SOURCE: Melnick, Jeffrey. “‘What You Lookin' At?’ Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, pp. 298-311. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Ishmael Reed—like Norman Mailer, another writer fond of boxing metaphors—seems to go out of his way to court controversy.¹ It is tempting to summarize Reed's career by presenting a kind of photographic negative image; one could learn much about Ishmael Reed by studying a random collection of quotations about him from his numerous enemies, rivals, and critics.²

Reed is an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, a peerless conspiracy theorist, and an individualist who consistently defies attempts to categorize him, although he has often been pushed unwillingly (if understandably) into a conservative pigeonhole.³ Amiri Baraka has described Reed as a “rightwing art major,” a “capitulationist” who is representative of “House Negroes” and is “part of the ‘bribed element’” to whom “we say, Fuck You!”⁴ Baraka has gone so far as to suggest that comments Reed has made about Malcolm X could, in certain circumstances, “easily get [him] iced.”⁵ But Reed has gone to great pains to form alliances with a wide range of other marginalized artists. It is important to Reed, as we shall see in his 1986 novel Reckless Eyeballing, that ethnic writers not let themselves be conquered by division.⁶

Another important ingredient of Reed's broad approach to art is an embrace of all cultural forms. In one catalogue of constitutive American items, Reed lists “comic books, movies, World War II, Milton Berle, Redd Foxx, Yiddish theater, John F. Kennedy, Muhammed Ali, Toscanini, John Coltrane, Black Power, KKK, Ice Cream, Mickey Mouse, etc.”⁷ The second page of his Reckless Eyeballing contains its own catalogue, this time of the objects found in lead character Ian Ball's hotel room: Kentucky Fried Chicken, Life magazine's World War II issue, a Hagler versus Hearns fight poster, a typewriter, and perhaps most tellingly of all, the Kronos Quartet's interpretation of Thelonious Monk—in other words, the long-dreamt-of meeting of Western “classical” and jazz music (2).⁸

One way to understand Reed is to pay attention to what he says about his own art. He has delineated an artistic vision which he calls the “Neo-HooDoo aesthetic.”⁹ Neo-HooDoo is necessarily undefined: it places a premium on improvisation and individual expression, and opposes attempts to codify art or separate it from its roots in folk expression. Neo-HooDoo is an attempt to move away from false oppositions such as East and West, artist and audience, history and myth. In his battle against monoculturalism, parochialism, and racism, Reed's major weapon has always been humor. He consciously invokes and parodies the most sacred texts and genres of American culture in order to demystify and subvert them. At times this leads Reed (by his own admission) to deal in “types” rather than in deep characterization as he searches for rhetorical clarity.¹⁰

Reckless Eyeballing takes great joy in the playful delineation of types who just barely qualify as characters. Reed claims to have written this book primarily as an exploration and revision of overly optimistic views of African American—Jewish relations, but the appearance of a number of straw-womanists makes it clear that he has at least one other major ax to grind as well.¹¹ Reed has described Reckless Eyeballing as a “part whodunit in which the first clue is contained in the book's title,” and presumably he means that as soon as we learn of the crimes of the Flower Phantom, we should know that Ian Ball (I. Ball) is responsible.¹² But Reed has also suggested that the title refers to his own daring in writing about Jewish issues. He argues that there is a long tradition of appropriation of African American experience by Jews (he cites Jewish television producer Norman Lear in particular) but that attempts by African Americans “to write about other major cultures is considered a case of ‘Reckless Eyeballing.’ What you lookin' at?”¹³ I will return to this issue, but first I want to sketch out the implications of one other central hint which the title of the book gives us.

The concept of reckless eyeballing most significantly refers to the charge historically made against African American men who are caught (or imagined to be) staring at white women. In Reed's novel this accusation is made within Ian Ball's play about Ham Hill. In this play, which Ball has written to appease the feminists who have “sex-listed” him as a result of his misogynistic first play, Ham Hill is a young African American who is lynched for “eyeballing” a white woman. Here one of Reed's major targets becomes obvious. The Ham Hill story is a retelling of the 1955 Emmett Till case, in which an African American teenager, visiting Mississippi from his home in Chicago, wolf whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Till was killed for it by Bryant's husband and his half-brother.¹⁴

