Epigraphical Rebel?

Ishmael Reed is really breaking convention by starting his novel Mumbo Jumbo on the literal first page in the book.  This is so much of a convention, to start it later in the physical book, that when I heard where he put the first chapter, I wondered to myself if that was even legal (perhaps legal is the wrong word, but a violation of some agreement in the publishing world). This sets the tone for the book, as one that will not follow standard literary conventions. What this also does, is make those interim pages between the first and second chapter be seen.  The copyright pages really aren't important to authors I presume, that's in the realm of the publishers.  But the epigraphs really are.  Just like every word in the narrative is chosen by the author, so too are the epigraphs. Why would anyone spend time finding the perfect quotations to put in the epigraph if they didn't want their readers to read them.  

There are three quotes in the epigraph, though it is my understanding that the second and third are both James Weldon Johnson from his work The Book of American Negro Poetry.  Looking at the first one, attributed to Zora Neale Hurston, I couldn't help but feel that this is akin to how Ernest Hemingway put the Gertrude Stein quote "You are all a lost generation" as his first in The Sun Also Rises.  In it, Hemingway is not only describing one theme for his novel, dealing with the generation born out of war, but he is also paying tribute to Stein for being his mentor and helping get him to the place where his modernist novel could make it through publishing.  While I have no biographical knowledge of Reed and Hurston's relationship, if any, I do know that Hurston is one of the most well respected writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, helping to pave the way for African-American authors to be accepted by main stream (White) America. Perhaps Reed is not being as rebellious as the location of his first chapter may suggest.

The final two quotes from Johnson are integral, even more so than Hurston's.  Without them, the whole meaning of the first few chapters is unclear.  "jes' grew" doesn't mean much out of context, at least it didn't for me. After the first chapter I started suspecting it was the early forms of Jazz, but as "jes' grew" is a focus for the beginning of the novel, a suspicion of its meaning is hardly something to base your understanding of a novel on.  In the epigraph though, Johnson is telling us, if not explicitly, just what "jes' grew" is.  Reed put that in there so that readers of the epigraph would have a better understanding of his novel.  It would be out of rhythm for him to define it somewhere in the narrative itself, so the logical place is then in the epigraph.  How do you get a reader to read the epigraph?  Put it in the middle of the novel, not before it.  It doesn't look like Reed was being as much of a rebel after all, now does it?