by Ishmael Reed
That’s a good idea, pop, Earline says.
She puts on her black felt hat which she wears cocked over her right eye. It’s a handsome contrast to the ribbed grey knit dress and the black belt around her waist. Large black beads rest on her chest.
The trio walk down the stairs and into the street. They walk a couple of blocks until they come to the restaurant. Inside LaBas orders 3 hamburgers. A radio in the restaurant’s rear room, used as a living room by the family who owns the store, is on.
S.R.: A GRATEFUL NATION POURS TELEGRAMS INTO THE PRESIDENT’S OFFICE. ACCORDING TO THE WHITE HOUSE POLL THEY ARE RUNNING 20-1 IN THEIR ENDORSEMENT OF HIS STRINGENT METHODS IN DEALING WITH THE JES GREW CRISIS. PEOPLE MAY BE STARVING, PRESIDENT HEEBER SAID, SALES MAY BE DOWN, CABARETS AND SPEAKS CLOSED, BUT DANCING IS FINISHED. THERE ARE HARD DIFFICULT DAYS AHEAD. WE MAY HAVE TO GO THROUGH A PERIOD OF ANXIETY. BUT IF WE PERISH, NO 1 CAN SAY WE DIDN’T PERISH WITH DIGNITY.
…AFTER A WEEK OF RECREATION IN EUROPE, BIFF MUSCLEWHITE, CURATOR OF THE CENTER OF ART DETENTION, SAILS FOR HOME ON THE INVINCIBLE SHIP THE TITANIC; HE IS DISMISSING RUMORS THAT HE WILL SEEK THE GOVERNORSHIP…HAITIAN WITHDRAWALS DUE SOON…A LIST FOUND IN THE POCKET OF THOR WINTERGREEN, A WHITE MU’TAFIKAH WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE IN THE TOMBS, LEADS TO THE ARREST OF THE MU’TAFIKAH, THE NOTORIOUS ART-NAPPERS…
Earline and T Malice have finished eating. The waitress hands LaBas the check.
75 cents for 3 hamburgers?
Don’t look at me, the waitress says. The wholesalers say they have to pay more for beef, the farmers say that the price on feed has gone up, the wheat farmers want more money, the tomato farmers have struck in support of the wheat farmers, people ain’t cutting the mustard the way they used to. At this rate we’ll all be out on the street selling apples before long.
LaBas reaches into his pocket and puts the money on the counter, the 3 people prepare to leave the premises.
What a beautiful doll! Earline cries, seeing the Black god Baphomet dressed in the sheik outfit, the turban with the ruby shining from its center. O isn’t that cute, she says to LaBas and T Malice, pointing out the little doll on a shelf behind the waitress. Where did you get that? Earline asks.
O my mama works for some crazy White man on Long Island. She was “carrying” some stuff the other night and she brought this trunk home the White man kept in his room. Well, we got it open and we found the little colored doll. Looks nice there, don’t he?
He’s adorable, Earline says.
Well, whats say we leave? PaPa LaBas asks.
Pop, can I have the car tonight, you know I’m returning to Lincoln University Monday for the fall semester and this young fox…well she…
Sure take it.
T climbs into the car. Earline stands next to LaBas outside the restaurant.
Pop?
Yes?
I must have really been silly with my carrying-on, my nervous breakdown.
I don’t think it was a nervous breakdown, I have my theory. Nervous breakdown sounds so Protestant, we think that you were possessed. Our cures worked, didn’t they? All you have to know is how to do The Work.
Yes, I want to learn more, pop. I’m thinking about going to New Orleans and Haiti, Brazil and all over the South studying our ancient cultures, our HooDoo cultures. Maybe by and by some future artists 30 to 40 years from now will benefit from my research. Who knows. Pop, I believe in Jes Grew now.
You do?
Yes, she answers as they walk past a fashion store whose inventory of Haitian clothes and jewelry has been drastically reduced in price; down the streets of boarded-up cabarets, past closed-down speaks and out-of-business record companies. The street is nearly deserted, gone now is the zest of the days when people were waiting for Jes Grew to invade and join its jazzed-up scouts already on the scene.
Pop, you know I neglected to replenish the altar’s 21st tray for many days.
That might have had something to do with you being touched that way.
True.
You should have explained to me what that particular rite was all about, pop, maybe I would have respected it. How are young people to know these things unless you older 1s tell us what you’ve been through? Sometimes I think we are ashamed of our experience no matter how loudly we proclaim its beauty. Each generation is condemned to repeating the errors made by the former. It’s a cycle.
I didn’t think you wanted to listen to my talk.
Pop, I have 2 tickets to a play at the Lafayette Theatre. Would you like to go? The curtain is in a ½ hour.
Love to, if you don’t mind going with an old man.
O pop, don’t give me that, pop, you’re only as old as you feel.
The couple heads toward the theater a few blocks away. Soon they see the title of the new play, a play about the future.
Mumbo Jumbo Holiday
PaPa LaBas remembers that Black Herman had praised it but the Atonist critics had criticized it as a lot of Bull. Well at any rate, it seemed to be packing them in.
Epilogue
In the year 1909 “…it began as a flair-up. Localized in a few places, the South, the West and the Northeast. It knew neither class, race nor consciousness.” An Atonist, whose cover was editorial writer for the Musical Courier, wrote in 1899:
Society has decreed that ragtime and cakewalking are the thing, and one reads with amazement and disgust of historical and aristocratic names joining in this sex dance, a milder edition of African orgies.
