Black Magic
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing BLACK MAGIC BY PEARL K. BELL Unlike most black writers today, whose novels and autobiographical testaments are firebombs meant to reduce susceptible white liberal readers to...
...You should hear them just the same...
...Puzzled but obedient, Faith embarks on her quest, armed with nothing other than a large supply of innocent courage...
...Just how's a li'l fox like you gonna find what ain't been seen since the beginning of our bondage...
...He is ultimately replaced by a Moog synthesizer...
...The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a lazy book, making do with crude cartoons in place of realized comic characters, with some feeble one-liners rather than a thoughtful, persuasive development of episodes...
...Maxwell Kasavubu, a "white"-mannered literature professor on loan to Berkeley from Columbia, who is writing the definitive study of Native Son, and whose "short stories cite all of the New York subway stops between the Brooklyn Ferry and Columbus Circle...
...Moochers ask you to share when they have nothing to share...
...Writers & Writing BLACK MAGIC BY PEARL K. BELL Unlike most black writers today, whose novels and autobiographical testaments are firebombs meant to reduce susceptible white liberal readers to guilty pulps, Ishmael Reed addresses himself basically to his own people...
...Faith Cross, "a brown-sugared soul sister," is the only child of Todd Cross, a rural Georgia fabulist who was lynched for his dreaming, and the bad-tempered Lavidia, who on her deathbed commands her 18-year-old daughter: "Girl, you get yourself a Good Thing...
...In Faith and the Good Thing, as in The Last Days of Louisiana Red, homiletics drown out fictional vitality, and the result is less art than sermon...
...But Faith, indomitable, goes off to Chicago...
...Moochers are people who, when they are to blame, say it's the other fellow's fault for bringing it up...
...I call this neo-hoodooism, a spur to originality...
...Unfortunately, he does not apply this conservative ethical severity sternly enough to his own effort...
...It's "an ugly age filled with disillusion, rife with conflictin' theories that bend and fold and mutilate men like a computer card to explain them completely and, through all that, deny their freedom to create...
...Reed's stand in favor of hard work and against mooching is certainly unexceptionable, but instead of giving it the narrative coherence it demands, he hands his message to us raw, in the flatly stated affirmations of LaBas...
...Johnson's novel, despite his wit, his intelligence and his sensitive ear, is more often boring than captivating, because all of its magic and conjuring and allegorical complexity is hopelessly chained to the "damned fool empiricist" sensibility of its author...
...Never for a moment are we tempted into "the willing suspension of disbelief" necessary for entering imaginatively and emotionally into an account of mysteries we do not believe in...
...Hoodoo magic, for both Reed and Johnson, is a metaphor for black integrity, a means of rediscovering the nurturing, and nonwhite, traditions in black experience and the untrammeled black imagination...
...Part shamus and part shaman, LaBas is the learned guardian of traditional Afro-American folk culture, which reaches back to ancient Egypt, and the invincible enemy of "Louisiana Red: insolence, sloppiness, attitude, sounds from the reptilian brain, dejection and nay-saying.'' When Reed, blazing with healthy disrespect for everything fashionably sacred, has finished trashing all the pretentious hypocrisies that threaten black life in America, he comes out squarely in favor of "Business, Occupation, Work...
...To free those contaminated by the Louisiana Red blight, Ed Yellings, "an american negro itinerant," develops the Solid Gumbo Works, a business that uses 19th-century hoodoo spells and charms to produce cures for cancer and heroin addiction, two conditions essential to the pernicious survival of Louisiana Red...
...Moochers don't return stuff they borrow...
...Robbed and raped within an hour of her arrival in the big city, she becomes a prostitute, protected and tormented by the garrulous, philosophic ghost of the man who originally robbed her, and started her on her way into the lower depths...
...T. Feeler, a hip professor at the university who teaches a popular course in "The Jaybird as an Omen in Afro-American Folklore...
...Moochers talk and don't do...
