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Mumbo Jumbo

Summary

summary:: Mumbo Jumbo is a satirical novel set in the 1920s that explores the cultural conflict between Black and white America. The story revolves around "Jes Grew," a spiritual virus that causes people to dance and embrace Black culture. The "Wallflower Order," a group representing Western civilization, tries to suppress Jes Grew. The novel uses humor, historical references, and elements of Vodou to critique Western society and celebrate Black identity.

Thoughts

Highlights

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ebullience 🔗

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Mumbo Jumbo
[Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō, “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away”: mā-mā, grandmother+gyo, trouble+mbō, to leave.] 🔗

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Jes Grew carriers came to America because of cotton. Why cotton? American Indians often supplied all of their needs from one animal: the buffalo. Food, shelter, clothing, even fuel. Eskimos, the whale. Ancient Egyptians were able to nourish themselves from the olive tree and use it as a source of light; but Americans wanted to grow cotton. They could have raised soybeans, cattle, hogs or the feed for these animals. There was no excuse. Cotton. Was it some unusual thrill at seeing the black hands come in contact with the white crop? 🔗

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If in the 1920s the British say “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” the American motto is “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute.” America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod. 🔗

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The 2nd Stage of the plan is to groom a Talking Android who will work within the Negro, who seems to be its classical host; to drive it out, categorize it analyze it expell it slay it, blot Jes Grew. A speaking scull they can use any way they want, a rapping antibiotic who will abort it from the American womb to which it clings like a stubborn fetus. 🔗

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Etheric Double 🔗

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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. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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loa 🔗

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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.fn4 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— 🔗

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majordomo 🔗

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a well-dressed young blond White man whom they recognize from the society pages as Thor Wintergreen, the son of a famous tycoon. 🔗

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ofay 🔗

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I am building something that people will understand. This country is eclectic. The architecture the people the music the writing. The thing that works here will have a little bit of jive talk and a little bit of North Africa, a fez-wearing mulatto in a pinstriped suit. A man who can say give me some skin as well as Asalamilakum. Haven’t you heard? This is the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it’s put over; how it’s gamed. Look at the Mormons. Did they recruit 1000s of whites to their cause by conjuring the Druids? No, they used material the people were familiar with and added their own. The most fundamental book of the Mormon Church, the Book of Mormon, is a fraud. If we Blacks came up with something as corny as the Angel of Moroni, something as trite and phony as their story that the book is the record of ancient Americans who came here in 600 B.C. and perished by A.D. 400, they would deride us with pejorative adjectival phrases like “so-called” and “would-be.” They would refuse to exempt our priests from the draft, a privilege extended to every White hayseed’s fruit stand which calls itself a Church. But regardless of the put-on, the hype, the Mormons got Utah, didn’t they? Perhaps I will come up with something that will have a building shaped like a mosque, the interior furnishings Victorian, the priests dressed in Catholic garb, and soul food as offerings. What of it as long as it has popular appeal? 🔗

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prestidigitation 🔗

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A new generation is coming on the scene. They will use terms like “nitty gritty,” “for real,” “where it’s at,” and use words like “basic” and “really” with telling emphasis. They will extend the letter and the meaning of the word “bad.” They won’t use your knowledge and they will call you “sick” and “way-out” and that will be a sad day, but we must prepare for it. 🔗

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Biff Musclewhite 🔗

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Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don’t have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House. 🔗

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O we’re accustomed to Abdul’s bunk. He gets on his soapbox and goes on for hours. I have heard that he is receiving money from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
PaPa LaBas reflects. I rather like him though, at least he has his own flag, not like these Black Marxists who merely mimic the words of the “Internationale,” somebody else’s thought, and somebody else’s song. Abdul is just an irritated lyricist who can’t seem to get his music sung. I am eager to read his book when it’s out. 🔗

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Charlotte, I think we should be careful. I don’t know the extent to which the Haitian aspects of The Work can be translated here. Suppose the loas have followed the features of their work I have borrowed. This means that they have to be appeased. That’s why I require that the 22 trays be fed just in case. The 22 trays dedicated to the Haitian loa. I know you all think it’s silly but we have to observe these precautions. People didn’t believe me when I warned of the Jes Grew epidemic; but now here it is. 🔗

