[In the following essay, McConnell explores the concept of “HooDoo” as a controlling metaphor in Reed's fiction.]

Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here).

—Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow

The history of American fiction is cluttered with talented black writers—Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson—who had to wait for their recognition until they were officially acknowledged, patted on the head, by an influential-enough member of the white literary establishment. Every twenty or so years, it seems, white America discovers with amazement and sighs of delight a new—the first—true black genius, the one who will finally articulate the sufferings of his people in an undeniable, inescapable voice and who will make that most native American experience, the Blues, into that most venerated American shibboleth, Art. (There is an analogy here, as Ishmael Reed would be quick to point out, to the birth of the ‘swing era’, when a talented clarinettist and a canny recording executive created a national fad by buying the arrangements of a brilliant but down on his luck black arranger named Fletcher Henderson.)

These observations are by way of apology for introducing an essay on Ishmael Reed's fiction with a reference from a novel by a white writer, and one accepted, however grudgingly, as a major writer by the Establishment. But Reed (as Pynchon would insist) doesn't need such puffs. And there is nothing condescending or patronizing about the passage I have quoted. Reed does ‘know more about it’ than you'll find in Gravity's Rainbow: and it, in this case, is the whole world of occult, pre-or anti-Christian religion, of the hip American underground, and of that special with-it, outside-it-all sensibility that he has made distinctively his own.

Ishmael Reed has written five novels—The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) and Flight to Canada (1977)—as well as two volumes of poetry and numerous essays, reviews, and interview articles with other artists. In the Introduction to his recent collection of essays, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), he speaks as frankly as he ever has about the business of writing:

Writing is hard work, don't let anybody fool you. … I'd say I get the most kicks out of writing poetry; fiction is the second most fun; the essay is the ditch-digging occupation of writing. I spend a lot of time running up and down the stairs for Facts!

This is an important passage for understanding Reed, I think. Fiction, the craft of the novel, lies somewhere between the kick of lyric poetry and the drudgery, the fact-bound plodding, of the essay. But that is to say, also, that fiction—if it works—can include the best powers of both the other two kinds of writing, the sheer sweep of poetry and the urgency, the argumentative power of the essay. From his first novel to his most recent one, Reed has kept close to this distinction. And while his poetry may sometimes be too private to understand, and his essays sometimes too complex to follow, his fiction has remained the clearest and best expression of his vision, and by the way one of the most brilliant and funniest bodies of storytelling of the last twenty years.

Sometime after the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Reed came to take VooDoo seriously. Or, maybe, VooDoo came to take him seriously, since Reed is fond of insisting that some of his best writing is simply a matter of taking dictation from the loas, or gods, of that complex and fascinating religion. By 1970, in his anthology of contemporary writers, Nineteen Necromancers from Now, he was describing his work as ‘Neo-Hoodooism’, and had published one of his wittiest prose pieces, the “Neo-Hoodooist Manifesto” (reprinted in Conjure, 1972). Some scattered assertions from the Manifesto will give its flavour:

Neo-HooDoos would rather ‘shake that thing’ than be stiff and erect. … All so-called ‘Store Front Churches’ and ‘Rock Festivals’ receive their matrix in the HooDoo rites of Marie Laveau conducted at New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain, and Bayou St. John in the 1880s. … Neo-HooDoo ain't Negritude. Neo-HooDoo never been to France. Neo-HooDoo is ‘your Mama’ as Larry Neal said. … Neo-HooDoos are detectives of the metaphysical about to make a pinch. We have issued warrants for a god arrest. … Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text.

Many of Reed's main influences, and much of his distinctive brilliance, are apparent in these telegraphic sentences. Among the influences: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones in the confident observation that Black American street culture, without embellishment, is a full and rich cultural heritage, the stuff of major myth (‘Neo-HooDoo never been to France’); William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon in the surreal transformation of history into nightmare, and nightmare into pop-melodrama (‘Neo-HooDoos are detectives of the metaphysical’); and the whole tradition of comparative religious thought from Fraser to Eliade in the swift, sure discoveries of the elemental and archetypal under the quotidian (‘Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text’).

