Mumbo Jumbo (28 page)

Gentlemen, please help a fellow down on his luck. Please!

Poor fellow, LaBas says reaching in his pocket for a quarter. What happened to you?

I am 29 but I don’t look it. I said the words that night when we turned the Plantation Club upside down. I said the words and she vanished into thin air hehehehheheheheheheheheheeh. Into thin air, do you hear? She just went away. Flew away like a delicate, beautiful white bird. A WHITE BIRD, DO YOU HEAR? the man cries, clutching LaBas by the lapels.

Please my friend. Here is a quarter. Go buy yourself some warm soup.

O thank you sir, the man says hobbling off in the direction of a restaurant.

Looks like hard times, T Malice says to LaBas as they watch Doctor Peter Pick rush to the luncheonette to spend his handout.

When they walk up the stairs of Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, LaBas removes his key and begins to open the door. The door opens. Surprise.

Earline! They both embrace her. It is like a family reunited.

I was a sick girl, but I feel great now.

Well at least there’s something to be joyous about, Earline.

You heard about Jes Grew, huh pop?

Yes, Earline, I heard.

LaBas and T Malice walk into the deserted room of the Kathedral.

O pop, here’s a letter that arrived today. The mail is so slow. It’s from Abdul Sufi Hamid, mailed the afternoon of the day his last message came.

Let me see, LaBas says, rushing out and tearing open the envelope.

Censorship until the very last. He took it upon himself to decide what writing should be viewed by Black people, the people he claimed he loved. I can’t understand. Apparently after Abdul burned the Book, Jes Grew sensed the ashes of its writings, its litany and just withered up and died. Better luck next time.

What do you think was eating him, pop?

Earline, who has been standing in the door taking it all in, lowers her head, sorry that LaBas perhaps won’t live to see the thing he ached to see.

I think I understand. He set himself up as a roadblock checking all of the data that passed through the senses of 1000000s. A Patrolman of the mind handing out tickets to any idea or thought that sped or made U turns. This was just too much traffic for 1 man to handle. It drove him into a crisis. He couldn’t stop the influences coming in on 1 people. Multitudinous, individual—like the 1000 1000000000 stars of a galaxy. The energy was just too much for him and he must have known that in the end he would receive the rebellious wrath of those ancient people who will not allow someone to tamper with their Sacred Head. A Head is like a temple in our tradition.

Is this the end of Jes Grew?

Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. It even precedes that little ball that exploded 1000000000s of years ago and led to what we are now. Jes Grew may even have caused the ball to explode. We will miss it for a while but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left. You see, life will never end; there is really no end to life, if anything goes it will be death. Jes Grew is life. They comfortably share a single horse like 2 knights. They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this. If the Daughters of the Eastern Star can do it, so can they. What do you say we all go down to the restaurant and have a sandwich?

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.

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.