Reckless Eyeballing

by Ishmael Reed

  “Brashford. You listen to him a lot.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “His talent isn’t all that large. His only play is warmed-over O’Neill. The Iceman Cometh. All of that stuff about illusion and reality. And the one scene taking place in the bar. The reason they went for it in the fifties was because the last monologue was delivered by a black guy got up in drag. Everybody knows that. That’s why he’s such a darling of the East Coast establishment.”

  “Well, why can’t he steal from O’Neill? The white boys steal our shit. Brashford says that you got these sixty-year-old punk rockers saying that they invented jazz poetry and blues. The ones in their late thirties, the yuppies with their Brooks Brothers suits and things, are saying that they invented rock and roll, and some of the white dudes in their seventies claim ragtime.” Minsk looked at the clock. He had to get to the airport. When Ball said something to annoy him, Minsk would either change the subject, pretend that he didn’t hear, or come up with something else to do.

  5

  O’Reedy was seated at his desk. Tremonisha Smarts was lying on a sofa. She was dressed in a magenta-colored gauzy gown. Her thighs and tits—well, you didn’t have to strain all that much to see them. She was beckoning him. Reaching out to him. Enticing him to join her on the sofa. She even patted a place next to her, a seat she intended for him to have. O’Reedy was dressed in a tux, which fit just right, and shiny black shoes. He began to float toward her. Soon they were engaged in a mean tango, their bodies riveted. Someone cleared his throat, awakening O’Reedy from his reverie.

  “Yes, what is it, Brown?” An Afro man, with keen features, a thick mustache, dressed in pants with well-defined creases and a splendid white shirt and striped tie, a shoulder holster fastened to his chest. He was holding some papers in his hand.

  “The newspapers are calling him the Flower Phantom.”

  “What?”

  “The Flower Phantom.”

  O’Reedy rustled the papers with annoyance. He tilted his head and slitted his eyes. “You’re not becoming sympathetic to this degenerate pile of shit, are you, Lieutenant?”

  The young man snapped to attention. He straightened up.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what’s the problem with you? Is it because you’re both black! Speak up, Brown!”

  “No, not at all, sir.”

  “Just because you’re both black, you must remember that he’s a criminal and you’re on the side of the law. He’s on the outside, you’re on the inside. Never forget that.”

  Brown was embarrassed. “Sir, it’s just that, well, a lot of the fellows don’t like Tremonisha Smarts. She wrote that play Wrong-Headed Man. A lot of the fellows are saying that her portrayal of the brothers, well, you know, they’re saying that it’s not too cool. She makes out like we’re all wife beaters and child molesters. I mean, I don’t beat my wife. And that scene where Mose throws the woman down the stairs.”

  “Did you see the play, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Go see the play, especially that scene—well, you know, well, there’s a scene—look, we’re here to protect the public, not to be theater critics. How old are you, anyway?”

  “I’m thirty-two, sir,” the lieutenant said. O’Reedy sighed. Just a kid, he thought.

  “Lieutenant, I have a lot of paperwork, if you will excuse me.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.” The young lieutenant left the office, O’Reedy’s eyes following him. O’Reedy was looking forward to his retirement. It couldn’t come soon enough. The force certainly had changed. Along about the mid-seventies some meddlesome wimp of a judge had decreed that every time a white policeman achieved a promotion, they had to promote a black. Sure, police brutality complaints were on the decline, but that wasn’t the point. In the old days you roughed them up so that they’d realize that white men were in charge. You didn’t take any crap in those days. If they’d had this civilian review jazz in the old days, he and the boys would have seen to it that none of the complainants survived to file a complaint. He thought again about the time, decades before, when he had dropped those three bank robbers while finishing up his sandwich. If memory served him correctly, it was a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on whole wheat bread. He remembered all of the events of that day and played them over and over again in his mind. The screams, the blood and human tissue splattered all over the place. He kept blasting, and the black sons of bitches were flying in all directions, and the crowds were screaming. When he finished his sandwich, he went inside the restaurant and ordered another one. Cool as he could be. Squint-eyed and disdainful.

