meaning can usually be found in context.

If writing is magic, it is also a way to strike back, to define one’s self against oppressors. In the opening of his 1974 interview in Black World, Reed quotes Muhammad Ali’s dictum, “writing is fighting,” and he made that phrase the title of his book about boxing literature. Reed does not limit his sparring to his critical essays: It shows up in his fiction as well. His novels usually have at least one scene of confrontation between two literary points of view.

In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the scene is Bo Shmo’s meeting with Loop Garoo in the desert, where Shmo tries to get Loop to conform to Marxist realist ideas of what the African American novel should be. The scene is repeated in Mumbo Jumbo, in which the Marxist realist is Abdul Sufi Hamid, and Reed’s point-of-view character is PaPa LaBas. In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, the conflict is embedded in the character of Chorus, who objects to her disappearance in modern literature. Reed’s appearance in a Buffalo production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944) in 1960 may have led to his interest in the Antigone myth in which Chorus appears in his novel.

In Flight to Canada, Raven Quickskill has literary arguments with his lover Qua Qua and presents post-Civil War literature as a continuation of the struggle: “What the American Arthurians couldn’t win on the battlefield will now be fought out on the poetry field.” In Reckless Eyeballing, Ian Ball objects not only to feminist attacks on his writing but also to the critiques of fellow black playwright Jack Brashford.

The feminist critique reflects attacks on Reed’s own works, as do the other literary arguments in his fiction. Reed has been labeled sexist by feminist critics for his portrayal of women and for what is perceived as his ratification of black “macho” stereotypes. In a 1981 essay in Playgirl, Reed reiterated a thesis that the black male was victimized by feminist gains in the 1970’s and that popular images of middle-aged males, black or white, are invariably villainous. The thesis is central to Reckless Eyeballing, where it is developed more fully. The biggest irony of Reed’s status in American letters is that this radical black writer seems to have more enemies on the Left (Marxist and feminist) than on the Right.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

First published: 1969

Type of work: Novel

The Loop Garoo Kid, a HooDoo cowboy, fights the powers of evil in their current manifestation: a powerful Old West rancher.

In a self-interview in the journal Black World, Reed explained the title of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down word by word. “Yellow back” refers to the pulp-novel fiction that created the myth of the Old West at the end of the nineteenth century; “radio” continued it; “broke-down” means stripped to its essence. The novel, then, is a dissection of the popular culture images of the Old West and an indictment of the way they portray minorities.

Reed’s first HooDoo hero, the Loop Garoo Kid, is the black cowboy who runs the circus at the opening of the novel; clues to a larger identity begin to accumulate as the novel progresses, and Loop is revealed as an eternal, the trickster figure from African myth, mistakenly identified by Western rationalists as the power of evil. Loop Garoo (whose name means “werewolf” in Haitian Creole) is the eternal good guy of Western fantasy.

The bad guy is Drag Gibson, a powerful rancher who jealously protects his way of life by trying to kill Loop and his circus people. He is hired by the people of Yellow Back Radio to return their town to them; it has been taken over by their children—an allegory of what seemed to be happening to the United States when the novel was written in 1969. Drag’s men attack and defeat the circus train, and Loop is stranded in the desert. He is picked up, however, by Chief Showcase, “the only surviving injun,” in a high-technology helicopter, one of the many examples of anachronism in the novel. Showcase, as another exploited minority, identifies with Loop and offers clandestine aid. Loop returns to haunt Drag’s men on the desert.

When Loop continues on the loose, the secretary of defense, General Theda Doompussy Blackwell, is called in. With Congressman Pete the Peek providing military appropriations, Blackwell hires the scientists Harold Rateater and Dr. Coult to develop weapons to subdue Loop. Here the satire is aimed at the military development of the Vietnam War era, contemporary with the novel.

