Reinventing the Slave Narrative: Ishmael Reed on Flight to Canada at 50

I was fourteen when my interest in history began. I placed third in Buffalo’s citywide Richmond Speaking Contest. All three of us winners received certificates for book purchases, and I bought a picture book about Stalin’s regime. I became so captivated by this book that when Stalin died, I tuned in to the funeral even though it was 3 AM EST.

When I was a student, we were taught European history. In our textbooks Blacks appeared happy with their condition under slavery. I recall illustrations of Blacks dancing to the fiddle. In these books, Africa was inhabited by ferocious animals and barely human men and women.

A friend of mine, the brightest kid in the projects, who by his early teens was reading William Faulkner, showed the extent of our indoctrination. He would repeat what we’d been taught by our schoolbooks and by films like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation. He said the Klan was justified in its actions because the Blacks elected during Reconstruction were incompetent. Even Shelby Foote, the heavily featured historian in Ken Burns’s The Civil War, was a defender of the Klan. He compared them to the French Resistance.

I was in my twenties when I read W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which proposed that Black legislators passed progressive legislation during Reconstruction and that it was a general strike among the slaves that ended slavery. This theory seems to square with the testimonies of white diarists like Mary Boykin Chesnut. Planters complained about work slowdowns or Blacks not working at all, or joining the Union as contraband.

Then as now, such information was unavailable to students in the lower grades as a perennial white supremacist curriculum denies such victories to the enslaved. When I saw Gone with the Wind, I rooted for the O’Haras. Having sided with the oppressors, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Cherokee scholar Geary Hobson took the side of the cowboys against the Indians. Hollywood’s leading men played Confederate killers like Jesse and Frank James who murdered citizens in Lawrence, Kansas. Their crime? “Stealing Negroes.” So entrancing is Hollywood, with its pro-Confederate films like Shane, that you find yourself supporting the Confederacy.

I was intellectually curious as a youngster and wanted to know which contributions Blacks had made to civilization besides those in sports and entertainment. This information was hard to come by. I couldn’t find the answers in textbooks or popular culture. I purchased Joel Augustus Rogers’s 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof. Rogers was a Jamaica-born journalist. I took the book to school. The teacher held it at arm’s length as though it were a dead cat. She dismissed the claims made by Rogers. He challenged what we were taught in school, where George Washington was depicted as a god, which is how he is shown in Constantino Brumidi’s painting “Apotheosis of Washington” in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. Rogers claimed George Washington sent an enslaved Negro to Barbados to be exchanged for a hogshead of molasses, a cask of rum, and “other good spirits.” Rogers was right about that and other facts. I didn’t have the intellectual footing to challenge my teachers then, some of whom were as ignorant of points of view rejected by the official establishment of historians as we were.

Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters, without a tradition of their own….Our generation rejected these influences.

With more female, Hispanic, Native American, Asian American, and Black historians entering the field, the situation is changing, yet these new historians face fierce resistance from politicians and best-selling historians as they introduce different points of view about the nation’s history. An example of how the Good Old Boy historians who praise sadists like Robert E. Lee are undergoing scrutiny can be found in a review of the late David McCullough’s The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, in which Joyce E. Chaplin disputed his claims. She writes, “McCullough plays down the violence that displaced the Indians, including the actual Ohio people. He adopts settlers’ prejudiced language about ‘savages’ and ‘wilderness,’ words that denied Indians’ humanity and active use of their land.” In my play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which challenged the musical Hamilton’s depiction of slave owner Alexander Hamilton as an “ardent abolitionist,” I merely staged the research conducted by four women historians.

Blacks were taught to revere such exterminators of Native Americans and slaveholders like Hamilton, who applauded a murderous vigilante raid on a Native American settlement as a victory over “savages.” Our teachers told us that we had no culture or traditions. When in high school we were asked to choose a country to represent for United Nations Day, none of the Black students chose an African nation. Our image of Africa was formed by popular culture. In their cartoons, even sophisticated magazines represented Africans as cannibals. Shockingly, so did Zora Neale Hurston.

