The dawning sunlight pricked the tarpaulin and fell upon the woman's
tired, sleep-sapped face. Enamel clanged and crashed. A sickly,
sour-sweet odor pervaded the hatch. The sea was calm, gulls scuttled
low, seizing and ecstatically devouring some reckless, sky-drunk sprat.
"Go, no, Halfred," cried the woman, the baby in her arms, "an' beg de
backra man fi' giv' yo' a can o' hot water fi' mek de baby tea. Go no?"
He rolled over lazily; his loggish yellow bulk, solid, dispirited.
"Cho', de man dem no ha' no hot water, giv' she a lemon, no, she
na'h cry." He tossed back again, his chin on his arms, gazing at the
glorious procession of the sun.
"Even de man dem, ovah yondah," she cried, gesticulating, "a hold a
kangfarance fi' get some hot water. Why yo' don't get up an' go, no
man? Me can't handastan' yo', sah."
A conspiration, a pandemonium threatened--the deckers.
"How de bleedy hell dem heckspeck a man fi' trabble tree days an' tree
whole a nights beout giv' him any hot watah fi' mek even a can o' tea
is somet'ing de hagent at Kingston gwine hay' fi' pint out to me w'en
de boat dey lan'--"
"Hey, mistah hawfissah, yo' got any hot watah?"
"Hot watah, mistah?"
"Me will giv' yo' a half pint o' red rum if yo' giv' me a quatty wut'
o' hot watah."
"Come, no, man, go get de watah, no?"
"Ripe apples mek me t'row up!"
"Green tamarin' mek me tummack sick!"
"Sahft banana mek me fainty!"
"Fish sweetie giv' me de dysentery."
Craving luscious Havana nights the ship's scullions hid in refuse cans
or in grub for the Chinks hot water which they peddled to the miserable
deckers.
"Get up, no Halfred, an' go buy some o' de watah," the girl cried, "de
baby a cry."
Of late he didn't answer her any more. And it was useless to depend
upon him. Frantic at the baby's pawing of the clotted air, at the cold
dribbling from its twisted mouth, which turned down a trifle at the
ends like Alfred's, she began conjecturing on the use to which a decker
could put a cup of the precious liquid. Into it one might pour a gill
of goat's milk--a Cuban _señora_, a decker of several voyages, had
fortified herself with a bucket of it--or melt a sprig of peppermint or
a lump of clove or a root of ginger. So many tropical things one could
do with a cup of hot water.
The child took on the color of its sweltering environs. It refused to
be pacified by sugared words. It was hungry and it wished to eat, to
feel coursing down its throat something warm and delicious. It kicked
out of its mother's hand the toy engine she locomotioned before it. It
cried, it ripped with its naked toes a hole in her blouse. It kept up
an irrepressible racket.
The child's agony drove her to reckless alternatives. "If you don't go,
then I'll go, yo' lazy t'ing," she said, depositing the baby beside him
and disappearing down the galley corridor.
Her bare earth-red feet slid on the hot, sizzling deck. The heat came
roaring at her. It swirled, enveloping her. It was a dingy corridor and
there were pigmy paneled doors every inch along it. It wasn't clear to
her whither she was bound; the vaporing heat dizzied things. But the
scent of stewing meat and vegetables lured her on. It sent her scudding
in and out of barrels of cold storage, mounds of ash debris of an
exotic kind. It shot her into dark twining circles of men, talking.
They either paused or grew lecherous at her approach. Some of the doors
to the crew's quarters were open and as she passed white men'd stick
out their heads and call, pull, tug at her. Grimy, ash-stained faces;
leprous, flesh-crazed hands. Onward she fled, into the roaring, fuming
galley.
Heat. Hearths aglow. Stoves aglow. Dishes clattering. Engines,
donkey-engines, wheezing. Bright-faced and flame-haired Swedes
and Bristol cockneys cursing. Half-nude figures of bronze and
crimson shouting, spearing, mending the noisy fire. The wet,
clean, brick-colored deck danced to the rhythm of the ship. Darky
waiters--white shirt bosoms--black bow ties--black, braided
uniforms--spat entire menus at the blond cooks.
