My awakening to history began at fourteen. I earned third place at Buffalo’s Richmond Speaking Contest, citywide. The trio of winners walked away with certificates that could be exchanged for books, and I bought a picture book detailing Stalin’s regime. So engrossed was I that, upon Stalin’s death, I watched the funeral at 3 a.m. Eastern Time.
As a student, our instruction skewed toward Europe. In classrooms, Black people appeared content, even joyful, under bondage. I recall images of Black folks dancing to fiddles. In those texts, Africa was portrayed as a land of wild beasts and barely human beings.
A friend—the sharpest kid in the projects—who began reading William Faulkner in his teens, epitomized how deeply we were conditioned. He repeated the bias in our schoolbooks and in films like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation. He claimed the Klan’s actions were defensible because Black leaders during Reconstruction were incompetent. Even Shelby Foote, a prominent voice in Ken Burns’s The Civil War, argued in favor of the Klan, likening them to the French Resistance.
Only in my twenties did I encounter W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which contended that Black legislators advanced progressive reforms during Reconstruction and that emancipation was effectively halted by a mass slave uprising. This view aligns with the testimony of white diarists like Mary Boykin Chesnut. Planters blamed slowdowns at harvests, or Black workers who stopped work altogether or joined the Union as contraband.
For many years, such perspectives remained beyond the reach of students in earlier grades, as a persistent white-supremacist curriculum denied enslaved people any emblem of victory. When I first saw Gone with the Wind, I found myself rooting for the O’Haras. Having once stood with the oppressors, I wasn’t surprised to discover that Cherokee scholar Geary Hobson sided with the cowboys against Indigenous peoples. Hollywood’s leading men portrayed Confederate murderers like Jesse and Frank James, who killed civilians in Lawrence, Kansas, for what the movies called “Stealing Negroes.” Hollywood’s enduring romance with the Confederacy makes it easy to find yourself siding with the wrong side.
As a curious youth, I yearned to uncover Black contributions to civilization beyond sports and entertainment, but reliable information was scarce. I searched textbooks and popular culture in vain, so I bought Joel Augustus Rogers’s 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof. Rogers, a journalist born in Jamaica, brought the claim to my classroom; the teacher treated the book as if it were a dead animal and dismissed its assertions. He challenged the official version of history that cast George Washington as a god—an image reinforced in Constantino Brumidi’s painting “Apotheosis of Washington” in the Capitol Rotunda. Rogers asserted that Washington sent an enslaved Black person to Barbados for a hogshead of molasses, a cask of rum, and “other good spirits.” He was correct about that, among other things. I did not possess the intellectual scaffolding to contest our instructors at the time, some of whom remained as ignorant as the official canon they taught.
Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters, without a tradition of their own….Our generation rejected these influences.
As more women and people of Hispanic, Indigenous, Asian American, and Black heritage entered the field, a shift began, though the new historians often faced fierce resistance from politicians and renowned popular historians as they introduced fresh viewpoints about the nation’s past. An illustration of the critique faced by the old-guard historians who praised Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee appears in a review of the late David McCullough’s The Pioneers, where Joyce E. Chaplin contends that McCullough downplays the violence that displaced Indigenous peoples and employs settlers’ biased language—“savages” and “wilderness”—that deny Indigenous people their humanity and their use of land. In my play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, I simply staged research conducted by four women historians to challenge the musical Hamilton’s portrayal of slaveholder Alexander Hamilton as an “ardent abolitionist.”
Black students were taught to revere the men who eradicated Indigenous peoples and enslaved others, and our educators insisted that we had no culture or tradition. When high school students were asked to choose a country for United Nations Day, none of the Black students selected an African nation. Our notion of Africa grew out of popular culture, and even accomplished magazines reduced Africans to caricatures. Shockingly, Zora Neale Hurston himself participated in this misrepresentation.
I could have learned Black history if I had asked questions while working for publisher A. J. Smitherman. He was the first to publish my writing in The Empire Star, when I was sixteen. My writing coach was Mary Cosby, a respected Black historian who would die at one hundred, and Toussaint Smitherman, who, in middle age, may have wrestled with memories of the Tulsa massacre. I later learned that his family had hidden in a basement as a mob burned down their home and Smitherman’s publishing business. He later struggled to keep The Empire Star afloat in Buffalo, and hints of past prosperity lingered in the yard, where piles of papers and scrap lined a makeshift dumping ground. Among the debris, I found photographs of a younger Smitherman perched before a truck bearing the title The Tulsa Star. At that moment, I did not understand what those pictures signified. I spent long hours with Smitherman, who sometimes dozed behind the wheel while delivering newspapers from a suburban press to his modest office on Broadway near St. Mary’s Church in Buffalo.
When I moved to New York in 1962, I learned that Smitherman was the hero of the Tulsa race riot, writing editorials for The Tulsa Star that condemned mob violence against unarmed Black people. Earlier, he edited The Muskogee Star in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which campaigned against white control of oil wealth belonging to Black and Indigenous communities. He didn’t reveal his past while I knew him in Buffalo, as Oklahoma authorities pursued him. His newspaper’s editorials against lynching were branded as “incitement,” a reference to the 1921 massacre in Tulsa that killed hundreds of Black residents. He and his family fled to Boston and later settled in Buffalo. I was proud when, decades later, President Joe Biden cited Smitherman’s resistance in a centennial Tulsa speech, and when Smitherman’s indictment was dismissed in 2007; he was later inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame posthumously.
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Although Smitherman kept The Empire Star running until his death, there was a period when I worked there for about two years and he could not pay me, prompting my departure. In 1955, the Black YMCA in Michigan Avenue named me a delegate to a international YMCA gathering in Paris at seventeen. There I encountered African students who contradicted the Africa portrayed in textbooks and mass media. Returning to Buffalo, I left high school behind. After leaving college, I went back to The Empire Star, by then under new leadership with Joe Walker as editor. Smitherman had passed away, and Joe—twenty-seven at the time—carried on. I, at twenty-two, lived in the projects with my first wife and our daughter, Timothy, who would later author three novels before her life ended at sixty. I had missed out on receiving mentorship from Smitherman, Cosby, and Toussaint Smitherman, whose names I had not even known. The prevailing message was that success depended on adopting the Anglo mainstream values.
Then, in 1962, I encountered Malcolm X, one of the two true geniuses I’ve met. He had spent time in a penitentiary where thousands of books donated by a philanthropist filled the shelves; he seemed to have absorbed them all. As part of our Empire Star work, Joe Walker and I hosted a radio program on WUFO called the Buffalo Community Round Table. Our guest was Malcolm X, who was starting to attract media attention. The show’s host, Jimmy Lyons, a Black broadcaster who had overcome barriers to Black radio talent, introduced him.
Like a punk challenging Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter, I asserted that Malcolm X might describe Black history as distorted. He called it “cotton-patch history.” I did not grasp the meaning then, but I later understood that Malcolm was speaking of a history hidden from view—the long, persistent Black resistance and revolts. Malcolm X even engaged Empire Star editor Joe Walker to edit Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper.
My understanding of that deeper history expanded after a visit to New York, where Irish-American writer David Sharpe urged me to move there if I wished to write professionally. Sharpe believed I possessed real talent. He invited me to a weekend in the city, where we stopped at Chumley’s, a writers’ hangout on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village.
There I met a patron—an accomplished screenwriter—who read a play I’d written, Ethan Booker, about a clash between Muslims and Christians at a historically Black college. The screenwriter believed the script showed promise, and I briefly envisioned a permanent move to the city. That plan fell apart when the car Bart Farmer had driven to New York broke down—Bart abandoned the car and my possessions, including the play. I assumed the vehicle only needed repairs, but it never resurfaced. A second attempt to reach New York proved successful, thanks to a mentor, John Black, who organized for the 1199 Hospital Workers Union; through him I obtained a position at Mount Sinai Hospital.
A patient at Mount Sinai, George B. David—cousin of Adolph Ochs, founder of The New York Times—invited me to serve as his assistant in his home. We both hailed from Chattanooga. He owned a theater there, Dreamland, and paid more than my hospital earnings, but the job ended when his relatives deemed the salary extravagant and dismissed me. He offered a glowing letter of recommendation to Times personnel. The HR director received the letter with a caustic, mocking tone and dismissed it, even ridiculing David. (A decade later, my portrait would grace the front page of The New York Times Book Review.)
During the 1960s in New York, I encountered Black cultural nationalists such as Askia Touré. Through the Umbra Workshop, I deepened my knowledge of Black history and culture. I also formed connections with Black painters like Joe Overstreet, Algernon Miller, Gerald Jackson, Al Loving, Danny Johnson, Peter Bradley, Jack Whitten, Ellsworth Ausby, and with white artists such as Art Bevacqua and Walter Bowart. Walter and I co-founded The East Village Other, an underground newspaper I helped name. I met musicians like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Albert Ayler, who sometimes stayed as a guest in my circle. Jackie McLean praised a poem I dedicated to him, and Max Roach nicknamed me “The Charlie Parker of American Fiction.” Tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan attended my poetry readings.
