Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

by Ishmael Reed

Jes Grew carriers came to America because of cotton. Why cotton? American Indians often supplied all of their needs from one animal: the buffalo. Food, shelter, clothing, even fuel. Eskimos, the whale. Ancient Egyptians were able to nourish themselves from the olive tree and use it as a source of light; but Americans wanted to grow cotton. They could have raised soybeans, cattle, hogs or the feed for these animals. There was no excuse. Cotton. Was it some unusual thrill at seeing the black hands come in contact with the white crop?

If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

The 2nd Stage of the plan is to groom a Talking Android who will work within the Negro, who seems to be its classical host; to drive it out, categorize it analyze it expell it slay it, blot Jes Grew. A speaking scull they can use any way they want, a rapping antibiotic who will abort it from the American womb to which it clings like a stubborn fetus. In other words this Talking Android will be engaged to cut-it-up, break down this Germ, keep it from behind the counter. To begin the campaign, NO DANCING posters are ordered by the 100s. All agree something must be done. “Jes Grew is the boll weevil eating away at the fabric of our forms our technique our aesthetic integrity,” says a Southern congressman. “1 must ponder the effect of Jew Grew upon 2,000 years of civilization,” Calvinist editorial writers wonder aloud.

B. Fuller terms this phenomenon “ultra ultra high frequency electromagnetic wave propagation.”

A new phenomenon is occurring. The Black Liberal; a new mark extorted in the manner of your former victims who became fed up with it and have withdrawn funds for your support. You are no different from the Christians you imitate. Atonists Christians and Muslims don’t tolerate those who refuse to accept their modes.

Some of the people who were listening have decided that it’s 1 of those discussions and have drifted away.

Sounds as if you’ve picked up the old Plymouth Rock bug and are calling it Mecca.

Abdul sees that the doorway is empty. Deprived of an audience, he changes his demeanor. He suddenly becomes polite affable patient reasonable.

You see, while you are cloistered protected by your followers and patrons and clients I’m out here on the street watching what was once a beautiful community become a slave hole. People are beginning to trickle in here from down home and I’ll bet that sooner or later there will be an exodus rivaling the 1 of the Good Book. Who is going to help them? Happy Dust is here now. What strange enslaving drugs will be here later? Where are these people going to work and who is going to feed them? Are they going to eat incense, candles? Maybe what you say is true about the nature of religions which occurred 1000s of years ago, but how are we going to survive if they have no discipline?

It was then that I began to read omnivorously.

I always wondered why the teachers just threw the knowledge at us when we were in school, why they didn’t care whether we learned or

not. I found that the knowledge which they had made into a cabala, stripped of its terms and the private codes, its slang, you could learn in a few weeks. It didn’t take 4 years, and the 4 years of university were set up so that they could have a process by which they would remove the rebels and the dissidents. By their studies and...

I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned. Every day I would learn a new character and learn how to mark it. It occurred to me that I was borrowing from all of these systems: Religion, Philosophy, Music, Science and even Painting, and building 1 of my own composed of their elements.

This country is eclectic. The architecture the people the music the writing. The thing that works here will have a little bit of jive talk and a little bit of North Africa, a fez-wearing mulatto in a pinstriped suit. A man who can say give me some skin as well as Asalamilakum. Haven’t you heard? This is the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it’s put over; how it’s gamed. Look at the Mormons. Did they recruit 1000s of whites to their cause by conjuring the Druids? No, they used material the people were familiar with and added their own. The most fundamental book of the Mormon Church, the Book of Mormon, is a fraud. If we Blacks came up with something as corny as the Angel of Moroni, something as trite and phony as their story that the book is the

record of ancient Americans who came here in 600 B.C. and perished by A.D. 400, they would deride us with pejorative adjectival phrases like “so-called” and “would-be.” They would refuse to exempt our priests from the draft, a privilege extended to every White hayseed’s fruit stand which calls itself a Church. But regardless of the put-on, the hype, the Mormons got Utah, didn’t they? Perhaps I will come up with something that will have a building shaped like a mosque, the interior furnishings Victorian, the priests dressed in Catholic garb, and soul food as offerings. What of it as long as it has popular appeal? This is the reason for Garvey’s success with the people.

prestidigitation.

Maybe I won’t be around but someone is coming. I feel it stirring. He might even have the red hair of a conjure man but he won’t be 1. No, he will get it across.

