Reckless Eyeballing Read Online Free PDF

because he was afraid that the patrons who had lavished him with gifts, prizes, chairs, would abandon him if it weren’t as big a hit as his first play, The Man Who Was an Enigma . In other words, he was afraid of failure, so the fellas said.
    After directing Ball to a seat, Brashford plopped down in the lap of his favorite sofa. Ball came right to the point.
    â€œYou’ve had the manuscript for about a month now, Jake. I wanted to get your reaction.”
    â€œYou want to get a reaction to your new play, huh? You and about thirty thousand others. See those corners? People think all I have time for is to read their manuscripts and scripts. I had to hire an extra secretary just to stand in line at the post office and at the copy places. See those corners?” He pointed to a corner of the room with his eyes.
    â€œYou and these other people calling me from all over the country asking me to read their manuscripts. You guys think that I’m some fucking agent. Get an agent.
    â€œAnyway, what’s all of this Ham shit? Ham Hill.” Bradford chuckled, then returned to his usual poker face. “You country boys come up here and try to wax all intellectual.” So he had read the play. “Say, would you like to have a cup of coffee? Got this stuff from Tanganyika. Dynamite.” Before Ian could answer, Brashford poured him a small cup from a silver pot he had on the table.
    â€œI called him Ham to make the point.” The coffee was as strong as it was down home. “Ham was cursed because he saw his father, Noah, naked. In Reckless Eyeballing , Ham Hill is cursed because he allegedly stared at a white woman too long.”
    â€œCursed so that he will be black and elongated!”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat he be black and elongated. That’s the curse, and when they said elongated they weren’t talking about his arms either. It was the Talmud that laid the curse on Ham and us. Anyway, these white people don’t care how smart you are or how impressive you are.” Brashford rose and walked toward a window. He was the type of guy who couldn’t keep still.
    â€œBall, they’re pushing your play because—” Every black guy had a cynical theory about why another black guy was “successful.”
    â€œBecause what?” Ian asked. Brashford was chuckling again. Ian looked at his smooth chin and cheeks. How did he remove all the hair from his face? It was completely bald. Brashford would attribute this to his Cherokee genes.
    â€œBecause you got that white woman’s monologue in the play. The one about her and the lynched nigger being in the same boat. How are they going to be in the same boat? How are some white woman and a lynched castrated nigger going to be in the same boat? The reason you did that was because you wanted to make up with women for Suzanna . The one about the whore who takes on all of those guys in the fields. That was a brilliant play. Brilliant. You remember those fellowships I got you for that play, the awards.” Brashford shook his head.
    â€œI guess you’re going to throw that up in my face forever.”
    Brashford swirled around. “Look, you little fuck—naw, skip it—”
    â€œGo on. Tell me what’s on your mind, old man!”
    Brashford stared at him momentarily. “You guys don’t know how hard it was back in the days when they had twilight zone-headed dudes wandering around New York hopped up on some kind of political bullshit and threatening guys like me who wrote the truth. Wrote it the way they saw it. It’s like what Chester Himes said: ‘All that matters now is to keep thinking the unthinkable and writing the unprintable and maybe I can break through this motherfucking race barrier that keeps us niggers suffocated.’ And some of us believed that. Hell, if I’m writing articles about freedom all the time, and they bored with that, then let them be bored, because in the