Unnamed Southern Prostitutes and Madams

During his fifteen years on the road, Joe has sex with many prostitutes. In what the narrative calls "the (comparatively speaking) south," whenever he doesn't have money to pay them, he tells them afterward that he is "a negro" - a kind of race card that apparently puts the transaction so far outside the bounds that all Joe risks by asserting it is a cursing from "the woman and the matron of the house" (224).