The strongest point of Reed’s Neo-HooDooism consists in parodying literary and historical conventions through his technique of making us contemporary with a multitude of texts and contexts that are rewritten in his fiction.⁴ Reed’s highly acclaimed novels—The Freelance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Last Days of Louisiana Reed (1974), Flight to Canada (1976), The Terrible Twos (1982), Reckless Eyeballing (1986), The Terrible Threes (1989), Japanese by Spring (1993)—are part of a postmodern venture of deconstructing political, economic, religious, and racial realms. Interpreting these novels, we escape from the straitjacket of a single literary or historic source of inspiration, and, by delving into a multifaceted past, we rethink the present.

Focused on Reed’s neo-slave narrative⁵ Flight to Canada, this chapter analyzes Reed’s reconfiguration of the African American identity by rewriting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853), and Alexandre Dumas’ Georges (1864). The novel also alludes to works by Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Walter Scott, George Santayana, and others. Placing his postmodern novel upon this culturally fertile soil, Reed indulges in a subversive exercise of uprooting standard meanings through a demythologizing endeavor of rethinking his black and white precursors.

It is the aim of this chapter to demonstrate how, by means of pastiche and satire, Reed’s historiographic metafiction recasts the slave history and character upon a new fictional screen, where facts are illuminated by insightful flash-backs and flash-forwards.⁶ The next section thus analyzes Reed’s (re)presentation of the standard version of real events (the Civil War, 1861-65) and standard portraits of real persons (Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Walt Whitman).

Taking into account this historical background, the following sections focus on Reed’s parody and reevaluation of two significant stereotypical images circulating in the epoch—the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto. On the one hand, Stowe’s Christ-like Uncle Tom finds his burlesque counterpart in Reed’s Uncle Robin—the one who “dabbles with his [master’s] will.” On the other hand, Stowe’s George Harris, the type of the resistant mulatto—to be also found in Brown’s and Dumas’ novels—is skillfully reconsidered by Reed. If nineteenth century authors insisted on self-made models of manhood, Reed’s postmodern writing proposes fiction-made characters, parasitically feeding on earlier texts. Ultimately, the haunting image of Canada, with its positive and negative undertones, is de-fetishized in relationship to the main characters’ (lack of) aspirations.

To gain authorial freedom, the author employs a hybrid technique: “a unique blend of the verbal and the visual, prosaic and poetic, old and new, fictive and factual, serious and satiric, African and American, traditional and popular” (Weixlmann 1991/92, 57). This textual mixture is not new, as Stowe, Douglass, and especially Brown ⁷ have infused into their work fragments from sermons, lectures, history books, songs, poems, letters, statistics, newspaper clips, and advertisements.⁸ Reed makes use of this eclectic genre in order to present polytropic figures that artfully subvert former representations of blackness. Liberated from essentialist views, his characters refuse to be labeled as “real” or “imaginary” and to be pinned down to a certain temporal or spatial dimension. A fetish-breaker, the author highlights the interplay between the factual and fictional to draw attention to the made-up aspects of black history and identity. Invoking Gates, Flight to Canada can be read in the same way as Mumbo Jumbo, as a “self-referential” novel that stresses its own rhetorical mechanisms, in order “to expose the nature of conventions and to insist on new and black structures of feeling” (Gates 1988, 219).