by Ishmael Reed
Raven was the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write and the first to run away. Master Hugh, the bane of Frederick Douglass, said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he’ll take an ell. If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write. And this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”
Master Hugh could have taught Harriet Beecher Stowe a thing or two.
* Sometimes spelled Griffado.
2
PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHEN the Swilles came to Virginia, and the Swilles ain’t talkin. Perhaps that’s why they live behind those great gates one reaches through mossy land and swamps full of so many swine that Swilles’ land has been named Swine’rd, Virginia.
According to the family records we do have, we know that the first Swille, a zealous slave trader, breeder and planter, was “indescribably deformed.” He did his business from the tower of a Castle he built on his grounds, said to be the very replica of King Arthur’s in the Holy City of Camelot, the Wasp’s Jerusalem, the great Fairy City of the old Feudal Order, of the ancient regime; of knights, ladies, of slaves; of jousting; of toasting; Camelot, a land of endless games. Seeing who could pull the Sword out of an anvil of iron. Listening to the convoluted prophecies of Merlin the Druid. Listening to Arthur and his knights, so refined and noble that they launched a war against the Arabs for the recovery of an objet d’art, yet treated their serfs like human plows, de-budding their women at will; torturing and witchifying the resistance with newfangled devices. Dracula, if you recall, was a count.
Arthur was England’s Alfonzo of the Kongo, the Pope’s native ruler who saw to it that the “heathen art” was destroyed. He was John Wallace of Hydaburg, the Christian native who persuaded the Tlingits to “cut down and burn” the great totem poles of Klinkwan. Arthur, whose father, Uther, according to Tennyson, was “dark,” even “well-nigh black” and so “sweet” some took him to be “less a man.”
Arthur made war against the Saxons and the old Druid gods who are depicted as monsters in his Romance. His descendants came to his America and made war against the gods of “Indians” and Africans.
Camelot became Swille’s bible, and one could hear him in the tower, giggling elflike as he came to each new insight; and they heard him dancing as Camelot, a fairy tale to most, became for him an Anglican Grand Design.
After Swille “crossed over,” his dream was taken up by Swille II, Rockland Swille, hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in “Mr. Polk’s War.” This Swille became “afflicted,” when he returned to Swine’rd, with an “inexplicable malady.” His wife was shut up in a sanitarium after witnessing what became known as “Swille’s malady” in the secret books of the old medical library, shelved so far back in the cavernous stacks.
His son, Swille III, was named Arthur because by that time a group of intelligent Virginia Planters had organized a branch of the Circle of the Golden Dawn and one of its notions was that the “Coming of Arthur” was at hand. (In certain books, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, also an Anglican, is referred to as “Our Arthur” or “The South’s Arthur.”) This group of Planters held meetings at a private Richmond club called the Magnolia Baths and was said to have exerted considerable influence during the proceedings of the secret Montgomery Convention where the plans for the Confederacy were drawn.
Arthur Swille received the licentious Hedonist Award for 1850 and was known in London and Paris circles as a gay blade, until he returned to Swine’rd to manage his Family’s great fortune after Swille II had mysteriously “pined away.”
This Swille, Swille III, Arthur Swille, obeyed no nation’s laws and once flogged Queen Victoria, a weekend guest at his English Country Manor, after a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin turned up in a search of her room.
Others say it was because Victoria refused to sell Swille III a barony; according to insiders, Victoria stuck to her guns, moaning, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” grunting, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” as Swille’s stud, Jim, brought the lash down upon the red striated back of the Queen of England. A proud day for the British Empire.
Security is stiff on the Swilles’ ground. Patrollers, called “paddies” by the slaves, reconnoiter the slave quarters.
Some say it’s due to Swille’s bitterness about the unfortunate and untimely death of his son, the anthropologist, whose head was returned to him in a box, covered with what a biopsy revealed as cells from a disgruntled crocodile.
The Snake Society went on satellite television to take credit for it, and added an especially grisly sidelight to a most heinous crime by joking that the head was covered with crocodile regurgitation because Mitchell was too rich for the crocodile, and that the crocodile just kinda laid around on the banks these days, wearing Bloomingdale shades, and was calling himself Aldo the Gourmet Crocodile.
It was reported from the Castle that Swille fired a pistol into the television set when he heard that, and in reprisal immediately ordered the execution of the North American crocodile in such a fiendish manner that by 1977 there will be only eighteen North American crocodiles left. Excuse me, twelve.