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Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny. 🔗

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That’s America for you. Rumor stacked upon rumor like bricks in the Mason’s Tower of Babel. 🔗

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THE QUESTION AS TO WHICH IS MORE REPREHENSIBLE, THE ALLEGED CUSTOM IN HAITI OF EATING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT COOKING HIM OR THE AUTHENTICATED CUSTOM IN THE UNITED STATES OF COOKING A HUMAN BEING WITHOUT EATING HIM. THE HAITIAN CUSTOM WOULD HAVE, AT LEAST, A UTILITARIAN PURPOSE IN EXTENUATION. 🔗

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Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth. 🔗

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The headquarters of the Wallflower Order. You have nothing real up here. Everything is polyurethane, Polystyrene, Lucite, Plexiglas, acrylate, Mylar, Teflon, phenolic, polycarbonate. A gallimaufry of synthetic materials. Wood you hate. Nothing to remind you of the Human Seed. The aesthetic is thin flat turgid dull grey bland like a yawn. Neat. Clean, accurate, and precise but 1 big Yawn they got up here. Everything as the law laid down in Heliopolis 1000s of years ago. (Heliopolis, the Greek name for the ancient city of Atu or Aton.) You eat rays and for snacks you munch on sound. Loading up on data is slumber and recreation is disassembling. Transplanting is real big here. Sometimes you play switch brains and hide the heart. Lots of marching. Soon as these Like-Men disappear walking single file down the hall here comes another row at you. The Atonists got rid of their spirit 1000s of years ago with Him. The flesh is next. Plastic will soon prevail over flesh and bones. Death will have taken over. Why is it Death you like? Because then no 1 will keep you up all night with that racket dancing and singing. The next morning you can get up and build, drill, progress putting up skyscrapers and … and … and … working and stuff. You know? Keeping busy. 🔗

gallimaufry (noun): a mixture or hodgepodge of various elements; a jumble 🎨🌀

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Carl Jung wrote:

The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind. 🔗

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You must capture its Celebration and then it will dissolve. It’s a new age. 1920. Sword fighting only interests the kids who attend the matinees. Douglas Fairbanks can sell Liberty Bonds and act but he is of no aid to you. The Teutonic Order is of no use. You must use something up-to-date to curb Jes Grew. To knock it dock it co-opt it swing it or bop it. If Jes Grew slips into the radiolas and Dictaphones all is lost. Luckily your scientists are working on microorganisms; minuscule replicas of yourself capable of surviving the atmosphere of any planet. Your inventors are preparing a Spaceship that will transport these microorganisms to 3 planets you’ve had your eye on. You wish all of your subjects were like them. Loyal, passive, “just doing our jobs.” 🔗

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On another wall are the symbols of the Atonist Order: the Flaming Disc, the 1 and the creed—

Look at them! Just look at them!

throwing their hips this way, that

way while 1, my muscles, stone,

the marrow of my spine, plaster, my

back supported by decorated paper,

stand here as goofy as a Dumb Dora.

Lord, if I can’t dance, No one shall. 🔗

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We’ve been banned in Boston! We’ve made it. (As a journalist in the 1932 movie Doctor X said, “Sensationalism? Why the sons of guns love it.”) 🔗

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The Mu’tafikah are holding a meeting in the basement of a 3-story building located at the edge of “Chinatown.” Upstairs is a store which deals in religious articles. Above this is a gun store; at the top, an advertising firm which deals in soap accounts. If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan during the 1920s it would resemble this little architectural number. 🔗

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Berbelang, Yellow Jack and Thor Wintergreen are awaiting the arrival of another member of their team, José Fuentes. 🔗

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Berbelang?
Someone is calling. Berbelang turns around and sees Thor following, his unkempt blond hair blowing. He seems a bit tanner than Berbelang had remembered him. Perhaps it was the recent trip around the Gulf of Mexico on his father’s yacht.
Look, Berbelang, if I am going to cause trouble maybe I’d better leave, he says walking alongside Berbelang.
O so it’s getting a little rough for you? Not like that cushy job on that radio station. How many did you have? 500 subscribers? The elite of the city but O yes, committed. Went up to Harlem once in a while to see what the new steps were. “Frolicing among the darkies,” as slavemasters used to say. After all, European artists are flocking to it, Stravinsky writing Ragtime pieces … Picasso painting like an African. Theodore Dreiser stealing one of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s plots. 🔗

