Ishmael Reed - The Last Days of Louisiana Red

Amos: Well, as you know, I gave up working for the taxi company. I now manage a fleet of limousines that’s sent to bring Papa LaBas’ customers to the Gumbo Works.

Kingfish: You mean this man LaBas has such a business that the customers are brought to the Gumbo Works in limousines?

Amos: Yes.

Andy: Aw, we don’t wants to hear about that man. He is a sell-out.

Kingfish: Yeah, a Gisling.

Andy: He is unmoochable.

Amos: He’s done mighty well for me … I have to go now. You boys enjoy your beer, stop by and see me sometimes.

Here’s my card. (He gives Fish the card, exits)

Kingfish: Yeah, that nigger is living in the Oakland Hills. Away from the Moochers.

Andy: Yeah, let’s have some more beer.

(Kingfish looks around and then pockets the tip Amos had left behind)

(Enter Rufus Whitfield, struggling with a fighting Minnie, into LaBas’ office. She’s dressed real mannish.)

“Here she is, Pop. Fought like a tiger; bit my hand; tried some of that Kung Fu mess on me, so I whopped her one real good.” (Minnie spits in his face. Rufus draws back his hand, ready to strike) “Why, you—”

“Don’t hit her, Rufus. You can go.” Rufus glares at Minnie, who glares fiercely back.

“O.K., Pop, but if this girl gives you any trouble, let me know. I’ll bop her so she’ll think I’m Gravedigger and Coffin Ed, Captain Blackman and Solomon Gillis — all one big chopping nigger.” (Rufus exits.)

Minnie stands before LaBas’ desk, fuming, arms folded, tapping her feet.

“Cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“What do you do, Minnie? You seem to be a very serious girl. That article of yours I read. People need to play, party sometimes, you know. Why be so stiff? Why, in my day, we’d pile into our zoot suits, jalopies, and jitterbug to the big bands at Roseland, then we’d—”

“Look, I know you brought me here to talk about that fire. If that’s what you want to talk about, you’re wasting your breath. I’m the first one to admit it was a mistake. Shortly before your men illegally entered my home and brought me here, I heard from my lawyer. Whatever you’re running here is going to be mine anyway. I’m the next in line after Wolf for the inheritance—”

“There won’t be anything here.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re phasing out. Ed and Wolf have trained the Workers to go out and set up their own individual offices. Wolf had completed the inventory before he was killed. I promised Wolf I’d preside over … not its liquidation but its metamorphosis. We’ve just about completed our inventory, and so there’s no need to keep it a secret. You see, to our organization, industrial secrecy is sacred; any violation is what we call ‘sin.’ Wolf could have told Street we were phasing out, but our plans would have been in jeopardy if that had gotten out prematurely. A true Worker, he went to his grave with his lips sealed. You see, as long as we’re conspicuous, as long as we’re in the public’s eye with a definable point of operation, there will be scandals, murder. As long as we’re trying to take care of Business, people like you will always seek us out and attempt to enervate us. Without a central location, if we’re inaccessible, beyond reach, we’ll even be more able to devote our full energy to the Work, communicating with each other only when the need arises. You see, they want us to fail. The competition would rather have us on the public dole than let us achieve anything, and they use people like you to keep it that way and to inhibit the development of our quality.”

“We will get whatever you leave. Why, we can use this place for a meeting hall where we can come and discuss abstract things. (LaBas smiles) What are you smiling at?”

“You. You, Minnie. You take yourself so seriously. You couldn’t stand for your Dad and your brothers to run a Business as they sought. You and your roustabouts and vagrants just couldn’t stand negro men attempting to build something; if we were on the corner sipping Ripple, then you would love us, would want to smother us with kindliness.”

“That’s not the truth.”

“It’s the truth. It’s been the truth since we were enslaved into being the same — hammered into the same and kept there by white and negro forces. Every fool the same as a wise man, griot or warrior. The philosophy of slavery — the philosophy of inferiority in which the slave’s plight was compared to that of fellow slaves: the ancient Hebrews. The philosophy of slavery has been handed down through the ages and has appeared under different names. Moochism, for example.

“But all of you are not the same really, are you? There are rivalries between you Moochers of different colors and from different classes. You even have a high command, don’t you? Your high command, your ruling circle, gets all of the cigarettes, good whiskey and good cocaine while you talk about your brother and sister Moochers and what you’re doing for them, like old Joe Stalin the ‘Communist’ rewarding his personal chef with a general’s medal because he cooked his favorite shashlik. Of course, being a woman, Minnie, being a hi-yellow woman or, as you say, being a ‘black’ woman (chuckle), you even have further leverage.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘pussy-whipped,’ or ‘pussy-chained’? These expressions may be crude, but they smack of the truth. A woman uses her cunt power to threaten and intimidate, even to blackmail — to cause brother to kill brother. We’re still expected to pick up the bill and do the tipping, even though you say we’re the same.

“Women use our children as hostages against us. We walk the streets in need of women and make fools of ourselves over women; fight each other, put Louisiana Red on each other, shoot and maim each other. The original blood-sucking vampire was a woman. You flirt with us, tease us, provoke us, showing your delicious limbs to our askance glances; then you furtively pretend you don’t want it. Even some of you going around here reading ‘love’ poetry on how good you are in the sack. Your cunt is the most powerful weapon of any creature on this earth, and you know it, and you know how to use it. I can’t understand why you want to be liberated. Hell. You already free — you already liberated. Liberated and powerful. We’re the ones who are slaves; two-thirds of the men on skid row were driven there by their mothers, wives, daughters, their mistresses and their sisters. I’ve never known a woman who needed it as much as a man. Women rarely cruise or rape.”

“Look, old man,” Minnie says, fidgeting, tapping her foot nervously, squirming in her chair. “I didn’t come here to listen to a whole lot of antediluvian bullshit from you. If you aren’t going to press charges against me, then I’ll leave. I don’t deal with your shit.”

“O yes, you call me old. The old morality is what you call mine. So liberated. So hip. Exposing your genitals at parties and swapping mates without getting jealous. You keep on letting it all hang out — you keep pulling it all out of yourself until you reach the dingy cave of yourselves and there you will find something cold and clammy that you won’t want to know. Mystery is no plaything. Mystery was put here for a purpose. Some things are better left alone.

“Of course, you won’t listen to me. I’m nothing but an aging nigger man in your eyes. Why don’t you take these questions up with that white boy, Max? You respect him.”

“O, you want to make it racial, huh? Well, no man tells me what to say or think. Negro or white, you or Max.”

“O, you’re denying the very lucrative benefits that go along with being a black woman in a white man’s country? One of our Business people, Zora Neale Hurston, had an informant in Georgia say, ‘White men and black women are running this thing.’”