The Last Days of Louisiana Red

by Ishmael Reed

  “We will get whatever you leave. Why, we can use this place for a meeting hall where we can come and discuss abstract things. (LaBas smiles) What are you smiling at?”

  “You. You, Minnie. You take yourself so seriously. You couldn’t stand for your Dad and your brothers to run a Business as they sought. You and your roustabouts and vagrants just couldn’t stand negro men attempting to build something; if we were on the corner sipping Ripple, then you would love us, would want to smother us with kindliness.”

  “That’s not the truth.”

  “It’s the truth. It’s been the truth since we were enslaved into being the same—hammered into the same and kept there by white and negro forces. Every fool the same as a wise man, griot or warrior. The philosophy of slavery—the philosophy of inferiority in which the slave’s plight was compared to that of fellow slaves: the ancient Hebrews. The philosophy of slavery has been handed down through the ages and has appeared under different names. Moochism, for example.

  “But all of you are not the same really, are you? There are rivalries between you Moochers of different colors and from different classes. You even have a high command, don’t you? Your high command, your ruling circle, gets all of the cigarettes, good whiskey and good cocaine while you talk about your brother and sister Moochers and what you’re doing for them, like old Joe Stalin the ‘Communist’ rewarding his personal chef with a general’s medal because he cooked his favorite shashlik. Of course, being a woman, Minnie, being a hi-yellow woman or, as you say, being a ‘black’ woman (chuckle), you even have further leverage.

  “Have you ever heard the term ‘pussy-whipped,’ or ‘pussy-chained’? These expressions may be crude, but they smack of the truth. A woman uses her cunt power to threaten and intimidate, even to blackmail—to cause brother to kill brother. We’re still expected to pick up the bill and do the tipping, even though you say we’re the same.

  “Women use our children as hostages against us. We walk the streets in need of women and make fools of ourselves over women; fight each other, put Louisiana Red on each other, shoot and maim each other. The original blood-sucking vampire was a woman. You flirt with us, tease us, provoke us, showing your delicious limbs to our askance glances; then you furtively pretend you don’t want it. Even some of you going around here reading ‘love’ poetry on how good you are in the sack. Your cunt is the most powerful weapon of any creature on this earth, and you know it, and you know how to use it. I can’t understand why you want to be liberated. Hell. You already free—you already liberated. Liberated and powerful. We’re the ones who are slaves; two-thirds of the men on skid row were driven there by their mothers, wives, daughters, their mistresses and their sisters. I’ve never known a woman who needed it as much as a man. Women rarely cruise or rape.”

  “Look, old man,” Minnie says, fidgeting, tapping her foot nervously, squirming in her chair. “I didn’t come here to listen to a whole lot of antediluvian bullshit from you. If you aren’t going to press charges against me, then I’ll leave. I don’t deal with your shit.”

  “O yes, you call me old. The old morality is what you call mine. So liberated. So hip. Exposing your genitals at parties and swapping mates without getting jealous. You keep on letting it all hang out—you keep pulling it all out of yourself until you reach the dingy cave of yourselves and there you will find something cold and clammy that you won’t want to know. Mystery is no plaything. Mystery was put here for a purpose. Some things are better left alone.

  “Of course, you won’t listen to me. I’m nothing but an aging nigger man in your eyes. Why don’t you take these questions up with that white boy, Max? You respect him.”

  “O, you want to make it racial, huh? Well, no man tells me what to say or think. Negro or white, you or Max.”

  “O, you’re denying the very lucrative benefits that go along with being a black woman in a white man’s country? One of our Business people, Zora Neale Hurston, had an informant in Georgia say, ‘White men and black women are running this thing.’”

  “What lucrative benefits are you talking about—rape?”

  “You say it was all rape, huh?” LaBas turns from the window where he has been standing with his hands behind his back, gazing out over the bay towards Alcatraz. “A lot of you begged for him and fought over the trinkets he threw at you, nursed him and taught him how to fuck, loved the bastard children he gave you more than your own. You are defiling the truth of history when you deny this.”