"Slap it on dey, Dutch, don't starve de man."
"Hey, Hubigon, tightenin' up on any mo' hoss flesh to-day?"
"Come on fellahs, let's go--"
"There's my boy Porto Rico again Hubigon, Ah tell yo' he is a sheik,
tryin' to git nex' to dat hot yallah mama."
On entering she had turned, agonized and confused, to a lone yellow
figure by the port hole.
"Oh, it's you," she exclaimed, and smiled wanly.
He was sourly sweeping dishes, forks, egg-stained things into a mossy
wooden basket which he hoisted and dropped into a cesspool of puttering
water.
He paused, blinking uncomprehendingly.
"You," she was catching at mementoes, "you remember--you helped me--my
trunk--"
"Oh, yes, I remember," he said slowly. He was a Cuban, mix-blooded,
soft-haired, and to him, as she stood there, a bare, primitive
soul, her beauty and her sex seemed to be in utmost contrast to his
mechanical surroundings.
"Can you," she said, in that half-hesitant way of hers, "can you give
me some hot watah fo' my baby?"
He was briefly attired; overalls, a dirty, pink singlet. His reddish
yellow face, chest and neck shone with the grease and sweat. His face
was buttered with it.
"Sure," he replied, seizing an empty date can on the ledge of the port
hole and filling it. "Be careful," he cautioned, handing it back to her.
She took it and their eyes meeting, fell.
She started to go, but a burning touch of his hand possessed her.
"Wait," he said, "I almost forgot something." From beneath the machine
he exhumed an old moist gold dust box. Inside it he had pummeled, by
some ornate instinct, odds and ends--echoes of the breakfast table. He
gave the box to her, saying, "If any one should ask you where you got
it, just say Jota Arosemena gave it to you."
"Hey, Porto Rico, wha' the hell yo' git dat stuff at, hotting stuff fo'
decks?"
Both of them turned, and the Cuban paled at the jaunty mug of the
cook's Negro mate.
"You speak to me?" he said, ice cool.
Hate shone on the black boy's face. "Yo' heard me!" he growled. "Yo'
ain't cock-eyed." Ugly, grim, black, his face wore an uneasy leer. He
was squat and bleary-eyed.
A son of the Florida Gulf, he hated "Porto Rico" for reasons planted
deep in the Latin's past. He envied him the gentle texture of his hair.
On mornings in the galley where they both did their toilet he would
poke fun at the Cuban's meticulous care in parting it. "Yo' ain't gwine
sho," Hubigon'd growl. "Yo' don't have to dress up like no lady's man."
And Jota, failing to comprehend the point of view, would question,
"What's the matter with you, mang, you mek too much noise, mang."
Hubigon despised him because he was yellow-skinned; one night in Havana
he had spied him and the chef cook, a nifty, freckle-faced Carolina
"cracker" for whom the cook's mate had no earthly use, and the baker's
assistant, a New Orleans creole,--although the Negro waiters aboard
were sure he was a "yallah" nigger--drinking _anee_ in a high-hat café
on the prado which barred jet-black American Negroes. He loathed the
Latin for his good looks and once at a port on the Buenaventura River
they had gone ashore and met two native girls. One was white, her lips
pure as the petals of a water lily; the other was a flaming mulatto.
That night, on the steps of an adobe hut, a great, low moon in the sky,
both forgot the presence of the cook's mate and pledged tear-stained
love to Jota. "An' me standin' right by him, doin' a fadeaway." He
envied Jota his Cuban nationality for over and over again he had
observed that the Latin was the nearest thing to a white man the _ofay_
men aboard had yet met. They'd play cards with him--something they
never did with the Negro crew--they'd gang with him in foreign ports,
they'd listen in a "natural" sort of way to all the bosh he had to say.
Now all the mate's pent-up wrath came foaming to the front.
He came up, the girl having tarried, a cocky, chesty air about him.