Malcolm X

He would never say “If you’ve seen 1 redwood tree, you’ve seen them all”; rather, he would reply with the African Chieftain “I am the elephant,” said long before Liverpool went on record for this.

(Freud would read this as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” which poor Freud “never experienced,” being an Atonist, the part of Jealous Art which shut out of itself all traces of animism.

(The 1909 versions of Albert Goldman, the “pop” expert for Life magazine and the New York Times who in a review of a record made by some character who calls himself Doctor John [when the original Doctor John was described by New Orleans contemporaries as a “huge Black man…, a Senegalese Prince…] made some of the most scurrilous attacks on the Voo-Doo religion to date—I. R.)

Nowadays we dance morning, noon and night. What is more, we are unconsciously, while we dance, warring not only against unnatural lines of figures and gowns, but we are warring against fat, against sickness, and against nervous troubles. For we are exercising. We are making ourselves lithe and slim and healthy, and these are things that all reformers in the world could not do for us.

Their writings were banished, added to the Index of Forbidden Books or sprinkled with typos as a way of undermining their credibility, and when they sent letters complaining of this whole lines were deleted without the points of ellipses. An establishment which had been in operation for 2,000 years had developed some pretty clever techniques.

She liked to choose.

THE PARTICULAR EDITION OF the New York Sun which is now a collector’s item certainly paid its dues to the Atonist order which demands that it devote so many column inches per month to the glorification of Western Culture. “The most notable achievements of mankind.” A story concerning the authentication of a Rembrandt jumps to page 60 where it runs parallel to a column describing Afro-American Painting which is described by the Atonist critic as “primitive,” at best “charming” and “mostly propagandistic.”

The modern incarnation of the Knights Templar is a tabloid. XD

King Baldwin 1

Look Hinckle, I don’t want to argue with you. We have our orders about this Haiti thing. Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny.

THE QUESTION AS TO WHICH IS MORE REPREHENSIBLE, THE ALLEGED CUSTOM IN HAITI OF EATING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT COOKING HIM OR THE AUTHENTICATED CUSTOM IN THE UNITED STATES OF COOKING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT EATING HIM. THE HAITIAN CUSTOM WOULD HAVE, AT LEAST, A UTILITARIAN PURPOSE IN EXTENUATION.

The headquarters of the Wallflower Order. You have nothing real up here. Everything is polyurethane, Polystyrene, Lucite, Plexiglas, acrylate, Mylar, Teflon, phenolic, polycarbonate. A gallimaufry of synthetic materials. Wood you hate. Nothing to remind you of the Human Seed. The aesthetic is thin flat turgid dull grey bland like a yawn. Neat. Clean, accurate, and precise but 1 big Yawn they got up here. Everything as the law laid down in Heliopolis 1000s of years ago. (Heliopolis, the Greek name for the ancient city of Atu or Aton.) You eat rays and for snacks you munch on sound. Loading up on data is slumber and recreation is disassembling. Transplanting is real big here. Sometimes you play switch brains and hide the heart. Lots of marching. Soon as these Like-Men disappear walking single file down the hall here comes another row at you. The Atonists got rid of their spirit 1000s of years ago with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, progress putting up skyscrapers and…and…and…working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy.

The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind.

“It is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like measles, sweep the block.”

Now you have come to your senses. 1, I will collect the Text and it will be burned. 2, I will create the Talking Android so that New York resistance will be firm if J.G. decides to make a foray into the city. A few tricks I learned at the New York Sun will come in handy. You see, the J.G.C.s have no control over who speaks for them. It’s in the hands of the press and radio.

The next morning Hinckle Von Vampton calls his old comrade-in-arms Hubert “Safecracker” Gould, 1-time carpetbagger, now “radical education expert” who lives in a penthouse high above the streets of New York purchased from the proceeds he has received from the scribblings of little colored waifs and the income from a downtown cabaret on East 3rd Street—a sweatshop for Black musicians—of which he is silent partner.

Safe Cracker

DYPSOMANIACS, THOSE WHO TAKE it from behind by german shepherds, those delighted by pin pricks at the bottom of the feet, whippersnappers, vibrators, Free Love advocates, ex-I.W.W. intellectuals, an art director who likes Aubrey Beardsley, a flagpole sitter whose record is 10 days, 10 hours, 10 minutes, and 10 seconds, people whose feet fall asleep, 3 or 4 inside dopes, and muckrakers of Tammany Hall. The staff of the Benign Monster.

