I: Twenty-One
Beyond Sandy Hook
Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.
The books went down into the moving water in the dark off Sandy Hook. Then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. I was a seaman going to sea for the first time—a seaman on a big merchant ship. And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen. I felt grown, a man, inside and out. Twenty-one.
I was twenty-one.
Four bells sounded. As I stood there, whiffs of salt spray blew in my face. The afterdeck was deserted. The big hatches were covered with canvas. The booms were all tied up to the masts, and the winches silent. It was dark. The old freighter, smelling of crude oil and garbage, engines pounding, rolled through the pitch-black night. I looked down on deck and noticed that one of my books had fallen into the scupper. The last book. I picked it up and threw it far over the rail into the water below, that was too black to see. The wind caught the book and ruffled its pages quickly, then let it fall into the rolling darkness. I think it was a book by H. L. Mencken.
You see, books had been happening to me. Now the books were cast off back there somewhere in the churn of spray and night behind the propeller. I was glad they were gone.
I went up on the poop and looked over the railing toward New York. But New York was gone, too. There were no longer any lights to be seen. The wind smelt good. I was sleepy, so I went down a pair of narrow steps that ended just in front of our cabin—the mess boys’ cabin.
Inside the hot cabin, George lay stark naked in a lower bunk, talking and laughing and gaily waving his various appendages around. Above him in the upper bunk, two chocolate-colored Puerto Rican feet stuck out from one end of a snow-white sheet, and a dark Puerto Rican head from the other. It was clear that Ramon in the upper bunk didn’t understand more than every tenth word of George’s Kentucky vernacular, but he kept on laughing every time George laughed—and that was often.
George was talking about women, of course. He said he didn’t care if his Harlem landlady pawned all his clothes, the old witch! When he got back from Africa, he would get some more. He might even pay her the month’s back rent he owed her, too. Maybe. Or else—and here he waved one of his appendages around—she could have what he had in his hand.
Puerto Rico, who understood all the bad words in every language, laughed loudly. We all laughed. You couldn’t help it. George was so good-natured and comical you couldn’t keep from laughing with him—or at him. He always made everybody laugh—even when the food ran out on the return trip and everybody was hungry and mad.
Then it was ten o’clock, on a June night, on the S.S. Malone, and we were going to Africa. At ten o’clock that morning I had never heard of the S.S. Malone, or George, or Ramon, or anybody else in its crew of forty-two men. Nor any of the six passengers. But now, here were the three of us laughing very loudly, going to Africa.
I had got my job at a New York shipping office. Ramon got his job at another shipping office. But George just simply walked on board about supper time. A Filipino pantry boy got mad and quit at the last moment. Naturally, the steward didn’t want to sail short-handed. He saw George hanging around the entrance to the pier, watching the stevedores finish loading. The Filipino steward said: “Hey, colored boy! You, there! You want a job?” And George said: “Yes,” so he walked on board, with nothing but a shirt and a pair of overalls to his back, and sailed.
Now, he lay there in his bunk, laughing about his landlady. He said she intended to put him out if he didn’t find a job. And now that he had found a job, he wouldn’t be able to tell her for six months. He wondered if she knew Africa was six months away from Harlem.
“Largo viaje,” said Ramon.
George commented in pig-Latin—which was the only “foreign” language he knew.
I might as well tell you now what George and Ramon were like. Everybody knew all about George long before we reached the coast of Africa. But nobody ever knew much about Ramon.
George was from Kentucky. He had worked around race horses. And he spoke of several white gentlemen out of his past as “Colonel.” We were all about the same age, George, Ramon, and I.
After Kentucky, George had worked in a scrap-iron yard in St. Louis. But he said the work wasn’t good for his back, so he quit. He went and got a job in a restaurant near the station in Springfield, Illinois, washing dishes. A female impersonator came through with a show and took George with him as his valet. George said he got tired of being maid to the female impersonator, so as soon as he got a new suit of clothes, he quit in Pittsburgh. He found a good job in a bowling alley, but had a fight with a man who hit him with one of the balls because he set the pins up wrong. George claimed he won the fight. But he lit out for South Street in Philadelphia to avoid arrest. And after that, Harlem.
George had a thousand tales to tell about every town he’d ever been in. And several versions of each tale. No doubt, some of the stories were true—and some of them not true at all, but they sounded true. Sometimes George said he had relatives down South. Then, again, he said he didn’t have anybody in the whole world. Both versions concerning his relatives were probably correct. If he did have relatives they didn’t matter—lying there as he was now, laughing and talking in his narrow bunk on a hot night, going to Africa.
But Ramon of the upper bunk didn’t talk much, in English or Spanish. He simply did his work in the morning. Then he got in bed and slept all the afternoon till time to set up the sailors’ mess hall for supper. After supper, he got in bed again and laughed at George until George went to sleep.
Ramon told us once that his mother was a seamstress in Ponce. Ernesto, the Puerto Rican sailor aboard, said “seamstress” was just another name for something else. Anyhow, Ramon was decent enough as a cabinmate, and practically always asleep. He didn’t gamble. I saw him drunk only once. He seldom drew any money, and when he did he spent it on sweets—seldom on a woman. The only thing that came out of his mouth in six months that I remember is that he said he didn’t care much for women, anyway. He preferred silk stockings—so half-way down the African coast, he bought a pair of silk stockings and slept with them under his pillow.
George, however, was always saying things the like of which you never heard before or since, making up fabulous jokes, playing pranks, and getting in on all the card games or fights aboard. George and I became pretty good pals. He could tap dance a little, shuffle a lot, and knew plenty of blues. He said he could play a guitar, but no one on the Malone possessed a guitar, so we never knew.