It is not the case itself that Reed is responding to but the interpretation of it presented by Susan Brownmiller (one model for Reed's Becky French) in her influential 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Calling Emmett Till's whistle “more than a kid's brash prank,” Brownmiller concludes that he “had in mind to possess” Carolyn Bryant.¹⁵ Brownmiller's hyperbolic and insensitive interpretation of the Till case was derived in large part from her reading of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), in which Cleaver recounts seeing a picture of Carolyn Bryant: Cleaver comes to the painful realization that he is attracted to Bryant and suffers a nervous breakdown. When he “recovers,” he decides to become a rapist; Cleaver concludes, in a notorious formulation, that rape is an “insurrectionary act.”¹⁶ That Brownmiller relied on this report for her understanding of the Till case is scandalous; notwithstanding later denials, she plainly and egregiously derives her argument from this single—and singular—piece of rhetoric. But Reed's location of Brownmiller as the basis for his attacks on all feminists replicates her offense. By 1986 numerous African American feminists (about whom Reed has said few kind words) had already roundly criticized Brownmiller's unfortunate use of the Emmett Till case; Reed's invocation of this controversy seems intellectually dishonest for what it neglects to mention.¹⁷

Ishmael Reed has had “female troubles,” as the title of a Michele Wallace essay once put it, for a long time.¹⁸ Since at least the mid-1970s it has appeared to Reed that an alliance between white and African American feminists (as well as between white men and African American women) has been forged—primarily through assaults on the African American man. In light of Reed's very public rhetorical battles with Alice Walker and others, it is not hard to see why he would create Tremonisha Smarts as his vehicle of retribution. The name Tremonisha comes from Scott Joplin's 1911 opera (Joplin spelled it “Treemonisha”), in which, according to Reginald Martin, Tremonisha “represents the powers of assimilation into American culture in opposition to” HooDoo power.¹⁹ In Reckless Eyeballing Tremonisha is first presented as similar to “those women who collaborated with the Nazis” (4). She is accused of fostering a “blood libel” against black men, and it is with this reference that Reed opens his investigations into the connections between African American and Jewish history and the present-day interactions of these two groups.²⁰

Reed's examinations of gender and racial politics are inseparable and represent an extended demonstration that, as James Weldon Johnson claimed over fifty years earlier, “in the core of the heart of the American race problem the sex factor is rooted.”²¹ The link is nowhere more clear than in Reed's daring reenactment of the Leo Frank case—a re-presentation of a sacred text of American Jewish history—which Reed playfully includes as an example of his own reckless eyeballing. Reed's reference to the Frank case is glancing and oblique but still significant. Ian Ball's friend Jim Minsk is invited to Mary Phegan [sic] College, where he is forced to watch an anti-Semitic performance which culminates with a dramatization of Frank's alleged murder of Mary Phagan. This performance reaches it climax as Jim Conley, the African American janitor at the factory managed by Frank, discovers Frank carrying Phagan's lifeless body; in an echo of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (“Mistah Kurtz—he dead”) Conley asks, “She dead, Mr. Frank? She dead?” (45). Following this ritualized interpretation of the Frank affair, Minsk himself is lynched. This episode seems to have little direct connection with the rest of Reckless Eyeballing, but a brief overview of the Frank affair might help us to understand Reed's revisionist take on African American-Jewish relations.

Leo Frank was an American Jew who was tried and convicted in Atlanta in 1913 for the murder of Mary Phagan, a young white woman who worked in the pencil factory he managed. Although Frank was not formally charged with raping Mary Phagan, much of the testimony at the trial centered on his alleged sexual perversions: various charges made included that he was a homosexual, that he was unable to perform like a “normal” man, that he was addicted to oral sex, and that he used his nose sexually.²² The composite picture that developed showed Frank as totally alien, a deviant who had defiled a young flower of the South.

