Word: labasent
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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...
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...
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