by Ishmael Reed
“No, you’re wrong, Quickskill. I have emotions too. That’s what’s wrong with your argument. You think you’re the only one with heart, with soul. I have feelings. I am not desensitized. I love her, in my own way. That night when I first saw her and captured her during the raid on her father’s village, she was a beautiful treasure to me. And there was great opposition to our marriage. From both sides. I had to send out thirty stereos and fifty mink coats to cool out the gossip. And I didn’t object to her affairs. I knew that her blood wasn’t like mine: cold, Anglo-Saxon. She had a different temperature and often, well, I was too busy. But you … Whatever you had going between you, it was too deep.”
“Well, it’s late. Maybe I’ll climb into a canoe and go back to Buffalo. Stay in the Eagle Tavern for the night. Head out to Canada tomorrow.”
“You can’t return.”
“Why?”
“Swille’s men are all over town. They’re in cahoots with the Buffalo Anti-Subversive Squad. A.S.S. Those fat men you see hobbling up and down the aisles taking notes and talking into walkie-talkies at anti-slavery meetings. They’ll certainly lock you up in the Erie County jail for the night. Then take you back to ’Ginny. You don’t want to go back to ’Ginny, do you? I understand that the worst torture a black can get is ‘Virginia Play.’ Isn’t that what they call it? ‘Virginia Play.’ I’ll take you across. This yacht has a thirty-thousand-dollar motor.”
“You know, Jack, you’re not such a bad guy. What’s wrong with you? Why are you … I mean, so mean. Raiding villages. Plundering …”
“I was young then.”
“But even now. Why do you tie up things so? Not permitting a free flow of ideas.”
“Somebody’s got to do it. Emerson, Thoreau, Greeley. Soft white men. Swille had his points. I used to admire him. But now he’s behind. Still thinking that he can maintain his empire through flogging and killing. It’s made him depraved.”
“You’re telling me. He has this private projection room where he shows films of slaves being tortured, pilloried, castrated, and he and his guests sit around sipping black milkshakes; it …”
“You see.” He goes over, picks up the phone and orders one of his men to begin the journey toward Niagara Falls, Ontario.
“Would you like something to eat, Quickskill? Lasagne? Crêpe cannelloni? Besciamella? I have some fine pastas I can order up.”
“No, thanks.”
They finally reached the other side. A man was waiting to canoe Quickskill to the banks. Yankee Jack had phoned ahead. Raven put his gear over his shoulder. He picked up his suitcase.
“Well, this is it.” The pirate extended his hand.
Quickskill looked at it. “I don’t think so. Thanks for the ride, but if I ever meet you on free ground, I’m going to kill you.”
The pirate chuckled. “Have it your way.”
Quickskill climbs into the canoe. The man prepares to row to the shore.
“One more thing,” the pirate says. “I read your poem ‘Third World Belle.’ It was a giveaway. One thing, though. You said I buried her brother in a sealed-off section of the Metropolitan Museum. Wrong. It was the Museum of Natural History. One of the board members, an old friend, Captain Kidd, had called me in to be a co-consultant on an Oceanic exhibit they were giving. Well, her brother rushed past the guard and into the board room to complain about a statue they have outside of Theodore Roosevelt sitting on a horse while a black slave and an Indian are obsequiously kneeling next to it, like the President’s children. He said it was paternalistic. He said something about its being racist. He had a shotgun, and … well, we couldn’t have him waving that thing around. We had to, ah, subdue him, and I guess we used a little too much force. We didn’t want to carry out the body before all of those milling visitors and so we stuffed him and put him downstairs in the lower floor. He’s there now, standing in a huge log boat next to a shaman figure.”
Quickskill wasn’t listening. The boat began to move toward land. Soon Quickskill would be free. But he was too tired and depressed to greet this prospect with joyful exclamation of former slaves who reached this moment of Jubilation.
