Ishmael Reed - The Last Days of Louisiana Red

LaBas is glum; he is eating a prawn. Ms. Better Weather is sobbing; she hasn’t touched her food.

“That poor child.”

“Will you control yourself, Better Weather, and continue with the report.”

“After she busted Kingfish and Andy out of jail, they commandeered a car and somehow evaded the security at the San Francisco Airport.”

“Amazing!”

“Anyway, they sky-jacked the plane, but then something happened. She was talking to one of the passengers; he jumped her and holding her with a gun to her back he was able to disarm Andy and Kingfish. He screamed, ‘I’m sick of you cutting into my lines, bitch.’ The captain rushed in upon the situation and mistaking the stranger for one of the sky-jackers killed him, but he got … he got—”

“O Better Weather, brace yourself. Tell me the rest.”

“They took her to the hospital, and that was the last I heard from New York. As soon as I heard, I came right down. They told me you were eating here. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? There’s nothing they would do to reverse what has happened. The Board of Directors has made the decision. I have no vote.”

“But you just told me she couldn’t help herself. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Better Weather, you know how the Corporation works. It is an individual with its own laws, an uncharacterized character like the Greek Chorus, a fictitious person. Once it moves, it moves by its own by-laws. Did you tell Sister?”

“I called her, but she had been told already. I think we ought to go up and see how she’s doing.”

“That’s a good idea.” LaBas paid the check, and he and Ms. Better Weather left.

The Solid Gumbo Works’ car pulls up in front of the Yellings’ house. Sister opens the door and tearfully rushes into Ms. Better Weather’s arms. Ms. Better Weather comforts her.

Sister’s Nigerian friend approaches the door.

“She’s really upset, LaBas. She was packing her clothes to go to New York to be with Minnie when she heard about Lisa.”

“Lisa, what happened to Lisa?”

“Come in, I’ll tell.”

Ms. Better Weather walks to a sofa and sits down with Sister, who is still shaken.

“This man with the African name,” he smirks, “this critic — Maxwell Kasavubu; he went berserk and was found running through the Berkeley Hills. People became suspicious when they saw him running around the same block over and over again. Of course, he could have been lost in the maze of cattle trails, but they phoned the police anyway because he had a negro accent characterized by a high falsetto laugh. There have been instances of robberies up there and so anything resembling black is suspect. Well, they found that he wasn’t black at all. They arrested him in front of a linguist’s house, and the linguist traced his dialect to Mississippi/Chicago, 1940s. The linguist had just finished a study on Black English. Maxwell Kasavubu was dressed in a chauffeur’s outfit.”

“How curious.”

“When they broke into his house, they found T Feeler and Nanny Lisa dead. She didn’t even look like the Nanny. She looked more like a glamorous streetwalker, and they saw her mammy’s costume in the bedroom. She had dropped her mammy guise.”

“So they were the three. It’s all so clear now.”

“What do you mean, LaBas?”

“The three industrial spies the messenger was talking about.”

“The messenger? Spies?”

“Skip it.”

“You’re a curious man, LaBas. America is curious. I’m taking Sister away from this city. As soon as we fly to New York and see about Minnie, we’re going to Lagos.”

“How’s Minnie?”

“They just called; they don’t think she’s going to pull through.”

LaBas has a clammy feeling. The Yellings’ house seems to have had its walls washed in blood.

Sister revives; Ms. Better Weather escorts her into the room.

“I feel better, Pop. It’s… it’s been like a bad dream. Those Moochers. They just about moved in after Wolf was killed. Turned the house into a commune, as they called it. Eating our food. Playing the music real loud. And then, when Kingfish and Andy were arrested, Minnie just about ordered me and Lisa to wait on them hand and feet; lazy rascals. The phone bill was eating up Dad’s estate. They had friends all over the world, it seemed. Nanny Lisa even offered to remain on free, they were eating up our funds so. But now she’s gone too.” She sobs.

“She was in the conspiracy that killed your father.”

“What?” Sister asks.

“What are you saying, LaBas?” the Nigerian asks.

“She had orders from a criminal mail-order house to spy on your father. This was after he had consulted with the remaining followers of Doc John who dwelled in an area near New Orleans called Algiers. When he returned to Berkeley, he went into the Gumbo business, calling it Gumbo so as not to arouse suspicion. Leading people to believe it was just another soul-food joint. What he had really done was to carry on Doc John’s work.”

“I don’t understand,” Sister says.

“Doc John took the show biz out of the Business, the long technical rites and often hideous gris gris and mojo. He took it off the streets and didn’t have to use sensational come-ons. The secret customers flocked to him. Well, Ed being a botanist, and knowing something of pharmacology, synthesized the formulas left by Doc into a pill — an aspirin-like white pill which he gave to his clients for what ailed them. He noticed that Doc John referred to certain human maladies in terms of astrology. One had a snake or a crab inside of one. It occurred to him one day that a crab meant cancer. Even the astrological sign for Cancer is a crab. Doc John cured cancer by using stale bread, ginger root soaked in sweet oil, blackberry tea and powdered cat’s eyes and making a pill of these elements. You see, Gumbo was the process of getting to the pill — using many elements, plant, animal and otherwise.

“Louisiana Red Corporation learned through a spy who had access to Ed’s papers, Nanny Lisa, that he was on the brink of a cure for heroin addiction — a cure that would keep the victim off heroin forever. That’s when they ordered their three spies to kill Ed. Nanny and Max did it. They killed him with butcher knives and blamed it on two black intruders.”

“It’s all very confusing,” Sister says.

“What he’s saying,” Ms. Better Weather says, “is that your family was destroyed not by a fate but by a conspiracy. Not Que será, será , whatever will be will be, but plain old niggers and white front men up to ugly.”

“Very well said, Ms. Better Weather,” LaBas said.

“You see, Sister, his hard-drug panaceas and his presence would have sent organized crime’s millionaires packing from their estates on Long Island, in Brooklyn and New Jersey and from their reconverted plantation nightclubs outside of New Orleans back to lower Manhattan to sell apples from pushcarts. If he had found a cure for heroin addiction, if gambling and prostitution had been legalized; if distribution had been taken out of the hands of criminals, then other negroes would have followed Ed’s example.”

“My dad did all that?” Sister said. “Why didn’t he ever tell us what he was up to? Why didn’t Wolf?”

“Because they wanted to Work in secret to bring about the results they desired. They worked with disciplined Workers; they weren’t interested in glory, only results.”

LaBas and Ms. Better Weather were climbing into the Solid Gumbo Works’ BMW. Sister and her Nigerian friend had called a cab for the trip to SFO Heliport. From there they would travel to San Francisco and then to New York.