by Ishmael Reed
“How’s Minnie?”
“They just called; they don’t think she’s going to pull through.”
LaBas has a clammy feeling. The Yellings’ house seems to have had its walls washed in blood.
Sister revives; Ms. Better Weather escorts her into the room.
“I feel better, Pop. It’s… it’s been like a bad dream. Those Moochers. They just about moved in after Wolf was killed. Turned the house into a commune, as they called it. Eating our food. Playing the music real loud. And then, when Kingfish and Andy were arrested, Minnie just about ordered me and Lisa to wait on them hand and feet; lazy rascals. The phone bill was eating up Dad’s estate. They had friends all over the world, it seemed. Nanny Lisa even offered to remain on free, they were eating up our funds so. But now she’s gone too.” She sobs.
“She was in the conspiracy that killed your father.”
“What?” Sister asks.
“What are you saying, LaBas?” the Nigerian asks.
“She had orders from a criminal mail-order house to spy on your father. This was after he had consulted with the remaining followers of Doc John who dwelled in an area near New Orleans called Algiers. When he returned to Berkeley, he went into the Gumbo business, calling it Gumbo so as not to arouse suspicion. Leading people to believe it was just another soul-food joint. What he had really done was to carry on Doc John’s work.”
“I don’t understand,” Sister says.
“Doc John took the show biz out of the Business, the long technical rites and often hideous gris gris and mojo. He took it off the streets and didn’t have to use sensational come-ons. The secret customers flocked to him. Well, Ed being a botanist, and knowing something of pharmacology, synthesized the formulas left by Doc into a pill—an aspirin-like white pill which he gave to his clients for what ailed them. He noticed that Doc John referred to certain human maladies in terms of astrology. One had a snake or a crab inside of one. It occurred to him one day that a crab meant cancer. Even the astrological sign for Cancer is a crab. Doc John cured cancer by using stale bread, ginger root soaked in sweet oil, blackberry tea and powdered cat’s eyes and making a pill of these elements. You see, Gumbo was the process of getting to the pill—using many elements, plant, animal and otherwise.
“Louisiana Red Corporation learned through a spy who had access to Ed’s papers, Nanny Lisa, that he was on the brink of a cure for heroin addiction—a cure that would keep the victim off heroin forever. That’s when they ordered their three spies to kill Ed. Nanny and Max did it. They killed him with butcher knives and blamed it on two black intruders.”
“It’s all very confusing,” Sister says.
“What he’s saying,” Ms. Better Weather says, “is that your family was destroyed not by a fate but by a conspiracy. Not Que será, será, whatever will be will be, but plain old niggers and white front men up to ugly.”
“Very well said, Ms. Better Weather,” LaBas said.
“You see, Sister, his hard-drug panaceas and his presence would have sent organized crime’s millionaires packing from their estates on Long Island, in Brooklyn and New Jersey and from their reconverted plantation nightclubs outside of New Orleans back to lower Manhattan to sell apples from pushcarts. If he had found a cure for heroin addiction, if gambling and prostitution had been legalized; if distribution had been taken out of the hands of criminals, then other negroes would have followed Ed’s example.”
“My dad did all that?” Sister said. “Why didn’t he ever tell us what he was up to? Why didn’t Wolf?”
“Because they wanted to Work in secret to bring about the results they desired. They worked with disciplined Workers; they weren’t interested in glory, only results.”
LaBas and Ms. Better Weather were climbing into the Solid Gumbo Works’ BMW. Sister and her Nigerian friend had called a cab for the trip to SFO Heliport. From there they would travel to San Francisco and then to New York.
“She seemed to be in a better mood when you told her the whole story. She will be in an even better disposition when she reaches New York and rushes to Minnie’s side.”
“Yes, that’s very good.”
There is a pause.
“Papa, what about interceding for Minnie?”
“How can I do that? You know how ill-tempered and cold-blooded the old Co. is. They wouldn’t listen to me.”
“But it seems to be the only route. I mean, after all, even you admitted that it isn’t the girl’s fault. You said others made her that way.”
“I’m not a sociologist, not a classicist. I’m just a trouble-shooter for a Board of Directors.”
“O Pop, you’re not all that cold as you make out to be. You have a soft spot in you. Go and get that girl away from Death. You can do it.”
Another pause.
“O, all right. I’ll give it a try.”
LaBas speeds away in a huff; Ms. Better Weather smiles, a triumphant, wetly luscious smile.
CHAPTER 40
Blue Coal had very large and sensual red lips which had the appearance of having been waxed. He was wearing hardly anything, and his penis could be seen, big, its tip almost touching the floor. He wore eagle feathers and was covered with white clay. He liked to beat on hollow things and boasted of saving the Sun from darkness. He had a hideous lecherous grin which disgusted Papa LaBas, but LaBas was civil. It takes all kinds to make this Co., LaBas thought, and when you’re in this Business you need all the support you can obtain, since enemies are constantly testing you.
Every time LaBas would try to broach the subject of Minnie’s release, Blue Coal would talk about something else, or shove a huge basket of fruit LaBas’ way or some 1973 California wine. The other guests seemed so weary, so bored, but kept their peace as Blue Coal rattled on about pussy.… Pussy seemed the only thing to be on his mind.
One guest, a young gentleman though mature-looking, impeccably dressed in a white tuxedo, hair shampooed, parted down the middle and giving off a lustre, was smoking a small cigar. He seemed a little bloodied but appeared relaxed, serene even, as if he had gotten something off his chest that had been bugging him for many years.
There was a burgundy-colored sky in this place. The winds sounded like the risqué clarinet trills of the old Cab Calloway band. The pervasive mist changed colors as if directed by a wizard lighter.… Maybe someone who had been in charge of lighting in a golden age of theatre.
LaBas sat through the ceremony in which a woman was seduced by some hooded figures, male and female; she had a delicate body and LaBas could see certain sections of this wonderful torso twitching with delight as if the body were inhabited by thousands of erotic creatures with a life of their own. He saw the clowns. He ate some more food. He drank some more wine. Some of the guests went to sleep, but Blue Coal was enjoying his own show, clapping the loudest of them all, yelling $$$$
Then they got down to serious business. In contrast to his former mood of merriment, Blue Coal began to snort and grimace as he heard one of his assistants, a short droll figure, read Minnie’s crimes.
How everything had to be her way. How she burned down the factory’s wings. How she promoted a shoot-out between two brothers—her own brothers.
LaBas tried to defend her, but the Blue Coal merely shook his head, his teeth full of pieces of meat from a hambone, wine flowing down his chin, while a woman on her knees was giving him pleasure, skillfully placing his peter in and out of her mouth, massaging it. LaBas turned away.
It wasn’t long before LaBas had requested his top hat from a short-skirted devilish woman with purple eyelids.
He walked out of this place he had come to petition. The Co. was effective, but Blue Coal wasn’t really his type. Blue Coal was intransigent; Minnie couldn’t be released. He would return to Berkeley and ease out Solid Gumbo Works. There were a few remaining details to attend to.
“Poor Minnie,” LaBas said as he was about to enter the crossroads dividing two worlds. She was certainly in the hands of a primitive crew. They w
ould eat her heart out.
Suddenly LaBas heard someone call behind him. It was Minnie.
He turned around just as Blue Coal threw her out. He kicked her hard in the backside, and she landed on earth; he certainly was no gentleman. He wiped his hands and then walked back inside, but not before addressing LaBas:
“Take her. I don’t want her here. This ain’t her type of scene. I mean, she don’t seem like she like it here. She don’t seem like she think we good enough for her,” Blue Coal said in his graveled cracked 7,000,000-year-old Be-bop voice. “She wants to devote all the time. This ain’t no devoting society—this is a partying Board of Directors.”
She got up and started towards him. She was beautiful in the bright red light. The star music played in the background. You won’t believe this but it was harp music, too. She moved as if on air, in slow motion. She headed straight towards LaBas and cuddled up to his chest. There was nothing underneath her nightgown and the warm youthful flesh stirred the old man. “It was like a world of endless blackness.”
“I know,” LaBas said, putting his coat about her. She began to sob. LaBas had won her an out.
At the same time two doctors were somberly talking outside Minnie’s room at a New York City hospital. They were shaking their heads.
1st. Dr.: I don’t know what happened. She was in that coma until a minute ago after every treatment failed, and then suddenly she came to, her vital signs strong and healthy.
2nd. Dr.: A miracle. That’s what it was, a miracle.
Sister had just turned the corner of the hospital corridor where she had come to visit her dying sister. She ran into Minnie’s room to find Minnie up and about. The sisters embraced.
CHAPTER 41
A wanga bag confiscated by marines in 1921 near Gonaives was supposedly a murder wanga, and its contents were rather peculiar. It was a hide bag, and in it were luck stones, snake bones, lizard jaws, squirrel teeth, bat bones, frog bones, black hen feathers and bones, black lamb’s wool, dove hearts, mole skins, images of wax and clay, candy made of brown sugar mixed with liver, mud, sulphur, salt, alum, and vegetable poisons.
Voodoo by Jacques d’Argent
It was the placid ending of a long case. No graves opening, releasing the dead to quake before damnation; no eleventh-hour shoot-out between the militants and the cops; no burning cars at the bottom of the cliff or chasing each other at high speeds pursuing good guys closing the gap; no trumpets in the heavens and groans in the deep.
Just the calm ending of a story with violent twists and turns, banging garden doors and knobs on the bedroom door turning mysteriously after midnight. They used to call LaBas and his Workers ghost chasers, but now they had become so respectable that the government was awarding contracts to investigate E.S.P.
LaBas sat in the empty office on a plain box. The physical properties of Solid Gumbo Works had been shipped east for recycling. He thought of the eaters and the eaten of this parable on Gumbo: poor Nanny Lisa murdered because she wouldn’t buck a nefarious Corporation; Maxwell Kasavubu driven mad by his own cover; Big Sally put in the police wagon for making sorry deals with the small business administration (piker to her soul she took cheap); T Feeler killed by the phantom of his own conscience he rejected in the name of “consciousness.” And Rev. Rookie. Well, Rev. Rookie was replaced by a moog synthesizer. The Kasavubus, Sallys, Feelers and Rookies are among all “oppressed people” who often, like Tod Browning “Freaks,” have their own boot on their own neck. They exist to give the La-Bases, Wolfs and Sisters of these groups the business, so as to prevent them from taking care of Business, Occupation, Work. They are the moochers who cooperate with their “oppression,” for they have the mentality of the prey who thinks his destruction at the fangs of the killer is the natural order of things and colludes with his own death. The Workers exist to tell the “prey” that they were meant to bring down killers three times their size, using the old morality as their guide: Voodoo, Confucianism, the ancient Egyptian inner duties, using the technique of camouflage, independent camouflages like the leopard shark, ruler of the seas for five million years. Doc John, “the black Cagliostro,” rises again over the American scene. The Workers conjure and command the spirit of Doc John to walk the land.
Solid Gumbo Works had no need for a factory; no need for mojo; the museums could have the mojo, the Working artist could have it. Not even the need for modified mojo of Ed’s, the aspirin-like pill, the Gumbo in which he had distilled Doc John’s cancer-healing formulas. Louisiana Red had indeed completely gone from manual to mind. A calm mind, unlike the old Louisiana Red mind which could only lead to a stroke. People were calmer, more peaceful because Louisiana Red had gone from manual to mind. No longer the animal entrails, the mess you had to make to do good, but from manual to mind, the jet equilateral cross replacing the many charms—so many that one couldn’t keep track of their many names and the many rites in these fast-paced modern times.
Ted C. was right, all you needed was a silver cup; the loas didn’t mind as long as you nodded their way from time to time. Now each Worker would take the knowledge he had gleaned from Ed’s mastery and LaBas’ precise investigative techniques and would spread out through the land, taking care of Business, teaching, improving the quality of the product, giving the customer a fair deal, making only enough profit to sustain him or herself.
The Workers were removing the last objects from the factory. They could do without all of the trappings of Business. They had decided to take Ed’s challenge of going from manual to mind, that is, everything the Business required was inside of each Worker. They had gotten rid of Louisiana Red but maintained its pungency. The Workers were dispersing, spreading out across the country, each person responsible for the quality of his or her own craft, getting in touch with one another only when necessary, through ultrasonic telephones. He remembered the lesson of war where, if you put all of your airplanes on one field, they could easily be destroyed. That was the problem. The Moochers were done for, but how long would it be before some other group riding on the crest of any old fad would get all up in their face, demanding they do this and that with their Business when they were ignorant of what the Business was all about? Now, without a central location, no one could lay a hand on them.