I could have learned about Black history had I asked questions when working for publisher A. J. Smitherman. He was the first to publish my writing in his newspaper, The Empire Star. I was sixteen at the time, and my writing coach was Empire Star columnist Mary Cosby, an important figure in Black history, who died at the age of one hundred, and Toussaint Smitherman, who, in his middle age, was probably suffering from nightmares about a Tulsa mob entering his family’s house and looting their belongings during the race massacre of 1921.

I later learned that his family hid in the basement. Jealous of Smitherman’s prosperity, the mob burned down the house and Smitherman’s publishing company. Later, as Smitherman struggled to keep his weekly newspaper in Buffalo above water, there were hints of a past prosperity. The backyard was a dumping ground for paper and other debris. Among the waste paper, I found photographs of a younger Smitherman squatting before a truck that read The Tulsa Star. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of this and other photos. I spent long hours in the presence of Smitherman, who sometimes would fall asleep at the wheel when returning the newspapers from a suburban printing plant to his dingy office located on Broadway near St. Mary’s Church in Buffalo.

While living in New York, where I resided beginning in 1962, I learned that Smitherman was the hero of the 1921 Tulsa uprising against lynching. In his newspaper, The Tulsa Star, he fought editorially against the mob violence that victimized unarmed Blacks. Before that, he edited The Muskogee Star, founded in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which crusaded against whites receiving oil rights that belonged to Blacks and Native Americans. He didn’t talk about his past when I knew him in Buffalo, because the Oklahoma authorities were in pursuit. His newspaper’s editorials against lynching were seen as “inciting a riot,” a reference to the deaths of three hundred Blacks murdered in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. He and his family fled to Boston, which refused to extradite him to Oklahoma, and later they settled in Buffalo. I was proud when, many years later, in a speech commemorating the centennial of the Tulsa insurgency delivered on June 1, 2021, President Joe Biden cited Smitherman’s poem about the resistance of Black men against the would-be lynchers. Smitherman’s indictment had been dismissed in 2007, and he was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

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Though Smitherman published The Empire Star until his death, at one point, after I had worked there for about two years, he was unable to pay me, and so I quit. Shortly afterward, in 1955, the Black Michigan Avenue YMCA chose me as a delegate to attend an international YMCA convention in Paris. I was seventeen years old. There I met African students who were quite different from the image of Africa in our textbooks and the popular media. When I returned to Buffalo, I dropped out of high school. If they were lying about Africa, what else might they be lying about?

Later, after I dropped out of college, I returned to The Empire Star, by which time A. J. Smitherman had died and been succeeded by Joe Walker, who now served as editor. Joe was twenty-seven at the time. I was twenty-two and living in the projects with my first wife and our daughter, Timothy, who would write three novels before she died at sixty. I had missed out on getting an education from Smitherman, Cosby, and Toussaint Smitherman, whose namesake I was ignorant of. We were told that our route to success was to inculcate Anglo mainstream values.

Then, in 1962, I met Malcolm X, one of two geniuses I’ve encountered in my life. He had been an inmate in a prison where thousands of books were available, donated by a philanthropist. He must have read all of them. As part of our job as writers for The Empire Star, Joe Walker and I had a radio show on WUFO that I named the Buffalo Community Round Table. Our guest was Malcolm X, who was beginning to be noticed by the press. The program host on WUFO was Jimmy Lyons, a Black man who had overcome the barrier that prevented Black radio talent from displaying their talents.

Like the punk who confronted Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter, I said, “Of course, Mr. X would describe Black history as one that’s been distorted.” He said, “It’s cotton patch history.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time. Later, I learned that Malcolm X was referring to a history hidden from us: the long years of Black resistance and revolts. Malcolm X hired Empire Star editor Joe Walker to edit Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam.

I would later learn more about our real history—not the “cotton patch history”—in New York, where Irish American writer David Sharpe believed I should relocate if I wanted to become a writer. Sharpe believed that I had talent. Under Sharpe’s prodding, I went to New York City for a weekend, where we visited Chumley’s, a writers’ bar on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village.