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Look, Yellow Jack’s father himself is a rich silk importer and Fuentes’ has a degree in medicine. It’s when we met at the University at the Art History class that we decided to do this. We vowed. We began to see that the Art instructor was speaking as if he didn’t know we were in the room. We felt as if we were in church, stupid dull sculpture being blown up to be religious objects. Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can’t even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he “cut off his ear.” Man, it’s religion they make it into. We decided that we would be their desecraters, that we would send their loot back to where it was stolen and await the rise of Shango, Shiva, and Quetzalcoatl, no longer a label on a cheap bottle of wine but strutting across the sacred cities near the mysterious lakes of huge snakes like a cock. A proud cock. 🔗

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… Faust was an actual person. Somewhere between 1510 and 1540 this “wandering conjurer and medical quack” made his travels about the southwest German Empire, telling people his knowledge of “secret things.” I always puzzled over why such a legend was so basic to the Western mind; but I’ve thought about it and now I think I know the answer. Can’t you imagine this man traveling about with his bad herbs, love philters, physicks and potions, charms, overcharging the peasants but dazzling them with his badly constructed Greek and sometimes labeling his “wonder cures” with gibberish titles like “Polyunsaturated 99½% pure.” Hocus-pocus. He makes a living and can always get a free night’s lodging at an inn with his ability to prescribe cures and tell fortunes, that is, predict the future. You see he travels about the Empire and is able to serve as a kind of national radio for people in the locales. Well 1 day while he is leeching people, cutting hair or raising the dead who only have diseases which give the manifestations of death, something really works. He knows that he’s a bokor adept at card tricks, but something really works. He tries it again and it works. He continues to repeat this performance and each time it works. The peasants begin to look upon him as a supernatural being and he encourages the tales about him, that he heals the sick and performs marvels. He becomes wealthy with his ability to do The Work. Royalty visits him. He is a counselor to the king. He lives in a castle. Peasants whisper, a Black man, a very bearded devil himself visits him. That strange coach they saw, the 1 with the eyes as decorations drawn to his castle by wild-looking black horses. They say that he has made a pact with the devil because he invites the Africans who work in various cities throughout the Empire to his castle. There were 1000s in Europe at the time: blackamoors who worked as butlers, coachmen, footmen, pint-sized page boys; and conjurors whom only the depraved consulted. The villagers hear “Arabian” music, drums coming from the place but as soon as the series of meetings begin it all comes to a halt. Rumors circulate that Faust is dead. The village whispers that the Black men have collected. That is the nagging notion of Western man. China had rocketry, Africa iron furnaces, but he didn’t know when to stop with his newly found Work. That’s the basic wound. He will create fancy systems 13 letters long to convince himself he doesn’t have this wound. What is the wound? Someone will even call it guilt. But guilt implies a conscience. Is Faust capable of charity? No it isn’t guilt but the knowledge in his heart that he is a bokor. A charlatan who has sent 1000000s to the churchyard with his charlatan panaceas. Western man doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew this difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition. When they converted a Roman emperor and began rampaging and book-burning. His sorcery, white magic, his bokorism will improve. Soon he will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button. I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendant of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop. We must purge the bokor from you. We must teach you the difference between a healer, a holy man, and a duppy who returns from the grave and causes mischief. We must infuse you with the mysteries that Jes Grew implies. 🔗

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That’s what I’m counting on. But if there is such a thing as a racial soul, a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man’s mind, then we are doomed. It always seems that we talk to the many and then the few and then we are down to 1 man and just as the war between the races is about to begin that 1 man becomes a few and then the many until the next time around and we turn our back on 1 another before the whole procedure begins again. Perhaps 1 day it will be the many and stay there. 🔗

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Berbelang rises from the counter under the scrutiny of the counterman’s wet crocodile eye. The eye which peered above hot primal mud. 🔗

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He delivers the Plague edict. Pelvis and Feets Kontrols.

