Plot summary
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down jumps into the narrative of the main protagonist, Loop Garoo, a black, silver tongued, circus cowboy, who represents the devil to the white men. The circus troupe heads into Yellow Back Radio, a sparsely populated ghost town overtaken by a child population in Indian garb. The circus troupe and the children are massacred by the adults that were chased out by the children, while Loop Garoo escapes with his life and a desire for vengeance. Drag Gibson, a homosexual and influential land-owner who is head of the city, is also introduced.
As Drag deals with the problems from a deteriorating city, Loop Garoo is saved from being eaten by wild animals by Chief Showcase, a Native American who fights his oppressors through suave and underhanded means. Loop begins his Hoodoo curses on Drag, giving him the retroactive itch and other inconveniences, as the conflict builds.
Drag murders his sixth wife and orders his seventh through the mail-order service. Her name is Mustache Sal, a nymphomaniac who seeks to murder Drag to inherit his vast fortunes. She proceeds to have sex with just about every main and minor male character, showing a complete lack of discrimination. As Drag continues into a progressively more deteriorating state of mind because of the uncontrollable loss of power and influence around him, Loop Garoo continues to gain influence through his appearance in town, soundly whipping the marshal and pushing the Preacher into the brink of insanity.
Mustache Sal's attempt to poison her husband fails and she is fed to the iron-jawed pigs. Drag then brings in John Wesley Hardin, a sharp-shooting racist who kills black people out of pleasure. When Loop Garoo quickly kills him, Drag's health quickly deteriorates until his savior, the Pope, arrives riding on red bull. He describes to the city's citizens the Hoodoo Loop Garoo is putting on them and proceeds to capture Loop with no difficulty. However, when the Pope fails in persuading Loop to return to Rome with him, he leaves in defeat. Drag sets the execution of Loop up but fails to execute him; instead through the sudden appearance of children with new technology, Amazonian women, and Field Marshal Theda Doompussy Blackwell's Raygun wielding detectives, Drag falls into the pit of pigs and dies.
Characters
Major characters
The Loop Garoo Kid is an African-American cowboy and Neohoodoo houngan. He combats the imperialism and monopolistic greed of Drag Gibson and organized religion, casting spells and summoning Loa to assist him. His struggle against Gibson symbolizes his fight against the power structure and repressive elements of white culture. He embodies African-American culture and religion; his art is as diverse and adaptable as the Hoodoo rituals he performs. Loop Garoo is the apocryphal brother of Jesus Christ, the love interest of the Virgin Mary, and the high priest of Neohoodooism.
Drag Gibson is an influential landowner who represents the impact of white culture on the West, the rapacious greed of land capitalists, and the rigidity of Judeo-Christian values. He rules the town of Yellow Back Radio from his ranch house with a small army of ranch hands. A blatant racist with no regard for human life, he kills off a total of seven wives by the end of the novel. Drag clashes with Loop Garoo and Neohoodooism until he is finally eaten by Yellow Back Radio's steel-jawed hogs.
Chief Showcase is the last surviving Native-American in the Yellow Back Radio region. After Drag Gibson slaughtered his tribe, he began writing militant poetry about white imperialism. Reed portrays Showcase as spiritual and advanced - he travels in a helicopter that confuses and terrifies his provincial white adversaries. Showcase fights back against his oppressors by playing both sides of an escalating conflict between Drag Gibson and the powers in Washington, D.C., working to stir up trouble between the powerful Western landowner and the greedy Federal Government.
Minor characters
Zozo Labrique is a Hoodoo mambo who travelled with Loop Garoo's circus. She taught Loop Garoo connaissance, or Hoodoo magic, and was killed by Drag Gibson's cowhands when they burned down the circus. She reappears in the novel as a Loa called upon by Loop Garoo during his summoning ritual.
Mustache Sal is Drag Gibson's nymphomaniac mail-order bride. She marries Drag with the intention of poisoning him and inheriting his land, but he discovers her plan and feeds her to the executioner's steel-jawed hogs. In contrast to the Black Cougar Saloon's Hurdy Gurdy girls and Drag's previous wife, The Horrible Hybrid, Mustache Sal displays independence, intelligence, and open-mindedness. She doesn't discriminate racially in her personal associations, consorting with Loop Garoo, the ranch hands, and Chief Showcase alike.
Reverend Boyd is the Protestant minister of Yellow Back Radio. He tries to connect with the youth of the town, hosting light shows for them, but his efforts fail. He turns to alcohol for comfort and is ridiculed by Loop Garoo and Pope Innocent. He is killed by the Pope with a can of DDT-based insecticide.
Field Marshal Theda Doompussy Blackwell is a member of the U.S. military brass who schemes with Chief Showcase to take control of Drag Gibson's land. Reed portrays the Field Marshal as weak, petulant, and possibly homosexual, poking fun at the typically virile stereotype of the military man.
Major themes
Neohoodooism
Reed interweaves the basic tenets of a religious aesthetic called Neohoodooism throughout the text. He achieves this chiefly through the statements of the Loop Garoo Kid, the spiritual high priest of Neohoodooism. The religious side of Neohoodooism has its roots in the African-American folk magic of Hoodoo, which Reed claims is based on the West African religion of Vodoun. Loop Garoo's summoning of various Loa and hexing of Drag Gibson confirms these religious roots.