But there is something more than a mere catalogue of influences at work in the Manifesto. Reed's tone, a combination of high intelligence, carefully academic terms and citations, jive talk and stand-up comic one-liners, seems at first not only confusing but confused. Here as in his fiction, he shifts voices as quickly and as disconcertingly as anyone writing in America, except perhaps Pynchon. But Pynchon's jumps at least are within the extremes of a given cultural context: high to low culture, scientific to humanistic, tragic to comic. Reed's jumps of tone are on that axis, too, but also on another, scarier one: from everything we have been trained to take as ‘culture’ to its opposite, which is not ‘low’ or ‘pop’ culture but deliberately corrosive anti-culture. Here is an example, from Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. A group of cowboys who work for the evil genius Drag Gibson are discussing the book's hero, the Loop Garoo Kid, who is an outlaw cowboy, a trickster HooDoo, and Satan himself:

You see the Kid ride off last night? It was as if he were lightning taking a hiatus from nature. Looked like two ghosts were waiting for him. I could see only their outlines in the moonlight.

What you say we pick up our gear and make it, Skinny?

The other cowpokes needed no encouragement and began to get their stuff together. Suddenly Drag's voice boomed through the intercom:

Men come on up here a minute. Something big is cooking on the range.

The speech of the cowpokes ranges, in this short passage, from the lyrical and metaphysical to street slang (and what is the intercom doing in this Gene Autrey scene?) to a groaner of a pun at the end. Examples of this technique could be multiplied from Reed's books, though one of the best is the moment in Mumbo Jumbo when he explains the personality of the VooDoo goddess Erzulie, whore and virgin, remarking that she is known among Americans as the girl with the red dress on (but among the Egyptians as Isis and among the Greeks Aphrodite).

The point is that these leaps, outrageous as they are, work. But they do not work the way associations usually work in novels, even in so-called ‘post-modern’ novels. To understand how funny and how profoundly right is the combination of Erzulie, Aphrodite, and the girl with the red dress on you have to know a little about VooDoo (Reed tells you that), a little about Greek mythology, a little about Ray Charles. But more than that, you have to know how to let all those associations merge instantaneously one into another, while still retaining their individuality, their historical specificity. The same is true of the outrageous pun, ‘Something big is cooking on the range.’

One way—the best way, I want to suggest—to understand Ishmael Reed's fiction is precisely in terms of these fast, jagged changes of tone and context; ‘as if he were lightning taking a hiatus from nature’, as the cowpoke in Yellow Back puts it. But lightning, however flashy, doesn't really take a hiatus from nature. Rather, it reveals in its sudden violence the possibilities of disaster and illumination that are part of the otherwise hidden nature of things.

Reed's narrative voice, at its best, has this kind of effect. And it is exactly the effect, more than of anything else, of a voice. One important source for this kind of storytelling is that distinctively modern American narrative tradition, the stand-up monologue. In cheap bars and expensive clubs for the last thirty years, from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor, the most manic and creative of American underground men have had their own back at the expense of the Establishment in free-form, improvisational ‘bits’—instant short stories and novels, actually—whose illogical scenarios mock our official expectations about ‘fiction’ at the same time they reveal to us—or remind us—how corrosive, distorting, and true can be the mirror fiction is supposed to hold up to life. Here is part of Bruce's famous ‘Religions, Inc.’ routine (from The Essential Lenny Bruce, 1967, edited by John Cohen): a character named ‘Oral Roberts’ is speaking long-distance to a character named ‘The Pope’:

Billi wants to know if yew can get him a deal on one o those Dago spawts cahs. … Ferali or some dumb thing. … yeah. … yeah. … Willie Mays threw up on the Alcazar? Ha ha! That syrup! Really freaked awf!