Do not wriggle the shoulders.

Do not shake the hips.

Do not twist the body.

Do not flounce the elbows.

Do not pump the arms.

Do not hop—glide instead.

Drop the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear,

the Bunny Hug, etc. These dances are ugly,

ungraceful, and out of fashion. 🔗

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He delivers the Plague edict. Pelvis and Feets Kontrols.

Do not wriggle the shoulders.

Do not shake the hips.

Do not twist the body.

Do not flounce the elbows.

Do not pump the arms.

Do not hop—glide instead.

Drop the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear,

the Bunny Hug, etc. These dances are ugly,

ungraceful, and out of fashion. 🔗

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Ornamenting the desk are amusing lampoons carved in wood, ivory, and cast in bronze by African sculptors. They depict Whites who went into Africa seeking skins, ivory, spices, feathers and furs. The subjects are represented giving bribes, drinking gin, leading manacled slaves, wearing curious, outlandish hats and holding umbrellas. Their chalk-faces appear silly, ridiculous. Outstanding in the collection is the figure of a monkey-like Portuguese explorer, carved by an Angolan. He is obviously juiced and is sitting on a barrel. What side-splitting, bellyaching, satirical ways these ancient craftsmen brought to their art! The African race had quite a sense of humor. In North America, under Christianity, many of them had been reduced to glumness, depression, surliness, cynicism, malice without artfulness, and their intellectuals, in America, only appreciated heavy, serious works. (’Tis the cause, Desdemona.) They’d really fallen in love with tragedy. Their plays were about bitter, raging members of the “nuclear family,” and their counterpart in art was exemplified by the contorted, grimacing, painful social-realist face. Somebody, head in hands, sitting on a stoop. “Lawd, I’z so re-gusted.” Bert Williams had captured the Afro-American mask with Northrop Frye’s inverted U lips. But the figures on the desk, these grotesque, laughable wooden ivory and bronze cartoons represent the genius of Afro satire. They had been removed to Europe by the slavers, traders and sailors who had taken gunpowder and uniforms to Africa. They did not realize that the joke was on them. After all, how could “primitive” people possess wit. LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor. For LaBas, anyone who couldn’t titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas. 🔗

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a handbill for the play Harlem by Wallace Thurman 🔗

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You will have to wait outside in the car. Here is 3 cents, go and buy yourself an August Ham.
An August Ham, Hink? What’s that?
Dammit, W.W.! An August Ham is watermelon. Don’t you know your own people’s argot? Get with it, Jackson, maybe it will enliven your articles a bit. You still haven’t made a transition from that Marxist rhetoric to the Jazz prose we want. 🔗

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What do you expect from these New Negroes or whatever they call themselves. Uppity. Arrogant. If they were real Black men they would be out shooting officials or loitering on Lenox Ave. or panhandling tear-jerking pitiful autobiographies on the radio, wringing them for every cheap emotion they can solicit. They would be massacred in the street like heroes and then … why I could snap pictures of the corpses and make a pile of dough. That’s why they should do this if they were real Black men. 🔗

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Perhaps it is easier to switch the conflicts about than educate the masses to a new melody. 🔗

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I know you look down on me because I come from one of the European countries under domination by stronger Whites than my people. We were your niggers; you colonized us and made us dirt under your heels. But in America it’s different. There is no royalty in the European sense. Only money counts. Guggenheim, Astor, Ford, Carnegie … people you would spit upon if you had them at home in Europe. We’re saving our dough and soon we will be able to purchase our own heraldry cheap and then maybe our values will be your values. We’ve learned, you see by joining your clubs and making our way from Police Commissioner to Curator of the Center of Art Detention. We’ve learned to bullshit the way you do, build up an aura of sacredness about the meanest achievement, allowing “the Sunlight to intrude upon Royalty” as 1 of your queens said. 1 of these days 1 of our sons, perhaps the son of a Polish immigrant, will emerge from some steel town in Pennsylvania and mount a turd on the wall of a museum and make it stick … and when you ask him what it is he will put on his dark glasses and snub you the way you did us. And on that day we will have overtaken you. 🔗

