Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

This development doesn’t deter Hinckle.

You have a body of Thugs now who kidnap innocent people at noon time and “rub them out.” Enforcers. Torpedoes. Hoods. No longer do you quote Plato or the other obscurantists…

That’s true, the Hierophant concurs. We leave all of that to New York intellectuals with Black maids. You have 5 seconds to tell us where you put that Text or it will be your last 5 seconds.

The man with the dagger, as if prompted by some military impulse, marches to the center and snaps to attention before the Hierophant.

I don’t have it.

You what?

I can be of no assistance to you. You should have thought of the Text the dark day October 13, 1307, your King Philip 4 and the pope, Clement, he hired to do his “Dirty Work,” brought the charges against my Order, rounded up our leaders and executed them. After all we did to defend your wretched tails.

The guards exchange surprised glances. Never before have they heard Hierophant 1 addressed in such a manner.

You are still the Grand Master of the surviving Knights Templar. Arrogant, proud. We had no choice but to bring you to trial. Your Order became so powerful that it threatened ours. We are not in a position to share power. I am merely the curator, the chief janitor, the custodian of a hierarchy which extends to the very top. I was given my orders and I had the pope and my king execute them. The charges they brought against you were all proven, even “worshiping the devil in the form of a cat,” “spitting, stamping, urinating on crucifixes” as well as participating in acts in which Arabs’ pharmacopoeia was used. You were accused of sodomy and kissing the tail of the black god Baphomet…you had to be dealt with for the sake of Christendom.

Christendom? Without our Order there would have been no Christendom. We wanted to expand and we were acquiring African powers as a result of our contact with the Arabs. You should have known when your King Philip the 4th was eaten by a boar on November 29, 1314, the month after our executed leader Jacques de Molay cursed him, and when Pope Clement the 5th died on April 20, 1314, after yelling, “I’m burning up, I’m burning up,” that we learned more from the Saracens than to play chess or smoke hashish. Your Christendom was for serfs, for underlings and the peasants. You, the pope and the king, were allowed to practice ceremonies which “deviated” from the rules of us as your flunkies. “Flatfoots,” you used to call us behind our backs…You arrested us but some of us escaped. I came to America where I have been able to hold our little band together now scattered all over the globe waiting for this day…this day when you would be forced to remit your errors. And now it has arrived.

The guards exchange glances again. They can’t believe what is occurring before them. The Hierophant knows the value of maintaining mystery between him and his guards.

Please leave. We want to be alone, he says as the guards salute by bringing their fists against their chests and leave the room.

What did you do with the Text, Hinckle?

O the Text. You want the Text. You fool. Did you think that the rivals of Atonism would be quelled by giving them fellowships and grants-in-aid? Didn’t you realize that the “pagans” would refuse to be Milled and Humed at your Universities, would return to the tribes, don the Robes of the Leopard Skin Priests and purge the Atonist from their minds, girding themselves to do battle against your thing?

Hinckle, we can make a deal. The Text. Please, think of the Cross, the Virgin.

Think of the Virgin, he says. We fought and died for the Virgin the Cross and the Cup and what kind of reward did we receive? Our lands burned, our property confiscated and a humiliating trial.

We need the Text, Hinckle, I implore you, the Hierophant remonstrates, his eyes brimming with tears.

If you really must know, it’s in the hands of 14 J.G.C. individuals scattered throughout Harlem for now. Only I can call it in and anthologize it. Janitors, Pullman porters, shoeshine boys, dropouts from Harvard, musicians, jazz musicians. Its carbons are in New York, Kansas City, Oakland, California, Chattanooga Tennessee, Detroit, Mobile, Raleigh. It’s dispersed. Untogether. I sent it out as a chain book.

So that’s why my men weren’t able to find it when they ransacked your apartment?

Yes. If J.G. is indeed seeking its Text I will be able to help you out. If it’s not I will also be able to aid you; but on 1 condition.

What is the condition?

Put my Order in charge of the 2nd phase as well as the 1st. Give us a chance to redeem our good name before the world.

Out of the question, the Hierophant answers. Higher-ups will never permit such an arrangement.

Very well then. Jes Grew is inclined toward New York, because it senses that the key to its Book is there. All it needs is the list of 14. It merely will have to be told what to do and then…

All right! All right! You win. The Knights Templar will be in charge of the anti-Jes Grew serum. I have no choice. The Black Tide of Mud will engulf us all. What do you need…?

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. What we will do is begin a magazine that will attract its followers, featuring the kind of milieu it surrounds itself with. Jazz reviewers, cabarets, pornography, social issues, anti-Prohibition, placed between acres of flappers’ tits. Here we will feature the Talking Android who will tell the J.G.C.s that Jes Grew is not ready and owes a large debt to Irish Theatre. This Talking Android will Wipe That Grin Off Its Face. He will tell it that it is derivative. He will accuse it of verbal gymnastics, of pandering to White readers. He will even suggest it abandon the typewriter completely and create a Black Tammany Hall. He will describe it as a massive hemorrhage of malaprops; illiterate and given to rhetoric. And if the Talking Android is female she will shout before the Caucasian club, “They just can’t write, they just can’t write,” but then when pressed she might break into her monologue — you know the one—“My no good nigger husband who left me with these kids.” So that won’t do.

I will accomplish this within 6 months or…or…

Or what?

I will imbibe the sacred poison.

Fair enough. It sounds like an excellent plan, Hinckle. A precaution in case the Text isn’t what the plague needs and a Talking Android who will Knock-It Bop-It or Sock-It.

The Hierophant smiles. Now you’re catching on. You’re grooving with the jive, H.

The Hierophant rises to shake Hinckle Von Vampton’s hand.

Of course you will work with our people there. They will provide you with all of the assistance you need. Their names are in this little black book.

The Hierophant hands Hinckle the little black book and for a moment Hinckle thumbs through it.

Warren Harding?

Yes, we had problems trying to get him nominated. It took 10 ballots. Some of the delegates at the convention called him a “He-Harlot” and a “Black Babylonian.” They called the convention “boss controlled” and said that his nomination was the result of a “Senate Cabal.” H. L. Mencken, the writer, termed him “a series of wet sponges,” but we groomed him from the beginning by surrounding him with a man who is now his Attorney General. It took an advertising agency named Lord & Thomas to sell him to the American people. The charges of the convention had to be somehow dealt with. If they only knew. Hard-headed, these descendants of indentured servants and criminals. 30,000 felons, I understand, were sent to Georgia alone. Bloody paradoxical place, that country. The J.G.C.s shipped there to harvest cotton and rice surrounded by the descendants of 2-bit hoods, loan sharks, and Atonists of the most fundamental variety. Ostensibly pragmatic, the place’s characteristic fiction is “dark romance.”