The Western stagecoach is being chased by a posse of cowboys. No, the pursuers are wolves. The driver's assistant and some of the passengers throw out bones of various sizes and shapes. The real loot is hidden. The leading wolves see these bones and stop to eat them, giving up the chase. Several wolves trip over these leaders. The dog in them leads others to fight for the bones. Not one Wolf, however; he sidesteps the bones and the mess. He decides to run off in an oblique direction and head the stagecoach off at the pass.

Just watch the Loop Garoo Kid in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed's second novel, a Western.¹ Loop Garoo is a black cowboy, like the famous Lash Larue of the fifties wearing black and using whips. First appearing as Loup Garou in Reed's quintessential poem, “I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,” he means “wolf.” Chapter 20 of Reed's Flight to Canada is prefaced by a poem by Raven Quickskill which ends, “Just like a coyote cassetting amorous / Howls / in Sugar Blues / I airmail them to you / In packages of Hopi Dolls / Ah ouoooooo! Ah ouoooooo!”² The coyote is a small prairie wolf, the poem ends as a blues, and the howl comes from Howlin' Wolf, the famous bluesman. We were prepared for this wolf howl because we have heard the low moan of a solitary wolf at critical points throughout the novel. The son of Ed Yellings who is taking care of business in The Last Days of Louisiana Red is named Wolf.³ When the President gets to the Presidents' hell in The Terrible Twos, “an animal in a white smock” dashes by which appears to be “a wolf or coyote.”⁴

Reed knows the heterogeneity of experiences of modern people, so he provides them with different entry points into the chase. The novel that gives me the best entry into Reed's path is Flight to Canada. In this novel, three slaves have escaped Arthur Swille, the slave owner who is simultaneously a multinational, and are trying to get to Canada. Canada represents the Promised Land. The chief character is Raven Quickskill, who wants to get to the literal Canada. Although Raven entered Reed's fiction through the Southwest coyote stories, the movement to Canada is taken from black history: slaves did escape to Canada.⁵ But when Raven finally gets to Niagara, Canada, he meets a beaten-up Carpenter returning from Toronto who tells him that Canada belongs to the Americans, the Swilles; they just let the Canadians run it. Raven is deeply disillusioned and decides to return to the United States. When I was in East Africa, Goans, my race, were always planning to fly to Canada. In 1975, my wife and I bumped into a Goan couple in Montreal who had left Uganda in 1970. The man said that he was thinking of moving to Toronto. He hadn't found his Canada in Montreal and was thinking of looking for it in Toronto. The following year, we met a Goan friend at a dance in Toronto. A travel agent, he had been trying to get to Canada since the late sixties and had only succeeded because of Amin's expulsion of Asians in 1972. He told us that we looked good, thanks to living in the United States. He had lived in Toronto for four years and wished he could move to the United States too. I met a Goan journalist in Toronto last July who had emigrated there from India and had been without a job since his arrival eight months earlier. Last I heard, he had returned to India. When I chaired the first panel on Goan literature at the annual conference on South Asia at Madison, Wisconsin, on 7 November 1982, Dr. John Hobgood presented a paper on the writings of Francisco Luis Gomes, a multitalented Goan intellectual of the nineteenth century, from which I learned, to my astonishment, that Goans had been looking to Canada as the Promised Land a hundred years ago. Time for me was collapsed: past and present became the same. Yet I had not understood the Goan obsession with Canada until I read Flight to Canada: it is the flight from a long colonial oppression, the ravenous hunger for freedom, which is in the blood. If Goans could have read Flight to Canada, moving the desire for escape to the mind, their options would have been different. Reed says in his foreword to Conjure, “If America had listened to me then, her son, her prophet, much of the agony of the following years could have been avoided.” I would modify this statement by adding “and Goans” to “America.”⁶

Getting to Canada is not simple. To make us see multifaceted reality, Reed operates on multiple artistic levels. Flight to Canada begins with a poem entitled “Flight to Canada,” written by Raven Quickskill to his erstwhile master, Arthur Swille. Within the poem, the poet says, “That was rat poison I left / In your Old Crow.” The crow is a sort of “Jim Crow” raven, which brings to mind “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, which brings to mind his most famous work, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which brings to mind an implied incestuous relationship in a Southern mansion, which is the underpinning of the novel that follows Raven's poem. The poem makes us laugh, and through laughter Raven both ridicules the enemy and makes us think.

If we do research, we discover that escaped slaves frequently sent taunting letters to the master. This fulfilled a psychic hunger for justice. Turn the page, and we realize that the poem is just that: a work of art. It is not reality. We should not be surprised, for the blurb to the first edition of The Free-Lance Pallbearers says, “This electrifying first novel zooms American readers off to a land they have never heard of, though it may strike them as vaguely, and disturbingly, familiar. It's a crazy, ominous kingdom called HARRY SAM, a never-never place so weirdly out-of-whack that only reality could be stranger.”⁷ Reed frequently gives us reading clues in his blurbs, indicating to us that his fiction is stylized. Art has a complex relation to reality, for it is not only mirror but also dynamo. The poem “Flight to Canada” has set forces into motion, creating a new reality for Raven. Chapter I begins, in italics, “Little did I know when I wrote the poem ‘Flight to Canada’ that there were so many secrets locked inside its world. It was more of a reading than a writing” (7). Raven the artist creates a work of art which then changes his life, getting him an invitation to the White House and then north to Canada. Note the parallel with Reed: Reed the artist created a novel, Flight to Canada, which got him invited to Alaska by the Raven's Bones Foundation of the Tlingits. “I cannot express the uncanny feeling that came over me as I read Raven Quickskill's monologue, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and narrative in Flight to Canada's first chapter while a movie screen Raven … stared down at me,” he says.⁸ Art is not a photograph of reality. When the two Nebraska tracers, earning their way through college by tracking down runaway slaves, catch up with Raven, one of them asks whether the poem is autobiographical. “‘I'm afraid it isn't,’” replies Raven. “‘See, I told you,’” the questioner tells the other. “‘They have poetic abilities, just like us. They're not literal-minded, as Mr. Jefferson said’” (63). This is the racism that grows out of thinking of black people as property, as things, lacking creative imagination. The two tracers say they have read his poetry in The Anthology of Ten Slaves, which is in the anthropology section of the library. Reed is dealing with the widespread idea that art is only created by white people. Under the heading “Black Literature in America,” The Reader's Companion to World Literature, the revised and updated 1973 edition, says:

The psychological and moral dehumanization of slavery, its brutality and corruption, have found a counterpart in and infected a black revolutionary literature where the “black aesthetic” becomes a violent rage against all things Western and white. … Much black literature is flawed by polemics, specious ideological arguments, and stereotyped situations and characters. But black writers have produced work of great passion and considerable art.⁹

Except for the ambiguous last line, this entry states that black writing is only reaction, not creation. Before they can get away with it, since they are part of the problem, they are put into a work of art by Reed and undermined. Anthropology section? Turn the tables. In the novel, the anthropologist is sent by his multinational father to the Congo to really find out about natural resources, which he will then grab. Missionaries have become too obvious, so there must be a new cover. But the Congolese are hip. They grab the anthropologist and feed him to the crocodiles. He comes back to haunt his parents.