In the final section of the novel, Pope Innocent arrives from Europe, giving an idea of the cosmic scope the conflict is about to assume. The pope, representing Western orthodoxy and authority, is upset that his American minions, the likes of Blackwell and Gibson, have been unable to subdue Loop Garoo. He has not always been Loop’s foe, however: His discussion with Drag reveals that Loop had originally been a member of the divine family of the Christian mythos. Put off by Jehovah’s demand of exclusive worship, Loop left him. Jehovah, however, now dominated by the feminine principle represented by Mary, needs Loop’s help. Only Loop could keep the feminine force under control: He knew her as his lover, Black Diane (the Greek Artemis). One of her followers appears as Mustache Sal, another former lover of Loop, now Drag’s wife.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down may be enjoyed on a number of levels. A parody of Western thrillers, it is as exciting and quick-paced as any of the horse operas it parodies. One index of its success as a story is a laudatory review in Western Roundup, a rodeo magazine written by and for modern-day cowboys. On another level, the novel functions, as does all Reed’s fiction, as a critique of American culture. Because the Western as a genre illustrates the errors of American culture—looking on the resources of the American West, including the human resources of its aboriginal people, as sources of wealth to be exploited—Reed uses the genre to exorcise those errors.

On a third level, the novel attacks critical presuppositions about what constitutes African American fiction. Instead of limiting himself to the black urban experience, Reed takes the popular forms of the majority culture and skews them to his own comic vision. The reaction of the literary establishment, black and white, to Reed’s choice of form is embedded in the novel itself. The Marxist “neo-realists” who have claimed black fiction for their own political uses show up as a posse seeking to hang Loop Garoo. They are led by a spokesman, Bo Shmo, who delivers a hilarious parody of the leading arguments of Reed’s literary enemies. Loop’s reply to Bo is such a succinct summary of Reed’s poetics that it is often quoted: “What if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”

Reed has certainly let his novels be anything they want to be, and they are never the same thing twice. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down delivers his now-familiar Neo-HooDoo picture of the United States, and it is appropriate that his first use of the HooDoo aesthetic was in a Western.

Mumbo Jumbo

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

HooDoo detective Papa LaBas seeks the origins of the disease “Jes Grew” while pursued by agents of the mysterious Wallflower Order.

Reed’s characteristic use of fluid time, effective in other novels, is particularly apt in Mumbo Jumbo. The Harlem Renaissance, the setting of the novel, has striking parallels to the African American experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The fact that the 1920’s were called “the jazz age” indicates how much black culture was affecting the white majority. Mumbo Jumbo traces that influence; the rhythms, the dances, sometimes the words of ragtime and jazz songs came from rituals of the African vodun religion, transplanted to America by the slave trade. Reed documents those connections by footnotes and a partial bibliography at the end of the novel.

The novel is not a documentary, however. The quick-spreading influence of African culture in America is represented as an epidemic, “Jes Grew” (a phrase from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin referring to the character Topsy, whose origins were unknown). The Wallflower Order, a secret society dedicated to maintaining the power of white Western rationalism, seeks to stop the disease. Unlike other plagues, however, instead of harming the hosts, Jes Grew makes them feel better. Thus, the Wallflower Order shows itself to be an enemy of pleasure.

Yet Jes Grew has powerful friends as well as powerful enemies. PaPa LaBas, the HooDoo detective in Harlem, tracks down Jes Grew in order to find it a sacred text and to protect it from the Wallflower Order. The Wallflowers, under the leadership of Hinckle Von Vampton (after they kidnap him), seek to contain Jes Grew by sponsoring black poets, thereby limiting and defining what black literature is. To some extent, that happened in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920 s, though the motives may not have been so overt. Von Vampton is modeled after Carl Van Vechten, among others, who brought the Harlem poets into prominence in white literary circles.

LaBas is joined by T Malice and Black Herman, who, though of a younger generation, share LaBas’s views about black culture. One of their circle who does not is Abdul Sufi Hamid, the Muslim who wants to coopt the entire Harlem culture into the leftist politics he sees as the only means to black liberation. Von Vampton’s young black protégé, Woodrow Wilson Jefferson (W. W.), is a fan of Abdul who also wants Jes Grew stamped out. W. W. is hired as “The Negro Viewpoint”: By trying to define African American art, limiting it to one point of view, von Vampton feels he can control it.

A subplot in Mumbo Jumbo involves the Mútafikah, a multiracial group dedicated to returning non-Western art objects that came to New York after World War I. To the Mútafikah, these were stolen under cover of the war, and they represent an irony: The majority culture that denies any value to non-Western art objects steals them and puts them into museums (or “Centers for Art Detention,” as Reed calls them, lampooning the Western “curator” mentality).