  The whole Western World was becoming sissy. What did that sell-out Jew, Henry Kissinger, say? Something about the Western World going to the dogs, and how his job was to make it easier for the West to accept this. He’d read this in the Sunday paper. What kind of thinking was that? Jew thinking, that’s what it was. Used to have somebody around the department who agreed with him, but now all the fellows had left, gone to Vero Beach, Florida. Soon he’d join them.

  Sure, they wasted a lot of the “underclass,” but in the old days the mayor and the head of the Police Benevolent Association would take your side. And if you, well, had to remove some poor slob from his misery, there was always the friendly M.E. who’d fix it up. Nowadays, the head of the Police Benevolent Association was a woman. Sanchez…Chavez…something like that. Lawrence O’Reedy dropped to one knee, pulled his gun, and mockingly pointed it at an imaginary fleeing suspect. “Freeze, you son of a bitch. Give me something to write home to Mother about.” He chuckled to himself. He got up and tugged on his pants at the waist. Brown was standing in the doorway, a puzzled expression. “You all right sir?” he asked.

  6

  Ball entered the plush building in which Jake Brashford’s in-town studio was located. He had a home on Long Island where it was claimed that he stashed away his wife and child. None of the fellas had seen them. The doorman looked him up and down before phoning up to Jake and having Jake verify his appointment. The doorman kept reading his newspaper as he nodded in the direction of the elevator. The New York Pillar said: “Flower Phantom Strikes Again.” Ian had read the paper that morning. The Flower Phantom had tied up the editor of a feminist magazine and shaved her head.

  When he got off the elevator a well-tailored white woman was heading in the direction of the elevator. When she saw Ball she turned around and half trotted in the opposite direction. Ball was a large man with broad shoulders. He had large hands and ripe facial features. To some he might have resembled a large ape.

  Brashford opened the door. He was slight with a thin mustache. His face was a reddish-brown color, and he had freckles: from his Irish ancestors, he claimed. He was always carrying on about the Cherokee and Irish in his background, and to skeptics would point out the famous black people with names like McCovy, MacElroy, Kennedy, McClure, McRae, and Shaw. He was frowning as usual, his hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket. The apartment was large and contained expensive furniture but very little of it. There were paintings on the wall that had been given or lent to him by friends from his generation. There were a number of books by Russian authors on his shelves. Dostoyevsky. Turgenev, whom Dostoyevsky accused of lacking ethnicity, and the old man Gogol, who ridiculed the modernist dogma that characters be “well rounded.” There was so much O’Neill memorabilia that the apartment seemed to be a shrine to the dark Irishman. In one room hung a huge portrait of Paul Robeson in Napoleonic military jacket and tights. An album cover on the top of the sleek blond (thirty thousand dollar) stereo system showed Louis Armstrong squint-eyed and grinning in an ambassador’s formal clothes. There were a number of books by American transcendentalists lining the bookshelves, plus oversized technical books on lighting, equipment, and stage design.

  Brashford snickered. “Man. Why don’t you get you some vines. You look like one of those punk people with them jeans and that leather jacket. I’m glad you stopped
wearing that cowboy hat. Boy, they’re right. You can take the nigger out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the nigger.” Brashford wouldn’t end a conversation with anybody without mentioning this adage at least twice. And he was so out of touch that he thought people still said “vines.” Brashford always recommended that Ian consult his personal tailor. “I’ll pay for it,” he had promised.

  “I started not to let you up here. I’ve been working on my second play,” Brashford said.

  That’s a laugh, Ian thought. He’d been telling people for years that he was at work on a second play, but even his strongest supporters realized that he would never finish the play, because he was afraid that the patrons who had lavished him with gifts, prizes, chairs, would abandon him if it weren’t as big a hit as his first play, The Man Who Was an Enigma. In other words, he was afraid of failure, so the fellas said.

