The Last Days of Louisiana Red

by Ishmael Reed

  CHAPTER 22

  (Ms. Better Weather has prepared for lunch. Her white battle jacket matches her ivory pants and white high heels. She has made her mouth up into a cupid’s bow; lots of rouge. She is about to put on her white beret. She is a faithful Worker and does all this because she knows that LaBas has a “twenties” jones. Suddenly, Street and his seven appear: Hog Maw, Player, Time Bomb, Bigger II, Tude, Shoot & Cut and Skag follow their leader. Ms. Better Weather looks up, startled.)

  “I want to see the head man!!” Street says.

  “I’m sorry, but you have to have an appointment; Papa is a busy man.”

  “Be quiet, you bushwa bitch! I can see him any time I want. Do you know who I am? Don’t you recognize my picture? Haven’t you seen my picture all over?”

  “I know that you’re Ed Yellings’ son, but this is a new operation.”

  Ms. Better Weather tries to stand between them and LaBas’ office door. Player slaps her to the floor, threatening, “Out of my way, yo filthy ho.”

  LaBas rushes into the room. “What’s going on here?”

  He goes over and helps a sobbing Ms. Better Weather up, smoothing the forehead above her arched eyebrows.

  “I told them you were out, Pop.”

  “That’s all right. These vermin know nothing about protocol. They’re used to just popping up like burnt toast.”

  “Why, you …” Almost as a reflex Shoot & Cut goes for his knife.

  “Put that back, Shoot,” Street exhorts his follower, who has a real vicious look on his face.

  “I thought I’d come in and look over my father’s business, LaBas, if you don’t mind. Let me introduce my Seven: Hog Maw, so-named because he carries around a greasy hog maw for good luck; Player, who at the height of his career had twenty-five hos on the block; Skag, the man who introduced uppers to Kiddie land …”

  “You needn’t hand me any vile biographies. State your business and leave. I have no time to discourse with idlers. Ms. Better Weather, why don’t you go to lunch at Berkeley House? I’ll join you there momentarily. Order me a lobster.”

  (Ms. Better Weather exits)

  “I’ll talk to you, Street, but first dismiss your men.”

  (Street pauses) “O.K., fellows, you wait outside.”

  (They exit, grumbling)

  Street swaggers over, all rude, punkish, smelling himself, and slumps into a black lounge placed in the outer office for the comfort of visitors.

  LaBas sits on the edge of the desk, legs crossed, arms folded.

  Street gazes about the room. “Nice layout you got here. Swell pictures on the wall. A sweeping view of the bay and San Francisco, outside a Japanese garden. Not bad at all. Built on the sweat and blood of the people.”

  “How would you know? The heaviest thing you ever lifted was your prick. Everything you do is thought out by your prick.”

  (Street glares) “You got one of them New York silver tongues. Somebody’s going to mind it one of these days.” (Lights up a joint)

  “Don’t smoke that thing in here. We don’t smoke on the job.”

  Street continues to smoke. LaBas walks over and knocks it from his lips. Street starts to rise, but thinks better of it.

  “We’re going to have to do something about your ill-humoredness, LaBas. In fact it may not be too long before you’re out of a job. The way I see it, this Gumbo thing you got here belongs to me. My father started it. The way I figure it, you and Wolf were merely holding it for me while I was away in Africa learning theory.”

  “Your father left this place to Wolf. Since he hadn’t achieved Mastery, our Board asked me to take it on. Balking, pestering creditors were lined up outside. I was the only one who could stave off the subpoenas, and get the vats boiling Gumbo again, so to speak.”

  “I won’t hear any of this. Signed papers. Contracts. Lawyers. Those things mean nothing to me. Nothing. This belongs to me.” (Rises, walks over and knocks over a lamp) “Everything in here belongs to me.”

  (Wolf enters)

  “Pop, what’s going on?”

  Street, sarcastically: “Well, if it isn’t my dear brother, Wolf.”

  “How are you, Street?”

  “I’m doing fine. I guess you saw my pictures in the papers, you saw all of that, didn’t you. The clapping. Everywhere I go there’s lots of clapping.”

  “Your brother has called me an intruder, Wolf. He says that the Business belongs to him. He wants to have the Argivians take over.”

  “He wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Wolf, what are you saying? Why, we’re brothers. We don’t need this… this man from New York running our company. Why, he talks real fast. Real fast.”

  “You don’t understand, Street. Gumbo is what’s up front, but the Business involves much more than mere Gumbo. Much more. Our Business is secret Business.”

  (Street rises, walks over to his brother and puts an arm around his shoulders) “Hey, man. This is me, Wolf. This is your brother Street. Remember when we used to go to parties together? All the girls we used to take up to Grizzly Peak. The dances at the Claremont? Hiking. Wolf, you got to go with me, your brother. We have to stick together against … against them!”

