Reckless Eyeballing

by Ishmael Reed

  “And I’m going to take your advice, too. You’re right. What did you say Jake Brashford called it? Finishing school lumpen. I knew that people who were aware would see through my dumb attempt to be down. Though the critics and the white feminists fell for it, I knew that those working class characters that I tried to write about and their proletariat voices I attempted to mime were phony. All of us who grew up in the middle class want to romanticize people who are worse off than we are. And suppose as Nikki said, and she was right, that some of these teenage welfare mothers started to really try to use that time they have to cultivate their children instead of partying, doing the freaky deaky, and spending the diaper money on reefer. Take them to museums and work with them on their reading. It won’t be long before some of these teenage mothers will begin writing about places like Bed-Stuy themselves, and then all of us debutantes will have to write about ourselves, will have to write about our backgrounds instead of playing tour guides to the exotics.

  “There’s probably somebody in jail right now who’s writing a book that will put our little artsy ghetto plays out of business and make them seem innocuous. Anyway, I’ve begun a new play. You remember how you guys got on me because I went on TV that time and said that when black men weren’t killing each other, they were killing women. Well, I was wrong and you were right. It’s the other way around, according to statistics. The women are the ones who are killing the men, and they get off too, as though there were some kind of bounty on black men. In my new play I tell the truth, and I know Becky and her friends will write me off after it’s produced. It’s about a woman who leaves her husband for another woman only to discover that she’s a batterer. See, this is a problem that the male-loathing feminists don’t want to discuss: women beating up on women. It’s an epidemic, and the women’s shelters are full of women who are fleeing other women. Yes, men should stop beating up women, and women have to stop beating up women, too. And men and women must stop killing each other. The feminists don’t want to bring up these taboo subjects because they feel it will hurt their cause. Well, if they’re afraid to tell the truth because they feel that it will play into the hands of their enemies, then their enemies have won. Same thing with the Jews and the blacks. If they are afraid to tell the truth for fear of furnishing ammunition to their enemies or if they’re trying to deflect legitimate criticism by dismissing it as anti-Semitic, or racist, then the Nazis will have won and the Klan will have won, and all of the other bigots under the sheets, and setting fires to synagogues will have won. Boy, I sure have put a bug in your ear, so I guess I will end this letter. Dred Creme is lying in my lap, he’s been practicing all day and I just gave him some warm milk and am about to put him to bed. Tomorrow’s his birthday and I’m going to take him to the circus. Take care, Ian, and who knows, one day you’ll answer your door down there on that beautiful island of yours and you’ll see Dred Creme and me standing there with our bags—”

  I hope not, Ian thought. He got into the back of the Citroën that his mother had sent for him. The chauffeur started to gibber something in that inscrutable creole the poorer classes of people spoke on the island. “Shut up, you black monkey,” Ian said in the mother tongue, a signal that he didn’t want to be disturbed. The car passed through the city of narrow streets and houses, which resembled the style of those in New Orleans. It passed the market place where the women were selling fruit and vegetables that were so large they could have been entered in the Guinness Book of Records, or Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The black women down here walked with their hips swinging and sat in the market with their legs apart. Up north there was the wizened hoary Protestant white father god brought to North America by the Puritans who looked after things, but down here it was Mama. Island and water deities.

  The love had some spice to it, the sex was piping hot, and the sun made you drunk. On one side of the island was the Caribbean, soft, peaceful, coated with specks of light from the sun, but on the other side was the killer Atlantic. Two things that blacks all over the Americas had phobias about: the Atlantic, bloodhounds.

  Soon the car was leaving the city where castles and hovels existed alongside one another and moving out into the country. On one mountain stood a bronze statue of Koffee Martin, the national hero. On another mountain in the distance he could see the Shoboater estate where Paul’s family lived in the style of the colonialists. Once in a while, Paul’s father could be seen in town. He was a very fair-skinned man who dressed like Noël Coward and used a walking stick, and did things for the queen of the Mother Country. They drove for about forty-five minutes until they came to his mother’s spacious home and lawns. He walked up the steps, the chauffeur following him, carrying his bags. His mother came out and opened her arms. They embraced for a long time.

  The maid was the color of carbon paper. She curtsied as Martha Ball and her son entered the house. Some members of the household staff were also present, and they greeted him as copiously as the first maid had. One of the boys—a man who must have been in his early fifties—took his bags upstairs. “Well,” she asked, “did you bring them?”

  “I didn’t forget, Ma,” he said, taking the record albums from a bag and handing them to her. They were by Tina Turner. His mother and her friends were crazy about Tina Turner, way down here, and come to think of it his mother did resemble Tina Turner, full in the thighs, her hair worn down the sides of her face, and the kind of lips that you get when you cross an Arawak and a Congolese.

