by Ishmael Reed
“What’s wrong with American women,” Martha said. “One of the students from Mother Country University who comes to visit me said that she went to some women’s conference in Copenhagen and there were these women from all over the world. They were talking about poverty and birth control and infant mortality. She said that all the American women wanted to talk about was sex. And I read in one of the Miami papers that we get down here that Ann Landers conducted a poll of American women and found that over seventy percent said they didn’t like to get fucked, oh, excuse my French,” Martha Ball said.
“Penetration,” Johnnie Kranshaw said. “They said that they are opposed to penetration. They want to be cuddled. And hugged. Charlene Hatcher Polite was right. They ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of brat women. They’re the most privileged women on earth, but all they do is complain.”
“Maybe that’s why the American man is always prowling the world with his warships. He can’t find no sexual satisfaction at home so he uses these military exercises as a cover for finding exotic women, women that will give him the pleasure he don’t get at home. They been leaving those Anglo women since the Crusades, going over into the Arabian countries, raping women. Trying to find women who won’t give them none of that ‘Dear, I have a headache tonight.’ Look at all the different kinds of babies that the Caucasian man has left all over the world. Ian, how do you get along with American women?” his mother asked.
“Oh,” Ian said, nervously, “I don’t have time to go on dates. I’m too busy trying to…well…you know, go for it.” His mother frowned.
“He means, he wants to be a success,” Johnnie Kranshaw explained.
“He speaks so much of that American language that he’s forgotten the Mother Tongue. Wears his hat at the dinner table.”
“It’s okay, Martha, it’s a cowboy hat. Many American men wear them and sometimes won’t remove them even when they’re going to bed. They sleep and die with their boots on.” He removed his hat.
“Thank you,” his mother said, squinting her eyes with annoyance. The two women began some small talk. Where there were bargains in downtown New Oyo, where there were some sales going on. They spent time at the beaches and on the tennis courts. That is, when Martha wasn’t giving advice to the high and mighty, running events of the country through the president. He wondered were they sleeping together. And Johnnie Kranshaw. She went to lectures and to museums. Had become almost a student of the indigenous dance.
Ball skipped the dessert. Down here they put sugar and rum into everything. It was still a sugar plantation economy. Sure the lavish estates had become tourist restaurants. They were operated by the original plantation owners. They still kept it all in the family, but the president had a black face, and so they didn’t fear the uprisings of the former ages, led by men possessed by Orishas.
“Now this is coffee. This is one thing about New Oyo I missed,” he said, taking a sip of the coffee from a tiny cup.
“You see, I told you that they’ve made him into…into…an American,” his mother said, nearly in tears.
“Look, Ma, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“The Tribune said that Tremonisha was the first director of your play. What happened to her?” Johnnie asked.
“She was getting hassled in New York. Seems that she couldn’t please anybody, catching it from all sides, the brothers and the sisters, and then she had a fight with Becky; and Randy Shank—he tied her up and shaved off her hair. Didn’t you hear down here? He was going around shaving off the hair of feminists whom, he felt, were smearing the reputations of black men.”
“He what?”
“Didn’t you hear in the newspapers? He pulled a gun on a cop and was killed after trying to assault Becky French.”
“I can’t believe it,” Johnnie said, her mouth open.
“Sure, he got to twelve women before they caught him.”
“His greatest role,” Johnnie said.
“Who is this man you’re talking about? He sounds crazy to me. Why hadn’t they locked him up? If we would have caught him down here we would have given him the African treatment,” Martha said.
“He was actually harmless. A brilliant playwright. Some have called him the first modern black playwright,” said Johnnie.
“He would dress in a leather coat and matching beret. He wore a mask. Said that he was using a method that the Resistance used after World War Two. Shaving the heads of those who collaborated with the Nazis.” Martha started to laugh and wouldn’t stop until Johnnie reprimanded her.
“It’s not funny, Martha. You don’t know how hard it is to be a black person of consciousness in the United States.”
“After lecturing his victims, he’d gather up their hair and place it into a black plastic bag,” Ball said sadly, shaking his head. He’d begun to admire Randy Shank on the sly.
“Poor Randy,” Johnnie said. His mother burst out laughing again; Johnnie glared at her. She stopped.
“Anyway, Tre relocated in Yuba City, California, which according to the Rand McNally Encyclopedia is the worst city in the United States. She’s begun a theater group out there.
“Old yellow squeaky bitch. They brought her in to take my place because she wouldn’t stand up to them. You know how weak those yellow bitches are. They worse than white women.”