This is an old function of art: art as magic. The good artist becomes a medium. Chapter 1 of the novel is a prologue whose action was sparked off by the poem which prefaces the prologue. Raven is speculating on art: Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction? An important question for a colonized person, whose history has been stolen, denied, or distorted. It is the artistic imagination that has to recover “his story.” Raven speculates on Harriet Beecher Stowe. She took the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin from Josiah Henson, who made no money; his settlement named “Dawn” went bankrupt while agents and a promoter producing a musical version of the novel got fabulously rich. “Is there no sympathy in Nature?” Raven wonders (9). Perhaps there is, since Byron came out of the grave to get Harriet Beecher Stowe for spreading stories of him committing incest with his half-sister Augusta. Raven thinks that she was herself attracted to Byron, as revealed by her words. This prepares us not only for the necrophiliac incest of Swille with his sister but also for his sister's ghost, phantom, or double coming to get revenge against him. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave was short, “but it was his. It was all he had. His story. A man's story is his gris-gris, you know. Taking his story is like taking his gris-gris. The thing that is himself. It's like robbing a man of his Etheric Double. People pine away” (8). Harriet Beecher Stowe stole the story of Henson, so if there is no sympathy in nature, there must be sympathy in art: Reed seeks artistic redress on behalf of Henson by putting her into an updated story of Uncle Tom, exposing her, and preventing her from doing it all over again. Reed demythifies history: she wrote the story of Uncle Tom, not because she wanted to undermine slave ownership or the aristocracy, but because she wanted to buy a dress. Uncle Robin is careful with his story: he commissions Raven to tell the story: “Quickskill would write Uncle Robin's story in such a way that, using a process the old curers used, to lay hands on the story would be lethal to the thief. That way his Uncle Robin would have the protection that Uncle Tom (Josiah Henson) didn't. (Or did he merely use another technique to avenge his story? Breathing life into Byron.)” (11). St. Augustine states that, since all time is eternally present, it is possible to change the past. He thought this could be done through prayer. Reed does it through art. Max Kasavubu is an expert on Wright's Native Son. He begins dreaming that he is Mary about to be raped by Bigger. Then he dreams he is Bigger about to kill Mary and he does kill “Mary,” his fellow-conspirator in Louisiana Red, Nanny Lisa. Mess around with the work and the work will get you.

But art is a two-edged sword. When Edward Said visited the University of Iowa in early 1982, he said he was very angry with a review of his book Orientalism by a friend in an Arab paper. This friend said that in writing this book, Said was serving the purposes of the CIA; whereas before the book, the CIA exploited the Arabs inefficiently, after it, they had the means to exploit the Arabs efficiently. Said said that he had stopped talking to this friend. Firstly, there was the likelihood that careless readers would conclude that he was a CIA agent; but secondly, he was really bothered that what the friend said was right. I pointed out to him that his dilemma had already been presented by Reed in Raven's story. “‘Flight to Canada’ was the problem,” Raven thinks. “It made him famous but had also tracked him down. It had pointed to where he, 40s and Stray Leechfield were hiding. It was their bloodhound, this poem ‘Flight to Canada.’ It had tracked him down just as his name had” (13). In a dream/vision while ill in the White House, Raven becomes an “it,” property, and hears Swille closing in: “The poem had also pointed to where it, 40s, Stray Leechfield were hiding. Did that make the poem a squealer? A tattler? What else did this poem have in mind for it. Its creation, but in a sense, Swille's bloodhound” (85). The chapter ends, “But it was his writing that got him to Canada. ‘Flight to Canada’ was responsible for getting him to Canada. And so for him, freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo. Others had their way of HooDoo, but his was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him; his typewriter was his drum he danced to” (88-89). Raven would not be able to achieve his freedom without taking the risk of being tracked down.

Raven's speculations before the story gets going become an important guide to the novel as art. They give us the questions by which the artist is to fly, just as a jazz musician starts with a theme and then soars. (The title of one of Grover Washington, Jr.,'s LPs is “Reed Seed.”¹⁰) When we get to what we might consider preposterous, we must remember this is stylized—it is not naturalism. It is absurd to read Reed naturalistically, as Sondra A. O'Neale has done in a review of Flight to Canada. She says, “And after all the painful realism of the effective time collage, the reader is left with an ending that is inappropos for Reed's sardonic humor. Master Swilles cannot be programmed into leaving all their money to faithful Uncle Toms. All will not end happily ever-after—not in 1868 or 1978. The black man's dilemma is insanely funny—enough to make one die laughing.”¹¹ But within the work of art, it is entirely plausible that the “faithful” Uncle Robin ends up owning Swille's estate. Swille gets to depend on Robin after Raven escapes because he suffers from dyslexia. The significance of the dependency relationship is recognized by Bessie Head's chief-to-be Maru when he sees a painting by Margaret Cadmore, Jr., of the Masarwa, the slaves of the society: “You see, it is I and my tribe who possess the true vitality of this country. You lost it when you sat down and let us clean your floors and rear your children and cattle.”¹² Uncle Robin is a player: he is playing at faithfulness, waiting for the right time. Trusting his faithfulness, Swille gets him to write out his will (“Massa's will”). Robin consulted his own gods, who told him that he did not have to obey the gods and the laws of people who did not respect him as a human being. He doctored the will, and when the will is read, he is named as the heir. The judge has doubts and says, “According to science, Robin, the Negro doesn't … well, your brain—it's about the size of a mouse's. This is a vast undertaking. Are you sure you can handle it? Juggling figures. Filling out forms’” (167). Robin, who actually has been doing all this for Swille, knows what the white man's “science” is:

“I've watched Massa Swille all these many years, your Honor. Watching such a great genius—a one-in-a-million genius like Massa Swille—is like going to Harvard and Yale at the same time and Princeton on weekends. My brains has grown, Judge. My brains has grown watching Massa Swille all these years.”

Then turning to Swille's relatives, Robin stood, tearfully. “I'm going to run it just like my Massa run it,” he said, clasping his hands and gazing toward the ceiling. “If the Good Lord would let me live without my Massa—Oh, what I going to do without him? But if the Lord 'low me to continue—”

(167-68)

We know this is burlesque, but the Ph.D.'d Cato mutters, “‘Allow, allow,’” putting his hand to his forehead “and slowly bringing it down over his face in embarrassment.” In a few lines, Reed is exposing the brainwashing of Western education accepted uncritically. Cato may be Swille's bastard son biologically, but he certainly is psychologically.¹³ Uncle Robin's behavior is the diametric opposite. “Uncle Tom” became a term of abuse in the radical sixties but Reed is showing that Uncle Tom techniques played an essential role in the survival of black Americans, techniques that are still required. By remaining in the shadows and “tomming” when necessary, Raven lives up to his name and flies to freedom. Robin, too, could have fled, for he often flew on business for Swille. But he knows what Raven discovers: that the Master owns it all, he owns Canada. And Raven too has to tom when he is in a jam. When the two Nebraska tracers come to his door to reclaim him, he greets them calmly, even obsequiously, putting them off their guard. Noting that one of them has a cold, he says he is going to get some vitamin C tablets from the bathroom and then he leaps out the bathroom window and makes his escape. Robin is not actually a faithful slave: he is a player, and so he recognizes that Lincoln is a player too, for the President is weaker than the multinational capitalist. Robin has never given the game away so that he could be bugged, like Moe, the white house slave. Reed the artist is playing a game too. In his deliberate exaggeration, a burlesque as in vaudeville, we know Robin is tomming. Nathaniel Mackey explains this aesthetic technique as displaying “the most indispensable ingredient of street-corner repartee, the ability to make one's opponent look silly through the creation of absurd scenarios and the use of outrageous images.”¹⁴

One has to read the work, as Raven tells us, not impose on it. It is simply not true that, as Ms. O'Neale says, “We get the distinct impression that Uncle Robin and his wife, Aunt Judy, have no intention of ‘freeing the people.’ Instead they simply fill the master's shoes. Life will continue as usual with the high-yellow nouveau riche in charge. It appears that the ‘plantation niggers’ are no nearer to owning themselves than they were when Swille was alive.”¹⁵ In fact, Uncle Robin frees Stray Leech-field, who is captured by the Nebraska tracers and brought back. Leechfield was not able to buy his freedom with the money he made from his pornographic photos taken by Mel Leer: as Raven warned him, Swille did not want money, he wanted his property. But Leechfield, blinded by his dislike of house slaves, does not see that he owes his freedom to Robin. One needs more than one wing to fly. Robin also gives Raven the freedom to work his art without fear of pursuit. As for the estate, Robin is trying to figure out what to do with it because it is too large for him. He needs to think. He has not given up his role in the shadows: after all, there are other forces around. He says at the end, “The rich get off with anything. … I don't want to be rich. Aunt Judy is right. I'm going to take his fifty rooms of junk and make something useful out of it” (179).

