Ishmael Reed believes that the capricious tastes of white readers have made Black literature appear to be a revolving door of transient stars. “Our writers can’t be permanent,” he says, like Hemingway and Faulkner.
. White publishing’s anticipation fell on him like the Eye of Sauron. “I could have become Basquiat,” he told me—a casualty of early stardom. So in 1967, at twenty-nine years old, Reed left for California with his then girlfriend, Carla Blank.
Blank read aloud from a review of “The Slave Who Loved Caviar” as Reed listened to CNN’s coverage of the Derek Chauvin trial on his smartphone. “Carla resurrected my faith in myself as a writer,” Reed later told me. “She was the only one who really believed in me.” Blank—a dancer, educator, author, director, and choreographer—attributed the longevity of their marriage to an ability to leave each other alone: “We’re both artists.
There are few writers with more to say about the American media. Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, Reed and Rome Neal, his longtime director at the Nuyorican, staged “.” The farce hinges on a white-supremacist conspiracy to assemble a million-man assault on Washington, where a Jewish President and a Black woman F.B.I. director are in office following the ouster of a golf-playing demagogue, President P. P. Spanky.
Reed is used to being dismissed as a bitter old crank for such comments, but he insists that they’re made in defense of a tradition. “The problem with tokenism, which I’ve opposed—and I’m a token, so I know how it goes—is that it overshadows all the writers of a generation,” he says. He’s always ready with a list of Black novelists who have been denied recognition commensurate with their achievements: it includes Chester Himes, John O. Killens, William Demby, John A.
Shortly before we finished our curries, our interview was interrupted once again, this time by an older man in a reflective safety vest who recognized Reed’s voice from a brief acquaintance decades ago at Berkeley. “Ishmael Reed!” he cried, clapping his hands and spinning in place. “You wrote those books!”
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