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claque 🔗

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Nerts! So you’d just say why bother about a civilization which is in need of young men? So you’d just fink out upon our glorious Western civilization; you would say why bother putting it back in stock? It makes me so mad I want to cry. You, a young Prince of Our Ways, running with a band of … of … of Mu’tafikah. Them loafers, ne’er-do-wells, nihilists throwing pineapples at us. Look son. Don’t you think I want to see every man a king, a chicken in every pot, every child fed clothed and sheltered in America? Warren Harding himself presided at a celebration of their achievements the other day at the Lincoln Memorial. Son, we don’t mind digging in our pockets and pitching in for the underprivileged, the insulted and injured, but son, this Berbelang is different. This is a nigger gone berserk. A nigger the planters kept from other niggers so they wouldn’t catch what he had. The insolent freeman who will sit in the front of the bus and look about as if to say “Who don’t like it?” Berbelang was on the ship the Flying Dutchman, the slaver under the cruel master captain. He put something on the captain so his sailing around the world forever became legendary. Berbelang’s not 1 of these automatons marching well dressed in an anti-lynching parade; he is aware of his past and has demystified ours.
Son, this is a nigger closing in on our mysteries and soon he will be asking our civilization to “come quietly.” This man is talking about Judeo-Christian culture, Christianity, Atonism whatever you want to call it. The most noteworthy achievements of anybody anywhere in the … the … whole universe. A … haha … haha … hahahaha. 🔗

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Crepuscule 🔗

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I think that when people like you, Mr. Von Vampton, say “The Negro Experience” you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds … I’m afraid that I won’t be able to help you, Mr. Von Vampton. I am teaching school to Harlem youngsters so that they won’t be influenced by people like you … 🔗

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blind pig 🔗

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Earline rose from her seat and walks, swinging her hips, down the aisle of the trolley car. She gives him a look the nature of which would force a man to divorce his wife, sell his home, hang around the blood bank, offer his skin for grafting, donate his eyes to an alligator, hit the banker on the head to give her what she wanted. 🔗

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she screams and drops the newspaper to the floor. BERBELANG SHOT BY BIFF MUSCLEWHITE!!

MUSCLEWHITE BAGS COON

War Hero Slays Art-Napper

Depraved Black Mu’tafikah Dead

More Arrests Predicted

Manhattan, the 1920s—Today Biff Musclewhite, fearless curator of the Center of Art Detention and consultant to Yorktown Police, shot and killed Berbelang the bad, cute Black bandit, and leader of a gang of dope-sniffing self-styled Mu’tafikah.

The shooting occurred shortly after he freed himself from a hideout where he was being held for ransom in the gang’s wild scheme to exchange the well-known city father for the ugly sausage-lipped big-headed Olmec head.

Musclewhite escaped by subduing Thor Wintergreen, misguided tycoon’s son who had joined the band of freaks and their scantily clad flappers.

Trapped inside his headquarters the demented coon chose to shoot it out with the World War 1 combat veteran and hero who once told Nature where to go. “Come in and get me, coppers,” the spade shouted, followed by his wild, bizarre laughter. 🔗

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The man climbs out of the bed and begins to put on his clothes. You know, nothing like this never happened to me. I’m happily married and have 3 children. I’ve never laid an eye on another woman.
You couldn’t help yourself. If you hadn’t given in to her requests she would have destroyed you. 🔗

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Well it’s like this, PaPa. You always go around speaking as if you were a charlatan and putting yourself down when you are 1 of the most technical dudes with The Work. Abdul was right that night … I didn’t want to say. You ought to relax. That’s our genius here in America. We were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were. We made up our own. The theories of Julia Jackson. I think we’ve done all right. The Blues, Ragtime, The Work that we do is just as good. I’ll bet later on in the 50s and 60s and 70s we will have some artists and creators who will teach Africa and South America some new twists. It’s already happening. What it boils down to, LaBas, is intent. If your heart’s there, man, that’s ½ the thing about The Work. Even the European Occultists say that. Doing The Work is not like taking inventory. Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It. 🔗