Perhaps most interesting for Reed's purposes, Frank was also accused of being a reckless eyeballer: he was charged with peeking into the dressing room of the factory while women workers changed into and out of their work clothes. Of all the many commentators on this case, only Leslie Fiedler, in his 1966 essay “Some Jewish Pop Art Heroes,” pushes this accusation to a rhetorical conclusion outrageous enough to attract Ishmael Reed: even if Frank were not sexually exploiting young women in the factory he managed, he did walk “in on their privacy with utter contempt for their dignity. Like most factory managers of his time, he was—metaphorically at least—screwing little girls like Mary Phagan.”²³

The case also revived the popular question (as Eugene Levy pointed out in 1974) of whether Jews “counted” as white—or if they should be considered equivalent to African Americans, or something else altogether.²⁴ The key testimony leading to Frank's conviction came from the janitor, Jim Conley. Never before had an African American's testimony been accepted in a capital case against a “white” man in the postbellum South. In addition, much of the evidence suggested that if Frank did not kill Mary Phagan, then Jim Conley must have. (Of course, a rarely uttered but real possibility is that both the Jew and the African American shared some responsibility for the crime.)

Frank was sentenced to death, but after two years of legal appeals the governor of Georgia finally commuted his sentence during the summer of 1915. Soon after this Frank was abducted from the prison farm where he was incarcerated and was hanged outside Marietta, the birthplace of Mary Phagan. The case led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League and contributed to the revitalization of the new Ku Klux Klan. When, in Reckless Eyeballing, Jim Minsk sees the campus of Mary Phegan College looming on a mountain in the distance, we are reminded that the legend of the new Klan has it that their first ritual was held on top of Stone Mountain in Georgia (36).²⁵

The “lynching” of Ian Ball's friend Jim Minsk is more or less tangential to the major plot line of Reckless Eyeballing, so it is worth asking why Reed summons the memory of the Frank case. Given the “truly tasteless” joke that serves as epigraph to Reckless Eyeballing—“What's the American dream? A million blacks swimming back to Africa with a Jew under each arm”—one possibility is that Reed believes Jews and African Americans are in the same boat as marginalized groups in American society.²⁶ Indeed, David Levering Lewis's influential 1984 study of African American-Jewish relations locates the Frank case as the moment when Jews realized that they too were vulnerable in America, and decided to throw in their lot with their African American brothers in suffering.²⁷ (My use of gendered language to describe the putative alliance is intentional; the rhetoric around African American—Jewish relations is almost completely masculinized.)

I think Reed would demur from this dominant interpretation. Reed's adaptation of the Frank case, especially in the context of Jake Brashford's strong anti-Jewish sentiments in Reckless Eyeballing, suggests that the case provides a matchless example of how the veneer of similarity in the tribulations of Jews and African Americans has often covered up important differences. These differences have festered in a culture of avoidance and ultimately have given the lie to the simple dreams of alliance which depend on analogy.²⁸

Most broadly, I think Reed is intent on reminding Jews of their provisional whiteness. Ian Ball tells Jim Minsk: “Brashford says that you're not a white male, you're Jewish, that white men and Jewish men have been fighting for centuries and for you to call yourself a white man is strange” (14). Randy Shank, in his own incoherent way, also promotes this viewpoint, arguing that “there's really no such thing as a white Jew. Real white people call Jews and the Arabs sand niggers behind their backs. Back in the 1900s and 1910s in this town they called the Russian ones Asiatics and Orientals” (67). Much of Reckless Eyeballing serves as a reminder of a time when the social and racial status of Jews in the United States was ambiguous and contested.

There are many voices in this book saying many contradictory things. It would do violence to the complexity of Reed's vision of African American—Jewish relations to simplify his message to the old line that these two oppressed groups were natural allies. Instead, through Ian Ball, Randy Shank, Jake Brashford, and Paul Shoboater, Reed includes a fairly representative sampling of modern African American opinion on relations with Jews. Reed himself harbors no romantic illusions about a golden age of African American—Jewish relations in anybody's recent memory. In an interview published in Southern Review in 1985, Reed claims with characteristic over-statement that “the last time Jews cooperated with blacks was in the Middle Ages when the Jews showed Africans how to get into Spain—how to take over the country. They provided the Moors with an invasion route because the Jews were catching hell in Spain. There were Spanish Christian fundamentalists who were trying to force the Jews into conversion; together the Jews and the blacks created a renaissance. It happened about 900 A.D.”²⁹ With this, Reed reveals his project in Reckless Eyeballing to be a subversion of older, more quiescent views of African American—Jewish relations.

