Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo

VooDoo General Surrounds Marines At Port-au-Prince

…only adds to the crisis. A corpulent, silkily mustached Robber Baron for whom a seal has been sacrificed to provide his hunk of toxic wastes with a covering notices this headline in the New York Sun and avers gruffly: The only thing they have in Haiti are mangoes and coffee. With prohibition there’s no need for coffee, and mangoes appeal only to a few people. A glamour item. Haiti is mere repast after a heavy meal of meat and potatoes. It doesn’t have any culture either. I didn’t see a single cannon or cathedral while I was there. Look at this!

The Robber Baron removes a wood sculpture from his pocket. Look at this ugly carving my wife gave me. She bought it from 1 of those leathernecks in the black market…Have you ever seen such an ugly thing. The obtuse snout; the sausage lips? It was really clever of Wilson to send Southern Marines down there. Those doughboys will really be able to end this thing and quick! VooDoo generals. Absurd.

Why do you think he sent them there in the 1st place? says his companion, who carries a black umbrella and wears a bowler hat, grey suit and black shoes, a copy of a Wall Street newspaper under his arm.

I have figured it out. Word has it that the old man was feeble and his wife was running the government. Maybe it was an expedition for some new fashions for the old girl. Can’t you see her walking across the White House lawn with a basket on her head above a tourniquet? Wouldn’t that be rich?

As the 2 men approach the intersection of Broad and Market a Black man opens the door for Buddy Jackson who struts alongside a high-yellow girl. They head toward the entrance of the bank where they plan to deposit the take from the previous night’s cabaret business. Jackson is carrying a large sack. The broker is about to comment about Jackson’s date, a “hotsy totsy,” when a loud pop occurs. The picket line of young flappers disperses. People fly about the streets until they land dazed and bloodied. 3 Packards reach the intersection far from the scene and turn the corner on 2 wheels.

Flappers, ginnys, swell-eggs, brokers, stenographers, carriages, automobiles, bicycles are scattered about the streets. The broker and his friend, a few moments before engaged in a penetrating analysis of the economic implications of the Haitian occupation, lie dead, bubbles forming on the broker’s lips. ½ his companion’s torso lies next to him.

† Castles in the Air— Irene Castle.

SOME SAY HIS ANCESTOR is the long Ju Ju of Arno in eastern Nigeria, the man who would oracle, sitting in the mouth of a cave, as his clients stood below in shallow water.

Another story is that he is the reincarnation of the famed Moor of Summerland himself, the Black gypsy who according to Sufi Lit. sicked the Witches on Europe. Whoever his progenitor, whatever his lineage, his grandfather it is known was brought to America on a slave ship mixed in with other workers who were responsible for bringing African religion to the Americas where it survives to this day.

A cruel young planter purchased his grandfather and was found hanging shortly afterward. A succession of slavemasters met a similar fate: insanity, drunkenness, disease and retarded children. A drunken White man called him a foul name and did not live much longer afterward to give utterance to his squalid mind.

His father ran a successful mail-order Root business in New Orleans. Then it is no surprise that PaPa LaBas carries Jes Grew in him like most other folk carry genes.

A little boy kicked his Newfoundland HooDoo 3 Cents and spent a night squirming and gnashing his teeth. A warehouse burned after it refused to deliver a special variety of herbs to his brownstone headquarters and mind haberdashery where he sized up his clients to fit their souls. His headquarters are derisively called Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral by his critics. Many are healed and helped in this factory which deals in jewelry, Black astrology charts, herbs, potions, candles, talismans.

People trust his powers. They’ve seen him knock a glass from a table by staring in its direction; and fill a room with the sound of forest animals: the panther’s ki-ki-ki, the elephant’s trumpet. He moves about town in his Locomobile, the name of which amused many of his critics including Hank Rollings, an Oxford-educated Guianese art critic who referred to him as an “evangelist” and said he looked forward to the day when PaPa LaBas “got well.” To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.

He is a familiar sight in Harlem, wearing his frock coat, opera hat, smoked glasses and carrying a cane. Right now he is making a delivery of garlic, sage, thyme, geranium water, dry basil, parsley, saltpeter, bay rum, verbena essence and jack honeysuckle to the 2nd floor of Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. They are for an old sister who has annoying nightly visitations.

The sign on the door reads

PAPA LABAS

MUMBO JUMBO KATHEDRAL

FITS FOR YOUR HEAD

When he climbs to the 2nd floor of Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral. The office is about to close for the day. Earline, his assistant Therapist, is putting her desk in order. She is attired in a white blouse and short skirt. Her feet are bare. Her hair is let down. PaPa LaBas places The Work on her desk.

Please give these to Mother Brown. She must bathe in this and it will place the vaporous evil Ka hovering above her sleep under arrest and cause it to disperse.

Earline nods her head. She sits down at her desk and begins to munch on some fig cookies which lie in an open box.

PaPa LaBas glances up at the oil portrait hanging on the wall. It is a picture of the original Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral taken a few weeks ago: Berbelang, his enigmatic smile, the thick black mustache, the derby and snappy bowtie, his mysterious ring bearing the initials E.F., his eyes of black rock, 2 mysterious bodies emitting radio energy from deep in space, set in the narrow face; Earline in the characteristic black skirt, the white blouse with the ruffled shoulders, the violet stone around her neck; Charlotte, a French trainee he has hired to fill in for Berbelang, wears a similar costume to Earline’s and smokes a cigarette. In the painting, completed 2 weeks before Berbelang left the group, she stands next to Earline.

Earline, now sitting at her desk, is smoking. 1 hand supports her head as she checks an order for new herbs and incense.

Daughter?

She looks up, distantly.

Jes Grew which began in New Orleans has reached Chicago. They are calling it a plague when in fact it is an anti-plague. I know what it’s after; it has no definite route yet but the configuration it is forming indicates it will settle in New York. It won’t stop until it cohabits with what it’s after. Then it will be a pandemic and you will really see something. And then they will be finished.

Earline slams the papers down on her desk.

What’s wrong, daughter?

There you go jabbering again. That’s why Berbelang left. Your conspiratorial hypothesis about some secret society molding the consciousness of the West. You know you don’t have any empirical evidence for it that; you can’t prove…

Evidence? Woman, I dream about it, I feel it, I use my 2 heads. My Knockings.* Don’t you children have your Knockings, or have you New Negroes lost your other senses, the senses we came over here with? Why your Knockings are so accurate they can chart the course of a hammerhead shark in an ocean 1000s of miles away. Daughter, standing here, I can open the basket of a cobra in an Indian marketplace and charm the animal to sleep. What’s wrong with you, have you forgotten your Knockings? Why, when the seasons change on Mars, I sympathize with them.