  After directing Ball to a seat, Brashford plopped down in the lap of his favorite sofa. Ball came right to the point.

  “You’ve had the manuscript for about a month now, Jake. I wanted to get your reaction.”

  “You want to get a reaction to your new play, huh? You and about thirty thousand others. See those corners? People think all I have time for is to read their manuscripts and scripts. I had to hire an extra secretary just to stand in line at the post office and at the copy places. See those corners?” He pointed to a corner of the room with his eyes.

  “You and these other people calling me from all over the country asking me to read their manuscripts. You guys think that I’m some fucking agent. Get an agent.

  “Anyway, what’s all of this Ham shit? Ham Hill.” Bradford chuckled, then returned to his usual poker face. “You country boys come up here and try to wax all intellectual.” So he had read the play. “Say, would you like to have a cup of coffee? Got this stuff from Tanganyika. Dynamite.” Before Ian could answer, Brashford poured him a small cup from a silver pot he had on the table.

  “I called him Ham to make the point.” The coffee was as strong as it was down home. “Ham was cursed because he saw his father, Noah, naked. In Reckless Eyeballing, Ham Hill is cursed because he allegedly stared at a white woman too long.”

  “Cursed so that he will be black and elongated!”

  “What?”

  “That he be black and elongated. That’s the curse, and when they said elongated they weren’t talking about his arms either. It was the Talmud that laid the curse on Ham and us. Anyway, these white people don’t care how smart you are or how impressive you are.” Brashford rose and walked toward a window. He was the type of guy who couldn’t keep still.

  “Ball, they’re pushing your play because—” Every black guy had a cynical theory about why another black guy was “successful.”

  “Because what?” Ian asked. Brashford was chuckling again. Ian looked at his smooth chin and cheeks. How did he remove all the hair from his face? It was completely bald. Brashford would attribute this to his Cherokee genes.

  “Because you got that white woman’s monologue in the play. The one about her and the lynched nigger being in the same boat. How are they going to be in the same boat? How are some white woman and a lynched castrated nigger going to be in the same boat? The reason you did that was because you wanted to make up with women for Suzanna. The one about the whore who takes on all of those guys in the fields. That was a brilliant play. Brilliant. You remember those fellowships I got you for that play, the awards.” Brashford shook his head.

  “I guess you’re going to throw that up in my face forever.”

  Brashford swirled around. “Look, you little fuck—naw, skip it—”

  “Go on. Tell me what’s on your mind, old man!”

  Brashford stared at him momentarily. “You guys don’t know how hard it was back in the days when they had twilight zone-headed dudes wandering around New York hopped up on some kind of political bullshit and threatening guys like me who wrote the truth. Wrote it the way they saw it. It’s like what Chester Himes said: ‘All that matters now is to keep thinking the unthinkable and writing the unprintable and maybe I can break through this motherfucking race barrier that keeps us niggers suffocated.’ And some of us believed that. Hell, if I’m writing articles about freedom all the time, and they bored with that, then let them be bored, because in the old African tales we came here with—the ones we knew before they took our brains to the cleaners—the god of drama demands that you tell the truth, and so lying is violating some sacred oath in a manner of speaking. So Chester and me, and some of the other guys, have stuck to our guns, but you guys and your generation, you’ve fallen victim to the moral laxity of the times. You ain’t trickin’ nobody. So since these broads have put a hurtin’ on those four one-acters you’ve written since Suzanna, you plan to get yourself off the sex list by writing this pussy play. You’re trying to get off the sex list. Admit it.”