“You’re right about that,” Martha said. She was reddish brown.
Good grief, Ball thought. Not only did the black and brown ones hate the white ones, but the yellow ones and each other as well.
“Well, she was asking for it. Writing all of those things, putting down the brothers.” Ball looked at her. He started to say what the fellas said. That Johnnie Kranshaw had started the whole thing. The fellas had accused Kranshaw of being the first to dredge up the old black beast image that had horrified and titillated southerners in the 1890s. Johnnie Kranshaw, Tremonisha, and the rest were accused of teasing the public with the old “a fate worse than death.” Dangling the gorilla, as the practice is called. Ball changed the subject.
“What are you working on now?”
“Whatever it is, it’s hard to drag her away from that hotel, she’s so much into it. The woman types day and night,” Martha said.
“I never discuss my projects,” Johnnie answered. “Let’s just say that I’m writing plays from now on that I wouldn’t be ashamed to read before a black Baptist Sunday morning worshiping service at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. I’m not going to be used any more by the likes of Becky French.” That’s it, blame it all on the white woman, Ball thought. “Wasn’t enough that we raised their children, cleaned their houses, gave them counsel, and sometimes shared their husbands, now these old crazy white women want us to be pimps for them. After they finished with No Good Man, it became nothing but a recruitment poster for lesbianism.” Why didn’t you stand up to them, Ball thought. Why weren’t you as hard on them as you were on the fellas.
“Now that Tre has left, I wonder who Becky’s whore is now.”
Ball dropped his cup. The coffee left a big spot on the rug.
“Must be jet lag,” he said, smiling weakly. His mother called the maid, making awful comments about the maid’s color in the Mother Tongue. Ian was glad that Johnnie Kranshaw didn’t get a translation. The maid rushed in like a scared rabbit and began to clean up the spilled coffee. His mother finally rose from the table.
“Ian, I’m going upstairs to begin unpacking your clothes. I’ll leave you and Johnnie to your playwriting talk.”
26
She left them, lifted her skirts and climbed the stairs toward his bedroom. It had remained the same since he’d left the Island of New Oyo for the States in the mid-seventies. There was a huge photo on the wall of Ball in his rugby shirt and shorts playing soccer. A framed degree in drama from New Oyo University, his books. She’d always scolded him for living in a fantasy world, for being ethereal, but now he had put his fantasies to work. Fantasies can’t earn a dime if they only exist in your mind, was her philosophy. That
was a nice write-up of Reckless Eyeballing in the international edition of the Herald Tribune. She laughed. He was just like his father. Crazy. He had his father’s Olmec face, his adobe-colored skin, and his gray eyes. One day after the political passions—the violent style of New Oyo’s politics—had cooled, she would tell him. She would tell him that she had lied when she said that his father was a shark fisherman who died when his fishing boat capsized. It was one elaborate and entertaining lie. She even said that they’d found his father’s undigested parts inside the stomachs of several sharks a few days after his father’s death. She looked into his mirror. She turned around and placed her hands on her waist. It was a little thick but in good shape for someone her age. Muscles firm. Superb bone structure, clean jaw line. Her hair streaked with black and red and resembling a large furry hat worn in Siberia. Yakish. Pupils, eight-ball black surrounded by white that resembled the unpolluted clouds above the Atlantic. Large white teeth, the lower lip heavier than the upper one. Huge bosom like Celia Cruz. Yes, indeed, Tina Turner had inspired the women of her age. She walked toward his luggage, which lay at the foot of his bed where the boy had placed it. She opened the first piece. It was his toilet bag and it was full of American products. Aspirin, Ban roll-on, Crest toothpaste, Aqua Velva aftershave. She removed the cap and smelled it. It stank. A toothbrush that had the word Gum written on it. Its fibers were soft.
One day, when all of his enemies were dead, she would tell him that Koffee Martin was his father, still a controversial figure since his death in the 1950s. If they knew that he was Martin’s son they would kill him too. When she thought of Koffee Martin, Ball’s father, her insides would ache. Could he make love. Making love to that man was what making love to chocolate or rum would be like if they could assume a human form. Made you feel sweet and warm inside. Made you tingle all over. But his first wife wouldn’t let him go. You know how some of these grudgeful-hearted and malicious colored women refer to the men as their men. Our men. They accuse other women of trying to take “my man.” A legacy of the old plantation days when the white planter used the women to control the men. She decided that if she couldn’t have him that I couldn’t have him. She and Martha were the only people in New Oyo with the Indian gift, the gift of second sight, but because she was blacker and had better public relations she had a bigger following. She always got her police to put Martha in jail for sorcery. She was one of those evil black ones who made a man feel as though he were making love to the night. A Nubian beauty who had a razor’s mark that extended from the corner of her left eye down to her chin. She went to the authorities and told them that Koffee was smuggling guns into the country. Koffee had to leave the country in 1940 and go to New York.
