Ishmael Reed: Flight to Canada

“But suppose they paid you off. Would you try to recover even then?”

“Look, Robin, if they’d came to me and if they’d asked to buy themselves, perhaps we could have arranged terms. But they didn’t; they furtively pilfered themselves. Absconded. They have committed a crime, and no amount of money they send me will rectify the matter. I’d buy all the niggers in the South before I’d accept a single dime for or from them … Quickskill, I’ll never be able to figure out. Why, he ate in the house and was my trusted bookkeeper. I allowed him to turn the piano pages when we had performers in the parlor, even let him wear a white wig — and he’d give all of this up. Well,” he said, pounding on the top of his desk, “they won’t get away with it. One thing my father told me: never yield a piece of property. Not to a man, not to the State. Before he died, that’s what he told me and my brothers.”

Dressed in his robes, Swille reaches out his hand, which embraces a wineglass. Uncle Robin walks over to the spirits cabinet, returns and pours him a gobletful, goes back to his place. Uncle Robin knows his place — his place in the shadows.

“Robin, what have you heard about this place up North, I think they call it Canada?” Swille says, eying Robin slyly.

“Canada. I do admit I have heard about the place from time to time, Mr. Swille, but I loves it here so much that … that I would never think of leaving here. These rolling hills. Mammy singing spirituals in the morning before them good old biscuits. Watching ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ on the Late Show. That’s my idea of Canada. Most assuredly, Mr. Swille, this my Canada. You’d better believe it.”

“Uncle Robin, I’m glad to hear you say that. Why, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I can always count on you not to reveal our little secret. Traveling around the South for me, carrying messages down to the house slaves, polishing my boots and drawing my bath water. All of these luxuries. Robin, you make a man feel like … well, like a God.”

“Thank you, Massa Swille. I return the compliment. It’s such a honor to serve such a mellifluous, stunning and elegant man as yourself, Massa Swille; indeed an honor. Why … why, you could be President if you wanted to.”

“I toyed with the idea, Robin. But my brothers made me think of the Family. It would be a disgrace to the Swilles if I ever stooped so low as to offer myself to this nation. I’m afraid, Robin, that that office is fit only for rapscallions, mobocrats, buckrahs, coonskinners and second-story men. Before Granddad died, they elected that Irishman Andrew Jackson, a cut-up and a barroom brawler, to office — why, I remained in exile during his entire term. Refused even to speak the language, spoke French for those years. It was only after Dad died that I returned to manage this land.”

“You’re a very busy man, Mr. Swille. The presidency would only be a waste of time for you.”

There’s a knock on the door. Mammy Barracuda enters. “Arthur,” then, noticing Uncle Robin, “Oh, I mean Massa Swille.”

“Yes, Barracuda?”

Barracuda has a silk scarf tied about her head. A black velvet dress. She wears a diamond crucifix on her bosom. It’s so heavy she walks with a stoop. Once she went into the fields and the sun reflected on her cross so, two slaves were blinded.

“It’s your wife, Ms. Swille, sir. She say she tired of being a second-class citizen and she say she don’t want to feed herself no mo. She say it’s anti-suffragette. She say she shouldn’t have to exert herself to feed herself and she say she wont to be fed extravenous, I mean, fed intravenous, somethin. Grumph. When she do get out of bed, we have to rock her in the rocking chair. We have to wash her feet and then empty her spoils. The room ain’t been aired out in months. She say she boycott somethin. Humph!”

“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. You mean she won’t eat at all?”

“She told me to mail this letter. I thought I’d show it to you. See what you thought about it before I mailed it.”

“Very thoughtful of you, Barracuda.”

He takes the letter, opens it.

“What you lookin at?”

“I was just admiring your new apron, Mammy Barracuda, that’s all,” Uncle Robin says.

“Better be. Humph. Grumph.”

“Destroy this letter, Barracuda. A one-year subscription to that National Era which carried the work by that fanatical Beecher woman.”

“I will burn it first chance I get, Massa Swille. What about him?”

“I trust Robin second only to you, Barracuda. Lying curled up fetuslike in your lap is worth a hundred shrinks on Park Avenue.”

