As George was of small stature, and both were white, there was no difficulty in his passing out without detection; and as she usually left the cell weeping, with handkerchief in hand, and sometimes at her face, he had only to adopt this mode and his escape was safe (84).

Moreover, disguise functions in Dumas’ Georges, where the title hero is a free, rich mulatto who returns to his native land, the Island Mauritius. After educating both his mind and his body, Georges’ lifetime ambition is to gain spiritual freedom and get rid of the prejudice that mulattos are inferior. His fight with a white man, his love for a white woman, his serene attitude in the face of death, and finally his bold escape are meant to draw the portrait of a heroic mulatto:

Forced by circumstances, Georges was facing that prejudice which, after travelling for so long, he had returned home to abolish; and here he was ready to fight, on death and life, for his own victory and that of his fellow beings (218).

Besides the technique of disguise, literacy also becomes a source of freedom in Stowe’s, Brown’s, and Dumas’ novels. Stowe sketches in the brightest colors George’s portrait—an inventor whose unusual intellect and dignity make his master “feel an uneasy consciousness of inferiority” (18). Brown also pictures George as an educated man, whose courage matches his brilliant mind, able to lead the black insurgents and destroy an abominable system. In his turn, Dumas pictures Georges as a fine character who educates his intellect and strength in order to become the leader of his black people and achieve his emancipating goal.

Like the above nineteenth century authors, Reed uses both disguise and literacy as key elements in Raven Quickskill’s liberation. In the case of the postmodern hero, his education serves as his major disguise. Intertextually, Raven’s livresque identity parasitically feeds on Stowe’s, Brown’s, and Dumas’ heroes and their quest for literacy and freedom. The nineteenth century George turns into a mask—a role enacted by Raven in a double play of mimicry and mockery. If earlier authors insisted on the connection between freedom and writing, Reed lays stress upon the relationship between freedom and rewriting. If the nineteenth century George is a Franklinesque self-made man, Reed’s Raven is a Borgesian fiction-made character whose constructed identity is a collage of texts.

High on rhetoric, low on action, Raven’s fictitious character is prompted by his words and his writings symbolize “his bows and arrows” (88). Like the nineteenth century heroes, Raven is a cultivated slave whose access to literacy initiates his escape. Literacy—“the most powerful thing in the pre-technological pre-post-rational age”—is compared by Swille to the old Voodoo, since both of them are liberating rituals (35). Empowered by his literacy, Raven “fools around” with his master’s books and invoices, and forges papers for himself and his friends, 40s, and Stray Leechfield. As in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Raven writes a poem about his liberation in order to mislead his master and made him believe that he has already run away to the North.

In Swille’s house, Raven plays the paradoxical role of an erudite slave, being the bookkeeper to whom his master entrusts his property and benefiting from the rights ascribed to a white man. Hence, Swille’s bewilderment: “Quickskill, I’ll never be able to figure out. Why, he ate in the house and was my trusted bookkeeper. I allowed him to turn the piano pages when we had performers in the parlor, even let him wear a white wig—and he’d give all of this up” (19). Raven’s unwillingness to play the role of a white man echoes the former texts. Stowe’s, Brown’s, and Dumas’ mulattos are exemplary models of gentlemanliness who can pass for white, but finally refuse the privileges of their white ancestry in order to choose their black belonging. In the same way, Raven refuses to be a simple puppet in his master’s hands. While pretending to perform his role seriously, just like Uncle Robin, he subversively “dabbles” with his master’s will.

Significantly, Raven is not the only pretender. Leechfield and 40s are two other instances of runaway slaves, who adopt two different types of identity in order to escape supervision. For Leechfield, business is a key issue: after selling his master’s poultry, he starts selling his own body. Together with his Jewish associate, Leer, he makes money in the pornography industry, by exploiting the prejudice about the excessive nature of black sexuality. He paradoxically wants to buy his freedom with the money obtained from selling his body. Unlike Raven who idealistically wants to change the whole system that considers him property, Leechfield is conscious that “this is a white man’s country” and understands the economic reasons behind his enslavement (74).

While Leechfield maintains his freedom through visibility (by taking pictures of himself and selling them), 40s maintains his freedom through invisibility (by hiding in “a houseboat down the river” (76)). Like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, 40s has his own hole, where he prepares for camouflaged fight. Without having a proper name, 40s is a belligerent protagonist who directs us to the troubled period of the 1840s, a time that prefigures the Civil War: the slave revolts abroad the ships Amistad and Creole (in 1839 and 1841), the struggle of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison (who started publishing his newspaper the Liberator in 1831), and Frederick Douglass (who published his first autobiography in 1845, and the newspaper The North Star in 1848). In his angry manner, 40s criticizes both Leechfield’s pragmatism and Raven’s idealism, while advocating the necessity of political action for the black people: “Cause them niggers don’t wont no organization. You have an organization, they be fighting over which one gone head it; they be fighting about who gone have the money” (79).

Parts of a triangle, Raven, Leechfield, and 40s appear as three versions of a multi-faceted character. Whereas Leechfield plays by the rules of the white system and 40s chooses to defy them through camouflaged fight, Raven’s middle position makes him both a pretender and a fighter. Hence, Raven’s repeated escapes to the North are part of Reed’s postmodern awareness of the impossibility of representing history in fiction in a single way. Once more, Flight to Canada is a distinct example of historiographic metafiction that evinces the fabricated nature of the narrated events.

Raven’s flight to Canada is orchestrated accordingly as a succession of escapes, each of them alluding to Stowe’s, Brown’s, and Dumas’ texts. Raven’s departure from Swille’s plantation derisively reenacts George Harris’ escaping from his cruel master and also his travelling incognito. Then, Raven’s outwitting of the Nebraska tracers (the detectives hired by Swille to find Quickskill and bring him back to the plantation) and his hurried escape through the bathroom window reiterate George’s outwitting of the slave-catchers in Brown’s novel (where George is helped by a farmer to run away through a secret way). Last but not least, Raven’s passage by boat to Canada more or less consciously mimics Dumas’ heroic fight, where Georges and his family aboard Jacques’ ship passionately fight with an English frigate.

Quickskill’s passage aboard Yankee Jack’s yacht parodies the nineteenth century heroism, in the sense that there is not so much fighting as acting, not so much a single text, as an inter-text that rewrites the earlier narratives. In their transcontinental journey, Raven, Yankee Jack, and Quaw Quaw prototypically enact three versions of ethnic identity. If Raven stands as the representative of the free spirit, Yankee Jack is just the opposite: a black man who made his great fortune by enslaving his own people. The couple Raven-Jack finds its counterpart in Dumas’ two characters, the brothers Georges and Jacques. Jacques alias Jack is the pirate of human flesh, the one whose main business is to capture black people and sell them as slaves. Playing the benefactor, Yankee Jack is instead a “distributor” who enslaves not only people, but also people’s minds. He decides “which books, films, even what kind of cheese, no less, will reach the market” (146).⁴⁴