Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

“You know, we didn’t get into this black thing until late. When I was a kid my sisters and I told everybody that we were Cuban; black was ugly. Then when black came in I became that, and when the feminist thing was the hip lick I joined that and then the womanist fad. I was trying to please the sisterhood, and even attended these seminars where people discussed whether the clitoral orgasm would be replaced by the vaginal kind. That is, when they were not talking about the Grafenberg spot. Back here in Yuba City I’m trying to get back to where I started from. I grew up in a town like this. I went to the best schools, came out, belonged to the Jack and Jills and went away to college to be accepted as the first black girl in one of the most exclusive sororities.

“One of my teachers encouraged me to write plays and some of them were staged by the college drama department. Then I won that national playwrighting contest. After that it was off to New York, and, well, the rest is, as they say, history. I staged my play Wrong-Headed Man in one of the East Village bars. Becky saw it and got me the Mountbatten. The success of Wrong-Headed Man turned into my curse. You know what those brothers said about me, and even some of the black women were hostile. I didn’t care. What money or influence did they have? Besides, no matter how vanguard they thought they were — those intellectuals and artists downtown — they were still impressed by somebody who made it big. Got their picture in People magazine. I was whisked away into the Broadway lights, I was wide-eyed like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz , everything was so unreal; the parties, the interviews, being in the same room with people you’d only read about, people who were legends, people telling me how much they liked my play. Then the questions. Some of the questions they asked were, well, sick. They didn’t bother me at first because I had convinced myself that their praise was genuine. But they kept asking these questions.

“I was writing about some brutal black guys who I knew in my life who beat women, abandoned their children, cynical, ignorant, and arrogant, you know these types, but my critics and the people who praised me took some of these characters and made them out to be all black men. That hurt me. The black ones who hated me and the white ones who loved me were both unfair to me. Nobody takes the crude and hateful white men like Hoss and Crow in Sam Shepard’s plays and says that these men represent all white men. Has anybody ever said that Richard III represented all white men? That all white men craved to lock children in a tower somewhere for perverse reasons? Nobody ever said Lady MacBeth or Medea represented all white women. That all white women manipulated their husbands into committing acts of murder or desired to murder their children. I thought they were my fans, those feminists, but some of them would have drinks and ask me about the ‘raw sex’ and how black men were, you know. Others used my black male characters as an excuse to hate all black men, especially some of these white women. Then they wouldn’t feel so guilty for taking their jobs. I was making this money and getting all of this praise when in reality I was no better than one of those panderers you see in the live sex shows up in North Beach. I was like a proprietor of one of those nasty adult movie houses you find in the rude sections of Cleveland and Rochester, where for a quarter you can go see a woman fuck a dog. With the feminists on my side and the support of those white males who had some strange passion for black men, I could have stayed in New York, but I left. Like Frank Sinatra says, I was at ‘the top of the heap,’ but the heap stinks, and I left before they could toss me into the shit. I think I’m just going to stay here in Yuba City. It doesn’t even have bus service. There is no airport. No colleges, universities, no theaters or symphonies. The average household income is under thirty thousand dollars. It doesn’t even have a bowling lane, but all I need at this point are my memories and a library. Yuba City has twelve. I’m just going to get fat, have babies, and write write write.

“And I’m going to take your advice, too. You’re right. What did you say Jake Brashford called it? Finishing school lumpen. I knew that people who were aware would see through my dumb attempt to be down. Though the critics and the white feminists fell for it, I knew that those working class characters that I tried to write about and their proletariat voices I attempted to mime were phony. All of us who grew up in the middle class want to romanticize people who are worse off than we are. And suppose as Nikki said, and she was right, that some of these teenage welfare mothers started to really try to use that time they have to cultivate their children instead of partying, doing the freaky deaky, and spending the diaper money on reefer. Take them to museums and work with them on their reading. It won’t be long before some of these teenage mothers will begin writing about places like Bed-Stuy themselves, and then all of us debutantes will have to write about ourselves, will have to write about our backgrounds instead of playing tour guides to the exotics.

“There’s probably somebody in jail right now who’s writing a book that will put our little artsy ghetto plays out of business and make them seem innocuous. Anyway, I’ve begun a new play. You remember how you guys got on me because I went on TV that time and said that when black men weren’t killing each other, they were killing women. Well, I was wrong and you were right. It’s the other way around, according to statistics. The women are the ones who are killing the men, and they get off too, as though there were some kind of bounty on black men. In my new play I tell the truth, and I know Becky and her friends will write me off after it’s produced. It’s about a woman who leaves her husband for another woman only to discover that she’s a batterer. See, this is a problem that the male-loathing feminists don’t want to discuss: women beating up on women. It’s an epidemic, and the women’s shelters are full of women who are fleeing other women. Yes, men should stop beating up women, and women have to stop beating up women, too. And men and women must stop killing each other. The feminists don’t want to bring up these taboo subjects because they feel it will hurt their cause. Well, if they’re afraid to tell the truth because they feel that it will play into the hands of their enemies, then their enemies have won. Same thing with the Jews and the blacks. If they are afraid to tell the truth for fear of furnishing ammunition to their enemies or if they’re trying to deflect legitimate criticism by dismissing it as anti-Semitic, or racist, then the Nazis will have won and the Klan will have won, and all of the other bigots under the sheets, and setting fires to synagogues will have won. Boy, I sure have put a bug in your ear, so I guess I will end this letter. Dred Creme is lying in my lap, he’s been practicing all day and I just gave him some warm milk and am about to put him to bed. Tomorrow’s his birthday and I’m going to take him to the circus. Take care, Ian, and who knows, one day you’ll answer your door down there on that beautiful island of yours and you’ll see Dred Creme and me standing there with our bags—”

I hope not, Ian thought. He got into the back of the Citroën that his mother had sent for him. The chauffeur started to gibber something in that inscrutable creole the poorer classes of people spoke on the island. “Shut up, you black monkey,” Ian said in the mother tongue, a signal that he didn’t want to be disturbed. The car passed through the city of narrow streets and houses, which resembled the style of those in New Orleans. It passed the market place where the women were selling fruit and vegetables that were so large they could have been entered in the Guinness Book of Records , or Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The black women down here walked with their hips swinging and sat in the market with their legs apart. Up north there was the wizened hoary Protestant white father god brought to North America by the Puritans who looked after things, but down here it was Mama. Island and water deities.