[In the following essay, Weixlmann investigates the influence of the Tlingit myth and Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” on Reed's Flight to Canada.]

Raven flew away to earth and let drops of water fall from his mouth on the land, and wherever they fell there are now springs and brooks and where the larger ones fell, seas and rivers originated.

—Iwan Weniaminow, Bemerkungen über die Inseln des Unalaschka-Distrikts¹

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
                              Shall be lifted—nevermore!

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”²

Schooled, as most of us have been, in the literature of the white West, the mention of a raven is almost certain to evoke Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 poem. And how much more strong that evocation is likely to be when a character named Raven appears in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), a novel which contains repeated allusions to the famous Virginia Romantic poet and short-story writer. Readers with some anthropological background, however, might prefer to understand Reed's Raven Quickskill in the context of Tlingit mythology, particularly since the Tlingits, a native American tribe situated in the panhandle area of Alaska, are alluded to in the second chapter of Flight to Canada. In fact, Reed's remark, reprinted in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, that “Raven Quickskill … was based more or less on a Tlingit legend—a raven myth,”³ would seem to make this latter association the more clearly appropriate. The subject, however, is sufficiently complex to merit—and reward—more detailed consideration.

“The mythology of the Tlingit,” observes Aurel Krause, “revolves around the adventures and deeds of Raven, about whom a large number of tales are told. … The fundamental concept is, ‘As Raven lived and acted, so must we behave.’”⁴ The Tlingits' Raven is, on the one hand, a creator: the source of the stars, sun, and moon; the originator of the earth's waterways; the one who, like Prometheus in Western lore, brought man fire; and, less happily, the one who originated sickness in mankind. But the characteristics which make Raven revered by the Tlingits are his trickiness and his penchant for producing coarse humor.⁵

Raven's values, particularly his sensuality, and the Tlingits', while they conflict rather obviously with those of the white West, are strongly akin to the African values Reed describes in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. Writing of his favorite Egyptian deity, Osiris, Reed observes that “he became known as ‘the man who did dances that caught-on,’ infected other people. … The people would plant during the day and at night would celebrate dancing singing shaking sistrums and carrying on. … Osiris was called the Bull by the Egyptians who loved him and greeted him as he toured Egypt with his musicians and their sets of decoration having to do with procreation.”⁶ Reed, in “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” extends the myth into twentieth-century America: “Neo-HooDoo [Reed's idiosyncratic version of “real” Black power] is the music of James Brown without the lyrics and ads for Black Capitalism. … Neo-HooDoo is sexual, sensual and digs the old ‘heathen’ good good loving.”⁷

The behavior of Raven Quickskill, the fugitive slave/protagonist of Flight to Canada, accords closely with that of the trickster/hero of Tlingit myth. Like the mythological character, Quickskill is a creator, a poet who, with godlike swagger, announces that “‘words built the world and words can destroy the world,’”⁸ and he is guileful. “‘Quickskill, the difference between you and me,’” quips Stray Leechfield, a fellow escapee from the Swille plantation in Virginia, “‘is that you sneak, while I don't. You were the first to hat, but you did it a sneaky way’” (74).

Indeed the two qualities, creation and guile, would seem to be tightly associated in Reed's mind: “Raven was the first one of Swille's slaves to read, the first to write and the first to write and the first to run away” (14). It is the honorarium paid to Raven for his combination of words and wit, the poem which gives the novel its name, that earns Quickskill his fare out of the United States: “‘Flight to Canada’ was responsible for getting him to Canada. And so for him, freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo … his typewriter was his drum he danced to” (88-89). Relatedly, the seemingly faithful Uncle Robin, who remains on the Swille plantation to “serve” his master, uses deceit and his ability with words to “‘dabble’” with Swille's will (170) and thus, by the novel's end, inherit his former master's estate. “They get down on me an [Uncle] Tom,” muses Robin. “But who's the fool? Nat Turner or us? Nat said he was going to do this. Was going to do that. … Now Nat's dead and gone for these many years, and here I am master of a dead man's house” (178).

Raven and Robin—the names have not been selected arbitrarily. Near the middle of the novel Reed observes that “there was much avian imagery in the poetry of slaves. Poetry about dreams and flight. They wanted to cross that Black Rock Ferry [from Buffalo's East Side] to freedom [across the Niagara River] even though they had different notions as to what freedom was” (88). Raven first seeks freedom in a place, Canada, only to discover that freedom is, as Robin observes, “a state of mind” (178). Robin, who “couldn't do for no [literal] Canada” (178), but for a time uses the Swille estate as a surrogate, at the very last also develops a sense of freedom which transcends the physical plane: “I don't want to be rich. … I'm going to take this fifty rooms of junk and make something useful out of it” (179). Raven and Robin celebrate life, healthful love, and the development of full human potential.

Conversely, and here is the point at which a consideration of Poe and his Raven takes on particular importance, the Southern slavemaster class, epitomized by Arthur Swille, seems to prefer death, warped romance, and self-abasement. “Raised by mammies,” Reed writes, “the South is dandyish, foppish, pimpish; its writers are Scott, Poe, Wilde, Tennyson. … [Jefferson] Davis, who was accused by The Charleston Mercury of treating Southerners like ‘white Negroes,’ misread his people. It wasn't the idea of winning that appealed to them. It was the idea of being ravished” (141-42).