...The story, told in a high-spirited, jivey rhythm, deals with Ed Yellings' murder by bad Moochers in the grip of Louisiana Red, and the unraveling of the crime by LaBas, a hoodoo detective who has appeared in earlier Reed novels...
...Since the scene of Reed's free-swinging satire is Berkeley in the 1960s, an anti-Gumbo, unwittingly pro-Louisiana Red campaign is soon organized by Ed's rebellious daughter Minnie...
...As Reed said in a recent essay, "One has to return to what some writers would call 'dark heathenism' to find original tall tales...
...Instead of realizing the magical, the "conjured" life of his story dramatically, he manipulates the details of superstition and folklore with an intellectual's schematic hand...
...To conjure...
...A younger black author, Charles Johnson, has written his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing (Viking, 196 pp., $7.95), with the scrupulous dedication to style and structure that Reed mistakenly thinks he can get along without...
...A professional cartoonist who is also completing his doctorate in philosophy, Johnson is a formidably talented young man...
...Though he has tried to do too much in this book-touching on supernatural fantasy as well as satire, black folklore and superstition as well as realism-his ambition is on the whole more commendable than Reed's hit-or-miss flippancy...
...Though Moochers wrap themselves in the full T-shirt of their ideology, their only ideology is Mooching...
...In Reed's acid view, they are the kind of "oppressed people" who often "have their own boot on their own neck," and he picks off his gallery of main-chance scoundrels with a shrewd and sardonic eye...
...Through the kind of coincidence that Johnson explicitly uses to convey the unreality of a fairy tale, Faith eventually escapes her bourgeois "living death," and finds her way back to the true source of her being-the earth-mother sorceress in Georgia...
...She is head Moocher of the black movement known as Moochism, Reed's mordant net for capturing all the self-serving activists who mislead blacks and deflect them from the strength of their indigenous being and history...
...You was born in the winter of the Age of Reason," the Swamp Woman-Johnson's equivalent of Reed's hoodoo detective LaBas-blares at the "damn fool empiricist" Faith...
...Since Reed is obviously inventive, intelligent, scholarly, and sometimes brilliantly funny, one can only lament the fact that in this novel he has sacrificed his considerable gifts on the worthless altar of glib indolence...
...raucous Big Sally, who has a PhD in Black English...
...In his new (and fourth) novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (Random House, 177 pp., $5.95), Reed attacks the black opportunists who corrupt their brothers and sisters with Louisiana Red-not a hot sauce, but a fiery and lethal state of mind among blacks, "the way they related to one another, oppressed one another, maimed and murdered one another, carving one another while above their heads, 50,000 feet, billionaires flew in custom-made jet planes...
...Yet in the case of Charles Johnson-a sophisticated, highly cultivated man-this fascination with hoodoo unhappily leads him not only to speak out in a modishly antirational voice, but also to weaken the creative strength of his novel with a heavy burden of overtalkative intentions...
...Equally prominent on the Right and the Left, Moochers exploit ignorance, laziness and stupidity with empty, inflammatory, demagogic slogans...
...Among them are Ed's son Street, a murderer who "had his 'consciousness raised' in prison and was immediately granted asylum in an 'emerging African nation...
...There the secret of the Good Thing yields itself at last...
...The first lap of her amorphous pilgrimage takes her to the Swamp Woman, a "were witch" who lives in the bogs and tries her necromantic best to dissuade the naive Faith from pursuing an utterly hopeless dream...
...This impressed his colleagues who like many members of the northern California cultural establishment felt inferior to New Yorkers.' Bringing up the preposterous rear is the Reverend Rookie, of the Gross Christian Church, a very with-it minister who preaches "a powerful jumpy sermon replete with strobes, bongos and psychedelic paraphernalia...
...Still, the Good Thing lures her on, and in an unguarded moment she marries a spineless, witless journalist, entrapping herself in the superficial materialism of middle-class insecurity...
...Faith and the Good Thing is, on one level, a latter-day Arthurian legend, and if the magic doesn't really work, there are some charming moments along the way...
Vol. 57 • December 1974 • No. 25
