Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Satire

Time of plot: 1920’s

Locale: Harlem, New York City

Principal characters

• PaPa LaBas, a conjure man of Jes Grew Kathedral
• Berbelang, LaBas’s former assistant and a Mu’tahfikah leader
• Black Herman, a famous African American occultist
• Hinckle Von Vampton, the Atonist publisher of The Benign Monster
• Hubert “Safecracker” Gould, Von Vampton’s assistant
• Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, Von Vampton’s African American tool
• Biff Musclewhite, curator for the Center of Art Detention

The Story:

One night in 1920, the mayor of New Orleans is drinking bootlegged gin with his mistress when a messenger announces the outbreak of Jes Grew, a “psychic epidemic” causing African Americans to thrash in ecstasy and to lust for meaning in life. By the next morning, ten thousand people had contracted the disease, which is spreading rapidly across America.

PaPa LaBas, a conjure man who carries “Jes Grew in him like most other folk carry genes,” runs Jes Grew Kathedral and represents the old ways of Jes Grew, specializing in “Black astrology charts, herbs, potions, candles, talismans.” His former assistant, Berbelang, moved away from old ways and worked to expand Jes Grew to other non-Western peoples such as Native Americans, Asians, and Muslims, as well as to more people of African descent. Berbelang leads the Mu’tahfikah, a radical group of Jes Grew Carriers who loot Centers of Art Detention (museums) to return treasures to their native lands in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Attempting to halt Jes Grew, the Wallflower Order of the Atonist Path (Western culture) forms a two-step plan. Its first step is to install Warren Harding as anti-Jes Grew president of the United States; their next step is to implant a Talking Android within Jes Grew to sabotage the movement. Atonist Biff Musclewhite gives up his job as police commissioner and becomes a consultant to the Metropolitan Police to qualify for a higher paying job as Curator for Art Detention.

One day, LaBas is in court facing charges that he allowed his “Newfoundland HooDoo dog 3 Cents” to defecate on the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Manhattan Atonists use charges like this, fire inspections, tax audits, censorship of writings, and other means to deter LaBas and Jes Grew.

Atonist Hinckle Von Vampton works in the copy room of the New York Sun, a Wallflower Order newspaper. One night, his landlady sees him performing secret rituals. At work, when he forgets to keep a headline in present tense, his boss thinks he is “losing his grip.” Later, Von Vampton is fired for printing the headline “Voo Doo Generals Surround Marines at Port-au-Prince,” violating the paper’s policy against mentioning U.S. military action in Haiti. Their reason is that “Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny.” Von Vampton is later seized at gunpoint and taken to Wallflower Order headquarters, which is buzzing with activity monitoring the Jes Grew epidemic.

The person in charge of the headquarters, Hierophant 1, explains to Von Vampton that the Wallflower Order needs The Text, the sacred Jes Grew writings. Von Vampton had divided The Text into fourteen parts and sent it to fourteen individual Jes Grew Carriers in Harlem. Only Von Vampton had the power to reassemble The Text, so the Wallflower Order agrees to let him control the project. First, he must burn The Text. Second, he must create the Talking Android that would infiltrate and undercut the Jes Grew movement. Von Vampton recruits Hubert “Safecracker” Gould to help run The Benign Monster, the magazine he will use to carry out the project.

Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, a young man who left rural Mississippi to begin a journalism career in New York City, is laughed out of the New York Tribune because of his ragged, rural appearance and because he wants to meet Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Later, Jefferson sees a sign outside the offices of The Benign Monster, stating, “Negro viewpoint wanted.” Von Vampton hires Jefferson and gives him an office in his estate, Spiraling Agony. Jefferson is like putty waiting to be formed and would have made a perfect Talking Android, except Von Vampton thinks his skin is too dark. The Talking Android has to be black, but Von Vampton believes people will not accept anyone too dark.

Von Vampton learns that Abdul Hamid has acquired and is trying to publish The Text. Von Vampton, Gould, and Jefferson go to Abdul’s office and offer to buy it, but Abdul refuses to sell. When Gould pulls out a gun and demands to see the safe, Abdul resists, so Von Vampton stabs him in the back. Gould opens the safe but finds it empty. The Sun headline distorts the incident by suggesting that Mu’tahfikah is responsible for Abdul’s death.

Charlotte, a young French translator at the Kathedral, quits her job to perform Neo HooDoo dances at the Plantation House cabaret, despite LaBas’s warning against using The Work for profit. She also entertains customers outside the club.

The Mu’tahfikah—Berbelang, Yellow Jack, Thor Wintergreen, and José Fuentes (whom La Bas had met during an art history class in college)—plan to recover some cultural artifacts. Biff Musclewhite is in Charlotte’s apartment when the Mu’tahfikah kidnaps him to gain access to the Center for Art Detention. As ransom, they demand the return of the Olmec Head, a Central American sculpture.

Left to guard the hostage, Thor Wintergreen is tricked into helping Musclewhite and the police ambush Berbelang, who is shot and killed. Musclewhite convinces Wintergreen that the Mu’tahfikah members not only are taking back their culture but also getting ready to take over the country. Once free, Musclewhite makes an appointment to see Charlotte, but before he arrives, she sees the headline announcing Berbelang’s death. When she accuses Musclewhite of having something to do with the incident, he strangles her.

