Mumbo Jumbo (18 page)

I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Black Herman says entering the room carrying 2 huge glasses containing his recipe on a tray.

What’s that that man has in his hands? Earline asks, reaching for the glasses on the tray from where she lies on the bed clad only in a black slip and panties.

Herman recoils, setting the tray supporting the cocktails on a table in the room.

O no you don’t. You don’t lay your hands on this until you promise to depart from this girl’s body.

A sister has entered into another phase of the ceremony. Clarence Williams is singing some mellow blues. She has placed the record on a Victrola. People begin to sway a bit along with the music.

What’s that sound? Earline asks Black Herman.

It’s a loa that Jes Grew here in America among our people. We call it Blues.

It sounds nice, Earline says, climbing from the bed in her bare-feet and approaching Herman. LaBas and the women move out of the way. She puts her arms about Black Herman’s neck and starts to move with him. As they dance about the table where the tumblers of the drink rest, cherries held by straws leaning on the rim, she tries to reach for the cocktail.

Herman pushes her hand away.

You better let me have that, nigger, before I put a hurtin’ on you you won’t like.

Black Herman walks to the bed, picks up her scarf, and casts it to the floor where it becomes a snake. He moves a fingertip in a teasing manner about the snake’s head. A snake with sufficient deadly venom to fell an elephant.

Anybody can do that, Earline taunts. You don’t have what it takes, Black American man, she says, moving again toward the tray.

Black Herman grabs her by the arms and flings her onto the bed. She starts to spring at him but before she can he swiftly moves the spread of hearts-and-daggers design out from under her and she lies curled-up, in thin air, about 2 feet between her and the top of the bed. Black Herman known as “an international heartbreaker,” the man who while on the trip to Africa hypnotized a lion, is now the first American to give a Crisis de loa to a loa.

Earline twists in the air, confused.

Put me down! Put me down!

Black Herman reaches over to where she is suspended and puts his arm about her waist, gently bringing her body toward him like an intelligent fisherman reeling in, causing only a slight ripple in the water, enchanting the fish. Black Herman is a Fish Bewitcher.

He bends over, holding her there and kissing her. She begins to struggle but suddenly kisses him back, passionately hanging on to him as he holds her from the waist up, her bottom half suspended there like a mermaid in water.

Black Herman signals for the sisters and PaPa LaBas to leave the room. They quietly leave, turning the lights down to a dark red glow, the music a quiet piano moving through the room. Herman takes over where LaBas has failed.

Before LaBas exits he hears Black Herman whisper to Earline.

Softly, a husky whisper. Now you know you want to leave this girl now, don’t you?

She cries passionately almost inaudibly Yes! Yes! You know I will; but first… please… please feed me! Then I will leave her…

The door closes shut.

A
BOUT AN HOUR LATER
Black Herman emerges from the room. LaBas and the sisters are seated about the kitchen table drinking tea.

How is she? T Malice asks.

She’ll be all right. When she wakes I want you to give her the magic bath; she will be herself again. But don’t tell her about Berbelang, she won’t remember anything from the last 24 hours or so. Just stay with her until she comes out of it and don’t mention who visited her. 1 of the sisters nods.

LaBas sits a minute; Black Herman joins the rest at the table. How did you succeed where I failed, Herman?

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.

Maybe I’m a bit too rigid. 1 of Berbelang’s friends, Jose Fuentes, called me a repressed Negro.

There was silence for a moment.

Don’t you think we ought to check with Earline to see if the other 1 has completely left.

O pop, I don’t believe that a little Etzulie ever did anybody any harm.

The sisters smile. T Malice smiles too.

T
HE NEXT MORNING LABAS
receives a call from Black Herman, indicating that “visitors in the harbor” are anxious to meet with him. He also indicates that Earline is in good hands and that she is “coming out of it.”

About a ½-hour later Herman’s President straight 8 pulls up to Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral and LaBas enters.

Who are we to meet?

I am not at liberty to say—it’s secret, but the people want very much for you to meet with them. Did you hear of Abdul Hamid’s murder? Herman asks.

Yes, I forgot to say I discovered the body. Was there anything to indicate how he got his?

I found something I didn’t show to the police, but as you will recall he mentioned something about an anthology, the archives of an ancient people. I found a crumpled piece of paper, an epigram in his fist concerning Egyptian-American cotton. I can’t connect it to anything but I have a nagging suspicion that it has something to do with the missing anthology. I can’t put it out of my mind.

Strange, very strange, Black Herman said, steering the car toward the Hudson River pier. You know the night before he died I had a vision of him attired in something which resembled a night club floor, he was whirling about the center like a dervish, in the center, he wouldn’t move away from that center…

LaBas hasn’t paid attention to the last remark. He had picked up a copy of the New York
Sun.
It was folded to the society page and a red pencil had circled the picture of a distinguished looking grey-haired man above the caption “Patron-of-the-Arts.” It was Hinckle Von Vampton, publisher of the
Benign Monster.
He wore a black patch over his eye but what was even stranger was the pendant he wore about his neck. The pendant depicted 2 Knights riding upon 1 horse.

A very interesting pendant; do you have it encircled for any particular reason, Herman?

I just want to keep my eye on him.

Once at the pier they approach the freighter
The Black Plume.
The ship’s searchlight swings in their direction. It blinks on and off 3 times. 2 of the Host’s assistants—Python men—both over 6 feet tall emerge from a room and lower the ramp. Black Herman and PaPa LaBas board. The men escort them into a stateroom where they are invited to sit upon some chairs. Outside the ship may be tugboat-shabby but the interior is beautiful. On the floor are loa signatures drawn with cornmeal and water. Rada Drums hang from the ceiling. The colors of the room are black and red, the walls are red, the floor is black. A flag hangs from the ceiling upon which has been sewn the words
Vin ’ Bain Ding,
“Blood, Pain, Excrement.” On a table are handbells, descendants of instruments Egyptians called (ancient) sistrums found in their Temples of Osiris and Isis. The central post is red. Incense composed of hot iron is burning.