Borrowing freely from Poe's “Annabel Lee,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Ligeia,” Reed depicts Swille's rejection of his wife, who is neither pallid nor emaciated—nor dead!—enough for her husband, and his necrophilic longing for his deceased sister Vivian. About halfway through the novel, a young slave happens upon Swille in Vivian's crypt, lying “‘on top of his sister … crying and sobbing, and … sweating and … making so much noise that he didn't even notice the child … and the child say he saw Vivian's decomposed hand clinging to his neck’” (60). Later, Swille's thoughts focus on “Vivian, my disconsolate damsel … my fair pale sister. Your virgin knees and golden hair in your sepulcher by the sea. Let me creep into your mausoleum, baby. My insatiable Vivian by the sea …” (109). And the planter's will expresses his “‘wish to be buried in my sister's sepulcher by the sea, joined [with Vivian] in the Kama Sutra position … in eternal and sweet Death’” (168-69). The dual-identity theme of “Ligeia” (the spirit of Ligeia infusing the corpse of Rowena) and the sister-brother death embrace of “The Fall of the House of Usher” also come into focus in the novel's climactic scene, in which a la Poe's tales, Ms. Swille/Vivian's “Etheric Double” (the latter, in Ms. Swille's rendering of the story of her husband's death) “grabs her brother and then is all atop him. He falls against the fireplace. … Fire is hungry. Fire eats” (136).

Reed is, moreover, careful not to overlook Poe's attachment, as expressed in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for example, to instruments of torture. The novelist depicts Swille as a dedicated sadist, one of whose fondest possessions is his whip collection. As the specter of the Swilles' dead son Mitchell tells his mother, “‘Your husband, my father, is one macabre fiend. No wonder he has Poe down here all the time’” (126). So attuned was Poe to the ethos of the Southern planter class, Reed feels, that, fully aware of the anachronism, he asks, “Why isn't Edgar Allan Poe recognized as the principal biographer of that strange war [i.e., the Civil War]? … Poe says more in a few stories than all of the volumes by historians” (10).

“The Raven” is consistent with Poe's other writings in its emphasis on deathly attachment (“the lost Lenore”) and torment (“my soul from out that [Raven's] shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!”). And though Reed never adverts directly to the poem, its shadow hovers over Swille throughout Flight to Canada. Referring specifically to “The Raven,” but alluding by extension to many of his works (among them “Annabel Lee” and “Ligeia”), Poe, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” remarks that “the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”⁹ Reed perceives this stance to be utterly degenerate. Poe, in discussing “The Raven” in “The Philosophy of Composition,” uses the term self-torture in combination with the verb delight and, later, the word thirst; the protagonist of the poem, Poe observes, in questioning the Raven, pursues “the luxury of sorrow.”¹⁰ Reed can view such celebration of “self-torture” in only one way—as profoundly sick, flagellant.

Poe's Raven, then, is precisely what the Tlingits' (and Reed's) is not. And Reed, it seems certain, wishes the reader to capture the dual connotation of his protagonist's name: The novel would have us reject the decadent weltanschauung of Poe's South in favor of the wholesome, liberating, multiethnic vision of Raven and Robin. To grasp only one import of Raven's name is to misunderstand the dynamic by which Flight to Canada operates.

Notes

1. Iwan Weniaminow, Bemerkungen über die Inseln des Unalaschka-Distrikts (St. Petersburg, 1840), 3:55, quoted in Aurel Krause, Die Tlingit-Indianer (Jena, 1885), trans. by Erna Gunther as The Tlingit Indians: Results of a Trip to the Northwest Coast of America and the Bering Straits (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1956), 179.

2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969): 369.

3. Ishmael Reed, “The Great Tenure Battle of 1977,” The Daily Californian, 28 January 1977, reprinted in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 228-29. Allusions to the Raven of Tlingit mythology also punctuate the title essay of Reed's God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 1-34, and Raven figures prominently in Reed's 1977 poem “Rough Trade Slumlord Totem,” reprinted in A Secretary to the Spirits (New York: NOK Publishers, 1978), 33-34.

4. “Myths of the Tlingit,” in The Tlingit Indians, 174.

5. This point is made by Krause (175), who relates a number of Raven tales. A similar group of tales may be found in John R. Swanton, Myths and Texts of the Tlingit, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 39 (Washington, D.C., 1909).

6. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 162-63.

7. Ishmael Reed, “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” in Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970 (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 20-21. The correlation between Osiris and James Brown is made explicit in the poem “why i often allude to osiris,” in which the Egyptian deity is described as “prefiguring JB” (Conjure, 43).

8. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Random House, 1976), 81. Future citations from the novel will refer to this edition and will occur parenthetically in the text.

9. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Hershel Parker et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 1:1324. Irrelevant to Reed is the fact that “The Philosophy of Composition” is, in T. O. Mabbott's words, “a partly fictional account of the planning of ‘The Raven’” (Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1:353). For, to Reed, the creative writer's reality is at least as trustworthy as the historian's: “Fiction, you say? Where does fact begin and fiction leave off?” (Flight to Canada, 10). Moreover, as Mabbott adds, Poe's essay is not a sham; rather, it dramatizes the “serious” descriptions of Poe's intentions (Collected Works, 1:359).

10. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1324, 1328.