Cakewalking and ragtime are symptoms of that X factor. The stumper of Psychic Epidemiologists. It was 11 years before Hinckle Von Vampton’s message, to those in the know, that Sigmund Freud was dispatched to America for the purpose of diagnosing this phenomenon. (Sigmund Freud as you will recall is the man who grew up in a town dominated by the 200-foot steeple belonging to a church named for the Virgin Mary. It affected him. He began to trace Man’s “neurosis” to situations arising from this elemental relationship. The Mother and Son! [How many times do you hear of Electra?]
Freud, whose real talent lies in the coinage of new terms for processes as old as the Ark. He is as gifted as an American soap canvasser at this. This is why perhaps he was better known here than in his own Vienna.
Freud drinks from a Dixie Cup as the party sails into New York harbor. He stands in awe before Niagara Falls. He then pushes into the hinterland of the American soul and here in this astral Bear country he sees the festering packing Germ.
Freud faints. What he saw must have been unsettling to this man accustomed to the gay Waltzing circles of Austria, the respectable clean-cut family, the protocol, the formalities of “civilization.” Smelling salts are administered to their teacher by followers who’ve not seen such an outburst since their teacher waxed all “paranoid” when someone awarded him a medal upon which was etched the Sphinx being questioned by the traveler. Or on another occasion when Carl Jung confronted him with the fable of the fossilized corpses of peat moss.
What did this man see? What did this clear-headed, rational, “prudish” and “chaste” man see? “The Black Tide of Mud,” he was to call it. “We must make a dogma… an unshakable bulwark against the Black Tide of Mud,” uttered this man who as a child returned from church and imitated the minister and repeated his sermons in a “self-righteous manner.”
A tall, bespectacled man summons a news conference.
Q. What did the Doctor mean by “The Black Tide of Mud?”
A. He meant occultism.
Q. Why, then, did he employ the language of the Churchman: “Dogma”?
A. It was merely a figure of speech.
Q. But according to his theories, don’t figures of speech have latent significance?
…Please, Dr. Jung pleads. No more questions. I must return to the Doctor.
1 reporter insists on 1 more question.
Q. Before you leave, Doctor, can you give us Dr. Freud’s impressions of America?
A. He considers it “a big mistake.”
Freud, who disliked prophecy, was in no position to make a diagnosis. He admitted once that he could not discover “this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.” Lacking harmony with the world, he was unable to see what it was.
Later Jung travels to Buffalo New York and at a dinner table discovers what Freud saw. Europeans living in America have undergone a transformation. Jung calls this process “going Black.”* This chilly Swiss keeps it to himself however.
Strange. It seems that the most insightful pictures of America are done by Europeans or Blacks. Myrdal, Tocqueville, Jung, Trollope, Hernton, Clarence Major, Al Young, or Blacks who know both Europe and America: Wright, Baldwin, Chester Himes, John A. Williams, William Gardner Smith, Cecil Brown. I once leafed through a photo book about the West. I was struck by how the Whites figured in the center of the photos and drawings while Blacks were centrifugally distant. The center was usually violent: gunfighting lynching murdering torturing. The Blacks were usually, if it were an interior, standing in the doorway. Digging the center.
The clock on the wall strikes 10:00 P.M. The lecture should have concluded an hour before. But when PaPa LaBas gets started he doesn’t stop. He’s a Ghede. Garrulous gluttonous satirical sardonic but unafraid to march up to the President’s Palace and demand tribute.
What did Freud mean by The Black Tide of Mud? Why were there later to be assassinations of cultural heroes? In 1914 Scott Joplin, who, after announcing that ragtime will “hypnotize this Nation,” is taken to Ward Island where they fritter away his powers with shock therapy. Scott Joplin has healed many with his ability to summon this X factor, the Thing that Freud saw, the indefinable quality that James Weldon Johnson called “Jes Grew.”
“It belonged to nobody,” Johnson said. “Its words were unprintable but its tune irresistible.” Jes Grew, the Something or Other that led Charlie Parker to scale the Everests of the Chord. Riff fly skid dip soar and gave his Alto Godspeed. Jes Grew that touched John Coltrane’s Tenor; that tinged the voice of Otis Redding and compelled Black Herman to write a dictionary to Dreams that Freud would have envied. Jes Grew was the manic in the artist who would rather do glossolalia than be “neat clean or lucid.” Jes Grew, the despised enemy of the Atonist Path, those Left-Handed practitioners of the Petro Loa, those too taut to spring from sharp edges, wiggle jiggle go all the way down and come up shaking. Jes Grew is the lost liturgy seeking its litany. Its words, chants held in bondage by the mysterious Order “which saved the 2nd Crusade from annihilation by Islamic hordes.” Those disgraced Knights. Jes Grew needed its words to tell its carriers what it was up to. Jes Grew was an influence which sought its text, and whenever it thought it knew the location of its words and Labanotations it headed in that direction. There had been a sporadic episode in the 1890s and it was driven back into its Cell. Jes Grew was jumpy now because it was 1920 and something was going on. A Stirring. If it could not find its Text then it would be mistaken for entertainment. Its basic dances were said to have been recorded by the secretary to the first Seedy Fellow himself.
Jes Grew was going around in circles until the 1920s when it impregnated America’s “hysteria.” I was there, a private eye practicing in my Neo-HooDoo therapy center named by my critics Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral because I awarded the Asson to myself. Licensed myself. I was a jacklegged detective of the metaphysical who was on the case; and in 1920 there was a crucial case. In 1920 Jes Grew swept through this country and whether they liked it or not Americans were confronted with the choices of whether to Eagle Rock or Buzzard Swoop, whether to join the contagion or quarantine it, whether to go with Jes Grew or remain loyal to the Atonist Path protected by the Wallflower Order, its administrative backbone, composed of grumblers and sourpusses to whom no 1 ever asked:
“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.