He made deft, telling jabs at the vapors enmeshing him. "Yo' can't do
that," he said, indicating the victuals, "like hell yo' kin! Who de
hell yo' t'ink yo' is anyhow? Yo' ain't bettah'n nobody else. Put it
back, big boy, befo' Ah starts whisperin' to de man. Wha' yo' t'ink yo'
is at, anyhow, in Porto Rico, where yo' come fum at? Com' handin' out
poke chops an' cawn muffins, like yo' is any steward. Yo' cain't do
dat, ole man."
It slowly entered the other's brain--all this edgy, snappy, darky
talk. But the essence of it was aggressively reflected in the mate's
behavior. Hubigon made slow measured steps forward, and the men came
flocking to the corner.
"Go to it, Silver King, step on his corns."
"Stick him with a ice pick!"
"Easy fellahs, the steward's comin'."
All of them suddenly fell away. The steward, initiating some fruit
baron into the mysteries of the galley, came through, giving them time
to speed back to their posts unobserved. The tension subsided, and Jota
once more fed the hardware to the dish machine.
As she flew through the corridor all sorts of faces, white ones, black
ones, brown ones, leered sensually at her. Like tongues of flame,
hands sped after her. Her steps quickened, her heart beat faster and
faster till she left behind her the droning of the galley, and safely
ascending the hatch, felt on her face the soft, cool breezes of the
Caribbean ocean.
Alfred was sitting up, the unpacified baby in his arms.
"'Im cry all de time yo' went 'way," he said, "wha' yo t'ink is de
mattah wit' 'im, he? Yo' t'ink him tummack a hut 'im?"
"Him is hungry, dat is wha' is de mattah wit' 'im! Move, man! 'Fo Ah
knock yo', yah! Giv' me 'im, an' get outa me way! Yo' is only a dyam
noosant!"
"Well, what is de mattah, now?" he cried in unfeigned surprise.
"Stid o' gwine fo' de watah yo'self yo' tan' back yah an' giv' hawdahs
an' worryin' wha' is de mattah wit' de picknee."
"Cho, keep quiet, woman, an' le' me lie down." Satisfied, he rolled
back on the hatch, fatuously staring at the sun sweeping the tropic
blue sea.
* * * * *
"T'un ovah, Halfred, an' lif' yo' big able self awf de baby, yo'
Ah crush 'im to debt," she said, awake at last. The baby was awake
and ravenous before dawn and refused to be quieted by the witty
protestations of the Jamaica laborers scrubbing down the deck. But
it was only after the sun, stealing a passage through a crack in the
canvas, had warmed a spot on the girl's mouth, that she was constrained
to respond to his zestful rantings. "Hey, yo' heah de picknee ah bawl
all de time an' yo' won't even tek heed--move yah man!" She thrust the
sleeping leg aside and drawing the child to her, stuck a breast in his
mouth.
The boat had encountered a sultry sea, and was dipping badly. Water
flooded her decks. Getting wet, dozing deckers crawled higher on top of
each other. The sea was blue as indigo and white reels of foam swirled
past as the ship dove ahead.
It was a disgusting spectacle. There was the sea, drumming on the
tinsel sides of the ship, and on top of the terror thus resulting rose
a wretched wail from the hatch, "Watah! Hot Watah!"
The galley was the Bastille. Questioning none, the Yellow One, giving
the baby to Alfred rushed to the door, and flung herself through it.
Once in the corridor, the energy of a dynamo possessed her. Heated
mist drenched her. She slid on grimy, sticky deck.
He was hanging up the rag on a brace of iron over the port hole. His
jaws were firm, grim, together.
The rest of the galley was a foetic blur to her.
He swung around, and his restless eyes met her. He was for the
moment paralyzed. His eyes bore into hers. He itched to toss at her
words, words, words! He wanted to say, "Oh, why couldn't you stay
away--ashore--down there--at the end of the world--anywhere but on this
ship."
"Some water," she said with that gentle half-hesitant smile of hers,
"can I get some hot water for my little baby?" And she extended the
skillet.