And here is a speech from Reed's latest novel, Flight to Canada. The slaveholder Swile is speaking to Abraham Lincoln, who has just claimed to be able to give the South its ‘death-knell blow’:

There you go again with that corn-pone speech, Lincoln. ‘Death-knell blow’. Why don't you shave off that beard and stop putting your fingers in your lapels like that. You ought to at least try to polish yourself, man. Go to the theatre. Get some culture.

The two passages are not interchangeable. But it is obvious that the Reed passage is family-related to the Bruce. It is dialect humour, assuming a role, improvising on the possibilities of the role, and finally reducing the role to absurdity (the grim humour of the one-liner about Lincoln going to the theatre to get some culture is what would have been called, during the first years of Bruce's celebrity, a ‘sick joke’). This is the humour, and the genius, of that headlong and frantic verbal invention that Jewish comics call the spritz and that is known in urban black culture as ‘the dozens’. And one way of tracing Reed's development is to note his increasing control over the direction and pacing of his multiple voices, from the wild but random comic violence of The Free-Lance Pallbearers through the inspired fantasia of Mumbo Jumbo and into the austere, pointed bitterness of Flight to Canada.

But there is another analogue to the speed and dazzle of his narrative voice, and perhaps a closer one. John A. Williams, a contemporary writer Reed admires, has said (in John O'Brien's 1973 Interviews with Black Writers):

There's an inclination to do to the novel what Charlie Parker did to jazz. I don't know whether you remember this period in jazz music that is called ‘Bop’, where the method was to take. … well, you could take any tune that was standard, say ‘Stardust’, for example. They would go through it once and then would come through again with all their improvisations, so that it was only recognizable in part. … That's the way it works. And I think that's what's happening to the novel … Ishmael Reed's books.

Reed, throughout Mumbo Jumbo and in many of the essays in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, argues that VooDoo, an old-world, solemn and slow ritual, becomes speeded up, like everything else, in America—and emerges as HooDoo, one of the prime manifestations of which is Bop. Of Charlie Parker, ‘Bird’, the astonishing genius of Bop, he writes (in Shrovetide): ‘Perhaps you can only relate to a monster in terms of awe, especially the Monster Bird, whose talents were so immense he could invent classics standing on his feet and whose appetites for life were as enormous. …’ In bop the improvisational art of jazz becomes self-conscious—more highly self-conscious than it had been previously—becomes the deliberate ‘invention’ of classics while standing on your feet. And more importantly, as Williams points out, it becomes aware of the popcult triviality of the material upon which its most towering masterpieces are constructed. What could be cornier, more worn-out than ‘Stardust’? Or than that swing-era warhorse, ‘Cherokee’? And yet it is upon the chord changes for ‘Cherokee’ that Parker constructs one of his most stunning improvisations, ‘KoKo’.

The boppers—Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk—were not only self-conscious about the value of their music, they were quite self-conscious about it as black music. At least, among the impulses behind the founding of bop was a strongly felt need to play a music so complex and so passionate, so distinctively the product of a single voice, that it could not be imitated, trivialized, or mass-produced by commercial white musicians. And while this may have begun as a separatist sentiment, it eventuated in a new and major American art form. Few serious people today would deny that, at their best, Parker, Monk, and Gillespie represent the best and most universal art Americans have produced since the end of the Second World War.

All these elements of bop (and post-bop) are crucial to reading Reed. ‘HooDoo’, after all, is a contemptuous white name for a native Afro-American religion: literally, with a punning irony Reed would like, a denigrating term for a system of belief and ritual. But what is this system? For one thing, it involves possession by the gods or loas rather than, as in the Christian tradition, approximation to the perfection of a single godman: the inspired, shamanistic, but also totally self-conscious moment at which you give yourself to the god who wants to take over your personality. And at that moment you use whatever everyday props are available to you to help the god manifest him/herself: it is the improviser's moment of vision, in other words, and the shabbier, the more familiar the props the more impressive the incarnation of the deity within them (this is not, really, very far from the most primitive ideas of the ‘scandal’ of Christianity—though far indeed, as Reed insists, from its most massively institutionalized manifestations). Remember that, for Reed, the business of writing fiction occupies the same kind of psychic space, midway between the lyrical exaltation of poetry and the everyday drudgery of a world of facts.