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1st they intimidate the intellectuals by condemning work arising out of their own experience as being 1-dimensional, enraged, non-objective, preoccupied with hate and not universal, universal being a word co-opted by the Catholic Church when the Atonists took over Rome, as a way of measuring every 1 by their ideals. 🔗

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Deluxe Ice Cream, Coffee, 1 cent Pies, Cakes, Tobacco, Hot Dogs and Highways. Highways leading to nowhere. Highways leading to somewhere. Highways the Occupation used to speed upon in their automobiles, killing dogs pigs and cattle belonging to the poor people. What is the American fetish about highways?
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them?
They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. We call it Haints. Haints of their victims rising from the soil of Africa, South America, Asia. 🔗

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We weren’t only a political cause but a cause that went to the very heart of Western Civilization. You see, there are many types of Atonists. Politically they can be “Left,” “Right,” “Middle,” but they are all together on the sacredness of Western Civilization and its mission. They merely disagree on the ways of sustaining it. If a radio show began touting the achievements of Western Civilization over civilizations of others there would barely be a letter to the station from anyone, anarchist or Calvin Coolidge Republican … 🔗

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legerdemain 🔗

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Erzulie 🔗

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Pa … I was just trying to get out there.
Don’t be using none of the city talk at me. We’ve been driving for 1 week. I couldn’t believe it. You told me you were working for a magazine and I was proud and went around telling everybody about it then 1 of the sisters brought me a copy and I knew, son, that you had left the teachings of d church and well son, I’m here going to take you back to Rē’-mōte and try to heal yo’ soul, you up here posing with all types of trash. Come here.
No, pa! Don’t do that!
I said come here boy! Raising your voice at me! Rev. Jefferson walks toward his son with an open 12-foot cotton sack and doesn’t stop until he gets him all the way. One squirming shoe shows and he pushes that in too.
Rev. Jefferson brushes his hands. Puts the wiggling, protesting sack over his shoulder steps over Hinckle Von Vampton and starts out to join his men to begin the journey back to Mississippi. The Rev. Jefferson, his deacons go outside and climb into their T Model Fords which at that time had such a reliable engine you could plow with it. 🔗

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O … I think you ought to ask PaPa LaBas or Black Herman. You see the Americans do not know the names of the long and tedious list of deities and rites as we know them. Shorthand is what they know so well. They know this process for they have synthesized the HooDoo of VooDoo. Its blee blop essence; they’ve isolated the unknown factor which gives the loas their rise. Ragtime. Jazz. Blues. The new thang. That talk you drum from your lips. Your style. What you have here is an experimental art form that all of us believe bears watching. So don’t ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains. Ask those little colored urchins who “make up” those new dance steps and the loa of the Black cook who wrote the last lines of the “Ballad of Jesse James.” Ask the man who, deprived of an electronic guitar, picked up a washboard and started to play it. The Rhyming Fool who sits in Rē’-mōte Mississippi and talks “crazy” for hours. The dazzling parodying punning mischievous pre-Joycean style-play of your Cakewalking your Calinda your Minstrelsy give-and-take of the ultra-absurd. Ask the people who put wax paper over combs and breathe through them. In other words, Nathan, I am saying Open-Up-To-Right-Here and then you will have something coming from your experience that the whole world will admire and need. But your musicians are dying your novelists are exiled for telling the truth your poets are pawning their coats for 10 dollars your people are talking of the New Negro movement but they can’t discuss more than 2 writers or a single painter or when they talk about Scott Joplin the Apostle of Ragtime I see shame in their eyes. Look, Nathan, our nation did not heed the prophecies of its artists and it paid dearly. We will never make that mistake again. 🔗

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The liquidity of Jes Grew has resulted in a hyperinflated situation, all you hear is more, more, increase growth … Suppose we shut down a few temples … I mean banks, take money out of circulation, how would people be able to support the appendages of Jes Grew, the cabarets the jook joints and the speaks. Suppose we put a tax on the dance floors and get out of circulation J.G.C.s like musicians, dancers, its doers, its irrepressible fancy. Suppose we take musicians out of circulation, arrest them on trumped-up drug charges and give them unusually long and severe prison sentences. Suppose we subsidize the 100s of symphony orchestras across the country, have government-sponsored Waltz-boosting campaigns, disperse the art from the Art Detention Center so that if the Mu’tafikah strike again all of the pillage won’t be in 1 place.
But wouldn’t these steps result in a depression?
Maybe, but it will put an end to Jes Grew’s resiliency and if a panic occurs it will be a controlled panic. It will be our Panic. 🔗

