Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: During and after the American Civil War

Locale: Buffalo, New York; Virginia; and Canada

Principal Characters:

• Raven Quickskill, the black protagonist, a runaway slave, bookkeeper, lecturer, writer, and idealist
• Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, his Native American lover, a trapeze artist and dancer
• Arthur Swille, his master on the Swine’rd, a Virginia plantation
• Yankee Jack, Quaw Quaw’s husband, a pirate, investor in gold and real estate, and connoisseur of art and wines
• Uncle Robin, the Uncle Tom of the plantation
• Mammy Barracuda, the black mammy of the plantation
• Stray Leechfield, a runaway slave
• 40s, a runaway slave
• Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States

The Novel

Flight to Canada records the conflict between a slave, Raven Quickskill, and his master, Arthur Swille, yet the two are physically separated throughout. When the story begins in the early 1860’s, Raven has already escaped to Buffalo, New York, en route to Canada and freedom. Swille remains on the Virginia plantation orchestrating his capture, even after the Emancipation Proclamation. Though the bulk of the narrative follows a chronological line ending with Swille’s death and Raven’s return to the plantation, the opening chapter is the final scene. Raven is sitting in the dining hall of the castle, now owned by Uncle Robin (Uncle Tom), and is planning his next piece of writing, his version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a truthful account of America under slavery that gives Uncle Tom his due. Flight to Canada is the result and Raven Quickskill is Ishmael Reed.

Raven was already a writer before his escape. His “Flight to Canada,” a letter-poem addressed to Swille, describes his journey (by airplane) and closes with the admission that he poisoned Swille’s bourbon before he left. The poem was to gain for him the two hundred dollars that he would need to cross the border into Canada, but it would also make him famous and easy to locate by Swille’s Nebraska tracers. Before he learns where Raven is, Swille has already begun to use his influence, as the most powerful man in the United States, to get his slave back. When Abraham Lincoln visits him to borrow money for the war effort, he leaves Swille with the impression that he will, in exchange, maintain slavery after the war. (During the visit, a soldier fortuitously shoots the poisonous bottle of bourbon from Swille’s hand.) Following the visit, Lincoln has the sudden inspiration that slavery is the issue that will win the war and prepares the Emancipation Proclamation. He returns the gold to Swille, who, feeling betrayed, sets in motion the assassination. Without Lincoln’s support and without any legal sanction, Swille nevertheless continues to search out Raven. After eluding the Nebraska tracers through a bathroom window, Raven elicits the support of two slaves who escaped with him, 40s and Stray Leechfield, but they have no interest in his ideological lecturing.

The second half of the novel continues to alternate between scenes in the North with Raven and scenes on the plantation with Swille. On the night before his departure for Canada, Raven meets his former lover, Princess Quaw Quaw, at a party. In a basement room, with the television tuned to a live telecast of Tom Tyler’s play at the Ford Theater, they make love. The scene ends with Lincoln’s assassination. Swille’s conspiracy has succeeded, and things look ominous for Raven. Back on the plantation, Swille is trying to maintain his Southern way of life. Mammy Barracuda is whipping Mrs. Swille into shape as the ideal Southern lady. Still, things are already beginning to fall apart. Swille’s past has caught up with him. Swille’s son, Mitchell, returns as a ghost to tell his mother that Swille not only was responsible for his death but also had donated his skull to the National Archives and declared it on his taxes as a charitable contribution. Then Swille’s sister returns from the grave to declare publicly their incestuous relationship. In her passionate rush to seize him, so the story goes, she shoves him into the fireplace and he burns to death. At the same moment, Raven and Quaw Quaw are boarding a yacht that will take them to freedom in Canada. The yacht, however, belongs not to a Quaker sympathizer but to Yankee Jack, Quaw Quaw’s husband. While Raven and Yankee Jack are fighting it out, to prove their manhood, Quaw Quaw jumps overboard and swims to safety. After Yankee Jack and Raven come to an understanding of each other’s purposes, it is clear that the conflict has changed ground. No longer does Swille, the old aristocratic power broker, control the country—Yankee Jack the capitalist does. Raven has a new enemy. His freedom comes from the hand of the enemy as Yankee Jack sets him ashore in Canada.

Quaw Quaw soon joins Raven, tightrope-walking backward across Niagara Falls, but the two of them learn that Canada is worse than the United States, and Raven further learns that Quaw Quaw, “the Native American,” is as corruptible by American capitalism as anyone else. Raven is thus left alone, but he receives word from Uncle Robin that the latter is now in possession of Swille’s estate (Robin had written himself in as beneficiary in the will) and that he wishes Raven to return and write his story instead of Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the end, both Raven and Robin have begun to interpret freedom in a more realistic light.

