Ishmael Reed - Reckless Eyeballing

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.