Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

The love had some spice to it, the sex was piping hot, and the sun made you drunk. On one side of the island was the Caribbean, soft, peaceful, coated with specks of light from the sun, but on the other side was the killer Atlantic. Two things that blacks all over the Americas had phobias about: the Atlantic, bloodhounds.

Soon the car was leaving the city where castles and hovels existed alongside one another and moving out into the country. On one mountain stood a bronze statue of Koffee Martin, the national hero. On another mountain in the distance he could see the Shoboater estate where Paul’s family lived in the style of the colonialists. Once in a while, Paul’s father could be seen in town. He was a very fair-skinned man who dressed like Noël Coward and used a walking stick, and did things for the queen of the Mother Country. They drove for about forty-five minutes until they came to his mother’s spacious home and lawns. He walked up the steps, the chauffeur following him, carrying his bags. His mother came out and opened her arms. They embraced for a long time.

The maid was the color of carbon paper. She curtsied as Martha Ball and her son entered the house. Some members of the household staff were also present, and they greeted him as copiously as the first maid had. One of the boys — a man who must have been in his early fifties — took his bags upstairs. “Well,” she asked, “did you bring them?”

“I didn’t forget, Ma,” he said, taking the record albums from a bag and handing them to her. They were by Tina Turner. His mother and her friends were crazy about Tina Turner, way down here, and come to think of it his mother did resemble Tina Turner, full in the thighs, her hair worn down the sides of her face, and the kind of lips that you get when you cross an Arawak and a Congolese.

“Boy, you know how much I love that girl. The United States, they may be how you say, Rehob , but they produce Tina Turner. A red woman like us.” She placed the albums on a hall table. The fellas had said that Ms. Turner’s song “Private Dancer” symbolized the bond between white men and Third World women all over the Americas. It was their love anthem.

“Your dinner will be coming soon.” He’d eaten on the airplane but he knew that she’d have to have her way. She always had her way. There was no arguing with her. He knew that he would have to eat again.

“I have a surprise for you,” she frowned. “Boy, why you wearin’ that black leather jacket, those jeans and what are those, cowboy boots?” She looked down at his boots. “Who you tryin’ to be, Roy Rogers? You done gone to the United States. You done become an American.” She wished that he would come home. Her friends in government would give him an ambassador’s post. Many literary men down here were ambassadors, mayors. She wanted him to leave New York. He could even become a banker in one of the overseas banks. Chase Manhattan.

“I may live in the United States, Ma, but my soul is here, my very character was formed by New Oyo.”

“Go on with ya. You have a tongue like your—” She started to say it. All of these years she’d resisted the temptation to tell him the secret. One day she would. They came to the end of the long hall with its hardwood floors, its high ceilings, the vases of flowers placed on tables, the autographed portraits on each wall. Everything was gleaming. Presidents, senators, literary figures, great artists. Some said that she actually influenced the policies of the nation through every president who’d been elected, since they were all believers.

They walked into the dining room with its view of the Caribbean and mountains gingerly touched by clouds. On the slopes of one he could see some goats grazing. A woman was standing with her back to them staring out of the window. She was enjoying the view and held a glass of champagne in her hand. She turned around. He recognized her from her pictures. It was Johnnie Kranshaw. She was very dark and had what some called “dancing eyes.” She wore her hair short and was wearing what some called an “African dress,” though it didn’t have the splashy colors of the native women, nor the overstated jewelry. Ms. Kranshaw was a Protestant, all right.

“Ms. Kranshaw. I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said when his mother introduced them. That he had. The fellas said that if she hadn’t been born the white man would have invented her and other vile and terrible things.

“Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Ball. I read the review in the international edition of the Herald Tribune . Looks as if you have a hit.”

“We think so,” he said. They sat down for dinner, and the girl brought out the oxtail soup. She served on her right instead of on the diner’s left. Martha Ball issued a quick insult. Called the girl a black idiot in the language of the Mother Country. The maid stared dumbly and began to serve from the left. Martha was a stern disciplinarian and was always complaining about how hard it was to keep good household servants. About a third of the youth who lived in this little country town had left for the city, where the unemployment rate was staggering, while still others had traveled overseas to the Mother Country where they were stealing and pimping like every other first generation of immigrants who find themselves subject to hostile treatment and who are barred from the legitimate ways of earning money.

Though some would have us believe that the Italian-, Irish-, and Jewish-Americans went from Ellis Island to comfort without no in-between, in their poor days they could match any black “underclass” statistic for statistic. The writers who tell the truth about those Hell’s Kitchen and Lower East Side days are unwelcome. Mike Gold is neglected; he reminds them of the time when they didn’t have a pot to piss in. The warts of black Americans were right there for everybody to see and even close-upped in the mass media that harassed them; other groups applied a lot of makeup to theirs. Martha was upset about the youth and often talked to the president about it. Their presence in the Mother Country was giving rise to neo-Nazism, and even the Netherlands, considered a socialistic country, had elected two Nazis from Rotterdam.

“You see where they bomb the Club Med; they going to chase the tourists away. Bad as the economy is. They say they want to chase our foreign friends away, but can they run it? No. This place will end up looking like Haiti, I tell you. I told the president he should crack their coconut heads. They mess up.” Some of the young radicals had been rounded up by the police, who were imported from the Mother Country.

“They’re nothing but a bunch of illiterate peasants,” Martha said. She had been an illiterate peasant herself at one time, hanging her one and only dress on the clothesline each day and trying to make do with a ragged child under a leaking corrugated tin roof. It had all changed after the contest between her and her only rival, Abiahu.

“They want independence. What they know ’bout independence? Who in their right minds would give them a nation? Way it is now, we a part of the Mother Country. The shelves in the stores are full. There’s plenty of petrol, perfume, fashions.” Johnnie Kranshaw was picking at her soup. Ian could tell that she was embarrassed. He’d seen her name in the newspapers in connection with benefits for left-wing causes. Reading for political prisoners and the millions starving in the Third World. Noticing her discomfort at hearing his mother’s views, he changed the subject.

“Ms. Kranshaw,” he began. “I know that the thousands of your fans would like to know where you disappeared to. You’d become a mother goddess of the feminist movement. And then, at the height of your success, poof,” he said with a wave of his hand. His mother gazed at his hands. Articulate, expressive like his father’s. He was huge and muscular like his father, too, and had prodigious lips, and a snug nose. Johnnie Kranshaw leaned back. The Caribbean magic seemed to have brought her peace. The photos on her Playbills made her look combative.