like American culture, is a composite of multiple
voices and traditions. Whites and blacks alike are
interested in stealing or destroying the jes grew
text. While PaPa LaBas, the “hoodoo detective,”
searches for jes grew, he uses magic and intu-
ition to help him. Reed criticizes here the genre
of the detective novel and its reliance on reason.
As in Western tradition, only logic and rational
thought can supposedly discover truth. This de-
nies that there are multiple truths or ways to find
truth. The lack of closure at the end of the novel
reinforces this notion. PaPa LaBas returns as the
detective in Reed’s next novel, The Last Days of
Louisiana Red. LaBas tries to solve the murder of
a “gumbo works” owner whose gumbo has been
found to cure the illness brought on when people
forget history. The gumbo (or what Reed has said
is a symbol of neo hoodooism) is the way to con-
nect back to the spirit of the African past.
Reed’s next novel, Flight to Canada (1976), also
gained a reputation as an important African-Amer-
ican literary work. A parody of the slave narrative
(as well as just about everything else), the novel
follows the escape and return of Raven Quickskill,
a slave and writer. The novel’s numerous anach-
ronisms (a common technique in Reed’s fiction)
criticize the lack of progress in America’s cultural
and historical definition of race. The anachronisms
and neo–slave narrative structure also argue that
little has changed in the ways that African-Ameri-
can expression and history are controlled by white
power. Both Quickskill and Uncle Robin (a criti-
cal response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character
Uncle Tom [see SAMBO AND UNCLE TOM]) are writ-
ers, and in their creative act they can experience
some manner of control of their identity and their
past. When Quickskill returns to the plantation, he
finds that Robin has rewritten his master’s will so
that Robin is now the owner of the land. He trans-
forms it into a writer’s community, which reminds
the reader of the power of art to shape the world.
As in Reed’s other works, writing is neo hoodoo;
it is a way to change the stories that have confined
African-American freedom and expression.
Reed’s remaining novels, Reckless Eyeballing
(1986), Japanese by Spring (1993), The Terrible
Tw o s (1982), and The Terrible Threes (1989) satirize
political correctness, feminism, the Reagan era, the
19th-century novel, the African-American middle
class, and academia. The collections of essays
Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), God Made
Alaska for the Indians (1982), Writin’ Is Fightin’
(1988), and Airing Dirty Laundry (1993) all pro-
vide scholars with further examples of Reed’s in-
tellect, creativity, and cultural examinations. While
there has not been much scholarly consideration
of Reed’s poetry, it has been critically successful.
The New and Collected Poems were published in- Reed’s three plays, Mother Hubbard, Savage
Wilds, and Hubba City, have not been published,
though they have had notable readings.
Reed’s significant contributions to African-
American literature are evidenced by the longevity
and productivity of his career and by the numer-
ous awards he has won. Besides the nominations
for the National Book Awards, Conjure was also
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1979, Reed
won the Pushcart Prize for poetry. He has also won
the Poetry in Public Places Award and the Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Award. He has been honored
with a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award
and a Guggenheim Foundation Award for fiction
in 1974. However, his influential place in the Af-
rican American Literary tradition was solidified
by two awards in the 1990s: the Langston Hughes
Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1994 and the
prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (the “Genius”
award) in 1998. A truer testament to Reed’s place
in American letters may be that his work never
ceases to inflame, inspire, or educate.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Matthew R. “ ‘Strange, History, Complicated,
Too’: Ishmael Reed’s Use of African-American
History in Flight to Canada.” Mississippi Quarterly
49, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 734–744.
Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations
with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1995.
Fabre, Michel. “Postmodernist Rhetoric in Ishmael
Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down.” In The
Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter434 Reed, Ishmael