There I met a patron, a screenwriter, who looked at a play I wrote titled “Ethan Booker,” about a clash between Muslims and Christians at a historically Black college. The screenwriter said it showed talent, and for a moment I saw my way into the city for good. Then the play was lost when the car that art critic Bart Farmer was driving to New York broke down. Bart abandoned the vehicle, along with my belongings, which included the play. I thought that the car only needed repairs, but for some reason it was never recovered. My second attempt to get to New York City was successful. Because a mentor, John Black, was an organizer for the 1199 Hospital Workers Union, I got a job at Mount Sinai Hospital.

A patient at Mount Sinai, George B. David, who was a cousin of Adolph Ochs, founder of The New York Times, invited me to work as his assistant in his home. Both David and I were Chattanoogans. He had a theater there called Dreamland. He paid more than what I was receiving from the hospital, but the job came to an end when his family decided that this was an extravagant sum and fired me. He gave me a glowing letter of recommendation to The Times’s personnel office. Using a nasty, sarcastic tone, the personnel director dismissed the letter and ridiculed George David. (Ten years later, my picture would make the front page of The New York Times Book Review.)

In New York during the 1960s, I had come under the influence of Black cultural nationalists like Askia Touré. Through the Umbra Workshop, I became better acquainted with Black history and culture. I also had contact with Black painters like Joe Overstreet, Algernon Miller, Gerald Jackson, Al Loving, Danny Johnson, Peter Bradley, Jack Whitten, Ellsworth Ausby, and white artists like Art Bevacqua and Walter Bowart. Walter and I founded The East Village Other, an underground newspaper which I named. I’d run into musicians like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Albert Ayler, a house guest. Jackie McLean admired a poem I dedicated to him. Max Roach called me “The Charlie Parker of American Fiction.” Tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan attended my poetry readings.

I joined the Umbra Workshop in 1963. Amiri Baraka said that the Black Arts Movement originated in the Umbra Workshop. We were from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Buffalo, Harlem, and New Orleans. We were in revolt against the Black imitators who preceded us. Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters, without a tradition of their own. They would proudly announce their influences from Faulkner, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James. Our generation rejected these influences. Larry Neal spoke for us in his manifesto titled “And Shine Swam On,” printed in Black Fire, an anthology edited by Neal and Amiri Baraka. “And Shine Swam On” is about a “toast” of unknown authorship, which arose from the grassroots and went through many versions. In 2025, I staged my version, The Shine Challenge, 2025, which ran at the Theater for the New City in New York. I expanded the thirty-three or so lines written by Langston Hughes into a two-act play.

When I arrived in New York, I found, besides the Umbra Workshop, poets, painters, and musicians advancing a culture that had been dismissed as vulgar by advocates of High Culture. (I remember sitting next to Dwight Macdonald at a reception hosted by the National Institute of Arts and Letters as he dismissed Miles Davis’s music.) I had written some absurdist pieces in Buffalo, including a short story called “Popcorn,” which I sent to my University of Buffalo professor, Myles Slatin, one of my allies when I was a student there. He never responded to it, and I hadn’t made a copy.

The reviewers might have been thrown off because my influences were not those white masters with whom they were familiar, but Black folklore.

But in New York, I found kindred spirits. Those comic books we traded when we were youngsters were now the subjects of painters whose works are exhibited in museums. East Village Other artists like Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb used cartoons to make trenchant social commentary. A long way from the Sunday funnies.

References to popular culture could be found in the works of New York poets, as when Frank O’Hara memorialized Lana Turner (“Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” in Lunch Poems). Writers felt challenged by musicians like Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and dancers such as Carla Blank and Meredith Monk, who were leaders of a second generation of Greenwich Village’s Judson Church avant-garde, and painters like Joe Overstreet. Realism was definitely out.

Inspired by these trends, I decided to write a series of novels that would parody traditional pop genres, such as the Gothic novel in The Free Lance Pallbearers; the Western in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a parody of “Yellow Backs,” the name of dime novels in which dudes from the East exaggerate the antics of cowboys); and Flight to Canada, my fifth novel, which was published in 1976.

