by Ishmael Reed
Praise for THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED
“The Last Days of Louisiana Red blends paradox, hyperbole, understatement and signifyin’ so expertly you can almost hear a droll black voice telling the tales as you read it.”
—Barbara Smith, New Republic
“Funky, hip, and cool.… The language is re-cycled garbage that sometimes, amazingly, becomes poetry and almost always is authentic, alive.”
—Choice
“A tangle of allusions, an allegorical puzzle that keeps the mind on its toes.… Mr. Reed exercises in jokes and wisecracks, scholarship and satire. All of which makes for a frenetic form of vaudeville show.”
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
“This is a very alive novel of living folklore; sometimes Reed’s prose feels like walking through a field teeming with wild game which jumps out from under your feet.”
—Martin Washburn, Village Voice
“This novel disguised as a verbal comic strip is brilliant and funny.”
—Library Journal
“Reed at his bravura best in the use of language and parody.”
—Publishers Weekly
BY ISHMAEL REED
ESSAYS
Writin’ Is Fightin’
God Made Alaska for the Indians
Shrovetide in Old New OrleOns
Airing Dirty Laundry
NOVELS
Japanese by Spring
The Terrible Threes
Reckless Eyeballing
The Terrible Twos
Flight to Canada
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Mumbo Jumbo
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
POETRY
New and Collected Poems
A Secretary to the Spirits
Chattanooga
Conjure
Catechism of D Neoamerican Hoodoo Church
PLAYS
Mother Hubbard, formerly Hell Hath No Fury
The Ace Boons
Savage Wilds
Hubba City
ANTHOLOGIES
The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology
The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology
Calafia
19 Necromancers From Now
Multi-America: Essays on Cultural War and Cultural Peace
THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED
Ishmael Reed
Copyright © 1974 by Ishmael Reed
First Dalkey Archive edition, 2000
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Reed, Ishmael, 1938-
The last days of Louisiana Red / Ishmael Reed. — 1st Dalkey Archive ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6531-6
1. Private investigators—California—Berkeley—Fiction. 2. Voodooism—California—Berkeley—Fiction. 3. Berkeley (Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Cookery (Okra)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.E365 L3 2000
813’.54—dc21
00020974
This publication is partially supported by grants from the Lannan Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Dalkey Archive Press
www.dalkeyarchive.com
IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR FLETCHER, JR.
THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED
GUMBO À LA CREOLE
Gumbo, of all other products of the New Orleans cuisine, represents a most distinctive type of evolution of good cookery under the hands of the famous Creole cuisinières of old New Orleans. Indeed, the word “evolution” fails to apply when speaking of Gumbo, for it is an original conception, a something sui generis in cooking, peculiar to this ancient Creole city alone, and to the manner born. With equal ability the olden Creole cooks saw the possibilities of exquisite and delicious combinations of making Gumbo, and hence we have many varieties! till the occult science of making a good “Gumbo à la Creole” seems too fine an inheritance of gastronomic lore to remain forever hidden away in the cuisines of this old Southern metropolis. The following recipes, gathered with care from the best Creole housekeepers of New Orleans, have been handed down from generation to generation.
The Picayune Creole Cook Book
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 1
California, named for the negro
Queen Califia
California, The Out-Yonder State
California, refuge for survivors
of the ancient continent of
Lemuria
California, Who, one day, prophets
say will also sink
The story begins in Berkeley, California. The city of unfinished attics and stairs leading to strange towers.
Berkeley, California, was incorporated on April Fools’ Day, 1878; it is an Aries town: Fire, Cardinal, Head (brain children who gamble with life, according to Carl Payne Tobey, author of Astrology of Inner Space).
Aries: activity, exaltation. PROPAGANDA. Self Assertiveness. Now, that would characterize Ed Yellings.
Ed Yellings was an american negro itinerant who popped into Berkeley during the age of Nat King Cole. People looked around one day and there he was.
When Osiris entered Egypt, cannibalism was in vogue. He stopped men from eating men. Thousands of years later when Ed Yellings entered Berkeley, there was a plague too, but not as savage. After centuries of learning how to be subtle, the scheming beast that is man had acquired the ability to cover up.
When Ed Yellings entered Berkeley “men were not eating men”; men were inflicting psychological stress on one another. Driving one another to high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, which only made it worse, since the stabbings, rapings, muggings went on as usual. Ed Yellings, being a Worker, decided he would find some way to end Louisiana Red, which is what all of this activity was called. The only future Louisiana Red has is a stroke.