Under colonial rule, the colonized were denied any knowledge of their history. “A sense of history was totally absent in me,” says Bessie Head, “and it was as if, far back in history, thieves had stolen the land and were so anxious to cover all traces of the theft that correspondingly, all traces of the true history had been obliterated.”¹⁶ Insofar as there is history, it is imposed; for example, the Horatio Alger myth that you can make it within the system by hard work. Reed checks out this idea in The Free-Lance Pallbearers. Bukka Doopeyduk has the ambition of becoming the first bacteriological warfare expert, works hard, goes backward, moves to the bottom in more ways than one, is to receive a golden bedpan for his faithfulness, but even that is denied him as he receives a boot on the bottom. You know what the novel is saying about the myth: one man's myth is another man's nightmare.

So you want your own history, huh? Here it is. You can have your history. That is all you can have: gnaw on it. “‘Get back to your language,’ they say,” says Adil Jussawalla in Missing Person.¹⁷ Reed ridicules this kind of obsession with one's own history in an exchange between Raven and Mel Leer, an immigrant Russian Jew:

“Nobody has suffered as much as my people,” says Quickskill calmly.

The Immigrant, Mel Leer, rises. “Don't tell me that lie.”

The whole café turns to the scene.

“Our people have suffered the most.”

“My people!”

“My people!”

“My people!”

“My people!”

“We suffered under the hateful Czar Nicholas!”

“We suffered under Swille and Legree, the most notorious Masters in the annals of slavery!”

(68)

Blowing up the balloon, Reed lets it burst. He shows that the oppression of people, which has actually happened, can be turned into what Derek Walcott calls a career.¹⁸ This is the accusation by the actress playing Desdemona to the actor playing Othello in Murray Carlin's play Not Now, Sweet Desdemona: “We have suffered,” she jeers. “We know what suffering is. We are all refugees, so will you pay my hotel bill. … Othello the Moor—and what is he? Another bloody self-pitying, posturing, speechifying Chairman of the Afro-Asian Delegation!”¹⁹ This is the danger of exploiting your people's exploitation. Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara enjoys the fame that comes from performing ethnic dances on college campuses. Her name suggests squaw, a raven's cry, and flightiness (“tralaralara”).

Quaw Quaw is therefore hypocritical when she accuses Raven of being too obsessed by race—this is his reality. When it comes to the crunch, when she is mistaken for Japanese by a racist United States immigration official, she gets mad. But real racism can make the recipient so touchy that he reacts to racism where it does not exist. Pirate Jack, a sophisticated, exploiting middleman who controls the market and mass taste behind the scenes, is helping Raven get to Canada on his private boat to elude Swille's men. There is the following exchange:

“You think that's manly. Huh? You think that's manly. One day I outwitted thirteen bloodhounds.”

“Preposterous.”

“I did. Thirteen bloodhounds. They had me up a tree.”

“That can't be. I've studied the history of bloodhounds since the age of William the Conqueror, and that's just a niggardly lie.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it's just a niggardly lie.”

“Why, you—” Quickskill rushes around the desk and nabs the pirate, lifting him up.

(151)

The reader knows what Raven thinks of the word “niggardly.” But Webster's New World Dictionary shows that the word comes from “niggard,” which probably comes from the Middle English “negarde,” which means “stingy” or “miserly.” Treating the subject on a comic level, Reed is showing that colonialism has programmed the colonized person to destroy himself if he is not cunning and self-knowledgeable. Pirate Jack was helping Quickskill elude Swille's men and get to Canada—his touchiness is jeopardizing this plan. Quaw Quaw jumps overboard to stop the fighting, and Raven nearly loses her.

Part of the reason for the two dangers is that the bitterness black people feel over their exploitation can seldom attach itself to the force that is actually responsible for the exploitation. It is difficult for people in the belly of the whale to realize what is going on in the whale and where the whale is going. “Day after day I'm more confused,” sings Dobie Gray in “Drift Away.”²⁰ People keep fighting among themselves, destroying one another while the real exploiters remain out of reach, out of sight. Reed, drawing on Afro-American tradition, gives these invisible forces concrete names. First, Louisiana Red, which is a hot sauce manufactured by a corporation:

Louisiana Red was the way they related to one another, oppressed one another, maimed and murdered one another, carving one another while above their heads, fifty thousand feet, billionaires flew in custom-made jet planes equipped with saunas tennis courts swimming pools discotheques and meeting rooms decorated like a Merv Griffin Show set.

(7)

By refusing to use commas, Reed makes us read this description in an out-of-breath way, thus making us feel the gross accumulation of luxury. The reference to the set of the Merv Griffin Show both undermines the whole description through bathos and makes us understand the thing described in an instant because we all watch television. Reed goes on to identity a category of people who are manipulable by Louisiana Red, finding a clue in Cab Calloway's hit song of the thirties, “Minnie the Moocher”:²¹

Moochers are people who, when they are to blame, say it's the other fellow's fault for bringing it up. Moochers don't return stuff they borrow. Moochers ask you to share when they have nothing to share. Moochers kill their enemies like the South American insect which kills its foe by squirting it with its own blood. God, do they suffer. “Look at all of the suffering I'm going through because of you.” Moochers talk and don't do. You should hear them just the same. Moochers tell other people what to do. Men Moochers blame everything on women. Women Moochers blame everything on men. Old Moochers say it's the young's fault; young Moochers say the old messed up the world they have to live in. Moochers play sick a lot. Moochers think it's real hip not to be able to read and write. Like Joan of Arc the arch-witch, they boast of not knowing A from B.

Moochers stay in the bathtub a long time. Though Moochers wrap themselves in the full T-shirt of ideology, their only ideology is Mooching. …

The highest order of this species of Moocher is the President, who uses the taxpayers' money to build homes all over the world where he can be alone to contemplate his place in history when history don't even want him. Moochers are a special order of parasite, not even a beneficial parasite but one that takes—takes energy, takes supplies.