I joined the Umbra Workshop in 1963. Amiri Baraka asserted that the Black Arts Movement began there. Our group drew people from Chattanooga, Buffalo, Harlem, New Orleans, and beyond, all in revolt against the imitators who had earlier appropriated Black culture. Mainstream critics continued to describe Black writers as if they were apprentices to white literary masters, proudly citingFaulkner, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and James. Our generation rejected those influences. Larry Neal articulated our stance in his manifesto “And Shine Swam On,” published in Black Fire. He described a grassroots “toast” of unknown authors, which evolved through multiple revisions. In 2025, I staged my own version, The Shine Challenge, 2025, at Theater for the New City in New York, expanding Langston Hughes’s thirty-some lines into a two-act play.
Arriving in New York, I found not only the Umbra Workshop but a community of poets, painters, and musicians advancing a culture long dismissed as vulgar by “High Culture” advocates. I recall sharing a table with Dwight Macdonald at a National Institute of Arts and Letters reception, where he dismissed Miles Davis’s music. I had penned some absurdist pieces in Buffalo, including a short story called “Popcorn,” which I sent to Myles Slatin, a professor at the University of Buffalo who supported me early on. He never replied, and I did not keep a copy of the piece.
The reviewers might have been thrown off because my influences were not those white masters with whom they were familiar, but Black folklore.
Yet in New York, I encountered kindred souls. The comic books we traded as youngsters became the subject of painters showcased in museums. East Village Other artists like Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb used cartoons to deliver pointed social critique—far from the lighthearted Sunday funnies.
References to pop culture appeared in the work of New York poets as well, such as Frank O’Hara’s tribute to Lana Turner (“Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” in Lunch Poems). Writers felt challenged by pioneers like Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and by performers who led the Judson Church’s avant-garde vanguard at Greenwich Village’s Judson Church, including dancers Carla Blank and Meredith Monk, and painters such as Joe Overstreet. Realism had fallen out of favor.
Motivated by these currents, I resolved to craft a cycle of novels that would spoof established pop genres: a Gothic tale in The Free Lance Pallbearers, a Western spoof in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a send-up of dime-novel “Yellow Backs” that fed the tall tales of cowboys), and Flight to Canada, my fifth novel, released in 1976.
Flight to Canada did not sell well, and Random House chose not to publish any more of my novels. My friend Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, halted a promotional push for my fourth novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, a crime-parody that had earned a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She despised Louisiana Red and spoke with me angrily about the book as I exited the building. I cherished Toni as a friend, but she judged experimental literature as unsellable. Even she faced pressure from the sales department. Some white feminists labeled her an “experimental writer,” though her roots lie more in modernism than in pure experimentation.
Leaving Random House cost me my editor, the legendary Anne Freedgood, who supported my experimental works. Editors everywhere were pressed by sales departments to push books that could recoup advances. St. Martin’s Press became my next home, where I pursued genre-bending with The Terrible Twos (1982), a hybrid Christmas novel set in Washington, D.C.—the first in a series that has stretched over forty years and continues with The Terrible Fives, slated for publication in November 2026 by Baraka Books in Montreal. I also released Reckless Eyeballing, my sixth novel, which skewered hypocrisy within Gloria Steinem’s faction of feminism and the womanist movement, which Harriet Fraad argued co-opted a working-class, racially integrated movement. The late editor Joyce Engelson warned that Reckless Eyeballing would offend everyone, yet she still stood by the work, and Toni Morrison and playwright Adrienne Kennedy attended a book party hosted by my agent Barbara Lowenstein. Although white feminists led by Emily Toth planned to boycott the book at Louisiana State University, that effort flopped because the boycott organizers hadn’t actually read the work—they were reacting to a misleading Times review by Michiko Kakutani.
The critics, perhaps, were unsettled by my sources of inspiration, which leaned on Black folklore rather than the canonical white masters they expected. The cast in Reckless Eyeballing draws on figures from African animal tales; Ian Ball corresponds to Br’er Rabbit. The principal influences on Flight to Canada were likewise Black: Henry Bibb, who escaped bondage after years of struggle in Kentucky, and William Wells Brown, a Black abolitionist and writer who had fled slavery in 1834. Henry Louis Gates Jr. credits me with reviving Brown’s reputation. My parody of Bibb’s letter to his master became the seed of Flight to Canada. The following is Bibb’s letter 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.
