"Oh, Blanche!"
"Yo' bes' be careful, Ballet, fo' de las' time Ah had fi' scrouch aroun' fi' hooks an' eyes an' dat dyam John Chinaman 'im not gwine giv' me anyt'ing beout me giv' 'im somet'ing."
"All right—dere—Blanche—wait—"
"Yo' know what 'im say to me de uddah dey? Me wuz—wait, tek yo' time, Ballet, de cock is jus' a crow, it are soon yet—oh, don't sweet—"
"'Im say to me dat Ah mus' giv' 'im somet'ing. An' me say to 'im, 'but John, yo' no me husban'—'an' yo' know wha' de dyam yallah rascal say 'im say 'but me no fo' yo' husban' too'?"
Her hair was hard, but the marble floor of the kitchen undoubtedly helped to stiffen its matty, tangled plaits. And in spite of the water daily splashing over the tanks and taches on to the ground, her strong young body took nothing diminishing from it. Only, unquestioningly the force of such a wiry, gluey, gummy impact as theirs left her heels a little broader, and a readier prey for chiggers, by virtue of the constantly widening crevices in them, her hair a little more difficult to comb, and her dress in a suspiciously untidy mood.
Emerging from the slippery darkness of the kitchen, Ballet dashed up Eighth Street. A Colon sunrise streamed in on its lazy inert life. Opposite, some of the disciples of the High Priest of the Ever-Live, Never-Die Sect sat moping, not fully recovered from the flowing mephitic languor of the evening's lyrical excesses.
All the way up the street, Ballet met men of one sort or another trekking to work—on tipsy depot wagons, shovels, picks, forks sticking out like spikes; on foot, alone, smoking pipes, hazily concerned.
Grog shops, chink stores and brothels were closed. The tall, bare, paneled doors were fastened. The sun threw warmth and sting under verandas; shriveled banana peels to crusts; darkened the half-eaten chunks of soft pomegranates left by some extravagant epicurean, gave manna to big husky wasps foregathering wherever there was light, sun, warmth....
Up on the verandas there dark, bright-skirted, flame-lipped girls, the evening before, danced in squares, holding up the tips of their flimsy dresses, to the coombia of creole island places. Creole girls led, thwarted, wooed and burned by obeah-working, weed-smoking St. Lucian men. Jamaica girls, fired by an inextinguishable warmth, danced, whirling, wheeling, rolling, rubbing, spinning their posteriors and their hips, in circles, their breasts like rosettes of flame, quivering to the rhythm of the mento—conceding none but the scandalously sexless. Spanish girls, white ones, yellow ones, brown ones, furiously gay, furiously concerned over the actualities of beauty.