George E. Kent
Among novelists writing today, Reed ranks in the top of those commanding a brilliant set of resources and techniques. The prose is flexible, easy in its shift of gears and capacity to move on a variety of levels. The techniques of the cartoon, the caricature, the vaudevillean burlesque, the straight narrative, the detective story, are summoned at will.
But his management of his resources in The Last Days of Louisiana Red fails to create a lasting or deep impression. The novel deals with areas which afford rich soil for the satirist, since rebellious and revolutionary movements are always harassed by paradox and baneful fruit no matter how necessary such movements reveal themselves to be. In the black movement: the attempt to transform criminal activity into political purpose aborting and now revealing a black community as the greatest victim of crime; the ideological shifts which threaten to swing around a circle; the romanticization of a jungle street world whose deadend "hipness" was often sold as true blackness, etc. What we get of such matters in the novel seems to come out of a simplicity which has not first felt the pressure of complexity. Except for an individual statement here and there, the center of values from which the attacks are to be made turn out to be rather vague suggestions about the artist, imagination, symbolic conjure. Or an uncritical and undisciplined endorsement of middleclass striving.
The imaging is a major problem. Approved images of black women are in the category of the vaguely drawn or conforming: Miss Better Weather and Sister. Powerful dramatization is conferred upon the betrayers, the "castrating," the crude. Coupled with statements by Papa LaBas, who makes a long accusatory speech regarding black women, the dramatic structure gives us conceptions of black women which could emerge from a peculiar and limited mix; the pimp code, Southern white apologists for plantation sexual relations, street corner raps, and school boy bull sessions. Perhaps the black women of the "silent black majority" are excepted from the mix. Unfortunately, they are both silent and unseen in this novel.
In the treatment of "militants" or "revolutionaries," the dramatic structure and comments seem designed to evoke pictures of the more spectacular and zany activities of the Panthers and street radicals in general. A number of their rituals … would certainly be irresistible to the satirist. But lingering in the shadows of one's consciousness is likely to be another sobering and terrifying image: that of men who soaked all their intentions and strivings in their own blood. Thus, despite wonderfully entertaining burlesque scenes, the reader's consciousness may still require that a satirist make his bold moves in a highly skilled stride through the after-rhythms and beats of pathos and tragedy. Perhaps a radicalism which could accomplish the task of bringing "down killers three times" its size, one that used ancient wisdom and techniques of "camouflage" and created silent and loyal workers, would be excepted from the simple, straight-line strictures of the novel. (pp. 192-93)
If we … try to put together the positive aspects of Reed's message, the results seem to be the following sum in addition: constructive builders, disciplined and undramatic workers, a draw upon the positive spirit available from aspiring blacks which makes possible construction and lethally destructive powers far beyond what numbers would imply, old virtues of self-reliance and individualism, necessitating acknowledgement of differences, and a rejection of destructive tendencies within the group. Unfortunately, much of the foregoing must be gained from statements and debates, rather than from imposing portraiture. Thus, if Reed wants to deliver the full force of his message, questions of adjustment of form may require his confrontation. (p. 193)
George E. Kent, in PHYLON: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture (copyright 1975, by Atlanta University; reprinted by permission of PHYLON), Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Second Quarter (June, 1975).
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