Ishmael Reed: Flight to Canada

“I was young then.”

“But even now. Why do you tie up things so? Not permitting a free flow of ideas.”

“Somebody’s got to do it. Emerson, Thoreau, Greeley. Soft white men. Swille had his points. I used to admire him. But now he’s behind. Still thinking that he can maintain his empire through flogging and killing. It’s made him depraved.”

“You’re telling me. He has this private projection room where he shows films of slaves being tortured, pilloried, castrated, and he and his guests sit around sipping black milkshakes; it …”

“You see.” He goes over, picks up the phone and orders one of his men to begin the journey toward Niagara Falls, Ontario.

“Would you like something to eat, Quickskill? Lasagne? Crêpe cannelloni? Besciamella? I have some fine pastas I can order up.”

“No, thanks.”

They finally reached the other side. A man was waiting to canoe Quickskill to the banks. Yankee Jack had phoned ahead. Raven put his gear over his shoulder. He picked up his suitcase.

“Well, this is it.” The pirate extended his hand.

Quickskill looked at it. “I don’t think so. Thanks for the ride, but if I ever meet you on free ground, I’m going to kill you.”

The pirate chuckled. “Have it your way.”

Quickskill climbs into the canoe. The man prepares to row to the shore.

“One more thing,” the pirate says. “I read your poem ‘Third World Belle.’ It was a giveaway. One thing, though. You said I buried her brother in a sealed-off section of the Metropolitan Museum. Wrong. It was the Museum of Natural History. One of the board members, an old friend, Captain Kidd, had called me in to be a co-consultant on an Oceanic exhibit they were giving. Well, her brother rushed past the guard and into the board room to complain about a statue they have outside of Theodore Roosevelt sitting on a horse while a black slave and an Indian are obsequiously kneeling next to it, like the President’s children. He said it was paternalistic. He said something about its being racist. He had a shotgun, and … well, we couldn’t have him waving that thing around. We had to, ah, subdue him, and I guess we used a little too much force. We didn’t want to carry out the body before all of those milling visitors and so we stuffed him and put him downstairs in the lower floor. He’s there now, standing in a huge log boat next to a shaman figure.”

Quickskill wasn’t listening. The boat began to move toward land. Soon Quickskill would be free. But he was too tired and depressed to greet this prospect with joyful exclamation of former slaves who reached this moment of Jubilation.

“While they were on my vessel I felt little interest in them, and had no idea that the love of liberty as a part of man’s nature was in the least possible degree felt or understood by them. Before entering Buffalo harbor, I ran in near the Canada shore, manned a boat and landed them on the beach … They said, ‘Is this Canada?’ I said, ‘Yes, there are no slaves in this country’; then I witnessed a scene I shall never forget They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it, hugged and kissed each other, crying, ‘Bress de Lord/ Oh! I’se free before I die!’ ”

RAVEN QUICKSKILL WAS SITTING on the terrace of the Queen Victoria Gardens Hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. He had to wait for a while to get a seat. He was looking out on the indescribable American Falls. It was the closest spot to heaven on earth. People of all races, classes, descriptions seemed to be there, dangling their feet on the walls overlooking the slopes, which ran down to the two-lane highway and to the rails where people of all ages looked out at the wonder, the terrifying rapids below. Was all of Canada like this? Then he saw it. The crowd looked up.

He could make out some kind of figure in the mist. It was a figure on a tightrope. The figure seemed to be carrying a banner. Later he was to learn that the tightrope was eleven hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet above the water. People closed in about the railing for a closer look. The patrons of the hotel rose from their seats and went down the slope to look, too. He joined them. He was curious. People were shoving each other to get to one of the telescopes that one could employ, near the rails.

He found an empty one and looked through. It was a woman. She was in Indian clothes. She was coming across Niagara Falls: She was walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls!

Sam Patch must be rolling in the grave, he thought. A woman doing this. She was doing what no man had ever done. She was coming across, backward. Quaw Quaw! He could tell it was she because he knew her backward quite well. It could be nobody else’s backward but hers. Carrying the banner, she did a somersault. The crowd gaped and murmured. It said Ahhhhhh. Later she said she would have made two omelettes, breaking the eggs in midair, but she figured that would be too anti-suffragette. All the way up in the air, doing housework. She kept coming across the tightrope as the crowd on both sides grew hushed. It even seemed that the Falls had hushed. It was an “eerie quiet.” Would she make it?

Of course, now he understood what she meant. Blondinist. He had thought it was some new rebellion game invented by the Emancipation Bugle.

Blondin. French tightrope walker. “The Little Wonder.” Jean François Gravelet. Walked above the Falls on a tightrope in 1859. She had done him better. Her feat was like her life, between the American and Canadian Falls with a gorge underneath. They argued all the time, but this they had in common. He was the raven. Ga! Ga! Gaaa! Ga! They both were capable of producing cliff-hangers, as she was now.

She reached the other side and the crowd went wild, joining hands and jumping about, whistling, stomping their feet. Automobiles were honking, policemen were blowing whistles. She had reached the other side and was coming down.

He could then read the banner she carried: Quickskill, I love you.

LATER THEY WERE DINING in the Victoria Gardens restaurant. She had gone upstairs to her suite to change, a difficult feat because the lobby was crowded with the press and with people from television and radio. The Canadian police had to help her to her room. He waited for her downstairs in the restaurant. Finally, when she appeared again, she was wearing a grey somber-striped Happi coat made of sheared weasel, which she had bought on impulse from the money collected when the hat was passed among the spectators. People had made movie offers. Book contracts were proposed. She turned them all down, telling the people that she was an “artist” and that she was “pure” and that she “didn’t want to sell out.”

Now it was quieter. People only glanced their way from time to time. They were alone. She was telling him her adventures, which occurred after she dove into the Niagara.

“Well, I swam and swam, and it was getting very dark and there was a fisherman. He noticed me and he asked if I wanted to be pulled out of the water. He said if I continued, I’d be swept over the falls. Well, my mind wasn’t into that, I was just swimming. I didn’t have any destination in mind; I heard the roar in the distance, but I didn’t know it was Niagara Falls. Then it occurred to me, I had a chance to do Blondin one better. I would walk the tightrope across Niagara Falls backwards. Well, the fisherman provided me with some blankets. He was very nice about it. He got me to the shore and hailed a cab for me. I came to this hotel and got a suite.”

“How did you do that? You didn’t have any money.”