  LaBas walked over to his desk and picked up an old yellowing newspaper column. “Just before you came here, I was looking through an old copy of the New Orleans Picayune newspaper, which I collect for the purpose of discovering old Gumbo recipes, and I ran across a story about a police raid that happened in the 1890s. Seems that a white man named Don Pedro, a Businessman, held an orgy in which 26 white men and 25 black and mulatto females were having intercourse in what the newspaper describes as ‘ungodly’ positions. There’s no suggestion of anyone twisting anyone else’s arm to participate in this affair. And if you don’t think it’s still going on, go to Broadway and Michigan Avenue in Buffalo, New York; Broadway and 52nd Street in New York City, and Broadway and Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. Every big city has some Broadway intersecting some other street where the ancient lovers meet, not to mention all the hidden places.”

  “Those New Orleans sisters must have been drugged.”

  “Could be. Could be. It could be that many were raped, but it also seems to suggest that some cooperated—you can find many examples of cooperation culled from slave narratives, old newspapers, family records and other documents found in North and South America.”

  “I don’t believe that. The sisters have been wronged, and it’s time for us to take over; we’ve held the family together for all these years.”

  “Every time I hear you say that I get sick. Inaccurate as usual. Your ideas seem to come from your spleen and not your head. For you to say that is an insult to the millions of negro men who’ve supported their families, freemen who bought their families freedom, negro men working as parking-lot attendants, busboys, slop emptiers, performing every despicable deed to make ends meet against tremendous odds. And as for those who ran away—if your corny little organization is interested in ‘dialogues,’ then why don’t you have a forum and invite some of them, that is, if you can get them coming out of the underground where they are ‘invisible legions,’ harassed and pursued by court warrants—the so-called ‘Law,’ that helps your vengeance. I’ll bet half the men in Attica were there on domestic court violations.

  “That’s where I come in—the Spook Chaser. I’ve kept my private eye on you and the rest of the Minnies, Minnie. If you attempt, with the shrewd ally whose presence you deny—if you try what I think you ultimately want to achieve, then we will strike you. Strike you with the venom of the ancient royal cobra in our heads. Damn! At least the couples who frequented Don Pedro’s operation, now called ‘sex therapy,’ were enjoying each other and not injuring some innocent third party.

  “What they were doing was not ‘ungodly’ but normal practice under cover in the North and South when the sun goes down. It’s almost like a secret society. When Governor Earl Long made a speech before the Louisiana Legislature about its existence, he was put into an asylum for giving away the Brotherhood. They’ve been enjoying each other, from the ninth-precinct cop whose car can be seen parked for two hours in front of the negro hooker’s home to the President’s cook who had more power than the First Lady. But now the old lovers have entered into a conspiracy to put the negro male into the kitchen and to death, and you can call me a male pig all you want, but I will do my utmost to stop you.”

  “Aw, negro, you must be tripping. It’s the negro man who is to blame. He’s like an insect that fertilizes a woman and then deserts her. All he knows is basketball and pussy. But I didn’t come here to argue with you. I don’t have to stay here and listen to this. This counterrevolutionary, reactionary …”

&nb
sp; “Those are just the slogans you use to mask your real ambition. You have something else in mind, don’t you? We understand each other.”

  “Look, why don’t you do what you want to do? Call Rufus Whitfield in here to beat me up. That’s all your kind know to do with a woman.”

  “I’m not going to call anyone. You can go. You can talk to me any way you want. I’m still trying to be a gentleman, but one of these days, perhaps soon, you’re going to meet your match.”

  “Well, I hope he’s not an old fool like you,” Minnie says, hurrying from LaBas’ office.

  CHAPTER 32

  George Kingfish Stevens and Andy Brown are creeping up a dimly lit Oakland Street in a superior neighborhood.

  They examine a letter box in front of the shrubbery of a well-groomed old Oakland home.

  “It say Mr. & Mrs. Amos Jones. This must be the place. Let’s jump over the bush here. It don’t look like they home, Bro. Andy.”

