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from the ship’s side.
    The harbor at St. Luce’s was clean and landlocked, white houses with red roofs under the coconutpalms. It turned out that it was bananas they were going to load; it took them a day and a half knocking up partitions in the afterhold and scantlings for the bananas to hang from. It was dark by the time they’d come alongside the bananawharf and had rigged the two gangplanks and the little derrick for lowering the bunches into the hold. The wharf was crowded with colored women laughing and shrieking and yelling things at the crew, and big buck niggers standing round doing nothing. The women did the loading. After a while they started coming up one gangplank, each one with a huge green bunch of bananas slung on her head and shoulders; there were old black mammies and pretty young mulatto
girls; their faces shone with sweat under the big bunchlights, you could see their swinging breasts hanging down through their ragged clothes, brown flesh through a rip in a sleeve. When each woman got to the top of the gangplank two big buck niggers lifted the bunch tenderly off her shoulders, the foreman gave her a slip of paper and she ran down the other gangplank to the wharf again. Except for the donkeyengine men the deck crew had nothing to do. They stood around uneasy, watching the women, the glitter of white teeth and eyeballs, the heavy breasts, the pumping motion of their thighs. They stood around, looking at the women, scratching themselves, shifting their weight from one foot to the other; not even much smut was passed. It was a black still night, the smell of the bananas and the stench of niggerwoman sweat was hot around them; now and then a little freshness came in a whiff off some cases of limes piled on the wharf.
    Joe caught on that Tiny was waving to him to come somewhere. He followed him into the shadow. Tiny put his mouth against his ear, “There’s bleedin’ tarts ’ere, Yank, come along.” They went up the bow and slid down a rope to the wharf. The rope scorched their hands. Tiny spat into his hands and rubbed them together. Joe did the same. Then they ducked into the warehouse. A rat scuttled past their feet. It was a guano warehouse and stank of fertilizer. Outside a little door in the back it was pitch black, sandy underfoot. A little glow from streetlights hit the upper part of the warehouse. There were women’s voices, a little laugh. Tiny had disappeared. Joe had his hand on a woman’s bare shoulder. “But first you must give me a shilling,” said a sweet cockney West India woman’s voice. His voice had gone hoarse. “Sure, cutie, sure I will.”
    When his eyes got used to the dark he could see that they weren’t the only ones. There were giggles, hoarse breathing all round them. From the ship came the intermittent whir of the winches, and a mixedup noise of voices from the women loading bananas.
    The woman was asking for money. “Come on now, white boy, do like you say.” Tiny was standing beside him buttoning up his pants. “Be back in a jiff, girls.”
    â€œSure, we left our jack on board the boat.”
    They ran back through the warehouse with the girls after them, up the jacobsladder somebody had let down over the side of the ship and landed on deck out of breath and doubled up with laughing. When
they looked over the side the women were running up and down the wharf spitting and cursing at them like wildcats. “Cheeryoh, laydies,” Tiny called down to them, taking off his cap. He grabbed Joe’s arm and pulled him along the deck; they stood round a while near the end of the gangplank. “Say, Tiny, yours was old enough to be your grandmother, damned if she wasn’t,” whispered Joe. “Granny me eye, it was the pretty un I ’ad.” “The hell you say . . . She musta been sixty.” “Wot a bleedin’ wopper . . . it was the pretty un I ’ad,”