This is not to suggest that Reed rejects all comparisons of the two groups. It is safe to say that he takes the extermination of Jews in Europe during the Second World War as an extreme cautionary tale. But where Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka, for instance, focused on the negative lessons of attempted assimilation by besieged minority groups, Reed is more interested in the specific ways that the group in power demonizes threatening outsiders—in other words, how in-groups make out-groups killable.³⁰ Reed has stated in a flagrant and purposeful misreading of Susan Brownmiller that he has

found some interesting parallels between the period leading up to the [German] denunciation of Jews … and some things that are going on in America today. That's what makes Susan Brownmiller and people like that frightening to me … She wrote that the black man encouraged rape and supported rape, which suggests that one person stands for the whole group and implicates all black men. This is the kind of generalization that you used to hear about Jewish males in Germany.³¹

So when Reed mentions a Nazi film replete with images of dark Jews compulsively raping pure German girls, the subtext is clear: the kind of cultural work this stereotyping does can open the door to genocide.³² Understanding how much emphasis Reed puts on the power of popular culture, we might also come to understand his committed attempt to brand any “negative images” of African American men as representing a concrete danger.

Even as Reed derives from the Jewish experience of the Holocaust crucial lessons for African Americans, he has little patience for what has been the most dominant version of African American—Jewish relations. This general line of thought argues two main points: (1) African Americans and Jews are similarly oppressed and ought to team up to fight their enemies together; and (2) since the Jews have had such success assimilating into American culture, African Americans should look to them as a role model and Jews should aid their progress.³³ For much of this American century it has been assumed by many African American and Jewish leaders that friction between the two groups was atypical and unnatural. (Of course, the contest of potential villains in the Leo Frank case gives us one poignant example of how African American and Jewish interests could clash.)

We can see how little stock Reed puts in this view by taking a look at the character who reproduces this argument, Paul Shoboater. Shoboater (perhaps modeled on Stanley Crouch) writes for the Downtown Mandarin, a thinly veiled version of the Village Voice, a weekly for which Reed harbors no little enmity.³⁴ His name is meant to remind us of Show Boat—the novel (1926) and Broadway play (1927)—a prime example of the adaptation of African American materials by Jewish artists.³⁵ Shoboater is presented as a sellout, a tour guide for white people “who wanted to become acquainted with the trends and styles of Afro-American culture” (79). Shoboater is himself a “showboat,” an inane, affected, and superficial man who covers the waterfront of standard assimilationist opinion on African American—Jewish relations. He tells Ian Ball that the Jews were responsible for the success of many African American writers, but “instead of expressing gratitude, the fellas keep coming down hard on the Jews.” He then goes on to advise Ball that “instead of fight the Jews, you ought to be more like them” (82). In addition to presenting the old “Jews as model” construct, Shoboater also suggests that “if it wasn't for Jewish morality … people would be burning niggers left and right” (84). In an exceedingly slippery novel where authorial intent is almost always in doubt, Reed makes it clear that Shoboater's position deserves scorn, not support.

A good question to ask at this point is: what does Ishmael Reed want anyway? He doesn't want the old “natural allies” argument (although there is the hint that if African American and white women can team up across race lines, then so should African American and Jewish men—which would recapture one important aspect of New Left politics). Reed doesn't really seem to believe that Jews are black or Hitler was a Jew or Hitler was a Moor passing for Nordic, or that Jews are not really Jews, or any of the other mumbo jumbo he plays around with either.

Two messages come clear, finally, out of the mass of satire and misdirection in Reckless Eyeballing. First, rigid segregation of the subjects of art into sets of ethnic ownership is unfair, limiting, and potentially dangerous; and second, there must be a freer, louder conversation among African Americans, Jews, and other ethnic Americans in order to stave off the divide-and-conquer tactics of the white power elite.