  After landing on the other side, they steal up the pathway towards the home. It is dark. On the ground they see a copy of the Oakland Tribune.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Fish puts the newspaper under his arm and dons the robber’s black mask. They tiptoe up the steps and look through the window. They see no one, and so they lift the window. Andy and Fish climb through to find themselves in the parlor. They come upon some lavish living-room furniture: huge sofas, tables topped with expensive lamps. Fish drops a cigarette on the floor and squashes it with his foot. They start with the lamps, putting them into a sack. They see a huge cassette machine, and they rip that off too. Then they rush about the room like madmen, swooping the valuables into boxes and sacks they’ve brought. They go into the kitchen and take the silverware. They enter the bathrooms and take $2.00 cakes of soap, shampoos, vitamins, Haitian oils and bathing herbs, combs imported from Ghana, thick exotic towels from India, Filipino prints. They go into the bedrooms and take clothes and jewelry. Down the hall they see a room with a faint light on. They rush down the hall and open the door. Incense is burning. There are two tables with food on them, a glass of champagne. White candles give out the light. Above the tables are pictures of mermaids and fan mail from South America.

  “What on earth do we have here?” Fish says.

  “Look like somebody had a party. Hey, look here on the table. Some coins! U-we! Let’s swoop them into the sack, Andy.”

  “I’m gone have me a piece of this chicken,” Andy says.

  Suddenly the lights go on.

  Amos stands in the corner, armed with one of them Haitian pistols.

  “Why, why,” Fish says, grinning, “Brother Amos, we thought you and the Missus might be out tonight, so we came here to watch the place. You can’t be careful enough in these times, all this surreptitious entry and all going around. We was putting your stuff in these bags so the robbers wouldn’t get ahold of them.”

  “Yes, we was keeping an eye on it for you,” Andy adds.

  Amos, frowning: “What do you take me for—some kind of chump? Something told me to come back here tonight. A vague feeling. I’m not surprised at you, Fish. You’ve always been a cheap thief, but Andy—you? Why, we came north together. Remember when Fish tried to pick your pocket?”

  “Well, that’s true, Bro. Amos. But Iz been listening to this Minnie woman, and it seem to me she got the right idea. What’s yours is mine.”

  “That’s right, Andy, he is being divisive. Share and share alike.”

  Amos, lowering the pistol, stung: “But we came from Georgia together. ’39. Don’t you remember? We use to go fishing and sell the catch aside the road. Why, all the things we’ve done together, and you pull this?”

  “That don’t matter. I don’t care nothing about the past. We is the future. We is the new world. Ain’t that right, Fish?”

  “Now you talkin, Bro. Andy. Ain’t no use a you taking time to talk to this chump. Let’s rush him.”

  “O no you don’t!” Amos raises the pistol; it clicks. “You always figured me for a patsy since I worked hard and I didn’t hang out on the avenue. All those fives I gave you. You thought you were tricking me, but I knew what I was doing. Always brother this, brother that. I should have known that it was always a hype. True brotherhood is not so casual. I’m going to call the police.” He walks over to the phone, all the while keeping the gun aimed at the two intruders.

  “Why … why … Bro. Amos, you wouldn’t do that, would you? You must be on whitey’s side,” Fish says.

  “Whitey’s side? How dare you confuse my struggle with yours? Who are my kind? Who are my people? Those who volunteer for the meanest tasks without fobbing them off on others. Those who when wrong don’t get mad at someone for pointing out their faults.”

  “Aw, nigger, I ain’t heard nobody talk that way,” Andy says. “Kissass.”

