Ishmael Reed - Flight to Canada

“Barracuda!”

Barracuda ignores her Mistress’ pleas and knocks over the whiskey bottle on the stand next to the bed, then throws back the covers.

“Barracuda, I’ll catch the flu. I’m always catching the flu.”

“Get out dat bed!”

“Why … what? What’s come over you, Barracuda?”

Barracuda goes to the window and raises it. “This room needs to air out. Oooooomph. Whew!” Barracuda pinches her nose. “What kind of wimmen is you?”

“Why, I’m on strike, Barracuda. I refuse to budge from this bed till my husband treats me better than he treats the coloreds around here.”

“Now, I’m gon tell you one mo time. Git out dat bed!”

“Barracuda! This has gone far enough.” The Mistress brings back her frail alabaster arm as if to strike Barracuda. Barracuda grabs it and presses it against the bed. “Barracuda! Barracuda! You’re hurting me. Oooooo.”

Barracuda grabs her by the hair and yanks her to the floor.

“Barracuda, Barracuda, what on earth are you doing to my delicate fragile body. Barracuda!”

Barracuda gives her a kind of football-punt kick to her naked hip, causing an immediate red welt.

“Barracuda, now that’s enough, you … you impertinent, black Raggedy Ann, you.”

Barracuda pulls her razor, bends down and puts it to Ms. Swille’s lily-white neck. “You see that, don’t you? You know what that is now? Now do what I say.”

“Anything you say, Barracuda,” Ms. Swille says, sobbing softly.

“BANGALANG. BANGALLLLAAAANNNNG.

YOUUUUUU. WHOOOOOO. BANGALANG.” Barracuda, one black foot on Ms. Swille’s chest, calls for her assistant.

Bangalang rushes into the room, her pickaninny curls rising up, her hands thrown out at the red palms, her eyes growing big in their sockets at the sight.

“Don’t just stand there, girl; go draw some bath water.”

Bangalang rushes into the bathroom and begins to draw the water.

“Now get up.”

“Barracuda. Barracuuuudaaaaa.”

The Missus of the household moans, holding on to Barracuda’s skirts. Barracuda knees her in the mouth. She falls back, blood spurting from the wound.

“Now get up, I say!”

She is lying in the middle of the floor, her blondish-streaked orange-grey hair spread out before her, moaning.

“I say get up! Where my poker?” Barracuda goes to the fireplace.

“All right, Barracuda. All right.” Ms. Swille slowly rises to her feet.

Barracuda begins to shove her toward the bathroom, where Bangalang has drawn the water. “Now move, you old mothefukin she-dog. You scarecrow. You douche-bag! You flea-sack drawers! You no-tit mother of a bloodhound. You primary chancre! Get on in there, like Barracuda say.” She keeps shoving her. “Look like shit. On strike. I got your strike, you underbelly of a fifteen-pound gopher rat run ober by a car. Sleep with a dog, he let you. You goat-smelling virago, you gnawing piranha, worrying that man like that.” She shoves her into the bathroom and the woman slips and falls because Bangalang has caused the tub to overflow. “What da matta … Fool!”

“You tole me to turn it on; you didn’t say anything about turning it off,” Bangalang says in her Topsy voice.

“Where my …?”

But before Barracuda could find an appropriate weapon, Bangalang, the little pickaninny, has dashed from under her skirts and out of the room. Ms. Swille lies in the water on the floor, unconscious. Barracuda picks her up as though she were a child and throws her into the tub. She lies there face down, until she begins to gurgle and bubble. Barracuda grabs her by the hair and turns her over. She rolls up her sleeves. She gets an old hard brush rich with pine soap. Then she starts scrubbing away.

LATER. THE ROOM HAS been cleaned. The cat litter and the cats have been removed. There are new curtains up. The sheets have been changed, and there is a pleasant light in the room instead of the dreary one that had been there for months. Barracuda has changed from her clothes upon which Ms. Swille’s blood had spattered. Bangalang is on one side, combing Ms. Swille’s hair; Barracuda is on the other. They are using long golden combs. Ms. Swille is propped up in the bed. She has a Band-Aid on her skin, here and there. Her skin is a raw red from the scalding hot water. She is drinking a tall glass of milk between sobs.

