The Free-Lance Pallbearers

by Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed's electrifying first novel zooms readers off to a land they have never heard of, a crazy, ominous kingdom called HARRY SAM--a never-never land so weirdly out-of-whack that only reality itself could be stranger. Venturing into this risky realm of a thousand contradictions is the quixotic Bukka Doopeyduk, a crusading, liberal fellow who is eager--if not always ready--to face the dangers of life. And dangers abound. Jousting and colliding with a macabre carousel of cops and beatniks, Elks and Black Muslims, he suffers a series of cockeyed misfortunes--maddening, saddening, and wildly uproarious. The Free-Lance Pallbearers fires a volley of savage torpedoes at the world's absurdities. Its rollicking language and blasphemous humor hide a merciless message.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, African American, 20th Century, Satire, American, Humor

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.

Reed has been described as one of the most controversial writers. While his work has often sought to represent neglected African and African-American perspectives, his energy and advocacy have centered more broadly on neglected peoples and perspectives irrespective of their cultural origins.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ishmael Reed is another unread unsung hero of American literature, relegated to a footnote in the canon for not being white and macho and writing about what happens behind closed doors in the wheatiest windiest nooks of the Midwest. His debut novel (this one) announces his important, original voice among the muscles and machismo. Reed’s language combines the free-wheeling rhythms of jazz and Beat poetry with erudite slapdown of Swift’s satire and Joyce’s tireless lexical invention. The first fifty pages of this cartwheeling absurdist satire electrify, dazzle, slapsmackbangwallop the reader with their hilarious, sui generis flightiness. This being a novel in the rollicking sixties language-as-music style, its absurdity has weary moments. But you’ve certainly never read writing like this before, unless you’ve read another Reed.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

(TORNADO REVIEW/CRACKER-ASS DOROTHY IN KANSAS EDITION!)

Reed deserves a helluva lot better than a flash-mob review, but I either read or review. I choose latterly. This is farce taken to its absolutely illogical extreme; doubtlessly indebted to Pynchon. Pynchie would return the compliment by means of a shout-out in Gravity's Rainbow. This, Reed's first, has much more commonality to Lot 49 than the one about banana missiles and a murderous cephalopod. But that, like Jesus, is just alright with me (The Byrds version, not the fucking Doobie Brothers; what do you take me for?)

Equal parts pastiche and call-to-attention (the arms would come later), The Free-Lance Pallbearers wears its subtext with intentionally transparent subtlety: Death to Whitey. Damn straight! This is a sentiment I'm sure we can all agree with at this late date. Right, you honkey bastards?

*

Tornado Notes: Did I mention that this whole novel takes place inside the body of a White man who has been taking a shit for 30-years in a maximum security bathroom located on an island protected by assassin trolls? 'Cause, yep, it does.

Ephemera: "No Vietnamese ever called me _______." Don't know it? Look it up.

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harry Sam does not love us. If he did, he'd come out of the John and hold us in his lap. We must walk down the street with them signs in our hands. We must throw back our heads and loosen our collars. We must bawl until he comes out of there and holds us like it was before the boogeyman came on the scene and everybody went to church and we gave each other pickle jars each day and nobody had acne nor bad breath and cancer was just the name of a sign.
The Harry Sam oaths

All is not well in the kingdom of HARRY SAM...

Bukka Doopeyduk is a young man on his way to becoming the first bacteriological warfare expert of the colored race. In his current job as "psychiatric technician," he empties utensils and moves some of our senior citizens into a room where prongs are attached to their heads and they bounce up and down on a cart and giggle. He's just gotten married to Fannie Mae and moved to a prime apartment in the projects. Suddenly, he finds himself afflicted with THE HOODOO, and everything turns to crap.

Bukka is now embroiled in the Rebellion, a mystery surrounding missing children, and the horrors of finding A CHINAMAN IN YOUR DUMBWAITER.

It's fairly obvious this novel is not set completely in "real life," though by the end, you'll see more similarities to today's world than you ever thought possible. Pretty prophetic for a book written in the sixties...or is it just a matter of same shit, different decade?

