The American Century: Literature since 1945 659to a singular, linear model. The writer metamorphoses into the voodoo-man or
magician, the trickster god weaving backwards and forwards in time and between
different levels of narration. And the writing turns on a syncretic, densely textured
and multi-layered vision of reality – with the clear enemy, the target, being the idea
of a master narrative, the overdetermined. In Flight to Canada, for instance, Reeds
picks up the old form of the slave narrative and then, through a transformation of
style, changes a remembrance of servitude into an act of liberation. A flight from
slavery is enacted twice in the book: the first time in a poem called “Flight to Canada”
written by a character called Quicksill, and the second time in Quicksill’s escape to
Canada. But a flight from slavery also is the book. “For him, freedom was the writing,”
it is said of Quicksill. And freedom is the writing of Flight to Canada the novel as
well as “Flight to Canada” the poem, as Reed deploys self-reflexiveness, parody,
deliberate anachronism, and constant crisscrossing between different histories and
cultures to maneuver himself out of the straitjacket of social realism. According to
some critics, at least, the traditional slave narrative was constrained by its moral
earnestness, its patient accumulation of detail. It was a clear illustration of what
some black commentators in particular have seen as the political uses to which the
abolitionists put black literacy, with a prescriptive and painstaking verisimilitude
denying blacks the possession of their own story, or the possibility of breaking out
of monocultural forms. Flight to Canada, on the other hand, with its punning title,
its mixing of an antebellum setting with casual references to the dreck of contemporary
culture, and its irreverent humor (“Go to the theater,” a slave owner advises Abraham
Lincoln, “Get some culture”), slips off all these shackles. The Civil War is spliced
with the civil rights wars of the 1960s, with the image of Lincoln’s assassination, for
example, being constantly replayed in slow motion on the late night news. Edgar
Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade, and Captain Kidd mingle with such props of the
modern age as satellite television, jumbo jets, and Time magazine. And a slave owner
declares himself doubly outraged at his runaway slaves because, as he puts it, “they
furtively pilfered themselves.” Through meaningful mischief such as this (slaves are
property but also, for the purposes of moral censure, people), through shrewd
mixings and the sudden splicing of stories, Reed slips the reader the message that
freedom springs from confluence not control, an easygoing commerce between
cultures. Reed refuses to be slave to his narrative Flight to Canada or elsewhere.
In the process, he resites the act of connection between the living and the dead in an
altered demography. This a return to origin, a flight into and out of the past that
occurs within a fictional version of the uncertainty principle: an America that seems
to follow no set rules, other than those of diversity, chance, and change.
Two African-American writers whose return to origins is less slippery are Ernest
Gaines (1933–) and Albert Murray (1916–). “I go to San Francisco but I cannot stay
away from here,” Gaines has observed. “Here” is Louisiana, where Gaines spent his
childhood and most of his youth. Born to a black sharecropping family in the Point
Coupe parish, Gaines was working in the fields by the time he was 9 and, after his
parents separated and his father disappeared, he was brought up by a crippled
but indomitable great aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson who, Gaines was to say later,GGray_c05.indd 659ray_c 05 .indd 659 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM