Ishmael Reed: Flight to Canada

Curious. Even in the Confederate anthem there was a belle fading away and losing her color. What was this fascination with declining belles in the South? What was the South all about? I’ll have to include all of this in my story, Quickskill thought.

Quickskill drank his coffee. He had a swell. His belly was up again. He spent so much time in thought, he forgot about his stomach. That was the writing business all right. He’d been writing since he could remember; his “Flight to Canada” was to him what blacks were to old Abe.

“Abe Lincoln’s last card or Rouge et Noir” was the caption under the wood engraving printed in Punch magazine. It showed Lincoln beating a Confederate with his ace of spades. Inside the card’s black spade was the grinning Negro. The engraving was by Sir John Tenniel, a Royalist. He’d have to write all of this in Robin’s story.

Raven was the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write and the first to run away. Master Hugh, the bane of Frederick Douglass, said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he’ll take an ell. If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write. And this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”

Master Hugh could have taught Harriet Beecher Stowe a thing or two.

* Sometimes spelled Griffado.

PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHEN the Swilles came to Virginia, and the Swilles ain’t talkin. Perhaps that’s why they live behind those great gates one reaches through mossy land and swamps full of so many swine that Swilles’ land has been named Swine’rd, Virginia.

According to the family records we do have, we know that the first Swille, a zealous slave trader, breeder and planter, was “indescribably deformed.” He did his business from the tower of a Castle he built on his grounds, said to be the very replica of King Arthur’s in the Holy City of Camelot, the Wasp’s Jerusalem, the great Fairy City of the old Feudal Order, of the ancient regime; of knights, ladies, of slaves; of jousting; of toasting; Camelot, a land of endless games. Seeing who could pull the Sword out of an anvil of iron. Listening to the convoluted prophecies of Merlin the Druid. Listening to Arthur and his knights, so refined and noble that they launched a war against the Arabs for the recovery of an objet d’art, yet treated their serfs like human plows, de-budding their women at will; torturing and witchifying the resistance with newfangled devices. Dracula, if you recall, was a count.

Arthur was England’s Alfonzo of the Kongo, the Pope’s native ruler who saw to it that the “heathen art” was destroyed. He was John Wallace of Hydaburg, the Christian native who persuaded the Tlingits to “cut down and burn” the great totem poles of Klinkwan. Arthur, whose father, Uther, according to Tennyson, was “dark,” even “well-nigh black” and so “sweet” some took him to be “less a man.”

Arthur made war against the Saxons and the old Druid gods who are depicted as monsters in his Romance. His descendants came to his America and made war against the gods of “Indians” and Africans.

Camelot became Swille’s bible, and one could hear him in the tower, giggling elflike as he came to each new insight; and they heard him dancing as Camelot, a fairy tale to most, became for him an Anglican Grand Design.

After Swille “crossed over,” his dream was taken up by Swille II, Rockland Swille, hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in “Mr. Polk’s War.” This Swille became “afflicted,” when he returned to Swine’rd, with an “inexplicable malady.” His wife was shut up in a sanitarium after witnessing what became known as “Swille’s malady” in the secret books of the old medical library, shelved so far back in the cavernous stacks.

His son, Swille III, was named Arthur because by that time a group of intelligent Virginia Planters had organized a branch of the Circle of the Golden Dawn and one of its notions was that the “Coming of Arthur” was at hand. (In certain books, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, also an Anglican, is referred to as “Our Arthur” or “The South’s Arthur.”) This group of Planters held meetings at a private Richmond club called the Magnolia Baths and was said to have exerted considerable influence during the proceedings of the secret Montgomery Convention where the plans for the Confederacy were drawn.

Arthur Swille received the licentious Hedonist Award for 1850 and was known in London and Paris circles as a gay blade, until he returned to Swine’rd to manage his Family’s great fortune after Swille II had mysteriously “pined away.”

This Swille, Swille III, Arthur Swille, obeyed no nation’s laws and once flogged Queen Victoria, a weekend guest at his English Country Manor, after a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin turned up in a search of her room.

Others say it was because Victoria refused to sell Swille III a barony; according to insiders, Victoria stuck to her guns, moaning, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” grunting, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” as Swille’s stud, Jim, brought the lash down upon the red striated back of the Queen of England. A proud day for the British Empire.

Security is stiff on the Swilles’ ground. Patrollers, called “paddies” by the slaves, reconnoiter the slave quarters.

Some say it’s due to Swille’s bitterness about the unfortunate and untimely death of his son, the anthropologist, whose head was returned to him in a box, covered with what a biopsy revealed as cells from a disgruntled crocodile.

The Snake Society went on satellite television to take credit for it, and added an especially grisly sidelight to a most heinous crime by joking that the head was covered with crocodile regurgitation because Mitchell was too rich for the crocodile, and that the crocodile just kinda laid around on the banks these days, wearing Bloomingdale shades, and was calling himself Aldo the Gourmet Crocodile.

It was reported from the Castle that Swille fired a pistol into the television set when he heard that, and in reprisal immediately ordered the execution of the North American crocodile in such a fiendish manner that by 1977 there will be only eighteen North American crocodiles left. Excuse me, twelve.

To add to this general mood of dolor and dread, three slaves—40s, Stray Leechfield and Raven Quickskill — have vanished.

THE MASTER’S STUDY. ARTHUR Swille has just completed the pushups he does after his morning nourishment, two gallons of slave mothers’ milk. Uncle Robin, his slave, is standing against the wall, arms folded. He is required to dress up as a Moorish slave to satisfy one of Swille’s cravings.

“Robin?”

“Yessir, Massa Swille.”

“What are the people down in the quarters saying about those kinks who took off with themselves?”

“Don’t get down to the slave village much any more, Massa Swille. After you and Cato the Graffado put out directions that none was to tarry there, I tain’t. We were gettin all of our information from Stray Leechfield, the runner, but now that he’s … well, after he …”

“Yes, you don’t have to say it, Robin. He’s gone. Stray Leechfield, 40s and [voice drops] Quickskill. They contracted Drapetomania, as that distinguished scientist Dr. Samuel Cartwright described in that book you read to me …”

“Dysaethesia Aethipica, Mr. Swille?”

“Exactly, Robin, that disease causing Negroes to run away. Of course, I’m not a sentimentalist. I won’t sleep until they’ve returned. I mean, I’m the last man to go against science, and if a slave is sick, then he must be rejuvenated — but I just can’t permit anyone to run over me like that. The other slaves will get ideas. So, even though they’re sick — they must be returned.”