Imagine if you strolled into a bookstore today and picked up a novel in which the action revolved around a detective investigating the spread of a virus called Jes Grew, a pandemic making people dance and move and become susceptible to Black culture. And imagine if in this same novel, in the background, the federal government was deporting aliens for their radical beliefs, and white cultural patrons were coming up with ways to squash the rise of a radical Black culture by appropriating it, and there was a movement on the rise to repatriate art to its country of origin. You’d probably think that some novelist had got a jump on our chaotic and dangerous present.
Ishmael Reed—whose novel Mumbo Jumbo this précis partly describes—would probably argue with the idea that he had a jump on anything. From the beginning of his writing life, even before he’d left his hometown of Buffalo, New York, his sense of time was wider, deeper, and more cyclical than that of any writer of his generation. Indeed, in Mumbo Jumbo, he says himself: “Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.” And so time has come around again to Mumbo Jumbo. Published just over 50 years ago, in 1972, it deals with forces and events that were 50 years old but, back then, were, as Dylan might say, a-comin’ back.
Mumbo Jumbo is essentially a spiritual detective novel about a centuries-old cold case: the terror of Blackness and Black culture that grips the West. Our chief investigator is hoodoo detective PaPa LaBas, who is working with a man named Berbelang, the leader of a group called Mu’tafikah. Their goals include returning stolen African artifacts and pushing back on the nationwide suppression of Black arts. Berbelang believes Jes Grew is looking for a sacred text in which to insert itself—LaBas’s job is to get to the text before the forces lined up against them do.
The main force lined up to squash Jes Grew is an ancient, secretive white supremacist group called the Wallflower order, whose members reach to the very top of government. Their man on the ground in charge of subverting the spread of Jes Grew is Hinckle Von Vampton, an editor surely based on Carl Van Vechten, the white writer, literary critic, and salonnière who promoted Black artists during the Harlem Renaissance but whose ideas of culture (and his own fiction) reinforced racist stereotypes. In Reed’s novel, Von Vampton starts a magazine, The Benign Monster, and hires a commentator to parrot ideas so pragmatic and annoying that they will set a fracture within the spreading virus of joy.
Mumbo Jumbo is innovative on so many levels that it would be hard to list them all. Among Reed’s greatest skills demonstrated here is that of pastiching real and fictional sources, cartoons and photographs, facts and fabulation, into a style that feels improvisational. In this way, it reminds us that America has always been a country of bunk, truthiness, and fraudulence. In these pages, real poets like Countee Cullen cross paths with made-up figures; mythic groups like the Knights Templar echo real organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Some aspects of Warren G. Harding’s administration are exaggerated, but on foreign policy, the novel comes correct: The United States was essentially at war with Haiti in the 1920s, brutally suppressing a rebellion. There was indeed across America a war on dancing, led by moral scolds, which would eventually cause the passage of the New York City Cabaret Law of 1926, which remained on the books until 2017.
The make-believe concepts driving racism cause real consequences, and so rather than treat them sacredly, Reed deals with them with a bravado and camp humor, a pose that has trickled down through example, influencing some of the most significant novelists today—including Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, and Charles Yu. On one front, about actual violence, though, the novel does not joke. Holding the narrative conch at one point, Reed guides us into a Harlem town house as it hosts a party but pauses to mention that “61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories—just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars against the Indians—thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged ‘enemy’ this time.”
Cutting a line through this time period, during which lynchings were widespread but Blackness was at a peak of cultural visibility, if seen or performed in certain ways, Reed’s characters operate in a space that inspires paranoia, rebelliousness, and self-loathing. Their greatest challenge is not simply to push back on an attempt to suppress dancing; they also want to avoid being molded into a posture of reactive argumentation or stylized accommodation. LaBas has the bullshit detector to live in this environment unfazed. He knows that Jes Grew isn’t just a fad, it’s a kind of loa, or voodoo spirit, that has been summoned in the form of movement and culture and dance. Berbelang has chosen him as an investigator because of his poise and what LaBas later calls his psychic mechanics, his ability to see through and around systems that are meant to suppress the old ways of seeing, the old religions, and their knowledge systems.
The title of the Jes Grew virus comes from the poet, songwriter, and Harlem Renaissance figure James Weldon Johnson’s anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, a book that had an enormous impact on poetry in its time. “The earliest ragtime songs, like Topsy, jes’ grew,” Weldon wrote. Mumbo Jumbo takes this comment and opens it wide up, showing how a whole aesthetic and spiritual world made this force possible. It was no joke, and a whole system tried to shut it down. It has been trying ever before and ever since. Dramatizing this endless battle in Mumbo Jumbo in ways that reorient our gaze toward the repression as the invasion, Reed has written a great novel, a circus perhaps, but one of the most important ones of the last half century. Or as the great author himself put it: “What if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” How those demons ride today.•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Reed will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Justin Desmangles to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