  “Boy, you know how much I love that girl. The United States, they may be how you say, Rehob, but they produce Tina Turner. A red woman like us.” She placed the albums on a hall table. The fellas had said that Ms. Turner’s song “Private Dancer” symbolized the bond between white men and Third World women all over the Americas. It was their love anthem.

  “Your dinner will be coming soon.” He’d eaten on the airplane but he knew that she’d have to have her way. She always had her way. There was no arguing with her. He knew that he would have to eat again.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she frowned. “Boy, why you wearin’ that black leather jacket, those jeans and what are those, cowboy boots?” She looked down at his boots. “Who you tryin’ to be, Roy Rogers? You done gone to the United States. You done become an American.” She wished that he would come home. Her friends in government would give him an ambassador’s post. Many literary men down here were ambassadors, mayors. She wanted him to leave New York. He could even become a banker in one of the overseas banks. Chase Manhattan.

  “I may live in the United States, Ma, but my soul is here, my very character was formed by New Oyo.”

  “Go on with ya. You have a tongue like your—” She started to say it. All of these years she’d resisted the temptation to tell him the secret. One day she would. They came to the end of the long hall with its hardwood floors, its high ceilings, the vases of flowers placed on tables, the autographed portraits on each wall. Everything was gleaming. Presidents, senators, literary figures, great artists. Some said that she actually influenced the policies of the nation through every president who’d been elected, since they were all believers.

  They walked into the dining room with its view of the Caribbean and mountains gingerly touched by clouds. On the slopes of one he could see some goats grazing. A woman was standing with her back to them staring out of the window. She was enjoying the view and held a glass of champagne in her hand. She turned around. He recognized her from her pictures. It was Johnnie Kranshaw. She was very dark and had what some called “dancing eyes.” She wore her hair short and was wearing what some called an “African dress,” though it didn’t have the splashy colors of the native women, nor the overstated jewelry. Ms. Kranshaw was a Protestant, all right.

  25

  “Ms. Kranshaw. I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said when his mother introduced them. That he had. The fellas said that if she hadn’t been born the white man would have invented her and other vile and terrible things.

  “Your
reputation precedes you, Mr. Ball. I read the review in the international edition of the Herald Tribune. Looks as if you have a hit.”

  “We think so,” he said. They sat down for dinner, and the girl brought out the oxtail soup. She served on her right instead of on the diner’s left. Martha Ball issued a quick insult. Called the girl a black idiot in the language of the Mother Country. The maid stared dumbly and began to serve from the left. Martha was a stern disciplinarian and was always complaining about how hard it was to keep good household servants. About a third of the youth who lived in this little country town had left for the city, where the unemployment rate was staggering, while still others had traveled overseas to the Mother Country where they were stealing and pimping like every other first generation of immigrants who find themselves subject to hostile treatment and who are barred from the legitimate ways of earning money.

  Though some would have us believe that the Italian-, Irish-, and Jewish-Americans went from Ellis Island to comfort without no in-between, in their poor days they could match any black “underclass” statistic for statistic. The writers who tell the truth about those Hell’s Kitchen and Lower East Side days are unwelcome. Mike Gold is neglected; he reminds them of the time when they didn’t have a pot to piss in. The warts of black Americans were right there for everybody to see and even close-upped in the mass media that harassed them; other groups applied a lot of makeup to theirs. Martha was upset about the youth and often talked to the president about it. Their presence in the Mother Country was giving rise to neo-Nazism, and even the Netherlands, considered a socialistic country, had elected two Nazis from Rotterdam.

  “You see where they bomb the Club Med; they going to chase the tourists away. Bad as the economy is. They say they want to chase our foreign friends away, but can they run it? No. This place will end up looking like Haiti, I tell you. I told the president he should crack their coconut heads. They mess up.” Some of the young radicals had been rounded up by the police, who were imported from the Mother Country.

  “They’re nothing but a bunch of illiterate peasants,” Martha said. She had been an illiterate peasant herself at one time, hanging her one and only dress on the clothesline each day and trying to make do with a ragged child under a leaking corrugated tin roof. It had all changed after the contest between her and her only rival, Abiahu.

  “They want independence. What they know ’bout independence? Who in their right minds would give them a nation? Way it is now, we a part of the Mother Country. The shelves in the stores are full. There’s plenty of petrol, perfume, fashions.” Johnnie Kranshaw was picking at her soup. Ian could tell that she was embarrassed. He’d seen her name in the newspapers in connection with benefits for left-wing causes. Reading for political prisoners and the millions starving in the Third World. Noticing her discomfort at hearing his mother’s views, he changed the subject.

  “Ms. Kranshaw,” he began. “I know that the thousands of your fans would like to know where you disappeared to. You’d become a mother goddess of the feminist movement. And then, at the height of your success, poof,” he said with a wave of his hand. His mother gazed at his hands. Articulate, expressive like his father’s. He was huge and muscular like his father, too, and had prodigious lips, and a snug nose. Johnnie Kranshaw leaned back. The Caribbean magic seemed to have brought her peace. The photos on her Playbills made her look combative.