Flight to Canada was a commercial failure, which led to Random House’s decision not to publish any more of my novels. My friend Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, killed an ad campaign that would have promoted my fourth novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, in which I parodied the crime novel, even though it was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and won the prestigious Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She hated Louisiana Red and shouted angrily at me about the book as I was exiting Random House one day. I had great affection for Toni, and we were friends until her death, but she just didn’t think that experimental literature was salable. Even Toni came under pressure from the sales department. And though she was classified by some white feminists as an “experimental writer,” she owes more to modernism.

Leaving Random House, I lost my editor, the legendary Anne Freedgood, who had championed my experimental novels. All the editors were under pressure from the sales department to acquire only books that could earn out their advances. St. Martin’s Press was the next stop, where I continued my genre-busting in The Terrible Twos (1982) by combining the Christmas novel with the Washington, D.C. novel. (Terrible Twos became the first of a series that has been a forty-year project and continues with The Terrible Fives, scheduled for publication in November 2026 by Baraka Books in Montreal.) I also published Reckless Eyeballing, my sixth novel, which skewered some of the hypocrisy and double standards of the Gloria Steinem and womanist factions of the feminist movement, which, according to Harriet Fraad, writing in Tikkun, co-opted a movement that began as working-class and racially integrated. The late editor Joyce Engelson said that Reckless Eyeballing would offend everybody. Still, she stood by the novel, and both Toni Morrison and playwright Adrienne Kennedy attended a book party hosted by my agent Barbara Lowenstein. Although white feminists led by Emily Toth planned a boycott of the book at Louisiana State University, it failed because none of the boycott planners had actually read the book, but were reacting to a hatchet job by The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani.

The reviewers might have been thrown off because my influences were not those white masters with whom they were familiar, but Black folklore. The characters in Reckless Eyeballing are based on those found in African animal tales. Ian Ball is a perfect match for Br’er Rabbit. The main influencers of Flight to Canada were also Black: Henry Bibb, who was born a slave to a Kentucky state senator and fought for years until he eventually won his freedom in 1841, and William Wells Brown, an abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery but escaped to the North in 1834. Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives me credit for reviving Brown’s reputation. My parody of Bibb’s letter to his “owner” William Gatewood was the origin of Flight to Canada. The following selection of Bibb’s letter is an excerpt from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

Henry Bibb’s Letter to William Gatewood

March 23, 1844

Dear Sir:—I am happy to inform you that you are not mistaken in the man whom you sold as property, and received pay for as such. But I thank God that I am not property now, but am regarded as a man like yourself, and although I live far north, I am enjoying a comfortable living by my own industry. If you should ever chance to be traveling this way, and will call on me, I will use you better than you did me while you held me as a slave. Think not that I have any malice against you, for the cruel treatment which you inflicted on me while I was in your power. As it was the custom of your country, to treat your fellow men as you did me and my little family, I can freely forgive you.

I wish to be remembered in love to my aged mother, and friends; please tell her that if we should never meet again in this life, my prayer shall be to God that we may meet in Heaven, where parting shall be no more.

You wish to be remembered to King and Jack. I am pleased, sir, to inform you that they are both here, well, and doing well. They are both living in Canada West. They are now the owners of better farms than the men who once owned them.

You may perhaps think hard of us for running away from slavery, but as to myself, I have but one apology to make for it, which is this; I have only to regret that I did not scare at an earlier period. I might have been free long before I was. I think it is very probable that I should have been a toiling slave on your property today if you had treated me differently.

To be compelled to stand by and see you whip and slash my wife without mercy, when I could afford her no protection, not even by offering myself to suffer the lash in her place, was more than I felt it to be the duty of a slave husband to endure, while the way was open to Canada. My infant child was also frequently flogged by Mrs. [William] Gatewood, for crying, until its skin was bruised literally purple. This kind of treatment was what drove me from home and family to seek a better home for them. But I am willing to forget the past. I should be pleased to hear from you again, on the reception of this and should also be very happy to correspond with you often, if it should be agreeable to yourself. I subscribe myself a friend to the oppressed, and Liberty forever.