The Characters

Flight to Canada is far from a conventional novel. The characters do not belong to a world resembling everyday reality. Their circumstances are too farcical and too improbable, the distortions of history too great, and the manipulation of every element of the fictional form to make a point too blatant for the characters to be convincing as human beings. Yet Reed animates his characters. By the end of the novel, one identifies with Raven Quickskill and Uncle Robin as survivors in a world that has lost its meaning. Raven is even close to being the protagonist in a Bildungsroman. The opening pages virtually identify him with the author of the book, and the story itself traces his coming to awareness. When he leaves the plantation, he is a naïve idealist engaged in antislavery activities. He regards not only Arthur Swille but also Uncle Robin as his enemy. He believes that Canada is freedom, that the slaves who escape with him will join the cause, that Quaw Quaw, as a Native American, shares his civil rights crusade. One by one, events disabuse him of his illusions. Yet he does not become a cynic. He holds on to a belief in his inner identity—and in literature as the expression of it. His novel, including the story of Uncle Robin, exposes the giant villains of American society through the eyes of one who has suffered at their hands.

If Raven is the representation of the black writer who over the past one hundred years has discovered his role in American society, Uncle Robin is the Uncle Tom who has used subservience to obtain his independence and the property that was his due. What redeems Uncle Robin is not his cleverness, though Reed respects it, but his willingness to learn and to change. He decides to use his property not for his personal comfort but for the encouragement of black culture. The castle becomes a location for “craftsmen from all over the South: blacksmiths, teachers, sculptors, writers.” What is more, Robin extends his own “connaissance” by traveling to the “Ashanti Holy Land.” Recognition of African origins and African religion is an essential part of Reed’s message.

Reed’s wit breathes life into other characters as well. Arthur Swille as evil preserver of the slave mentality entices readers with his devilishness, especially in the scene with Lincoln: Swille is the epitome of aristocratic contempt for humble origins, the masses, moral principle, and selfless motives. He is Mephistopheles. Reed makes Swille an engaging personality because such single-mindedness in the wielding of power fascinates, or, as Reed would say, the con man always has an audience in America. Reed’s judgment of Swille is clear, however, when the daimones of his son and sister return to avenge their deaths. Lincoln, too, though more of a background figure than Swille, has a convincing reality. He is not the Lincoln one knows from myth, or even from history, but a totally practical politician motivated by political expediency. He chooses to emancipate the slave because the idea is politically sound; it will attract support to the Northern cause. Lincoln exhibits his own cleverness in the dialogue with Swille, and in fact wins the confrontation. The Emancipation Proclamation itself is an inspiration that derives not from Lincoln’s moral principles but rather, Reed suggests, from pragmatic political considerations.

Other characters fill out the sociopolitical scene. Yankee Jack, as amoral as Swille, represents the new order of capitalist society. More tolerant than Swille, he is perfectly willing to admit to Raven his methods and motives because he is certain that Raven will have no real power to oppose him. He invites Raven to join him and engages him in physical combat to assert his superiority, but when Raven rejects him, he voluntarily sets Raven ashore in Canada. Princess Quaw Quaw embodies the romantic dream of innocence, pure love, art for its own sake, and the nobility of primitive American life: She is the Native American. Nevertheless, her real nature emerges when she sacrifices her integrity to the god of commercialism. Mammy Barracuda as the traditional Southern mammy never appears as anything other that what she is, a sadistic enforcer of the Southern white mentality. The two slaves who escape with Raven reflect inadequate responses to white oppression: Stray Leechfield’s acceptance of a masochistic role in pornographic pictures and 40s’ confused linking of militancy and withdrawal. Such characterizations are, then, not what one might expect or even accept at first glance, but they are appropriate in the novel that Reed creates: a satire on American (Western) culture.

Critical Context

Flight to Canada has motifs that appear in various forms in all of Reed’s novels. Here, Reed demythologizes a past that has been prejudicial to blacks: the Civil War and the book that allegedly caused it, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed exposes two different sides of Christianity, and in The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), he exposes the myth of corporate America. As in the other novels, Reed not only debunks what we are, in his eyes, jaded legends, but also tries to create new myths, new perspectives on history, character, and race. There are no untarnished heroes, white or black.