(17)

The portrait of Minnie the Moocher is a hard one, particularly if we see her in terms of Angela Davis.²² Reed is frequently accused of misogyny. Sondra A. O'Neale says, “For the black woman Reed intends no sympathy,” continuing, “If Reed purposes to free the black man with his writing, let us hope that he will magnanimously enlarge his vision to free all the race—even his likewise-enslaved-to-unfair-stereotypes black sister.” Reed could be better understood if one looks at other black male novelists he is connected with. Al Young's Sitting Pretty and William Demby's Love Story Black are novels narrated by black males.²³ Reed once said that the runaway black man should be given equal time to present his side of the story instead of just being blamed for deserting the family and leaving the burdens entirely on the woman. This is precisely what Young does: grant his protagonist equal time. Not that Sitting Pretty is without fault: in his late fifties, he can recognize some of the areas in which he has been deficient, particularly towards his wife and children; but when younger, he had wanted freedom. The point is that he is a man, he has a voice and a point of view, he has a philosophy such that a black philosophy professor needs him to maintain his sense of identity, and he is a great hit on radio and TV. In Demby's novel, the protagonist is a black professor. He does not realize that he has been psychically castrated by the system, just as the black male was physically castrated in the past by certain forces. He goes to interview Mona Pariss, an old entertainer, to earn enough money from a black success magazine to pay off his credit cards. But she turns the tables. It turns out that the deeper level of her entertainment is that of high priestess. She has been waiting to restore the manhood of the black man. Mona Pariss is like Okot p'Bitek's Lawino in wanting to cure her man whose testicles have been smashed by large books.²⁴ The TV sitcom Different Strokes has as its underpinning the idea that two young black boys cannot have an irresponsible black father, and so they must be brought up by a great white father. The denial of manhood can take different forms.

Why is Minnie always talking of shedding blood, Papa LaBas asks her. Enough black people have been destroyed by colonial forces without their destroying one another in the name of some mythic freedom. Minnie is bringing disaster down on her family without realizing what she is doing. She springs Andy and Kingfish from jail and hijacks a plane for them on the assumption that every black man in jail is a political prisoner. In fact, both men were jailed for burglarizing Amos's house, and they proceed to rob the passengers on the plane. Chorus is on the plane and shoots Minnie, whom he sees as Antigone. Minnie's case reminds me of what happened to a friend of mine, a game warden in Kenya. He told me that the huge lump I saw on his head was the result of going on patrol with his dog. The dog disappeared into the forest, upset a herd of elephants, and then ran back to my friend, with the herd of elephants in pursuit. My friend turned to flee and tripped on his gun, which struck his forehead. He barely got away. Imagine the elephants programming the dog to lead them to the man. Papa LaBas discovers from Minnie's unconvincing language, which he realizes is secondhand, that she is being manipulated by her feminist nanny, who is teaching her man-hating stories, and her Marxist teacher, both of whom are agents of Louisiana Red. The nanny is not actually a black woman but a white woman acting as a black woman. This is the black-imitating-white-imitating-black tradition of this country but it is also out of the movie cartoon tradition, where a person can change form.

Before condemning Reed for misogyny, we have to look closely at the specific character and see how that character functions within the work. I was startled when seeing Gone with the Wind on TV a few years ago to notice that the Mammy was exactly like Mammy Barracuda in Flight to Canada (as well as being a female Idi Amin). Like Professor in Wole Soyinka's The Road,²⁵ Reed finds clues to make his psychic arrests all over the place: literature, comics, newspapers, movies, TV, radio, music. Nance Saturday, the maverick criminologist in The Terrible Twos, “approached a problem as a romantic would. He would read material. He would study all the trivia connected with the case and all the facts he could sew together and usually the solution would come” (119-20). This is the oral person's respect for the power of the word. Why was the Mammy figure so outspoken and so powerful in this popular precursor to the TV soap opera? There must be a meaning there, and Reed finds it in the hidden relationship between Mammy Barracuda and the owner of the estate. Swille did have a special relationship with his Mammy, given his incestuous nature. Mammy terrorizes the underlings, including Swille's pale wife. We cannot make the mistake that she is in charge of the plantation/multinational corporation: she is not. But she has power within the household because of her relationship to Swille, whom she brought up, and she is as dangerous as the factors Ayi Kwei Armah identifies in his novels: the Africans who were middlemen in the slave trade, who handed the slaves over to the white men.²⁶ No wonder Mammy lights up when she inherits Swille's whips and fettering devices. She is not playing a game to win her freedom, unlike Pompey and Bangalang who react “stupidly” when Swille is on fire and let him burn. Notice the looping relationship to the movie: Reed finds a clue in the Mammy of the movie, reinterprets her in his novel of Southern aristocracy caught up in the Civil War, and then makes us see Mammy differently when we see the movie again. We know that Reed was conscious of this movie because the white woman acting as Minnie's nanny says, “I have to shuffle about like Hattie McDaniel,” who played Mammy in the movie. The Southern belle was played by Vivian Leigh, Swille's sister's name.

Reed creates what he wants out of what exists. Underneath Minnie the Moocher, you find an Angela-Davis-type figure from the seventies, Minnie the Moocher from a pop song of the thirties, Joan of Arc from the fifteenth century, and Antigone from over four centuries B.C. Reed has unearthed another version of the Antigone myth, hinted at by Creon in Sophocles' play, in which Antigone is actually a man-hater in love with death. In Reed's value system, as Marian Musgrave points out, those to be admired are people who take care of business.²⁷ Creon got on with the job of keeping the state going. If Antigone wanted to do things for her brothers, why didn't she stop the two from fighting? This is what Chorus asks, and one of his functions in the novel is to present that alternate version of Antigone as a pattern that continues through time. Chorus also draws attention to Reed's use of the particular myth underlying the novel so that we will not make the mistake of thinking that Reed's improvisation is without structure.²⁸ The simultaneous myths and histories in Reed, like the market studies by corporations which superimpose various polyethylene patterns onto one basic design, have the effect of retrieving relevant history and myth all at once. No pedestrian chasing after historical facts in a scholarly way, one element at a time; that way, we will never catch up with the coach. Reed deals with simultaneous myths because he expects us to have the quick skill to connect things on the run.

Since men are deliberately prevented by colonialism from achieving their manhood, the women frequently have to take on more than one role. Colonialism puts a heavy burden on women by making it possible for them to do things in areas where it blocks the men. When Canada took in Asians from Uganda expelled by Amin in 1972 (some of whom were Ugandans whose citizenship had been taken away), the women found it easy to get jobs while the men had to go through several humiliating rejections, frequently being told that they were overqualified or lacked Canadian experience. The effect was to totally demoralize several of the men, particularly those qualified for high jobs; they were as unprepared as Carpenter and Raven for the existence of racism in Canada against “West Indians” (all people originating from Africa) and “Pakistanis” (all people originating from the Indian subcontinent) (160). Very few of the Goan women in Canada, if any, realized, while they were keeping the family together, that the men were unemployed because of colonial forces rather than their own innate uselessness. There was no alternate way of judging the system and themselves. “It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves,” says Angela Davis, “using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery.”²⁹ Raven bitterly ponders such lack of understanding in the bar in Emancipation City: “Slaves judged other slaves like the auctioneer and his clients judged them. Was there no end to slavery? Was a slave condemned to serve another Master as soon as he got rid of one? Were overseers to be replaced by new overseers? Was this some game, some fickle punishment for sins committed in former lives? Slavery on top of slavery?” (144). Papa LaBas, really Legba, the Yoruba god of communications and the medium between the material and spiritual world, explains to Wolf why there are such divisions in his family: “‘The experience of slavery. I'm afraid it's going to be a long time before we get over that nightmare which left such scars in our souls—scars that no amount of bandaids or sutures, no amount of stitches will heal. It will take an extraordinary healer to patch up this wound’” (100). But there are healers at work in Reed's fiction. Aunt Judy is one of them. She is aware of the slave-master's hegemony. Although she had disagreed with Robin's daily providing Swille with slave-mothers' milk, she did not quarrel with him but asked him about it afterwards, and he explained that it was Coffee Mate with which he was poisoning the master. She is aware that there is something going on between Robin and Bangalang, but she waits for the right time to deal firmly with it. And she is the one who advises Robin to break up the estate.