“While they were on my vessel I felt little interest in them, and had no idea that the love of liberty as a part of man’s nature was in the least possible degree felt or understood by them. Before entering Buffalo harbor, I ran in near the Canada shore, manned a boat and landed them on the beach … They said, ‘Is this Canada?’ I said, ‘Yes, there are no slaves in this country’; then I witnessed a scene I shall never forget They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it, hugged and kissed each other, crying, ‘Bress de Lord/ Oh! I’se free before I die!’ ”
25
RAVEN QUICKSKILL WAS SITTING on the terrace of the Queen Victoria Gardens Hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. He had to wait for a while to get a seat. He was looking out on the indescribable American Falls. It was the closest spot to heaven on earth. People of all races, classes, descriptions seemed to be there, dangling their feet on the walls overlooking the slopes, which ran down to the two-lane highway and to the rails where people of all ages looked out at the wonder, the terrifying rapids below. Was all of Canada like this? Then he saw it. The crowd looked up.
He could make out some kind of figure in the mist. It was a figure on a tightrope. The figure seemed to be carrying a banner. Later he was to learn that the tightrope was eleven hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet above the water. People closed in about the railing for a closer look. The patrons of the hotel rose from their seats and went down the slope to look, too. He joined them. He was curious. People were shoving each other to get to one of the telescopes that one could employ, near the rails.
He found an empty one and looked through. It was a woman. She was in Indian clothes. She was coming across Niagara Falls: She was walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls!
Sam Patch must be rolling in the grave, he thought. A woman doing this. She was doing what no man had ever done. She was coming across, backward. Quaw Quaw! He could tell it was she because he knew her backward quite well. It could be nobody else’s backward but hers. Carrying the banner, she did a somersault. The crowd gaped and murmured. It said Ahhhhhh. Later she said she would have made two omelettes, breaking the eggs in midair, but she figured that would be too anti-suffragette. All the way up in the air, doing housework. She kept coming across the tightrope as the crowd on both sides grew hushed. It even seemed that the Falls had hushed. It was an “eerie quiet.” Would she make it?
Of course, now he understood what she meant. Blondinist. He had thought it was some new rebellion game invented by the Emancipation Bugle.
Blondin. French tightrope walker. “The Little Wonder.” Jean François Gravelet. Walked above the Falls on a tightrope in 1859. She had done him better. Her feat was like her life, between the American and Canadian Falls with a gorge underneath. They argued all the time, but this they had in common. He was the raven. Ga! Ga! Gaaa! Ga! They both were capable of producing cliff-hangers, as she was now.
She reached the other side and the crowd went wild, joining hands and jumping about, whistling, stomping their feet. Automobiles were honking, policemen were blowing whistles. She had reached the other side and was coming down.
He could then read the banner she carried: Quickskill, I love you.
26
LATER THEY WERE DINING in the Victoria Gardens restaurant. She had gone upstairs to her suite to change, a difficult feat because the lobby was crowded with the press and with people from television and radio. The Canadian police had to help her to her room. He waited for her downstairs in the restaurant. Finally, when she appeared again, she was wearing a grey somber-striped Happi coat made of sheared weasel, which she had bought on impulse from the money collected when the hat was passed among the spectators. People had made movie offers. Book contracts were proposed. She turned th
em all down, telling the people that she was an “artist” and that she was “pure” and that she “didn’t want to sell out.”
Now it was quieter. People only glanced their way from time to time. They were alone. She was telling him her adventures, which occurred after she dove into the Niagara.
“Well, I swam and swam, and it was getting very dark and there was a fisherman. He noticed me and he asked if I wanted to be pulled out of the water. He said if I continued, I’d be swept over the falls. Well, my mind wasn’t into that, I was just swimming. I didn’t have any destination in mind; I heard the roar in the distance, but I didn’t know it was Niagara Falls. Then it occurred to me, I had a chance to do Blondin one better. I would walk the tightrope across Niagara Falls backwards. Well, the fisherman provided me with some blankets. He was very nice about it. He got me to the shore and hailed a cab for me. I came to this hotel and got a suite.”
