“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.”
Jes Grew embodies the jazz culture, which influences the masses to dance and enjoy music to the fullest. The novel's plot centers on the protagonist, PaPa LaBas, trying to resist the efforts of the Wallflower Order to inhibit the masses from dancing. Therefore, the assertion alludes to the ideals of the individuals willing to keep the Jes Grew alive and kicking. The spirit of the novel speaks to the racial conflicts in the history of Black people, the story of which is the center of Reed’s curated yet complex setting.
“Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.”
The narrative entails two time periods that have parallels in terms of their cultural and historical realities: one is the 1920s Jazz Age, the other the 1970s funk. Timelessness being a main theme in the novel, Reed shows the dialectic between the two periods, especially around the Black experience in America. Reed subverts the flow of time by creating this universe that crosses the periods effortlessly; thus, the quote refers to the non-linear nature of time in the novel's universe.
"You ought to relax...Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It."
PaPa LaBas is a remarkable man, esteemed as a seer, a healer, and an inspiration in his community. Yet even he can fall prey to limitations of the mind, and here Black Herman reminds him that it is better to be freer, looser, and less rigid than to adhere to limiting strictures. This is what Atonism thrives on and what Jes Grew wants to destroy. LaBas is also too focused on the Test itself, whereas Black Herman, Richard Swope writes, "recognizes that Jes Grew does not aim to define its parameters through its text, but rather to stretch the limits of the Atonist culture it disrupts."
"magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away"
Reed provides this definition of the term "mumbo jumbo," but it is clear that the meaning to the contemporary reader is much different; in fact, what has gone away is this older, more specific definition. Now, we think of inscrutable language and/or its meaning; we think of communication forestalled. By providing this definition, titling his novel this, and then using the phrase in its more colloquial fashion, Reed calls attention to the mutability and malleability of language.
"I really wanted you and Herman to see this Book, the Book of Thoth, but now you won't have a chance...for I have burned it!! it has gone up in smoke!!"
Just because Abdul Hamid is Black, does not mean that he is a supporter of Jes Grew; instead, as a conservative Black nationalist, he sees Jes Grew as a danger to his community and thus snuffs it out. He is, Jonathan Lewis writes, "an ironic Atonist who thinks he is working against them right up until the moment that murder him." Sharon Jessee agrees, stating that Atonists "love order and the repression of natural instincts" and are not "exclusively white European[s]."
"You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezuma; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your kind carries their supply chains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo."
In this quote, Jose Fuentes makes the case for racial memory, which Merriam-Webster defines as "the body of experiences, beliefs, and general recollections transmitted from one generation of humankind or of a race to another." He says that the white man cannot escape his ancestors and his past, both characterized by racism, bloodlust, and a desire for hegemony over self-ordained "inferior" peoples, while the man of color also retains his past, both of glory and of victimization at the hands of Westerners. Thus it is difficult for men of the contemporary moment to claim that they are totally divorced from their ancestors, as such memories flow in their blood and fire synapses in their brains.
"We merely practiced Catholicism up front and VooDoo underground."
The African diaspora resulted in a great deal of religious syncretism, meaning that African peoples transported to the New World blended aspects of traditional African religion with the Christianity of their oppressors. While some elements of Christianity were genuinely useful, the religion as a whole was not easily embraced—especially when its adherents endeavored to stamp out African practices and beliefs. Thus, as Benoit said, in Haiti most people allowed the Christian elements to remain in public view while VooDoo lived on below the surface.
"...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."
Reed dramatically suggests that what caused the Great Depression is not what we've always assumed it to be and that instead, a cabal of rich, white, male, Westerners engineered it in order to forestall the spread of a cultural "threat" that celebrated polytheism, Blackness, freedom, etc. This sounds absurd on the surface, and Reed does not actually believe this to be the case as he lays it out for us, but it is compelling in that it is believable in light of the atrocities that that same group of powerful people has carried out over the centuries in the name of Western civilization. Through his fiction, Reed opens our minds to different historical truths and possibilities.
"After all, European artists are flocking to it, Stravinsky writing Ragtime pieces...Picasso painting like an African. Theodore Dreiser stealing one of Paul Laurence Dunbar's plots."
Berbelang gives voice to something that revisionist historians have been trumpeting for the last several decades: the greatest artists and writers and musicians of the Western canon freely pilfered from the "exotics" for their own works, which were then upheld as the quintessential exemplars of the avant-garde. They "othered" those whom they visited or read about, preferring to ignore their nuances and dilute their styles to what they deemed "primitive," straddling the line of admiring them for their prelapsarian innocence and frowning on their backwardness and lack of civilization.
Until Marcus Garvey came along to rescue the American Negro he was basking in his lethargy like a crocodile sleeping in the sun.
In this simile, the narrator suggests that the American Black man was ignorant, sleeping through the aftermath of slavery and the years of Jim Crow, unwilling to wake up to do something about it. It took Marcus Garvey, he suggests, to change things. The Jamaican-born Garvey was the founder of the United Negro Improvement Association and sounded a clarion call for a "Back to Africa" movement. His pan-African views placed the American Negro in a trans-Atlantic community, and he hoped to create a Black nation in Africa. He was known as the "Black Moses" and was beloved by the people for his charisma, frankness, and racial pride (though some were wary of his emphasis on racial purity, as he even agreed with the Klan on this matter of separation of the races). His rise and his fall were precipitous, however, and he was indicted for mail fraud in 1922, served several years in prison, and was then deported.
