Mumbo Jumbo

by Ishmael Reed

  Well, Abdul says, looking at his watch, I have to get back to the office. I have an anthology that’s really going to shake them up when I get done translating it.

  What language is it in? LaBas asks.

  Hieroglyphics. Abdul starts to shake hands with Herman and LaBas but seeing a couple arriving at the doorway his friendly face becomes a scowl and he withdraws his hand.

  He wags his finger in their face. And if I ever see you characters hanging around my mosque I will have my men take care of you, Abdul says, his back turned to the 2 people. He winks at LaBas and Herman and then nearly knocks over the 2 people on the way out of the room; standing in the doorway are a high-yellow woman and her bespectacled light-skinned unsteady harassed-looking male escort.

  Watch out with your old short Black ugly self, she scornfully shouts as Abdul flies by the 2 and out the door.

  Julius? Why don’t you do something, Julius? When these niggers manhandle me like that?

  Yes dear my lovely Nubian queen, the man says meekly as he and the woman turn about and head for the other rooms. (Julius was a well-known Black doorman for a quality Gentlemen’s club, hired to bounce the literary bad niggers who might become rowdy. He was W. E. B. Du Bois’ Boswell, but Du Bois was always in conference to him.)

  PaPa LaBas and Black Herman move from the room and down the hall of the Townhouse now filled with people.

  You know, maybe he’s got something, Herman.

  Maybe so but I don’t think that he should experiment in public this way. He’s doing a lot of damage, building his structure on his feet like this. That bigoted edge of it resembles fascism. An actor…We’ll see.

  PaPa LaBas reflects. Do you think we’re out of date as he said?

  I know that the politicians of this era will be remembered more than me but I would like to believe that we work for principles and not for self. “We serve the loas,” as they say. Charismatic leaders will become as outdated as the solo because people will realize that when the Headman dies the movement dies instead of becoming a permanent entity, perispirit, a protective covering for its essence. Yes, Abdul will become surrounded by people who will yield inches of their lives to him at a time; become the satellites rotating about the body which gives them light; but that’s ephemeral, the fading clipping from the newspaper in comparison to a Ju / Ju Mask a 1000 years old. No, LaBas, the New York police will wipe out VooDoo just as they did in New Orleans, but it will find a home in a band on the Apollo stage, in the storefronts; and there will always be those who will risk the uninformed amusement of their contemporaries by resurrecting what we stood for.

  The 2 men, PaPa LaBas and his guide Black Herman, walk into the 1920s parlor of the Townhouse. People are standing about a light-skinned-appearing man.

  Well I’ll be damned, Black Herman says. It’s the President Elect, Warren Harding.

  They move into the center of the room where Harding stands beneath some white chandeliers. He is on the tail end of some remarks he is making to the gathering. The Hostess stands off to the side, next to a society interviewer from the Race press. Her party is made: an unannounced visit of the next President.

  As you know, Mr. James Weldon Johnson visited me in Muncie and gave me information concerning the nasty war taking place in Haiti the administration was attempting to conceal.

  The guests move in as Harding reaches into his hip pocket and removes a plug of tobacco.

  I think we made a good shot with the Haitian material and the administration was put on the defensive. They were hard pressed to explain why a horrid war with Marines committing so many atrocities was allowed to continue. I promised Mr. Johnson that on the way to Washington I would drop by and see him and it was he who suggested that if I attended your little party I could hear some of that good music. The sounds Mr. Daugherty my Attorney General and Florence my wife keep hidden from me. So if you don’t mind a gate crasher I think I’ll just go and dip my fork into some of those chitterlings and pigs’ feet I know you’re cooking down in the basement kitchen.

  The President Elect followed by 2 of his aides walks down the steps leading to the basement as titters fly through the room.

  Well I have to go, LaBas says to Herman.

  Wait, I’ll walk you down the stairs.

  Herman puts on his black top formal hat and black cape. They walk down the Townhouse steps. Black Herman and LaBas shake hands when they reach the sidewalk.

  Keep in touch, PaPa; there are some people in the harbor who want to meet you.

  Good. Call me. LaBas walks toward his car. T Malice has the night off. He turns to Black Herman, the other man approaching the end of the block.

  Herman, can I give you a ride?

  The man turns around. No that’s O.K. I’ll walk.

  Herman?

  Yes?

  These young kids these days know how to give a party, don’t they?

  You can say that again, Herman agrees before vanishing around the corner.

  Biff Musclewhite has reduced his status from Police Commissioner to Consultant to the Metropolitan Police in the precinct in Yorktown in order to take a job as Curator of the Center of Art Detention. (More pay.) He is sitting with 1 of his old colleagues, Schlitz “the Sarge of Yorktown,” nicknamed affectionately by the police station he so often visited over the years.

  They are sitting at the table of the Plantation House located in the Milky Way of Manhattan, the area of theaters and night clubs. The Southern Belle chorus line is promenading on the stage (the background of which is a riverboat) in their multipetticoated skirts, carrying parasols and wearing bonnets. Banjos strumming. Black waiters stand against the wall dressed as if they were in some 18th-century French court. White powdered wigs, frilled cuffs and shirts. The deep, blue lighting fills the club.

  Gonna miss ya, Biff, remember the bags I use to bring to ya, ya got real rich outta that; the only guy retiring at $3000 per as a millionaire. I’ll bet you have 1,000,000s in stocks and bonds inside your shoeboxes.

  Yes, I’ve come a long way, hobnobbing with the rich out on Long Island…Curator of a museum…a long way from that punk kid you use to cover, down in the Tenderloin. Musclewhite laughs.

  Yeah, remember when you went off to war and the whole gang turned out to say goodbye and sing “Over There.” You really gave it to them Huns, Biff. We were proud of you.

  …You know, Sarge, some would think that this was a plot for a Cagney movie. You and I brothers, you become a gangster and I become a cop…

  Only you didn’t go straight. I was always dumb but you were smart, taking more money from us than I would ever make in policy or bootlegging liquor, and now Curator of the Center of Art Detention which is kind of Big Cheese for us crooks. There you are taking bigger than me and getting away clean; how did you swing it?

  Some of my friends over at the Plutocrat Club said there was an opening. I asked them how I could get the job if my only experience was as police commissioner. They said I had to learn the art of making a simple oil portrait resemble a window dressing in heaven. They said it was the gab that was the art. How you promoted it…So I’ve been learning these art terms from reading the New York Sun. And you know, I’m getting good at it.

  Similar to my business. That’s what I mean, Biff, you’ve always had a head on your shoulders. Your silver hair, the expensive clothing, hanging out with all the swanks. A good cover. You got it made, pal. The pressures I have…Buddy Jackson is muscling in on my operation in Harlem; we tried to get him the other day but the nigger seems to have 9 lives. My man hurled a bomb at him and a dame.

  [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.