He took it to the sink, his eyes still on hers. The water rained into
it like bullets and he brought it to her.
But a sound polluted the lovely quiet.
"Hey, Porto Rico, snap into it! Dis ain't no time to git foolin' wit'
no monkey jane. Get a move on dey, fellah, an' fill dis pail full o'
water."
He was sober, afar, as he swept a pale, tortured face at Hubigon. As if
it were the song of a lark, he swung back to the girl, murmuring, "Ah,
but you didn't tell me," he said, "you didn't tell me what the baby
is, a boy or girl?" For answer, the girl's eyes widened in terror at
something slowly forming behind him.
But it was not without a shadow, and Jota swiftly ducked. The mallet
went galloping under the machine. He rose and faced the cook's mate.
But Hubigon was not near enough to objectify the jab, sent as fast as
the fangs of a striking snake, and Jota fell, cursing, to the hushed
cries of the woman. For secretly easing over to the fireplace Hubigon
had taken advantage of the opening to grasp a spear and as the other
was about to rise brought it thundering down on the tip of his left
shoulder. It sent him thudding to the deck in a pool of claret. The
cook's mate, his red, red tongue licking his mouth after the manner of
a collie in from a strenuous run, pounced on the emaciated figure in
the corner, and kicked and kicked it murderously. He kicked him in the
head, in the mouth, in the ribs. When he struggled to rise, he sent him
back to the floor, dizzy from short, telling jabs with the tip of his
boot.
Pale, impassive, the men were prone to take sides. Unconsciously
forming a ring, the line was kept taut. Sometimes it surged; once an
Atlanta mulatto had to wrest a fiery spear from Foot Works, Hubigon's
side kick, and thrust it back in its place. "Keep outa this, if you
don't want to get your goddam head mashed in," he said. A woman, a
crystal panel in the gray, ugly pattern, tore, fought, had to be kept
sane by raw, meaty hands.
Gasping, Hubigon stood by, his eyes shining at the other's languid
effort to rise. "Stan' back, fellahs, an' don't interfere. Let 'im
come!" With one shoulder jaunty and a jaw risen, claret-drenched,
redolent of the stench and grime of Hubigon's boot, parts of it
clinging to him, the Cuban rose. A cruel scowl was on his face.
The crowd stood back, and there was sufficient room for them. Hubigon
was ripping off his shirt, and licking his red, bleeding lips. He
circled the ring like a snarling jungle beast. "Hol' at fuh me, Foot
Works, I'm gwine sho' dis monkey wheh he get off at." He was dancing
round, jabbing, tapping at ghosts, awaiting the other's beastly
pleasure.
As one cowed he came, his jaw swollen. Then with the vigor of a maniac
he straightened, facing the mate. He shot out his left. It had the
wings of a dart and juggled the mate on the chin. Hubigon's ears
tingled distantly. For the particle of a second he was groggy, and the
Cuban moored in with the right, flush on the chin. Down the cook's mate
went. Leaping like a tiger cat, Jota was upon him, burying his claws in
the other's bared, palpitating throat. His eyes gleamed like a tiger
cat's. He held him by the throat and squeezed him till his tongue came
out. He racked him till the blood seeped through his ears. Then, in
a frenzy of frustration, he lifted him up, and pounded with his head
on the bared deck. He pounded till the shirt on his back split into
ribbons.
"Jesus, take him awf o' him--he's white orready."
"Now, boys, this won't do," cried the baker, a family man. "Come."
And some half dozen of them, running counter to the traditions of the
coast, ventured to slug them apart. It was a gruesome job, and Hubigon,
once freed, his head and chest smeared with blood, black, was ready to
peg at a lancing La Barrie snake.
In the scuffle the woman collapsed, fell under the feet of the milling
crew.
"Here," some one cried, "take hold o' her, Butch, she's your
kind--she's a decker--hatch four--call the doctor somebody, will ya?"
They took her on a stretcher to the surgeon's room.
* * * * *
The sun had leaped ahead. A sizzling luminosity drenched the sea. Aft
the deckers were singing hosannas to Jesus and preparing to walk the
gorgeous earth.
