Summary
Chapter 43
Hinckle Von Vampton is frustrated by how fast Jes Grew is catching on and is worried about it reaching New York soon. Its spurring on of individuality is a problem, making it hard to predict. The war in Haiti is going poorly as well, as whenever they eradicate a humfo, another one rises up.
He thinks about the Talking Android and wishes it could be Jefferson, but he is too Black. Suddenly, though, he sees a skin-lightening ad and has an idea.
Chapter 44
Excited, Hinckle calls Gould into his office. Gould says he was watching Black children play and writing notes about their songs and words. Hinckle tells him that he has solved the Talking Android problem, and shows him the ad.
Chapter 45
Jefferson is not a fan of the idea at first, but he finally agrees. As they are rubbing the lightening cream on his skin, a booming voice sounds in the room. The three look and see a tall Black man in a Stetson and clergyman outfit as well as three deacons.
Shocked, Jefferson begins to sob and says this is his pa. Hinckle becomes unctuous but Rev. Jefferson slugs him and knocks him out. His men catch Gould as he tries to flee.
Jefferson sputters an excuse but the Reverend silences him. He tells his son angrily that he had been proud to hear he was working for a magazine but then he saw a copy and knew he’d have to come up here and get him and bring him home. Against his son’s wishes, he has him thrown into a large cotton sack and thrown into the back of the T Model Ford.
On the way out, one deacon asks how they can justify hitting those men. The Rev. smiles and says “John 2:14,” which is about Christ and the money lenders.
*
Hinckle comes to, groaning over the preacher’s strength. He goes outside and sees Gould lying in the mud. Now that Jefferson is gone, he will have to resort to this new idea that springs to him.
Chapter 46
An Android comes into the see the Hierophant 1. He reports of Harding going into the Lincoln Bedroom and surreptitiously listening to jazz. The Hierophant knows about the rumors of Harding not being white, though there is little public evidence. He is frustrated to hear of this, as he already knew about the Rent Party.
*
Harry Daugherty is Harding’s friend and fellow poker player, but he is also an agent of the Wallflower Order. The Hierophant realizes that this is the time, and he phones Daugherty to tell him of his decision.
Chapter 47
Harding embarks on what historians have deemed “Harding’s mysterious journey West” (147). He grows paler and sicker and dies at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The public thinks he died of illness but Harding had the last word by leaving notes for a speech he was to give on “The Ideals of a Christian Fraternity” (148). This way he “points his fingers at his killer,” (148).
Chapter 48
PaPa LaBas is in his office at the Kathedral, thinking about Abdul and the Text. T Malice comes in and reports favorably on Earline, then says he is headed over to the Cotton Club to see the Dancing Bales, a tap group that is so good they make the floorboards creak. At this, PaPa has an epiphany and jumps up excitedly, saying they have to go.
Chapter 49
Benoit Battraville has summoned the men interviewed for the Talking Android position to his ship, telling them to give their stories to the Dictaphone. Battraville is in a good mood, explaining that he has discovered thanks to PaPa LaBas that the man who was looking for this Android is Hinckle Von Vampton and tonight he and his assistants will be arrested at the gala at Irvington-on-Hudson.
He continues, saying that they do not know exactly how a new loa is formed but it is known that when one does form it must be fed, so the men will speak and the recording will be fed to it.
The men tell their stories. Nathan Brown, who is one of them, hangs back after the others leave. He asks Battraville in a serious manner how one catches Jes Grew. Battraville replies that he ought to ask Black Herman or PaPa, as the Americans do not know the long list of rites and deities as they know them here. They’ve synthesized the HooDoo of VooDoo; they know shorthand. He ought to call the musicians and painters and listen to how they do what they do. Nathan needs to open up to what is right here in front of him now; Battraville’s own nation failed to listen to its artists—and look at what it is going through. America cannot make that same mistake.
Nathan listens and embraces Battraville, then leaves. On his way out he feels a tingling at the back of his neck—he’s Caught-On.
*
There is a quote from Studs Terkel about the Depression, in which he says that when interviewed the industrialists and bankers testified that they had no idea what caused it.
Chapter 50
The Hierophant 1 has felt hopeless for some time now as Jes Grew came within sixty miles of New York. Yet suddenly cases are going down and he does not know what to make of it.
He receives a phone call from Walter Mellon, “the Sphinx,” a real estate tycoon who conducts the Order of the Wallflower in America. Mellon comments brusquely that it looks like they’ve made it, and the Hierophant says indeed it does. Mellon begins to speak of the number of radios in the country and then asks what would happen if people did not have the money to buy them. The Hierophant is unsure what Mellon is getting at.
Mellon lays out his thinking. Perhaps they ought to shut down a few banks and take money out of circulation, which would shut down cabarets and speakeasies. Musicians would be poor and they could be arrested for trumped-up drug charges. The government could subsidize symphonies that only play waltzes. This will, he avers, put an end to Jes Grew’s resiliency and if a panic occurs, it will be a planned panic. Impressed, the Hierophant agrees.
After Mellon’s call, the Hierophant receives another. His pet zombie Lester says it’s the Teutonics, who want to know now that the Templars failed in phase 2 of the campaign if they could have another go at the Grail. They say they have a “housepainter in the balcony” (155). The Hierophant tells Lester to say yes, they can have a go at it, and asks what the rouse is. Lester replies, “a grab bag with a few novelties tossed in. He’s an original” (156).