On the first point, Jake Brashford's complaints about Jews' stealing all the good material have to be taken seriously, especially since they reflect Reed's own beliefs as he has displayed them in essays and interviews. Brashford tells Ball: “Every time you turn on the TV or go to the movies or read a new play or novel, there's some Jewish writer, director, or producer who thinks that he knows more about niggers than they know about themselves, and who's cashing in on the need of Americans to consume the black style without having anything to do with niggers” (30). Then, in a self-reflexive moment which echoes Reed's own contentions about how he is recklessly eye-balling by telling a Jewish story, Brashford tells Ian Ball that he's going to write about Armenians (30-32). For all of the intended humor in this, Reed does seem to be making a serious protest against artistic apartheid. If various ethnic artists are going to mine African American culture, then African Americans must be considered authorized interpreters of other cultures as well.³⁶

On the second point, Reed believes that certain white ethnic groups, Jews in particular, have been used in American culture to keep African Americans in check. Randy Shank suggests that powerful white people “let” the Jews be white now “because they serve the white man by keeping an eye on us, monitoring us, providing him with statistics about us, and interpreting us to the white man” (67). Jews, then, become “deputy” whites, who maintain their status as long as they do their jobs as social scientists, artists, and television producers. Ball recounts that Brashford completes the argument with this proposition: “Jews are not being innocently manipulated, but are consciously using blacks to keep the goyim off their case. All this stuff about pathology—welfare, crime and dope, single parent households … conservative Jews keep those issues on the front burner so's the goyim will be so angry with blacks that they will ignore the Jews and leave them alone” (86).³⁷ Reed has argued elsewhere that “white” ethnic groups which “stave off the ‘nonwhite’ hordes” are rewarded in American culture with “Angloness.”³⁸ Reed's own cultural work—including his outrageous caricatures of ethnic conflict in Reckless Eyeballing—has often been focused on trying to avoid this kind of atomization.

But Reed doesn't get overly pious about all of this, as Tremonisha's “conversion” letter to Ian makes clear. Tremonisha, having escaped from the control of white feminists, is presumably the voice of informed reason here. She suggests that African Americans and Jews need to be more open to criticism and hard dialogue if they are going to make progress together. But listen to how treacly her language is: “Same thing with the Jews and the blacks. If they are afraid to tell the truth for fear of furnishing ammunition to their enemies or if they're trying to deflect legitimate criticism by dismissing it as anti-Semitic, or racist, then the Nazis will have won and the Klan will have won, and all of the other bigots under the sheets, and setting fires to synagogues will have won” (132). This scarcely sounds like the tough-minded feminist playwright Tremonisha is supposed to have been. It is hard to imagine this is the payoff Reed has been working toward. This kind of piety is certainly not part of Reed's cherished Neo-HooDoo aesthetic. The obvious flatness of Tremonisha's rhetoric suggests that Reed believes that reverence is not the only proper attitude to bring to discussions of cross-ethnic encounter; humor, too, may have a place. (Of course, Tremonisha's language might also be evidence of a wicked act of ventriloquism on Reed's part; here, finally, he can put the “proper” words in the mouth of a recovered feminist.)

But the serious point should not be lost: the manipulation of ethnic boundaries can cause real divisions, and usually serves ruling-class interests. It is the responsibility of the committed multicultural artist to reveal and combat discourses that marginalize “ethnic” expression. Jake Brashford's wife remarks at one point that Brashford has been “trying to write a play of universal values, but everywhere he turns, he runs into ethnicity” (117). So, too, does Ishmael Reed continue to run into ethnicity, but in his hands Mrs. Brashford's disconsolate binary opposition becomes (ap)positive.

Notes

1. This essay is a part of my Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation, “Ancestors and Relatives: The Uncanny Relationship of African Americans and Jews” (1994), a study of episodes in the construction of African American-Jewish relatedness. All references to Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing (1986; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1988) are cited by page in the text. On Reed's penchant for fight imagery, see especially his collection of essays, Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1988; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1990). See the contributions by Katrin Schwenk and Sämi Ludwig in this volume for more on, respectively, Reed's interests in lynching and Neo-HooDoo. While I agree with Schwenk's general claim that Reed is particularly interested in historiography, I find her contention that Reed privileges racial over gender politics somewhat misleading; in Reed, as I note in the text, it is impossible to discuss race and gender separately.

2. Robert Murray Davis suggests that Reed has been received with “relative neglect” because of his iconoclasm. Davis writes that Reed has “gone out of his way to reject … the New York literary establishment; Jewish critics of Black literature; other Black writers and critics of differing political, esthetic, and even physical hue.” See Robert Murray Davis, “Scatting the Myths: Ishmael Reed,” Arizona Quarterly 39.2 (Summer 1983): 406. Of course Davis does not even mention Reed's most frequent and vociferous antagonists, feminists and womanists.