Like conceptual artist David Hammons providing a statue with an overcoat, to begin Flight to Canada I applied a new coating on Bibb’s letter in the form of an epistolary poem. Using contemporary hip language instead of requesting reconciliation as the historical Bibb did, my character, Robin Quickskill, is not willing to forget the past. He seeks revenge. The recipient of my speaker’s letter is deceased because Robin has not only fooled the master but has poisoned him by mixing his Old Crow whiskey with rat poison. (Precisionist John A. Williams said I should have used strychnine.) Typical of the literary style of fugitives like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, there was an emphasis on eloquence in an effort to draw sympathizers from a literate white audience. (This was still the practice of some Black writers before the Black Arts revolt in the 1960s, when a younger generation followed the advice of Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and Larry Neal to find inspiration in folklore.)

I was also influenced by the kind of psychological theories that influenced fiction and Broadway and by critics like Leslie Fiedler during the 1950s. I sought to probe the underbelly of the polished veneer of the Victorian prose of Douglass and others. Did Robert E. Lee experience sexual pleasure when whipping two Black fugitives? Why did he instruct the overseer to apply brine to their wounds after whipping a man and his sister? Why did he order that they be stripped? Was Robert E. Lee a sadist? What are we to make of his remark that slaves needed “Painful discipline” in light of modern ways of examining the desires of humans? “Whips and chains are ornaments of subjection: political, physical, social, and psychological. They remain sexually charged objects today. Bondage has not only shed its taboo status as a sexual bent but has generated a thriving subculture of modern sexuality. The persistent attraction of these artifacts of slavery for authors of pornography is undeniable. The paddle, the whip, the collar, the handcuffs and ankle cuffs, reflect a preoccupation with dominance and submission that has chosen to embody the metaphor of master and slave. Today’s ‘equipment’ of sexual domination derives in part from America’s legacy of slavery.”

My stand-in for the Southern master race was Arthur Swille, who likes being whipped and who practices incest with his deceased sister. In Flight to Canada, I speculate that some of those who sympathized with the Southern cause did so because they were masochists or sadists. Lord Gladstone, who appears in Flight to Canada as a Confederate sympathizer, was a flagellant, which made the news after I wrote the book. Though some of the sexual perversions practiced by some of the characters were considered edgy, I learned later that I’d understated the treatment of Black women during this period. Southern white men forced Black women to undergo painful surgery to increase their own sexual pleasure. Surgeon J. Marion Sims was an American Dr. Mengele who perfected a technique to repair fistulas, which are holes between the vagina and the bladder or rectum and can lead to incontinence, by repeatedly conducting painful experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women without using anesthesia, with which he supplied white women.

Besides Henry Bibb, who inspired the poem which led to the novel, I was influenced by William Wells Brown’s play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, which was self-published by the author in 1858. Though William Wells Brown lived in Buffalo for nine years, I never heard any Black or white person mention his name while I lived there. No one mentioned that William Wells Brown was an antislavery lecturer. His employer was the American Anti-Slavery Society. We were not aware that poet James Monroe Whitfield, author of America and Other Poems, was also a resident. I and other Black students were ignorant of the National Negro Convention Movement (1830-1864), aka the Colored Conventions Movement, which had met in Buffalo in 1843. Indeed, I didn’t learn that Buffalo had been an antislavery center until after I moved away.

Because he was self-published, William Wells Brown was not under pressure to tone down his indictment against a heinous institution. His pen plays target practice against a situation which he found abhorrent but not without comedy in the form of Cato, a cynical enforcer working for Dr. Gaines, whom Cato despises. Dr. Gaines offers Melinda, a biracial slave, her freedom if she promises to be his kept sex slave. He has told his wife that he has sold Melinda, but in fact he’s hidden her in a cottage. Melinda resists Gaines:

“Sir, let me warn you that if you compass my ruin, a woman’s bitterest curse will be laid upon your head, with all the crushing, withering weight that my soul can impart to it; a curse that shall cling to you throughout the remainder of your wretched life; a curse that shall haunt you like a spectre in your dreams by night, and attend upon you by day; a curse, too, that shall embody itself in the ghastly form of the woman whose chastity you will have outraged.”

