by Ishmael Reed
“What did you want to ask me?” she asked.
“Well, if I may be frank, why do middle-class women like you go out with guys who want to beat you up and take your money?” He and the fellas always wondered why the musicians got all of the pussy. They concluded that it was because they did all of their talking with their instruments. They were nonverbal and so the bitches could run their mouths without fear of being interrupted or being called on the bullshit they were laying down. They also had theories about what the mouthpieces were substitutes for.
“It’s none of your business,” she said.
“These guys beat you up. Why don’t you date somebody from your own class?”
“Leave.” She pointed to the door. She ah…looked…well, cute when she got mad. His mother’s image appeared in his mind. She was giving him a stern look. He’d have to cool it. He wasn’t as close to any woman as he was to his mother. Mama’s boy? Why not. Ten years ago, when Freud was still riding high, you couldn’t say that, but now that even some of his staunchest supporters were stating publicly that there was no empirical foundation whatsoever for his theories, you could say that you dug your mother without anybody, you know, looking at you funny. He started for the door. She’d gone to the couch and was sobbing on her arm. No. He decided. He’d have this out. “And another thing.” She had her knees up, and he could see some of that excellent area above her knees: Her thighs were calling out to him, Ian, Ian, they were saying. He felt like pulling a Clark Gable, in that scene from Gone With the Wind, taking her into his arms—she beating his chest and kicking—and going into the bedroom to comfort her and stuff. But since he had her attention he decided to go for broke.
“I know I’m from the South, and I’m not all that hip to the way northern urban proletariat people talk, but some of the fellas say that they can’t follow the dialect in Wrong-Headed Man. I mean, if they can’t follow it, how are these white women who praise it so enthusiastically able to follow it! What do they know that the people who grew up actually speaking this language don’t know? The fellas say—”
“What do those hardheaded fools say about me?”
“They say that you know as much about the way black people talk as Al Capp knew about Indian languages—” She started screaming and shouting. Then she started throwing things. He got out of there fast. He knew that he’d fucked up this time. Randy Shank was in the lobby, sitting at his desk. He was a little drunk.
“How come she let you up there and won’t let none of the other fellas in there? Only people I see going up there are broads. Man, some of those chicks look rough. They could have gone into the wrestling business. I’ll bet you’re working on more than that play up there. Does she stopwatch the foreplay? I’ll bet a cold biddy like that times her sexual orgasms.” He then began to ramble.
“That Becky French fucked over my play. I’ll fix her. That Flower Phantom. That dude is right. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Ball started to punch out Shank. These northern guys were always pushing him. He was always having to invite them outside. Always fucking with him. He was just about around the corner from Tre’s building when Shank came running out.
“The bitch wants to talk to you.”
Randy Shank waited for him to come into the lobby. He handed him the downstairs phone. He had a silly mocking grin. Ball grabbed the phone from the sucker.
“Yes,” he said. Randy was trying to listen, peering over the top of the newspaper he pretended to be reading. Headlines read: FLOWER PHANTOM’S NEW VICTIM.
“I don’t want our…what just happened to come between us and the play. We have to forget about our differences and think of the play. I guess I lost my head. Throwing those things at you like that. We’ll work tomorrow.” He noticed Shank trying to spy. He put his hand over the receiver.
“Very well.” He didn’t want to let on how relieved he was.
14
They’d been working from four to eight P.M. She had smoked a pack of cigarettes. When he went to the bathroom during a break he noticed a lot of stress pills in her medicine cabinet. Their exchanges since the argument had been cordial, civilized. A word she used a lot. This or that is so civilized, she’d say.
She knew her business. He had a tendency to tell rather than show, and she was teaching him the art of description. The art of movement. The art of character differentiation. She had recommended some minor changes in the script, having mostly to do with his tendency toward lengthy dialogue (Brashford’s influence). Some of his lines had to be snipped. He had a tendency toward the robust, having grown up under a big sky. A sky uncluttered by skyscrapers and other attempts to “make order from chaos.” He’d read that she had received a Phi Beta Kappa from a school in New York somewhere. The school where she met Becky. She’d had her stuff produced in a lot of workshops before hitting the big time with Wrong-Headed Man, which had become an international hit. One of the posters hanging in her living room showed a scene from Wrong-Headed Man, a black man with the missionary held over his head. He wears an idiotic grin. The viewer was provided with a good look at the missionary’s thighs and bosom. He seems to be handling her with his big, hairy fists as easily as one would hold a doll.
The doorbell rang. She opened it to a white man. He was breathing hard. Sweating. She escorted him into the room.
“This is Detective Lawrence O’Reedy of the New York Police Department,” she said proudly. The handshake was polite.
“He’s trying to find the man who cut my hair.”
“A hair fetishist,” O’Reedy said, frowning at Ball.
“A hair fetishist? I thought the newspaper said that he cut off her hair because of World War Two, or something,” Ball said. Tremonisha glared at him. O’Reedy ignored him.
“I came over to show you the profile of the man. It’s based on your description of his face.” She looked at the photo and then to Ball, who averted his eyes. There was a silence.