3. In “The World Needs More Guys Like Pee Wee,” in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1989), Reed writes that his critics are “always calling me ‘conservative’ and ‘right wing’ but all I know is when you lose your spine, you can't walk” (p. 242).

4. The first phrase is quoted in Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 82. The rest of the epithets are from Amiri Baraka, “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle,” Black American Literature Forum, 14.1 (Spring 1980): 10.

5. Baraka, “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle,” p. 12.

6. In one essay Reed cautions other African American writers not to become hypnotized by manipulation, and to examine themselves for feelings of competition with other struggling writers. “We will have to admit,” he writes, “that some of us are flattered when the Colonialists … tell us that we have better ‘craft’ than the Chicanos, or that we have more balls than Asians.” Ishmael Reed, “The ‘Liberal’ in Us All,” in Shrovetide, p. 42.

7. For this catalogue, see Ishmael Reed, “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” in God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), p. 112. Indeed, cross-cultural exchange has always been central to Reed's work. For instance, unlike most African American intellectuals Reed does not dismiss Norman Mailer's imagined White Negro out of hand he admits to some sympathy for Mailer's frustration at being white (although his sympathy, of course, is laced with irony) and imagines that maybe someday there will be an “identity delicatessen where one can obtain identity as easily as buying a new flavored yogurt.” On Mailer and the identity delicatessen, see Ishmael Reed, “The Fourth Ali,” in God Made Alaska for the Indians, p. 48.

8. The issue of Life magazine mentioned here (December 22, 1941) included a post-Pearl Harbor guide for distinguishing between Japanese and Chinese citizens, titled “How to Tell Japs from Chinese” (p. 81). For a recent gloss on this special issue, see Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 76. The hotel sounds like the famed Chelsea, long a bastion of New York bohemian life, where Bob Dylan lived for a while, and where ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen. On the Chelsea, see Florence Turner's memoir At the Chelsea (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); and Claudio Edinger's photoessay Chelsea Hotel (New York: Abbeville, 1983). The Chelsea has been home to William Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Lee Masters, O. Henry, Brendan Behan, and James Farrell. Recall the hilarious reference to Farrell during Lieutenant O'Reedy's death scene (Reed, Reckless Eyeballing, p. 124).

9. For Reed's initial HooDoo pronouncements, see “Black Power Poem,” “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” “The NeoHooDoo Aesthetic,” and “Catechism of d Neoamerican Hoodoo Church” (originally in his collection Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970 [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972]), in Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems (New York: Atheneum, 1989), pp. 19-27, 36. Various critics have striven mightily, if quixotically, to formalize Reed's intentionally slippery HooDoo conceptualizations. See, for instance, Reginald Martin, “Hoodoo as Literary Method: Ishmael Reed's ‘True Afro-American Aesthetic,’” in his Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 63-108; James R. Lindroth, “From Krazy Kat to HooDoo: Aesthetic Discourse in the Fiction of Ishmael Reed,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4.2 (1984): 227-233; James R. Lindroth, “Generating the Vocabulary of Hoodoo: Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed,” Zora Neale Hurston Forum, 2.1 (Fall 1987): 27-34; and Sämi Ludwig's essay in this volume.

10. See Ishmael Reed, “The Great Tenure Battle of 1977,” in Shrovetide, p. 232.

11. In Mel Watkins, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Southern Review, 21.3 (July 1985): 609-611. There has, so far, been little scholarly reaction to Reckless Eyeballing; Daniel Punday argues, among other things, that Reed's attacks on feminists here are best read as an ironic cooptation of the charge of sexism so frequently levied against him. Daniel Punday's, “Ishmael Reed's Rhetorical Turn: Uses of ‘Signifying’ in Reckless Eyeballing,” College English, 54.4 (April 1992): 446-461. See also Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 39-42.

12. Ishmael Reed, “The Tradition of Serious Comedy in Afro-American Literature,” in Writin' Is Fightin', p. 137. There are other clues in the title, too. First, it is an ironic rewriting of Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous image of the “transparent eyeball” from his 1836 work Nature, where he writes of “standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me … I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.” Of course for Ian Ball it is the beauty of women's bodies—not “the Universal Being”—which circulates through him when he becomes a transparent eyeball. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library 1981), p. 6. For a brief account of the surrealist obsession with eyeballs, see Vicki Goldberg, “A Spooky Fascination with Disembodied Eyes,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, section 2, p. 29.