He read the news item in the San Francisco Chronicle about people who were in the old Business à la Louisiana Red and how in Florida they skinned a dog, put pennies under its feet, a banana in its mouth and an apple in its rectum. This done to discourage a Business competitor. The Business could not survive with such crude methods. Their people must have forgotten that the Business could always adapt itself to whatever time and whatever place it found itself in. He had assembled the Workers a few hours before and told them they were liquidating the physical equipment because it was no longer necessary. That they could help people without the long technical prayers, the pills; they could help them through using their own inherent psychic energy. The Workers seemed relieved. There had been problems too. When people worked around one another all day, they got on the other fellow’s nerves. Ms. Better Weather had given him a tearful goodbye. She was going back into teaching, and though she would miss the operation she knew that this was best.
The Yellow Cab honked its horn. LaBas gathered his things and went outside and got in. He could smell the fresh breeze coming in from the Pacific. Soon he was at the SFO Heliport.
When the helicopter reached San Francisco, he got out and went into the TWA section for his flight to New York. There was a big commotion. It was Ruby Yellings, Ed’s divorced wife. She was in the company of some people from the Food and Drug Administration. She was announcing to the press their mission; they had come into town to investigate her husband’s business to see if there had been any violation of the law. He walked over to the newsstand, away from the hubbub generated by Ruby’s arrival, and bought a paper. The story was on page 1.
There were wholesale arrests in New Orleans after Solid Gumbo Works informed the Authorities in N
ew Orleans of Louisiana Red Corporation’s crimes. As the French would say, “Chef Cock,” the Red Rooster, had been plucked. The music and the song of the country were no longer controlled by one family operating out of Brooklyn and Las Vegas, but were open once again to Free Enterprise. Louisiana Red was going out of style. The Louisiana Red that tempted even LaBas to consider having an arsonist shot until he found that arsonist was Minnie. Minnie was going to be all right. Young people are resilient, like a body that can grow back a limb.
Had the presence of Solid Gumbo Works meant the complete end of Louisiana Red as Ed wanted? Never, thought LaBas, who subscribed to the viewpoint that man is a savage who does the best he can, and so there will always be Louisiana Red. No, Ed wouldn’t go down as the man who ended Louisiana Red, but only one of many people who put it into its last days. But like the tough old swaggering pugnacious vitriolic cuss Louisiana Red was, it would linger on until it was put out of man’s mind forever. Ed would be remembered as the good Businessman whose only fault was too much heat; a model who showed the up-and-coming Businesses that “you can do it”; this achievement would eclipse even his cure for cancer.
LaBas chuckled at the thought of how Ruby would react when she found that the Solid Gumbo Works had dissolved to be carried on in the Work of each of its Workers.
(The next morning’s paper said that when her party arrived at Solid Gumbo Works and found only a deserted interior of plain walls, she became furious and cussed out everybody in sight. Ranking some of her Food and Drug male associates so they felt like crawling on into the Bay, which was some feet away.)
LaBas sat relaxing on the plane. It was a clear day and he could see the skyline of Chicago below. It looked like a row of dominoes, some taller than others. He had been on the plane for about three hours. There were magazines the stewardesses brought, but he wasn’t interested. He was writing a long report, a criticism of the Board of Directors, who were spending all of their time partying while the Workers were taking care of Business. Blue Coal had pulled rank on him and talked about seniority when LaBas complained about the lack of adequate bookkeeping and how he was only called upon during an emergency. He would submit a critical report to the stockholders, who were the Workers working from coast to coast. In this respect he would call for a clean slate and a new Board of Directors, and if this didn’t work he would go to higher-downs. Maybe it was time to elect a Gemini to the post. Somebody rational who wasn’t Pisces-eaten like Blue Coal (even though the Egyptians hated fish!)—somebody who wouldn’t be as indecisive as Pisces was, condemning somebody the first minute, releasing them the next. But first he was going to visit Hamadryas, who should have completed the translation of the line from “Minnie the Moocher.” He would take him a bag of pears dipped in champagne. Maybe Hamadryas had an inkling of what his next Work would be.