The attempt to end colonialism must incorporate, if not begin with, the restoration of manhood to the male. All the women who do not recognize this are acting, in Reed's fiction, as agents of the oppressors, of Louisiana Red. These include Fannie Mae, Mammy Barracuda, Ruby, and Minnie. All the women who understand the de-manning of colonialism and work against it and/or work with the men are admirable figures in Reed's fiction, women like Zozo Labrique, Joan, Sister, Aunt Judy, Bangalang, Esther, and Erline in Mumbo Jumbo.³⁰ Women who work against the men without realizing it but can be rescued are not damned: Quaw Quaw, Vixen, and even Minnie, for whose life Papa LaBas goes to the underworld to plead. The question of why Reed does not make a woman the protagonist of his novels is an aesthetic one, not a moral one: it is as absurd as asking Paule Marshall why she makes a woman the protagonist of Brown Girl, Brownstones and Praisesong for the Widow.³¹

So you want black manhood? Here is a man! Look at him on TV and in the papers! But Reed is already there. See, Reed says, look at Louisiana Red at work. Street Yellings: a selfish, greedy, vicious, mean thug, a murderer sprung from jail to be used against black people. There was a famous Street-type black leader of the sixties who killed a woman for the same reason as Street roughed up Ms. Better Weather: “‘Do you know who I am? Don't you recognize my picture? Haven't you seen my picture all over?’” (95). This happened after the publication of The Last Days of Louisiana Red so the readers could have anticipated such behavior. Reed is against sloppily attaching heroism to individuals who do not deserve it. Real manhood does not need to “bully the blacks, to bully the women,” as Vixen thinks in The Terrible Twos (105). It may work quietly, behind the scenes, in the shadows, like Ed Yellings, Papa LaBas, and Uncle Robin. Minnie, not knowing her history and culture, wants to go public, thus exposing her people to further destruction. Mammy Barracuda never questioned the rightness or wrongness of Swille's absolute ownership of human beings, having no knowledge of her culture but only that of suffering Western Christianity, as indicated by the huge cross she wears around her neck, the reflection of the sun on which once blinded two slaves. Uncle Robin, knowing his culture and his gods, played a game until the time was ripe. Pompey and Bangalang knew he was playing a game, as they were, and they did not squeal on him.

No, freedom is not easy to achieve. Stray Leechfield thinks he can buy his freedom by making money from posing for pornographic photos and other schemes with Mel Leer. 40s thinks he can protect himself with guns. Raven begins to recognize what Robin has known much earlier: that Swille's ruling philosophy is the love of property, and he considers the slaves to be property. Swille does not need money: he controls the source and supply of money. But his love of property may be too abstract an idea to grasp, for slavery also chains the mind and the imagination. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Reed concretizes the Western capitalist's love of property:

Three horsemen—the Banker, the Marshal and the Doctor—decided to pay a little visit to Drag Gibson's ranch. They had to wait because Drag was at his usual hobby, embracing his property.

A green mustang had been led out of its stall. It served as a symbol for his streams of fish, his herds, his fruit so large they weighed down the mountains, black gold and diamonds which lay in untapped fields, and his barnyard overflowing with robust and erotic fowl.

Holding their Stetsons in their hands the delegation looked on as Drag prepared to kiss his holdings. The ranch hands dragged the animal from his compartment towards the front of the Big Black House where Drag bent over and french kissed the animal between the teeth, licking the slaver from around the horse's gums. …

This was one lonely horse. The male horses avoided him because they thought him stuck-up and the females because they thought that since green he was a queer horse. See, he had turned green from old nightmares.

After the ceremony the unfortunate critter was led back to his stall, a hoof covering his eye.

(21-22)

The difficulty for a critter—excuse me, “critic”—is that Reed always has a hundred things going on at the same time while the critic goes in a straight line, pursuing one lead. Reed cautions us against this kind of linear reading: on page 183 of the Avon edition of Mumbo Jumbo, one has to turn the book in circles to read what is being said at the bottom of the page. We see the love of property concretized in terms of a Wild West pattern imprinted on our cowboy-loving minds: the cowboy loves his horse more than anything else. But this is a horse that has turned green from its nightmares. Nightmare—horse: the connection is that of the stand-up comic who, in this heterogeneous America, finds all words funny, like Groucho Marx's “Why a Duck?” The horse is green, as in “greenhorn,” again from the cowboy yellowbacks. Then the horse is led away, covering his eye with a hoof: this is out of movie cartoons. Lest we dismiss the whole thing as “unreal,” we know from the very beginning that the story is a tall tale, a tradition as old as America: “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 bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women” (9). Straight from the tall tale, from yellow-back novels, and also from the storylines in black music.³² The horse turned green from nightmares: in its recurrent nightmare, it is about to be killed by Germans. The big American problem, says Reed, is that Drag, Swille, and other American capitalists live in America but have their hearts in Europe. Arthur Swille is named after the Arthur of the mythic Camelot, but he is actually no better than food for pigs, which is precisely the fate of Drag. The German chieftain hates green and wants his men to chop off the horse's head; the horse always wakes up just before they are to do so. In the horse's nightmare, “The Germans burned down Yellow Back Radio in a matter of seconds—about the amount of time it takes for a station break” (78).

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a title that tells several stories. The “yellow back” is a Wild West novel. It refers to the young people who have taken over the town because they do not have “yellow fever”: the fever for gold like many European adventurers and perhaps the paranoia against the Chinese and Japanese. They are not afraid; they are not “yellow.” The word “radio” tells us that we are reading a radio script, that we are to hear the words that follow as we would on radio. The word “radio” also brings to mind Reed's quintessential poem “I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.”³³ The poem connects up “Ra,” the Egyptian sun god, with “RAdio,” suggesting that there is a world beyond one's perceptions from which, if one is tuned in, one can receive messages; conversely, one can tune out bad messages. “Broke-Down” suggests both that the whole system has broken down and that the radio has been “exploded” so that we can understand it. (The radio connection is extended to TV by the neighboring town being named Video Junction.) “Yellow Back” has yet another meaning, mentioned in Mumbo Jumbo. Benoit Battraville from Haiti, which is fighting an invasion by white American soldiers, says to the black Americans, “I know this is a strange request but if you will just 1 by 1 approach the Dictaphone, tell just how Hinckle Von Vampton propositioned you, the circumstances and the proposals he made to you, we will record this and then feed it to our loa. This particular loa has a Yellow Back to symbolize its electric circuitry. We are always careful not to come too close to it. It's a very mean high-powered loa” (172-73). The word “electric” is a clue that “to loop” is to join so as to complete circuitry. Thus although it would make no difference on radio, the difference in spelling of “Loop Garoo” in the novel compared with “Loup Garou” in the poem is significant. A loop is a sharp bend in a mountain road which almost comes back on itself like a snake (so Loop fights Drag with a white python, Damballah). In physics, a loop is an antinode, the node being the point, line, or surface of a vibrating object free from vibration. To knock for a loop is to throw into confusion. And a loop antenna is used in direction-finding equipment and in radio receivers. Once you get to the multiple meanings, you, the reader, begin to loop. “Garoo,” according to Toma Longinovic, a Yugoslav writer who was in the International Writing Program in 1982, means “essence.” Reed's novel gets to the essence, doing more in two-hundred-odd pages than a six-hundred-page novel, and Loop practices HooDoo, which is the essence of VooDoo. Reed wants us to short-circuit the whole mess, to break it down.

