Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

Well, go on.

He put on a record entitled “The Whole World Is Jazz Crazy” and began to tap his “pedal extremities” as Fats Waller would say.

Fats Waller? Who is this Fats Waller?

He’s a piano player, sir. He wrote “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp,” “Stompin’ the Bug,” “Hog Maw Stomp,” “The Rusty Pail” and one the boys down in central control enjoy called “Abercrombie had a zombie.”

How did you become so familiar with this Jazz? The Hierophant gives the assemblage of wires and aluminum metal a steely questioning look.

You told us to keep an eye on Jes Grew, sir.

O, yes…true.

The Android turns about and leaves the room.

He thought it was antiseptic up here. He’d have to watch that Android in case the Germ was about. Warren Harding. Him too? Of course there had been rumors during the campaign, the book brought to Washington by guarded express car, written by 1 William Eastbrook and based upon interviews with Harding’s neighbors of Marion Ohio who said that they had never treated his father as a White man. The books had been secretly destroyed in a bonfire.

Even the plates were destroyed. Another book, Warren Harding, President of the United States, worth $200,000 per copy, is available only from the “Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library.”* 250,000 copies of a book which asserted Harding’s Negro ancestry had previously been ordered destroyed by Woodrow Wilson. (It seems that the Haitian minister to Paris requested an audience with Woodrow Wilson to complain to this lying, hypocritical champion of “self-determination” the pain the American occupation was inflicting upon the Haitian people. The envoy was rudely dismissed by Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Wilson later lay ill, helpless, exhibiting the symptoms of VooDoo vengeance, for example, lassitude, the inability to concentrate more than 10 minutes at a time.)* When Republicans approached Harding with these rumors and asked him to deny them he said, “How should I know. One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence.”* What kind of answer was that? They had received reports from Hinckle Von Vampton that he had attended a Rent Party where he mingled with J.G.C.s and now this.

The author Mark Sullivan paints a picture I would imagine to be prolific with shadows, a waning witch-moon covered with shiny oil, 1 dark figure darting through a deserted street. The subject is the mysterious Harry Daugherty of whom the biographer wrote, “one of his eyes was imperfect, and the other, at the beginning of an acquaintance, seemed to circle round the man rather than focus on him, as if he was getting his impression, not from a physical man, but from some psychic aura about him, not visible to an ordinary eye.” Harry Daugherty is not only Harding’s poker partner, the man who was to put up with the Presidents’ swearing and drinking, but he is also the man “who pushed into the water” this reluctant candidate who would have preferred to remain in the Senate. You guessed it. Harry Daugherty is an agent of the Wallflower Order.

They thought that Harding would be perfect for the job of Jes Grew stopper. Hadn’t he earned his 1st dollar cutting corn? Didn’t he assist local farmers in painting their barns and thrashing? As a printer hadn’t he learned the art of “sticking type, feeding press, making forms, and washing rollers?” Hadn’t this man maintained William McKinley’s flagpole on his lawn as a good luck symbol? Didn’t he sprinkle his conversation with such wholesome expressions as “pleased as punch?” Wasn’t his favorite reading matter “the funnies?” And his contribution to building the Ohio railroad; what about that?

Wasn’t this a sedate businessman, newspaper editor and family man, a devoted husband of Florence, a dashing husband who campaigned often, dressed in white trousers, blue coat and saw-tooth hat? Here was a man whose opinions were those of Muncie, Indiana and now he had been exposed as Black.

They can’t use the lone psychopath emerging suddenly as the President’s party enters the train station. They used that with Garfield. No, they must use something different this time. Poison. It all adds up to guilty. He attended a Rent Party, exposed the Holy War in Haiti and now this. And when he was quoted as saying, “The Negro should be the Negro and not an imitation White man,” what did he mean by that? Was that some kind of code he was giving to Blacks? You know, how they talk sometime you don’t know what they’re saying and as soon as you find out they done gone on to something else.

The Hierophant phones Harry Daugherty to tell him of his decision.

* The Five Negro Presidents US.A. —J. A. Rogers.

* The Harding Era — Robert K. Murray.

* The Five Negro Presidents US.A.—J. A. Rogers.

…JES SMITH, A FRIEND, attempts to warn Harding but “commits suicide”* in Harry Daugherty’s apartment. As soon as Warren Harding boards a train for what has become known to historians as “Harding’s mysterious journey West,” they begin injecting the poison. By the time he reaches San Francisco by way of Alaska on the morning of July 29 he is described by reporters as “gray and worn.”

They finish the job at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Harding had the last word though. It is contained in a message he was to deliver before the Hollywood Chapter of the Knights Templar, entitled “The Ideals of a Christian Fraternity.”* (In this way, he points his finger at his killers. Few historians have understood this clue.—I.R.)

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

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

THAT EVENING PAPA LABAS sits in the office of Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. He has closed the place until further notice. He is thinking of the deaths of his assistants Charlotte, Berbelang; and of Abdul Hamid. Was there a common thread which united them? If he could only find the Text. Abdul must have had it. He must have really been on to something. The Text must be somewhere in New York because wasn’t Jes Grew headed this way? Jes Grew would smell it out. He studies once again the epigram on cotton.

T Malice enters the room.

I went to see Earline over at Black Herman’s.

How is she?

She’s her old self. She took Berbelang’s death hard they say but got over it. The sisters will take care of her for a few weeks. Think I’ll go take in a show.

LaBas rolls a pencil in his fingers.

Where are you going? To a talkie?

No, thought I would go to the Cotton Club. There’s a terrific comedy team called the Warp and Woof formerly of the Diastole and Systole who imitate 3rd-rate literary critics with a passion. They are hilarious. Then there’s the Dancing Bales; that tap dance group taps so that the floorboards begin to creak.

Excited LaBas looks at T Malice. Say that again.

The Dancing Bales they dance so…

Come on let’s go.

But where?

No time to explain. LaBas flies down the stairs to the car, T Malice gasping for breath as he tries to keep up with the old man.

THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN interviewed by Hinckle Von Vampton for Talking Android don’t have very much longer to wait. The 3 black Buicks bearing Haitian license plates pull up to the intersection of what is now 8th Ave. and 125th St. The men climb into the 3 cars and are driven to the pier near the blind pig where recently a series of amorous adventures culminated in a 1 night stand which nearly lost an innocent trolley car operator his happy home. They board The Black Plume and wait in the stateroom until Benoit Battraville (so bad that he isn’t mentioned in the index of one of the few books which cite him) enters the room.