by Ishmael Reed
Schlitz, “the Sarge of Yorktown,” a Beer Baron, has a lucrative numbers and Speak operation in Harlem. His stores are identified by the box of Dutch Masters in the window.
1 day, collection day, 3 Packards roll up to a store, 1 of the fronts belonging to the Sarge. The street, located in Harlem, is unusually quiet. The only sounds heard are the Sarge’s patent-leather shoes coming in contact with the pavement. Where are the salesmen, the New Negroes, the “ham heavers,” “pot rasslers” and “kitchen mechanics” on their way to work? Where are the sugar daddies and their hookers, the peddlers, the traffic cops, the reefer salesmen who usually stand on the corners openly peddling their merchandise? (Legal then.) There are no revelers and no chippies. The streets are deserted…
Schlitz looks into the window of his 1st store. What? No Rembrandt Dutch Masters but the picture of Prince Hall founder of African Lodge #1 of the Black Masons stares out at Schlitz, “the Sarge of Yorktown.”
The mobster moves on, the 3 Packards following his course. The next store, the same story. The portrait of Prince Hall dressed in the formal Colonial outfit of his day, the frilled white blouse and collar showing beneath the frock coat and vest. The short white wig.
The painting is so realistic that you can see his auras. In his right hand he holds the charter the Black Freemasons have received from England. Schlitz shrugs his shoulders, puts a cigar in his mouth and walks over to the curb to speak to the driver of 1 of the Packards. He feels something cold at the back of his neck. He turns to see Buddy Jackson standing behind him, aiming a Thompson Automatic at him. The gun which has acquired the name of “The Bootlegger’s Special.”
Packing their heat, the hoods begin to open the car doors to assist their Boss. But they are pinned in. Up on the roofs, firing, are Buddy Jackson’s Garders. Exaggerated lapels. Bell-bottoms. Hats at rakish angles. The Sarge’s men sit tight. The bullet pellets zing across the front of the automobiles and graze the top and trunk. Buddy Jacksons exhorts the Sarge to leave Harlem and “Never darken the portals of our abode again.” He marches the Sarge down to the subway, followed by many people coming from the hallways and apartments and alleys, bars, professional offices, beauty parlors, from where they’ve watched the whole scene. Most people read the newspaper to tell them what’re the coming attractions. In the 1920s folks in Harlem used the Grapevine Telegraph. Booker T. Washington observed its technology. Booker T. Washington the man who “bewitched” 1000s at the Cotton States Exposition, Atlanta, September 18, 1895.
8
PICTURE THE 1920S AS a drag race whose entries are ages vying for the Champion gros-ben-age of the times, that aura that remains after the flesh of the age has dropped away. The shimmering Etheric Double of the 1920s. The thing that gives it its summary. Candidates line up like chimeras.
The Age of Harding pulls up, the strict upper-lip chrome. The somber, swallow-tailed body, the formal top-hatted hood, the overall stay-put exterior but inside the tell-tale poker cards, the expensive bootlegged bottle of liquor, and in the back seat the whiff of scandal. The Age of Prohibition: Speaks, cabarets, a hearse with the rear-window curtains drawn over its illegal contents destined perhaps for a funeral at sea.
Now imagine this Age Race occurring before a crowd of society idlers you would find at 1 of those blue-ribbon dog shows. The owners inspecting their pekinese, collies, bulldogs, german shepherds, and then observe these indignant spectators as a hound mongrel of a struggle-buggy pulls up and with no prior warning outdistances its opponents with its blare of the trumpet, its crooning saxophone, its wild inelegant Grizzly Bear steps.
For if the Jazz Age is year for year the Essences and Symptoms of the times, then Jes Grew is the germ making it rise yeast-like across the American plain.
An entry in the table of contents of a Δ205 book tells the story.
THE UNITED STATES, WHEN HARDING BECAME PRESIDENT
A Period of Frazzled Nerves, Caused by the End of Wartime Strain; of Disunity Caused by the End of the More or Less Artificially Built-up Unity of the War Period; of Strikes Caused by Continuation of Wartime’s High Cost of Living; of Business Depression Which Came when Wartime Prices Began to Fall; and of Other Disturbances Due in Part to Economic Dislocations Brought by the War and Its Aftermath. From All of Which Arose Emotions of Insecurity and Fear, Which Expressed Themselves in Turbulence and Strife. The Boston Police Strike, the Steel Strike, the “Buyers’ Strike” and the “Rent Strike.” The “Red Scare.” The Bomb Plots. A Dynamite Explosion in the New York Financial District. Deportation of Radicals. Demand for Reduction of Immigration. The I. W. W. and the “One Big Union.” Sacco and Vanzetti. Race Riots Between Whites and Negroes. The Whole Reflecting an Unhappy Country when Harding Became Its President.
* Our Times, vol. 6, The Twenties—Mark Sullivan.