But VooDoo, or ‘HooDoo’, is also a religion of the oppressed that turns into a religion of triumph over the oppressor. The saints of the slaveholders’ Christianity become new loas in the pantheon of VooDoo—not simply parodied, in other words, but really converted, in this most syncretic of religions, into precisely what they should not (from the orthodox viewpoint) become. At its most creative, VooDoo is a kind of exorcism, the exorcism of the stultifying mythology of the oppressor from the figures of that mythology itself. It is, if you will, Heart of Darkness told from the side of the people Mr. Kurtz tries to ‘raise’, and as such it is liberating, wildly funny, and immensely good-humoured. Parker playing ‘Cherokee’ or Monk playing ‘I Surrender, Dear’, or Sonny Rollins playing ‘Softly As in a Morning Sunrise’ can be taken as the same sort of exorcism.

Reed has said that his most experimental writing to date is the short story, “Cab Calloway Stands In for the Moon”, published in Nineteen Necromancers from Now. In Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, he writes, ‘I wanted to make a crude, primitive fetish and that would put a “writing” on an individual considered an enemy to the tribe.’ The sub-title of “Cab Calloway” is ‘D HEXORCISM OF NOXON D AWFUL (D MAN WHO WAS SPELLED BACKWARDS)’ and the story is a grotesque, surreal, obscene narrative of a day in the life of ‘President Noxon’ as he slips further and further into madness and cretinism. Of course, spelling an enemy's name backwards is one traditional way of gaining power over him. And the whole story, which could easily be mistaken for a disorganized, though very funny, attack upon the President, really is an exorcism. All the terrible things that happen to Noxon are ‘worked’ on him by the HooDoo detective and hero, Papa LaBas (‘Cab Calloway’ was originally intended as part of Mumbo Jumbo, where Papa LaBas makes his first full-scale appearance in Reed's fiction).

If we think in terms of VooDoo as a form of creative parody and purification-through-possession, and of bop as an especially fast, especially improvisational form of VooDoo, it is easy to see both how consistent and how deeply serious has been Reed's development as a comic novelist. The Free-Lance Pallbearers, his first novel, is a headlong, William Burroughs-influenced satire with more energy than point. Its non-hero, a Black named Bukka Doopeyduk, narrates how he rises from the rank of mere hospital attendant in the mythic kingdom of HARRY SAM to that of media personality, star token Black revolutionary, and almost the new leader of HARRY SAM itself—though at the end he fails in this bid for ultimate power, and is subjected to a grisly public crucifixion. Bukka Doopeyduk is an earnest, well-meaning lad, a careful student of the Nazarene scriptures, a believer in the rightness of HARRY SAM's government, and an altogether assimilated Black man—a fucking dopey dupe, as his name implies—who is almost a working model of everything not to be in Reed's world. In the first chapter of the novel, as the title has it, ‘Da HooDoo is Put on Bukka Doopeyduk’: the hero finds himself wasting away because of a strange curse that has been worked on him. He finds a man to cure him of the curse, and that of course is his worst mistake, since the rest of his career will be his increasingly frantic attempt to assimilate himself to the grotesque and evil world of HARRY SAM, the white idea of ‘normalcy’ from which the HooDoo might have saved him.