“How did you do that? You didn’t have any money.”
“Oh, Mother just bought a forest up here. I simply told them who I was. No trouble. They called Mother and she told them to give me what I wanted. They’re used to Americans owning forests, lakes and mountains up here.”
“You’ve always gotten what you wanted, haven’t you?”
“Just about. Anyway, I bought some clothes and supplies and then a couple of long rolls of wire. I had some workmen hitch it up to some poles, and just as the tourists began arriving this morning I started out.”
“You’re crazy,” he said playfully, smiling.
“No, not crazy, famous. If I’d slipped and fallen, then I would have been crazy.”
“Hey, look,” Quickskill said, “it’s Carpenter.”
And it was Carpenter. He was in the lobby, registering in the hotel. His head was bandaged, and he walked with the assistance of a cane. Quickskill rose and went to the lobby. He brought Carpenter back to the table.
“Carpenter, how are you? What happened?” Quaw Quaw said, rising.
Carpenter pulled up a chair. Ordered some Scotch.
“Cutty Sark?” the waitress asked.
“No, not me,” he said, waving her away, “Ballantine. I don’t want anything to do with Canada. The sooner I’m out of here the better.”
“What on earth happened, man?” Quickskill asked.
“Some mobocrats beat me up,” he said, pointing to the bandages on his head. “Left me in the street unconscious. I was going back to the hotel after being denied this room I wanted to rent.”
“In Canada? You were denied a room?” Quickskill asked.
“That’s right. Man, I’d take my chance with Nebraskaites, Know-Nothings and Democrats anytime. Even a Copperhead or a Confederate.”
“I don’t understand, Carpenter. Why, outside it looks like the Peaceable Kingdom.”
“Maybe here but not elsewhere. Man, as soon as you reach the metropolitan areas you run into Ford, Sears, Holiday Inn, and all the rest.”
“You’re kiddin,” Quickskill said. “You have to be kiddin.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“But what about St. Catherine’s? William Wells Brown told me that he’d gotten a number of slaves across to St. Catherine’s, where they found rewarding careers.”
“Let me show you downtown St. Catherine’s,” Carpenter said, removing a photo from his wallet. It looked like any American strip near any American airport; it could have been downtown San Mateo. Neon signs with clashing letters advertising hamburgers, used-car lots with the customary banners, coffee joints where you had to stand up and take your java from wax cups.
“It looks so aesthetically unsatisfying.”
“You can say that again, Quaw Quaw,” Quickskill said.
“Man, they got a group up here called the Western Guard, make the Klan look like statesmen. Vigilantes harass fugitive slaves, and the slaves have to send their children to schools where their presence is subject to catcalls and harassment. Don’t go any farther, especially with her. They beat up Chinamen and Pakastani in the streets. West Indians they shoot.”
“I’m a Native American,” she said.
Quickskill had never heard her say it that way. A Native American. And she stuck out her chest.
“Don’t you remember her, Carpenter? She came to your party.”
“Oh, that’s right. I was a little high that night. Don’t remember everybody who came. Was so glad to get to Canada. Now look. Man, let me show you something.” Carpenter pulled from his pocket a piece of paper upon which some figures had been written. “Of the ten top Canadian corporations, four are dominated by American interests. Americans control fifty-five percent of sales of manufactured goods and make sixty-three percent of the profits. They receive fifty-five percent of mining sales and forty percent of paper sales. Man, Americans own Canada. They just permit Canadians to operate it for them. They needs a Castro up here bad. And get this. Time magazine receives special tax rates up here.”
The more Carpenter continued to talk, the more depressed Quickskill became.
Finally Carpenter got up from his seat. “Well, Quickskill, Quaw Quaw, I have to go,” he said, downing his Scotch. “Want to get up early in the morning to start the journey back to Emancipation. Those people I sublet my apartment to are really going to be in for a surprise.”
“Yeah, sure, Carpenter,” Quickskill said in almost a whisper.
