by Ishmael Reed
“Oh, son. I know what to do,” she said as the specter crept back through the wall.
Outside a thunderstorm began. It was thrashing across the sky. She thought she heard someone calling. A familiar voice. Echoing across the meadows. A sweet soprano voice.
21
AT ONE END OF the table, the top of which bore three white candles and a basket of fruit and flowers, sat, dining, Arthur. Swille. At the other, a man dressed in a Union military uniform. He was much decorated. His chest looked like a medal bed.
“… then Mudd took the wounded man in and bandaged him. Everything is proceeding according to plan.”
“Good. So no one can trace it to me?”
“We made sure of that. One of our men, posing as a marshal, shot him to death as he was running out of the barn. The newspapers are getting suspicious. You know, the story we put out that all the conspirators burned up in the fire.”
“Whitewash.”
“Nothing about whitewash. Just suspicious. We did it away from the TV cameras. Told the video people that we couldn’t guarantee their safety.”
“What about the woman who ran the inn?”
“Oh, she doesn’t know anything about you.”
“Good job, General. When do you think you can get Johnson down here to see me? The great Plebeian.”
“Ha ha. That was some speech he made at Abe’s second inauguration, huh?” He swallowed two tumblers of whiskey before he went on. “Lincoln was so mad. You should have seen Abe. He said if we allowed that son of a bitch to say another word, he’d fire the whole cabinet. Johnson’s having d.t.’s now. Says he sees Lincoln’s ghost. We have to get Jacobson to give him injections. They’re beginning to whisper in the Capitol. You know how the town talks. We listened in on one of Anderson’s lines, and he’s thinking about doing a column on it. The man has no class. The rude Tennessean. Got into a fistfight with a heckler.”
“He what?”
“Wrestling in the streets with a buckrah. You know, Abe had his bad points, but Abe was cold. These fancy Confederates were trying to arrange a peace deal. We were all sitting on The River Queen. And one of them cited Charles I for some precedent. Some action Charles I took. They wanted to win a few points. Well, Abe … Abe started to clutch his lapels with his fingers. And he leaned back until his eyes were focused on the ceiling. And he kinda got that twinkle in his eyes that brought lines in their corners closer together. And he said, ‘All I know about Charles I is that he went and got himself beheaded.’ You know, the South will never forgive him for declaring medical supplies contraband at Richmond.”
“Look, General, I didn’t mind Lincoln. Had him down here.” Swille stops and begins munching on apple pie. “Hmmmmm. This is delicious. Pompey …” addressing the small slave standing against the wall, “go and have them order Mammy Barracuda a ruby ring from Cartier’s. Anyway, as I was saying, I liked the man. But he gave away all that property. All that property. Gave away other people’s property. Why, I tried to loan him the money to buy the slaves. What made him change his mind, General?”
The general puts down a wineglass. “Toward the end he kept having visions of himself as a statue. Sitting in the chair and staring out over the Potomac. He started to believe it. He began to see himself as a great Emancipator, Mr. Swille. Got hooked by his own line. Then he saw visions of himself lying in state on the catafalque in the Capitol rotunda. I finally realized why Abe was an infidel, Massa Swille.”
“Why’s that, General?” Swille says, sipping a cup of coffee.
“He couldn’t imagine anybody being Christ but him. He could never deal with the infidel issue they kept raising in his campaigns about our Lord being the real Christ.”
The Military Man reaches over and carves some salmon, which rests in a china platter, an idiot look on its face, surrounded by sliced lemons.
“Strange times, don’t you think, General? What happens to such people in these times? I think Abe must have gotten nigger fever.”
“What’s that, Mr. Swille?”
“Nigger fever. Niggers do something to you. I’ve seen white people act strange under their influence. First you dream about niggers, little niggers mostly; little niggers, sitting eating watermelons, grinning at you. Then you start dreaming about big niggers. Big, big niggers. Big, big niggers walking all on top of you; then you got niggers all over you, then they got you. Now they got white men fighting white men on land taken away from the Indians—Rappahannock, Chattanooga. It’s spooky. As long as they’re in this country, this country is under their spell. It’ll be one great HooDoo sea.”
