Ishmael Reed: The Last Days of Louisiana Red

But Chorus kept his optimism, even though nobody wanted to buy his scripts.

Many said that he wasn’t relevant and was in fact archaic. Chorus was getting ready. He was doing his intellectual dugout work like a mental New York Met, and, like the 1973 New York Mets, he would come from the bottom of the league, enter the World Series and give the A’s a run for their money.

He was sparring well. Rope dancing too. Jabbing, ducking and feinting; his legs were still holding up. Man, did he have a roundhouse. So he wasn’t surprised when his agent sent him that telegram informing him that there had been two maybe three offers from Recital Halls requesting he sign a contract with them. He was so exuberant after receiving the telegram that he made himself a stiff highball and it was only 10:00 A.M. This was certainly out of character. He felt like boasting. Why not? He wasn’t meek. After all, the Chorus predates Christianity, which removed the dance and life from Greek Drama/-Religion (in early plans for the Greek Amphitheatre there was included a seat for the Priest of Dionysius). He could brag if he wanted, not being one of these simpering emotionally mooching Moochers (“That’s o.k. I’ll go on a hunger strike. Don’t mind me, I’ll just lie here in the street; roll a truck over me if you wish”).

He was more like the Egyptian boatman who made a form out of jiving the crocodiles, if I may give a very loose translation: “Get back, M.F. Don’t You Know Who I Am: I’ll whip your ass, crocodile, if you mess with me, why my brother is the baddest nigger in Memphis. What? What? You bet not put your snozzle up here on my boat, I’ll stomp the do-do out of it.” Chorus went out into the streets and told everybody of his comeback from the trauma. The next day he didn’t remember anything. Not even the dream that came after 10 highballs:

(White-tuxedoed Chorus sits in the middle of a vaudeville stage, the backdrop of which is reminiscent of those scenes in the old photo shops honeymooners used to pose before, but instead of Niagara Falls we see a backdrop of slanted piano keyboards, musical notes, a zoot-suited trumpet section standing up while the rest of the band is seated.)

“Thought you got rid of me, eh? I know a lot of you lobsters thought when they replaced me with second-rate actors, who didn’t know their entrances, that I was through. I know that a lot of you thought I was washed up when they removed my last word from the script. You thought I’d be satisfied with a couple of walk-ons; that I was all over when my programs were cut back there in the early seventies; that this ‘troublesome presence,’ as your scenarist called me, had been cut out like a ‘cancerous sore.’ A fad. Yes, that’s the way you used to describe me, and in language even worse than that. ‘Black Problem.’ Well, I’ll have you know, Daddy, that things are looking up. If you go to the end of the universe, you’ll come up behind yourself, so to speak. The course of history once again proves to be fickle, unpredictable, like one of the moons, thought to be artificial, circling Saturn. Here I am again, advising the King, butting in, singing and dancing my head off. Knocking them over, turning the tables on my critics.

“In the 1960s I was the stand-up comic who didn’t have a nightclub. Now I have all the nightclubs I need, and do you know how I did it? (flicks ashes from his cigar, inhales) Do you know how I fell from protagonist to humiliation, hung around for throwaway parts, kissed the lead’s ass to stay in business, and now look at me, so powerful that this morning I closed down the actors’ lobby.

“What I did was to go back to see where I went wrong. It started with plays like Antigone .”

“Antigone. The archaic story treated by 18 prose writers, dramatists, poets and even the musician Felix Mendelssohn. It closely parallels the Egyptian story of Osiris and Isis, so there were probably Egyptian writers who had a hand at it first. The Greeks were in Africa long before the plays were written on Egyptian papyri, and there are references to Africa in the Oedipus plays, as in Oedipus at Colonus when Oedipus remarks of his sons Eteocles and Polynices: ‘O true image of the ways of Egypt that they show in their spirit and their life! For there the men sit weaving in the house, but the wives go forth to win the daily bread.’ In Alexandria, the Greeks worshipped Osiris.

“Oedipus, Antigone’s father, was banished from Thebes because he had committed an awful deed. ‘Get away from me, wretch, you will kill your father and marry your mother,’ a hideous hag oracle once told him, according to Robert Craves.

“He gouged out his eyes some say because he wanted to be wise like Teiresias the soothsayer, who informed Oedipus of the taboo he had committed. Others say this is a mutilation which occurred because Oedipus desired to restore the patrilineal succession to Thebes!

“It could also have been the revenge of the Ethiopian Sphinx who had come to punish Thebes because Laius, Oedipus’ father, had kidnapped his homosexual lover Chrysippus, from Ethiopia.

“When Oedipus left Thebes to go to Colonus for the purpose of sacrificing himself to the sea god Poseidon, his sons Eteocles and Polynices agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years, but when it became Polynices’ turn to rule, Eteocles refused to yield the throne. Polynices went to Argus for 7 recruits and returned to Thebes, sending a forerunner to warn Eteocles to resign.

“Eteocles refused, and the two, like bucking antlered creatures, met on the battlefield and slew each other. Their uncle, Creon, the new king, decreed that Eteocles be given a hero’s funeral while Polynices, in Creon’s eyes a traitor, be left to rot, unburied. Antigone, Oedipus’ faithful daughter who went into exile with Oedipus until Creon came to Colonus and arrested her and her sister Ismene, violated this order and ritualistically buried her brother, Polynices.

“The stern tough-minded Creon punished her by having her buried alive in Polynices’ tomb. She took her lover Haemon, Creon’s son, with her to Hades, her lover, her King.

“Antigone comes down through the ages as the epitome of the free spirit against the forces of tyranny. However, some say she went too far. I say she went too far; not only because she opposed a good and just authority, but because she was the beginning of my end. It was in plays like Antigone that I, the Chorus, declined until I was cast out, off the scene altogether, but now I’m bouncing back. I say that Antigone got what she deserved.

“I went back and read that play to see where I failed, and do you know what? I figured it out. Antigone was so cunning, so wily, the girl was so beautiful, that we were dumbstruck by her — her strength and her intelligence — and we lost our objectivity. She was able to crowd out my lines, and do you know when I saw that — it was then and there I decided that I deserved to fall and from that day on made up my mind that never again would Antigone crowd me out, take me off the scene and then, sarcastically, remark, ‘Why don’t you sit in the audience? Maybe the camera will flash on you from time to time.’”

Wolf was in Santa Barbara when he began to feel a tingle at the nape of his neck which all Workers knew to be a sign. He became worried. He took the next flight out and rushed to the family home in the Berkeley Hills. The house was swarming with police and neighbors. Minnie was being comforted by T Feeler and Max Kasavubu. Nanny was hysterical, screaming and hollering in the back yard; nurses were trying to make sense out of her.