Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo

This is an inquiry, it seems, and the man officiating wants to get to the bottom of why the Mayor, a Mason, allowed his Vital Resistance to wear down before Jes Grew’s Communicability. This augurs badly, for if Jes Grew is immune to the old remedies, the saving Virus in the blood of Europe, mankind is lost. No word of this must get out. The Mayor even volunteers to accept the short bronze dagger and “get it over with.” All for the Atonist Path. The visitors await his final groan, and when the limp hand falls to the side of the bed and begins to swing, they leave as quickly as they came.

This was no ordinary commission. When an extraordinary antipathy challenges the Wallflower Order, their usual front men, politicians, scholars and businessmen, step aside. Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies. Another author suggested that the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestoes of the political realm.

NEW YORK IS ACCUSTOMED to gang warfare. White gangs: the Plug Uglies, the Blood Tubs of Baltimore, the Schuylkill Rangers from Philadelphia, the Dead Rabbits from the Bowery, the Roaches Guard and the Cow Bay Gangs terrorize the city, loot, raid and regularly fight the bulls to a standoff.

A gang war has broken out over Buddy Jackson, noted for his snappy florid-designed multicolored shoes and his grand way of living. There are legends about him. He went into the police station and knocked the captain cold when he didn’t come forward with policy protection. Later, while orators and those affected with “tongues and lungs” were rapping as usual, he sent a convoy into Peekskill and rescued “Paul from the Crackers.”

Schlitz, “the Sarge of Yorktown,” a Beer Baron, has a lucrative numbers and Speak operation in Harlem. His stores are identified by the box of Dutch Masters in the window.

1 day, collection day, 3 Packards roll up to a store, 1 of the fronts belonging to the Sarge. The street, located in Harlem, is unusually quiet. The only sounds heard are the Sarge’s patent-leather shoes coming in contact with the pavement. Where are the salesmen, the New Negroes, the “ham heavers,” “pot rasslers” and “kitchen mechanics” on their way to work? Where are the sugar daddies and their hookers, the peddlers, the traffic cops, the reefer salesmen who usually stand on the corners openly peddling their merchandise? (Legal then.) There are no revelers and no chippies. The streets are deserted…

Schlitz looks into the window of his 1st store. What? No Rembrandt Dutch Masters but the picture of Prince Hall founder of African Lodge # 1 of the Black Masons stares out at Schlitz, “the Sarge of Yorktown.”

The mobster moves on, the 3 Packards following his course. The next store, the same story. The portrait of Prince Hall dressed in the formal Colonial outfit of his day, the frilled white blouse and collar showing beneath the frock coat and vest. The short white wig.

The painting is so realistic that you can see his auras. In his right hand he holds the charter the Black Freemasons have received from England. Schlitz shrugs his shoulders, puts a cigar in his mouth and walks over to the curb to speak to the driver of 1 of the Packards. He feels something cold at the back of his neck. He turns to see Buddy Jackson standing behind him, aiming a Thompson Automatic at him. The gun which has acquired the name of “The Bootlegger’s Special.”

Packing their heat, the hoods begin to open the car doors to assist their Boss. But they are pinned in. Up on the roofs, firing, are Buddy Jackson’s Garders. Exaggerated lapels. Bell-bottoms. Hats at rakish angles. The Sarge’s men sit tight. The bullet pellets zing across the front of the automobiles and graze the top and trunk. Buddy Jacksons exhorts the Sarge to leave Harlem and “Never darken the portals of our abode again.” He marches the Sarge down to the subway, followed by many people coming from the hallways and apartments and alleys, bars, professional offices, beauty parlors, from where they’ve watched the whole scene. Most people read the newspaper to tell them what’re the coming attractions. In the 1920s folks in Harlem used the Grapevine Telegraph. Booker T. Washington observed its technology. Booker T. Washington the man who “bewitched” 1000s at the Cotton States Exposition, Atlanta, September 18, 1895.

PICTURE THE 1920S AS a drag race whose entries are ages vying for the Champion gros-ben-age of the times, that aura that remains after the flesh of the age has dropped away. The shimmering Etheric Double of the 1920s. The thing that gives it its summary. Candidates line up like chimeras.

The Age of Harding pulls up, the strict upper-lip chrome. The somber, swallow-tailed body, the formal top-hatted hood, the overall stay-put exterior but inside the tell-tale poker cards, the expensive bootlegged bottle of liquor, and in the back seat the whiff of scandal. The Age of Prohibition: Speaks, cabarets, a hearse with the rear-window curtains drawn over its illegal contents destined perhaps for a funeral at sea.

Now imagine this Age Race occurring before a crowd of society idlers you would find at 1 of those blue-ribbon dog shows. The owners inspecting their pekinese, collies, bulldogs, german shepherds, and then observe these indignant spectators as a hound mongrel of a struggle-buggy pulls up and with no prior warning outdistances its opponents with its blare of the trumpet, its crooning saxophone, its wild inelegant Grizzly Bear steps.

For if the Jazz Age is year for year the Essences and Symptoms of the times, then Jes Grew is the germ making it rise yeast-like across the American plain.

An entry in the table of contents of a Δ205 book tells the story.

THE UNITED STATES, WHEN HARDING BECAME PRESIDENT

A Period of Frazzled Nerves, Caused by the End of Wartime Strain; of Disunity Caused by the End of the More or Less Artificially Built-up Unity of the War Period; of Strikes Caused by Continuation of Wartime’s High Cost of Living; of Business Depression Which Came when Wartime Prices Began to Fall; and of Other Disturbances Due in Part to Economic Dislocations Brought by the War and Its Aftermath. From All of Which Arose Emotions of Insecurity and Fear, Which Expressed Themselves in Turbulence and Strife. The Boston Police Strike, the Steel Strike, the “Buyers’ Strike” and the “Rent Strike.” The “Red Scare.” The Bomb Plots. A Dynamite Explosion in the New York Financial District. Deportation of Radicals. Demand for Reduction of Immigration. The I. W. W. and the “One Big Union.” Sacco and Vanzetti. Race Riots Between Whites and Negroes. The Whole Reflecting an Unhappy Country when Harding Became Its President.

* Our Times , vol. 6, The Twenties —Mark Sullivan.

WALL STREET IS TENSE. An incident has occurred which threatens to flapperize those yet uncommitted youngsters who adamantly refuse to eschew Jes Grew, last heard flying toward Chicago with 18,000 cases in Arkansas, 60,000 in Tennessee, 98,000 in Mississippi and cases showing up even in Wyoming. It would take a few months before a woman would be arrested for walking down a New Jersey street singing “Everybody’s Doing It Now.”† A week before, 16 people have been fired from their jobs for manifesting a symptom of Jes Grew. Performing the Turkey Trot on their lunch hour. Girls in peekaboo hats and straw-hat-wearing young men have threatened reprisals against the broker who dismissed them.

The kids want to dance belly to belly and cheek to cheek while their elders are supporting legislation that would prohibit them from dancing closer than 9 inches. The kids want to Funky Butt and Black Bottom while their elders prefer the Waltz as a suitable vaccine for what is now merely a rash. Limbering is the way the youngsters recreate themselves while their elders declaim they cease and desist from this lascivious “sinful” Bunny-Hugging, this suggestive bumping and grinding, this wild abandoned spooning.