  “Every time I run into an American at the hotel, they ask me that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ball said. “I didn’t mean to be intrusive—”

  “She has a right to keep her business to herself,” his mother said, placing her hand gently atop Johnnie Kranshaw’s. They looked each other in the eye.

  “It’s all right, Martha,” Johnnie Kranshaw finally said. “I know that many a night I’ve asked myself that question over at that tourist trap with a view. Chain smoking. If it wasn’t for your mother inviting me out here on weekends I don’t know what I’d do.” The maid entered. She came and picked up the soup bowls and placed them on a tray. Martha was glaring at her. The maid’s hands were trembling. Johnnie Kranshaw continued: “They should put a skull and crossbones label on the elixir bottle of success in the United States. It’s thrilling, all right. The interviews, being recognized on the street, having credit cards, meeting people you’ve seen in People magazine, the special treatment at the hotels, favors piling up in your mailbox and people asking you to endorse things. Success in the United States is like the potent rum you have down here, makes you want to do the Soca all night. It gives your soul a gorgeous feeling, but the next morning you have a hangover.”

  The three of them laughed. Like Tremonisha Smarts’ plays, her plays were grim, even though the fellas called her a clown. He remembered the cruel things that he and the fellas had said about her. “I should have known when [she mentioned the name of the leading feminist critic] called me ‘seductive’ and ‘ravishing’ something must have been up. I should have heeded the warning signs. You know, in the original version of my play No Good Man, the man and wife get back together at the end. Becky changed the play so that it had the wife running off with another woman.” Ian cleared his throat. He began to have a coughing spasm. “Anything wrong, son?” his mother asked. “No,” he said.

  “I went along with the program. I didn’t care what black men and women were saying about me. Why should I? They hardly attended the theaters where my plays were shown, but they always had plenty of opinions.” When she said black men she looked at Ian. He looked down at the plate. It was a dish from Guadaloupe, some sort of fish with curry. Ian was beginning to miss the States. He could do with a hamburger along about now. They had a Wendy’s and a Burger King in town. They were informal embassies where the youth went to practice their American styles. They wore jeans and played Prince and George Clinton on their radios. McDonald’s now occupied a fortress building that had been used by the Mother Country during wars waged by Europeans over the spoils of New Oyo.

  He continued to listen to Johnnie Kranshaw’s narrative. She had a wholesome figure, he could tell, and for fifty-two years of age she still had all the stuff in the right places. He’d never made it with anybody over fifty, but the fellows say that after making it with a fifty-year-old you don’t want none of these young women who have the devil with a red mouth where their pussies should be. He wondered how it would be if he was holding her titties and giving it to her from behind, maintaining his pleasure by concentrating on something dull. He wondered how it would be to give her what the Germans call a durchficken. He put it out of his mind. Besides, the only lover she seemed to be fucking was the Caribbean sun.

  “One day I was having lunch with Becky at the Four Seasons, and during the course of our conversation I asked her to see if she could get a friend of mine’s book published. The book was about natural childbirth and the black community, and do you know what she said?” His mother and Ian stopped eating. They definitely were interested in what Johnnie Kranshaw was going to say.

  “Boy, did that bitch get hot. She turned red as a beet, and started talking so loud some of the other people in the restaurant started looking our way. She said that neither she nor her friends in publishing would have anything to do with a book whose subject matter was even remotely connected to the penis.

  “She said that the penis had been used as a weapon against all women for thousands of years and that there would be no peace in the world as long as men were not disarmed of their penises.” The fellas were right about Becky, Ian thought.

  “What did you say?” Martha asked. Johnnie Kranshaw closed her eyes and transmitted her answer to Becky. “I turned to the bitch, cool as you can be, and I said, ‘Heifer, you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for some man’s thing.’”

  “Well, what did she do?” Martha asked.

  “She ran out of the restaurant. Well, two days went by and I was worried about her, I mean she used to call me every day. So I called the office and they told me that she had le
ft instructions that I never call her at home again. Two weeks later, my photo was supposed to appear on the cover of MaMa, you know, the big feminist magazine. They had Tremonisha’s picture on there and said that just as surely as Eddie Murphy had replaced Richard Pryor, Tremonisha would take my place. They took back all of the praise they’d heaped upon No Good Man, and next thing I know, nobody in New York was doing my work. And Becky had said that my play was the most important play of the 1980s, but I just picked up her biography, Pilgrim’s Daughter, and I’m not even in the index. I read about this package that a travel agency had for Caribbean travel and came down here for two weeks. I stayed. And thanks to your mother and her friends, I’ve met some people who respect me for what I am.” She burst into tears. Martha Ball rose, went over to her and comforted her. Ball was embarrassed. He thought of all the pressure her play No Good Man had put on the fellas.