Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

Well, they are indeed delicious, W.W., and I must advise you that many people like your column “The Pat Juber.” It really stirs things up. But there’s 1 thing though, W.W.

What is that, Publisher Von Vampton? W.W. says, standing before Hinckle’s desk.

You know our readership isn’t as bright as you are. The books you read and all of those articles. You quote Kant, James and Hegel very well but don’t you think that you ought to liven it up a bit with some of that raggle-taggle. A little ingredient of scandal…

The next issue, Mr. Von Vampton, there will indeed be some spice. I am going to get some of these niggers who are writing these nasty plays like Wallace Thurman. He wrote some play called Harlem in which these bonzos be rubbing up against each other.

Why would you object to that, W.W.? Why any month we might run a picture of a nice boyish young disrobed thing. We’ve been banned in Boston for pornography. Why would you want to include your material in our magazine but then abhor the same freedom when it occurs among your playwrights.

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.

Excellent, W.W., excellent. I never thought of it that way… of course I should have known.

I have some more articles to write for the forthcoming issue, Mr. Von Vampton, I will retire to my office in the rear.

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. № 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?

W.W., before you leave, I have been reading Abdul Sufi Hamid. I can’t decipher some of the dialect and the esoteric references. What is your assessment of him?

O he writes stirring poems. Apocalypse. Moors triumphant, riding elephants as they conquer southern Europe. Black women whom he equates with the Queen of Sheba! He is really a dynamo, Publisher Hinckle Von Vampton.

What do you think he is saying, Woodrow? Hinckle moves the tray to the center of his long desk topped with a gas lamp.

He’s telling them niggers that they will never be ready and that nothing will come of them and that if they take a drink from time to time it will enervate their brains and every time they go to bed with a woman that the corners of the room will fill with nests of Gog and Magog.

Excellent, now I understand those lines of his very well. What’s his views on the plague?

He says it involves too much dancing and should be stamped out, with force if necessary.

Good. Good. I will give him an entire page in the next issue. Accompanying photo. The works. Maybe some flappers kicking up their legs beside his scowl. Maybe even the Talking Android!

He’s a little off though, Publisher Hinckle Von Vampton.

Look W.W., will you cut out that Publisher Von Vampton nonsense. You’re up North now. Call me Hink. Now what’s this about him being mad?

He’s going about telling everyone that he is compiling some sort of anthology that will upset the nation. Some strange text he’s assembled about this Jes Grew thing. He said it would be the anthology of the century.

Hinckle Von Vampton staggers to his feet, the patch nearly slipping from the black hollow where his left eye used to be. The eye had been dislodged when the ancient foe drove a lance through it.

He what?

He says he has this anthology the nigger says has hieroglyphics and strange drawings written all over it. He says only 14 other people have seen it and that some crazy White man has paid them monthly checks to keep sending the anthology around. For some strange reason 1 of the 14 gave the anthology to Abdul.

Hinckle Von Vampton rises, drags himself to the fireplace and leans against the wall above it. He is wheezing, gasping for breath. His respiratory system feels jammed with something so thick that had it been a plumbing system all of the Drāno in the world couldn’t relieve its burden.

Is there anything wrong, Hink?

These old war pains, W.W. I get them from time to time. Old war wounds.

O I didn’t know that you fought in the last war, sir.

I didn’t. I received them in another, loftier crusade. What war was that, Hink, the Spanish-American War?

I…I…How do you think that this Harding election will affect the Negroes, W.W.? Hinckle says in at attempt to change the subject.

Why…it’s funny that you should mention it, sir, they all call him the Race President.

What?

He was at a Rent Party I hear and was dipping his fork into the chitterlings and drinking liquor along with everybody else. Why that man is copacetic with me, Publisher Hink.

Hink?

Hinckle Von Vampton, sir?

Publisher Hinckle Von Vampton?

W.W. runs from the room to obtain aid for his employer who is stretched out on the floor, cold.

THE MU’TAFIKAH ARE HOLDING a meeting in the basement of a 3-story building located at the edge of “Chinatown.” Upstairs is a store which deals in religious articles. Above this is a gun store; at the top, an advertising firm which deals in soap accounts. If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan during the 1920s it would resemble this little architectural number.

3 men, under an almost maroon red light, kneel on the basement’s concrete floor. Berbelang and Thor’s raincoats hang from a coat rack near the door. Propped against the wall are their dripping, black umbrellas. Some of the women Mu’tafikah in Garbo hats and speaking in brittle unadorned voices are standing around a long wooden table in the rear of the basement. Under a soft lamp they are coolly planning excursions into the Cloisters the Frick and the Met.

On the table lies a Nimba mask made of Guinea wood they’ve seized from a private collection belonging to a society woman on Park Ave. Other Mu’tafikah are carefully packing items. They are to be sent to a contact “Frank” somewhere in the Pacific Islands who will in turn ship them to their rightful owners in Asia. “Tam” a Nigerian musician and writer will return 5,000 masks and wood sculpture to Africa. He had begun by lifting a Benin bronze plaque with leopard from the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Before museum heads could warn their continental colleagues of his presence in Europe, he and his aides, posing as innocuous exchange students, had repatriated masks and figures — carried to Europe as booty from Nigeria, Gold Coast, Upper Volta and the Ivory Coast — from where they were exhibited in the pirate dens called museums located in Zurich, Florence, England and in a private collection in Milan. The Tristan Tzara collection, Paris; the Rietberg Museum, Zurich; Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde; Budapest’s Néprajzi; the Náprstkovo Museum, Prague; the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden — none are spared invasions into their “primitive” collections by these cool soft-spoken, colorfully dressed Africans. Moving swiftly about Europe with the aid of sympathetic White students and intellectuals (yet unaffected by 1 of America’s deadlier and more ravaging germs: racism), they reap a harvest of their countrymen’s stolen work. (Their task is in many ways easier; for example, they don’t have to lift heavy sculpture or canvases. Some pieces are only a few inches.) The Jean-Pierre Hallet Collection of Kongolese sculpture is picked clean.