13. On Lear, see Reed, “The ‘Liberal’ in Us All,” p. 39. In “300 Years of 1984,” in Writin' Is Fightin', pp. 60-61, Reed contends that attempts by African American writers “to write about other major cultures is considered a case of ‘Reckless Eyeballing.’ What you lookin' at? This is none of your business.” Similarly, in Mel Watkins's Southern Review interview Reed argues that African American writers “can write about those other groups with more class and knowledge than they can write about us.” See Watkins, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” p. 612.

14. For the most complete account of this case, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988).

15. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1976), pp. 272-273. We should be careful about trying too hard to denote the “real” identities lurking behind Reed's characters. Reckless Eyeballing flirts with being a roman à clef but never quite commits. Ian Ball displays similarities to Ishmael Reed, but so too does Lieutenant O'Reedy. (Reed has often written and spoken of his own Irish heritage.) Jake Brashford seems, in some ways, a parody of Ralph Ellison, but, again, it is an incomplete representation.

16. See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), pp. 10-14.

17. See especially Angela Davis's response to Brownmiller in “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in Women, Race, and Class (1981; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 176-201, esp. pp. 178-180. Additionally, and quite unfortunately, Reed goes far beyond a mere rebuttal of Brownmiller's appallingly divisive rhetoric. There are, throughout Reckless Eyeballing, brazen instances of men staring at women with at least implied violence in their gaze. The representative of white male authority, Detective Lawrence O'Reedy, can hardly concentrate on the Flower Phantom case because he is too busy staring at Tremonisha Smarts's “serendipitous buttocks moving beneath her silk pants” (p. 11). The most egregious example of reckless eyeballing comes on page 61. While Ian is speaking with Becky French, we hear this interior monologue: “She put her hand down her back for a moment and scratched. As she did this her ass shifted on the sofa's pillow. He didn't know anybody who had fucked her, but he could look at her and know that she was a gasper. One of those kind who took short breaths when you gave it to her hot.”

18. Michele Wallace, “Ishmael Reed's Female Troubles,” In Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 146-154. This essay appeared originally in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, no. 51 (December 1986): 9-11.

19. Martin, Ishmael Reed, p. 106. Joplin's Treemonisha was published in 1911 and performed only once during the composer's lifetime.

20. The “blood libel,” of course, is the age-old charge that Jews use the blood of Christians in certain religious rites. The most famous blood libel incident is the Mendel Beiliss (also spelled Beilis) case which took place in Russia from 1911 to 1913. It came to a close in the same year in which the Leo Frank case, discussed later in this essay, began. Bernard Malamud used the Beiliss case as a rough model in his book The Fixer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). On Beiliss, see Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), and Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 129-193.

21. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1933; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 170.

22. For the basic historical outlines of the Frank case and its implications, see Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Harry Golden, A Little Girl Is Dead (New York: World Publishing, 1965); Nancy MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” Journal of American History, 78.3 (December 1991): 917-948; Eugene Levy, “‘Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reaction to the Leo Frank Case, 1913-1915,” Phylon, 35.2 (June 1974): 212-222; and my dissertation, “Ancestors and Relatives.” For specific information on Frank's perversions, see Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, pp. 17-19, 41, 51; MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered,” p. 932; Jeffrey Melnick, “Leo Frank's Perversion,” paper delivered at the 1993 American Studies Association Conference in Boston.

23. Leslie Fiedler, “Some Jewish Pop Art Heroes,” in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 2:135.

24. On this point, see Levy, “Is the Jew a White Man?,” in particular.

25. Leonard Dinnerstein suggests that the Knights of Mary Phagan, organized to avenge her death, formed the nucleus of the new Klan. See Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, pp. 149-150.

26. As such, it might be more accurate to say that African Americans and Jews are in the same ocean—without even a boat to keep them afloat.

27. See David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History, 71.3 (December 1984): 543-564. This important essay has been reprinted in Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, ed. Jack Salzman, with Adina Back and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin (New York: George Braziller in association with the Jewish Museum, 1992), pp. 17-35. My own archival research into the discourses in and around this case suggest a much more ambiguous conclusion. The Frank case, rather than serving as a first entry in a utopian version of the relationship of Jews and African Americans, is better understood as a site of much struggle, specifically over whether Frank or Conley should have been punished for this crime, and more broadly over which group was “safer” and more Americanized.