On the walls are oil portraits of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Jean Jacques Dessalines, heroes who had expelled Napoleon’s troops from Haiti and brought about the Independence of 1803. Next to these are portraits of Henri Christophe and Boukman, the Papa Loi, who rallied the Haitian countryside to the banner of VooDoo, and the mulatto general André Riguad.

A tall Black man enters the room. He is wearing a red robe and a long necklace made of beads and snake bones. On his finger is a ring upon which a Dark Tower is ensconced.

B. Battraville invites the others to sit. He sits, crosses his legs and lights a cigarette.

I must give you the background, gentlemen. As you well know we surrounded the Marines at Port-au-Prince but the action wasn’t entirely successful because they had been tipped off by the mulatto secretary.

The
New York Times
called you bandits.

Benoit Battraville smiles as a tall Python man serves them rum.

Charlemagne Peralte was hardly a bandit. Our leader was a member of the Haitian elite. He did not invite the American Marines to land in our country on July 28, 1915. The U.S.S.
Washington
landed uninvited. They came on their ships without an Act of your Kongress or consent of the American people.

We didn’t learn about it until recently and that was when you surrounded the Marines…

We were lucky to hear even then, Black Herman, Battraville replies. It was made as a signal to someone. It was a telegram, a message by headline from 1 man to a secret society located in a “neutral country.”

PaPa LaBas is startled…You mean?

Yes you were correct in your book
The Forest Within.
People thought it was merely a far-out work but we read what you were saying…At the foundation of the aesthetic order which pervades this country is a secret society—an ancient society known as the Atonist Path which is protected by its military arm the Wallflower Order, those to whom no 1 ever asked, “May I have this 1?”

Herman chuckled.

Why I’ll be damned. I figured something like this was at the bottom because everyone is wondering why we were down there. Economics didn’t make sense, although, in his excellent
Nation
articles James Weldon Johnson did speak of the influence of the National City Bank.

Yes, that figured into it, but we saw it as merely an upsurgence of a Holy War they’ve waged against us and others like us for 1000s of years. They wanted to bring it to a head because they saw us as a beachhead for their ancient opponents and responsible for the Jes Grew crisis in your country.

Strange, the press claimed that you had dissected the President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam’s…head.

They are required to yield their column inches to the Wallflower Order if they are to survive. What for us are heroes are for them robbers, killing a man who could not do malice with style is considered barbarism or cannibalism, worshiping out of doors in the woods instead of in a cathedral is a sign of unculturedness.

I don’t follow, malice with style?

Yes, LaBas, certainly as a matter of course, there are to be political prisoners but not whole families randomly massacred in prison as Sam did. The U.S.S.
Washington
saw the punishment of the President as their excuse. They marched into the city. The 1st thing they did was remove all the money from our banks—$60,000,000—to pay “debts” we owed.

Sounds like the American cowboy Jesse James, Black Herman muses.

Yes, and they call
us
robbers…It was a miracle that they wrote anything. The
Sun.
It’s only because someone within the New York
Sun
wanted to intimidate the Wallflower Order, he is the man we are after, according to Ti Toubon. You see this was to be a mystery war and I would imagine that after the Americans withdraw, it will be completely deleted from the American “History Books.” They’ve always wanted to drive out the ancient enemy; the anti-Christ as some of them call it.

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.

Yes, Black Herman ponders, the usual. A man downtown is trying to imitate me. A man named Houdini (Ehrich Weiss) is attempting to do what I do…this man should know that he can’t do what I do.

What
is
your specialty, Herman?

Lying buried underground for 8 days, Benoit. I have performed it all over the world. But please continue your narration.

Benoit Battraville drinks from the cup of rum…Artists who were found in possession of The Work were beaten whipped and subjected to a torture, a French invention called “blanchings”; they sent out squads of Marines to interrupt the ceremonies and destroy the wood sculpture and drums.

What did you do?

We merely practiced Catholicism up front and VooDoo underground. Similar to your New Orleans expression “doing the Calinda against the Dude.”

Black Herman lifts a glass of white rum to his lips and returns the glass to the table.

The joke became “The Haitian people are 95% Catholic and 100% VooDoo.” The Belgians and French were always bewildered when we laughed as they tried to interpret St. Jacques as Ogoun, the Warrior! the Gangster! the Fire!

Herman and LaBas chuckle.

The Americans were worse. We knew that we would suffer under the Marines because they were Southern Marines. Southerners being descendants of convicts from Europe, we knew they would not have the sophistication of, say, New Yorkers who had read Freud. The manner of torture they extended to their Black victims. The burning, the hanging. Burning was the traditional way used by early Europe of ridding people of the plague of the pagan religions.

How did this come about? LaBas asks.

We do not work the way you do. You improvise here a great deal; we believe in the old mysteries. I occasionally practice the Petro Loa. Not much but I raise the altitude a little. Kick up a fuss. You see, Charlemagne was arrested by the Marines for aiding the Cacos, peasants who had revolted against them in 1915, and he was forced to do hard labor in a convict’s uniform in the street.

The Marines raped our women, they took a member of the Assembly and kicked him in the seat of his pants in the presence of the people. They used what you call “Crackers” to administer our educational system. Our Superintendent of Public Instruction was a school teacher from Louisiana; they used our official limousines so that our own President had to borrow a car from the Occupation in order to make a trip into the interior.