The novel opens with a description of the freighter on which Jake, the protagonist, is sailinghome. It is dirty, manned by Arabs,and a berth he picked up in Cardiff, Wales. The white crew refuses to clean the Arabs’ bathroom facilities, while the ship’s cook dislikes the Arabs because they refuse to eat pork. The Arabs’ food is usually taken to them with garbage mixed in with it. Jake finds the Arabs’ way of eating—eating a piece of meat out of a common pan then tossing the remainder back in—strange, and he eventually comes to dislike them for these habits and their general lack of hygiene. He pays the cook money to have his food prepared separately.

One of the white sailors tells Jake is he is just like them, not the Arabs, but Jake rejects this idea since he was signed on to work as a stoker instead of a deckhand, a position reserved for whites. The quarters he shares with the Arabs are smelly and dirty, which he blames on them. He sings to the ship, telling it to take him to the beautiful, brown-skinned women walking down Lenox Avenue in

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