erudition in novels that are syncretized from a series of subtexts. The literary equivalent of scat singing, his stories-within-stories parody literary formulas and challenge the traditional limits of fiction.

Reed claims that his novels constitute “an art form with its own laws,” but he does not mean to imply that his work is private, for these “laws” are founded on a careful but imaginative reinterpretation of the historical and mythological past. The lengthy bibliography appended to Mumbo Jumbo satirizes the documentary impulse of social realist authors, but it also underscores Reed’s belief that his mature work demands scholarly research to be decoded. This artistic process of reinterpretation often requires the services of an interlocutor, a character who explicitly explains the events of the narrative in terms of the mythological past. Reed’s novels describe a vision of an Osirian/Dionysian consciousness, a sensuous humanism that he presents as an appropriate cultural alternative for nonwhite Americans. His imaginative reconstructions of the American West, the Harlem Renaissance, the American Civil War, and contemporary U.S. politics, interwoven with ancient myths, non-European folk customs, and the formulas of popular culture, are liberating heresies meant to free readers from the intellectual domination of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Free-Lance Pallbearers

Reed’s first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, takes place in a futuristic America called HARRY SAM: “A big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG.” This crumbling and corrupt world is tyrannized by Sam himself, a vulgar fat man who lives in Sam’s Motel on Sam’s Island in the middle of the lethally polluted Black Bay that borders HARRY SAM. Sam, doomed by some terrifying gastrointestinal disorder, spends all of his time on the toilet, his filth pouring into the bay from several large statues of Rutherford B. Hayes.

The bulk of the novel, although framed and periodically informed by a jiving narrative voice, is narrated by Bukka Doopeyduk in a restrained, proper English that identifies his passive faith in the establishment. Doopeyduk is a dedicated adherent to the Nazarene Code, an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, a student at Harry Sam College, and a hapless victim. His comically futile efforts to play by the rules are defeated by the cynics, who manipulate the unjust system to their own advantage. In the end, Doopeyduk is disillusioned: He leads a successful attack on Sam’s Island, uncovers the conspiracy that protects Sam’s cannibalism, briefly dreams of becoming the black Sam, and is finally crucified.

The Free-Lance Pallbearers is a parody of the African American tradition of first-person, confessional narratives, a book the narrator describes as “growing up in soulsville first of three installments—or what it means to be a backstage darky.” Reed’s novel challenges the viability of this African American version of the bildungsroman, in which a youngprotagonist undergoes a painful initiation into the darkness of the white world, a formula exemplified by Wright’s Black Boy and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In fact, the novel suggests that African American authors’ use of this European form is as disabling as Doopeyduk’s adherence to the dictates of the Nazarene Code.

The Free-Lance Pallbearers is an unrestrained attack on U.S. politics. HARRY SAM, alternately referred to as “Nowhere” or “Now Here,” is a dualistic vision of a United States that celebrates vacuous contemporaneity. The novel, an inversion of the Horatio Alger myth in the manner of Nathanael West, mercilessly displays American racism, but its focus is the corruptive potential of power. Sam is a grotesque version of Lyndon B. Johnson, famous for his bathroom interviews, and Sam’s cannibalistic taste for children is an attack on Johnson’s Vietnam policy. With The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Reed destroys the presumptions of his society, but it is not until his later novels that he attempts to construct an alternative.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is set in a fantastic version of the Wild West of popular literature. Reed’s protagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, is a proponent of artistic freedom and an accomplished Voodoo houngan who is in marked contrast to the continually victimized Doopeyduk. Armed with supernatural “connaissance” and aided by a white python and the hip, helicopter-flying Chief Showcase, the Kid battles the forces of realistic mimesis and political corruption. His villainous opponent is Drag Gibson, a degenerate cattle baron given to murdering his wives, who is called upon by the citizens of Yellow Back Radio to crush their rebellious children’s effort “to create [their] own fictions.”

Although Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down satirizes Americans’ eagerness to suspend civil rights in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, its focus is literature, specifically the dialogue between realism and modernism. The Loop Garoo Kid matches Reed’s description of the African American artist in Nineteen Necromancers from Now: “a conjurer who works JuJu upon his oppressors; a witch doctor who frees his fellow victims from the psychic attack launched by demons.” Through the Loop Garoo Kid, Reed takes a stand for imagination, intelligence, and fantasy against rhetoric, violence, and sentimentality. This theme is made explicit in a debate with Bo Shmo, a “neo-social realist” who maintains that “all art must be for the end of liberating the masses,” for the Kid says that a novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”

Reed exhibits his antirealist theory of fiction in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down through his free use of time, characters, and language. The novel ranges from the eighteenth century to the present, combining historical events and cowboy myths with modern technology and cultural detritus. Reed’s primary characters are comically exaggerated racial types: Drag Gibson represents the whites’ depraved materialism, Chief Showcase represents the American Indians’ spirituality, and the Loop Garoo Kid represents the African Americans’ artistic soul. Reed explains the novel’s title by suggesting that his book is the “dismantling of a genre done in an oral way like radio.” “Yellow back” refers to the popular dime novels; “radio” refers to the novel’s oral, discontinuous form; and a “broke-down” is a dismantling. Thus, Reed’s first two novels assault America in an attempt to “dismantle” its cultural structure.

