I need help on an essay responding to the assignment described below. I'd like a recommendation of a second primary reading and where to find...

Your first major decision in working on this paper is to choose the works you will be writing about. If you choose Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed as the first primary work, then you should consider choosing Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe as the second work. The reason for this is that Reed was explicitly updating and responding to Stowe's work. 

For a thesis, you might argue that the supernatural background to...

Your first major decision in working on this paper is to choose the works you will be writing about. If you choose Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed as the first primary work, then you should consider choosing Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe as the second work. The reason for this is that Reed was explicitly updating and responding to Stowe's work. 

For a thesis, you might argue that the supernatural background to Stowe's work was grounded in her firm belief in Christianity and its redemptive power. Stowe saw Christian faith (and ultimately God) as the path to ending slavery, especially in viewing it as the bulwark of abolitionism. Reed, on the other hand, sees Christianity as part of an oppressive white culture and views recovery of pantheistic Vodoun African religious traditions as part of black identity. 

Two useful secondary sources would be:

Hortense Spillers, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, eds. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 1989, pp. 25–61.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “Ishmael Reed's Neo-HooDoo Slave Narrative,” Narrative 2.2 (May 1994): 112–139.