“I understand the wisdom of your decision, Mr. Swille.”
“Would you like some dessert?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Swille, think I’ll just sit here, light up a cigar and relax next to this wonderful fireplace.”
“Had it shipped over here from Windsor Castle. The Duke was glad to get the money, too. Glad to. Went out and gave away his food stamps.”
“You spend a lot of time over there, don’t you, Mr. Swille?”
“That I do, General. Though my body inhabits the Swille Castle, my mind is in Europe. What’s that you always say, Uncle Robin?”
“Say what, Massa Swille?”
“What’s that old colored saying?”
“Oh, you mean, you can take my body but not my soul?”
“That’s the one. Americans, both North and South, hate the slaves, and they’re slaves themselves. If we didn’t have the cocoas, we’d get the Irish. Did you hear the one about the Irish map? Shows you where the roads don’t go. Get it? Shows you where the roads don’t go.”
“Sir, I’ve never heard it put so sanguinely. Sir, you … you should run things yourself instead of hiring people, sir. You should …”
Swille, now leaning back, flicking ashes from his Havanna into an ashtray, says, “I know. I know. Uncle Robin asked me the same thing. But the Family would get mad. It would be an embarrassment to the Family.”
“Incidentally, speaking of the Family, how’s the crocodile-killing coming on?”
“We brought in the army corps of engineers. Some congressman from Lawrence, Kansas, some kind of offbeat town, objected and called it genocide. I’d like to parachute feetfirst into Lawrence and clean it up, that anti-slavery hotbed.”
“Why can’t you do something about that town?”
Ms. Swille enters the room. Uncle Robin starts. Swille and the general rise. She is decked out in finery—hoop skirt, Paris shoes, hair in belle curls. She is thin as Twiggy and wan as Morris’ Guenevere; titties the size of spuds. Swille and the general lift their wineglasses.
“How’s about a toast to Southern womanhood,” the general says.
“I don’t want your toasts. You Swille swine.”
She moves into the room, and from her handbag she pulls a Stonewall Jackson rocket-powered miniature cannon, leave a hole in a man the size of an eightball.
“Dear, what’s come over you?” Swille says, dropping his glass, rolling his eyes about like Mantan Mooreland in the Charlie Chan movies.
“My son. You killed my son. All he wanted to do was hunt some shrunken heads for his museum, and you had him over there … you disgusting …”
“Look, dear, he asked me if there was anything he could do for me in the Congo. I didn’t think it’d hurt for him to look in on some copper. Just think, all the copper, Mother, radiant … yellow!”
“You Moloch! You Mammon! You … you Beelzebub! Oh, this man, my husband,” she said, turning to the Military Man.
The Military Man nodded nervously, clutching his white linen napkin in his hand.
“You have to forgive her, General. She’s, well … she’s suffering from melancholy. It’s induced by the miasma in our atmosphere.”
“Yes, that’s it. Try to change the subject. There you go. You’re always changing the subject on me, treating me like the field help around here. As though I came with the land, like arrangements in the feudal ages. Military Man,”
she says, “he has a mammy who says abrasive things to me, and she manhandles me and confiscates my belongings. And he has concubines. The slave girls walk around with all of my jewelry on. Oh, the decadence. Tell them about the decadence down here, Military Man. The great immoral decadence. Tell them in the land beyond the screams.”
She gags as if to bring up phlegm in her throat. “And his concubines. Why, some of the girls are mere babies. And if that’s not enough, he belongs to this awful Magnolia Baths. He stays there for weeks sometimes, and when he returns, his lips are pudgy and there’s a steady string of saliva hanging from his bottom lip, and his fingers look … look gross, and he sits there for weeks staring at the wall. I think he must be on belladonna. Have you noticed his eyes?”
She’s focused her attention on Swille and hasn’t noticed until now that the Military Man has left through the side door. “Well, haven’t you noticed, Robin?”
“Now, Ms. Swille, I want you to leave me out of the argument you and Mr. Swille is having. It ain’t right for the slave to tell the Master and the Missus how to conduct their affairs.”