Fighting the Mútafikah directly is Biff Musclewhite, a parody of the white strong-arm hero. Former Police Commissioner of New York, now charged with guarding the Center for Art Detention (C.A.D.), he is kidnapped by three Mútafikah in the process of raiding the C.A.D. (a telling acronym). Representing three races—the African Berbelang, the Asian Yellow Jack, and the Nordic Thor—they are in solidarity against the suppression of non-Western culture, though Thor is of Western origin himself. In fact, that proves his undoing. Left alone with the bound Biff Musclewhite, Thor succumbs to his accusations of being a traitor to the white race and lets Musclewhite go.

All threads of the plot come together when von Vampton, seeking writers for his periodical The Benign Monster, discovers the dead body of Abdul. The corpse clutches a rejection slip, which gives LaBas a clue: Apparently Abdul had found the text Jes Grew was seeking and tried to publish it as his own. All the pieces are put together in a parody of the final explanation scene of detective fiction.

LaBas’s explanation is the longest chapter in the book and takes in thousands of years of history. The battle between Jes Grew and the Wallflowers turns out to be a recent outgrowth of an eternal struggle between followers of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Aton. The Wallflowers are Atonists, worshipers of the cruel god who forbade them to follow any other. Moses introduced his worship to the Israelites, and thence to the West, when he lived in Egypt, transferring Aton’s qualities to Jahweh. The chapter acts as a fitting punch line to Reed’s most popular satire.

Flight to Canada

First published: 1976

Type of work: Novel

The money from his published poem about escape allows a slave to escape a Virginia plantation and flee to Canada during the American Civil War.

Although Flight to Canada is Reed’s Civil War novel, all ages of American history are squeezed into this satire. As in all Reed’s novels, time is fluid. It opens with Reed’s poem “Flight to Canada,” followed by a present-day reflection on the ways in which Josiah Henson’s escaped slave narrative and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s more celebrated version of it helped create the history of the war.

Thus, the time-consciousness of this novel is always double, referring to the events, real and fictitious, of the 1860’s and the 1970’s simultaneously. Deliberate anachronisms are commonplace; when Abraham Lincoln first meets the Virginia aristocrat Arthur Swille, Swille is talking on the telephone. The play at Ford’s Theatre at which Lincoln is assassinated is carried on public television.

There is a tinge of autobiography in the novel’s protagonist, Raven Quickskill. Quickskill is a poet, and it is his writing that helps him to escape slavery on a Virginia plantation. The Civil War ends before Quickskill actually leaves, but his master, Arthur Swille, pursues him anyway. Swille is a seductive villain. A powerful international businessman and financier, he deals with both sides in the war, and treats President Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Generals Lee and Grant like toadies. The scenes with Lincoln produce some of Reed’s most enjoyable satire. Reed’s Lincoln is a bit of a hick, and his assistance to the slaves is shown to be political expediency. Nevertheless, Reed makes him likable: He defends his wife against cruel attacks by Swille, and though he takes Swille’s money, he does not trust him. Lincoln’s assassination is presented as Swille’s revenge for freeing the slaves.

Flight to Canada gains additional meaning when read against Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reed’s Uncle Tom (there are references to him and the “Legree plantation”) is Uncle Robin, an old compliant black slave who has so capitulated to the machinery of slavery that he keeps Swille’s records. Robin’s fawning is only apparent, however; by juggling the books, he is able to cover for escaped slaves, and he always destroys the invoices so that Swille will have no proof of “ownership.” His final bit of forgery tops them all: He doctors Swille’s will so that Robin inherits the plantation.

As in Reed’s other novels, the supporting characters carry much of the satire. Raven’s lover, Princess Qua Qua Tralaralara, is an American Indian dancer and tightrope walker. He wins her away from Yankee Jack, whom Raven exposes as a pirate who killed Qua Qua’s father. Mammy Barracuda, as her name suggests, is the secretly ruthless plantation mammy; Reed suggests that it is her conversion to Christianity that makes her so nasty. Swallowing whole the value system of her oppressors, she turns oppressor herself, of such poor creatures as the slave girl Bangalang (a version of Stowe’s “Topsy”) and even her master’s wife, beating her until she becomes the model of a southern belle. Cato the Graffado, Swille’s white servant, is so self-abasing that he is indistinguishable from the slaves, who laugh at him.

