314
PARTISAN REVIEW
Black literature is prophetic in
MumboJumbo,
not yet realized , and we leave
off in the modern period with this ancient necromancer still construing the
hopeful signs. Obviously the Hinckles remain, only now they teach courses in
Black Lit at the University of California , and to that extent Papa LaBas' s work
is not finished .
It
is also evident that it is not just the Hinckles and Kasavubus
who impede that work , who throw sauce into the Gumbo of the new con–
sciousness, the new style. Here Reed is constrained in determining responsi–
bility and forced back into the culture of the Black community itself, and
here , perhaps not so surprisingly, he begins to sound somewhat like George
Schuyler rumbling forth conservative diatribes in the
Pittsburgh Courier.
There has always been in Reed ' s fiction an involuted love/have relationship
with Black history and the types it has engendered in popular mythology and
literature. This revulsion is powerfully expressed in
Pallbearers ,
which
resembles Philip Roth's
Portnoy 's Complaint
in its vitriolic exposures of
domestic life. Unlike Roth , however , Reed has taken great pains in his subse–
quent fiction to create a constructive protagonist who embodies an intelligible
morality. When Alex Portnoy goes back to Israel to touch his racial roots , to be
renewed, he is instead stripped bare and rejected. Reed's Africa is a different
place, a distributed Africa alive in Haiti and expressed in New Orleans , an
Africa still powerful in its cures and spells. But in
The Last Days
Papa LaBas is
not all that convincing in his powers, not all that intelligible in his ' 'connais–
sance." For all of Reed's pregnant allusions, Gumbo seems more a business
than the Business.
Reed 's anti-moocherism is an attack not just on the Marxist cant of
radical politics, but on something deeper in the Black psyche-moocherism
itself, the slave's mentality. How does one break the sophistication of its hold
on the mind , break through the cycles of abject dependency and wild aggres–
sion moocherism creates? Ed Yellings, Minnie's entrepreneurial father, is
Reed 's exemplar and PapaLaBas 's protege. Clearly the fust step is to turn away
completely from the values of White America, a step that necessitates a
revaluation of the concept of work and a separation of oneself from the
regressive elements in the Black community. When Andy Brown and the
Kingfish are caught by Amos in the act of robbing his house , they expect him
to understand and excuse their criminality. Because , after all, they are all
Black and each knows that crime in Soulsville is a necessary way of life. Amos 's
rebuke is straightforward : "You Moochers always intimidating us, extorting
us because we're the same skin color ; even insects and animals have a higher
criterion than that for comradeship .
It
was just another protection racket, but
we ain't going to be your old man in the candy store any longer. I'm calling
the police ." Minnie 's ideological moocherism only rephrases the earlier forms
of mooching and results in the same debasement , the same waste of initiative .