Vonnegut and Bizzaro fiction fans would probably find something to love in this book. These ramblings of an angry black man with a sense of humor certainly made me very happy.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acerbic maniacal vision of 60s America amok. In another novel, the zaniness might become off-putting, but here it seems just about spot-on. And that the frenzy of the prose and action managed to maintain for an entire book is pretty impressive in it own right.

I'm also confident that the old 1969 Bantam edition I found a Book Thug Nation has the best possible version of the cover art:

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

""Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here." --Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, page 588." --Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

[Zadignose]

Hot damn! Ishmael Reed goes all out in his debut novel, a wildly imaginative, paranoiac, outrageous farce--a nightmarish comedy--and he pulls it off amazingly well. It seems that hyperbolic madness is his forte, and he does best when his writing is unrestrained.

Of course, maybe as an author it would be difficult for him, or for anyone, to make an entire lifelong career out of writing in this style... probably no one wants to be entirely defined as a writer by his or her one, first book. So it seems some of his later writings that I've rubbed shoulders with have attempted to strike more of a compromise between outlandishness and our-world-ness. That is perhaps a fair choice for an author to make. Or, on the other hand, I may simply have been reading them wrong. But right now I'm enthralled to Reed's more fantastic side.

Anyway, good book!
----------------------
But I guess, in the above, I didn't actually talk about what the book is about. And perhaps it's my impediment that I tend to let a book be what it is. I don't mean to imply that the book is not about anything, however.

In simplest summary, this book tells us the world is a tripped out, fucked up place.

To add detail: People at the bottom got it hard, people at the top are corrupt, and everyone between is hypocritical, envious, covetous, and largely desperate. Nothing is what it seems. Nothing nor nobody can be trusted. Ideals, faith, and ideology are mainly for chumps... they function as a means of self-blinding. But we should probably still fight the man, or at least try to get a little bit of what's ours.

Oh, yeah, and watch out for the hoodoo, and goddamnit, clean up the kitchen, it's a mess.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Ishmael Reed reminded me of the first time I came across Barry Hannah. I had no idea what I was reading, but it was entertaining.

I read this as a satire and a what-the-fuck type hodgepodge of ramma-lamma-ding dong, but also read it as something I've never quite read before. I enjoyed it and will go for more.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reed's one of those writers that you don't hear people mention much when they're tallying up all the great iconoclastic, anti-what-have-you artists of the last century. Which is a shame, because he's one of the best: delirious, hilarious, and offensive all at once and he excels at all these qualities. He's also a welcome, refreshing blast of fuck-you to our culture at large, one of those guys who takes on pretty much everything, whether it's America (called HARRY SAM here, a Polish car dealer who sits on the toilet), various racist and black power movements (the core of the novel, really, mocking pretty much everyone who has political pretensions), or just our culture in general (with random citations and references to shit as disparate as Lawrence Welk and hippies).
Cloying and fun, with lots of shit jokes!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is some wild stuff, surreal and strange but also entertaining and highly intelligent. I'm sure a lot of references went over my head, but it wasn't pretentious by any means and I got more than enough to enjoy the book. I just kind of came to the book out of nowhere and was left reeling a bit. Highly impressed, but still reeling a bit.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reed does not get the respect nor the addition to the canon he should have years ago. This is a marvelous book which makes Pynchon's CRYING OF LOT 49 look like a picture book for beginner readers. The dialect is masterful, the distortions adapt, and the message clear. Reed manages to weave a poetry around his satire, which does not lessen its devastating leveling of all it gazes upon. As a reflection of the post Kennedy Assassination years in America, I can think of no novel that rivals its grasp on City living and the black population's weird obsessions and modern hucksterism.

HARRY SAM is a ruler who will not leave the bathroom. From his toilet seat perch he keeps a close eye on all the goings on in his fiefdom. The manipulation of the Nazarene theology allows our hero, Bukka Doopeyduk, to Booker T Washington through his world holding on to an achievement of faith and a good grasp on proper sounding English. Little good it does him in the end, where we find him hanging by meathooks in Soulsville's square. But by then, we, the readers, have already accepted the tirades against Rutherford Birchard Hayes' Jim Crow inflicted blindness, the dognapping of Checkers Nixon, and the Black Bay's monstrous creatures.

