Ishmael Reed - Flight to Canada

Brown smiled broadly. “I’d love to, lad. Do you have it with you?”

“It’s in my cabin. I’ll be right back.”

Quickskill ran to the cabin, almost knocking down one of the lakers, he was so excited. He dashed inside. “Quaw Quaw! Quaw Quaw! William Wells Brown—” She was lying on the bed, sobbing. He reached for her arm.

“Don’t you touch me, Leave me alone. I was tired of reading Dickens and so I took your manuscript out of the suitcase. I read the poem. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone?”

“You loved him so, Quaw Quaw. I didn’t want to be the one. I don’t need to knock another man to gain a woman.”

“But … I’ve been with this man since I was fourteen. He raised me. Sent me to school. Paid my bills. I loved him. But if I had known …” She breaks into sobs, burying her head in the wet pillow.

Quickskill walked over to the dresser where the poem lay. He didn’t want her to learn about it this way. No, not this way.

Third World Belle

My Indian Princess

No one has the heart to tell

You, so I will

Your favorite pirate uses

Your Dad’s great-chief’s skull

As an ashtray

And sold your Mom’s hand-knitted

Robes to Buffalo Bill’s

Wild West Show

He buried your brother alive

In a sealed-off section of the

Metropolitan Museum

To you he’s a “heavy” aesthete

Born in ’27

While I am a native mind riding

Bareback, backwards through

A wood of words and when I stumble

I get my Ibo* up and hobble

like a bloody-footed slave

Traveling from Virginia to

Ohio and if I stumble again

I get my Cherokee up and smell

My way to the clearing

Your Apache temper snaps at me

Even before I open my trap

But I still love you my

Mountain-climbing woman with

A rope all around your waist

My rider of Killer Whales

I’m on a fox hunt for you baby

Got my black cap and red coat on

I’m on a fox hunt for you baby

Got my black cap and red coat on

Just like a coyote cassetting amorous

Howls

In Sugar Blues

I airmail them to you

In packages of Hopi Dolls

Ah ouooooool Ah ouoooooo!

* Ibos: a fiercely proud African tribe who’d rather cut their throats than be sold into slavery.

MOOOOTTTTHHHHHEEEEERRRR. MOOOOOTTTTTHHHHHEEEERRR.

“What can that be?” Ms. Swille said at the dresser, turning her head around.

Moooootttttthhhhhheeeeeerrrrr.

Then she saw a foot — no, not really a foot but some strange reticulated claw — entering the room from the wall opposite her. And then a clammy-looking hand … well, not exactly a hand. It was a human figure, but not exactly; the skin belonged to that of a crocodile, but the head — oh no — the head, it was Mitchell’s head. Mitchell, the anthropologist; it was his head.

“Mitchell, you’re supposed to be in the Congo. What on earth are you doing in that outfit?”

“I hate to greet you in this awful state, Mother, but, well, you see, I was killed.”

“Killed! My son! You were … they told me that you had extended your stay in the Congo. Killed!” She begins to sob.

“I know, Mom,” the creature says, now having moved to next to where she’s seated in front of the mirror. “They never tell you anything. But my body was never found. The Snake Society was mean, and they, well, they have some strange ideas about the supernatural. You don’t hear them longing for ‘hebbin,’ as the kinks call it here. They threw me to this crocodile called Aldo. He ate everything but my head … He …”

“Oh, oh, oh! No! Please, Mitchell, they didn’t.”

“You can’t blame them, Mom. They condemned me to go about in this outfit for eternity. It’s cold where I am. A cold-blooded place, as they say in Sacramento. The other side. Boy, are the smokes going to be in for a surprise. I had to tell you this, Mother; I know that even the little picks who remove the worms from the tobacco know more about what’s going on here than you do. The smokes do the same thing there that they do here, only overtime. The unglorious occupations. You see, they found out that I wasn’t really on an anthropology expedition but was checking things for Dad. Your husband, my father, is one macabre fiend. No wonder he has Poe down here all the time. Do you know what he did?”

“What did he do, son?”

“Sent my head to the National Archives and took it off his taxes.”

“Oh, son, did he do that?”

“I didn’t want to meddle in the internal affairs of the Congo. He had me spending my time making resources maps. All I wanted to do was bring back some shrunken heads for my museum collection. You know, the one uptown that Dad gave me.”

“I’m furious. Son, do you see me shaking? Do you see what a terrible state I’m in? That smoke, Mammy Barracuda, just makes my life miserable. I have no authority any more, and when I do exercise my functions she says things like ‘Dit out of my way,’ or ‘Dit out of my kitchen.’ She has some strange hold on Master Swille.”

“That’s not all, Mother. He has this film library. When his friends were riding high before the war, he’d invite them up here. He showed terrible pictures of slaves being tortured and killed. Close-ups of them biting each other’s ears off. His friends would watch this, drink Tennessee whiskey and eat box lunches. It was awful.”

“No, no, spare me.”

“And not only that. He flogged Queen Victoria. Yet she refused to give him a title.”

“What!”

“That’s when you were away in New York on behalf of one of the Beecher causes. He was in England on business. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Dad for the purpose of his loaning England some money so that they could buy Burma. Well, Barracuda found a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in her room, and Dad had her fettered before the whole establishment. Others say that the Queen refused him a barony. And Mom, Dad’s gotten mixed up with this Lord Gladstone who’s a friend of Marquis de Sade who is introducing some new pastime for the rich called Sadism.”

“What on earth is that, son?”

“Something to do with whips. But sometimes screws. Sadists have closets full of lashes. They trade fettering devices.”

“But we do that all the time down here, son.”

“That’s why Gladstone came out for the Confederacy.”

“Why … I don’t follow.”

“Gladstone is a leading Sadist. He’s into flagellation. He … he whips himself, Mother, tortures and beats himself.”

“Oh my God, you mean your father is mixed up with that outfit?”

“Yes, Mother. They want to make the South into their headquarters so that all of their followers can come here and practice their ways without being persecuted. They’ve referred to Virginia as the Sadist’s Canada. Well, they had the Queen of England whipped, Mother. The Sadists have about captured the Crown. They’re all over the world, whipping people in the name of England. Whipping. Screaming. Beating people for the Queen.”

“Zounds! What horrors!”

“Victoria’s old whale-white skin started spotting red. Then they blotched her, wringed her. And they stretched her. And Prince Albert stood there real dignified, Mother. Real dignified. And under so much stress. And speaking of stress, Mother, they brought in that stud, Big Jim. Mother, you know the one who goes about saying motherfuck a motherfucker all the time. Then it got kinky, Mom. Real kinky. They really needed that loan bad, but Dad didn’t get the barony. He’s now trying to get a circle of corrupt lords to persuade the Queen to bestow one upon him. He’s a saber-toothed guppy, Mom. Look at me. I have to go through eternity this way. You know, it’s hard to get crocodile skin clean, real hard. Dirt digs deep in the scales. I can’t control the tail. All I wanted to do was hunt some heads for my museum collection. Now look … I talk in this evil nasal twang.”