Gaines orders the overseer Scragg to punish Glen, Melinda’s husband. He and Moe, a white slave, resent “uppity” Blacks. His speech mirrors that of Huckleberry Finn’s father, Pap Finn, in Mark Twain’s novel. Scragg says,

“I tell you, doctor, that suits me to a charm. I’ve long wanted to whip that nigger. When your brother-in-law came here to board, and brought that boy with him, I felt bad to see a nigger dressed up in such fine clothes, and I wanted to whip him right off. I tell you, doctor, I had rather whip that nigger than go to heaven, any day,—that I had!”

Unlike Henry Bibb’s letter offering to forgive his former master, both Melinda and Glen fight back physically against their oppressors, Scragg and Mrs. Gaines. Glen and Melinda escape Dr. Gaines and make it to Canada. Along the way, with an acerbic wit, Brown mows down what he refers to as the South’s immorality. Mr. Wildmarsh, neighbor to Dr. Gaines, is having sex with his biracial daughter. Mr. Walker, with whom he is having a conversation, indicates such sexual arrangements between slave owners and their biracial daughters was common. Enslavers saw slaves as no different from livestock. Booker T. Washington said that for his white father there was no difference between his mother and a cow.

Flight to Canada also proposes that feudalism, which Europe had left back in the Middle Ages, had found a home in the South. Indeed D. W. Griffith described members of the slaveholding elite as knights and ladies. (I had drawn a collage for the cover of Flight to Canada that showed the enslaved picking cotton with a castle situated on a hill in the background, but the cover was rejected.) Mark Twain blames Sir Walter Scott for providing members of the Scots-Irish South with delusions of nobility. It was Sir Walter Scott who provided the Ku Klux Klan with a mythology. The Klan was also inspired by Goethe’s “Götz von Berlichingen,” a drama translated by Scott.

As Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” Though Mrs. Gaines is considered “white trash,” she becomes a lady who controls the lives of the slaves in her household. Susan, a slave, says,

“Well, chile, you can’t speck any ting else from ole missis. She come from down in Carlina, from ’mong de poor white trash. She doesn’t know any better. You can’t speck nothin’ more dan a jump from a frog. Missis says she is one of de akastocacy; but she ain’t no more of an akastocacy dan I is.”

Like many of the Southern white men during that period, Mrs. Gaines’s husband has his eyes on Melinda, a biracial slave whose husband Glen, a slave of a relative of Dr. Gaines, is seen as an obstacle to the rape of Melinda. Mrs. Gaines knows, as do many of the plantation mistresses, that he has love interests on the side. A dinner guest comments about how much the servants resemble Gaines. A similar comment was made about the help by a French visitor to Monticello, who observed that the servants resembled Jefferson. Though much has been made about Jefferson’s pursuit of his mistress Sally Hemings, another oral tradition casts him as promiscuous. Southern men saw Black women as not only fulfilling their labor needs but their sexual needs as well. (The privileged Northeastern white men left, right, and in-between who continue to monopolize commentary about the recent election missed the real reason for Kamala Harris’s defeat. Donald Trump reached back to the old stereotype of the promiscuous slave wench to defame the former vice president and to appeal to the millions of pathetic individuals who form the “manosphere.”)

My only regret is that neo-slave narratives—a category that I introduced—have become products.

In his letter to William Gatewood, Henry Bibb reveals that the slave mistress could wield the cowhide as furiously as the master. So does Mrs. Gaines, who punishes her “servant” Hannah and even dictates whom she could marry. Hannah’s love, Sam, has been sold. Though the slave master is the villain in popular culture, some white women also bought and exploited slaves. Slavery products, books, films, college courses, and so on are a huge industry, yet one of the more important books has received little notice. In They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, author Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers writes that slave-owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, but they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them. I doubt there will be a film version of this book. The usual defense of white women, such as Alexander Hamilton’s wife and sister-in-law, is that they didn’t know what was going on. Yet they grew up in their father’s Albany mansion, where slaves were brutalized.