“True, Robin. You’re such a wise man.”
“Thank you, Ms. Swille.”
“He should have set you free by now … Oh, he’s such a suave Swille swine!”
“But, dear—” Swille says, moving toward her.
“You keep away from me.”
She is now holding the gun with two trembling hands. Swille continues to move toward her away from the fireplace in which every log is afire and heating the entire room.
“I’ve been watching you … A …”
“You see, it’s been so long, you’ve forgotten my name. It’s Arthur Swille. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember. How can I forget that when we were six years old my father and your father made our betrothal. And the letters I wrote to you when I was in Europe. Remember those letters? The tormented sad letters I wrote you from the cafés. The telegrams of pathos. The palliative and passionate night letters. You remember the letters, Arthur?”
“Yes. And our wedding. Why, all of Richmond must have been there.” Swille is near to where she is standing. “But now you’re even more beautiful.”
“You mean you like my white tongue and my sallow looks.”
“Of course, my dear.”
“And my bones protruding, my legs and my ribs showing.”
“It’s so … so aesthetic, dear.”
“And you like the way I’ve become so delicate that I won’t go out of doors for fear the sun will melt me or that I will stumble in a puddle and drown or if somebody said boo I’d keel over?”
“You’re lovely, my dear.”
She lays down the pistol and rushes into his arms. He embraces her. A gust of wind opens the door. The candles go out.
“Uncle Robin, would you go downstairs and fetch some more candles?”
Uncle Robin leaves the room in which Ms. Swille is sobbing against her husband’s chest, the pistol lying on the table.
“Now there, dear,” Swille said, comforting her.
“I wasn’t boycotting, I wanted you to notice me. You weren’t paying attention to me.”
“I’ll make up for that, dear. We’ll have parties again. Why, Eddie Poe told me he had some opiates that were so good that you contemplated the world in a book’s binding for one whole day. We can travel—Majorca, the Greek Islands—you name it.”
“Oh, Arthur, Arthur, I knew I was doing the right thing, becoming like her. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Arthur? I’ve become just like her …”
“I don’t follow you, dear—”
Just then there was a giggle—a shrill giggle, arising from some remote decaying city, deep under and far away.
“Don’t listen to him. He’ll never love you. He’ll never love anyone but me.”
“Vivian,” shrieked Ms. Swille and folded like a bag into her husband’s arms.
“What … what are you doing here? Go back …” gasped Swille.
“You know you don’t love her. You’ll never give up your licentious Hedonist Award of 1850, the Golden Dawn Club, the Epicurean Club and the Bohemian Club. You’ll never give up me, will you, brother? Out in my sepulcher by the sea. By the grey dismal seaaaaa,” she said, a hideous sardonic grin on her face.
“Get back,” Swille cries moving back from his sister, who is approaching him, a filmy scarf, white-death negligee, feet white and ashen, carrying some strange book of obscure lore. It is leather-bound, wearing its words embossed in gold.
“At first I thought the notion was disgusting, abominable even. You was violatin’ … my chaste Southern belle upbringing out there in my tomb, standing over the coffin lid, real hard like that. You put my hand on it and made me feel it.” Her evil green eyes are staring at him, her body a silhouette under her ragged white gown, her long fingernails dripping blood. Her wildcat hair. Her sinister, diabolical face.
“No, please—”
“And then there under the moonlight you slid the lid back altogether and then you climbed in … and each night after that, you’d hold on to me, cling to me, there in the silence of the cemetery. And you would become so peaceful … so peaceful. And you said I was your fair lady and you were my knight and we were married in Death … Please—”
She grabs her brother and then is all atop him. He falls against the fireplace, and she is laughing, staring into his eyes from her gaping skeleton sockets. Fighting and screaming, Swille backs into the fire. Fire grabs his coattails. Fire is hungry. Fire eats.
When Robin returned with the candles, he was shocked at the hideous scene before him. Swille was crackling and bouncing from the fire. Ms. Swille had been flung across the room. Robin rushed over and lifted her by the arms. He dragged her out into the hall, where Pompey stood in vigil.