“See you back in Emancipation … Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you …”
“What’s that?”
“Swille got his.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was in the newspapers. His old lady burned him.”
“That’s nice.”
“What? I expected to hear a bigger response than that.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really care at this point, Carpenter. After what you’ve said about Canada. All my life I had hopes about it, that whatever went wrong I would always have Canada to go to.”
“Don’t let it get you down, Raven. Look, I’d better be going.”
Carpenter left a tip, and using his cane, headed toward the elevator.
“Quickskill,” Quaw Quaw said, reaching out her hand to him, “don’t take it so hard. Quickskill …”
But Quickskill held his head between his hands. Then he slowly dropped his head to the table and let it rest there for a while, his arms stretched out.
27
HE FELT HIS GUTS were made of aluminum. The tears went to behind his eyes and burned there. She had her black silky Indian hair resting on his shoulder. Her arm was inside his. From time to time she’d pinch his arm. He’d look at her and smile. There were fruit stands on the highway. Red apples, yellow grapefruit. Fresh. She’d want to stop and buy some. Good-eyes Raven would point to a cloud in the direction opposite that of the fruit stand. He didn’t feel like stopping.
“Look, there’s a cloud,” he’d say.
“Where? I don’t see it.”
It worked every time. They were approaching the border. There was a long line of cars. The border was tense, and some of the passengers stood beside the vehicles. They were being questioned by the border guards. The United States still hadn’t gotten over that incident which took place during the War of 1812. The Canadians had tried to burn down the White House. The Canadians hadn’t forgotten that they had repelled three invasions from the Union. A fortnight before, the Prime Minister of Canada had publicly rebuked an American ambassador for having “overstepped the bounds of diplomatic propriety.”
Things brimmed over when a visiting American producer and director had called the National Arts Center’s theatre in Ottawa “lousy,” and suggested that whoever built it “should be shot.” The next day the Château Laurier in Ottawa was blown up. Some blamed it on “Seceshes,” an abundance of which every nation has. Others said it sounded like Yankees. The “staid” London Times had described the Yankee character as one of “swagger” and “ferocity,” this after Captain Charles Wilkes of the Union ship San Jacinto had boarded E
ngland’s Trent in order to arrest two Confederate diplomats. It was described as an “audacious” act which outraged the “civilized world.”
Had crossing the Atlantic changed the character of both Europeans and Africans? Were Yankees really “vulgar cowards” as the London Times had said? Why had the Canadian Prime Minister said that living next to the Union was like being a flea on an elephant? Every time the elephant twitched you felt it. Why did the Europeans think that Yankees hunted elephants?
They weren’t surprised, therefore, when a kid-glove-wearing guard in a black bear coat waved them over to the side. He walked to their car and peeked in. Noticing Quaw Quaw, he asked, “Hey, aren’t you one of them Japs who used to worship dragons and were in the throes of superstition?” It wasn’t said with any malice. He was friendly even, and when he said it, smiled at both of them. He then removed a handbook from his pocket. “Japs, Japs. J … Japs,” he said, leafing through. “The Union is a Christian Union, and there’s no room for infidels.”
“She’s not Japanese, she’s Indian.”
But by this time Quaw Quaw had leaped out of the car and was heading toward the guard, her face contorted in anger, like a mask he had once seen.
The guard dropped his pencil and stepped back. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you the girl who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope? Quaw Quaw Tralaralara.”
When they heard that, the passengers of the other cars stopped honking and rushed out of their cars with matchbox covers, napkins, candy-bar wrappers, pads, driver’s licenses and anything they could find to get Quaw Quaw’s autograph. For someone who talked about how she “disdained” commercialism and how her Columbia professors had taught her to “deplore” the “star system,” she seemed to be enjoying it. Well, at least to Quickskill she seemed to be enjoying it. Only one of Quaw Quaw’s fans recognized him, and then only to ask him for a piece of paper to write Quaw Quaw’s name on.
