Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

“Jim.”

“Right, Jim. She said that you and Jim had agreed.”

“I certainly didn’t, and Jim’s not here.”

“She feels that the white women who attended those lynchings did so under coercion by their husbands.”

“They could have fooled me. I got those pictures up at the Schomburg. Their eyes are glassy and they wear fixed grins as they watch these poor men dangling from a rope. Drooling over the burnt flesh. I mean, some of them dragged their kids along. She’s saying that they were pretending? Couldn’t they have gotten baby-sitters?”

“She has the same theory about Nazi Germany. She said that Jewish and German women were innocent victims, caught in a battle between men over sexual turf. That the reason Jewish men got into trouble in Germany was because they couldn’t get goyim ass off their minds. They were sexually addicted to white women. She got the idea from this film called Jud Süss . Afterward, during an interview, she said that if someone wrote a play about Nazi Germany from Eva Braun’s point of view she would consider producing it. Mysteriously, a script turned up. It was written by some old biddy who lives in seclusion on Long Island.”

“Yeah. She told me. That’s why I got booted out of the Lord Mountbatten. You say she got the idea from a film?”

“She started to collect all kinds of supporting material. I’ve never seen her so driven. She collected cartoons from Nazi magazines and newspapers that showed Jewish men mugging and raping German women. The Jewish men were always drawn dark. But her main inspiration was the Nazi film. Becky saw it about thirty times.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It rarely plays here in the States. We saw it at one of those bohemian art theaters in the village. You see, the Nazis were paranoid about Jewish men and foreigners diddling their women. It drove Joseph Goebbels crazy. He was the one behind the film. They’d play this movie for German troops before they went to the front. It would get them all steamed up. Some say that Goebbels arranged the film to get Hitler mad. They were always teasing Hitler about the grandfather on his father’s side. Some bourgeois Jewish man impregnated his grandmother, a German who worked in his household. So in the film you have this usurious and dark Jew raping this German girl who goes through the film posing as some kind of idealized Gretel. In pigtails. Some say that this hatred of Jews by German men was the reason for the concentration camps. That’s where Becky got the idea. That the World War Two holocaust was caused by a primal struggle between the Nordic man and the Moorish types.”

“I’ve never heard that before; I thought they sent the Jews to those camps because they were scapegoats.”

“Not a scapegoat. A scapegoat is one who is sacrificed to achieve a larger end. In Germany, the annihilation of the Jews was the end.”

“What about this thing about the Jews killing Christ?”

“The Germans did it. The Romans brought in these German toughs to deal with the Jews just like they used to import southern cops to deal with niggers.”

“You mean the Germans did it all along? Then they blame it on the Jews?”

“No longer; the Catholic Church is slowly absolving the Jews of the responsibility for Christ’s murder. Pretty soon they’ll probably blame it on us.” She put her hand down her back for a moment and scratched. As she did this her ass shifted on the sofa’s pillow. He didn’t know anybody who had fucked her, but he could look at her and know that she was a gasper. One of those kind who took short breaths when you gave it to her hot.

“Anyway. This is where Becky got the idea. It’s a white feminist bourgeois notion that women are innocent victims in a struggle between men.”

“But I’ve heard you say the same thing. You said that the fight in this country is between black men and white men and that women are caught in the crossfire.”

She jumped up from the sofa and started screaming. “That’s a lie. I didn’t say it.”

“You did, you know you did,” he persisted.

“That’s a big lie, I never said it.”

“Well, what about the castration thing? What about that?”

Ball caught himself. If he wanted to get his play done he could not alienate her. “Of course, I can see how you could be misquoted.” She stood for a minute. She then sat down and lit a cigarette. “I never said it. Becky said it. As though she cared about the Jews. Sometimes she sounds like Henry Ford, she hates Jews so much. She concedes that their men are good lovers. She said that she experimented in college. That’s why it’s easy for her to say that the women had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler. As for Jewesses, as she calls them, she’s always putting them down. Says they talk loud in restaurants and say crass and impolite things, always butting into people’s business and always talking about money. She’s always talking about their putting on too much makeup. She and her friends make fun of Jewish women getting nose operations.”

“What?”

“Sure, didn’t you know? Many Jewish women have nose operations to avoid looking ‘Mediterranean.’ They used to not be able to get jobs in Hollywood because they looked too ‘Mediterranean.’”

“But I thought that the Jews owned the media. That’s what Brashford says.”

“They don’t own the media, they own him.”

“Man, do you get a kick out of running down black men?” This time his mother appeared in his mind’s eye. She was wearing that bandanna on her head tied up in that certain way. “But on the other hand,” he said before her frown appeared, “a lot of them deserve it.” He swallowed bitter. Things were so tight for black men, here he was asking Tremonisha Smarts for a handout, in spite of all the things he and the fellas said about Wrong-Headed Man and her friends.

“They don’t let Jews up there in the boardrooms of the big companies. They may have a few management positions, or they may be storekeepers, or speculate for the big capitalists, but they know that these capitalists will sell them out as they did in all the other countries. Some Jews try to cultivate an arrangement for protection, but others see the futility of it and remain separate.

“But back to the film. It’s about this Jew named Joseph Ben Isaacher Oppenheimer. You see, he has this decadent duke in his debt and he strings the slob out in order to win political and sexual concessions for the other Jews. Like, he gets the duke to permit his people to enter Stuttgart from outside the town, where they’re living in these filthy camps, and as the Jews enter the German men cry out, ‘What will happen to our wives and our daughters?’ The Jews grin at the fräuleins with the same concupiscent stare that the black legislators in The Birth of a Nation have in that scene where they check out the southern belles in the legislature’s gallery.

“In fact, the films The Birth of a Nation and Jud Süss have a lot in common. Just as The Birth of a Nation was innovative, the Nazis recruited some of Germany’s supreme talent to appear in the film. It was directed by Harlan Veidt.

“The Jew even pimps for the duke. For example, there’s one scene where the duke fantasizes about having some ballerinas perform for him and then, presto, in a cut we see the ballerinas the Jew has procured for the duke. Well, there’s this one Aryan fräulein that the Jew really has the hots for. He finally rapes her, well, you don’t see her actually raped, you see the Jew wrestling on the bed with her and then in the next scene she’s walking down a road, defiled, ruined. She commits suicide and after the duke dies, depriving the Jew of his protection, the Jew is hanged for violating the old German law that forbade any Jew from having carnal knowledge of a Christian on penalty of being ‘hanged for all to see.’