Ishmael Reed - Flight to Canada

“Oh, son. I know what to do,” she said as the specter crept back through the wall.

Outside a thunderstorm began. It was thrashing across the sky. She thought she heard someone calling. A familiar voice. Echoing across the meadows. A sweet soprano voice.

AT ONE END OF the table, the top of which bore three white candles and a basket of fruit and flowers, sat, dining, Arthur. Swille. At the other, a man dressed in a Union military uniform. He was much decorated. His chest looked like a medal bed.

“… then Mudd took the wounded man in and bandaged him. Everything is proceeding according to plan.”

“Good. So no one can trace it to me?”

“We made sure of that. One of our men, posing as a marshal, shot him to death as he was running out of the barn. The newspapers are getting suspicious. You know, the story we put out that all the conspirators burned up in the fire.”

“Whitewash.”

“Nothing about whitewash. Just suspicious. We did it away from the TV cameras. Told the video people that we couldn’t guarantee their safety.”

“What about the woman who ran the inn?”

“Oh, she doesn’t know anything about you.”

“Good job, General. When do you think you can get Johnson down here to see me? The great Plebeian.”

“Ha ha. That was some speech he made at Abe’s second inauguration, huh?” He swallowed two tumblers of whiskey before he went on. “Lincoln was so mad. You should have seen Abe. He said if we allowed that son of a bitch to say another word, he’d fire the whole cabinet. Johnson’s having d.t.’s now. Says he sees Lincoln’s ghost. We have to get Jacobson to give him injections. They’re beginning to whisper in the Capitol. You know how the town talks. We listened in on one of Anderson’s lines, and he’s thinking about doing a column on it. The man has no class. The rude Tennessean. Got into a fistfight with a heckler.”

“He what?”

“Wrestling in the streets with a buckrah. You know, Abe had his bad points, but Abe was cold. These fancy Confederates were trying to arrange a peace deal. We were all sitting on The River Queen. And one of them cited Charles I for some precedent. Some action Charles I took. They wanted to win a few points. Well, Abe … Abe started to clutch his lapels with his fingers. And he leaned back until his eyes were focused on the ceiling. And he kinda got that twinkle in his eyes that brought lines in their corners closer together. And he said, ‘All I know about Charles I is that he went and got himself beheaded.’ You know, the South will never forgive him for declaring medical supplies contraband at Richmond.”

“Look, General, I didn’t mind Lincoln. Had him down here.” Swille stops and begins munching on apple pie. “Hmmmmm. This is delicious. Pompey …” addressing the small slave standing against the wall, “go and have them order Mammy Barracuda a ruby ring from Cartier’s. Anyway, as I was saying, I liked the man. But he gave away all that property. All that property. Gave away other people’s property. Why, I tried to loan him the money to buy the slaves. What made him change his mind, General?”

The general puts down a wineglass. “Toward the end he kept having visions of himself as a statue. Sitting in the chair and staring out over the Potomac. He started to believe it. He began to see himself as a great Emancipator, Mr. Swille. Got hooked by his own line. Then he saw visions of himself lying in state on the catafalque in the Capitol rotunda. I finally realized why Abe was an infidel, Massa Swille.”

“Why’s that, General?” Swille says, sipping a cup of coffee.

“He couldn’t imagine anybody being Christ but him. He could never deal with the infidel issue they kept raising in his campaigns about our Lord being the real Christ.”

The Military Man reaches over and carves some salmon, which rests in a china platter, an idiot look on its face, surrounded by sliced lemons.

“Strange times, don’t you think, General? What happens to such people in these times? I think Abe must have gotten nigger fever.”

“What’s that, Mr. Swille?”

“Nigger fever. Niggers do something to you. I’ve seen white people act strange under their influence. First you dream about niggers, little niggers mostly; little niggers, sitting eating watermelons, grinning at you. Then you start dreaming about big niggers. Big, big niggers. Big, big niggers walking all on top of you; then you got niggers all over you, then they got you. Now they got white men fighting white men on land taken away from the Indians — Rappahannock, Chattanooga. It’s spooky. As long as they’re in this country, this country is under their spell. It’ll be one great HooDoo sea.”

“I understand the wisdom of your decision, Mr. Swille.”

“Would you like some dessert?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Swille, think I’ll just sit here, light up a cigar and relax next to this wonderful fireplace.”

“Had it shipped over here from Windsor Castle. The Duke was glad to get the money, too. Glad to. Went out and gave away his food stamps.”

“You spend a lot of time over there, don’t you, Mr. Swille?”

“That I do, General. Though my body inhabits the Swille Castle, my mind is in Europe. What’s that you always say, Uncle Robin?”

“Say what, Massa Swille?”

“What’s that old colored saying?”

“Oh, you mean, you can take my body but not my soul?”

“That’s the one. Americans, both North and South, hate the slaves, and they’re slaves themselves. If we didn’t have the cocoas, we’d get the Irish. Did you hear the one about the Irish map? Shows you where the roads don’t go. Get it? Shows you where the roads don’t go.”

“Sir, I’ve never heard it put so sanguinely. Sir, you … you should run things yourself instead of hiring people, sir. You should …”

Swille, now leaning back, flicking ashes from his Havanna into an ashtray, says, “I know. I know. Uncle Robin asked me the same thing. But the Family would get mad. It would be an embarrassment to the Family.”

“Incidentally, speaking of the Family, how’s the crocodile-killing coming on?”

“We brought in the army corps of engineers. Some congressman from Lawrence, Kansas, some kind of offbeat town, objected and called it genocide. I’d like to parachute feetfirst into Lawrence and clean it up, that anti-slavery hotbed.”

“Why can’t you do something about that town?”

Ms. Swille enters the room. Uncle Robin starts. Swille and the general rise. She is decked out in finery — hoop skirt, Paris shoes, hair in belle curls. She is thin as Twiggy and wan as Morris’ Guenevere; titties the size of spuds. Swille and the general lift their wineglasses.

“How’s about a toast to Southern womanhood,” the general says.

“I don’t want your toasts. You Swille swine.”

She moves into the room, and from her handbag she pulls a Stonewall Jackson rocket-powered miniature cannon, leave a hole in a man the size of an eightball.

“Dear, what’s come over you?” Swille says, dropping his glass, rolling his eyes about like Mantan Mooreland in the Charlie Chan movies.

“My son. You killed my son. All he wanted to do was hunt some shrunken heads for his museum, and you had him over there … you disgusting …”

“Look, dear, he asked me if there was anything he could do for me in the Congo. I didn’t think it’d hurt for him to look in on some copper. Just think, all the copper, Mother, radiant … yellow!”

“You Moloch! You Mammon! You … you Beelzebub! Oh, this man, my husband,” she said, turning to the Military Man.

The Military Man nodded nervously, clutching his white linen napkin in his hand.