We’ve been banned in Boston! We’ve made it. (As a journalist in the 1932 movie Doctor X said, “Sensationalism? Why the sons of guns love it.”) While the staff celebrate, Hinckle Von Vampton contemplates his next move. He glances at the poll he devised as a feature for the newspaper. The Jazz Poll. Bix Beiderbeck wins the Trumpet category. Paul Whiteman the Big Band. Something is missing. Something colored. It will take time to get the Talking Android. In the meantime they need a Negro Viewpoint.

ACROSS TOWN THE CITY room of the New York Tribune is in stitches. The reporters, rewrite men and managing editor are on the floor convulsed with laughter. Woodrow Wilson Jefferson stands in the middle of the room barefoot, his bags dropping chicken feathers, his cuffs the length of what are called “high waters.” He is bewildered at the response he is receiving. The cherubic-faced balding man sitting at the desk prods Jefferson. Tell us again who you want to meet? Why…why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Woodrow Wilson cast as George Jefferson?

I came about the Negro Viewpoint job. Yes, what is your experience? I have read all the 487 articles written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and know them by heart.

The perfect candidate, Hinckle Von Vampton decides. He doesn’t mind the shape of the idol: sexuality, economics, whatever, as long as it is limited to 1.

S.R.: IN HAITI IT WAS PAPA LOA, IN NEW ORLEANS IT WAS PAPA LABAS, IN CHICAGO IT WAS PAPA JOE. THE LOCATION MAY SHIFT BUT THE FUNCTION REMAINS THE SAME. CREOLE BANDS CONCEAL JES GREW FROM CHICAGO’S PSYCHIC DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH. ERZULIE WITH HER FAST SELF IS SHELTERED IN A “VOCALISING” TRUMPET WHICH SINGS FROM MUTE TO GROWL. LEGBA TAKES REQUESTS FROM BEHIND THE DERBY-COVERED BELL OF A “TALKING” SLIDE-TROMBONE. (He is a loa who has always worked for his keep.—I.R.)

A Note from Ishmael Reed

Don’t know what to do with W.W. If he wasn’t so good at gathering these er…er…delicacies. What’s this? mmmmmm-mmmmmmmmmmm-MMM! Weeds gathered at the grave site of a recently dead infant? Why I haven’t savored this since…well since those parties we used to have many many years ago in our private guarded Chapter House…W.W. would be all right if he’d just avoid those Marxist-Engelian and sociological clichés. Economics, integration, separation…capitalism. No one took this seriously. Why, this Soviet business would blow over. Each day the New York Times experts were predicting that the monarchy would be returned to power and when this happened then his magazine would seem out of step with the times which was ½ of its appeal—being-in. His column only did 1 thing…confuse the state of Black letters which was good because then they would be isolated and he could be like the wolf approaching the sheep who wanders away from the variegated herd. Yes indeed W.W.’s column which pitted 1 writer against the other called “The Pat Juber”…saying each new writer made the former resemble…how had W.W. put it, “resemble interlocutor in a minstrel show?” This column had its good points, but W.W. didn’t seem to have that razzle-dazzle. That jargon he used bored people…A…here comes the dope now.

Look, Mr. Von Vampton. It comes down to this. If I have to be contradictory using the real 1 time and ideal the other then that’s the way I would be. I will use any vehicle at all so that I won’t have to return to that farm and spend the rest of my life milking cows and distributing feed.

The central thesis of Reed's language. Also the reason Woodrow Wilson appears as a strong, educated black man, rather than a stupid, cowardly racist president.

Most impressive, Hinckle thinks. Perhaps…no that was out of the question…W.W. was too dark. This was the 1920s, black is out, colored is in. Besides Jes Grew absorbs Black as Black does Jes Grew. Others must try harder. But this was a marvelous thing he had just witnessed. A Black Pragmatist. Perhaps soon the slave-master will learn that he doesn’t have to use his offspring mulatto children to curb and refine Jes Grew activity. He can use White talking out of Black instead of the Brown or White talking out of Black. No 1 will be wise. A new kind of robot. The mulattoes were always held in suspicion by the Blacks anyway, but a Black Pragmatist could be anything he chose to be. Why that was freedom, wasn’t it?