There is an attempt to include Native American culture in the novel. Visiting a San Francisco school, I once found a picture book about the myths of the Tlingit tribe of southeastern Alaska. The myth of the Raven attracted my attention. I conveyed my interest to writer and publisher Robert Callahan, whose interest in Native American culture—his press was called Turtle Island—brought him into contact with Native American intellectuals. One of them was Andrew Hope III, a Tlingit leader and writer. My use of the Raven from Tlingit mythology in Flight to Canada, including naming the novel’s protagonist Raven Quickskill (the surname Quickskill came from a comment that a bystander once made when I debated an opponent; she said that my style was the quick kill), led to a number of trips to Alaska. Hope and I became friends and my partner, Carla, became close to his wife, the late Elizabeth Hope, also known as Sister Goodwin, of the Inupiaq tribe. Carla edited Sister Goodwin’s book of poetry, A Lagoon Is in My Backyard. The couple named their second son Ishmael Hope, and Carla and I were listed as honorary pallbearers at Andy’s funeral. In 1998 I was made an honorary member of the Tlingit Raven clan, and my inauguration at the potlatch ceremony required that I do a Halibut dance.

There is a vaudevillian relationship between Raven and an Indian woman named Qua Qua Tralaralara. This name came from a Vaudeville poster given to me by my students at the University of Buffalo. My father’s mother was a Cherokee woman whom my grandfather met in an Indian school in Tennessee. I don’t push this connection because the Cherokee were among the most racist of Native American tribes. Indeed, one of the most prominent of the slave revolts was against the Cherokee.

It’s ironic that Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, considered commercial failures at the time of their publication, continue to attract readers after fifty years. My only regret is that neo-slave narratives—a category that I introduced—have become products. This has led to disasters like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

A character named Ishmael Reed complains about this commercialization of the neo-slave narrative in my novel Conjugating Hindi, in which he points to a Wall Street Journal article about the possibility of slave products—books and films—becoming ripe for investors. Of course, the mainstream prefers that Black writers dwell on the past, not that books about the slavery period can’t be great. Margaret Walker’s Jubilee is a candidate for the Great American Novel, but it’s the present in which Blacks are catching hell, when those elected to office and unelected billionaires believe making Nazi salutes is fun.

The final irony is that the Black African descendants of those who sold Blacks into slavery are portraying Black American slaves in film, because traditional American-born Black actors are regarded as troublemakers by the film industry. One could say that these African families have been paid twice: they sold us into slavery, and now their descendants play the role of slaves in movies.

So, two books that were considered commercially dead at the time are still around fifty years later. Most of my novels are still available, the most recent of which have received few reviews in the United States, but have been reviewed in Africa, Europe, Japan, China, and India. I call this my global strategy because mainstream U.S. critics only tolerate one minority diva or divo at a time. I’ve seen divas and divos come and go while I’m still “Writin’ and Fightin.’” If it weren’t for the Black media in New York, along with the Nuyorican Poets Café theater and Theater for the New City communities, and my home base Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group, I couldn’t fill the seats at my plays. While these plays are ignored by the mainstream media, they receive solid backing from the Black media of New York. But, like the fugitive slaves, I have found a home for my recent novels and nonfiction works. They are published by Baraka Books, based in Montreal, Canada.

Judging from the careers of Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, my books that have sold poorly and been ignored by the mainstream media, which still offers a spot to one Black writer at a time, should also be around for another fifty years. They might even reach William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb’s record. Bibb’s letter to his “owner” was published in 1844 and is still anthologized. Brown’s play, The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom, was published in 1858. Though not performed during his lifetime, it was officially produced in 1971 at Emerson College, and in 2018 at the Columbia School for the Arts.

In this prophetic work, the abolitionist Mr. White implies that if whites were forced to choose between white supremacy and the Constitution, they would uphold supremacy and reject the Constitution. It was prophetic because Southern leaders, including generals who had once sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, abandoned their allegiance to it during the Civil War. It is prophetic again. The 2024 election and its aftermath shows that millions of white Americans still prefer white supremacy over the Constitution.

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From Flight to Canada (50th Anniversary Edition) by Ishmael Reed. Preface copyright © 2026. Available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.