BOOKS
311
THE GUMBO THAT JES GREW
THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED.
By
Ishmael Reed. Random
House. $5.95 .
Ishmael Reed's first novel,
The Free -Lance Pallbearers,
hoo–
doo'd those sympathetic critics who instinctively praise the fust novels of
young Black writers. There was nothing to praise in
Pallbearers-no
privileged insights into negritude, no angry calls for social justice, no trade at
all on the racy material of Black experience . Instead Reed caricatured the
typical hero of the " Neo-Slave Narrative" and relentlessly parodied its
traditional rhetoric. What
is
it like to grow up in Soulsville? To make one's
way ftom Chattanooga to the grim projects on Buffalo's East Side and finally
into the "Now-here" world of New York City? Doopeyduk's ptogress
through the world of Hairy Sam is set forth in episodes as sharply delineated as
cartoon frames . Ralph Ellison's epiphanies are reduced to pratfalls, James
Baldwin's careful discriminations are heaved like pies at the reader, and
indeed the pieties of that exemplary fiction are turned one by one inside
out-reversed , ridiculed. The subject of
Pallbearers
is the monstrosity of
American life , but the full force of Reed 's ire falls upon the conventional
modes of telling the Black man 's role in that life . Doopeyduk's foolish
innocence in the novel, his resolute dedication to good grammatical English ,
the Nazarene Code, and Success, thus marks in large farcical letters the loss of
Reed's own innocence as a Black writer, his refusal to enter Afro-American
literature through the usual door.
Since that denial in 1967 , Reed has produced rwo books of poetry,
Conjure
and
Chattanooga,
and three affirmative novels :
Yellow Back Radio
Broke Down, Mumbo Jumbo ,
and
The Last Days ofLouisiana Red.
In this
fiction he has tried to do a number of difficult things at once and not always
succeeded. Too often the satirist and the mythmaker are at odds in his narra–
tive , and there are times , particularly in
The Last Days ,
his most recent novel ,
when this tension is ruinous . On such occasions , his free-flowing style breaks
down deplorably. "He then slaps her against the cheek ," we are told in
The
Last Days,
" and with his hands lifts her up and then gently rests her on him in
a fashion that his Dong shoots up all in her hot wet orifice and like a sneaky
SAM missile starts probing for them secret dark places . She starts convulsing
and trembling like a 3-point Richter-scale earthquake , her passion stemming
from a deep fault in her soul." This passage is knowingly purpled , of course,
written to dismiss jokingly Street's rape of the militant Amazon who captains