I had the petty officers’ mess to take care of and their staterooms to make up. There was nothing hard about a mess boy’s work. You got up at six in the morning, with the mid-Atlantic calm as a sun-pool, served breakfast, made up the rooms, served luncheon, had all the afternoon off, served dinner, and that was all. The rest of the time you could lie on deck in the sun, play cards with the sailors, or sleep. When your clothes were dirty, you washed them in a bucket of soapsuds and lye. The lye made the washing easy because it took all of the dirt out quick.
When we got to Africa we took on a full African crew to supplement the regular crew who weren’t supposed to be able to stand the sun. Then I had an African boy to do my washing, my cleaning, and almost all my work—as did everybody on board. The Africans stood both work and sun without difficulty, it seems.
Going over, it was a nice trip, warm, calm, the sea blue-green by day, gold-green at sunset. And at night phosphorescent stars in the water where the prow cut a rift of sparkling foam.
The S.S. Malone had been built during the war. It was a big, creaking, old freight boat, two or three years in the African trade now. It had cabins for a half-dozen passengers. This trip the passengers were all Nordic missionaries—but one. That one was a colored tailor, a Garveyite who had long worshipped Africa from afar, and who had a theory of civilization all his own. He thought that if he could just teach the Africans to wear proper clothes, coats and pants, they would be brought forward a long way toward the standards of our world. To that end, he carried with him on his journey numberless bolts of cloth, shears, and tailoring tools, and a trunk full of smart patterns. The missionaries carried Bibles and hymnbooks. The Captain carried invoices and papers having to do with trade. We sailors carried nothing but ourselves.
At Horta, our only port of call in the Azores, we anchored at sea some distance from the rocky shore. Everybody went ashore in rowboats or motor launches. Some of the boys made straight for women, some for the wine shops. It depended on your temperament which you sought first. Nobody had much money, because the Captain didn’t permit a draw. I had an American dollar, so George and I bought a big bottle of cognac, walked up a hill to the top of the town, and drank it. The sun was setting. The sea and the palm trees and the roofs of Horta were aglow. On the way down the hill in the amber dusk, George smashed the cognac bottle against the wall of a blue house and said: “I wants to holler.”
“George, don’t holler right here on the main street,” I cautioned.
George said: “This town’s too small to holler in, but I got to holler, anyhow.” And he let out a tremendous “Yee-hoo-oo-o!” that sent children rushing to their mothers’ arms and women scurrying into doorways. But a sleepy-looking cop, leaning against a wall with a lantern, must have been used to the ways of sailors, because he paid George no mind. In fact, he didn’t even stir as we went on to the center of the village, where there were lots of people and lights.
We came across the bo’sun and some sailors in a bar, emptying their pockets, trying to get enough together to pay for a round of drinks that Slim—who didn’t have a penny—had ordered for all. I had four cents to contribute. Chips had a quarter. But, all told, it didn’t make enough to pay for the drinks, so the bartender said they should give him the rest when the S.S. Malone came back to Horta in five months. So everybody agreed they would settle then. Whereupon, the bartender set up another round of drinks for nothing.
The Malone’s whistle began to blow. The bo’sun said: “Come on, you bloody so-and-so’s, the Old Man’s calling you!” We went down to the wharf. Some other boys were there. An Irish kid from Brooklyn and his cousin had two girls on their arms, and the wireless man, Sparks, was in the middle between the two girls. Sparks said they were the best two girls in town and that he always traded with them. The Irish kid said his was the best girl he ever had.
His cousin said: “Aw, nuts! You never had one before!” (The Irish kid was just out of high school and this was his first trip to sea. He looked like a choirboy, except that he couldn’t sing.) We waited for the launch that we had paid to take us back. Finally it came. At seven bells we went on toward Africa, the engines chugging soft and serene.
The next day was Sunday and the missionaries wanted everybody to come to prayers in the saloon, but nobody went except the Captain and the Chief Mate. The bo’sun said he’d go if the missionaries had any communion wine, but the missionaries didn’t have any, so he didn’t go.
When we got to Teneriffe, in the Canary Islands, it was mid-afternoon and very bright. The Canaries looked like fairy islands, all sharp peaks of red rock and bright sandy beaches and little green fields dropped like patchwork between the beaches and the rocks, with the sea making a blue-white fringe around.
The Captain let us draw money—so Las Palmas seemed a gay city indeed. Ashore, three or four of us, including Ernesto and a Norwegian boy named Sven, had supper at a place with very bright lights, where they served huge platters of delicious mixed fish with big bottles of cool, white wine. Then we all went to a white villa by the sea, called El Palacio de Amor and stayed all night. In the morning very early, when the sun was just coming up, we drove back to the wharf in an open carriage. We kept thinking about the girls, who were Spanish, and very young and pretty. And Sven said he would like to take one of them with him.
But all those days I was waiting anxiously to see Africa. And finally, when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! Africa! The real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.
That first morning when we sighted the coast, I kept leaving my work to lean over the rail and look at Africa, dim and far away, off on the horizon in a haze of light, then gradually nearer and nearer, until you could see the color of the foliage on the trees.
We put in at the port of Dakar. There were lots of Frenchmen, and tall black Senegalese soldiers in red fezzes, and Mohammedans in robes, so that at first you couldn’t tell if the Mohammedans were men or women.
The next day we moved on. And farther down the coast it was more like the Africa I had dreamed about—wild and lovely, the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright, and the rivers deep. The great Africa of my dreams!
But there was one thing that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro.