The devil's country home. That's what the South is. It's where the devil goes to rest after he's been about the world wearying the hunted and the haunted. This is the land of the hunted and haunted. This is where he comes. The devil sits on the porch of his plantation; He's dressed up like a gentleman and sitting on a white porch between some white columns.
Flight to Canada is the most difficult Ishmael Reed novel I have read. It's a satire of 19th century America, slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Civil War, and the planter elites of the antebellum South. The novel also pokes fun at the assumptions of many that slaves who escaped the South for the North or Canada suddenly lived in paradise. As Raven Quickskill, the black poet and protagonist of the novel finds out, Canada ain't all it's cracked up to be. He finds racism everywhere, North, South and Canada. Thus, the slave narrative never ends with escaping Southern slavery, but continues in lives of turmoil and struggle against white racism around the 19th century world. Canada is far from a noble, safe haven for black runaways. Now, this novel also shares many similarities to other Reed novels, such as Yellow Back Radio Broke Down in that technology from the 20th century is present in 1860s United States, such as television, film, helicopters, yachts, and other wonders of 20th century technology. So the novel has a lot of anachronisms as well as several literary, historical, and political references pertaining to abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate states, Captain Kidd, the usurpation of Native American lands, and William Wells Brown, a famous black abolitionist and writer. So this novel is very dense, and for those unfamiliar with the history and literary allusions, it may be too avant-garde for some.
A large part of the novel is dedicated to satirical looks at Southern planter aristocracy through the white planter, Arthur Swille, and the ineptness and desire to recreate feudal Europe with black slaves/serfs and romanticized gallantries. Reed also pokes fun at Abraham Lincoln and his reasons for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and his own extreme racism towards blacks. Of course Harriet Beecher Stowe and the suffragettes, who were quite racist and exploitative of black slavery, are also attacked. Swille's wife is a lazy, Southern belle suffragette who lives off her husband's slaves. Stowe, who got the idea for Uncle Tom's Cabin from black writer Josiah Henson's autobiography, only wrote the novel to purchase a nice home and silk, refusing to share some of her profits with the blacks who gave her the material necessary for her writings. So once again, whites, even abolitionist alllies, perpetuate racism and the dehumanization of African-Americans. Thus, in many ways this novel is a tribute to those forgotten black voices of abolition such as Josiah Henson and William Wells Brown, who wrote the first novel ever penned by an African-American.
Flight to Canada's portrayal of Native Americans is also worth mentioning. Quaw Quaw, educated at Columbia University paid for by her pirate husband, who killed her father and brother, represents the Native American whitewashed by Anglo-American values and civilization despite losing her own identity and family as a result. Reed also uses the stereotype of an Uncle Tom for Uncle Robin, who actually takes advantage of his privileged position to gradually poison Arthur Swille and change his will, leaving himself the Swille Castle and plantation after the Civil War. Indeed, as Uncle Robin himself notes near the novel's conclusion, he ultimately wins against Swille without direct confrontation whereas Nat Turner is dead and gone for his valiant effort. So the trickster motif in African-American literature is self-evident in Uncle Robin, who 'toms' for white folks but is the one ultimately playing a trick on them despite appearing servile.
I suppose the most meaningful messages from Flight to Canada is to not distort American history into portraying whites as saviors of black slaves, to recognize the agency of blacks in dismantling slavery as a social, political and economic system, and that freedom is ultimately a state of mind, not a geographic locale. It's a short novel whose multifaceted allusions sometimes escape me, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. Three stars out of five.
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