Miss Theodora, in a sharp way, ‘except a lot of African lives.’
‘Oh, stop all your politics,’ cried Dorothy, ‘while we’re eating food.’
‘We shoot you like Mau Mau, man,’ said Ronson Lighter, pointing a pepper-pot with an evil grin upon my friend Montgomery.
‘If you was in Kenya, Mr Montgomery,’ said Billy Whispers, ‘what side would you be?’
‘My own people’s, of course,’ Montgomery replied. ‘When trouble comes, you must go with your own tribe.’
‘Oh-ho! And if I take you prisoner, you know what I do?’ said Ronson Lighter to him.
I broke in. ‘If I take my friend Montgomery prisoner,’ I said, ‘I grab away his weapon, yes, but maybe himself, I turn him loose.’
Muriel smiled up at me, and move much closer.
Hamilton jumped up. ‘This man’s an African!’ he cried, taking Montgomery round his neck. ‘I know my brother, because I see he is an African.’
‘No, no, not me.’
‘Yes, man! You’s an African! And I prove it to you now! I give you a present, a great gift.’
Hamilton went to his cupboard, and pulled off a hanger the dress of our dear tribe. ‘Come, man, you put this on!’ he cried.
‘I couldn’t accept,’ Montgomery said.
‘You are my guest,’ Hamilton told him severely.
‘Yes, put it on,’ said his friend Theodora. ‘I’m sure it’ll suit you to perfection.’
Hamilton pulled it on over Montgomery, and tied the cloth round his head. He looked really quite strange in it, but he stood there quite clearly filled with flattery and pleasure. He took my friend Hamilton’s hand. ‘I do appreciate it,’ he said. ‘Thank you very, very much.’
Now Billy Whispers and Ronson Lighter were starting to roll weed, in company with Hamilton and Mr ‘Nat King’ Cole: which I’d rather they’d practised in private in the kitchen, instead of in this public way in front of strangers. They passed the sticks round, and Dorothy was eager, and little Barbara, and my brother Arthur, as I of course expected of him.
But Muriel wouldn’t touch the stuff, and our other English visiting friends, though Billy Whispers tried to press them to it, which he shouldn’t do, really, because weed is something it’s best not to handle unless you have the mastery of its action from experience since an earlier age. In this refusal, they had the support of Larry the GI and Karl Marx Bo.
‘All you get out of that,’ said Mr Bo, ‘is crazy antics and then ruin. That rubbish is the ruin of my people.’
‘Many good men,’ said Larry, ‘have lived inside penitentiaries on account of that goddamned ganga.’
‘Just listen to this Yank,’ said Dorothy, all tough and daring. ‘Man, ain’t you never raved nor rocked in your career?’
‘With this I forget my troubles,’ Arthur said, soft and silly. ‘And of troubles, I say that I have plenty.’
‘It’ll give you plenty more,’ said Muriel. ‘It’ll send you right back inside where you came out of.’
‘Let Arthur be,’ said Dorothy. ‘Is he telling you what you should do?’
‘Why let him be?’ cried Karl Marx Bo. ‘She’s right, this chick. Weed kills your conscience, don’t we all know it? It opens the door to what is violent inside of you, and cruel, and no good sense, and full of fear.’
‘It don’t make you silly like this liquor does,’ said Mr Cole. ‘It may slow you up, your bodily movement, but it leaves you with a better control and perfect speech.’
‘Perfect speech to say some rubbish like you do,’ said Larry the GI.
Little Barbara laughed. ‘Why you all so serious about it, anyway?’ she said. ‘Isn’t life hard enough without it?’
Miss Theodora, she was listening closely. She seemed a little troubled with anxiety, and also by her unusual ignorance of this subject. Though this did not stop her now from saying her word.
‘But you, Mr Bo,’ she asked him. ‘If you know so much about it, surely you must have smoked it once yourself?’
‘Who hasn’t, lady!’ cried this legal student. ‘But some, when they burn their fingers in the fire, can learn, and others not. What this man Cole here says is true. It leaves your mind clear, yes, but only half of it, the half that has the proud and the darker thoughts. You think that the world is you, is yours, you think it is you that make the laws of all creation. Off goes your personality, you lose control of it, and in walks the dark spirit to take over. And all the time, under that stuff you say to yourself: “How can anyone as wonderful as