The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

Abstract

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Between the 1830s and the 1860s, African Americans published many slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Bibb (1849). But perhaps the most influential slave narrative during this period was that of a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Even as Black writers rediscovered their African and African American cultural and historical past during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, there were only two narratives or novels about slavery, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon (1931).1 Nor were any narratives/novels about slavery written by African Americans in the 1940s or the 1950s. But the absence of texts about slavery by African Americans does not mean the absence of the image of slavery and the enslaved African American before the American public. Within the institutions of the ideological state apparatus, such as the media and education, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin's influential and widespread construction of slavery was taught in high schools and colleges and was reproduced on television and in Holly-wood. There were many film adaptations of Stowe's novel, including nine from the silent era—especially Edwin S. Porter's 1903 twelve-minute film adaptation, in which Uncle Tom is "a childlike, unthinking, and happy slave" (hooks 2013, 99). Later there were Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Song of the South (1946), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947)—all dealing with the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. The mainstream literary establishment, educational institutions, and Hollywood successfully established Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and related films as the generalized truth about slavery. In the 1960s, things begin to change for African American writers and the representation of slavery. In 1962, William Melvin Kelley in A Different Drummer revisited and reconfigured the enslaved African, giving him subjectivity and agency. In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee, which is about her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1971, Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is about a one-hundred-year-old Black woman who was born in slavery and had [End Page 253] lived to see the beginnings of the civil rights movement. With these texts, along with John O'Killen's Slaves (1969), Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), J. California Cooper's In Search of Sale Factory (1994), Lorene Carey's The Price of the Child (1995), Lalita Tademy's Cane River (2000), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019), slavery returned to the center of African American literature. Why were African American writers again writing slave narratives or novels about slavery? Was it the stories about slavery that their grandparents had passed down, as in the case of Walker's Jubilee? Was the new emphasis on slavery a result of the 1960s, which created a generation of African Americans who had "assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, ha[d] freed themselves of it and w[ould] never be victims again" (Baldwin 1997, 20), or who, in critically examining their history, had psychologically broken away and freed themselves from white hegemonic narratives about slavery (embodied in Stowe) and, therefore, could revisit the issue of slavery from a different space, giving them an understanding of their own power and agency? Seemingly, the 1960s produced a generation of African American historians, scholars and writers who revisited, dusted off, interrogated, and critically studied and reclaimed African and African American history, cultural traditions, and belief systems that had been denigrated, appropriated, omitted, and/or excluded by Western reason. But unlike normative American society, this generation viewed this history and these...