Flight to Canada is also another attempt at the Bildungsroman (earlier examples are The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 1967, and Mumbo Jumbo). The thematic reason for favoring the genre is clear: Reed’s message is the need for awareness, for education. While Reed puts his character through a series of adventures that corrupt him or that educate him in non-Western perspectives, he is shocking the reader into those perspectives as well. The protagonist may be Reed himself coming to awareness. PaPa LaBas in Mumbo Jumbo resembles Reed the teacher and lecturer; Raven Quickskill is a writer finding his way through years of black history in America. As highly individual as Reed is in his approach to the novel form, the wisdom he teaches is that of other black writers; Alice Walker, too (in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 1970), locates wisdom in a two-headed fortune-teller and in a transformed Grange Copeland: They live in one culture but judge it through the eyes of another.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Although brief and largely introductory in nature, Bell’s discussion is valuable both for its overview of Reed’s career and aesthetic and for its situating of Reed’s work within the tradition of the African American novel.

Cote, Jean-Fracois. “The North American Novel in the United States: Ishmael Reed’s Canada.” Canadian Review of American Studies 26 (Autumn, 1996): 469-480. Cote examines novels written by authors from the United States and explores how their works reflect North American social identity. He offers examples of North American novels, as well as an in-depth analysis of Reed’s Flight to Canada. He interprets the history of the novel and discusses the literary hegemony of the United States over the rest of North America.

Davis, Matthew R. “ Strange History. Complicated, Too.’: Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada.” Mississippi Quarterly 49 (Fall, 1996): 744-755. Davis discusses Reed’s “blend of anachronistic history” as reflected in Flight to Canada. He examines how Reed’s work is theorized, offers a description of his style of writing, and examines his characterization of history.

Dick, Bruce, ed. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Features a wide range of critical opinion concerning Reed’s writings, including Flight to Canada. A detailed introduction surveys the response to Reed’s works, a chronology lists the major events in his life and career, and a bibliography suggests books for further reading.

Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. The fiction of Baraka, Reed, and Delany proves that historically informed and historically relevant postmodern fiction is possible. Reed, the most “spontaneous” and “brazen” of the three, deconstructs the black literary tradition and reasserts the folk aesthetic upon which that tradition is founded.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Although it deals with Mumbo Jumbo rather than Flight to Canada, Gates’s discussion, a revision of his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987), is important for its analysis of Reed’s art of pastiche and its relation to both the Eurocentric and African American literary traditions. Gates also discusses Reed’s sense of blackness as an arbitrary signifier rather than a transcendental signified, that is, as a rhetorical construction rather than an essential quality.

McConnell, Frank. “Ishmael Reed’s Fiction: Do HooDoo Is Put on America.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Discusses the relation of Reed’s HooDoo aesthetic to the monologues of stand-up comics such as Lenny Bruce and, more especially, to “bop,” in which “the improvisational art of jazz becomes self-conscious.” McConnell treats all of Reed’s first five novels. In Flight to Canada, Reed “has passed beyond the idea of HooDoo … or, rather, has assimilated that idea into a larger and more capacious aesthetics and politics of national liberation and rebirth.

McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. McGee examines Reed’s fiction from the point of view of gender and race theory. He asserts that Reed’s novels should be understood as critiques of racial ideology, and examines Reed’s fiction as a response to the disparities of postmodern and postcolonial history.

Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Provides a detailed analysis of the “New Black Aesthetic” and Reed’s “battle” with it and its proponents. Martin analyzes Reed’s syncretic and synchronic fiction, poetry, and essays in the context of and as an advance on the New Black Aesthetic. His discussion of Flight to Canada emphasizes Reed’s use of the HooDoo concept of time.

Nazareth, Peter. “Heading Them Off at the Pass: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4 (Summer, 1984): 208-226. Focusing on Flight to Canada, Nazareth contends in this wide-ranging discussion that “the difficulty for [a critic] is that Reed always has a hundred things going on at the same time while the critic goes in a straight line, pursuing one lead.”

Settle, Elizabeth A., and Thomas A. Settle. Ishmael Reed: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. A comprehensive and well-annotated, indeed, indispensable, guide to works by and about Reed through 1980.

Singh, Amritjit, and Bruce Dick, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1995. A series of interviews with Reed that cover his life, career, and reasons for writing. Reed discusses several of his works in detail.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Reads Flight to Canada “against and with” Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an “iconoclastic reinvention” that “wants to speak both for itself and against something else.” Reading semiotically, Spillers reads Flight to Canada not as a rewriting of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but instead in terms of Reed’s imitating various discursive and interpretive strategies.

Weixlmann, Joe. “Ishmael Reed’s Raven.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4 (Summer, 1984): 205-208. Discusses the Tlingit legend of the raven (both a creator and a trickster) and the way Reed plays that legend against Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”