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People were eating good, the crops were abundant, things were going smoothly and Osiris and Isis were happily married. Their sister Nephthys and her husband, their brother Set, didn’t make out so well. He spent most of his time “out with the boys”; legislators, an unpopular group of poets who went about Egypt telling Egyptians that they could do better that they weren’t ready and that they ought to try to make something out of themselves. Make ready for what? 1 man asked at one of their whistle stops. Ready for progress? Invading foreign countries and killing? The people didn’t go for it and sarcastically called them The First Poets because in Egypt at the time of Osiris every man was an artist and every artist a priest; it wasn’t until later that Art became attached to the State to do with it what it pleased. 🔗

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Set stood there in triumph. There goes your Seedman eaten by fish, let’s cut out all this farming jazz and go back to eating each other. Come here you, Set said in his John Wayne voice, swaggering toward a luscious woman, a succulent dish standing in the crowd. 🔗

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Dionysus taught the Greek guides to identify the Nature that spoke through mankind. The Work. Listen to Hippocrates:

If they imitate a goat, or grind their teeth, or if their right side be convulsed, they say that the mother of the gods is the cause, but if they speak in a sharper and more intense tone they resemble this state to a horse and say Poseidon [Neptune] is the cause. 🔗

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After the exile of the Osirians, Dionysus, Thoth and other members of that fabled entourage, Set had problems. Every time he’d go out on tour his convoy was stoned. He had outlawed Dancing. Everything that Osiris stood for he attempted to banish so that he would cut this figure out of his life forever. Next he banished Music. And then as his mind deteriorated he banned Fucking.
And later even Life itself. He began to groove behind a real death cult that grew up about him. His legislators and their wives resembled a Billy Graham audience at Oakland Coliseum. The people began to grumble. There was talk of revolution. 🔗

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Set knew his sister all right and Moses began to talk to her the way the Osirians talked to her in their rites. He told her how much he loved her and that he would die for her. Cut his throat swim in a river of thrashing crocodiles fight lions for her pussy. He said that he would cuss the day he was born if he couldn’t have it and that he would walk all over Egypt crying like a baby. He said that he would gouge out his eyes and dust off the feet of all the dock workers in Egypt, jump off a cliff and lock himself in a cave for the rest of his life. And every time Moses would say another lie Isis would moan and sigh and whimper and purr like a kitten as Moses’ hand moved down and touched her Seal. He fished her temple good. She showed him all her rooms. And led him into the depths of her deathless snake where he fought that part of her until it was limp on the ground. He got good into her Book tongued her every passage thumbing her leaf and rubbing his hands all over her binding. 🔗

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Smiling, Black Herman, PaPa LaBas and Buddy Jackson exchange the ancient Black handshake, the vulva embracing the phallus. 🔗

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We had invented our own texts and slang which are subject to the ridicule of their scholars who nevertheless always seem to want to hang out around us and come to our meetings and poke into our ceremonies. 🔗

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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? 🔗

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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 Is 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. 🔗

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“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. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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Sanguine 🔗

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People in the 60s said they couldn’t follow him. (In Santa Cruz the students walked out.) What’s your point? they asked in Seattle whose central point, the Space Needle, is invisible from time to time. What are you driving at? they would say in Detroit in the 1950s. In the 40s he haunted the stacks of a ghost library. In the 30s he sought to recover his losses like everybody else. In the 20s they knew. And the 20s were back again. Better. Arna Bontemps was correct in his new introduction to Black Thunder. Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around. (Locomobile rear moving toward neoned Manhattan skyline. Skyscrapers gleam like magic trees. Freeze frame.)
Jan. 31st, 1971  3:00 P.M.
Berkeley, California 🔗