Only Alfred St. Xavier Mendez was standing with the baby in his arms,
now on its third hunger-nap, gazing with a bewildered look at the
deserted door to the galley. "Me wondah wha' mek she 'tan' so lang,"
he whispered anxiously.
Imperceptibly shedding their drapery of mist, there rose above the prow
of the _Urubamba_ the dead blue hills of Jamaica.
_THE WHARF RATS_
4
_THE WHARF RATS_
I
Among the motley crew recruited to dig the Panama Canal were artisans
from the four ends of the earth. Down in the Cut drifted hordes of
Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Negroes--a hardy, sun-defying set of white,
black and yellow men. But the bulk of the actual brawn for the work was
supplied by the dusky peons of those coral isles in the Caribbean ruled
by Britain, France and Holland.
At the Atlantic end of the Canal the blacks were herded in box car
huts buried in the jungles of "Silver City"; in the murky tenements
perilously poised on the narrow banks of Faulke's River; in the low,
smelting cabins of Coco Té. The "Silver Quarters" harbored the inky
ones, their wives and pickaninnies.
As it grew dark the hewers at the Ditch, exhausted, half-asleep,
naked but for wormy singlets, would hum queer creole tunes, play on
guitar or piccolo, and jig to the rhythm of the _coombia_. It was a
_brujerial_ chant, for _obeah_, a heritage of the French colonial,
honey-combed the life of the Negro laboring camps. Over smoking pots,
on black, death-black nights legends of the bloodiest were recited
till they became the essence of a sort of Negro Koran. One refuted
them at the price of one's breath. And to question the verity of the
_obeah_, to dismiss or reject it as the ungodly rite of some lurid,
crack-brained Islander was to be an accursed pale-face, dog of a white.
And the _obeah_ man, in a fury of rage, would throw a machette at the
heretic's head or--worse--burn on his doorstep at night a pyre of Maube
bark or green Ganja weed.
On the banks of a river beyond Cristobal, Coco Té sheltered a colony of
Negroes enslaved to the _obeah_. Near a roundhouse, daubed with smoke
and coal ash, a river serenely flowed away and into the guava region,
at the eastern tip of Monkey Hill. Across the bay from it was a sand
bank--a rising out of the sea--where ships stopt for coal.
In the first of the six chinky cabins making up the family quarters of
Coco Té lived a stout, pot-bellied St. Lucian, black as the coal hills
he mended, by the name of Jean Baptiste. Like a host of the native St.
Lucian emigrants, Jean Baptiste forgot where the French in him ended
and the English began. His speech was the petulant _patois_ of the
unlettered French black. Still, whenever he lapsed into His Majesty's
English, it was with a thick Barbadian bias.
A coal passer at the Dry Dock, Jean Baptiste was a man of intense
piety. After work, by the glow of a red, setting sun, he would discard
his crusted overalls, get in starched _crocus bag_, aping the Yankee
foreman on the other side of the track in the "Gold Quarters," and loll
on his coffee-vined porch. There, dozing in a bamboo rocker, Celestin,
his second wife, a becomingly stout brown beauty from Martinique,
chanted gospel hymns to him.
Three sturdy sons Jean Baptiste's first wife had borne him--Philip,
the eldest, a good-looking, black fellow; Ernest, shifty, cunning;
and Sandel, aged eight. Another boy, said to be wayward and something
of a ne'er-do-well, was sometimes spoken of. But Baptiste, a proud,
disdainful man, never once referred to him in the presence of his
children. No vagabond son of his could eat from his table or sit at
his feet unless he went to "meeting." In brief, Jean Baptiste was a
religious man. It was a thrust at the omnipresent _obeah_. He went
to "meeting." He made the boys go, too. All hands went, not to the
Catholic Church, where Celestin secretly worshiped, but to the English
Plymouth Brethren in the Spanish city of Colon.
