MJJG 24-33

[Raphael Saltwood]

Thanks, Bekah and Cagliostro, for background on the gangsters.

numbers racket - later taken over by the state in many jurisdictions - a criminal enterprise that in many people’s thoughts was “victimless” (although hard-core moralists continue to disagree) so is this changeover of power a benevolent manifestation of Jes Grew?

Imho, no - like the Nation of Islam, & African-American communism, a-and maybe even the Mira-filths, black gangsterism is peripheral, not central to Jes Grew

24 - again the grapevine telegraph, and mention of Booker T Washington at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. That was the famous “cast down your bucket where you are” speech.
With which he “bewitched” the first mixed-race audience for a speech given by an African-American in the South. Bewitched?
Sounds like Reed is linking BTW’s self-help message with the magic of Jes Grew.

25 does “Picture the 1920s as a drag race” owe something to Donald Barthelme?
Maybe a bit, but it develops differently, imho. Mixing the metaphor with a dog show.
Actually pretty cool, I didn’t notice the transition (and back again with “hound mongrel of a struggle-buggy”) till writing about it.
Author has a way with words, film at 11...yeah, ok, but still, pretty deft imho.

“Gros ben age” is supposed to be a pun on Haitian “gros bon ange” (“big good angel”?) which is like zeitgeist?


28 & forward - invasion of Haiti

So Harding was only President from 1921 to 1923. Under Wilson’s orders, US factotums invaded and occupied it in 1915; Roosevelt Admin finally ended it in 1934.

James Weldon Johnson, who was, like, a very major poet who also wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” journeyed there & wrote about it for the NAACP and in the Nation - Reed puts him at the rent party that PaPa LaBas attends


30 “A little boy kicked his Newfoundland HooDoo 3 cents and spent a night squirming and gnashing his teeth.”

Didn’t make sense to me until a later chapter, 3 cents is the name of LaBas’s dog.


31 & forward - Earline is introduced as his assistant therapist but then many times he calls her daughter.

Who is this Berbelang cat?