Mumbo Jumbo

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed expands on the neo-hoodooism of the Loop Garoo Kid in order to create and define an African American aesthetic based on Voodoo, Egyptian mythology, and improvisational musical forms, an aesthetic to challenge the Judeo-Christian tradition, rationalism, and technology.

Set in Harlem during the 1920’s, Mumbo Jumbo is a tragicomical analysis of the Harlem Renaissance’s failure to sustain its artistic promise. Reed’s protagonist is PaPa LaBas, an aging hoodoo detective and cultural diagnostician. LaBas’s name, meaning “over there” in French, reveals that his purpose is to reconnect African Americans with their cultural heritage by reunifying the Text of Jes Grew, literally the Egyptian Book of Thoth. Reed takes the phrase Jes Grew from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy and James Weldon Johnson’s description of African American music’s unascribed development, but in the novel, Jes Grew is a contagion, connected with the improvisational spirit of ragtime and jazz, that begins to spread across America in the 1920’s. Jes Grew is an irrational force that threatens to overwhelm the dominant, repressive traditions of established culture. LaBas’s efforts to unify and direct this unpredictable force are opposed by the Wallflower Order of the Knights Templar, an organization dedicated to neutralizing the power of Jes Grew in order to protect its privileged status. LaBas fails to reunify the text, a parallel to the dissipation of the Harlem Renaissance’s artistic potential, but the failure is seen as temporary; the novel’s indeterminate conclusion looks forward hopefully to a time when these artistic energies can be reignited.

The novel’s title is double-edged. “Mumbo jumbo” is a racist, colonialist phrase used to describe the misunderstood customs and language of dark-skinned people, an approximation of some critics’ description of Reed’s unorthodox fictional method. Yet “mumbo jumbo” also refers to the power of imagination, the cultural alternative that can free African Americans. A text of and about texts, Mumbo Jumbo combines the formulas of detective fiction with the documentary paraphernalia of scholarship: footnotes, illustrations, and a bibliography. Thus, in the disclosure scene required of any good detective story, LaBas, acting the part of interlocutor, provides a lengthy and erudite explication of the development of Jes Grew that begins with a reinterpretation of the myth of Osiris. The parodic scholarship of Mumbo Jumbo undercuts the assumed primacy of the European tradition and implicitly argues that African American artists should attempt to discover their distinct cultural heritage.

The Last Days of Louisiana Red

In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, LaBas returns as Reed’s protagonist, but the novel abandons the parodic scholarship and high stylization of Mumbo Jumbo. Although LaBas again functions as a connection with a non-European tradition of history and myth, The Last Days of Louisiana Red is more traditionally structured than its predecessor. In the novel, LaBas solves the murder of Ed Yellings, the founder of the Solid Gumbo Works. Yellings’s business is dedicated to combating the effects of Louisiana Red, literally a popular hot sauce but figuratively an evil state of mind that divides African Americans. Yelling’s gumbo, like Reed’s fiction, is a mixture of disparate elements, and it has a powerful curative effect. In fact, LaBas discovers that Yellings is murdered when he gets close to developing a gumbo that will cure heroin addiction.

In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Reed is examining the self-destructive forces that divide the African American community so that its members fight one another “while above their headsbillionaires flew in custom-made jet planes.” Reed shows how individuals’ avarice leads them to conspire with the establishment, and he suggests that some of the most vocal and militant leaders are motivated by their egotistical need for power rather than by true concern for oppressed people. Set in Berkeley, The Last Days of Louisiana Red attacks the credibility of the black revolutionary movements that sprang up in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Flight to Canada

Flight to Canada, Reed’s fifth novel, is set in an imaginatively redrawn Civil War South, and it describes the relationship between Arthur Swille, a tremendously wealthy Virginia planter who practices necrophilia, and an assortment of sociologically stereotyped slaves. The novel is presented as the slave narrative of Uncle Robin, the most loyal of Swille’s possessions. Uncle Robin repeatedly tells Swille that the plantation is his idea of heaven, and he assures his master that he does not believe that Canada exists. Raven Quickskill, “the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write, and the first to run away,” is the author of Uncle Robin’s story.

