Gumbo Diplomacy

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED

by ISHMAEL REED 177 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In such original comic novels as The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down and Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed displayed powers of camouflage, mimicry and verbal play that drew praise from his peers--though very little cash from his publishers. As a black writer with a ticklish touch, Reed had to sit in the back of the literary omnibus until the white audience tired of having their heads whipped by the Cleavers and Joneses.

Yet Reed can hardly be accused of eye rolling and cakewalking for his supper. His angers and resentments are sheathed in intelligence, learning, scatological wit and showmanship. One thinks of Redd Foxx before he was San-fordized, or Philip Roth confronting his middle-class American Jewish background in ways that have been judged, perhaps too hastily, as self-hateful and tasteless. Likewise, many blacks may find themselves both amused and offended by The Last Days of Louisiana Red, a combination circus freak show, detective story, Negro Dead Sea Scroll and improvised black-studies program.

The novel owes its title partly to a blistering chili pepper sauce. It marks the return of an earlier Reed hero, Papa LaBas, the great black shamus. To white readers, he is soul's answer to Sherlock Holmes. To Reed, he is torchkeeper of "HooDoo," the 19th century AfroAmerican folk religion and business that dealt in magic cures, spells and charms.

With his "million-year-old Olmec Negro face," LaBas combines both art and religion with a down-home style that reaches back thousands of years to those silted-over times when the animism of black Africa was supposed to have seeped into Egypt.

In the novel Reed calls this savory cultural mess of lore and history "the Gumbo"--after the unique and varied Creole dish. But Reed's Gumbo is strongly metaphorical rather than explicitly edible, a sort of royal soul food manufactured at the Solid Gumbo Works by a black capitalist named Ed Yellings. The plot, full of violence, intrigue and high-speed travel, turns on whether the Gumbo Works will be controlled by LaBas' forces of good and healing magic (Gumbo can cure heroin addiction) or the perversion of the ancient mysteries led by the Louisiana Red Corp. and its sinister head, Blue Coal.

Hootchy-Kootcher. The Red menace finds unwitting allies among "the Moochers," a category into which Reed consigns all those he regards as black opportunists--Ed Yellings' own son, for instance, Street Yellings, a violent militant who has a rape clinic named after him. There is also Ed's daughter Minnie the Moocher ("a lowdown hootchy-kootcher," according to Cab Calloway), whose entourage is a group of Amazonian bodyguards known as the Daho-meyan Softball Team.

Reed spares precious few of his brothers and sisters. (He even offers a veiled suggestion that Angela Davis is the modern equivalent of the stern black mama figure trying to shape up her offspring in the absence of a father.) A minister named the Rev. Rookie is replaced by a Moog synthesizer; Maxwell Kasa-vubu, a button-down black literary critic, hallucinates that he is Richard Wright's illiterate murderer Bigger Thomas. Reed even brings back those veteran moochers from Amos 'n' Andy, the Kingfish and Andrew H. Brown, now trying to cash in on the street-corner Hindu racket. "Andy," says the Kingfish, "I think it's about time we went into the Karmel bizness."

Reed himself admits that he has more in common with Calvin Coolidge than with Dionysus. Bacchanalian plots and extended riffs of funky prose scarcely disguise the conservative folksiness within. Born in Chattanooga and raised in Buffalo, Reed had an early ambition to become a concert violinist. His writing talent surfaced at the University of Buffalo. One of his admirers is another musician-writer, the ranking wizard of experimental fiction, John Barth. After sampling the edges of New York literary life in the early '60s, Reed headed west to Berkeley where he teaches writing at the University of California and is a partner in a new publishing company that supports young talent.

He has obviously found the multicultural gumbo of California ideal for developing a fiction in which facts, academic speculations and just plain jive freely cohabit. The overall effect in Louisiana Red is thoroughly disarming. His approach to the novel is not unlike a Dixieland band's approach to music: a native American diversity that adds up to a unified style--authentic and endlessly fresh. -R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.