9
WALL STREET IS TENSE. An incident has occurred which threatens to flapperize those yet uncommitted youngsters who adamantly refuse to eschew Jes Grew, last heard flying toward Chicago with 18,000 cases in Arkansas, 60,000 in Tennessee, 98,000 in Mississippi and cases showing up even in Wyoming. It would take a few months before a woman would be arrested for walking down a New Jersey street singing “Everybody’s Doing It Now.”† A week before, 16 people have been fired from their jobs for manifesting a symptom of Jes Grew. Performing the Turkey Trot on their lunch hour. Girls in peekaboo hats and straw-hat-wearing young men have threatened reprisals against the broker who dismissed them.
The kids want to dance belly to belly and cheek to cheek while their elders are supporting legislation that would prohibit them from dancing closer than 9 inches. The kids want to Funky Butt and Black Bottom while their elders prefer the Waltz as a suitable vaccine for what is now merely a rash. Limbering is the way the youngsters recreate themselves while their elders declaim they cease and desist from this lascivious “sinful” Bunny-Hugging, this suggestive bumping and grinding, this wild abandoned spooning.
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.
10
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.
O pop, that’s ridiculous. Xenophobic. Why must you mix poetry with concrete events? This is a new day, pop. We need scientists and engineers, we need lawyers.
All that’s all right, what you speak of, but that ain’t all. There’s more. And I’ll bet that before this century is out men will turn once more to mystery, to wonderment; they will explore the vast reaches of space within instead of more measuring more “progress” more of this and more of that. More Increase, Growth Inflation, and they don’t know what to do when Jes Grew comes along like the Dow Jones snake and rises quicker than the G.N.P.; these scientists, there’s a lot they don’t know. And as for secret societies? The Communist party originated among some German workers in Paris. They called themselves the Workers Outlaw League. Marx came along and removed what was called the ritualistic paraphernalia so that the masses could participate instead of the few. Daughter, the man down on 125th St. and Lenox Ave. on the stand speaking might be mouthing ideas which arose at a cocktail party or from a transcontinental telephone call or—
Earline puts her head on the desk and begins to sob. PaPa LaBas comforts her.
O there I go, getting you upset…
She confesses to him. O it isn’t you, pop, it isn’t you, it’s…
Berbelang?
O pop, he thinks you’re a failure, he felt that you were limiting your techniques. He thought you should have added Inca, Taoism and other systems. He felt that you were becoming all wrapped up in Jes Grew and that it’s a passing fad. He isn’t the old Berbelang, pop; his eyes are red. He seems to have a missionary zeal about whatever he’s mixed up in. I get so lonely, I would like to go out; tonight for instance. I’m invited to a Chitterling Switch.
A Chitterling Switch? What’s that, Earline?
She shows him the card.
We’re attempting to raise money for anti-lynching legislation; James Weldon Johnson is supposed to speak… It’s like a Rent Party, you know?
You and T use so much slang these days I can hardly communicate with you, but your Chitterling Switch sounds interesting. Do you mind if an old man comes along?
O pop, 50 is not old these days.
You flatter me; just wait until I lock the office.
And I must change, pop. I’ll be right with you.
PaPa LaBas glances into another office toward the main room of Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral.
Where’s Charlotte?
Earline has entered the ladies room.
You know pop, she�
��s been acting strangely these days. She’s listless and cross. She had an argument with a client this morning and began to swear at him in French; isn’t that a sign?
He pauses for a moment.
I must speak to her. Perhaps she’s upset about Berbelang leaving as he did. You know, they were fond of each other. My activist side really charms the women; I suppose this is how he was able to woo such a beautiful thing as yourself.
O cut it out, pop!
Earline looks at her features in the mirror. Something has come over her. She finds it necessary to go through the most elaborate toilet ritual these days, using some very expensive imported soaps, embroidered towels, and she has taken a fancy to buying cakes even though she never before possessed a sweet tooth. She glances at the sign above the marble sink.
REMEMBER TO FEED THE LOAS
O, that reminds her. She hasn’t replenished the loa’s tray #21. On a long table in the Mango Room are 22 trays which were built as a tribute to the Haitian loas that LaBas claimed was an influence on his version of The Work. This was 1 of LaBas’ quirks. He still clung to some of the ways of the old school. Berbelang had laughed at him 1 night for feeding a loa. This had been 1 of the reasons for their break. Of course she didn’t comprehend their esoteric discussions. PaPa LaBas hadn’t required that the technicians learn The Work. The drummers, too, were clinical; their job was that of sidemen to PaPa LaBas’ majordomo. They didn’t know PaPa LaBas’ techniques and therapy. Didn’t have to know it. As long as they knew the score LaBas wasn’t interested in proselytizing. But feeding, she thought, was merely 1 of his minor precautions. It seemed such a small thing. She would attend to it tomorrow or the next day.
I’ll be with you in a moment, she shouts through the door to LaBas.
We have plenty of time, no rush, PaPa LaBas answers her. He is inspecting the trays. He stops at the 12th tray, then returns to join Earline who is ready to go.
