ideal for all humanity.

  All this was like an unknown tongue to Lafala, but interesting to hear. His civilized contacts had been limited to the flotsam and jetsam of port life, people who went with the drift like the scum and froth of the tides breaking on the shore, their thinking confined to the immediate needs of a day’s work down the docks or a trip on a boat or any other means of procuring money for flopping, feeding, loving.

  Existing thus he had often thought of more comfort, more spaciousness and cleanliness as he was accustomed to in the bush, but never of such toilers achieving anything different or changing that way of life that seemed as eternal as the rhythm of the waves along Quayside which they so much resembled.

  “And so you’re going back to Africa,” the manager said.

  Lafala said yes, adding that he was really being sent back.

  “You must help us over there as much as you can. We need the cooperation of your people. For the white workers alone cannot create a new society if the capitalists have vast reserves of ignorant black and brown workers against them.”

  “What about the vast reserves of ignorant whites?” asked Falope. “They may be even more dangerous than the backward colored. Why not try to convert them first?”

  “There is no first and last in the class struggle,” said St. Dominique. “We need advanced groups of workers everywhere regardless of race to be the vanguard of the class struggle.”

  While talking the president had been gathering from the piles of literature a little bundle of pamphlets and papers bearing on the subject of the Colored Races and the Class Struggle. These he handed to Lafala (as was his custom with all new visitors) asking him to distribute them among his friends.

  “Is it the same as the Back-to-Africa organization?” Lafala asked. That was the only movement that had penetrated his ears in the portholes.9

  “Oh, no,” said St. Dominique. “The Back-to-Africa movement is different. It began like a religious revival and is dying out the same way. Because it wasn’t founded on the facts and needs of our time. It was a race movement. But we can’t go back to Africa. You can as an individual. But we can’t as a people. Our movement is a bigger thing. Each group of workers must stay where it is but all fight the battle of the class struggle for a new society.”

  “I don’t believe in any working class having the absolute power,” said Falope. “I can’t see where they have more intelligence to rule than the present ruling classes.”

  “They have the intelligence in Russia,” said St. Dominique.

  “Oh, the leaders are all well-educated men,” said Falope. “Like our president here.” The president smiled.

  “It’s a government in the sole interest of the workers,” said St. Dominique. “That’s all I can say.”

  “I don’t care a damn for the workers,” said Falope, “and don’t want to see any working class ruling the world. I get on better with the bosses than the workers every time.”

  “You’re reactionary as always,” said St. Dominique. “You know we did promise not to argue about politics.”

  “All right, I’ll shut up,” said Falope. “I’ll leave you to convert Lafala. I’ve got to go now and work like a good bourgeois. You’re a proletarian and so you can take it easy with Lafala.”

  “We’re going too,” said St. Dominique.

  They said goodbye to the president of the Seamen’s Club and left. Outside they hailed a taxicab on the corner. As Lafala was entering he saw the two men of the brasserie sitting in a café opposite. He felt panicky.

  “They’re after me,” he whispered agitatedly to St. Dominique.

  “Who? Where? Why?” asked St. Dominique.

  “Two men in the café. They followed me from the brasserie.”

  Lafala explained about the suspicious-looking men in the brasserie.

  “Oh, it’s nothing! I know what it is,” said St. Dominique. “It’s your b
eing with me and going to the Seamen’s Club. I am followed you know and they follow you because you are with me to find out who you are. It’s nothing.”

  But Lafala was not at all convinced by St. Dominique’s plausible explanation. He remembered he had been kidnapped in New York and the misunderstanding with his lawyer. He had an idea the two men had something to do with his case. He did not feel safe.

  Falope thought that as the shipping company had paid Lafala a handsome compensation and brought him safely back to Marseille on its own boat, there was nothing to fear from that source. St. Dominique agreed with him.

  “I’m sure it’s the political police,” he said. “They haunt all the left radical places and try to know about everybody and everything.”

  “Political or criminal, the police is all the same to me,” said Lafala. He didn’t like to be followed. And when the taxicab reached the crowded square in the center of Marseille, he stopped it and hastily hustled out and mingled with the crowd.

  But that evening he did not appear at his hotel, the Tout-va-Bien or any place down Quayside. He had vanished like a spark in the air.

  THIRD PART

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Lafala had had a partner in stowing away. He was a huge West Indian from a British island who went by the name of Babel.1 He was routed out of his hiding place a day after Lafala had been discovered. He was also locked up but came all right out of his confinement skin-clean and foot-whole.

  Babel caught a glimpse of Lafala on a stretcher being taken to the hospital, but did not know what had happened. He was held as a prisoner to be taken back to Marseille on the same boat. Babel did not relish going back there to stand trial for the misdemeanor of stowing away. So when the boat appeared in full view of Marseille and the officers were busy preparing for the visit of port officials, he leaped overboard and dived to safety. Getting clear of the ship, he swam to the far out-of-the-way end of the breakwater. And he hid himself for nearly two weeks before he struck a job on an outgoing freighter. . . .