Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

“May I Have This 1?”

Papa LaBas notices that some of the students are leaving the hall. It is nearly 10:30 P.M.

I will end now…Are there any questions?

A woman, whose hair has been sprayed and sculpted into a huge soft black ball of cotton raises her hand.

Yes?

PaPa LaBas, how did you live to become 100 years old?

Serving my Ka, daughter. Even a healthy body is useless unless the spirit is provided for with its own unique vitamins. There is a prescription for every soul here. The process has been developed from our ancient artificers until now.

You mean, the woman continues, that there are signs which determine our spiritual heritage?

Yes. In a superficial way it operates in a manner similar to the way natal astrology works: the notion that what happens in the heavens has an influence upon our lives on earth. Of course what is known as “natal astrology” has been corrupted by the Atonist scholars who’ve over 1000s of years brought their traditional prejudices to the art. We do not use the systems employed by the Egyptians Aztecs or Babylonians. Taurus for example is described as — in his main qualities — reliable patient slow honest trustworthy. Sounds to me like the deft hand of the Atonist Path who’ve had it in for Taurus for 1000s of years; unable to resist any opportunity to emasculate this figure — and get this, his colors are pastels — they’ve created a weak Bull. Saks 5th Avenue window dressing. Wonder does he play football and appear on talk shows?

Early tabloid editors as they were, they doctored the ancient texts at Heliopolis. Who worked about a horseshoe-like table in this early center of Yellow Journalism where they made their heroes look radiant, glowing; umbraging the heroes of others in this City Room of Hypocrisy.

Compare this description of Taurus with that of a Black loa, by the Haitian houngans who’ve maintained The Work largely uncorrupted. The Loa Agovi Minorie boasts when mounting a woman that his phallus is so hard that the brilliance of his organ’s bulb resembles that of a mirror.

Houngans in Haiti as well as Priests of Africa and South America are able to identify any Spirit or God that possesses a person, an art the Greeks knew, taught to them by an aide to the Human Germ who went into exile after the Master was assassinated by the arch Atonist in Egypt.

The Greeks established temples to the Egyptian’s Osiris and Isis where people were allowed to go out of their minds so that spirits could enter their heads; all under the watchful eyes of trained priests who knew the knowledge that Dionysus brought from Egypt. It is in this dictionary, which was committed to memory by the Human Germ’s aides when they fled to the Sudan and Nubia and brought to the Americas when the slaves came, that you will find something to fit your head. 1000s of loas some of whose qualities are modified when conjoined with certain rites just as those of the 12 Houses of Astrology are when matched with the planets. The rites, principally Rada and Petro, are not inherently good or evil; it depends upon how they are used. The houngan practices the Rada rites with the Right Hand. Cheap, evil bokors practice the rites with the Left Hand. The Left Hand Work, Dirty Work has been frowned upon from the time of the ancient Egyptians until North America.

So wherever the untampered word exists the Atonists move in. They know that Jes Grew needs its words and steps, or else it becomes merely a flair-up. Without substance it never fully catches on. When the people defeat their religious arm they move in their secular troops, men good at confusing people by making up new words that would be palatable to the masses who confuse quackery with profundity. Exorcism becomes Psychoanalysis, Hex becomes Death Wish, Possession becomes Hysteria. This explains why Holy Wars have been launched against Haiti under the cover of “bringing stability to the Caribbean.” 1 such war lasted longer than Vietnam. But you don’t hear much about it because the action was against niggers. From 1914 to 1934 Southern Marines “because they knew how to handle niggers” destroyed the government and ruined the economy in their attempt to kill Jes Grew’s effluvia by fumigating its miasmatic source. The Blues is a Jes Grew, as James Weldon Johnson surmised. Jazz was a Jes Grew which followed the Jes Grew of Ragtime. Slang is Jes Grew too.

The Black professor interrupts PaPa LaBas.

This is all we have time for, PaPa LaBas. Thank you very much for being with us tonight. PaPa LaBas is an eccentric old character from the 20s who thrills us with his tales about those golden times and his role in bringing about the holiday we are celebrating today.

The students smile at this old man accepting his inevitable envelope containing the honorarium. He loves to come to the university for his annual lecture on Jes Grew. All the students are wearing Jes Grew buttons of their own design.

Papa LaBas sprightly walks through the door of the classroom wearing his opera hat, the smoked glasses, carrying the cane, that familiar 1920s outfit — The Handsome Stranger of the 1919 Poster, by R. di Maga — fatal, skeptical—

PaPa LaBas?

Someone is calling, a cracked old voice. He turns about. It is he. The old man who in his devotion to empirical method had washed out any prophecy for which his ancestors were famous. He had written derisively of it after the last flair-up when Jes Grew launched a trial balloon, sent out a feeler; he had sought to inoculate the populace by writing that it would have to imitate Crane and Twain before it would amount to anything. That it was a fad like Flagpole Sitting and Goldfish Swallowing. His imagery was about as contemporary as he was because the craft of Jes Grew put him into a tizzy. He didn’t know what to make of it. In his last lucid interview he had regretted that he had opposed Hoffman Rubin Zimmerman the Beatles and the poet in the Balaam seat, Negro delineators in the tradition of Paul Whiteman, Dvorak, Fred Astaire, Sophie Tucker, Mae West, Dan Rice, George Gershwin. Singing the Blues. Getting hot. Contacting Jes Grew Carriers so that some of it would rub off. Using the word Man as a fugitive part of speech. He had denounced their warped syntax composition and grammar; but now he wished he had bent a little. It was too late. The imitators were on the decline and the members were taking over. Jes Grew was latching onto its blood. After all Liverpool ain’t Memphis and the Monterey Jazz Festival no Bucket of Blood. Now the delineators were taking a backseat to the Jes Grew Carriers, those jockey-dressed amulets on the Southern Lawn of America’s consciousness. Those who made Sutter’s Gold prospectors jittery by their presence.

Those who would never be allowed at the Free Enterprise gaming wheels, blackjack tables and slots because of that Black gentleman there in the beret with the goatee and whiskers. He threw 7, 7 times. They called it HooDooing the dice. The Jes Grew factor.

The Carriers were learning too. As long as they were stagemen, like those clowns who were so adept in the art of rap they could recite the 1st 15 listings in the telephone book and still entice the masses. They were supplied with Town Hall, Carnegie, the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, but when they went after the fetishes of the Atonist Path strange things happened. The mysteriously unfulfilled orders from the bookstores. The tapes turned up missing. The microphone in that innocent little box about 15 feet from where you’re speaking. You know, what Atonists call “paranoid fantasies” began to occur.