Ed gained a reputation for being not only a Worker but a worker too. No one could say that this loner didn’t pay his way. He worked at odd jobs: selling tacos on University Avenue across the street from the former Santa Fe passenger station, now a steak joint; during the Christmas season peddling Christmas trees in a lot on San Pablo across the street from the Lucky Dog pet shop and the V.I.P. massage parlor.
He even worked in an outdoor beer joint on Euclid Street a few doors above the U.C. Corner.
Since he worked with workers, he gained a knowledge of the workers’ lot. He knew that their lives were bitter. He experienced their surliness, their downtroddenness, their spitefulness and the hatred they had for one another and for
their wives and their kids. He saw them repeatedly go against their own best interests as they were swayed and bedazzled by modern subliminal techniques, manipulated by politicians and corporate tycoons, who posed as their friends while sapping their energy. Whose political campaigns amounted to: “Get the Nigger.”
Louisiana Red was the way they related to one another, oppressed one another, maimed and murdered one another, carving one another while above their heads, fifty thousand feet, billionaires flew in custom-made jet planes equipped with saunas tennis courts swimming pools discotheques and meeting rooms decorated like a Merv Griffin Show set. Like J. P. Morgan, who once made Millard Fillmore cool his heels, these men stood up powerful senators of the United States—made them wait and fidget in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel.
The miserable workers were anti-negro, anti-chicano, anti-puerto rican, anti-asian, anti-native american, had forgotten their guild oaths, disrespected craftsmanship; produced badly made cars and appliances and were stimulated by gangster-controlled entertainment; turned out worms in the tuna fish, spiders in the soup, inflamatory toys, tumorous chickens, d.d.t. in fish and the brand new condominium built on quicksand.
What would you expect from innocent victims caught by the american tendency towards standardization, who monotonously were assigned to churning out fragments instead of the whole thing?
Sherwood Anderson, the prophet, had warned of the consequences of standardization and left Herbert Hoover’s presence when he found that Hoover was a leveler: I don’t care if my car looks like the other fellow’s, as long as it gets me to where I’m going was how Hoover saw it.
Ed wanted to free the worker from Louisiana Red because Louisiana Red was killing the worker. It would be a holy occupation to give Louisiana Red the Business, Ed thought. Ed thought about these things a lot. Ed was a thinker and a Worker. After working at his odd jobs Ed would go to his cottage on Milvia Street and read up on botany theology music poetry corporation law american Business practices, and it was this reading as well as his own good instincts and experiences that led him to believe that he would help the worker by entering Business and recruiting fellow Workers. Not the primitive and gross businessmen of old who introduced the late movies on television, but the kind of Business people who made the circuit of 1890s America, contributing mystery and keeping their Business to themselves.
His reading directed him to an old company that was supposed to be the best in the Business. Their Board of Directors was very stringent; cruel, some would say. Ed passed their test and received his certificate from Blue Coal, the Chairman of the Board. Shortly afterwards he received an assignment from his new employers; they sent him to New Orleans on a mission to collect the effects of a certain astrologer, diviner and herbalist who had been done in by some pretty rough industrial spies working for the competition. Ed’s assignment was to collect this man’s bookkeeping and records and to continue this Businessman’s Work. (His Board of Directors had distributed franchises all over the world; the New Orleans branch was one.)
Some say that it was after Ed returned from New Orleans that he abandoned the rarefied world of ideals and put his roots to Business; gave up being a short-order cook and handyman and became instead the head of a thriving “Gumbo” Business: Solid Gumbo Works.
He chose a very small staff of Workers—very small, because Ed had learned through bitter experience that if you go over a secret number you will run into an informer who leaks industrial secrets to industrial spies, or even worse a maniac who not only wishes to self-destruct but to bring down the whole corporation as well.
Ed rented an office on the Berkeley Marina and started making his Gumbo. He was deliberately cryptic about the kind of Gumbo he was into; it certainly wasn’t “Soul Food.”
Ed’s Gumbo became the talk of the town, though people could only guess what Ed was up to in this city named for Bishop George Berkeley, the philosopher, who coined the phrase “Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way.”
When asked his purpose, Ed would merely answer that he had gone into the Gumbo Business.
Though no one could testify to having seen it or tasted it, Ed’s Gumbo began making waves; though ordinary salesmen hated it, distributors wouldn’t touch it and phony cuisinières gave it a bad name, no one could deny that, however unexplained, there was some kind of operation going on at Ed’s Gumbo premises: cars could be seen arriving and departing; others got theirs through subscription.
