SOURCE: McConnell, Frank. “Ishmael Reed's Fiction: Da Hoodoo Is Put on America.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee, pp. 136-48. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980.

In the following essay, McConnell explores the concept of “HooDoo” as a controlling metaphor in Reed's fiction.

Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here).

—Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow

The history of American fiction is cluttered with talented black writers—Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, James Alan McPherson—who had to wait for their recognition until they were officially acknowledged, patted on the head, by an influential-enough member of the white literary establishment. Every twenty or so years, it seems, white America discovers with amazement and sighs...