While much of the book is social satire, a major theme is the power of literature itself to emancipate. Reed, like Raven, has freed himself with his words, despite the ridicule of white and black enemies and misunderstanding friends. For a black artist, however, there is a further barrier: the dominant white culture that suppresses black art by ridicule, theft, and denial. Part of what Reed has achieved in Flight to Canada is returning the story of the escaped slave to its rightful owners, the former slaves themselves. Josiah Henson’s autobiography foundered in obscurity; Harriet Beecher Stowe made it famous but by whitewashing it into sensationalism aimed at a white audience. Flight to Canada corrects Stowe’s distortion, not by re-creating the clinical facts but by skewing it in another direction, providing the slave’s-eye view through one hundred years of history.

Reckless Eyeballing

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

A black southern male playwright fights white people, northerners, and feminists to get his new play produced.

As in Flight to Canada, the title of Reckless Eyeballing is the name of a work within the novel, written by the main character. Ian Ball, a southern black playwright, has been “sex-listed”—that is, blacklisted as sexist—by the feminist critics who control New York theater. In an attempt to redeem himself, he has written a play called Reckless Eyeballing, which caters to feminist views.

Ian Ball bears some resemblance to Reed, who dabbled in playwriting in the 1980’s, though he is clearly not Reed’s point-of-view character. In a carefully controlled ironic narration, Reed makes it clear that Ball has sold out his real beliefs in order to be popular, yet neither Ball nor the narrator ever says so explicitly. In fact, Ball himself is guilty of “reckless eyeballing”—that is, looking at women lasciviously, “undressing them with his eyes.” Even while he argues with the feminists who oppose him, he is thinking about them sexually. Further, his very name is “I. Ball.”

Like Reed’s other novels, Reckless Eyeballing coalesces several simultaneous plots. While Ball is trying to get his play produced, Detective Lawrence O’Reedy, a parody of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan (whom Reed mentions several times in the novel), is chasing the “Flower Phantom,” who accosts feminists who have denigrated black men, shaves their hair, and leaves them with a chrysanthemum. In a third plot, Jim Minsk, the powerful director who stands up to the feminist bullies Tremonisha Smarts (playwright and director) and Becky French (producer), is murdered in an anti-Semite conspiracy that is never explained.

Jim’s murder puts Ian at the mercy of his enemies, Tremonisha, who takes over as director, and Becky, who moves the play to a smaller, less prestigious “workshop” theater. During the course of their collaboration, however, Ian has his consciousness raised, and Tremonisha begins to see some truth in his point of view, which she had previously discarded as sexist. Ian beings to think of women as more than sex objects, and Tremonisha begins to realize that men are not monsters.

If Reed had left the plot there, it would not be much more than a trendy situation comedy. The last chapter, however, provides an ironic subtext to the whole novel. In an interior monologue, Ian’s mother, Martha, recalls a hex placed on him at birth, making him “a two-head, of two minds, the one not knowing what the other was up to.” This revelation is foreshadowed in Ball’s reaction to the “Flower Phantom” in chapter 11: “Ian’s head told him that this man was a lunatic who should be put away for a long time, but his gut was cheering the man on. His head was Dr. Jekyll, but his gut was Mr. Hyde.” In the final paragraph of the novel, it is revealed than Ian, unknown to himself, is actually the Flower Phantom.

A fourth interwoven plot counterbalances the main story of Ball’s struggle to mount his play. The lush theater originally scheduled to house his play is now running Eva’s Honeymoon, a feminist romp presenting Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s lover, as a victim. Mysterious scenes in the novel with an old lady who mumbles about leaving Hitler in a bunker forty years earlier make the reader realize that the play is, in fact, written and subsidized by Eva Braun herself, still alive and hiding in New York.

Stylistically, Reckless Eyeballing is more conservative than any of Reed’s previous novels. The only remotely HooDoo character is Ian’s mother, a Caribbean peasant with “second sight,” a fortune teller very powerful in the politics of New Oyo, Ian’s island birthplace. Yet none of the scenes are given a surreal or otherworldly point of view, with the possible exception of O’Reedy’s hallucinations of the ghosts of innocent minorities he killed while on duty. There is no use of unusual spelling and punctuation to reproduce dialect, as in Reed’s previous novels. The novel is uncharacteristically realistic.

Reckless Eyeballing is a portrait of every conceivable type of hatred in contemporary America—racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, regionalism, classism, and infighting among factions of every group. Yet the attitude that Reed projects in the novel is not hatred but ridicule. By exposing every type of extremism—racial, gender-related, cultural—Reed has made many enemies, but he has also helped American readers see their demons and, it is hoped, exorcise them.