Nevertheless, the idea of ‘HooDoo’, and therefore of parody, quotation, possession, and improvisation plays little part in The Free-Lance Pallbearers. It appears only as a negative possibility—something bad that can happen to you—but not in its more positive, creative aspects. This may be part of the reason why Pallbearers, in retrospect, seems Reed's weakest book. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, at any rate, the myth and the image of HooDoo is much more important and mature—and the book is correspondingly vastly more perceptive and entertaining.

If VooDoo is the conversion of Christian saints into pagan loas, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is the conversion of that most cherished of white middle class psychic shibboleths, the Western, into—literally—Black humour. Here is the first paragraph of the novel:

Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bull-whacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so ornery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine.

It is, in the purest sense of the phrase, an epic invocation, summarizing the entire action, in sequence, of the book that will follow—but to what Muse? To the Muse of the ‘Folks’, surely: those folks who were raised on Western radio shows and the entire, white-centred myth of the American West. But the Loop Garoo Kid, the hero of this Western, is not only black, he is Satan himself, the Dark One rejected by the self-confident, daylight religions of Europe and America, returning as an outlaw, sorcerer, and cosmic gunslinger to reclaim his heritage. He is, in other words, a HooDoo hero, a self-conscious and witty parodist and gris-gris-man whose magic is not so much a matter of spells and rituals as it is of the corrosive, mythically alert consciousness itself. Loop's battle against the evil Drag Gibson, trail-boss of the town of Yellow Back Radio, doubles the struggle of Bukka Doopeyduk to enter the presence of the terrible HARRY SAM, leader of the nation HARRY SAM. But here the struggle is even, and Loop knows how phony is the magic Drag Gibson employs to keep his own people down. ‘HooDoo’, in other words, simply a negative factor in Reed's first novel, has now become a principle of narrative and satire. Yellow Back Radio, like The Free-Lance Pallbearers, ends with the public execution of its hero—with a lynching, that most powerful and most grim detail of the black American experience. But in the second novel, the lynching turns against the lynchers: Loop's tormentor and enemy Drag Gibson is eaten alive by his cannibal swine, and the Loop Garoo Kid escapes. In the baldest terms, it is the symbolic turning of the oppressor's tools against himself, as has been, in fact, the whole course of this inverted Western.

Between Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Mumbo Jumbo, Reed seems to have developed the idea of ‘neo HooDoo-ism’ into something like a deliberate aesthetic. It is an aesthetic he has recently (in Shrovetide) disclaimed and one he has (in Flight to Canada) surpassed, but nevertheless it is a central part of his fiction. Mumbo Jumbo, which may be his best novel, is in some ways less a novel than it is an exploration of the idea of HooDoo, and of its possibilities for the writer. Set in the twenties, Mumbo Jumbo tells how Papa LaBas, head of the Mumbo Jumbo Cathedral and metaphysical Private Eye, tracks down the ‘text’ of the jazz craze sweeping the nation (remember: ‘Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text’) and foils the plans of the ‘Wallflower Order’, a Teutonic Christian sect of those who can't dance, to stifle the jazz phenomenon by converting it into another pseudo-classical and self-consciously secondary ‘Negro movement’.

As in a Charlie Parker solo, the shifts of tone and motif in Mumbo Jumbo are too swift and too complicated to transcribe here. But they are all organized around the same central theme, the same hackneyed, standard set of thematic assumptions that the book itself expands, inverts, and remakes. Mumbo Jumbo is a detective story, but a detective story with no crime and with no criminals—except for the white members of the Wallflower Order who try to suppress the phenomenon of jazz by turning it into a denatured version of Western modes of imagination. The Wallflower plan is at least partially successful, with the result that the real flowering of HooDoo—or ‘Jes Grew’, as it is called in this book—will have to wait another thirty or so years; until, in other words, the flowering of the genius of Charlie Parker (who, the book is careful to point out, was born in 1920—the beginning of the book's action) or until the writing of Mumbo Jumbo itself.