To add to this general mood of dolor and dread, three slaves—40s, Stray Leechfield and Raven Quickskill—have vanished.
3
THE MASTER’S STUDY. ARTHUR Swille has just completed the pushups he does after his morning nourishment, two gallons of slave mothers’ milk. Uncle Robin, his slave, is standing against the wall, arms folded. He is required to dress up as a Moorish slave to satisfy one of Swille’s cravings.
“Robin?”
“Yessir, Massa Swille.”
“What are the people down in the quarters saying about those kinks who took off with themselves?”
“Don’t get down to the slave village much any more, Massa Swille. After you and Cato the Graffado put out directions that none was to tarry there, I tain’t. We were gettin all of our information from Stray Leechfield, the runner, but now that he’s … well, after he …”
“Yes, you don’t have to say it, Robin. He’s gone. Stray Leechfield, 40s and [voice drops] Quickskill. They contracted Drapetomania, as that distinguished scientist Dr. Samuel Cartwright described in that book you read to me …”
“Dysaethesia Aethipica, Mr. Swille?”
“Exactly, Robin, that disease causing Negroes to run away. Of course, I’m not a sentimentalist. I won’t sleep until they’ve returned. I mean, I’m the last man to go against science, and if a slave is sick, then he must be rejuvenated—but I just can’t permit anyone to run over me like that. The other slaves will get ideas. So, even though they’re sick—they must be returned.”
“But suppose they paid you off. Would you try to recover even then?”
“Look, Robin, if they’d came to me and if they’d asked to buy themselves, perhaps we could have arranged terms. But they didn’t; they furtively pilfered themselves. Absconded. They have committed a crime, and no amount of money they send me will rectify the matter. I’d buy all the niggers in the South before I’d accept a single dime for or from them … Quickskill, I’ll never be able to figure out. Why, he ate in the house and was my trusted bookkeeper. I allowed him to turn the piano pages when we had performers in the parlor, even let him wear a white wig—and he’d give all of this up. Well,” he said, pounding on the top of his desk, “they won’t get away with it. One thing my father told me: never yield a piece of property. Not to a man, not to the State. Before he died, that’s what he told me and my brothers.”
Dressed in his robes, Swille reaches out his hand, which embraces a wineglass. Uncle Robin walks over to the spirits cabinet, returns and pours him a gobletful, goes back to his place. Uncle Robin knows his place—his place in the shadows.
“Robin, what have you heard about this place up North, I think they call it Canada?” Swille says, eying Robin slyly.
“Canada. I do admit I have heard about the place from time to time, Mr. Swille, but I loves it here so much that … that I would never think of
leaving here. These rolling hills. Mammy singing spirituals in the morning before them good old biscuits. Watching ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ on the Late Show. That’s my idea of Canada. Most assuredly, Mr. Swille, this my Canada. You’d better believe it.”
“Uncle Robin, I’m glad to hear you say that. Why, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I can always count on you not to reveal our little secret. Traveling around the South for me, carrying messages down to the house slaves, polishing my boots and drawing my bath water. All of these luxuries. Robin, you make a man feel like … well, like a God.”
“Thank you, Massa Swille. I return the compliment. It’s such a honor to serve such a mellifluous, stunning and elegant man as yourself, Massa Swille; indeed an honor. Why … why, you could be President if you wanted to.”
“I toyed with the idea, Robin. But my brothers made me think of the Family. It would be a disgrace to the Swilles if I ever stooped so low as to offer myself to this nation. I’m afraid, Robin, that that office is fit only for rapscallions, mobocrats, buckrahs, coonskinners and second-story men. Before Granddad died, they elected that Irishman Andrew Jackson, a cut-up and a barroom brawler, to office—why, I remained in exile during his entire term. Refused even to speak the language, spoke French for those years. It was only after Dad died that I returned to manage this land.”
“You’re a very busy man, Mr. Swille. The presidency would only be a waste of time for you.”
There’s a knock on the door. Mammy Barracuda enters. “Arthur,” then, noticing Uncle Robin, “Oh, I mean Massa Swille.”
“Yes, Barracuda?”
Barracuda has a silk scarf tied about her head. A black velvet dress. She wears a diamond crucifix on her bosom. It’s so heavy she walks with a stoop. Once she went into the fields and the sun reflected on her cross so, two slaves were blinded.