  “We’re grown now, Street. We are grown men, although you don’t seem to realize it. Our family has had its share of troubles. But now, for the first time, with LaBas at the helm, I feel that things don’t have to be so accursed. It’s not fate that’s holding us back. We just have to learn to cut it, Street; that’s what LaBas has taught me. Look at yourself, Street. You’re not getting any younger. Pretty soon you will be antiquated, your slogans and your ways. You can’t keep the Street Gang going forever. Already the kids are coming out—engineers and lawyers, scientists, builders, Street. All you knew how to do was to destroy. Maybe destruction was good then, it showed our enemies we meant business. But we can’t continue to be kids burning matches while the old folks are away. We have to buckle down.”

  “So LaBas has got to you, huh? (pause) Well, brother, I didn’t want it this way, but this is the way it’s going to have to be. I’m going to take over this factory. Me and my Argivians. It belongs to me, and if you don’t yield what’s rightfully mine, then you’ll have to be prepared to fight.”

  “But, Street (Wolf pleading), what good is bloodshed? We have contracts. You were out of the country. You didn’t take any interest in the Business, even ridiculed us behind our backs. I heard the reports from travelers how you were putting us down. Now that we are prosperous, you want to horn in on our enterprise. Our sacrifice. Street, we don’t need bloodshed.”

  “We do! We always need bloodshed! You can see the blood dripping. It’s both immediate and symbolic, it moves people, the flowing red. You two have to work year round to get results; all I have to do is cut swiftly, accurately, and people will see what I mean. Pow! Bang!! Va-room!!! Boom!!!!”

  (Street, angry, stalks out of the room. Wolf starts after him.)

  “Let him go, Wolf.”

  “What do you suppose got into him, Pop? He never even expressed interest in the Business before. Never came down here. And now he wants to take it over. Strange.”

  “He’s not alone, Wolf. He’s being used. I know one thing, that’s a sorry evil crew he has with him—those seven. It’s a tribute to the people’s stupidity that they are regarded as heroes. In parts of Africa such men are stoned to death by the outraged mob, stripped and made to march through the village naked; in the Central African Republic they are beaten to death publicly—petty thieves, rapists, mackers, and all the rest of the raw sewage. Savages. True savages. I shudder to think of how they were disposed of in ancient Africa.”

  “Why do you suppose it’s that way, Pop?”

  “Slavery. The experience of slavery. I’m afraid it’s going to be a long time before we get over that nightmare which left such scars in our souls—scars that no amount of bandaids or sutures, no amount of stitches will heal. It will take an extraordinary healer to patch up thi
s wound.”

  (Pause)

  “You know, Pop, maybe I should just tell him that we’re dissolving anyway and that there won’t be anything here for him to take over.”

  “You can’t do that, Wolf. You’d be revealing an industrial secret, and besides, our enemies will interpret it as being a sign of weakness.”

  “It’s easy to give up, go into exile with your Business—that’s how it’s been these many years, but now we’re not alone as the small band of Workers of ancient America—there’s a lot of us now. We miss an opportunity if we don’t stay and fight—get rid of these rascals who hold sway over the mob once and for all. And you ought to get rid of that gun, Wolf. You have the Chairman of the Board and his Directors backing you up—they can put something on Street that will make Street back up from harming Workers whose only crime is minding their own Business.”

  “I don’t have faith in the organization as much as you do, LaBas. Besides, look what happened to my dad, Ed.”

  “Ed permitted evil to enter his household. He didn’t use the right precautions, and so a dangerous person was permitted to get next to him and get into his Business.”

  “You know something the police don’t know, LaBas?”

  “I know a lot of things the police don’t know, Wolf, but in this matter my guess is as good as theirs. Only time will tell. My intuition has gotten me this far. My intuition tells me you should get rid of that heat before you get the kind of Louisiana Red your dad got. But you’re a grown man, suit yourself.”

  CHAPTER 23

  A landmark tells you a lot about the town. Berkeley’s is still Sather Tower, which holds a clock with four faces. It was designed by John Galen Howard, who also did the campus’ log cabin in which a secret society known as the Order of the Golden Bear met and in collusion with the Chancellor ran the school for many years. For his tower, Howard had in mind “the tall stalk of a lily with a single tightly closed bud as a crown.”

  Berkeley is so rational that even its trashings have structure; the rocks know right where to go: Bank of America.

  Oakland is wild, churlish, grinding its pelvis to tough shipyard music. The last thing its negro weekend casualties say to their wives before they go out of the house with their shotguns is “I’ll be right back.” Even a rough-and-tumble painter like Joe Overstreet refuses to go into Oakland. He’ll drive to the border of the town and drop off passengers as if they were passengers at the edge of the world. Oakland’s caretaker was Bill Knowland, publisher of the Oakland Tribune. If you will recall, he was the Senator Knowland of the fifties who wanted to blockade Asian ports and lob a few at communism. Shooting from the hip, you know. “Let him hang there and twist slowly in the wind.” He wasn’t interested in merely containing the thing but wanted to wipe out “the whole enchilada,” as high-class lawyers from Orange County say. If the early skyline of Oakland was dominated by gothic gables, now Doggie Dog Diner’s totemic head revolves everywhere—the animal god. Oakland’s focal point is Lake Merritt. This early description:

  Literally hundreds of species and their varieties crowd the water, especially in autumn. Rare birds, swans and geese you are never likely to see elsewhere, unless you travel into distant Alaskan wilds, paddle and fly and swim, seem to lose all sense of fear and eat the grain scattered twice a day for them like barn-fowl. Ducks, comprising every breed that flies, dozens of varieties of gulls, gannets, divers, here they are. One of the interests of Oaklanders is to go to the Lake and stroll its beautiful banks, throwing bread to favorites, while bird clubs revel in the opportunities offered. Many small birds are happily at home in the park, too, songsters, bright-plumaged wanderers, some staying a few days, some for months, some making their home there. And all are charmingly tame and safely trustful.