Overall, a masterpiece of vignettes that when pulled together make a compelling satire, but as a straight narrative fiction, the book would stand as a confusing jumble of nonsense.

"Anyway, I'm just the agent, kinda like a catalyst. Little does the Joo know that I'm secretly collecting milk bottles and rags as I prepare for 'Git It On' right under my man's nose. See, I'm a poet down here in this artistic community, going around saying mothafuka in public by night, but by day I'm stacking milk bottles in the closet instead of taking them back to the store for the two cents deposit. that's what you might call out-maneuvering whitey."

"There's not two-cent deposit on milk bottles these days, and they're disposable," I said. p.98

[Printable Tire · Rating 1 out of 5]

Guess I'm the only one on here not liking this book? I think I probably started this book in MARCH last year, and it took me this long to finish it because I would read a couple of pages, lose track of what was going on, get bored, and put it down (why I felt compelled to finish it at all is a matter for another day). It's a distinctly of-its-time piece, sorta a Invisible Man by way of Mad Magazine, and it's just got too much cornball antics, dated references, and random-ass kitchen sink shit in it. There's no plot but instead a bunch of set pieces and the main character isn't a character and in fact for a while I'd completely forget the whole thing was being told in the first person. It felt like reading the literary form of watching loony "satires" (o laziest of genres) of the time like 99 and 44/100% Dead, bad unfunny pop art that one time was thought of as edgy but hasn't aged well.

[Solita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally got around to reading this. Been sitting on my shelves for thirty years. Read Reckless Eyeballing many years ago, and very much enjoyed it. Back then, anyway. Sometimes time changes one's perspective.

I have no idea what I just read in Free-Lance Pallbearers. Well, OK, it's a satire. I get that. I chuckled several times, catching the cynical humor. The energy of the prose never lets up. It feels highly charged, as if Reed were on speed when he wrote this. Sometimes it felt hateful, resentful and angry. Sometimes it felt righteously critical. That's all I can say about this. I enjoyed it, but I also didn't. Not putting it on my re-read list. It's a political and cultural critique, but it's so coded I barely catch the gist of it. It reads like a horrible nightmare. I'm glad to be done with it.

[Dale Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having just finished this book, I'm not quite sure what to say about it. It feels like the entire read was an LSD-laced, cartoon dream. There are definitely some humorous portions, many portions of "what the hell did I just read", and a dictator who's been sitting on the toilet for the past 30 years. Bukka Doopeyduck, our main character and tour guide through the odd, surreal, contradicting world of HARRY SAM, is one hell of a character mixed among an entire cast of loopey lunatics. If for nothing else, this book is a great experiment of language.

I'm really at a loss for words right now, so maybe I'll return later to explain a bit better.

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 3 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEW: You flabbergast of a satirist, you.

[Dash Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took awhile for me to catch on to what the Hell is going on in this book, but when I did I was rewarded.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the style of this is better experienced than described.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a f—ing gorgeous satire that I only half-understood. I look forward to a second reading (maybe next year?) to try and get a better grasp on the material. Occasionally the content raised my eyebrows, but overall it is a masterpiece.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.5cense.com/20/764.htm

[Saul Chan Htoo Sang · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Ishmael Reed novel I read was for a class titled, Philosophy and Literature. We spent 4 weeks wrestling with the novel, breaking each line (sometimes words) apart, and putting them under various literary analytical lenses—psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, deconstructive, historical, and structuralist critical lenses. But all of the lens only provide a few aspects of his ever-expanding words and lines. Then towards the end of the semester, we read an essay by Linda Hutcheon, a literary theorist, who argued that Reed’s work, because of its complexity and cohesiveness, allows a new genre to arise: historiographic metafictional novel.