Martha Ball removed her son’s athletic socks, ten pairs of jeans, and an equal number of jerseys, some of which bore an alligator insignia. He had about eighteen pairs of new jockey shorts.
Koffee gained a great following in the United States, feeding people in his socialistic kitchens at the end of the Depression, turning away no one, black, white, man, woman or child. Thousands of people turned out to see him in Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. But he had enemies there as well, enemies who resented his physical features, his accent, enemies who didn’t like the fact that this foreigner had such power over their masses. They had him arrested on trumped-up charges and deported him to New Oyo. The Mother Country soldiers took him right from the plane to jail. That night Martha bribed one of the black guards to let her in to see him. The next day he was found dead in his cell. Shortly after she left, they’d come in and beat him until his head resembled a crushed watermelon. When she entered the cell she was one, but when she left Koffee she was one going on two. When Abiahu, his first wife, found out that Martha was pregnant with Ian, she told everybody that she’d put a hex on the child and that he would be born a two-head, of two minds, the one not knowing what the other was up to.
She opened another bag. It was full of audio and video cassettes which included Shane, High Noon, The Virginian, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Werewolf of London, Rebel Without a Cause, Superfly. She opened the garment bag. It held about five winter and spring suits. None looked as if it had ever been worn. There were more cassettes at the bottom of this bag. Larry Holmes vs. Ken Norton, Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Gene Fullmer, Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Thomas Hearns. She stopped for a moment and sat on the bed. Boy just as soon take out American citizenship, she thought. When he was born she and the midwives had taken seriously Abiahu’s threat and placed some of that Hebrew obeah around the room. The Hebrews call it kimpezettl. They hung it around in case that woman Abiahu tried something funny. They dressed in white and knelt about his bed, praying to the old God, the one before Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha. It must have worked because Ian grew up with no signs of two-headedness or two-facedness. Excelled in Latin. Sent to the school for the elite. Used to have such nice manners before he went to the United States. Spoke the Mother Tongue flawlessly. An aristocrat. The fencing team. Equestrian. And the soccer team. But he wasn’t all athlete. Had the green fingers. Could he bring up a flower, and that favorite flower of his, the chrysanthemum, that smelly flower, people said couldn’t grow down here, but he grew it. That greenhouse that she built for him out back. He used to go all over the island, giving away chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemums became his calling card. I bet he doesn’t remember any of that, and then he went away to America. Started coming home with jazz records and nasty magazines. Naked women in them. Started smoking filthy cigarettes. She sighed. Came home once with some book called The Tropics Have Cancer. She couldn’t remember the exact title. One nasty book, and then the fast foods and the American cars he had to have. She went over to the last bag, a green army bag, that he sometimes used to carry his belongings. She opened it. It smelled sour. Inside was a dirty, crumpled leather coat. A beret. A dirty white air force scarf, and a black mask. Underneath this she found human hair. Many textures and colors. Fuzzy, frizzy straight, silky, stringy, brittle. “Johnnie, come up here. I need your help,” she screamed. Johnnie came into the room from downstairs, quickly. Martha showed her the contents of the bag. “I told you that they have made my child into an American,” she said. Downstairs, Ian was staring at a picture in the Life magazine’s World War II special issue. The picture showed a group of smiling soldiers. They held signs that said “Peace.” Upstairs it sounded as though his mother was crying. Ian yelled up:
“Hey, Ma. Is there anything wrong?” Without lifting his head from the magazine. In some photos, people were waving white flags.
LANNAN SELECTIONS
The Lannan Foundation, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a family foundation whose funding is focused on special cultural projects and ideas which promote and protect cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity.
The literary aspect of Lannan’s cultural program supports the creation and presentation of exceptional English language literature and develops a wider audience for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Since 1990, the Lannan Foundation has supported Dalkey Archive Press projects in a variety of ways, including monetary support for authors, audience development programs, and direct funding for the publication of the Press’s books.
In 2000, Lannan Selections was established to promote both organizations’ commitment to the highest expressions of literary creativity. The foundation supports the publication of this series of books each year, and works closely with the Press to ensure that these books will reach as many readers as possible and achieve a permanent place in literature.
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