Reed's syncretism opens up “the possibilities of exquisite and delicious combinations,” which is a Gumbo way of writing, as Reed's epigraph to The Last Days of Louisiana Red suggests, as does the poem “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” which is about Gumbo.³⁴ Reed does not want black Americans to shortchange themselves by denying what they are told is not their tradition (“Get back to your language”). Black people have built up this continent and their contributions have penetrated everything that is American, even the Wild West.³⁵ Reed's epigraph to Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, from Henry Allen, says, “America … is just like a turkey. It's got white meat and it's got dark meat. They is different, but they is both important to the turkey. I figure the turkey has more white meat than dark meat, but that don't make any difference. Both have nerves running through 'em. I guess Hoo-Doo is a sort of nerve that runs mostly in the dark meat, but sometimes gets into the white meat too.” So as Americans, black Americans have to be open to possibilities of connecting up with other Americans. When Uncle Robin is taking care of business, he hears footsteps approaching. “Uncle Robin takes a sip of coffee, looks innocent and begins to hum a spiritual” (40). He is actually as innocent as the pope of the same name who comes to confront Loop Garoo. Moe is suspicious but cannot prove anything. Robin says, “‘Sometimes it seems to me that we are all Uncle Toms. Take yourself, for example. You are a white man but still you a slave. You may not look like a slave, and you dress better than slaves do, but all day you have to run around saying Yessuh, Mr. Swille, and Nossuh, Mr. Swille, and when Mitchell was a child, Maybe so, l'il Swille. Why, he can fire you anytime he wants for no reason’” (41). Moe's refuge is race: “‘What! What did you say? How dare you talk to a white man like that!’” Robin replies, “‘Well, sometimes I just be reflectin, suh.’” Like other Reed heroes, Robin is always thinking. The next moment, the red light begins to blink, which means that Swille wants Moe to come into his office, and “Moe wipes his mouth with a napkin, gulps the coffee down so quickly it stains his junior executive's shirt.” Robin cleans it quickly. The detail of the shirt shows that even an executive is a slave. The timing of the incident to prove a point is that of the TV sketch.

Moe is the “white house slave.” If we heard this, which we would on radio and TV, it would sound like “White House Slave.” This takes us forward to The Terrible Twos in which the President, Dean Clift, a former model, is a slave to forces he never bothered to understand until he began to speak out against their interests. It is his black butler, trying to protect him, who tells him, “Mr. President, everybody in the White House knows that you don't run the government, and that the Colorado gang is in charge. … Mr. President, will you get it through your thick head that all they wanted to use was your model's face. They know that America gets butterflies in the belly over a pretty face. It was just your face, Mr. President” (158-59). Shades of Benson!

But the President is locked up in an asylum after he blows the lid off the vicious antihuman schemes on TV. This is not all a disaster, for a black American saying is, “Suffering is seasoning” (173). It is a sort of purgatory for Dean Clift's days of selfishness. Justice demands a correction to, not a gloss over, historical crimes. In Mumbo Jumbo, there is a multicultural group going around reclaiming its stolen art from Western museums. Not all the members of the group agree with Berbelang's decision to include a white man, Thor Wintergreen, in the group on the grounds that he is different from the others because, the repentant son of a rich white man, he wants to end exploitation. Yellow Jack, a Chinese, does not trust the white man because of his history. In spite of the bitter exploitation of black Americans, Berbelang is willing to take a risk, a great risk. He sees the white man's history in terms of the myth of Faust. He is not the first thinker to see the West in terms of the Faust myth, which is usually interpreted as the willingness to sell one's soul for knowledge and power, or rather, for power through knowledge. Berbelang approaches the myth from a perspective outside the Western one. He says that the real point is that Faust is a charlatan, a bokor, a thief-magician who one day finds to his surprise that something seems to be working. He is thereafter haunted by his fear of being revealed as a charlatan. Thus Berbelang's interpretation of the myth is that, perhaps deep down, Western man knows that he has been stealing the art and creativeness of non-Western man and knows he is a fake. If so, the knowledge, the fear of exposure, will make him continue to keep non-Western people down. Is this the case? “I'm just 1 man,” says Thor Wintergreen. “Not Faust nor the Kaiser nor the Ku Klux Klan. I am an individual, not a whole tribe or nation” (104). “That's what I'm counting on,” replies Berbelang. “But if there is such a thing as a racial soul, a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man's mind, then we are doomed.” In the event, Thor is weakened by an appeal to his race, class and tribe by a descendant of the lower class of Europe, still serving the upper class and keeping European values going, preparing to take over and protect white civilization. “Son,” says the tied Biff Musclewhite, “this is a nigger closing in on our mysteries and soon he will be asking our civilization to ‘come quietly’” (130). Thor tearfully unties Musclewhite, who proceeds to kill Berbelang, Papa LaBas's daughter Charlotte, and finally Thor himself. The media call it suicide in two cases and justifiable homicide in the third.

Must there always be Christian monotheistic domination? Zumwalt in The Terrible Twos is working for the North Pole Development Corporation, which has acquired monopoly rights to Santa Claus. He used to be a radical member of the SDS in the sixties but got tired of the demands of black Americans. Western culture reasserted itself: it had never abandoned his mind. But he is not abandoned by the novel. He is ultimately saved by the Santa Claus and Black Peter exposure of the terrible crime he had carried secretly within him, that he had accidentally killed the President's son in his radical days and had had plastic surgery to change his identity. Deep down, Reed suggests, there is hope for ending the alienation of at least some powerful white people, including the President. Black Peter and Saint Nick reveal to these people the alienation from their own humanity.

So it is worth taking the risk of selectively linking up with other people, because you can then go places you would be denied, see things you would miss, remember things your people have forgotten, and get a different perspective on yourself. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Chief Showcase, the lone survivor of a massacre by Drag, rescues Loop from Bo Shmo by helicopter. Showcase says, “You see the tribe was so busy trying to organize they forgot that they were clandestine by nature, camouflage, now you see now you don't, what some blockheads call esoteric bullshit. But now I'm trying the same thing on him he put us through. … Foment mischief among his tribes and they will destroy each other. Not only that. I have my secret weapon. … If I can't get their scalps I'll get their lungs. … This time it'll be done by an idea” (46). The value of the shadows again. Drag permits his Chinese servant to say rude things about him. Drag enjoys it, and perhaps, with his Judeo-Christian consciousness, he wants to be whipped for his sins, just like Swille. Not too much, just enough to permit him to continue doing what he likes best, exploiting other people, owning them, killing off those who stand in his way, grabbing property. And why not permit his servant to let off steam? He is likely to feel better too, and nothing will change. Just shouting the truth will not make the walls of Jericho Collapse. Was this what happened in the sixties, with radicalism going public? Reed's novels note that the real struggles are taking place between secret societies behind the scenes. In Mumbo Jumbo, the Atonists deliberately begin the Great Depression to put black artists out of work and stop Jes Grew. Among their agents are “The 1909 versions of Albert Goldman” (51): Albert Goldman, the man who did a hatchet job on the late Elvis Presley several years after the publication of Mumbo Jumbo.³⁶ Another novelist who sees history in terms of plots between secret societies, Thomas Pynchon, says in his massive novel Gravity's Rainbow, “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.)”³⁷

Real fighters do not underestimate the power of their antagonists. In fact, they do not underestimate power. There is a tendency for Third World intellectuals, not having tasted power and dealing with its structures and modes of operation, and also imitating powerless Western intellectuals, to underrate power and profess to despise all powerful men—a deadly misjudgment since, as Wole Soyinka shows in Kongi's Harvest, a dictator knows how to exploit the weakness of intellectuals, giving them a taste of power in return for which they manufacture the words of legitimacy for him.³⁸ No, with Reed, power is given due respect, even when the adversary is hated. Aunt Judy sees as hypocrisy the fact that Lincoln (initially) only frees the slaves in the territories he has no control over. Not so Uncle Robin: he applauds the player in Lincoln. And as a true player, Lincoln wonders whether Uncle Robin is one too. Although Robin is secretly working to undermine his boss, when Swille is dead, he says, “Well, you had to hand it to Swille. He was a feisty old crust. Lots of energy. What energy? Rocket fuel” (179). The stand-up comic again. In American culture, you can get away with murder through jokes.