Historiographic metafictional novels, as the name suggests, are concerned with historiography (the study of [written] history) and how we interpret (or remember) the history. As such, it challenges the Eurocentric and western scholarly interpretations of history (of those from other cultures and ideological backgrounds). Understanding the depth and ambition of Ishmael, I went into the Pallbearers with these thoughts in mind. And I was not disappointed. The novel is packed with satirical references to America’s dark sides: the multi-national corporations with massive lobbying power, role of media in memory making, disillusionment of the capitalist hierarchical “game”, and analysis of social/cultural movements!

This novel digs its fingers into your shoulders and shakes the shit out of you. 10/10 recommend to all those who like academia but despise the institutions that host the academics. Also, reading this novel without a concrete knowledge of America’s colonial and political history would be a terrible idea.

(Read about what the American colonists did to the indigenous populations in America! Reed refers to the measles blankets and hidden genocide).

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning - there is surprisingly little free-lance pallbearing in this book titled The Free-lance Pallbearers.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand The Black Experience in 2023, let alone The Black Experience in 1966. Other reviewers can speak to how well Reed represents this for them -- as I understand from his autobiographical intro to The Reed Reader, he's ruffled many a Black feather, publicly feuded with Ralph Ellison, and survived multiple cancellation attempts (all in the pre-Twitter era) for his depictions of Black women. Most recently, he's gained a sort of wider notoriety for his excoriation of Lin Manuel Miranda, going so far as to have produced a full-length "response play" to Hamilton. (For all my white, Gen X opinion on the musical Hamilton matters to anyone, I'm firmly in Reed's camp on this one --a musical painting slaveowners as abolitionists is ultimately revisionist history no matter how diverse the casting or how many different toe-tapping, stomp-clapping musical genres are on display. It's not Song of the South levels of revision, it's not "Springtime for Hitler," but there's a distant kinship to be discussed by people way more qualified than I am to discuss these things).

This is all to say, Reed is an outspoken man, one not interested in your rules of engagement. His oft-quoted motto "Writin' is Fightin" is on full display here in his debut novel even if I can't verify whether he'd coined it yet. If Pallbearers is any indication, he's also an incredibly funny writer, irreverently so. He's certainly taken hits for it (the Ellisons and Wrights he's accumulated various beefs with were a staple of my white, southern undergrad canon even in 2002, whereas I had to hear about Reed from a narrator's aside in Gravity's Rainbow). Hopefully I'm forgiven for saying this increases his appeal for me considerably.

It's become cliché in 2023 to say something "pulls no punches" or "makes fun of both sides" but that is what's happening in The Free-lance Pallbearers, and -- to be more than a little reductive -- you're either here for that, or you're not. I am. Many an internet edgelord has relied on the old "bLaZiNg SaDdLeS CoUlDn'T Be MaDe iN 20-WOKEY-3!" chestnut, but -- like it or not -- this most likely applies to The Free-lance Pallbearers as well. In a world where, depending on what comment section you had the misfortune of stumbling into, even our cartoon characters are either Much Too Dark or Not Nearly Dark Enough, I simply can't see a book like The Free-lance Pallbearers getting picked up.

How to even describe this fever dream of a book?
A morbidly obese Polish used-car salesman named HARRY SAM (always in all caps) sits on a toilet for 30 years and rules despotically over a definitely-not-New-York city, also named HARRY SAM. HARRY SAM (the guy) on his toilet fuels the mythology and legal system of HARRY SAM (the place). Various stereotypes, both white and black, proceed to have goings-on in HARRY SAM for around 170 pages, and the book ends. The lives of characters named "U2 Polyglot" and "Georgia Nosetrouble" and "Arboreal Hairyman" and "The Reverend Eclair Porkchop" coalesce around our no-less-creatively-named protagonist "Bukka Doopeyduk" -- a sort of Black-but-white-coded rule-follower, an obedient acolyte to HARRY SAM (and a bit of a Pharisee at that) who'd like nothing more than for him to, as the prayer to HARRY SAM goes, "come off the John and hold us in his lap." Doopeyduk's wife is a gold digging shrew (cf. those Attitudes Toward Black Women I mentioned) who loafs around reading comic books stopping only to demand he get better employment so that he can finance, "the kinda fun I likes to have." His friend Elijah Raven is a pontificating would-be revolutionary who never seems to graduate beyond stealing Whitey's cereal box tops. The Reverend Porkchop's sermons amount to little more than pasted together jazz-isms like "Flim-Flam Alakazam" and the like. Doopeyduk's grandmother-in-law, who must be over a hundred years old, takes "conjure lessons" in the mail, "puts the hoodoo" on a large section of the city's men, then sells the cure.