Making his last run of the night, a trolley operator is seduced by LaBas’s assistant Earline, who had picked up a loa, the sensuous spirit of the Voodoo goddess Erzulie. When PaPa LaBas leaves to tell Earline of Berbelang’s death, she faints and LaBas calls Black Herman to exorcise the loa.

The next morning, Black Herman takes LaBas to see Haitian Benoit Battraville aboard the freighter The Black Plume in the harbor. Battraville explains the Atonist role in Haiti and reveals the Wallflower Order plot to install a Talking Android. LaBas and Black Herman volunteer to track the Talking Android.

Meanwhile, Von Vampton is still looking for someone to become the Talking Android when he sees an advertisement for skin bleaching cream. He is applying the cream to Jefferson’s face when the young man’s father rushes in and then takes his son back home to Mississippi. The skin-lightening plot failed. Instead, Von Vampton settles on an opposite plan when Gould accidentally falls facedown into black mud. Gould becomes the Talking Android.

Concerned about President Harding’s political blunderings and alleged black ancestry, the Wallflower Order decides to do away with him by sending him on a train trip to California and slowly poisoning him along the way. Harding dies in San Francisco. The order also takes defensive moves to combat the spread of Jes Grew. The federal government seizes control of the arts and decentralizes art objects away from the Centers for Art Detention to protect them from the Mu’tahfikah.

At a gathering north of New York City, the Talking Android is reading his epic poem “Harlem Tom Toms” when LaBas and Black Herman break in and expose Gould as a fake. Asked to defend their charges, LaBas gives an extended history of the mythology behind Jes Grew, dating back thousands of years to ancient Egypt. Having brought Jes Grew history up to the present, LaBas explains how he solved the mystery and located the box that should have held Abdul’s copy of The Text underneath the floor of the Cotton Club where Abdul had hidden it. A seal on the box reminds LaBas of Von Vampton’s pendant, connecting the Atonist to the mystery. Then Buddy Jackson, operator of several Harlem speakeasies, steps forward and announces that he had given The Text to Abdul. PaPa LaBas and Black Herman seize Von Vampton and Gould and turn them over to Benoit Battraville.

Jes Grew dies down, but PaPa LaBas continues telling its history, giving yearly university lectures. The novel ends with a philosophical discussion of the psychic power of blackness in the American imagination.

Bibliography

Byerman, Keith E. “Voodoo Aesthetics: History and Parody in the Novels of Ishmael Reed.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Focuses on Reed’s use of parody and reworking of history. Analyzes six novels and traces the development of a new aesthetic of African American sensibility that Reed calls Neo-HooDoo art.

Carter, Steven R. “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-Hoodoo Detection.” In Dimensions of Detective Fiction, edited by Larry N. Landrum, Pat Browne, and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976. Argues that Reed’s parody of detective fiction leads readers from the mysteries within the text to the mysteries in life, to consider the culprits in history, to question the alleged truths of Western culture, and to discover distortions of reality in written history.

Cooke, Michael G. “Tragic and Ironic Denials of Intimacy: Jean Toomer, James Baldwin, and Ishmael Reed.” In Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Recognizes Mumbo Jumbo as a high-spirited satire but criticizes Reed for not developing the concept of the Jes Grew Text into something more positive for African Americans.

Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. A compilation of twenty-six interviews with Reed that were conducted from 1968 through 1995. Includes one “self-interview” and a chronology of significant events in Reed’s life.

Dick, Bruce Allen, and Pavel Zemliansky, eds. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Chronological account of the critical response to Reed’s novels. Contains book reviews, essays, an interview with Reed, a chronology of his life, and bibliographical information.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “On ’The Blackness of Blackness’: Ishmael Reed and a Critique of the Sign.” In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Recognizes Reed’s importance in the tradition of African American literature. Finds Mumbo Jumbo to be an elaboration on the detective novel and a postmodern text because of its use of intertextuality.

Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Closely analyzes Reed’s evolving notion of Neo-HooDoo aesthetics and how it relates to black aesthetic critics such as Clarence Major, Houston Baker, Jr., Addison Gayle, Jr., and Amiri Baraka. Concludes that Reed refuses to acknowledge any mode of criticism. Discusses Mumbo Jumbo as a satiric allegory that is in itself the Text that is searched for in the novel.

Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien. The “Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as American Literary Hoodoo. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Defines Reed’s novels as postcolonial writings characterized by Neo-HooDooism, an aesthetic derived from African voodoo. Demonstrates how Reed transforms the English language and debates about colonialism into discourses about self-empowerment and self-representation, reconnecting African Americans with Africa.

Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A discussion of Reed’s use of Menippean satire in Mumbo Jumbo is included in this study of satire in thirty postmodern American novels.

Whitlow, Roger. “Ishmael Reed.” In Black American Literature: A Critical History. Rev. ed. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1976. Covers Reed’s early work, including his poetry, and makes a strong argument for his inclusion in the absurdist literary tradition. Sees many connections to the style and satiric content of such American writers as Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and J. D. Salinger.