Like much of Reed’s work, Flight to Canada is about the liberating power of art, but in Flight to Canada, Reed concentrates on the question of authorial control. All the characters struggle to maintain control of their stories. After escaping from the plantation, Quickskill writes a poem, “Flight to Canada,” and his comical verse denunciation of Swille completes his liberation. In complaining of Quickskill’s betrayal to Abraham Lincoln, Swille laments that his former bookkeeper uses literacy “like that old Voodoo.” In a final assertion of authorial control and the power of the pen, Uncle Robin refuses to sell his story to Harriet Beecher Stowe, gives the rights to Quickskill, rewrites Swille’s will, and inherits the plantation.

The Terrible Twos

In The Terrible Twos, Reed uses a contemporary setting to attack Ronald Reagan’s administration and the exploitative nature of the U.S. economic system. In the novel, President Dean Clift, a former model, is a mindless figurehead manipulated by an oil cartel that has supplanted the real Santa Claus. Nance Saturday, another of Reed’s African American detectives, sets out to discover Saint Nicholas’s place of exile. The novel’s title suggests that, in its second century, the United States is acting as selfishly and irrationally as the proverbial two-year-old. The central theme is the manner in which a few avaricious people seek vast wealth at the expense of the majority of Americans.

Reckless Eyeballing

Reckless Eyeballing takes place in the 1980’s, and Reed employs a string of comically distorted characters to present the idea that the American literary environment is dominated by New York women and Jews. Although Reckless Eyeballing has been called sexist and anti-Semitic by some, Reed’s target is a cultural establishment that creates and strengthens racial stereotypes, in particular the view of African American men as savage rapists. To make his point, however, he lampoons feminists, using the character Tremonisha Smarts, a female African American author who has written a novel of violence against women. Reed’s satire probably is intended to remind readers of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982).

Because the novel’s central subject is art and the limitations that society places on an artist, it is appropriate that Reed once again employs the technique of a story-within-a-story. Ian Ball, an unsuccessful African American playwright, is the novel’s protagonist. In the novel, Ball tries to succeed by shamelessly placating the feminists in power. He writes “Reckless Eyeballing,” a play in which a lynched man is posthumously tried for “raping” a woman with lecherous stares, but Ball, who often seems to speak for Reed, maintains his private, chauvinistic views throughout.

The Terrible Threes

The Terrible Threes, a sequel to The Terrible Twos, continues Reed’s satiric attack on the contemporary capitalist system, which, he argues, puts the greatest economic burden on the least privileged. (Reed also was planning a third book in the series, The Terrible Fours.) In the first book, there appears a character named Black Peter—an assistant to St. Nicholas in European legend. This Black Peter is an impostor, however, a Rastafarian who studied and appropriated the legend for himself. In The Terrible Threes, the true Black Peter emerges to battle the false Peter but is distracted from his mission by the need to do good deeds. Black Peter becomes wildly popular because of these deeds, but a jealous St. Nick and concerned toy companies find a way to put Santa Claus back on top. Capitalism wins again.

Japanese by Spring

Japanese by Spring is postmodern satire. Like much of Reed’s imaginative work, the book mixes fictional characters with “fictionalized” ones. Reed himself is a character in the book, with his own name. The protagonist of Japanese by Spring is Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt, a teacher of English and literature at Oakland’s Jack London College. Chappie dabbled in activist politics in the mid-1960’s, but his only concern in the 1990’s is receiving tenure and the perks that accompany it. He will put up with virtually anything, including racist insults from students, to avoid hurting his chances at tenure. As in many of Reed’s books, Chappie is passive in the face of power at the beginning of his story. He is a middle-class black conservative, but only because the climate at Jack London demands it. Chappie is a chameleon who always matches his behavior to the ideology of his environment. However, when he is denied tenure and is about to be replaced by a feminist poet who is more flash than substance, Chappie’s hidden anger begins to surface.

Chappie also has been studying Japanese with a tutor named Dr. Yamato. This proves fortuitous when the Japanese buy Jack London and Dr. Yamato becomes the college president. Chappie suddenly finds himself in a position of power and gloats over those who denied him tenure. He soon finds, however, that his new bosses are the same as the old ones. Dr. Yamato is a tyrant and is eventually arrested by a group that includes Chappie’s father, a two-star Air Force general. Dr. Yamato is released, though, and a surprised Chappie learns that there is an “invisible government” that truly controls the United States. Chappie has pierced some of his illusions, but there are others that he never penetrates, such as his blindness to his own opportunism.

The novel’s conclusion moves away from Chappie’s point of view to that of a fictionalized Ishmael Reed. This Reed skewers political correctness but also shows that the people who complain the most about it are often its greatest purveyors. Reed also lampoons American xenophobia, particularly toward Japan, but he does so in a balanced manner that does not gloss over Japanese faults. Ultimately, though, Reed uses Japanese by Spring as he used other novels before, to explore art and politics and the contradictions of America and race.