  Now you only see a dozen or so polluted specimens from the bird infirmary, down on their luck and stranded because their oil-laden wings won’t lift them off.

  Old Doc Durant, a classics professor, intended Berkeley to be the Athens of the West; that would make Oakland the Thebes.

  CHAPTER 24

  This scene takes place in Oakland. Chorus was waiting his turn to speak. He wanted to tell the good news to the audience of how he had made his comeback. How he had regained his dignity. It was a forum, and he was appearing with a sculptor and a musician. People wandered in and out dressed in their fantasies; they strode across the podium giving their unsolicited views concerning the dimensions of Hades, the correct way of grooming a unicorn and other verbal play. These Thebans consider the arts for the sissies; for Athenians. And so these public forums provide an opportunity for the profoundest idiots to castigate the artists because they cannot see, hear or taste—they have no sense and are one big ignorant tongue, constantly rolling off opinions like breakfast cereal boxes in a factory assembly line. Chorus merely attended to see if the dialogue was as bad as he had heard; it was worse. It stunk.

  The moderator wandered in and out, occasionally peeking through an open door like a moron. Children bawled. People in the hallways were noisy. You could hear the clunk of cigarettes dropping in machines—the rattle of coffee dispensers.

  People greet the moderator with shouts; giggle and sneer at the panelists. Chorus notices Antigone in the audience. She is always in the audience. She is raising her voice and folding her arms. Her hatred has screwed up her face so that, though she can’t be more than twenty-five years old, she looks like a rotten hag with crowsfeet and craggy wrinkles. She heaps viperous words, she sneers, she twists her mouth.

  In a former time when the Theban elders had manhood, a man would have leaped across that stage and whipped the shit out of this bitch, but this is considered bad form these days. People are allowed to say anything to you in any words.

  In Brazil they would have left Antigone in a temple until all of her psychic poisons were flushed out, but there is no such system of mental sanitation created for the Thebans. Their gods have been destroyed, their art plundered, their goals in life: eat, sleep, shelter, pussy; they steal from and assault each other. What did Creon say? “O Zeus, what a tribe you have given us in woman.” When she finishes excoriating the other forum members, she turns to the Chorus and talks in the manner of a 19th-century Barbary Coast sailor.

  She respects no man and the only one she can deal with is Polynices, whose Greek name means “much strife.” The painter, the sculptor, the writer and the Chorus glare at her, inwardly raging as Athenian guards walk up and down the aisles, grinning over their discomfort. They are Theban men who are sitting on a stage discussing their art; they have walked into a trap because the conqueror wishes to demean the Thebans by having them ridicule their best. The conqueror always sends Antigone. She gets the biggest honorariums. She is on her way to becoming: “The Sphinx who ate men raw.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Chorus: Just answer me this one: Did Oedipus think that when he banished the Sphinx—in Africa a half-man, half-animal which became a grotesque female in Greece—did he think that when he banished this monster from Thebes, in thousands of years the Sphinx would not have learned a trick or two? That the Sphinx would reappear as his brother’s niece, Antigone, woo Teiresias to wear down Oedipus about his origin (Creon was close when he suggested Teiresias was out for personal gain) and finally wipe out his brother’s family?

  CHAPTER 26

  (Sister and Minnie are seated in an apartment in the Yellings’ house. Minnie is reading a grey-covered magazine with no cover picture. Sister is sewing and listening to Radio KDIA “Lucky Thirteen.”)

  Radio: Still unconfirmed reports are trickling in from a shoot-out at the Berkeley Marina. As reported earlier this morning, two men apparently in a case of mistaken identity mortally wounded each other in gun battle. KDIA will keep you posted on further developments.

  “What do you suppose it means, Minnie? Do you think that LaBas and Wolf have been injured?”

  “No. Most likely an internal feud among the Workers. We’ll never know. You know how secretive they are
.”

  (Sister rises to go to the telephone.) “I’d better call and find out.”

  “I’m amazed it’s even made the radio. They usually keep their little squabbles among themselves, never issuing information to anyone. Elitists,” Minnie says sourly.

  Radio: More details are coming in on the shoot-out which took place at the Berkeley Marina early today. In what was apparently a case of mistaken identity in which each man got the wrong one, two brothers, the popular Street (the sisters gasp) Yellings, leader of the Moochers, and Wolf, his brother, Vice President of Solid Gumbo Works, shot it out, leaving each other dead. (Sister screams, throwing a hand over her mouth) The scene of the double murder is shrouded in heavy fog. Eyewitnesses claim that when the blaze of gunfire ceased, the two men could be seen in the death embrace.