As a narrative technique, I opened Flight to Canada with Bibb’s letter retooled into an epistolary poem in a contemporary voice through my character Robin Quickskill—the missive’s target is the deceased master. A nod to conceptual artist David Hammons, I dressed Bibb’s letter in a modern epistolary frame. Yet Robin Quickskill refuses to forget the past and seeks vengeance, not reconciliation. Unlike Bibb’s historical aim, my speaker’s target is the late master, whom he has outwitted by lacing his Old Crow whiskey with rat poison (a notion that Precisionist John A. Williams suggested I should have used strychnine). The fugitives’ tradition, as seen in the works of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, emphasized eloquence designed to woo sympathetic white readers. Even before the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, some Black writers urged an internalized folklore for inspiration, following the guidance of Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and Larry Neal.
I also drew from psychological theories permeating literature and Broadway, and from critics like Leslie Fiedler in the 1950s. I questioned the refined veneer of Douglass’s Victorian prose. Did Robert E. Lee savor whipping two Black fugitives? Why did he have an overseer apply brine to their wounds after the whipping of a man and his sister? Why were they stripped? Was Lee a sadist? How should we interpret the assertion that slaves required “Painful discipline” in light of contemporary analyses of human desires? Whips and chains are depicted as symbols of domination—political, physical, social, and psychological. They endure as potent, almost erotic, emblems in modern depictions of slavery. The contemporary preoccupation with bondage traces back to America’s slave history.
Arthur Swille serves as a stand-in for a Southern master race who relishes punishment and even engages in incest with his deceased sister. In Flight to Canada, I speculated that some who aligned with the Confederacy did so out of masochistic or sadistic urges. Lord Gladstone appears as a Confederate sympathizer, a figure who becomes a notorious flagellant in the book’s aftermath. Some of the sexual taboos included in the narrative were controversial, yet I later recognized I had understated the mistreatment of Black women in that era. Dr. J. Marion Sims—often called a medical Mengele—developed procedures to repair fistulas by repeatedly performing painful surgeries on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, contrasting with the treatment of white women.
Apart from Henry Bibb, I drew on William Wells Brown’s play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, which Brown self-published in 1858. Although Brown lived in Buffalo for nine years, I never heard anyone discuss his name there, Black or white. No one mentioned that he was an antislavery lecturer affiliated with the American Anti-Slavery Society. I was unaware that James Monroe Whitfield, author of America and Other Poems, also lived in Buffalo, and I did not realize that the National Negro Convention Movement (the Colored Conventions Movement) had met in Buffalo in 1843. I did not discover Buffalo’s role as an antislavery hub until after I had left the city.
Because Brown wrote independently, he was free from pressure to temper his indictment of the institution. His play targets a scenario he found appalling yet imbued with humor—Cato, a cynical enforcer working for Dr. Gaines, who offers Melinda, a biracial enslaved woman, her freedom if she agrees to become his kept concubine. He has deceived his wife by hiding Melinda in a cottage, and Melinda resists Gaines’s designs. The drama unfolds with Melinda’s defiance and the couple Melinda and Glen escaping to Canada. Brown’s narrative cuts through the era’s immorality with a sharp wit, as elsewhere a white plantation neighbor’s daughter engages with her father’s sexual scandals. Some enslavers treated Black people as indistinguishable from livestock. Booker T. Washington would later describe a similar dynamic, noting that his white father saw his Black mother as no different from a cow.
Flight to Canada also argues that feudal systems survived in the South as European aristocracy, and D. W. Griffith’s depictions of the planter elite treated them as knights and ladies. I had crafted a cover collage for Flight to Canada showing enslaved people picking cotton with a castle in the distance, but the art was rejected. Mark Twain blamed Sir Walter Scott for supplying the South’s aristocratic fantasies; Scott’s influence, Twain argued, fed the Ku Klux Klan’s mythology. In Twain’s Life on the Mississippi he wrote that Scott helped create the Southern gentleman’s ranks and the reverence for caste; he argued Scott bore much responsibility for the prewar culture of the region. Mrs. Gaines, though described as “white trash,” becomes a mistress who wields power over the enslaved in her household. A visiting French guest at Monticello observed that the servants resembled Jefferson. While Jefferson is often noted for his liaison with Sally Hemings, another tradition suggests he was deeply promiscuous. The North’s white elites who dominate commentary on recent politics have missed the real issue: Kamala Harris’s defeat can be traced to the same old trope of the promiscuous enslaved woman, manipulated to defame a political opponent and appeal to the “manosphere.”
