Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed Page B

for days. Neighboring tribes attended. And when his church objected to this marriage between a Christian and an Infidel, he closed the church down, so to this day there’s no church in Emancipation City, just various temples of different religions where people wander in and out. Some are near the city parks, others right downtown. He was a worldly pirate, but Raven Quickskill had learned how to read between the lines in his job of preparing slave invoices. He had something on this pirate. Something … something awful! Something everybody knew but Quaw Quaw. No one had the heart to tell her. Quickskill had written an unpublished poem about it. A rare “serious” love poem for him.
    When Raven first came to town, he checked in at the general store where the registration was going on; he could see the pirates’ castle on a mountain overlooking Pirates’ Plaza. It was a replica of Crevecoeur (heartbreak), the slave fort built by the Europeans on the coast of Guinea. After having his papers signed, he bought some stamps, writing paper and typewriter ribbon. He then decided to take a tour of the slave castle. The tour cost a penny.
    He got lost from the main tour group and mistakenly entered an upstairs room, where Quaw Quaw lay in an old French bed underneath a canopy. She had her knees drawn up and was reading a chapbook. The poems of a New Englander. They were about lobsters, aunts and religion.
    “Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I got lost from the main tour,” Quickskill said.
    “Raven Quickskill,” she said.
    She recognized him as the fugitive slave writer. She was always haunting the bookstalls. Next to her bed was a tray of cherrystones, eggs benedict, a tall glass of grapefruit juice and a pot of coffee. She invited him to pull up a chair next to her bed and talk to her about poetry. She had begun to back up poets at public readings with her dances. He told her about the poem he was working on, “Flight to Canada,” and how he had submitted it to Beulahland Review.
    She talked about her husband and what a good man he was, even though some people libeled him by calling him a pirate; and she talked about how her husband, the pirate, had taught her to see: “I mean, really see.”
    And before you knew it, they were in bed together, in this slave castle, in this warm bed covered with silk-laced blankets; in this slave castle, floors above where his ancestors rotted in chains, in this pirate’s bed, in this slave castle with its stone floors and knights’ statues. A portrait of her husband done in Rembrandt style hung above them.
    Was she a roadrunner? It was hard for her to catch up, but he wouldn’t call her a turtle because when she did catch up he had to hold on to her cheeks as though they were Spirit-of-St.-Louis’ seats in Lindbergh’s plane, the only thing between him and the Atlantic. Then it was rodeo; a lot of bucking and slipping out. It had gone that way for some time until they had fallen out of touch. They had an argument about the Kansas-Nebraska Act. She said that slavery was a state of mind, metaphysical. He told her to shut the fuck up.
    “I’m glad to see you, Quaw Quaw; it’s been a few years.” She stared at him, waiting for him to hurt her, but he wasn’t going to. “I see you’re backing up that pirate, Captain Kidd, and his translations of Oceanic poetry. You’re a good dancer, what are you performing behind this character for?”
    He was missing her. It showed when he was missing her. Sometimes they had drunk wine together in a café at a table covered with red-and-white-checkered cloth, where the bread was served in woven baskets. They’d rendezvous every time her husband went to those conventions on trade routes he was always attending. Sometimes he was in New York, looking in on his galleries and jewelry stores.
    “It’s none of your business, Raven. Times have changed. I’m not your squaw any more. And speaking of squaw, Captain Kidd was the hit of the Squaw