Chapter 51
The gala is filled with Princes of Europe and Harlem poets and tycoons and playwrights and professors. A massive pipe organ plays, delectables are passed around, and the whole scene is full of the Black elite. A woman announced as the “Queen of Ubangi” arrives, with Hinckle Von Vampton on one side and the Talking Android on the other. The guests politely applaud and watch as the three perambulate the room.
In a singsong voice, the woman introduces the exciting new poet Hinckle has brought with him, Mr. Hubert “Safecracker” Gould. Gould is done up in blackface though no one at the party can tell. He begins to recite his poem, “Harlem Tom Toms,” in which he uses offensive vernacular and disconcerts the guests.
But before he can finish the poem, PaPa LaBas, Black Herman, T Malice, and 6 Python men burst into the party. The lady tells them she does not want any conjure mens’ detectives here, but LaBas reveals his .22 when male guests start to come closer to him.
LaBas demands that Gould and Von Vampton come with him. The guests stir, confused. One of them, a Guianese art critic named Hank Rollings, stands up for them and asks what this embarrassment is. LaBas walks over to Gould and wipes a finger on his face, taking away some of the paint and leaving a streak of white skin. The guests gasp.
Rollings, whose work is “phony, and completely devoid of feeling,” insists that they must explain what these men are guilty of before hauling them away. Hinckle nods his head vigorously.
Black Herman looks at PaPa and begins by saying it all began thousands of years ago in Egypt.
Analysis
Reed continues to subvert traditional understandings of history through his fiction, positing that Harding was killed by people who did not want a potentially Black and jazz-loving president in the White House and that the Great Depression was orchestrated by Atonists who wanted to quell any remainder of Jes Grew. While on the surface such claims are dubious, if not clearly absurd-sounding, after reading Reed’s novel they don’t actually seem that outlandish—after all, adherents of Western hegemony, white supremacism, and Christianity have done many terrible things throughout the centuries.
By now, the reader can indeed see that Mumbo Jumbo is not a conventional novel, and one of the characteristics that render it unconventional is its usage of science fiction structural elements and tropes. Isiah Lavender’s article on the subject begins frankly, stating, “The blunt thesis underlying Afrofuturism is that all black cultural production in the New World is SF [science fiction]. The forced transplantation of Africans to the Americas for the sole purpose of slave labor capable of producing wealth has been interpreted as the substance of SF for blacks.” He explains how Mumbo Jumbo creates an ethnospace that takes a familiar environment and renders it strangely to “create a sense of the alien or unknown.” Science fiction’s conventional characteristics include the presence of science, technology, mythology, aliens, etc., and the ethnoscape adds to it an intersection with race and its cultural, social, and political implications. This ethnospace “entails world-building where racial myth can be told in a visibly subjective world. It is a combination of history, folklore, and SF that counters SF's racial assumptions about humanity’s color-blind future and uses of SF devices to confront racial assumptions of American culture more generally.”
Mumbo Jumbo—with its pastiche of history and fiction, its secret society and conspiracy, and its use of the occult, among other things—is an apposite example of an ethnoscape. Jes Grew is the concept of Soul, here a “cultural myth rendered science-fictional by Reed’s depiction of it as a plague.” The novel looks to the past and present, exploring race relations “by parodying the world its readers occupy” and “literalizing fears and constructions of difference as a disease and of Otherness-particularly black culture-as a contagion that might reduce white rationality to bodily excess.” Specifically, the Talking Android is a very SF-esque creation, an anachronistic term used by Reed via Hinckle to imply just how insidious Hinckle’s plan to use a Black person to parrot white supremacy to other Black people truly is. Lavender explains this by writing, “Much like a slave-owner, Von Vampton seeks to divide the black race by sowing seeds of distrust, and maintain white privilege through the Talking Android, which itself speaks to the alienated experience of blacks in the New World-it is, after all, an obedient machine whose ethnicity is technologically produced. When Von Vampton cannot find any black person foolish enough to become his Talking Android and participate in a plan designed to stop the outbreak and continue racial oppression, he selects his white right-hand man, Hubert 'Safecracker' Gould, to be his mouthpiece. It is Gould who delivers the comical epic poem, ‘Harlem Tom Toms,’ to black high society (158), and through whom Reed lampoons the practice of minstrelsy.” Overall, what Reed does is “[create] an alternate history and landscape of black/white contact that powerfully indicts the irrationality of racism in the United States through social satire. His use of sf devices produces a fabulist ethnoscape that questions existing racial power dynamics by asking for whom the crisis of racial difference is most threatening in a multicultural state.”
One of the Talking Androids is supposed to be Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, but he is saved from such ignominy by his father, the Reverend Jefferson. Donald L. Hoffman writes of the preacher that, unlike his naive son, he "asserts the value of his own language and his own religion; his religion, however, is a syncretic one. When after his departure, one notices 'chicken feathers ... all over the floor', there is reason to suspect that, despite appearances, the Reverend and his deacons have not abandoned The Work. The Reverend is a master of the 'country bricolage' that creatively synthesizes Christianity and HooDoo, Western and African traditions.”
Similarly, Nathan Brown (modeled on Countee Cullen) is targeted for the Talking Android position but refuses it, understanding the temptation offered to him but also intuiting that it is not what it appears. He chides Hinckle for his generalizations about Blackness and refuses to be the face of some sort of universal Black experience. It is his openness to difference, to individuality, that allows him to finally catch Jes Grew, something he’d been wanting for a while.