“Doesn’t look like him at all,” she said. “He’s heavier in the face. Like Ball here.” Detective O’Reedy stared at Ball. Ball squirmed in his chair.
“We’ll do another sketch,” Detective O’Reedy said.
“Since he was wearing a mask, we can only approximate his features.” He studied Ball. Like Clint Eastwood, his idol, Detective O’Reedy talked with his face.
“Ball is working on a play. I’m helping him improve it. I’m making some minor changes.”
“Playwright, huh?”
“Yes. Yes, sir,” Ball said.
“Well, I have to be going,” he said.
“Thanks for all you’re doing,” Tremonisha said, escorting him to the door.
Ball heard them talking low as they approached the door in the hall. Almost in a whisper. They talked that way for about three minutes. He heard the door shut. She returned to him. It was getting dark and he could see the moon beginning to appear over the East River. He was putting on his coat to leave. Their eyes met. They were that way for a long time. He could see her grunting and groaning as he moved his hips under her body. He wondered was she thinking the same thing. Probably not. She finally said it. He wondered what took her so long.
“You got a thing about black women. They’re either vamps or being subservient to some man.” She stressed man. “And then you give the old whorish white bitches in your play all the good lines, and don’t leave no good lines for the sisters. I know all about your problem.”
“What do you want me to do, Tre?” he said, eager to mend his ways.
“I want you to do better.” She blew some smoke from the cigarette she held.
“I’ll certainly work on it.” Outside he waited for the elevator. He was stunned at what she was saying about white women. Calling them whores and things. Making fun of Becky. The white women made her. They produced her. They promoted her plays. They told her what to say on television. They put her on the cover of their magazines. They told all of their readers and followers to read her. They analyzed the motives behind t
he male reviewers’ unfavorable reviews before they’d even appeared. They arranged her trips and tours; they called up the hotels; they bought her tickets; they would have flown the planes if asked; they got her on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” network night shows, call-in shows, and kept her on Broadway for six months breaking all records, and here she was calling white women all kinds of bitches and telling him what he should do for the sisters. He thought about the picture of her on the podium at Town Hall, kissing some elderly southern novelist; almost knocking her over with affection, and how she said, when she won her honor, that she wanted to spend the time with Becky and celebrate her success with all of her friends.
Up north, Ball decided, things were awfully complex. He couldn’t wait until the day after the opening of his play. He would go south, visit his mother for a few weeks.
15
He’d received a call from Becky French that morning. Can you please get over here this morning at 9:30 A.M. No hello or nothing. When he reached the office, Mr. Ickey, the receptionist, the man with Humpty Dumpty’s shape, lacking any perceptible waist, peered up at him. He smiled a decadent sleazy smile. Probably a frustrated romantic, Ball thought. Ickey signaled for him to go in and returned to reading the newspaper. Ball could hear the discussion coming from behind the door. He recognized Tremonisha’s voice.
“You’re going to change the entire meaning of the play. You hell hussy. Everything you touch you corrupt.” The voice that replied was equally shrill.
“I’m not going to produce that play as it is. We have…standards to uphold.” In his mind’s eye, he could see Becky shake her head like a filly when she said standards.
“It’s not standards. You’re worried about that monologue. It’s political, isn’t it? You don’t like the monologue, you bitch, admit it. You white feminists sound more like the white man with each passing day. In fact, the only thing your dipshit movement has produced is more white men. Standards. All the mediocre shit that you produce by these junior womanists. You’ve got your nerve talking about standards. Why do you always feel the need to castrate the black man?”
“How can you say that? You’re the one they picketed.” That remark from French was followed by silence.
“That was your fault. You and that mutant bacteria out there. Your assistant. You were the one who listed me as a spokesperson for all black women in that press release. Writing The Black Woman’s story. You insisted that I write in the scene about the man throwing his wife, the missionary, downstairs. In my version, she only converts him. You wanted to sensationalize it.”
“I don’t remember.”
“All of you white bitches are like that. You don’t remember. You treacherous cunt. Every time I’d appear on television you’d call. Telling me how I didn’t sound like a dedicated feminist. How I should change my hairdo. How I ought to put more punch into my attack on black men. What’s you bitches’ hang-up about black men anyway? You’re more likely to be raped by your daddy, your brother, or your date, man or woman.”
“Tremonisha, have you been taking Valium again? I told you about that. It makes you sound, well, you know, unreasonable.”
“It’s not the Valium, it’s you, you’re the biggest depressant I know.”
“Look, Ms., I made you and I can destroy you. I filled that theater with women and got you those interviews in the magazines. You were nothing. Reading your diatribes in quaint little coffee shops on the Lower East Side. I created you. I gave you prominence. But don’t get smart. There’s always somebody else who’ll take your place.”
“Do me like you did Johnnie Kranshaw, huh? Whatever became of her? Where did she go? Answer me, bitch, where did she go!”
Ball used the silence that followed as an opportunity to enter the office. He cleared his throat. They were both frozen toward each other like two cats with humped backs. Their jaws were puffed. He could smell the violence. Becky was lighting a cigarette, her hands trembling, and Tremonisha was staring at her, her hands on her hips.
“You’re not to come into this office unless you knock,” Becky said. She was shaking like a wet dog.