Stalking about like a ghost in Jean Baptiste's household was a girl,
a black ominous Trinidad girl. Had Jean Baptiste been a man given to
curiosity about the nature of women, he would have viewed skeptically
Maffi's adoption by Celestin. But Jean Baptiste was a man of lofty
unconcern, and so Maffi remained there, shadowy, obdurate.
And Maffi was such a hardworking _patois_ girl. From the break of day
she'd be at the sink, brightening the tinware. It was she who did the
chores which Madame congenitally shirked. And towards sundown, when
the labor trains had emptied, it was she who scoured the beach for
cockles for Jean Baptiste's epicurean palate.
And as night fell, Maffi, a lone, black figure, would disappear in the
dark to dream on top of a canoe hauled up on the mooning beach. An
eternity Maffi'd sprawl there, gazing at the frosting of the stars and
the glitter of the black sea.
A cabin away lived a family of Tortola mulattoes by the name of Boyce.
The father was also a man who piously went to "meeting"--gaunt and
hollow-cheeked. The eldest boy, Esau, had been a journeyman tailor for
ten years; the girl next him, Ora, was plump, dark, freckled; others
came--a string of ulcered girls until finally a pretty, opaque one,
Maura.
Of the Bantu tribe Maura would have been a person to turn and stare
at. Crossing the line into Cristobal or Colon--a city of rarefied
gayety--she was often mistaken for a native _señorita_ or an urbanized
Cholo Indian girl. Her skin was the reddish yellow of old gold and in
her eyes there lurked the glint of mother-of-pearl. Her hair, long as a
jungle elf's was jettish, untethered. And her teeth were whiter than
the full-blooded black Philip's.
Maura was brought up, like the children of Jean Baptiste, in the
Plymouth Brethren. But the Plymouth Brethren was a harsh faith to
bring hemmed-in peasant children up in, and Maura, besides, was of a
gentle romantic nature. Going to the Yankee commissary at the bottom
of Eleventh and Front Streets, she usually wore a leghorn hat. With
flowers bedecking it, she'd look in it older, much older than she
really was. Which was an impression quite flattering to her. For
Maura, unknown to Philip, was in love--in love with San Tie, a Chinese
half-breed, son of a wealthy canteen proprietor in Colon. But San Tie
liked to go fishing and deer hunting up the Monkey Hill lagoon, and the
object of his occasional visits to Coco Té was the eldest son of Jean
Baptiste. And thus it was through Philip that Maura kept in touch with
the young Chinese Maroon.
One afternoon Maura, at her wit's end, flew to the shed roof to Jean
Baptiste's kitchen.
"Maffi," she cried, the words smoky on her lips, "Maffi, when Philip
come in to-night tell 'im I want fo' see 'im particular, yes?"
"_Sacre gache!_ All de time Philip, Philip!" growled the Trinidad girl,
as Maura, in heart-aching preoccupation, sped towards the lawn. "Why
she no le' 'im alone, yes?" And with a spatter she flecked the hunk of
lard on Jean Baptiste's stewing okras.
As the others filed up front after dinner that evening Maffi said to
Philip, pointing to the cabin across the way, "She--she want fo' see
yo'."
Instantly Philip's eyes widened. Ah, he had good news for Maura! San
Tie, after an absence of six days, was coming to Coco Té Saturday
to hunt on the lagoon. And he'd relish the joy that'd flood Maura's
face as she glimpsed the idol of her heart, the hero of her dreams!
And Philip, a true son of Jean Baptiste, loved to see others happy,
ecstatic.
But Maffi's curious rumination checked him. "All de time, Maura, Maura,
me can't understand it, yes. But no mind, me go stop it, _oui_, me go
stop it, so help me--"
He crept up to her, gently holding her by the shoulders.
"Le' me go, _sacre_!" She shook off his hands bitterly. "Le' me go--yo'
go to yo' Maura." And she fled to her room, locking the door behind her.
Philip sighed. He was a generous, good-natured sort. But it was silly
to try to enlighten Maffi. It wasn't any use. He could as well have
spoken to the tattered torsos the lazy waves puffed up on the shores of
Coco Té.