As I've said. It wouldn't be made today.

The main flaw here is that bit of historical knowledge is required to get some of the references. Statues of Rutheford B. Hayes are prominent, which felt like quirk-for-its-own-sake until I looked up to confirm that president's role in establishing Jim Crow. There's a blue-eyed man testing a bomb who walks around "quoting perms" (how Reed spells "poems"), that I assume is either J. R. Oppenheimer (or an expy of the same) quoting Eliot quoting Shiva. What he's doing in HARRY SAM is anyone's guess. There are "yam riots" that I assume refers to some sort of real-life rebellion. A man with a Mickey Mouse pin is thrown from a beer hall full of WWI vets saying, "Just like Munich! You'll see!" Maybe he's Hitler, or some kind of we-got-Hitler-at-home parody.

Who knows.

There is almost no readily-available scholarship or annotations for this book to be found online, which is criminal considering Reed's story is no more manic or obtuse than V or The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon apparently felt the same to a degree, literally breaking the forth wall in his next book for that aforementioned shout-out to Reed's Mumbo-Jumbo, and the "human shit as metaphor" angle is too prevalent in both Pallbearers and Gravity's Rainbow to be coincidence (if anything, the timeline would suggest it was Reed who inspired Pynchon, who then cribbed more than a few themes). Tyrone Slothrop's descent into the toilet (chased by a young Malcolm X, no less) to face the cowboy Crutchfield and "little pard" Whappo echoes Doopeyduk's journey to the throne of SAM HIMSELF in a way that's blatant if one's bothered to read both books.

I'm glad that I have. But then, what do I know?

[Curt Lorde · Rating 5 out of 5]

A prophetic, crazy adventure, that I can see a Dave Chappelle carrying to glory. This is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man's revenge. Nutcases, the willfully manipulated, the blatantly rewarded stupid, and the glitz bounded mediocre folk in this novel and unfortunately,reality, will see themselves in the characters. And don't you want to follow the adventures of a man named Bukka Doopeyduk?

[Justin Howe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a secondary world created to resemble New York City circa 1965 and with the character motivations and internal physics of a Looney Tunes cartoon. That’s what you’ll find here. Bukka Doopeyduk lives in HARRY SAM a kingdom ruled by a former used car salesman who hasn’t left the bathroom in thirty years. Things happen and mayhem ensues.

[Betsy]

So how does this book, coming up on its 50 birthday, hold up today? Answer: Frighteningly well. In fact, in some ways it's more relevant today than when it was written. What doesn't stand up to time are the anti-women, anti-gay sentiments in the book, but it's important to remember how common this was in the '60s.

[Adryan Glasgow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really want to like Ishmael Reed, despite the general misogyny that pervades the world of his books. This first novel, however, is underdeveloped. It is too much under the influence of Kafka and Reed's full literary voice isn't yet established. Read Mumbo Jumbo instead.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

what?

[Michael Gossett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo' first--if you like it, you'll like this.

[Ernest Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This outrageous satire from the Sixties seems more contemporary as time goes by.

[Amy Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might have to scan in my old paperback--it's irritating for a book designer to have the wrong cover indexed on Goodreads!

[Omkar Kudalkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great work of Satire by Ishmael S. Reed. I agree "Nothing, nobody ,it seems that, remains aloof from Reeds' satirical barbs."

[Phil Overeem · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea behind this book is way more enjoyable than the reality. I was excited to take it on, having LOVED Reed's MUMBO JUMBO, but it is really wearing. Or...it may be that it's just dated.