today in Christmas traditions in the Netherlands and Belgium, he was dropped from the St.
Nicholas legend in the United States, as Reed says, because of America’s peculiar “racial
customs” rooted in slavery. Even President Clift’s’ spiritual transformation, as Reed explains in
an interview, derives from African and Afro-Caribbean culture as much as it does from Charles
Dickens. “[The] idea of hell and descent and reform…is a feature of African literature…in the
African tradition, [the spirits] Esu-Kekere-Ode…have a fight with the chief deity, [and] are
forced to live among the dead and become wise.” (Conversations With Ishmael Reed, 365)
A list of some of the other characters and plot lines in The Terrible Twos further illustrate the
expansive cultural syncretism of Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic. Oswald (Ziggie) Zumwalt heads
the North Pole Development Corporation, which buys the rights to the character and image of
Santa Claus and plans to build a domed city/shopping mall at the North Pole called
Christmasland. Disillusioned by the commercialization of Christmas as personified by Zumwalt,
Boy Bishop founds the Nicolaites to re-establish the true spirit of Christmas—the virtues of
generosity, charity and love--which he hopes to make a guiding cultural creed year-round for all
Americans. The central plot line revolves around Nance Saturday, a private investigator who is
hired to solve the disappearance of a street hustler (Snowman) who was last seen in the
Nicholites’ compound; Nance’s estranged wife, Virginia, is a reporter for WBC, where Krantz
formerly worked before joining Clift’s presidential cabinet. Black Peter, the former street
performer (ventriloquist) and longtime member of the Nicolaites, grows disaffected by the sect’s
Euro-centric theology; he hopes to revitalize the sect by replacing its God, St. Nicholas, with
Haile Selassie, the messiah of the Rastafari movement. Flinch Savvage, an American Indian
liaison for the North Pole Development Corporation in Alaska, mediates disputes between it and
native peoples whose land the corporation has usurped; his girlfriend, Vixen, works for
Zumwalt’s North Pole Development Corporation. And Rex Stuart, an alcoholic, out-of-work TV
soap opera actor, is hired by the North Pole Development Corporation to play the role of Santa
Claus at corporate and public functions. At one such event--a nationally-televised kick-off of the
holiday season--rather than the usual Christmas greetings, this Santa gives an impassioned
speech criticizing America’s culture of greed and selfishness and calling for a national boycott of
Christmas. The Nicholites, it turns out, have surreptitiously replaced Stuart with their own Santa
Claus, using him to spread their anti-capitalist message to the masses.
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