Explore "Banjo" by Claude McKay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In his little chambre noire in a lodging-house of the Ditch Banjo was bearing his pain. His kidneys were not functioning and his belly was as tight as a drum and hard as a rock. He sat on the little bed, hunched up in a clenched resistance, as if trying to hold the pain back from laying his body out. Sometimes he would lie down on his side, his back, his belly, sometimes slide to the floor, but always in that hard, huddled posture. Sometimes in his shiftings he could not repress a deep-down groan, but he bore his punishment bravely like a man -- one who knows that he must take the consequences of spurning the sheltered, cramping ways of respectability to live like a reckless vagabond, who burns up his numbered days gloriously and dies blazing.
"We got to get him into hospital," Ray said to Malty.