Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

Yes, that figured into it, but we saw it as merely an upsurgence of a Holy War they’ve waged against us and others like us for 1000s of years. They wanted to bring it to a head because they saw us as a beachhead for their ancient opponents and responsible for the Jes Grew crisis in your country.

Strange, the press claimed that you had dissected the President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam’s…head.

They are required to yield their column inches to the Wallflower Order if they are to survive. What for us are heroes are for them robbers, killing a man who could not do malice with style is considered barbarism or cannibalism, worshiping out of doors in the woods instead of in a cathedral is a sign of unculturedness.

I don’t follow, malice with style?

Yes, LaBas, certainly as a matter of course, there are to be political prisoners but not whole families randomly massacred in prison as Sam did. The U.S.S. Washington saw the punishment of the President as their excuse. They marched into the city. The 1st thing they did was remove all the money from our banks—$60,000,000—to pay “debts” we owed.

Sounds like the American cowboy Jesse James, Black Herman muses.

Yes, and they call us robbers…It was a miracle that they wrote anything. The Sun. It’s only because someone within the New York Sun wanted to intimidate the Wallflower Order, he is the man we are after, according to Ti Toubon. You see this was to be a mystery war and I would imagine that after the Americans withdraw, it will be completely deleted from the American “History Books.” They’ve always wanted to drive out the ancient enemy; the anti-Christ as some of them call it.

1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal, universal being a word co-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atonists took over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals.

Yes, Black Herman ponders, the usual. A man downtown is trying to imitate me. A man named Houdini (Ehrich Weiss) is attempting to do what I do…this man should know that he can’t do what I do.

What is your specialty, Herman?

Lying buried underground for 8 days, Benoit. I have performed it all over the world. But please continue your narration.

Benoit Battraville drinks from the cup of rum…Artists who were found in possession of The Work were beaten whipped and subjected to a torture, a French invention called “blanchings”; they sent out squads of Marines to interrupt the ceremonies and destroy the wood sculpture and drums.

What did you do?

We merely practiced Catholicism up front and VooDoo underground. Similar to your New Orleans expression “doing the Calinda against the Dude.”

Black Herman lifts a glass of white rum to his lips and returns the glass to the table.

The joke became “The Haitian people are 95 % Catholic and 100 % VooDoo.” The Belgians and French were always bewildered when we laughed as they tried to interpret St. Jacques as Ogoun, the Warrior! the Gangster! the Fire!

Herman and LaBas chuckle.

The Americans were worse. We knew that we would suffer under the Marines because they were Southern Marines. Southerners being descendants of convicts from Europe, we knew they would not have the sophistication of, say, New Yorkers who had read Freud. The manner of torture they extended to their Black victims. The burning, the hanging. Burning was the traditional way used by early Europe of ridding people of the plague of the pagan religions.

How did this come about? LaBas asks.

We do not work the way you do. You improvise here a great deal; we believe in the old mysteries. I occasionally practice the Petro Loa. Not much but I raise the altitude a little. Kick up a fuss. You see, Charlemagne was arrested by the Marines for aiding the Cacos, peasants who had revolted against them in 1915, and he was forced to do hard labor in a convict’s uniform in the street.

The Marines raped our women, they took a member of the Assembly and kicked him in the seat of his pants in the presence of the people. They used what you call “Crackers” to administer our educational system. Our Superintendent of Public Instruction was a school teacher from Louisiana; they used our official limousines so that our own President had to borrow a car from the Occupation in order to make a trip into the interior.

PaPa LaBas and Black Herman listen, indignant.

Their slothful wives and children occupied villas with many servants while our men were used as cheap labor to build plazas resembling a picnic in Sheboygan.

Herman and LaBas laugh—

Deluxe Ice Cream, Coffee, 1 cent Pies, Cakes, Tobacco, Hot Dogs and Highways. Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the Occupation used to speed upon in their automobiles, killing dogs pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people. What is the American fetish about highways?

They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.

Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.

But what is after them?

They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia.

Well at any rate I am getting away from our story. Charlemagne escaped, and soon the cry was “Let all Haitians rise and drive the American Marines into the sea just as our ancestors did the French.” He rallied the Cacos to his banner of Ogoun War Loa. I joined him. We are the 1st to fight a guerrilla war against modern armed forces. It was 1918, a few short years ago. It became a sport of the American Marines to shoot the Cacos on sight, but we countered by moving in small detachments during the night and ambushing many a Marine patrol. Soon the conch horns and the drums informed the people all over the country that we had returned to our ancient religion just as our ancestors the Egyptians the Nubians the Ethiopians did in times of trouble. The Marines became nervous. They didn’t expect this.

Strange, there was nothing about this in the press? Black Herman questions. Even if it was a mystery war it seems that an explosion such as this would reach the ears of the people here.

We received help from the N.A.A.C.P., James Weldon Johnson and his articles in the Nation magazine. There was no phone campaign among the rich telephone owners. No receptions in swanky Park Ave. parlors. No ads in newspapers or massive demonstrations. We weren’t only a political cause but a cause that went to the very heart of Western Civilization. You see, there are many types of Atonists. Politically they can be “Left,” “Right,” “Middle,” but they are all together on the sacredness of Western Civilization and its mission. They merely disagree on the ways of sustaining it. If a radio show began touting the achievements of Western Civilization over civilizations of others there would barely be a letter to the station from anyone, anarchist or Calvin Coolidge Republican…

We made a sacred journey to have Ogoun possess us to know our course. By this time I was close to Charlemagne and we went to Arcahaie where in the hills lived 1 Ti Bouton who “conversed with the streams and could produce rain in the dry season and make lightning strike” as someone said. He was so powerful he could make the Titanic sink a second time.

Ti Bouton did not like the secretary Charlemagne brought along, a mulatto who was trained in France and possessed by the White man’s loas. He had made some remarks dismissing our ancient faith as “crazy” or “sick” and backward “mumbo jumbo.”

That sounds familiar, PaPa LaBas mulls.

The mulatto was taking black out of blanc. Minstrelsy is not confined to your theaters.