28. In the Frank trial even the images of perversion which surrounded the defendant marked him off as particularly alien and totally unlike the mythical phallic rapist of the southern imagination. Jim Conley claimed to have seen Frank with a woman who was “sitting down in a chair and she had her clothes up to here, and he was down on his knees” (Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, p. 41): I think it is instructive that the focal point of this Jewish man's sexual perversion is not organized around a powerful vision of genitality, as it would have likely have been for an African American man at the time. See Melnick, “Leo Frank's Perversion.”

29. Watkins, “Interview with Ishmael Reed,” p. 609. Bridges and Boundaries is a good place to begin an investigation of the liberal optimism surrounding this subject. See also Lenora E. Berson, The Negroes and the Jews (New York: Random House, 1971); Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism, intro. and ed. Nat Hentoff (New York: R. W. Baron, 1969); Negro and Jew: An Encounter in America, ed. Shlomo Katz (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: Scribner, 1988); Robert Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970). For more from Reed, see “Is There a Black-Jewish Feud?” Airing Dirty Laundry (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993), pp. 33-42.

30. Malcolm X wrote that “history's most tragic result of a mixed, therefore diluted and weakened, ethnic identity has been experienced by a white ethnic group—the Jew in Germany.” See Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1966), pp. 277-278. For Baraka on Jewish assimilation, see his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” (“the / ugly silent deaths of jews under / the surgeon's knife”) and his “Letter to Jules Feiffer,” where he wonders rhetorically, “Why so much fuss about Negroes wanting to call themselves Afro-Americans? … If you want to call yourself a Judeo (Judaeo?) American, it's perfectly all right with me. In fact, I think that if perhaps there were more Judeo-Americans and a few less bland, cultureless, middle-headed AMERICANS, this country might still be a great one.” In Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), p. 67. For “Black Dada,” see The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), pp. 71-73. This poem originally appeared in The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1964). I am grateful to Werner Sollors for these references.

31. Watkins, “Interview with Ishmael Reed,” p. 611.

32. Reed has noted that one of the white men accused in the Howard Beach incident was reputed to have seen the movie of The Color Purple with his African American girlfriend and to have been “real emotional” about it. (The Howard Beach incident took place late in 1986, when a gang of young white men chased and beat a group of African American men in this now infamous section of Queens, New York. One of the victims, Michael Griffith, tried to cross a highway to escape his attackers and was struck and killed by a car. The man Reed is describing is Jon Lester.) Reed's inference is that the depredations of African American men encouraged by the movie and its ilk were no longer abstract. See Reed's essay “Steven Spielberg Plays Howard Beach,” in Writin' Is Fightin', pp. 145-157.

33. As early as 1899 Booker T. Washington described Jews as “a very bright and striking example” for Negroes, a people who have “unity, pride, and love of race … Unless the Negro learns more and more to imitate the Jew … to have faith in himself, he cannot expect to have any high degree of success.” Booker T. Washington, The Future of the American Negro, reprinted in The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 5, 1899-1900, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 369-370.

34. Recall that Michele Wallace's attack on Reed was first published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

35. Edna Ferber, Show Boat (1926; rpt. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.). The musical was frequently lauded for its modern integration of music and story and its dignified presentation of African Americans. On the one hand, this Jewish-produced fantasy seems just the type of “tour” into African American culture that Shoboater is accused of leading; on the other, it does have a fairly progressive miscegenation plot. On the meaning of Show Boat as play and film for Paul Robeson's career, see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, British Film Institute Series, 1986), pp. 105-109, 126-128.

36. For relevant reflections, see Reed's essay “Chester Himes: Writer,” in Shrovetide, pp. 77-99.

37. The reference here is to the proliferation of social science literature about rampant dysfunctions in the African American community, a stance that was actually given its most influential articulation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “The Moynihan Report,” as it is commonly called, was originally titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and was published in March 1965 by the Office of Policy Planning and Research of the U.S. Department of Labor.

38. Ishmael Reed, “Hymietown Revisited,” in Writin' Is Fightin', p. 81.