“It’s your wife, Ms. Swille, sir. She say she tired of being a second-class citizen and she say she don’t want to feed herself no mo. She say it’s anti-suffragette. She say she shouldn’t have to exert herself to feed herself and she say she wont to be fed extravenous, I mean, fed intravenous, somethin. Grumph. When she do get out of bed, we have to rock her in the rocking chair. We have to wash her feet and then empty her spoils. The room ain’t been aired out in months. She say she boycott somethin. Humph!”
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. You mean she won’t eat at all?”
“She told me to mail this letter. I thought I’d show it to you. See what you thought about it before I mailed it.”
“Very thoughtful of you, Barracuda.”
He takes the letter, opens it.
“What you lookin at?”
“I was just admiring your new apron, Mammy Barracuda, that’s all,” Uncle Robin says.
“Better be. Humph. Grumph.”
“Destroy this letter, Barracuda. A one-year subscription to that National Era which carried the work by that fanatical Beecher woman.”
“I will burn it first chance I get, Massa Swille. What about him?”
“I trust Robin second only to you, Barracuda. Lying curled up fetuslike in your lap is worth a hundred shrinks on Park Avenue.”
“Humph. Whew. Wheeew,” utters Barracuda, of whom it once was rumored “she stared a man to death,” as she goes out.
“Wonderful old soul, Mammy Barracuda.”
“You can second that twice for me, Massa Swille.”
“What’s that, Robin?”
“That part about her being a wonderful old soul. You can second that twice for me.”
4
THERE’S A KNOCK AT THE door. It’s Moe, the white house slave—Mingy Moe, as the mammies in the kitchen call him. He looks like an albino: tiny pink pupils, white Afro.
“Sorry to disturb you, Master Swille, but Abe Lincoln, the President of the so-called Union, is outside in the parlor waiting to see you. He’s fiddling around and telling corny jokes, shucking the shud and husking the hud. I told him that you were scheduled to helicopter up to Richmond to shake your butt at the Magnolia Baths tonight, but he persists. Says, ‘The very survival of the Union is at stake.’ ”
“Hand me my jacket, Uncle Robin,” Swille says as he stands in the middle of the room.
“Which one do you wont, suh—the one with the spangly fritters formal one or the silvery-squilly festooned street jacket?”
“Give me the spangly one,” Turning to Moe, Swille says, “Now, Moe, you tell this Lincoln gentleman that he won’t be able to stay long. Before I fly up to Richmond, I have to check on my investments all over the world.”
“Yessir, Mr. Swille.”
Momentarily, Lincoln, Gary Cooper-awkward, fidgeting with his stovepipe hat, humble-looking, imperfect—a wart here and there—craw and skuttlecoat, shawl, enters the room. “Mr. Swille, it’s a pleasure,” he says, extending his hand to Swille, who sits behind a desk rumored to have been owned by Napoleon III. “I’m a small-time lawyer and now I find myself in the room of the mighty, why—”
“Cut the yokel-dokel, Lincoln, I don’t have all day. What’s on your mind?” Swille rejects Lincoln’s hand, at which Lincoln stares, hurt.
“Yokel-dokel? Why, I don’t get you, Mr. Swille.”
“Oh, you know—log-cabin origin. That’s old and played out. Why don’t you get some new speech writers? Anyway, you’re the last man I expected to see down here. Aren’t you supposed to be involved in some kind of war? Virginia’s off limits to your side, isn’t it? Aren’t you frightened, man?”
“No, Mr. Swille. We’re not frightened because we have a true cause. We have a great, a noble cause. Truth is on our side, marching to the clarion call. We are in the cause of the people. It is a people’s cause. This is a great, noble and people period in the history of our great Republic. We call our war the Civil War, but some of the fellows think we ought to call it the War Between the States. You own fifty million dollars’ worth of art, Mr. Swille. What do you think we ought to call it?”
“I don’t feel like naming it, Lanky—and cut the poppycock.”
“Lincoln, sir.”
