Ishmael Reed: The Last Days of Louisiana Red

There were Moocher songs, Moocher tie clips and Moocher bumper stickers; Wall Street predicted that Moochism would be one of the top thirty-five trends in the U.S. to succeed.

Minnie was content. She wriggled about Telegraph Ave. like a chicken without a neck. Then it happened.

Solid Gumbo Works had invented a Gumbo that became a cure for certain cancers. Crowds gathered, submitting their loved ones. Newsmen came. Gumbo came to be seen as a cure-all dish, and the health-food stores were in trouble. The Co-ops had to slash prices to compete, and if this happened to these economical and consumer-minded stores you can imagine the panic at Safeways. The people didn’t want to Mooch when they could have Gumbo, and so the Moocher recruits fell off. Minnie was even heckled.

Even though she was eighteen, she clung to the massive heaving bosom of her Nanny, and Nanny would rock her to sleep like she used to, staring at the child with her old shiny mammy eyes as she prayed to Saint Peter to look down on this chile. Outside, the Dahomeyan Softball Team, Minnie’s crack bodyguards, would mill about as Nanny issued hourly press bulletins on the state of Minnie’s despondency. They were some fierce, rough-looking women led by this big old 6-foot bruiser they all called the “REICHSFÜHRER.”

Ed, Wolf and some Workers came up to the house one night to discuss some Gumbo business and ran into this strange vigil. The Dahomeyan Softball Team camping out stared at the men angrily; Nanny was in the midst of telling Minnie one of those stories about Doc John, and how when Marie, by that time the “last American witch,” finished with him, she had him eating out of her hand.

“What’s wrong with Minnie?” Ed asked as he led the guests and Wolf into his study.

“Ah don’t know, Mistuh Ed. Seems she haint feeling too good. I going to fix the child some buttermilk and put her to bed.”

“I hope she feels better,” Ed said as the company moved into Ed’s private room.

Nanny undressed Minnie and put her to bed. When she was half asleep, she had the child drink some nice warm buttermilk. Minnie’s body possessed all of the fertile peaks and valleys of young womanhood. Nanny stared at her a long time.

As Minnie climbed into bed, Nanny started to tell her the stories. Stories about Marie and how she had showed Doc John that he wasn’t such a big deal. Minnie dozed off, smiling. She began to talk in her sleep. She was thinking of how better things would be if her father would just take a walk and not come back. Nanny shook her grey head sadly at the mutterings of this troubled teenager.

The next day Ed took off early. When he arrived home he told Nanny to fix him a rum and Coke. He went upstairs and climbed into bed.

Around the Bay it was April Fools’ Day. A pig leaped from a truck in S.F. and was pursued by housewives waving meat cleavers and about to make mincemeat of it, until it was rescued by incredulous policemen, finally convinced that the farmer’s bizarre tale was on the up and up. In the same town on the same day a man found a four-foot anaconda in his toilet bowl. A “bottomless” fight was being waged by café owners whose performers had been warned to cover up their Burgers. Rev. Rookie of the Gross Christian Church preached a powerful jumpy sermon replete with strobes, bongos and psychedelic paraphernalia.

This was part of a three-day ceremony celebrating Minnie’s ascension to Queen of the Moochers which ended with an old-fashioned torchlight parade to Provo Park in Berkeley. Sister went to hear Nina Simone at the Rainbow Sign on Grove St. that night.

A book called White Dog , on how to train dogs to check negroes, was on sale at The Show Dog, a pet shop at 1961 Shattuck Ave—“Whitetown.” The North and South Hills Berkeley was getting ready. Dazed-eyed beasts big as horses trying to jump over the fence at negroes while their masters with those stupid-looking gardening hats on grinned at them.

The old feud was coming to a boil between the North and South Hills and their traditional enemies in the “Flats”: niggertown. A councilman, popular among the University people and the “Flats,” was recalled, unfairly many thought. People made comparisons to the Reconstruction days when many negro legislators were expelled from their seats and even lynched by the whites. There were more parallels than people thought. The councilman in question even wore a modern version of the post-Civil War clothes associated with the carpetbagger’s nigger dandy: spats and such. The ex-councilman thought he was in New Haven; instead he was out here in Poker Flats, in Dry Gulch, in Tombstone. How did the old saying go? “There’s no God nor Sunday west of Tombstone.”

But the most startling development on this April Fools’ Day was Street’s escape from prison. He had had his “consciousness raised” in prison and was immediately granted asylum in an “emerging” African nation.

It was a strange day for Chorus too. He had come to this bucolic sleepy town hoping for some action; as soon as he arrived he could tell that the Berkeley projected to the nation comprised only a score or so blocks surrounding the south campus of the University where the students would go on trashing sprees from time to time. It was merely a small town which reminded him of the sketches of university towns in his high-school German textbook. The Berkeley Gazette was a more accurate representation of the town than the Berkeley Barb . Actually the town had lost much of the excitement of the early days of the 1890s when cattlemen, Asians and free negroes frequented the twenty or so saloons in rip-roaring West Berkeley.

Berkeleyans were proud of their Greek Theatre, designed by John Galen Howard, where Kreisler, Bernhardt and somebody called “Nordica” had once performed. Douglas Turner Ward, an eminent man of the theatre and leader of The Negro Ensemble Co., was surprised at his shabby treatment by the managers of Berkeley’s Greek Theatre when he brought Lonnie Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men there in 1971. Being a sophisticated New Yorker he didn’t realize that the old citizens of Berkeley didn’t want any niggers tampering with their theatre. They wanted to keep negroes in the psychological as well as physical “Flats.”

Chorus had failed miserably in the East. He had made what one critic called a “valiant” attempt to restore the Chorus to its rightful role. They shut down his act even though it was receiving rave reviews. A profession — a Royal Profession once subsidized by the great Pharaohs — was now being controlled by Pyramid Rock Toters, whose only interest was the box office.

Of course, there were some roles still open to him, but they were mostly commercial. Plugging things he didn’t believe in. Puffing nobodies. Rather than play understudy to eastern charlatans and stagemen who had no presence he had come to Berkeley, seeking his natural diction between reading writing and watching television.

Sometimes he would put on his white tuxedo and saunter over to Harry’s or the Toulouse for a drink or two or three or … People snickered at his white tuxedo, a habit he had cultivated in the east. Westerners went about informally and didn’t care that much about the theatre. Some of his eastern friends referred to everything west of the Rockies as “boony” for Boondocks.

Berkeley’s major streets were named after obscure University Presidents: Durant, LeConte, Gilman, white-bearded men who looked out sternly from blemished, sepia photographs. The majority of the citizens’ ages fell between 18 and 29. For someone like Chorus, who was in his middle thirties, the tavern and nightclub audiences looked like the ones on American Bandstand.