The theme of the individual working against or in cohesion with various communities flows throughout Flight to Canada, Beloved, Oxherding Tale, and Wild Seed. In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed uses the slave community on Swille’s plantation to contrast the actions of the two protagonists of the novel. Whilst Ouickskill’s “flight to Canada” ends up unfulfilled, Robin’s “flight” to freedom is more satisfying and we see the effect on the slave community as Reed’s measure of this success. Communities play a more significant part in the remaining three novels although they are used in slightly different roles. Toni Morrison uses communities in Beloved as part of the solution and problem to Sethe’s struggle with her traumatic past. The black community exorcises Beloved’s ghost from 124 but not before indirectly contributing to the death of Sethe’s third child. Morrison places the community in this binary good/evil position in Beloved and conveys the dual nature of a modern black community and can even be extended to our modern American community. Morrison uses the communities in her novel to provide her audience with an answer to how the American society can liberate itself from its slave past? The prominent communities in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed are Doro’s community of mutants at Wheatley and Anyanwu’s community of descendents. Butler’s communities differ from Johnson, Reed, and Morrison’s in that Butler highlights communities as stemming from and affecting their leaders, Doro and Anyanwu. Anyanwu is enslaved as a by-product of her protection to her children. Doro ultimately does not find fulfillment in his breeding communities. Butler uses the struggle of Anyanwu and Doro as leaders of their communities to comment on leaders of American slave communities and their struggles. Oxherding Tale is likely the novel that delves deepest into the tension and connection between the individual and the community. Charles Johnson writes of Andrew Hawkins’ individual quest for...