“Pompey! Something awful has happened! Massa Swille is on fire.”
“Yeah,” Pompey said, standing next to a vase in his green silk dress coat, wearing his white-powdered wig. “I figured something was up when I saw that general hightailing it out of here and I heard all of that screaming.”
“Well, you try to revive Ms. Swille, while I run and fetch some water for Massa Swille.”
“Good idea,” Pompey said. “If the man’s afire, you should get some water. Maybe that will help,” Pompey said as he began to slap Ms. Swille.
Robin walks to the elevator. Waits for it. It goes down to the basement, then begins to rise to the third floor while Robin waits. He presses the button again and hears popping sounds coming from the dining room, followed by Ms. Swille’s screams. She is coming around. Pompey shrugs his shoulders and glances Robin’s way. Robin stands at the elevator, and this time the elevator goes to the top of the roof and then suddenly drops to the basement.
He decides to take the steps and starts down. He reaches the kitchen and runs to the sink. He begins to draw a bucket of water. Bangalang appears.
“Something terrible has happened, Bangalang. Mr. Swille has been pushed into the flames.”
“Did she kill him?” Bangalang asks.
“He’s not dead yet, he’s on fire.”
Bangalang goes to the faucet and turns off the water.
“Bangalang, what’s the matter with you, turning off the water?”
“I was just trying to help. Mammy Barracuda says when you turn the faucet on, you’re not suppose to forget to turn it off.”
Robin, having filled the bucket, begins to return to the dining room. She catches his arm, “Robin, when you going to take me out, like you said you were going to? On one of those trips you make for Mr. Swille.”
“Shut up, girl. You want to get me into trouble? You young wimmen all alike. No discretion.” He leaves a giggling Bangalang behind.
When Robin returned to the dining room it was too late. The fire was sleeping off its dinner.
PART III
THE BURNING OF RICHMOND
What are we all—white Negroes, or serfs or what? What
is the little man, Jeff Davis? Where did he get it? Is this man one of the Caesars? Or is he one of the Medici? Or perhaps the last of the Bothic … ? Or is he veritably “the last of the Bourbons”? Can it be so? Or is he indeed that little backwoods man from Mississippi … the very worst executive officer known in the modern world since the time of his prototype, James II of England.
The Charleston Mercury
February 7, 1865
22
WHAT THE AMERICAN ARTHURIANS couldn’t win on the battlefield will now be fought out on the poetry field. Lincoln, the Saxon chief, is slain. Lincoln, London, two towns in Britain—Lincoln, London, England, Lincoln London England—the savage sounds of rock worshipers. “Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other,” Sir Walter Scott said. Sir Scott.
Old man Ruffin, who fired the first shot against the Union at Fort Sumter, shot himself when he heard that Lee had surrendered.
Jefferson Davis is captured, disguised in his wife’s hoops, shawl and rainproof coat. Davis’ defenders say it’s a lie. Historians still debate this.
Oscar Wilde, “The Great Decadent,” would say, “His fall after such an able and gallant pleading in his own cause must necessarily arouse pity.” Davis later invited “The Apostle of Aesthetics” to his Mississippi homestead, where Wilde “charmed” the ladies. Maybe it was Wilde’s knee breeches and the sunflower pinned to the lapel of his coat that appealed to them. Raised by mammies, the South is dandyish, foppish, pimpish; its writers are Scott, Poe, Wilde, Tennyson; its assassin left behind a trunk in which was found: “clothes in fine silk velvets; silks, ermine and crimson; and also hats, caps, plumes, boots, shoes, etc.”
Davis later said that he desired to carry on guerrilla warfare in the hills of Virginia. Davis missed the point. Davis, who was accused by The Charleston Mercury of treating Southerners like “white Negroes,” misread his people. It wasn’t the idea of winning that appealed to them. It was the idea of being ravished. Decadent and Victorian writing both use the romantic theme of fair youth slumbering. Fair youth daydreaming. Fair youth struck down. In the New Orleans Mardi Gras, that great Confederate pageant, the cult of Endymion has a whole evening. Saturday.
