“You got a thing about black women. They’re either vamps or being subservient to some man.” She stressed man. “And then you give the old whorish white bitches in your play all the good lines, and don’t leave no good lines for the sisters. I know all about your problem.”
“What do you want me to do, Tre?” he said, eager to mend his ways.
“I want you to do better.” She blew some smoke from the cigarette she held.
“I’ll certainly work on it.” Outside he waited for the elevator. He was stunned at what she was saying about white women. Calling them whores and things. Making fun of Becky. The white women made her. They produced her. They promoted her plays. They told her what to say on television. They put her on the cover of their magazines. They told all of their readers and followers to read her. They analyzed the motives behind the male reviewers’ unfavorable reviews before they’d even appeared. They arranged her trips and tours; they called up the hotels; they bought her tickets; they would have flown the planes if asked; they got her on “The Today Show,” “CBS Morning News,” network night shows, call-in shows, and kept her on Broadway for six months breaking all records, and here she was calling white women all kinds of bitches and telling him what he should do for the sisters. He thought about the picture of her on the podium at Town Hall, kissing some elderly southern novelist; almost knocking her over with affection, and how she said, when she won her honor, that she wanted to spend the time with Becky and celebrate her success with all of her friends.
Up north, Ball decided, things were awfully complex. He couldn’t wait until the day after the opening of his play. He would go south, visit his mother for a few weeks.
15
He’d received a call from Becky French that morning. Can you please get over here this morning at 9:30 A.M. No hello or nothing. When he reached the office, Mr. Ickey, the receptionist, the man with Humpty Dumpty’s shape, lacking any perceptible waist, peered up at him. He smiled a decadent sleazy smile. Probably a frustrated romantic, Ball thought. Ickey signaled for him to go in and returned to reading the newspaper. Ball could hear the discussion coming from behind the door. He recognized Tremonisha’s voice.
“You’re going to change the entire meaning of the play. You hell hussy. Everything you touch you corrupt.” The voice that replied was equally shrill.
“I’m not going to produce that play as it is. We have…standards to uphold.” In his mind’s eye, he could see Becky shake her head like a filly when she said standards.
“It’s not standards. You’re worried about that monologue. It’s political, isn’t it? You don’t like the monologue, you bitch, admit it. You white feminists sound more like the white man with each passing day. In fact, the only thing your dipshit movement has produced is more white men. Standards. All the mediocre shit that you produce by these junior womanists. You’ve got your nerve talking about standards. Why do you always feel the need to castrate the black man?”
“How can you say that? You’re the one they picketed.” That remark from French was followed by silence.
“That was your fault. You and that mutant bacteria out there. Your assistant. You were the one who listed me as a spokesperson for all black women in that press release. Writing The Black Woman’s story. You insisted that I write in the scene about the man throwing his wife, the missionary, downstairs. In my version, she only converts him. You wanted to sensationalize it.”
“I don’t remember.”
“All of you white bitches are like that. You don’t remember. You treacherous cunt. Every time I’d appear on television you’d call. Telling me how I didn’t sound like a dedicated feminist. How I should change my hairdo. How I ought to put more punch into my attack on black men. What’s you bitches’ hang-up about black men anyway? You’re more likely to be raped by your daddy, your brother, or your date, man or woman.”
“Tremonisha, have you been taking Valium again? I told you about that. It makes you sound, well, you know, unreasonable.”
“It’s not the Valium, it’s you, you’re the biggest depressant I know.”
“Look, Ms., I made you and I can destroy you. I filled that theater with women and got you those interviews in the magazines. You were nothing. Reading your diatribes in quaint little coffee shops on the Lower East Side. I created you. I gave you prominence. But don’t get smart. There’s always somebody else who’ll take your place.”
“Do me like you did Johnnie Kranshaw, huh? Whatever became of her? Where did she go? Answer me, bitch, where did she go!”
Ball used the silence that followed as an opportunity to enter the office. He cleared his throat. They were both frozen toward each other like two cats with humped backs. Their jaws were puffed. He could smell the violence. Becky was lighting a cigarette, her hands trembling, and Tremonisha was staring at her, her hands on her hips.
“You’re not to come into this office unless you knock,” Becky said. She was shaking like a wet dog.
“I’m sorry, the receptionist told me to come in.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Ian. This bitch wants to fuck with your play. The same way they did with mine.”
“Look, Tre, nobody was twisting your arm,” Becky said, cuttingly. They were staring at each other. Their chests were heaving. “Nobody begged you, Tre. You didn’t complain as long as the money was coming in. As long as you could take those trips to Europe, to learn and to grow, as you put it. You didn’t complain then.” Tremonisha looked at the floor.
“I was young.”
“Maybe you want to be alone. I can leave,” Ball said.
“Tell him what you want to do with his play. She wants to change your play so that the mob victim is just as guilty as the mob. She wants to drop Cora Mae’s line about their being in the same boat. That’s that collective guilt bullshit that’s part of this jive New York intellectual scene. She wants you to change the whole meaning of the play. She’s saying that the man who reckless eyeballed Cora Mae was just as guilty as the men who murdered him. She feels that Ham Hill’s staring at Cora was tantamount to a violent act. If looks could kill? Huh, Becky? She’s saying that Ham Hill murdered Cora with his eyes.” Tremonisha and Becky were exchanging stares that were so dense he felt that they were probably looking right through each other.
He thought of them in the same households all over the Americas while the men were away on long trips to the international centers of the cotton or sugar markets. The secrets they exchanged in the night when there were no men around, during the Civil War in America when the men were in the battlefield and the women were in the house. Black and white, sisters and half-sisters. Mistresses and wives. There was something going on here that made him, a man, an outsider, a spectator, like someone who’d stumbled into a country where people talked in sign language and he didn’t know the signs. After a long silence Becky said, turning to him: “I just want you to tone it down a little.”
As a climax to this extraordinary scene, Tremonisha started for the door. “Come on, Ian. Buy me a drink. Let’s get out of here. First she cuts the white women out of the lynching scene, and next she wants you to change the whole meaning of the play.” Ball stood there. He thought of a long article he’d read about how plays about women were hot, and that anybody who could put together a halfway decent one could be assured of a performance. And anyway, what did this argument between these women have to do with him? Hadn’t the black ones said that the only thing that had happened since Martin Luther King, Jr., was the black woman, and weren’t the white ones telling themselves that they had come a long way baby? What did a quarrel between these sisters, hugging each other one minute and scratching out each other’s eyes the next have to do with him? “Well, Ball,” Tre finally said. “Are you coming?” He stood his ground. She went to the door and slammed it, but not before giving them both disgusted looks. Ian turned to Becky and said: “Can we talk?” She smiled.