Read Online Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed - Free Book Online

to him, so he say. Them Yankees are a mess. Well, the Planters have been driving up to the Castle all day now. Those Planters are up to no good.”
    The bottom of her foot moved across the top of one of his. The top of his right thigh was resting on her hip. He was talking low, in her ear.
    “Rub my neck a little, hon.”
    He began to rub her neck.
    She sighed. “That’s nice.”
    “Did you hear what the runner up from Mississippi said?”
    “What, Robin?”
    “Say he saw Quickskill’s picture in the newspaper way down there.”
    “Was it a personal runaway ad that old man Swille put in there?”
    “No, it was something about a poem of his.”
    “Oh, that must have been the poem I heard Cato discussing with Swille. All about him coming back here. I didn’t see him come back. Did you hear anything from the fields?”
    “Nobody seen him here.”
    “Say Ms. Swille showed him the combination to her safe.”
    “That Quickskill. Boy, he was something.”
    They both laugh.
    “Remember that time, Judy, when he complained to Massa Swille that Mammy Barracuda would always serve his dinner cold and put leftovers in his meal?”
    “Sometimes she wouldn’t even put silverware out for Raven.”
    “She didn’t like it because he was Swille’s private secretary and sat at the table with the family.”
    “She didn’t like anyone to come between her and Arthur, as she calls him.”
    Aunt Judy turns to him and puts her arms around his neck, their abdomens, thighs, touching, her cheek brushing against his as she places the champagne glass on the table next to the bed.
    “Want some more?”
    “I’ll be drunk, Robin. I have to get up tomorrow at six and get breakfast.”
    “One more. For the Emancipation.”
    “Won’t do us any good. He freed the slaves in the regions of the country he doesn’t have control over, and in those he does have control over, the slaves are still slaves. I’ll never understand politics.”
    Robin is sitting up, the covers down to his naked waist. He picks up the champagne bottle and pours.
    “That’s Lincoln playing. Lincoln is a player. The Emperor of France’s secretary called up here and told Swille not to show up to that party for the royal people next week. Swille tried to get through to the Emperor, but the secretary refused, and when Swille called the Emperor by his first name, the secretary said to Swille, ‘Don’t you slave peddler ever be calling him that again,’ and hung up, in French.” They laugh. “Is Ms. Swille still on her strike?”
    “Is she! Today she called me and Bangalang her sisters and said something about all of us being in the same predicament. Me and Bangalang just looked at each other.”
    “She used to be so beautiful.”
    “Wasn’t she so! The belle of the Charity Ball. Horse rider. Miss Mississippi for 1850, same time Arthur got his award.”
    “When do you think they’re going to tell her about her son?”
    “You mean how he got eat—Oh, that reminds me. I mean to tell you. Speaking of the dead. Well, Bangalang told us today that one of the children was out in the cemetery and they wandered into the crypt where that old hateful Vivian, Arthur’s sister, is, and that the child saw …”
    “What … what she see?”
    “As she said, she heard somebody talking and he went inside, and the child saw Massa Swille and the man had done taken off the lid from the crypt and was on top of his sister and was crying and sobbing, and that he was sweating and that he was making so much noise that he didn’t even notice the child and the child run away, and the child say he saw Vivian’s decomposed hand clinging to his neck.”
    “That kid’s got to be telling a fib, Judy. I told you about letting those children play in the cemetery.”
    “But, Robin, ain’t nothin in there but dead folks.”
    A low moan of a solitary wolf can be heard.
    “Oh, there go that wolf again. I hope he’s not out there all night again. Judy … Judy?”
    Robin turns over