“Oh yes, Lincoln. Well, look, Lincoln, I don’t want that war to come up here because, to tell you the truth, I’m not the least bit interested in that war. I hate contemporary politics and probably will always be a Tory. Bring back King George. Why would a multinational like myself become involved in these queer crises? Why, just last week I took a trip abroad and was appallingly and disturbingly upset and monumentally offended by the way the Emperor of France was scoffing at this … this nation, as you call it. They were snickering about your general unkempt, hirsute and bungling appearance—bumping into things and carrying on. And your speeches. What kind of gibberish are they? Where were you educated, in the rutabaga patch? Why don’t you put a little pizazz in your act, Lanky? Like Davis … Now that Davis is as nit as a spit with his satin-embroidered dressing case, his gold tweezers and Rogers & Sons strap. He’s just bananas about Wagner and can converse in German, French and even that bloody Mexican patois. Kindly toward the ‘weak’ races, as he referred to them in that superb speech he made before the Senate criticizing Secretary of State Seward and other celebrities for financing that, that … maniac, John Brown. And when he brought in that savage, Black Hawk, on the steamboat Winnebago, he treated the primitive overlord with the respect due an ethnic celebrity. You can imagine the Americans taunting this heathen all decked out in white deerskins. Davis’ slaves are the only ones I know of who take mineral baths, and when hooped skirts became popular he gave some to the slave women, and when this made it awkward for them to move through the rows of cotton, he widened the rows.”
“That’s quite impressive, Mr. Swille. I have a worthy adversary.”
Swille, smirking and squinting, flicks the ashes from a cigar given him by the King of Belgium. “An intellectual. What an intellectual. Loggerhead turtles? Oysters? Hogarth? Optics? Anything you want to know, Davis’s got the answer. And his beautiful wife. More brilliant than most men.
As aristocratic as Eugénie, wife of my good friend Imperial Majesty Napoleon Bonaparte III. I was having dinner with her just a few weeks ago. You know, she’s the daughter of the Count of Montijo and the Duke of Peneranda. Men who like nothing but the best. I call her Gennie, since we move in the same circles. Why, I’m thinking about refurbishing the Morocco Club in New York—just no place for the royal ones to go any more. We were eating, and she turned to me and asked why Du Chaillur searched for the primitive missing link in Africa when one had shambled into the Capitol from the jungles of the Midwest.”
Lincoln looks puzzled. “I don’t get it, Mr. Swille.”
“She was talking about you, silly. They’re calling you the Illinois Ape. Eugénie’s a brilliant conversationalist. But Varina Davis has it over her. Those glittering supper parties at the Montgomery White House—and did you see the carriage she bought Jeff? Imported it from New Orleans. Yes indeed, from New Orleans. Almost as good as mine. Upholstered in watered blue silk. Can’t you see those two representing the … the Imperial Empire of the Confederate States of Europe in London? They might even make him a knight—Sir Jefferson Davis. I can see it all now. And then upon their return, a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, with clerks leaning out of office windows shouting, Long Live Jeff. Long Live Varina. Long Live Jeff. Long Live Varina. The Duke and Duchess of Alabama. What a man. What a man. A prince. One of my friends recently visited this six-plus-foot tall specimen and said he just felt like stripping and permitting this eagle-eyed, blade-nosed, creamy Adonis to abuse him and … [pant, pant] humiliate him.”
“Come again, Mr. Swille?”
“Oh, Abe, you’re so green. Green as jade in a cocaine vision.”
“Mr. Swille, mind if we change the subject?”
“We have a delightful life down here, Abe. A land as Tennyson says ‘In which it all seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon. Here are cool mosses deep, and thro the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, and from the craggy ledge the poppy hang in sleep.’ Ah. Ah. ‘And sweet it is to dream of Fatherland. Of child, and wife and slave. Delight our souls with talk of Knightly deeds. Walking about the gardens and the halls.’ And, Abe, a man like you can have a soft easy hustle down here. You could be walking around and wallowing in these balmy gardens and these halls. The good life. Breakfast in a dress coat. Exotic footbaths. Massages three times a day. And what we call down here a ‘siesta.’ Niggers fanning you. A fresh bouquet of flowers and a potent julep delivered to your room. Roses. Red roses. Yellow roses. White roses. We can bring back the ‘days that were.’ Just fancy yourself the Earl of Lincoln, or Count Abe. Or Marquis Lincoln. Marquis Lincoln of Springfield. You could have this life, Lincoln.” He goes to the window and draws back the curtains. There is a view of the hills of Virginia. “It’s all bare now, Lincoln. But we will build that city. From here to as far as the eye can see will be great castles with spires and turrets. We can build one for you, Lincoln. Sir Lincoln.”
