Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

[The curtain opens, revealing Charlotte’s Pick, who is about 4’ 1”. He is in what appears to be a slave cabin and the stage foliage indicates that the cabin is in a forest. There are roots lying on a wooden table and an old tattered book. We can see by the way Peter is mixing things, the greenish-yellow candles, the black cats walking about, and a black bird looking sinisterly down upon the whole affair, that Peter is impersonating a cunjah man. He removes a tattered book and begins to mumble words from it. The slave master’s wife Charlotte materializes; she tantalizingly removes her hoop skirt and petticoats until she is down to a brief flappers skirt. Bloodhounds approaching in the background. The audience begins to chuckle as Doctor Peter Pick goes through the motions of putting her down. Charlotte makes even bolder more suggestive overtures to him. The closer the noise of the bloodhounds comes to his cabin the more the audience laughs at the Pick’s Predicament. The bankers, publishers, visiting Knights of Pythias and Knights of the White Camelia, theatrical people, gangsters and city officials who frequent the club are getting a big kick out of this.

An angel in a Green Pastures getup passes by. Pick invites him in and asks him to read the words. Nothing happens as Charlotte now begins to remove her blouse. The angel leaves the cabin, puffing on his cigar and tipping his black felt derby with ribbon band. The bloodhounds are closing in on the cabin as Peter Pick makes more attempts to send her back from where he conjured her. A local demon passes by and Peter Pick yanks its tail and pulls it into the cabin. It too reads from the magic book, the grimoire, and nothing happens. Charlotte is removing her brassiere and has unpinned her hair. The bloodhounds are heard crossing the swamps and some can be heard coming up on the ground a few yards from the Pick’s cabin. Well, in desperation Pick passes the book to the planter’s wife and asks her to read from it. She reads. Pick disappears!] The curtains close upon thunderous applause and laughter.

So this was the Charlotte his friends, Masons in the know, at the Caucasian lodge talked about. Her apartment where one was initiated into certain rites. They were calling it the Temple of Isis. The rites, it suggested, were of a sexual nature, Muses Biff Musclewhite, who resembled the white-mustached Esquire symbol. Well-heeled. Dirty old man.

Some act huh!

Yes, Musclewhite distantly replies to Schlitz the Sarge; the beauty, the enchanting body of this woman, Musclewhite thinks. A…why don’t we order.

The “Sergeant” snaps his fingers.

Hey Pompey! Cato! come over here, he calls to the 2 Black waiters standing against the wall of the Plantation House.

They respond smartly, approaching Biff Musclewhite and Schlitz the Sarge’s table, bedazzling in their resplendent uniforms. The Police Commissioner now Curator of the Center of Art Detention is examining the menu.

Schlitz the Sarge, about to give an order, raises his head when he gets it shattered.

The 2 men put the guns back inside their vests and hop some tables until they disappear through the door. The patrons scream. Faint. Panic. Screaming.

Shocked!! Musclewhite rises from the table and pursues the waiters. His friend’s leaning back in the chair. Eyes staring straight ahead, about ½ of his head from the brow up scattered into the neighboring diners’ dinner plates and on their clothes.

Outside the club the 2 men are nowhere to be seen. Only white powdered wigs lying on the sidewalk.

PaPa LaBas, noonday HooDoo, fugitive-hermit, obeah-man, botanist, animal impersonator, 2-headed man, You-Name-It is 50 years old and lithe (although he eats heartily and doesn’t believe in the emaciated famished Christ-like exhibit of self-denial and flagellation).

He is contemplative and relaxed, which Atonists confuse with laziness because he is not hard at work drilling, blocking the view of the ocean, destroying the oyster beds or releasing radioactive particles that will give unborn 3-year-olds leukemia and cancer. PaPa LaBas is a descendant from a long line of people who made their pact with nature long ago. He would never say “If you’ve seen 1 redwood tree, you’ve seen them all”; rather, he would reply with the African Chieftain “I am the elephant,” said long before Liverpool went on record for this. The reply was made when a Huxley had the nerve to warn him about the impending extinction of the elephant — an extinction which Huxley’s countrymen were precipitating in the 1st place.

(Freud would read this as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” which poor Freud “never experienced,” being an Atonist, the part of Jealous Art which shut out of itself all traces of animism. When Freud came to New York in 1909 LaBas sought him out to teach him The Work; but he couldn’t gain entrance to the hotel suite, which was blocked by ass-kissers, sychophants similar to those who were to surround Hitler and Stalin later, telling the “Master” what they wanted him to hear and screening all alien material meant for their master’s attention. They had told LaBas to take the back elevator even though some of them prided themselves on their liberalism. 42 Professors of New York University or people from Columbia University.) (The 1909 versions of Albert Goldman, the “pop” expert for Life magazine and the New York Times who in a review of a record made by some character who calls himself Doctor John [when the original Doctor John was described by New Orleans contemporaries as a “huge Black man…, a Senegalese Prince…] made some of the most scurrilous attacks on the Voo-Doo religion to date — I. R.)* Humiliated, PaPa LaBas had left the hotel, the laughter of these men behind him. He didn’t get to see Freud, much to Freud’s and Western Civilization’s loss.

He could have taught Freud The Work. Give him a nook of the Nulu Kulu and maybe his followers would not have termed such sentiments “abnormal” or “pathological.” For next to Black Herman he was 1 of the few in the Northeast who could summon a loa when he wished.

It is customary for the followers of the great man, being prigs and inferior to him, to distort and cheapen the techniques of the master.

LaBas sits in court awaiting the clerk to call his case. He has been summoned for allowing his Newfoundland HooDoo dog 3 Cents to soil the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. PaPa LaBas couldn’t comprehend the charge. He was merely fulfilling an old civic axiom: that of keeping the city streets clean.

This is 1 in a long series of annoyments that have been launched against him by the Manhattan Atonists. They know that he was in contact with Jes Grew.

There were suspicious mailmen. A nasty fat-cheeked Black cat sat on the fence all day below his office, staring up at his window. A human hand had been sent through the mail. Barbarous? Maybe, but this wasn’t a case of conjugating Greek words, or cumbersome footnoting; this was cash. Their livelihood.

Their patients were flocking to his methods. Irene Castle, in a book, had seemingly given 1 of his techniques her endorsement:

Nowadays we dance morning, noon and night. What is more, we are unconsciously, while we dance, warring not only against unnatural lines of figures and gowns, but we are warring against fat, against sickness, and against nervous troubles. For we are exercising. We are making ourselves lithe and slim and healthy, and these are things that all reformers in the world could not do for us.*

This had saved him at 1st. This endorsement by Irene Castle, a woman whose personal fetish was that of dressing as a nun.

After her endorsement the vicious campaign aimed at him had abated. The harassment from the bulls, the constant inspections of his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral by the Fire Department, the reviews of his tax records.