“Barracuda hates to do what she had to do with her darlin, but her darlin was letting her darlin self go. Barracuda no like that. Barracuda no like. Come from a proud fambly. Good fambly. Remember when you used to help fix waffles for your Daddy and Mr. Jefferson Davis? ‘Can I help, Mammy Barracuda?’ you used to ax. Bless yo little soul. You’d even carry some out back for Mr. Davis’ body servant, Sammy Davis. Round here wearing Levi negligees. No wonder Bossman Swille took to having a separate bedroom. You can’t blame the man for wanting to be away from you, the condition you was in.

“It all started that time you came home from Radcliffe. That Yankee school. I told your Daddy that that school wasn’t doing nothing but bothering your head, but he wouldn’t listen. Then you come home. People glad to see you. Then how you act. How you act! Call them a bunch of antebellum anal retentive assholes. Then we found you reading that book by that old simple Stowe fambly. Old crazy fambly. That wild Harriet one. And her adulteratin brother Henry, ain’t got a bit of sense, and her suffragette sister Isabelle — she crazy too. Jesus tired of them. Jesus tired. That’s why her son got wounded in the war and the other one drownded. That’s Jesus gettin back at them for they lies. And the way she bad-mouth old Simon Legree. He a good man. He always say, ‘Now, anything you need, just ask for it, Mammy Barracuda. Just speak up, you can have it.’ Lorrrrrd.”

Mammy Barracuda is preening and plaiting the Mistress’ hair, looking googly-eyed toward the ceiling. She pauses a minute. “You try to raise them and look what they done done. Marry a rich man like that. Arthur Swille III. Anybody else would be proud. Proud. Like a fairy queen in one of them Princess books. Worrying him so. Now I want you to get your basket of violets together, do you hear me?”

“But—”

“Don’t choo be buttin me! You gon pick some violets; that is, after you have come down and personally looked after the preparing of the breakfast for the men. Then … What else, Bangalang?”

Bangalang picks up an in-Castle memo from the night-stand top. “Then there will be a garden poetry reading of Edgar Poe.”

“I think for dat occasion you shall wear a bonnet and a cloak and some jewelry … some of dat nice golden jewelry. Maybe your goldbug pin.”

“I gave that to Mr. Poe to pawn. He’s always seeking ‘loans,’ as he calls them. Says he can’t figure out royalty reports.”

“Then after that I want you to come to my office, and I’ll have you fill out the details for the rest of the day, which will include a tea for some of the neighborhood belles, an outdoor cookie sale to help the po ’Federate hospital …”

“But, Barracuda, don’t you see that that’s exploitin—”

“You shush about the ‘sploitin.’ Now I want you to roll over.”

“What are you doing now?”

Barracuda, one eye shut, one eye open, is preparing a long hypodermic needle filled with cc’s of Valium.

“What … what are you doing, Barracuda?”

“This ain’t gon take but a little time. And don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit. Just a little pinch.”

“But, Barracuda …”

“Barracuda wants her darlin to turn over now. Cooperate, I don’t have all day. A famous military man is coming for dinner tomorrow, and I have to prepare the menu. Tomorrow night while they’re dining I want you to make an appearance. When the men is lighting up the cigars, you will enter the room and make a few courtesies and stay until they have recited the ‘Ode to the Southern Belle.’ Tomorrow A.M. you will return to watering flowers, selling cookies, fanning yourself, fluttering your eyebrows and blushing at the flirtatious remarks of the Southern gen’mens. I want that drawl back, too. You sound too Yankee, that’s part of your problem. But tomorrow you goin to look fine. Like nothing ever happened. You gon look chaste — not too chaste, though, a wee bit coquettish, refined. Now turn over. You will be quality people again and quit yo old tomcat ways. Hrmph! Grumph!”