Pursued by a confusion of voices, he threaded his way deftly down an alley dressed with booths. Pomegranates, some open with their crimson seeds displayed, banana-combs, and big, veined watermelons, lay heaped on every side.
“I could do wid a slice ob watteh-million,” he reflected: “but to lick an ice-cream dat tempt me more!” Nor would the noble fruit of the baobab, the paw-paw, or the pine, turn him from his fancy.
But no ice-cream stand met his eye, and presently he resigned himself to sit down upon his heels, in the shade of a potter’s stall, and consider the passing crowd.
Missionaries with freckled hands and hairy, care-worn faces, followed by pale girls wielding tambourines of the Army of the Soul, foppish nigger bucks in panamas and palm-beach suits so cocky, Chinamen with osier baskets their nostalgic eyes aswoon, heavily straw-hatted nuns trailing their dust-coloured rags, and suddenly, oh could it be, but there was no mistaking that golden waddle: “Mamma!”
Mamma, Mammee, Mrs. Ahmadou Mouth. All in white, with snow-white shoes and hose so fine, he hardly dare.
“Mammee, Mammee, oh, Mammee....”
“Sonny mine! My lil boy!”
“Mammee.”
“Just to say!”
And, oh, honies! Close behind, behold Miami, and Edna too: The Miss Lips, the fair Lips, the smiling Lips. How spry each looked. The elder (grown a trifle thinner), sweet à ravir in tomato-red, while her sister, plump as a corn-fattened partridge, and very perceptibly powdered, seemed like the flower of the prairie sugar-cane when it breaks into bloom.