  “Shut up! How long did you think we would take this crap, Fish? You Moochers always intimidating us, extorting us because we’re the same skin color; even insects and animals have a higher criterion than that for comradeship. It was just another protection racket, but we ain’t going to be your old man in the candy store any longer. I’m calling the police.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Formerly Berkeley was called “The City of Many Churches.” It still is, though not the kind Edward Rowland Sill, an early U. C. English professor, had in mind when he wrote the hymn “Send Down Thy Truth, O God.” Signs reading HooDoo were posted on the telegraph poles at Euclid Street near Hearst; Marcus Gordon had dressed up like Baron Samedi, top hat and all, at the Long Branch on San Pablo. At his Nyingma Institute, Tarthang Tulku, Tibetan Lama, led a session in meditation, exercise and philosophy. Cardadoc ap Cador and his pagans were conducting weekly meetings at 2 P.M. Sundays at Stiles Hall on the University of California campus. People were asking, Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji? Nam-myoho-renge-kyo was holding meetings at 790 Curtis Street. Gypsies everywhere. Muhammad Speaks was sold in broad daylight. Shamballa. Asian Bean Pie. Nairobi College. Transcendental meditation lecture at Martin Luther King Jr. High School at 1781 Rose Street. Maggie Anthony, Isaac Bonewitz.

  There is a full moon over the “City of Many Churches.” Midnite. Venus high. Cool empty streets. Trees whispering. A woman walked into Harry’s niteclub. It was the messenger. Full lips, sharp-edged “sculptured” nose, big bright Egyptian eyes. The messenger standing on the right-hand side of Osiris. When the messenger entered the club, the few patrons who were there on this cool Berkeley night looked up. Even the bartender, suave Obie Emerson, a connoisseur, looked up. Every time she entered a place, people looked up. She was smiling, fresh from the crossroads. She was wearing a white cloche hat, white suit, white high heels, and white veil. She wore the cross made of jet; not the cross of anguish and suffering but the traditional cross of American Business people: the Watson cross. She saw LaBas, who was beckoning to her, and joined him in a booth behind the fireplace. As soon as she was seated, they ordered. Judy, the waitress, brought them two long-stemmed glasses of rum; the messenger prepared to give her report; you see, LaBas maintained that only fools thought they knew everything, and therefore he would enlist someone from the other side who would check out information beyond his realm to verify. The messenger began her report with her characteristic broad smile.

  “It’s some place. I didn’t think we were going to locate Ed at all until someone crossed my path and introduced me to Blue Coal’s scene; all of these ages in the service of the Business, and I’d never met the boss. It was a cabaret type place with entrances and exits formed of arcs formed by old trees. The host was one of these archaic nigger faces you see in Italian palaces of the Renaissance. You know, the ones with the bright red lips and shiny black faces. Art Deco nigger. Blue Coal tried hard to please me; he took me to a patio, and there, staring sadly out over a red lake, was Ed.

  “When he saw me, he really became jubilant. Blue Coal was happy too in his rather guffawing manner, slapping me on the back, happy that you were leaving no stone unturned in your effort to solve the
case. He seemed uninformed of what was going on in the Business; maybe he’s been on the job too long. He set up a cabaret to celebrate my locating Ed. There was some kind of floor show and the band played like Cab Calloway’s orchestra; you know, those dippy riffy 1932 woodwinds.”

  “Cab Calloway! I’m doing research on one of his villainesses.”

  “Really? Anyway, it was hot. Ed began to pump me for information. He reminisced. He talked about how he used to go to the Claremont Hotel to hear Count Basie.”

  “That’s all very interesting. Did he say anything about industrial spies killing him?”

  “They never say anything candidly there, Pop. Everything is said in riddles. Question marks decorate the cabaret, whirling above your head like mobiles. I’ll just have to report to you what he said. The key is Doc John.”

  “O yes. Doc John the herbalist. Wolf told me of Ed’s interest in Doc John.”

  Judy, the waitress, refreshed their drinks.

  “Well, Ed sought out Doc John’s advocates who had fled across the river to Algiers after Doc John was murdered in New Orleans. They took his ideas with them, which Ed was able to compile. Actually, there were two Doc Johns. One of the primitive variety who wore loincloths and prophesied that Marie would replace Saloppeé, the dark-skinned queen of the Business and undisputed ruler who held rites down at Saint John Bayou. Saloppé was getting old and Marie was young, sassy and beautiful. But there was another catch to the prophecy.”