“Humph. Whew. Wheeew,” utters Barracuda, of whom it once was rumored “she stared a man to death,” as she goes out.

“Wonderful old soul, Mammy Barracuda.”

“You can second that twice for me, Massa Swille.”

“What’s that, Robin?”

“That part about her being a wonderful old soul. You can second that twice for me.”

THERE’S A KNOCK AT THE door. It’s Moe, the white house slave — Mingy Moe, as the mammies in the kitchen call him. He looks like an albino: tiny pink pupils, white Afro.

“Sorry to disturb you, Master Swille, but Abe Lincoln, the President of the so-called Union, is outside in the parlor waiting to see you. He’s fiddling around and telling corny jokes, shucking the shud and husking the hud. I told him that you were scheduled to helicopter up to Richmond to shake your butt at the Magnolia Baths tonight, but he persists. Says, ‘The very survival of the Union is at stake.’ ”

“Hand me my jacket, Uncle Robin,” Swille says as he stands in the middle of the room.

“Which one do you wont, suh — the one with the spangly fritters formal one or the silvery-squilly festooned street jacket?”

“Give me the spangly one,” Turning to Moe, Swille says, “Now, Moe, you tell this Lincoln gentleman that he won’t be able to stay long. Before I fly up to Richmond, I have to check on my investments all over the world.”

“Yessir, Mr. Swille.”

Momentarily, Lincoln, Gary Cooper-awkward, fidgeting with his stovepipe hat, humble-looking, imperfect — a wart here and there — craw and skuttlecoat, shawl, enters the room. “Mr. Swille, it’s a pleasure,” he says, extending his hand to Swille, who sits behind a desk rumored to have been owned by Napoleon III. “I’m a small-time lawyer and now I find myself in the room of the mighty, why—”

“Cut the yokel-dokel, Lincoln, I don’t have all day. What’s on your mind?” Swille rejects Lincoln’s hand, at which Lincoln stares, hurt.

“Yokel-dokel? Why, I don’t get you, Mr. Swille.”

“Oh, you know — log-cabin origin. That’s old and played out. Why don’t you get some new speech writers? Anyway, you’re the last man I expected to see down here. Aren’t you supposed to be involved in some kind of war? Virginia’s off limits to your side, isn’t it? Aren’t you frightened, man?”

“No, Mr. Swille. We’re not frightened because we have a true cause. We have a great, a noble cause. Truth is on our side, marching to the clarion call. We are in the cause of the people. It is a people’s cause. This is a great, noble and people period in the history of our great Republic. We call our war the Civil War, but some of the fellows think we ought to call it the War Between the States. You own fifty million dollars’ worth of art, Mr. Swille. What do you think we ought to call it?”

“I don’t feel like naming it, Lanky — and cut the poppycock.”

“Lincoln, sir.”

“Oh yes, Lincoln. Well, look, Lincoln, I don’t want that war to come up here because, to tell you the truth, I’m not the least bit interested in that war. I hate contemporary politics and probably will always be a Tory. Bring back King George. Why would a multinational like myself become involved in these queer crises? Why, just last week I took a trip abroad and was appallingly and disturbingly upset and monumentally offended by the way the Emperor of France was scoffing at this … this nation, as you call it. They were snickering about your general unkempt, hirsute and bungling appearance — bumping into things and carrying on. And your speeches. What kind of gibberish are they? Where were you educated, in the rutabaga patch? Why don’t you put a little pizazz in your act, Lanky? Like Davis … Now that Davis is as nit as a spit with his satin-embroidered dressing case, his gold tweezers and Rogers & Sons strap. He’s just bananas about Wagner and can converse in German, French and even that bloody Mexican patois. Kindly toward the ‘weak’ races, as he referred to them in that superb speech he made before the Senate criticizing Secretary of State Seward and other celebrities for financing that, that … maniac, John Brown. And when he brought in that savage, Black Hawk, on the steamboat Winnebago, he treated the primitive overlord with the respect due an ethnic celebrity. You can imagine the Americans taunting this heathen all decked out in white deerskins. Davis’ slaves are the only ones I know of who take mineral baths, and when hooped skirts became popular he gave some to the slave women, and when this made it awkward for them to move through the rows of cotton, he widened the rows.”