Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

“Would you like to have some more coffee?” she asked, noticing that his cup was empty. Before he answered she had bounded into the kitchen. He had been trying his luck in the North since 1979 but still hadn’t gotten used to the coffee. It was weak and people drank it with lots of milk. He always looked forward to going home to relax after he’d finished a project. They had real coffee there. She returned to the couch after pouring him some more.

“Boy, Becky has come a long way,” she said. “She started out as a silly radical feminist and now she’s producing a play that’s sympathetic to Eva Braun, a Nazi. How people change. Seems that the left all over the West is going to the right. Wouldn’t even be surprised if the Soviet Union got into a consumer binge. It always takes them a number of years to catch up with western fashion. How these radicals have changed.”

Brashford said the same thing about you: Ball had the words right on the edge of his lips. A long time ago she wrote poems about blacks robbing department stores and shooting down the police, but recently she’d received a lot of criticism for traveling to South Africa. He decided to talk about something else.

“Eva Braun. Wasn’t she that woman in the black bathing suit who was always romping about playing with puppies and pinching children on the cheeks at that place Hitler kept as a retreat?”

“Berchtesgaden,” she said.

“Say, you really know a lot about it.”

“I was doing research for this TV special. You know, the one I wrote about Jo Baker and Bessie Smith. Well, I ran across some kind of mention that Jo Baker had dinner with Hermann Göring; this huge Nazi whose abdomen was much wider than his hips, he tried to poison her.”

Göring had a perpetual idiotic grin on his face, Ian remembered. He thought of the photos he’d seen of the fat buffoon in his cream-colored uniforms and giant raincoats. His big cheeks, tiny eyes, and helmet that fitted his head like a bucket. “Why?”

“The Nazis wanted to get rid of her because she was spying for the French and that’s not all. I discovered that the night of his Austrian triumph Adolf Hitler slept in a bed with a picture of Josephine Baker hanging above the head. You know, Hitler hated jazz and was always scolding Eva about her collection of American jazz records. So why didn’t he order Josephine Baker’s picture to be removed from the wall of the inn where he slept that night? He was getting even with his mother. He had her picture on the wall of his bedroom, but the night that he’s away from his room, sort of a shrine to his mother, he fantasizes about sleeping with the demon princess, the wild temptress Lilith, Erzulie, the flapper who brought jazz dance to the Folies. It was very significant that he had this fantasy in the land of his birth.

“Jesus Christ had the same experience with a prostitute on the road, away from his prying mother, whom some say was the prostitute. A Lilith or Erzulie of her time. He had the same problem. Jesus, Hitler, both had weak fathers and strong, manipulative mothers. He would have this ambivalent attitude toward the other women in his life, and finally toward the German nation, which in Nazi portraits is a prodigious butt buxom Brünhilde type blond blue-eyed white woman who is either holding a banner or a flag and at the lead of a vigilante mob. Hitler had the best ass in Germany available to him. Actresses, intellectuals, oxenlike bombshells, models, anything a man would desire, but he was a freak for these high-strung difficult types. That first one was his niece. It’s rumored that she went and got pregnant by a Jew. Hitler was part Jewish. His relatives in London always threatened to tell the whole story. Hitler had to pay money to keep them quiet.”

“Tremonisha, are you saying that World War Two happened because Hitler was trying to pass for white?”

“Overzealous assimilation, it happens all the time.

“Becky is wrong about the German women. When he pulled up to a station the women in the town would line up for a chance to sit in his lap for a couple of minutes. He was their pimp. He told them to give him babies and they did, and those babies died in Russia and France. They’re just like these white women over here. Allow themselves to get sweet-talked and seduced. Look at all of the white women who voted for this war-monger and apartheid champion, Reagan. That’s why Becky’s wrong.” Apartheid? Ian thought. Tre gave lectures at Women’s Centers where no men were allowed. What about that apartheid?

She paused for a moment and drank from the glass.

“I think your version of what happened in Nazi Germany is far superior to Becky’s,” he said, trying to stay on her good side.

“Becky’s not too much of an intellectual. I think that she went to school in California. But she’s a go-getter all right. Sure, Jim’s genius brought in the grants, but Becky’s administrative abilities kept the Lord Mountbatten in the black.”

“How do you suppose that Jim’s disappearance will affect his operation?”

“She didn’t care about him. Thought he was arrogant. She just used him to pull in Jewish contributions, but now I understand that this lady in Long Island is going to pay some of the bills they used to pay.”

He noticed her knee bobbing. “Did you know that the doorman downstairs is Randy Shank?”

She was shocked. Her eyes became gleeful. “I thought he looked familiar. Isn’t that the nigger who used to dress up like Tom Mix and entertain tourists down in the Village during the fifties? Rent-a-nigger. A dollar a nigger?”

“Yes. He rented himself out to parties for a dollar. But you have to understand it was hard for black writers in those days, Brashford says. Randy played bongo drums in Washington Square Park during the day, and wrote at night. He paved the way for all of us.” She covered her mouth and began to laugh. He looked around at her Danish furniture, blond tables, and lacquered black chairs. Her desk with the post-modernistic lamp. He looked at the original Afro-American paintings on the wall. Even with this affluent apartment, her money and fame, she was making fun of the brother while he was down.

“I thought he said that he was never going to return to America.” She laughed some more.

“He’s really bitter,” Ball said. “He blames you and Becky for what happened to his career. Said Becky rejected his play for political reasons and that he had to leave Europe because as soon as your play and Johnnie Kranshaw’s books started to get translated into foreign languages the women in those countries began to hate black American men, as if they didn’t have enough problems. Says you even have women in Sri Lanka mad at them.” She started to laugh. He wanted to grab her and shake her to make her stop laughing. It was a laugh of revenge, of hatred.

He left her that way and headed to the lobby. Shank was sitting at his doorman’s desk reading a newspaper. He saw Ball and jumped up.

“Getting back to our conversation about the Jews.” Oh, no, not again, Ball thought. “There’s really no such thing as a white Jew. Real white people call Jews and the Arabs sand niggers behind their backs. Back in the 1900s and 1910s in this town they called the Russian ones Asiatics and Orientals. You couldn’t pick up a paper in those days without reading about some Jewish pickpocket or pimp, and when they weren’t doing that they were committing arson and poisoning horses.” Ball tried to move out of the building, but Randy Shank blocked his way, insistent that he hear his tortured and odd theories. “They let them be white now because they serve the white man by keeping an eye on us, monitoring us, providing him with statistics about us, and interpreting us to the white man. The white man don’t care about them. They didn’t care if they burned up in the ovens, Roosevelt, Churchill, these American Jews even, nobody gave a damn. In the old days they even passed immigration laws to keep them out of the country.”