“The Germans did it. The Romans brought in these German toughs to deal with the Jews just like they used to import southern cops to deal with niggers.”
“You mean the Germans did it all along? Then they blame it on the Jews?”
“No longer; the Catholic Church is slowly absolving the Jews of the responsibility for Christ’s murder. Pretty soon they’ll probably blame it on us.” 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.
“Anyway. This is where Becky got the idea. It’s a white feminist bourgeois notion that women are innocent victims in a struggle between men.”
“But I’ve heard you say the same thing. You said that the fight in this country is between black men and white men and that women are caught in the crossfire.”
She jumped up from the sofa and started screaming. “That’s a lie. I didn’t say it.”
“You did, you know you did,” he persisted.
“That’s a big lie, I never said it.”
“Well, what about the castration thing? What about that?”
Ball caught himself. If he wanted to get his play done he could not alienate her. “Of course, I can see how you could be misquoted.” She stood for a minute. She then sat down and lit a cigarette. “I never said it. Becky said it. As though she cared about the Jews. Sometimes she sounds like Henry Ford, she hates Jews so much. She concedes that their men are good lovers. She said that she experimented in college. That’s why it’s easy for her to say that the women had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler. As for Jewesses, as she calls them, she’s always putting them down. Says they talk loud in restaurants and say crass and impolite things, always butting into people’s business and always talking about money. She’s always talking about their putting on too much makeup. She and her friends make fun of Jewish women getting nose operations.”
“What?”
“Sure, didn’t you know? Many Jewish women have nose operations to avoid looking ‘Mediterranean.’ They used to not be able to get jobs in Hollywood because they looked too ‘Mediterranean.’”
“But I thought that the Jews owned the media. That’s what Brashford says.”
“They don’t own the media, they own him.”
“Man, do you get a kick out of running down black men?” This time his mother appeared in his mind’s eye. She was wearing that bandanna on her head tied up in that certain way. “But on the other hand,” he said before her frown appeared, “a lot of them deserve it.” He swallowed bitter. Things were so tight for black men, here he was asking Tremonisha Smarts for a handout, in spite of all the things he and the fellas said about Wrong-Headed Man and her friends.
“They don’t let Jews up there in the boardrooms of the big companies. They may have a few management positions, or they may be storekeepers, or speculate for the big capitalists, but they know that these capitalists will sell them out as they did in all the other countries. Some Jews try to cultivate an arrangement for protection, but others see the futility of it and remain separate.
“But back to the film. It’s about this Jew named Joseph Ben Isaacher Oppenheimer. You see, he has this decadent duke in his debt and he strings the slob out in order to win political and sexual concessions for the other Jews. Like, he gets the duke to permit his people to enter Stuttgart from outside the town, where they’re living in these filthy camps, and as the Jews enter the German men cry out, ‘What will happen to our wives and our daughters?’ The Jews grin at the fräuleins with the same concupiscent stare that the black legislators in The Birth of a Nation have in that scene where they check out the southern belles in the legislature’s gallery.
“In fact, the films The Birth of a Nation and Jud Süss have a lot in common. Just as The Birth of a Nation was innovative, the Nazis recruited some of Germany’s supreme talent to appear in the film. It was directed by Harlan Veidt.
“The Jew even pimps for the duke. For example, there’s one scene where the duke fantasizes about having some ballerinas perform for him and then, presto, in a cut we see the ballerinas the Jew has procured for the duke. Well, there’s this one Aryan fräulein that the Jew really has the hots for. He finally rapes her, well, you don’t see her actually raped, you see the Jew wrestling on the bed with her and then in the next scene she’s walking down a road, defiled, ruined. She commits suicide and after the duke dies, depriving the Jew of his protection, the Jew is hanged for violating the old German law that forbade any Jew from having carnal knowledge of a Christian on penalty of being ‘hanged for all to see.’
“Would you like to have some more coffee?” she asked, noticing that his cup was empty. Before he answered she had bounded into the kitchen. He had been trying his luck in the North since 1979 but still hadn’t gotten used to the coffee. It was weak and people drank it with lots of milk. He always looked forward to going home to relax after he’d finished a project. They had real coffee there. She returned to the couch after pouring him some more.
“Boy, Becky has come a long way,” she said. “She started out as a silly radical feminist and now she’s producing a play that’s sympathetic to Eva Braun, a Nazi. How people change. Seems that the left all over the West is going to the right. Wouldn’t even be surprised if the Soviet Union got into a consumer binge. It always takes them a number of years to catch up with western fashion. How these radicals have changed.”
Brashford said the same thing about you: Ball had the words right on the edge of his lips. A long time ago she wrote poems about blacks robbing department stores and shooting down the police, but recently she’d received a lot of criticism for traveling to South Africa. He decided to talk about something else.
“Eva Braun. Wasn’t she that woman in the black bathing suit who was always romping about playing with puppies and pinching children on the cheeks at that place Hitler kept as a retreat?”
“Berchtesgaden,” she said.
“Say, you really know a lot about it.”
“I was doing research for this TV special. You know, the one I wrote about Jo Baker and Bessie Smith. Well, I ran across some kind of mention that Jo Baker had dinner with Hermann Göring; this huge Nazi whose abdomen was much wider than his hips, he tried to poison her.”
Göring had a perpetual idiotic grin on his face, Ian remembered. He thought of the photos he’d seen of the fat buffoon in his cream-colored uniforms and giant raincoats. His big cheeks, tiny eyes, and helmet that fitted his head like a bucket. “Why?”
“The Nazis wanted to get rid of her because she was spying for the French and that’s not all. I discovered that the night of his Austrian triumph Adolf Hitler slept in a bed with a picture of Josephine Baker hanging above the head. You know, Hitler hated jazz and was always scolding Eva about her collection of American jazz records. So why didn’t he order Josephine Baker’s picture to be removed from the wall of the inn where he slept that night? He was getting even with his mother. He had her picture on the wall of his bedroom, but the night that he’s away from his room, sort of a shrine to his mother, he fantasizes about sleeping with the demon princess, the wild temptress Lilith, Erzulie, the flapper who brought jazz dance to the Folies. It was very significant that he had this fantasy in the land of his birth.
“Jesus Christ had the same experience with a prostitute on the road, away from his prying mother, whom some say was the prostitute. A Lilith or Erzulie of her time. He had the same problem. Jesus, Hitler, both had weak fathers and strong, manipulative mothers. He would have this ambivalent attitude toward the other women in his life, and finally toward the German nation, which in Nazi portraits is a prodigious butt buxom Brünhilde type blond blue-eyed white woman who is either holding a banner or a flag and at the lead of a vigilante mob. Hitler had the best ass in Germany available to him. Actresses, intellectuals, oxenlike bombshells, models, anything a man would desire, but he was a freak for these high-strung difficult types. That first one was his niece. It’s rumored that she went and got pregnant by a Jew. Hitler was part Jewish. His relatives in London always threatened to tell the whole story. Hitler had to pay money to keep them quiet.”