Book excerpts since late january 2018

ISHMAEL REED MUMBO JUMBO

“From the bedroom of the White House, where he sits sipping whiskey, Warren Harding glares down at his Attorney General. A mere Mason, he is helpless to prevent what is about to take place. Raids on Washington Speaks go on until dawn. NO DANCING! signs of huge black letters and exclamation points are posted throughout the city. Anybody caught Doing it! Doing it! Doing it! is a federal crime.”

“That 1 decade which doesn’t seem so much a part of American history as the hidden After-Hours of America struggling to jam. To get through.”

“We got reports from down here that people were doing “stupid sensual things,” were in a state of “uncontrollable frenzy,” were wriggling like fish, doing something called the “Eagle Rock” and the “Sassy Bump”; were cutting a mean “Mooche,” and “lusting after relevance.” We decoded this coon mumbo jumbo. We knew that something was Jes Grewing just like the 1890s flair-up. We thought that the local infestation area was Place Congo so we put our antipathetic substances to work on it, to try to drive it out; but it started to play hide and seek with us, a case occurring in 1 neighborhood and picking up in another. It began to leapfrog all about us.”

“Yes. You see, it’s not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It’s nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else."

“Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.”

“Much later came another Atonist compromise, Sigmund Freud, who refined the rhetoric of the Church and eased the methods of dealing with the problem. Freud saved many lives which would have ordinarily been dealt with by the Church in an inhumane manner. But when Freud came to America and saw what was going down over here it was too much for even this man. Freud fainted.”

“In 1914 Scott Joplin, who, after announcing that ragtime will “hypnotize this Nation,” is taken to Ward Island where they fritter away his powers with shock therapy.”

“They will shout loudly about soul because they will have lost it. And their protests will be a shriek. A panic sound.”

“...those jockey-dressed amulets on the Southern Lawn of America’s consciousness.”

Art: Elmer Simms Campbell