Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

Now some problems. Jes Grew. Mu’tafikah, Teutonic Knights who’ve done it again making such a mess of things that Carl Jung wrote:

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.

* Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Dance: from Ritual to Rock and Roll, Ballet to Ballroom (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960), p. 39.

THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE Wallflower Order, backbone of the Atonists is, due to the Jes Grew contagion, bustling with activity. Aides run about like ants scurrying across a white telephone. They use a new invention Television to scan the U.S. for Jes Grew activity at this moment stirring Chicago.

Wearing sandals and dressed like a Cecil B. De Mille extra, Hierophant 1 paces the floor, his long, grey beard touching his waist. His yellow eyes dart from screen to video screen as he watches the progress of the epidemic. Watching it Fade Out of Kansas City only to Fade In in St. Louis. Various wooden, metallic and plastic figures shaped like human beings, pet zombies and creatures whose mothers were scared by computers speak to 1 another in code. Gibberish. Sounds of tape recorders of its human voice at high speed. Jes Grew is compounded by the Mu’tafikah who are responsible for art thefts now ravishing the private collections of Europe and America. 1 of their number, an international Mu’tafikah, has lifted the sacred Papyri of Ani stored in the British Museum and returned it to “Brothers in Cairo,” so read the “illiterate” “contradictory” “scrawls,” product of “a tormented mind,” which was left behind at the scene of the theft.

The Far Eastern Museum of Cologne has discovered several items from its Chinese collection missing. To add to this, the war launched by the Order against the Haitian nation has been exposed by a well-planted headline in the New York Sun. More books concerning Haiti have been checked out of American libraries in a week than in the previous history of the library system. To add to that, people walk all over New York speaking Creole and wearing tropical clothes; the women long white dresses, the men linen suits. As the war drags on it arrives upon American shores. The Wallflower Order launched the war against Haiti in hopes of allaying Jes Grew symptoms by attacking their miasmatic source. But little Haiti resists. It becomes a world-wide symbol for religious and aesthetic freedom. When an artist happens upon a new form he shouts “I Have Reached My Haiti!”

Dance manias inundate the land. J. A. Rogers writes, “It is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like measles, sweep the block.” * People do the Charleston the Texas Tommy and other anonymously created symptoms of Jes Grew. The Wallflower Order remembers the 10th-Century tarantism which nearly threatened the survival of the Church. Even Paracelsus, a “radical” who startled the academicians by lecturing in the vernacular, termed these manias “a disease.”

The Wallflower Order is well aware of what Jes Grew wants and what Jes Grew needs. In case they’re wrong they have other techniques. Their diagnosis is the same as PaPa LaBas’, a “so-called” astrodetective they have under surveillance.

You must capture its Celebration and then it will dissolve. It’s a new age. 1920. Sword fighting only interests the kids who attend the matinees. Douglas Fairbanks can sell Liberty Bonds and act but he is of no aid to you. The Teutonic Order is of no use. You must use something up-to-date to curb Jes Grew. To knock it dock it co-opt it swing it or bop it. If Jes Grew slips into the radiolas and Dictaphones all is lost. Luckily your scientists are working on microorganisms; minuscule replicas of yourself capable of surviving the atmosphere of any planet. Your inventors are preparing a Spaceship that will transport these microorganisms to 3 planets you’ve had your eye on. You wish all of your subjects were like them. Loyal, passive, “just doing our jobs.”

You must get your hands on Jes Grew’s hunger. That text. Last reported in the hands of a surviving member of the Knights Templar, that discredited order which once held the fate of Western Civilization in its hands until the scandal.

When Hinckle Von Vampton is shoved into the round revolving room he interrupts the Hierophant’s speculations.

This round room’s ceiling is a dome of glass through which the Hierophant can keep track of the Heavens. The 1st thing Hinckle sees is a man suffering from a condition know as kyphosis angularis standing on a ladder marking a huge map. It is his species count; the name and number of life near extinction. Dots of a dead white color are placed in Birds Reptiles Amphibians and Fish. The phone rings. The man climbs down and answers. The man grins, resumes his position, then places a dot in the watercress darter.

A huge magic snake of electric bloodless dots, and potentially deadly or benevolent depending upon how you look at it, clusters from New Orleans to Chicago on a map of the United States. Rashes are reported in Europe as well. Jes Grew begins to become pandemic, leaping across the ocean but generally forming a movement which points from Chicago to the East. On another wall are the symbols of the Atonist Order: the Flaming Disc, the $1 and the creed—

Look at them! Just look at them! throwing their hips this way, that way while I, my muscles, stone, the marrow of my spine, plaster, my back supported by decorated paper, stand here as goofy as a Dumb Dora. Lord, if I can’t dance, No one shall.

Hinckle Von Vampton, arms held by the interrogators of New Orleans’ late mayor, stands before the Hierophant 1.

Why have you removed me from the City?

Jes Grew has gripped the vitals of America, the Hierophant replies to his prisoner. You placed that headline in the New York Sun, our Atonist organ. We traced it to you. You knew what the script was. What we were doing in Haiti; we’ve all been through this before. And you have the nourishment of Jes Grew without which it will soon wane. Hand it over.

O I see, Hinckle replies, freeing his arms from the assistants who begin to struggle with the captive.

Leave him alone, the Hierophant orders.

I see, Hinckle says with obvious relish. Now that the Teutonics have fumbled the latest crusade you want me, a Templar, to bail you out.

The Hierophant bows his head. You know we’re in trouble, don’t you? You’ve seen the young men wearing slave bracelets, sitting in the cafés quoting nigger poetry. The young women smoking Luckies, wearing short skirts and staying out until 3:00 in the morning. If you know that we are desperate then you must know that we will go to any extreme to stop it. Therefore if you don’t yield the Text we will rub you out.

Rub me out…Hinckle smiles and begins to strut about the room. Rub me out. Gone is the rhetoric, the convoluted sentences 300 words long with many parenthetical elements and modifying clauses separated from their objects, the logic and reason you were always so pleased with. Anxious about this Jes Grew epidemic, you speak like the common bootleg merchant or heist artist.

I…I don’t want to be difficult with you, Hierophant 1 says pressing the button so that 3 weird-looking dudes in 3rd Man Theme trenches enter through doors leading to the round room. One carries the ritual dagger on a pillow…