Whatever Ed was selling, the people were buying, and rather than put his product on the shelves next to the synthetic wares of a poisonous noxious time, Ed catered to a sophisticated elite. In a town like Berkeley, as in any other American small town, superstitiousness and primitive beliefs were rife and so was their hideous Sister, gossip.
Ghosts too. The computer isn’t to blame; the problems of The Bay Area Rapid Transit are due to the burial grounds of the Costanoan indians it disturbs as it speeds through the East Bay.
CHAPTER 2
Ed was a Piscean, and so he had a whole lot of passion. Too much passion. It was all that passion that made him fall in love with the beautiful Ruby who had been Miss Atlantic City. Maybe it was those cowgirl clothes and boots she wore the night he asked her to dance at Harry’s, the businessman’s lunch place. (Its booths resembled those of a victorian law office; it was dark inside all the time. That’s why exiled New Yorkers drank there: it reminded them of home.)
Ed and Ruby danced all night to Al Green’s singing of The Oakland National Anthem. They danced so they didn’t even hear Percy, owner of the jack-johnson black derby and ’39 Pontiac, announce “Last Call.”
It was all passion and no intellect that made him take her home to his italianate cottage on Milvia and succumb to her clamping squeezing sensual techniques. Before he knew it he was in her vice.
Now, Solid Gumbo Works was becoming so prosperous that when they were married they were able to move into a fine old home in the Berkeley Hills equipped with fireplaces, gaslight medallions, stained-glass windows, and rooms with 12-foot ceilings; in the back was an old stable which he had made into private rooms.
He didn’t want to have children, but she was always miscalculating her “phase of the moon”; she was always talking that way as if influenced by forces in the remote universe, like she was born of a comet or meteorite. How else could you explain Ruby’s strange power over people; she always got her way. She could lie so cleverly that you became convinced that it was the truth even though you knew it was a lie. She would control people and abuse them, but they always forgave her and loved her even more.
Ed was no dummy. Nobody in the Business was a dummy. He was patient; but after sifting the facts and meditating to Doc John he decided to get rid of her. Doc John was the head of the Old Co.’s western field office and stood in an oil portrait on the wall behind Ed’s desk in Ed’s study. He was a tall negro man who, in the painting, was wearing a strange yellow top hat and red jacket and standing next to a handsome auburn-colored horse with a silver-trimmed saddle on its back. In the painting’s background was the old steepled skyline of New Orleans.
Sometimes Ed’s youngest daughter Minnie would peek through his office’s keyhole and see him there in that black silk robe with the jet cross hanging on a chain around his neck. Not the cross of anguish and suffering, the crux simplex, but the oldest cross made of two straight lines which bisect each other at right angles.
There Ed would be kneeling, consulting with Doc John, while white peace candles burned on a long table of brilliant white linen in the center of which was a beautiful silver cup.
His problem wasn’t difficult because Ruby Yellings wanted to leave too. Her husband would never discuss his Business with her. He spent most of his time at the Solid Gumbo Works. And she didn’t like those people who worked with him. That Ms. Better Weather, Ed’s assistant Worker, who sometimes wore a veil.
Ruby liked to spend her time at the Democratic Club. Though she ran for councilwoman and lost, she was buildi
ng quite a machine. She was always flying from Berkeley to D.C. and partied with the black caucus.
One day Ed came home to find her closets empty and her valuables gone. There was a note on the dresser. She had run off with an up-and-coming Democrat and had gone for good to Washington, D.C., to enter national politics.
Ed was left behind with four children: Wolf, the oldest; Sister, the second; Street; and then the youngest, Minnie.
He wanted his children to believe in Labor, Work and Occupation.
He was successful with Wolf, who at an early age displayed cunning and self-reliance and the ability to finish projects he started. Sister was that way too. An industrious girl who was good with the needle, she sewed the clothes for the family. She was destined to become an internationally known fashion designer, famous for her eclectic prints.
Young Street was a disappointment. He walked about with a pugnacious swagger and was pretty much a bully until someone would give him a licking.
As for Minnie:
During the International Congress of Genetics held in Berkeley the week of August 20, 1973, an important paper was read whose prominence was overshadowed by the sensationalistic headline-grabbing race theories of a Berkeley geneticist. The tenure of this less heralded paper was that psychic as well as physical traits are inherited. Of course, we knew this all along, for didn’t old folks used to speak of how so and so took after his mother or father or was the spitting image of some remote ancestor in “ways” as much as in physical appearance. How many of us have looked in the mirror and seen an unfamiliar pair of eyes staring out of our heads?