My only regret is that neo-slave narratives—a category that I introduced—have become products.
Henry Bibb’s letter reveals that a slave mistress could wield the whip just as fiercely as the master, a dynamic that Mrs. Gaines mirrors in dictating the fate of her enslaved servant Hannah and arranging marriages for her. Hannah’s beloved Sam has been sold. While the villain in many retellings is the master, some white women bought and exploited slaves as well. Slave-made goods—books, films, courses, and other products—constitute a vast industry, yet one of the most significant books in this field has largely been overlooked. In They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers shows how slaveholding women witnessed the brutalities of slavery, profited from them, and defended them. It’s unlikely to become a film, given the typical defense that such women “simply didn’t know better,” even though they grew up in households where slaves were brutalized.
There was also an attempt to integrate Native American culture into the novel. While visiting a San Francisco school, I found a picture book about the myths of the Tlingit people of Alaska. The Raven myth in particular drew my attention. I introduced this interest to Robert Callahan, a publisher who ran Turtle Island Press and who connected me with Native American intellectuals, including Andrew Hope III, a Tlingit leader and writer. Using the Raven from Tlingit mythology in Flight to Canada, including naming the protagonist Raven Quickskill (the surname’s “quick kill” origin comes from a bystander’s remark about my style), led to several trips to Alaska. Hope and I became friends, and my partner Carla formed a close bond with his wife, Elizabeth Hope—also known as Sister Goodwin—of the Inupiaq tribe. Carla edited Sister Goodwin’s poetry collection, A Lagoon Is in My Backyard. The couple’s son was named Ishmael Hope, and Carla and I were honored as pallbearers at Andy Hope’s funeral. In 1998 I received honorary membership in the Tlingit Raven clan, and joining the potlatch required a Halibut dance as part of the rites.
There is a vaudeville-like dynamic between Raven and an Indigenous woman named Qua Qua Tralaralara. That name came from a Vaudeville poster my students at the University of Buffalo gave me. My grandmother on my father’s side was Cherokee, a connection I do not emphasize because the Cherokee were among the most prejudiced Indigenous groups. Indeed, one of the most significant slave revolts involved against the Cherokee people.
It’s ironic that Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, once regarded as commercial failures, still attract readers after half a century. My only wish is that neo-slave narratives—an umbrella term I helped coin—haven’t become mere commodities. The phenomenon even shaped cinema, as Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained illustrates.
A character named Ishmael Reed in my novel Conjugating Hindi critiques the commodification of neo-slave narratives. He points to a Wall Street Journal piece that discusses the potential market for slave-era products—books and films—becoming attractive investments. Of course, the mainstream wants Black writers to dwell on the past rather than explore the full scope of slavery. Margaret Walker’s Jubilee is often cited as a candidate for the Great American Novel, but the present-day turmoil—where elected officials and billionaire elites celebrate Nazi slogans—reveals a harsher reality for Black people.
The ultimate irony is that the descendants of those who sold Black people into captivity now portray Black American slaves in film, benefiting from a system that still marginalizes Black actors. In short, two works once deemed commercially dead endure now—though most of my novels remain accessible, with recent attention largely outside the United States in Africa, Europe, Asia, and beyond. I describe this as my global strategy, because American critics tend to tolerate only one minority artist at a time. The print and stage works owe much to Black media in New York, the Nuyorican Poets Café, Theater for the New City, and Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group, which have kept audiences engaged when mainstream media would not. My later novels and nonfiction have found a home with Baraka Books, based in Montreal, Canada.
Looking at the trajectories of Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, the works that initially flopped may endure for decades more. They might even outsell Brown’s and Bibb’s legacies: Bibb’s letter to his master has appeared in anthologies since 1844, and Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom was published in 1858 and eventually performed in 1971 at Emerson College and in 2018 at the Columbia School of the Arts.
In the prophetic work, the abolitionist Mr. White imagines that if whites were forced to choose between white supremacy and the Constitution, they would uphold supremacy. The prophecy seems to have borne out, as Southern leaders—some who had sworn to defend the Constitution—turned away from it during the Civil War. The present moment likewise suggests that a significant portion of white America still clings to white supremacy over constitutional ideals.
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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.
