Banjo by Claude McKay — Read

There was one Southern black on the beach whom Banjo and his boys hated to see and always avoided. He had come to Marseilles from a North-African port, where he had been paid off on a foreign ship. When he arrived at Marseilles, like the boy of the "Don't-light-it-afire" story, he was highly disdainful of the beach boys and would have none of them; but he allowed himself to be picked up by some insectile Corsican voyous who made their headquarters in a sewer hole of a hotel-bistro of the Ditch. When his money was gone he went to the American consulate, and it was arranged for him to be returned home by an American freighter. But when the day came for him to ship he refused to go. He had got a little money somewhere. He lived on it for a few days. After that was gone he again returned to the consulate for help, but the clerk in charge of the seamen's department would have nothing to do with him.

Then he tried to get in with the beach boys, but they would not have him. Not merely because he had scorned their company at first, but because he was a dead thing with no spark in him of the vagabond flair for life which was the soul of the beach existence. The boys called him Lonesome Blue.