Ishmael Reed - The Last Days of Louisiana Red

“You can’t do that, Wolf. You’d be revealing an industrial secret, and besides, our enemies will interpret it as being a sign of weakness.”

“It’s easy to give up, go into exile with your Business — that’s how it’s been these many years, but now we’re not alone as the small band of Workers of ancient America — there’s a lot of us now. We miss an opportunity if we don’t stay and fight — get rid of these rascals who hold sway over the mob once and for all. And you ought to get rid of that gun, Wolf. You have the Chairman of the Board and his Directors backing you up — they can put something on Street that will make Street back up from harming Workers whose only crime is minding their own Business.”

“I don’t have faith in the organization as much as you do, LaBas. Besides, look what happened to my dad, Ed.”

“Ed permitted evil to enter his household. He didn’t use the right precautions, and so a dangerous person was permitted to get next to him and get into his Business.”

“You know something the police don’t know, LaBas?”

“I know a lot of things the police don’t know, Wolf, but in this matter my guess is as good as theirs. Only time will tell. My intuition has gotten me this far. My intuition tells me you should get rid of that heat before you get the kind of Louisiana Red your dad got. But you’re a grown man, suit yourself.”

A landmark tells you a lot about the town. Berkeley’s is still Sather Tower, which holds a clock with four faces. It was designed by John Galen Howard, who also did the campus’ log cabin in which a secret society known as the Order of the Golden Bear met and in collusion with the Chancellor ran the school for many years. For his tower, Howard had in mind “the tall stalk of a lily with a single tightly closed bud as a crown.”

Berkeley is so rational that even its trashings have structure; the rocks know right where to go: Bank of America.

Oakland is wild, churlish, grinding its pelvis to tough shipyard music. The last thing its negro weekend casualties say to their wives before they go out of the house with their shotguns is “I’ll be right back.” Even a rough-and-tumble painter like Joe Overstreet refuses to go into Oakland. He’ll drive to the border of the town and drop off passengers as if they were passengers at the edge of the world. Oakland’s caretaker was Bill Knowland, publisher of the Oakland Tribune . If you will recall, he was the Senator Knowland of the fifties who wanted to blockade Asian ports and lob a few at communism. Shooting from the hip, you know. “Let him hang there and twist slowly in the wind.” He wasn’t interested in merely containing the thing but wanted to wipe out “the whole enchilada,” as high-class lawyers from Orange County say. If the early skyline of Oakland was dominated by gothic gables, now Doggie Dog Diner’s totemic head revolves everywhere — the animal god. Oakland’s focal point is Lake Merritt. This early description:

Literally hundreds of species and their varieties crowd the water, especially in autumn. Rare birds, swans and geese you are never likely to see elsewhere, unless you travel into distant Alaskan wilds, paddle and fly and swim, seem to lose all sense of fear and eat the grain scattered twice a day for them like barn-fowl. Ducks, comprising every breed that flies, dozens of varieties of gulls, gannets, divers, here they are. One of the interests of Oaklanders is to go to the Lake and stroll its beautiful banks, throwing bread to favorites, while bird clubs revel in the opportunities offered. Many small birds are happily at home in the park, too, songsters, bright-plumaged wanderers, some staying a few days, some for months, some making their home there. And all are charmingly tame and safely trustful.

Now you only see a dozen or so polluted specimens from the bird infirmary, down on their luck and stranded because their oil-laden wings won’t lift them off.

Old Doc Durant, a classics professor, intended Berkeley to be the Athens of the West; that would make Oakland the Thebes.

This scene takes place in Oakland. Chorus was waiting his turn to speak. He wanted to tell the good news to the audience of how he had made his comeback. How he had regained his dignity. It was a forum, and he was appearing with a sculptor and a musician. People wandered in and out dressed in their fantasies; they strode across the podium giving their unsolicited views concerning the dimensions of Hades, the correct way of grooming a unicorn and other verbal play. These Thebans consider the arts for the sissies; for Athenians. And so these public forums provide an opportunity for the profoundest idiots to castigate the artists because they cannot see, hear or taste — they have no sense and are one big ignorant tongue, constantly rolling off opinions like breakfast cereal boxes in a factory assembly line. Chorus merely attended to see if the dialogue was as bad as he had heard; it was worse. It stunk.

The moderator wandered in and out, occasionally peeking through an open door like a moron. Children bawled. People in the hallways were noisy. You could hear the clunk of cigarettes dropping in machines — the rattle of coffee dispensers.

People greet the moderator with shouts; giggle and sneer at the panelists. Chorus notices Antigone in the audience. She is always in the audience. She is raising her voice and folding her arms. Her hatred has screwed up her face so that, though she can’t be more than twenty-five years old, she looks like a rotten hag with crowsfeet and craggy wrinkles. She heaps viperous words, she sneers, she twists her mouth.

In a former time when the Theban elders had manhood, a man would have leaped across that stage and whipped the shit out of this bitch, but this is considered bad form these days. People are allowed to say anything to you in any words.

In Brazil they would have left Antigone in a temple until all of her psychic poisons were flushed out, but there is no such system of mental sanitation created for the Thebans. Their gods have been destroyed, their art plundered, their goals in life: eat, sleep, shelter, pussy; they steal from and assault each other. What did Creon say? “O Zeus, what a tribe you have given us in woman.” When she finishes excoriating the other forum members, she turns to the Chorus and talks in the manner of a 19th-century Barbary Coast sailor.

She respects no man and the only one she can deal with is Polynices, whose Greek name means “much strife.” The painter, the sculptor, the writer and the Chorus glare at her, inwardly raging as Athenian guards walk up and down the aisles, grinning over their discomfort. They are Theban men who are sitting on a stage discussing their art; they have walked into a trap because the conqueror wishes to demean the Thebans by having them ridicule their best. The conqueror always sends Antigone. She gets the biggest honorariums. She is on her way to becoming: “The Sphinx who ate men raw.”

Chorus: Just answer me this one: Did Oedipus think that when he banished the Sphinx — in Africa a half-man, half-animal which became a grotesque female in Greece — did he think that when he banished this monster from Thebes, in thousands of years the Sphinx would not have learned a trick or two? That the Sphinx would reappear as his brother’s niece, Antigone, woo Teiresias to wear down Oedipus about his origin (Creon was close when he suggested Teiresias was out for personal gain) and finally wipe out his brother’s family?

(Sister and Minnie are seated in an apartment in the Yellings’ house. Minnie is reading a grey-covered magazine with no cover picture. Sister is sewing and listening to Radio KDIA “Lucky Thirteen.”)