Cunning people like Robin and Chief Showcase, learning from their history, are working indirectly. Papa LaBas, knowing his culture, believes in wearing masks. Not that they know everything: Papa LaBas seeks help to solve the murder of Ed Yellings by consulting Hamadryas, an older baboon god in the zoo (who may also be the Egyptian baboon god Toth). When Aunt Judy asks Robin whether it was not un-Christian of him to doctor Swille's will and end up owning the estate, he replies, “‘I've about had it with this Christian. I mean, it can stay, but it's going to have to stop being so bossy. I'd like to bring the old cults back’” (171). Loop Garoo fights Drag, not with Drag's weapons, for then Drag would win, but with HooDoo, spells, thought control, psychic force, the mind. When Loop is winning, the problem gets serious enough for the Pope to appear in the West. He knows how to fight Loop since they are ancient enemies. The Pope wins a round but not the fight. The Pope wants Loop to rejoin Christianity and bring his strengths in. It is an old fight, the novel says. Christianity designated all the African gods as the devil. Yet the West needs the energy and creativeness of the black world. The Pope knows this: check out the Pope's art collection being sent around the U.S. The Pope also wants Loop's help in controlling the Blessed Virgin. The fight is not for total destruction but for Western hegemony. This is the same fight in Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red as in the James Bond movie of the same time, Live and Let Die. In the Bond movie, the action alternates between New Orleans and a Caribbean island. There is a white woman possessed by a loa who loses her power after being seduced by Bond, then becoming a white virgin to be sacrificed by black voodooists. At the end, there is a diversion: the conflict is presented as one between the forces of good (the West) and black drug dealers. But Baron Samedi survives at the end, with his Geoffrey Holder laugh. We can see why Reed takes movies seriously but uses them in his own way. He has his own detectives, opposed to the Bonds, detectives like Papa LaBas and Nance Saturday, out to make psychic arrests.

People's idea of history is created by the media: by fiction. The kids at Yellow Back Radio have taken over and chased the grown-ups out because they are tired of being taught miserable, hateful lies. “We decided to create our own fiction,” they say (18). “Who pushed Swille into the fire?” Robin speculates. “Some Etheric Double? The inexorable forces of history? A ghost? Thought? Or all of these? Who could have pushed him? Who?” (179). The logic of the fiction pushes Swille in, like the spontaneous combustion in Dickens's Bleak House. Art seeking justice through the working of its story. The anthropologist son of Swille sent to the Congo to find energy sources for his father is thrown to the crocodiles. He comes back to haunt his father's mansion. Vivian, with whom Arthur commits necrophilious incest, haunts him to death. Everybody is haunted by past crimes. There are ghosts in the White House. President Dean Clift in The Terrible Twos is taken by Saint Nick to the Presidents' hell, where he sees past presidents and would-be presidents chained to their crimes against nature for not having had the courage to oppose dehumanizing actions: Eisenhower (Lumumba), Truman (Hiroshima), and Rockefeller (Attica). Reed's fiction haunts, too, and changes things in our mind. Is the American Indian really seeking revenge against the white man by introducing him to smoking tobacco so that he will die of lung cancer? Well … we know that smoking tobacco so that he will die of lung cancer? Well … we know that smoking causes cancer. … Uncle Robin has been poisoning Swille with Coffee Mate while Swille thought he was drinking slave-mothers' milk which would keep him young: will the FDA suddenly announce that Coffee Mate causes cancer? Just look at those nasty ingredients listed on page 174. Reed the black American artist plants things in the mind and thereby changes the past. “No one says a novel has to be one thing,” says Loop to Bo Shmo. “It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (40). We have seen the news and the demons. Vaudeville? Reed the necromancer presented a vaudeville show in 1970 of forthcoming attractions in his novels entitled “D Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful,” which introduces almost the whole cast of Reed's characters in order to put a “Nix on Noxon.”³⁹ Reed's writing is like an electronic series. Black Peter in the sixth novel seems to be Pompey in the fifth novel (175). In Loop's story: “Three black cowboys were seated on tree stumps drinking from some wooden bowl and grinning. One of 'em was playing the slide trombone” (64). Reed used to play the trombone. The staple unit of vaudeville on TV is the anachronistic historical sketch, where past and present are hilariously simultaneous. This is how Reed writes his fiction. When Professor Hobgood spoke on my panel at Madison on Goan literature, he produced a volume of Gomes's selected writings with the stamp of the Entebbe Goan Institute, of which I had been president three times and my father before me five times, and yet I had never noticed the volume! Suddenly all the layers of time were before me, summoned up by the introduction of a material medium of communication. This is what Reed does when he introduces the TV or radio into what we might think is the past. For example, Lincoln is assassinated with the TV cameras on him, there is an instant replay, and an immediate interview with his wife—which Raven sees while making love to Quaw Quaw in a den in Carpenter's house the night before Carpenter leaves for Canada. What presidential assassination is this? What time? What plot? Is the multinational involved? Reed would not call it anachronism. Of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, he says, “The ‘time sense’ is akin to the ‘time’ one finds in the psychic world, where past, present and future exist simultaneously.”⁴⁰ Through the constant TV, radio, video, and electronic references, Reed is also asking his people to acquire literacy as well as to leap to video and electronics or else they will be left far behind, as when they were denied literacy. Swille spells it out to Lincoln: “‘We gave him Literacy, the most powerful thing in the pre-technological pre-post-'rational age—and what does he do with it? Use it like that old Voodoo’” (37-36, my emphasis).

Raven Quickskill acquires reading, and this makes him flee outward from the condition of slavery. Robin, who is put in charge because of the flight of Raven, also acquires reading and uses it to move inward. The two need each other's skills; hence Robin gets Raven to write his story, which is also Raven's story. Watch the name: “Raven” comes from a curing story; he is a healer through words.⁴¹

The original spelling of Loop Garoo's name in “I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra” is “Loup Garou,” a wolf, actually a werewolf. The man who changes into a wolf does so to try to rescue the earth from the mess men of power have made in their blindness, greed, and alienation from nature.⁴² The wolf also seeks to rescue those men of power who would be rescued. Thus in The Terrible Twos, Black Peter, Santa Claus, and Saint Nick save Zumwalt, the aging soap-opera star who would be Santa, and the President. Even the President who was elected in 1980, setting off a Scrooge-like meanness in the spirit and a cold wave in nature, is not doomed because he did once take part in a movie in which he represented the plight of the oppressed. But some cannot be saved. The Christmas tree that an old Indian chief had tried to protect from the white man's bulldozers on the grounds that it was alive gets its revenge: when the President's wife turns the Christmas tree lights on, she is electrocuted and burned to a crisp. The switch let the current pass. The Yellow Back loa is mean. There is sympathy in Nature, LOUP GAROU, but it needs help from Art, LOOP GAROO, to close in on the Western stage. Reed.

Notes

1. Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (New York: Avon, 1977). The novel was first published in 1969. All page references are from the Avon edition.

2. Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (New York: Random House, 1976), 124. All page references are from this edition.

3. Ishmael Reed, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (New York: Random House, 1974). All page references are from this edition.

4. Ishmael Reed, The Terrible Twos (New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1982), 109. All page references are from this edition.

5. Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 2. Ralph Ellison quotes “an old slave verse” in his famous interview in The Paris Review which contains three characters, Aunt Dinah, Uncle Jack, and Uncle Ned, who want to get to Canada, freedom. Ellison comments, “It's crude, but in it you have three universal attitudes toward the problem of freedom. You can refine it and sketch in the psychological allusions, action and what not, but I don't think its basic definition can be exhausted. Perhaps some genius could do as much with it as Mann has done with the Joseph story” (Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, New York: Signet, 1966, 173-74).

6. Ishmael Reed, Conjure (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972), viii. Goa, in India, was conquered by the Portuguese in 1510.

7. Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

8. Reed, Shrovetide, 2.

9. Lillian Herlands Hornstein, C. D. Percy, and Sterling A. Brown, eds., The Reader's Companion to World Literature, second edition revised and updated by Lillian Herlands Hornstein, Leon Edel, and Horst Frenz (New York: New American Library, 1973), 65.

10. Grover Washington, Jr., Reed Seed (Hollywood: Motown, 1978), M7-910R1.

11. Sondra A. O'Neale, “Ishmael Reed's Fitful Flight to Canada: Liberation for Some, Good Reading for All,” Callaloo (October 1978): 176.

12. Bessie Head, Maru (London: Heinemann, 1971), 109.

13. Reed, Flight, 54. Also see Reed's poem, “Badman of the Guest Professor,” in Conjure, 77. “They gibbed me a Ph.D.,” says Cato (53).

14. Nathaniel Mackey, “Ishmael Reed and the Black Aesthetic,” CLA Journal 21 (March 1978): 358.

15. O'Neale, 175.

16. Bessie Head, “Social and Political Pressures that Shape Literature in Southern Africa,” World Literature Written in English 17 (April 1979): 21. The paper was first presented in Iowa City in the fall of 1977 when Bessie Head was a member of the International Writing Program.

17. Adil Jussawalla, Missing Person (Bombay: Clearing House, 1976), 15.

18. Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 20.

19. Murray Carlin, Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (Nairobi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 43-44.

20. Dobie Gray's “Drift Away” was no. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1973. Ray Charles's version of the song is on Ain't It So (New York: Atlantic, 1979), SD 19251.

21. A new recording of “Minnie the Moocher” by Cab Calloway is on the original soundtrack recording of The Blues Brothers (New York: Atlantic, 1980), SD 19251. See his Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976).

22. It is difficult on the first reading to avoid linking Minnie the Moocher with Angela Davis. I bought The Last Days of Louisiana Red and Angela Davis: An Autobiography at the same time; they were published simultaneously by Random House in 1974. Reed says in his “Self-Interview,” originally published in Black World in 1974, “The abuse of the term [Political Prisoner] by people like Baldwin and Professor Angela Davis harms the cause of those who are truly political prisoners” (Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 136), a point that is made against Minnie in the novel.

23. Al Young, Sitting Pretty (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976). William Demby, Love Story Black (New York: Reed, Cannon & Johnston, 1978).

24. Okot p'Bitek, “Song of Lawino” and “Song of Ocol” (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1972), 191. Song of Lawino was first published in 1966.

25. Wole Soyinka, The Road (London: Oxford, 1965).

26. In particular, see the following novels by Ayi Kwei Armah: Fragments (New York: Collier Books, 1969); Why Are We so Blest? (New York: Doubleday, 1973); Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973).

27. Marian E. Musgrave, “Ishmael Reed's Black Oedipus Cycle,” Obsidian: Black Literature in Review 6, no. 3 (1980): 64.

28. For example, see J. A. Avant's review of the novel in Library Journal 99 (1974): 3147.

29. Davis, 95.

30. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Avon, 1978). The novel was first published in 1973. All page references are from the Avon edition.

31. Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: Avon, 1972). The novel was first published in 1959. Praisesong for the Widow (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1983). Paule Marshall shows how colonialism undermines manhood in her fiction. She has major male characters in all her work, particularly her tour de force The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, but even here the protagonist is a woman. See my chapter, “Colonial Relationships, Colonized People” in my The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978).

32. “Now this here's the story 'bout the ‘Rock Island Line,’” begins Lonnie Donegan's imitation of Leadbelly's “Rock Island Line,” which reached no. 8 on the British pop charts and no. 10 on Billboard's pop charts in 1956, setting off the skiffle craze in England. A whole generation of English boys were inspired by Donegan to start their own skiffle groups, including what became the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and discover black blues. Supposedly, Bill Skiffle was the first man in New Orleans to hold a rent party, using instruments like a washboard and box-bass. Lonnie Donegan is a collection of Donegan's 26 hits (Scarborough, Ontario: Pye, 1977), FILD 011. Putting on the Style is an updated Donegan, backed by his musical heirs (Los Angeles: United Artists, 1977), UA-LA827-H. Leadbelly's version of “Rock Island Line” can be found on Leadbelly (Hollywood: Capitol, undated), SM-1821.

33. Reed, Conjure, 17-18.

34. Ibid., 26. One of the problems with Abdul Hamid, a Muslim, in Mumbo Jumbo is that he, too, has a monolithic world view, though for tactical reasons.

35. For example, see Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, The Adventures of the Negro Cowboys (New York: Bantam, 1969). Durham and Jones wrote the book at UCLA.

36. Albert Goldman, Elvis (New York: Avon, 1981). I am aware of the feeling that Elvis ripped off black music. The singers he copied, learned from, or was influenced by, run into dozens, chiefly black but also white. But Little Richard says in his Rolling Stone interview, “Like, see, when Elvis came out, a lot of black groups would say, 'Elvis cannot do so and so and so, shoo shoo shoo [huffs and grumbles]. And I'd say, ‘Shut up, shut up.’ Let me tell you this—when I came out they wasn't playing no black artists on no Top 40 stations, I was the first to get played on the Top 40 stations—but it took people like Elvis and Pat Boone, Gene Vincent, to open the door for this kind of music, and I thank God for Elvis Presley. I thank the Lord for sending Elvis to open that door so I could walk down the road, you understand?” (The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking with the Legends of Rock & Roll, New York: St. Martin's Press/Rolling Stone Press, 1981, 92.)

37. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Bantam, 1974), 685.

38. Wole Soyinka, Kongi's Harvest (London: Oxford, 1965). Bob Krantz in The Terrible Twos refers to Uganda in 1990 and says, “We wouldn't have expected that these nations would spend an eternity under military rule and unemployed intellectuals” (55).

39. Ishmael Reed, “D Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful,” Amistad 1, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Vintage, 1970), 165-82. By focusing the readers' minds, the story gets a psychic fix on “Noxon.”

40. Reed, Shrovetide, 134.

41. For the raven in a “curing story,” see The Greenfield Review, issue on American Indian writing, vol. 9, nos. 3 and 4 (Winter 1981-82): 136-38. Hena Maes-Jelinek says in her chapter on Wilson Harris's Eye of The Scarecrow, “In alchemy Raven's Head is at once the initial stage of the process of exploration and the state of blackness that precedes the cauda pavonis or resurrection.” (Hena Maes-Jelinek, Wilson Harris, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982, 171, n. 6.)

42. See Coyote's Journal, James Koller et. al., ed. Harry Fonseca (Berkeley: Wingbow, 1982).