Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo

(My italics)

Louis Armstrong

Mumbo Jumbo

[Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō, “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away”: mā-mā, grandmother+ gyo, trouble+ mbō , to leave.]

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Some unknown natural phenomenon occurs which cannot be explained,

and a new local demigod is named.

— Zora Neale Hurston on the origin of a new loa

The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, “jes’ grew.”

…we appropriated about the last one of the “jes’ grew” songs.

It was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.

— James Weldon Johnson

The Book of American Negro Poetry

WITH THE ASTONISHING RAPIDITY of Booker T. Washington’s Grapevine Telegraph Jes Grew spreads through America following a strange course. Pine Bluff and Magnolia Arkansas are hit; Natchez, Meridian and Greenwood Mississippi report cases. Sporadic outbreaks occur in Nashville and Knoxville Tennessee as well as St. Louis where the bumping and grinding cause the Gov to call up the Guard. A mighty influence, Jes Grew infects all that it touches.

EUROPE HAS ONCE MORE attempted to recover the Holy Grail and the Teutonic Knights, Gibbon’s “troops of careless temper,” have again fumbled the Cup. Instead of raiding the Temples of Heathens they enact their blood; in the pagan myth of the Valkyrie they fight continually; are mortally wounded, but revived only to fight again, taking time out to gorge themselves on swine and mead. But the Wallflower Order had no choice. The only other Knight order had been disgraced years before. Sometimes the Wallflower Order was urged to summon them. Only they could defend the cherished traditions of the West against Jes Grew. They would be able to man the Jes Grew Observation Stations. But the trial which banished their order from the West’s service and the Atonist Path had been conclusive. They were condemned as “devouring wolves and polluters of the mind.”

The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu’tafikah * were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe’s last hope, the protector of the archives of “mankind’s” achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu’tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the “fetishes” of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New York City. Bootlegging Houses financed by Robber Barons, Copper Kings, Oil Magnets, Tycoons and Gentlemen Planters. Dungeons for the treasures from Africa, South America and Asia.

The army devoted to guarding this booty is larger than those of most countries. Justifiably so, because if these treasures got into the “wrong hands” (the countries from which they were stolen) there would be renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.

* Mu’tafikah— According to The Koran, inhabitants of the Ruined Cities where Lot’s people had lived. I call the “art-nappers” Mu’tafikah because just as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were the bohemians of their day, Berbelang and his gang are the bohemians of the 1920s Manhattan.

1920. CHARLIE PARKER, THE houngan (a word derived from n’gana gana ) for whom there was no master adept enough to award him the Asson, is born. 1920–1930. That 1 decade which doesn’t seem so much a part of American history as the hidden After-Hours of America struggling to jam. To get through.

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?

According to the astrologer Evangeline Adams, America is born at 3:03 on the 4th of July, Gemini Rising. It is to be mercurial, restless, violent. It looks to the Philippines and calls gluttony the New Frontier. It looks to South America and intervenes in the internal affairs of its nations; piracy is termed “bringing about stability.” 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. If in the 1920s the British say “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” the American motto is “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute.” America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod. They attend, these upstarts, a disarmament conference in Washington and play diplomatic chicken with the British, advising them to scrap 4 hoods including the pride of the British Navy: H.M.S. King George the 5th. Bulldog-faced British Admiral Beatty leaves the room in a huff.

THE WALLFLOWER ORDER ATTEMPTS to meet the psychic plague by installing an anti-Jes Grew President, Warren Harding. He wins on the platform “Let’s be done with Wiggle and Wobble,”* indicating that he will not tolerate this spreading infection. All sympathizers will be dealt with; all carriers isolated and disinfected, Immumo-Therapy will begin once he takes office.

Unbeknown to him he is being watched by a spy from the Wallflower Order. A man who is to become his Attorney General. (He is also surrounded by the curious circle known by historians as “The Ohio Gang.”)

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.

* The Harding Era— Robert K. Murray.

NEW ORLEANS IS A mess. People sweep the clutter from the streets. The city’s head is once more calm. Normal. It sleeps after the night of howling, speaking-in-tongues, dancing to drums; watching strange lights streak across the sky. The streets are littered with bodies where its victims lie until the next burgeoning. 1 doesn’t know when it will hit again. The next 5 minutes? 3 days from now? 20 years? But if the Jes Grew which shot up a trial balloon in the 1890s was then endemic, it is now epidemic, crossing state lines and heading for Chicago.

Men who resemble the shadows sleuths threw against the walls of 1930s detective films have somehow managed to slip into the Mayor’s private hospital room. They have set up a table before his bed. A man wearing a mask that reveals only his eyes and mouth calls the meeting to order.