“I’m sorry, the receptionist told me to come in.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Ian. This bitch wants to fuck with your play. The same way they did with mine.”
“Look, Tre, nobody was twisting your arm,” Becky said, cuttingly. They were staring at each other. Their chests were heaving. “Nobody begged you, Tre. You didn’t complain as long as the money was coming in. As long as you could take those trips to Europe, to learn and to grow, as you put it. You didn’t complain then.” Tremonisha looked at the floor.
“I was young.”
“Maybe you want to be alone. I can leave,” Ball said.
“Tell him what you want to do with his play. She wants to change your play so that the mob victim is just as guilty as the mob. She wants to drop Cora Mae’s line about their being in the same boat. That’s that collective guilt bullshit that’s part of this jive New York intellectual scene. She wants you to change the whole meaning of the play. She’s saying that the man who reckless eyeballed Cora Mae was just as guilty as the men who murdered him. She feels that Ham Hill’s staring at Cora was tantamount to a violent act. If looks could kill? Huh, Becky? She’s saying that Ham Hill murdered Cora with his eyes.” Tremonisha and Becky were exchanging stares that were so dense he felt that they were probably looking right through each other.
He thought of them in the same households all over the Americas while the men were away on long trips to the international centers of the cotton or sugar markets. The secrets they exchanged in the night when there were no men around, during the Civil War in America when the men were in the battlefield and the women were in the house. Black and white, sisters and half-sisters. Mistresses and wives. There was something going on here that made him, a man, an outsider, a spectator, like someone who’d stumbled into a country where people talked in sign language and he didn’t know the signs. After a long silence Becky said, turning to him: “I just want you to tone it down a little.”
As a climax to this extraordinary scene, Tremonisha started for the door. “Come on, Ian. Buy me a drink. Let’s get out of here. First she cuts the white women out of the lynching scene, and next she wants you to change the whole meaning of the play.” Ball stood there. He thought of a long article he’d read about how plays about women were hot, and that anybody who could put together a halfway decent one could be assured of a performance. And anyway, what did this argument between these women have to do with him? Hadn’t the black ones said that the only thing that had happened since Martin Luther King, Jr., was the black woman, and weren’t the white ones telling themselves that they had come a long way baby? What did a quarrel between these sisters, hugging each other one minute and scratching out each other’s eyes the next have to do with him? “Well, Ball,” Tre finally said. “Are you coming?” He stood his ground. She went to the door and slammed it, but not before giving them both disgusted looks. Ian turned to Becky and said: “Can we talk?” She smiled.
16
Paul Shoboater, critic for the Downtown Mandarin, kept Ian waiting. He looked at his watch. Paul was forty-five minutes late. He was like that, especially toward up-north fellas. They were from the same neck of the woods, but back home he and Paul didn’t move in the same circles. Shoboater had been in the North as long as Ball had, but refused to drop his down home accent. Shoboater knew that Ball would probably be uncomfortable in this kind of place, with its white and black checkerboard tile floor, and waitresses in black silk dresses and white aprons, and tuxedoed waiters. Ball sat at the bar, sipping from a glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The bartender had sighed when Ball ordered it. Shoboater finally entered, or swept in. He saw Ball, but pretended not to notice him as he greeted some of his friends. Artists and critics from the downtown art scene. He finally reached the spot where Ball was seated, and gave him a cool handshake. The maitre d’ came up bowing an
d scraping before Shoboater, greeting him as he escorted the pair to Shoboater’s reserved table. Ball followed Shoboater, carrying his Pabst with him and finally placing it on the white linen tablecloth. When the waiter asked them what kind of cocktails they wanted, Shoboater ordered some vintage wine, and Ball ordered another Pabst. The waiter and Shoboater shared a chuckle. The fellas called Shoboater “Eye Spy” because they claimed that his column for the Mandarin was actually a literary reconnaissance mission for tourists who wanted to become acquaintances with the trends and styles of Afro-American culture. An expedition into the heart of darkness, as it were. The fellas claimed that his position made him lazy because his editors didn’t know whether he was faking it or telling the truth. Others said that his real role was that of a hit man for modernism, Pound’s “botched bitch gone in the teeth” reeling from blow after successive blow. The modernists could take Sartre’s late disavowal of existentialism, and the failure of Marxism, or even the death of abstract expressionism, but Freud’s fall, that was the severest blow, and finished off the movement that had been traveling a steady intellectual downhill since the revelations about Stalinism. Freud had achieved the status of a Holy Man for them.
Brashford had claimed that the Jews ran the Downtown Mandarin, and that even though it carried articles that opposed quotas and affirmative action as methods for subsidizing blacks, fifty percent of the revenue of Jewish organizations was derived from government subsidies, and though they had put Shoboater up to claiming that black talent got by because of liberal guilt, the same thing was said about Jewish talent in the fifties; that the rise of the American Jewish novelist coincided with a wave of guilt that swept the country after the discovery of the Holocaust. The fellas also ridiculed Shoboater’s “show-out” ornamental prose style that made his work nearly unreadable—they said that if his prose style were a horse someone would have put it out of its misery long ago.