To find the essential text of Jes Grew, the written liturgy that will make the emotional experience of HooDoo truly religious, truly institutionalized, men will and do kill in Mumbo Jumbo. But, the story insists, such killing is not only wrong, it is a betrayal of the text itself. Mumbo Jumbo ends in a brilliant parody of the end of the classic detective story. LaBas makes his arrest, and in making it explains the nature of the crime he has been investigating: but that crime turns out to be, not at all the limited, specific act of violence we are used to in the convention, but rather the aboriginal crime through which Set usurped the music and the godhead of Osiris, turning it from cosmic bop into a kind of metaphysical Laurence Welk tune, and through which latter-day magicians like Moses and Christ imitated and transmitted this boring, foxtrot version of a radiant and shattering original vision.

The novel, in other words, moves from pop-parody to cosmogony, from cliché to mythography, and all without missing a beat. It is, in many ways, precisely the ‘text’ that Jes Grew (or HooDoo) is seeking throughout the narrative, the right story that will allow us to understand our whole cultural heritage as, not occlusion or limit to the imagination, but the backdrop for new levels of possession, new reaches of generosity and vision.

The Last Days of Louisiana Red continues the movement of Mumbo Jumbo, though in a somewhat muted and more tentative way. It is set in the present, more or less, with the now-aged Papa LaBas in New Orleans, investigating the collapse of the HooDoo business, the ‘Solid Gumbo Works’, (‘Solid Gumbo’ is a kind of universal medicine and nourishment). LaBas traces the problem to the usurpation of the business of a cartel of white liberals and black revolutionaries—aided by a passionate and misguided Women's Liberationist—none of whom understand the profound cosmological implications of ‘The Business’, and all of whom try to warp it in the direction of their own petty interests. Louisiana Red has been taken as Reed's unsympathetic, grumpy reaction to the Women's Movement; and, indeed, there is a kind of accidental but distracting parti pris to the novel. But it is most interesting—and quite brilliant—as an exercise in HooDoo without apologies and without deflections, an exorcist's division of the world into those who understand the vital powers of the work and those—regardless of race, background, or political affiliation—who do not.

This division continues in his most recent novel, Flight to Canada. After two exercises in HooDoo parody at its most extreme, Reed has most lately written a book that is a parody of that most black, as opposed to white, form of popular literature, the slave narrative. Flight is the story of Raven Quickskill, an escaped slave who tries to reach Canada but ends up back in the plantation he escaped from, though now as a free man and a liberator of others. Flight merges and confuses historical periods, real and imagined characters, and factual and fantastic situations with a grace and a mad subtlety that reminds one of Thomas Pynchon. But the point of the book remains sure and clear from the beginning: this is the narrative of a slave who, through comedy and parody, has ceased to think of himself as a slave and is, therefore, no longer a slave. It is a fiction that completes that archetypal American fiction (which Reed himself has admitted to loving) the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, in which the narrator insists that he became really free at the moment he learned to read and write—the moment, that is, when he took over the tools of his oppressors and learned how to turn them to the uses and needs of his own soul.

Reed, in other words, has passed beyond the idea of HooDoo in his latest book—or, rather, has assimilated that creative idea into a larger and more capacious aesthetics and politics of national liberation and rebirth. Unlike Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon, he insists that the mythologies of black people in America are themselves worthy of respect and repetition, without artificial neo-classical embellishments. And unlike James Alan McPherson in Hue and Cry or Elbow Room, he insists that the black experience in America is, of itself, both richly comic and richly humanizing, without the filter of a conventionally ‘novelistic’ narrative style. But like both these other brilliant contemporary black writers, he is concerned with making the black experience not a revolutionary programme, a marching-song for violence in the streets, but rather the basis for a new polity, a community of charity and good humour—including ribald good humour—that can transform violence into the dance. Like all great comedians, he is a trickster whose tricks glimpse not only the abyss but the way out of that pit. And to the reader wondering whatever happened to the black movement in American literature, one cannot do better than requote Pynchon: check out Ishmael Reed.