  You should hear about how the fellas explain your success, old man, Ball started to say, but kept his peace. The reason that Chester Himes and Jake Brashford, and the others like them who risked their necks by trying to assert as large a range as their contemporaries, to break barriers, didn’t get as far as some of the others, is because they were abrasive, went around with a chip on their shoulders. They were confrontational. Confrontation was passé. This was the eighties.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Brashford continued. “It’s these white women who are carrying on the attack against black men today, because they struck a deal with white men who run the country. You give us women the jobs, the opportunities, and we’ll take the heat off of you and put it on Mose, is the deal they struck. They have maneuvered these white boys who run the country, but they have to keep the persecution thing up in order to win new followers, and so they jump on po’ Mose. They get Tremonisha and Johnnie Kranshaw to be their proxies in this attack. Sort of like the rich used to hire poor people to fight their wars. As for these Jewish women who are putting a hurtin’ on black dudes in print—they know they can’t change Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so they’re rehearsing on us, and backing these literary sleep-in maids who are coming down on the brothers in a foul and horrendous manner. Now I don’t approve of violence, but I can’t help secretly applauding what that crazy dude did to Tremonisha.” Ian looked at the wall above the Queen Anne sofa that Brashford sat on. There were framed portraits of Eugene O’Neill, and playbills from performances of O’Neill’s plays. Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst dressed as O’Neill characters. Stills of scenes from The Iceman Cometh.

  “How can you agree with what this guy did?” asked Ian. “You northern black intellectuals are always backing lunatics, just like you backed Idi Amin and Mark Essex. It’s irresponsible if you ask me—you’re always complaining, always feeling sorry for yourself—”

  “You don’t know the ropes, youngster.” Brashford rose and walked to the front of his bookshelf. “Any black man, I don’t care how much prominence he has, if he isn’t bitter by the age of forty has lived his life as a fool. We can’t get through the day without somebody inviting us outside. Going out on us. Gettin’ it from every direction. White people, black people, faggots, Jews, Third World women, you name it. Some take to alcohol, some commit suicide; that is, if diabetes and cancer don’t get them first. And homicide. All you hear on the media is stuff about white women getting assaulted. The movies are always about monsters from space, creatures from the deep, all with one thing on their mind: white women. Read all the Nazi books. All about saving white women. Well, according to statistics, being a white woman is the safest thing you can be. If you’re a white woman your chances of being murdered is one in three hundred sixty-nine. If you’re a white man, one in one thirty-one, if you’re a black woman, one in one hundred four, but if you’re a black man it’s one in twenty-one. Get that? One in twenty-one. In other words, being Mose is the riskies’ thing you can be. When you’re born a black man you’re taking your life into your hands. The brothers’ killing of one another has become so
epidemic that the phenomenon was written up in Science magazine. Living like a black man is like doing hand-to-hand combat every day of your life.”

  “But you’re not in combat. You have this terrific studio, and I hear that your home on Long Island is a regular villa. Yet you’re always going after somebody in print. Attacking people. Those nasty letters you write to The New York Pillar. I mean, put a piece of paper in your typewriter and all of a sudden it becomes a war zone.”

  Brashford shook his head. “You guys don’t know how hard it was in the fifties. Nobody gave a damn about you unless you were writing some sensational, titillating play.” You should know, Ball thought.

  “Sure, I lucked up and got a hit. But that doesn’t mean that I was supposed to relax after that. The play ran on Broadway and I invested the money. Everything that I have, I earned, but don’t think that I don’t know that to them I’m just another nigger. Listen, let me tell you a joke. A Jew, a Pole, and a black man arrive at the pearly gates and are told by Saint Peter that they can only enter the Kingdom if they spell a word. The Jew and the Pole are asked to spell God. They do so and are admitted. The black man is asked to spell chrysanthemum. It is always going to be twice as hard for us. In fact,” Brashford continued, “I’m thinking about going into business. I don’t want what happened to those Afro writers of the forties to happen to me. I’m going in the rent-a-male-chauvinist business.”

  “What?”

  “Rent a male chauvinist. This will solve the unemployment problems of black men. See, some of these black feminists and the white ones who are backing them like Becky French have made the afro man into an international scapegoat. Man, you even got German, East Indian, and Japanese women writing things against black men in America, as if the men in their countries spend all of their time doing the dishes and changing diapers.