Neohoodooism is also an artistic aesthetic which values multicultural hybridism. The Loop Garoo Kid uses Neohoodooism to fight Drag Gibson, a symbol of the intolerance in white culture. Their battle represents the struggle of an inclusive African-American culture against a rigid Judeo-Christian one.
Reed explains that he linked the religious and aesthetic aspects of Neohoodooism together because the one is a metaphor for the other; both aspects are essentially amalgamations: "Voodoo is the perfect metaphor for the multicultural. Voodoo comes out of the fact that all these different tribes and cultures were brought from Africa and Haiti. All of their mythologies, knowledges, and herbal medicines, their folklores, jelled. It's an amalgamation like this country." [4]
Religious conflict
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is rife with religious conflict. Protestantism conflicts with Catholicism, and Catholicism with Neohoodooism. Yellow Back Radio's reverend, Preacher Boyd, symbolizes the failure of Protestantism. Despite his best efforts, the young people of the town ignore him, and as a result he descends into despair and alcoholism. The representatives of both the novel's other major religions scorn him. The Loop Garoo Kid, high priest of Neohoodooism, lashes the crucifix off Reverend Boyd's neck with a bullwhip, and Pope Innocent, leader of the Catholic Church, kills him with a can of insecticide. Protestantism in the town Yellow Back Radio is out of touch and dying. Catholicism and Neohoodooism conflict during an argument between Loop Garoo and Pope Innocent. Loop Garoo launches a scathing attack on the violent nature of the Catholic Church: "You and your crowd are the devils. The way you massacred the Gnostics, not to mention the Bogomils, Albigenses, and Waldenses" (165). Reed compares African-American Neohoodooism to Catholicism, contrasting the tolerance and inclusiveness of the former with the massacres and bigotry of the latter.
Racial conflict
The struggle between a pluralistic African-American culture and an intolerant white culture is central to the novel. Loop Garoo, the impromptu spell-casting Hoodoo houngan, diametrically opposes the bigoted Drag Gibson. The conflict between these two men and the forces they represent leads to direct, racist violence. Drag Gibson sets fire to Loop Garoo's circus, killing his associates and forcing him to flee into the desert. He then hires the genocidal John Wesley Hardin to finish Loop Garoo off. Hardin symbolizes the racist tendencies of the Old West; he sees African Americans as the devil incarnate and slaughters them without mercy. The Loop Garoo Kid responds to Drag's violence by calling on a diverse array of resources, unleashing the power of nature and the innumerable hexes and spells of the Hoodoo religion on Gibson and his cronies. Drag is quickly overwhelmed by the forces assembled against him, and not even Pope Innocent can save him from Loop Garoo. Reed argues that the transparent violence employed by white society is no match for the diversity and adaptability of African-American religion and culture. Reed also comments on the ethnocidal history of the Western Expansion. Chief Showcase's poetry bitterly reflects the atrocities committed against Native Americans by white imperialists, and Showcase sardonically jeers at the promises of white leaders.
A mojo, in the African-American spiritual practice called Hoodoo, is an amulet consisting of a flannel bag containing one or more magical items. It is a "prayer in a bag", or a spell that can be carried with or on the host's body. Alternative American names for the mojo bag include gris-gris bag, hand, mojo hand, toby, nation sack,conjure hand, lucky hand, conjure bag, juju bag, trick bag, tricken bag, root bag, and jomo. The word mojo also refers to magic and charms. Mojo containers are bags, gourds, bottles, shells, and other containers. The making of mojo bags in Hoodoo is a system of African-American occult magic. The creation of mojo bags is an esoteric system that involves sometimes housing spirits inside of bags for either protection, healing, or harm and to consult with spirits. Other times mojo bags are created to manifest results in a person's life such as good-luck, money or love.
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Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. It is a syncretic religion between two or more cultural religions, in this case being African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion.
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John the Conqueror, also known as High John de Conqueror, John, Jack, and many other folk variants, is a folk hero from African-American folklore. He is associated with the roots of Ipomoea purga, the John the Conqueror root or John the Conqueroo, to which magical powers are ascribed in African-American folklore, especially among the Hoodoo tradition of folk magic. Muddy Waters mentions him as Johnny Cocheroo in the songs "Mannish Boy" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man". In "Mannish Boy", the line is "I think I'll go down/To old Kansas too/I'm gonna bring back my second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo" and in "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man", it is called "John De Conquer Blue".
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Mumbo Jumbo is a 1972 novel by African-American author Ishmael Reed, originally published by Doubleday in New York. The novel has remained continuously in print in the decades since its first edition. It was first published in the UK by Allison and Busby, and has been published in translation in several languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, as well as a Chinese translation in 2019. The novel was released as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2017.
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Gris-gris is a Voodoo amulet originating in West Africa which is believed to protect the wearer from evil or bring luck, and in some West African countries is used as a purported method of birth control. It consists of a small cloth bag, usually inscribed with verses from an ancestor and a ritual number of small objects, worn on the person.
Louisiana Voodoo, also known as New Orleans Voodoo, is an African diasporic religion that originated in Louisiana. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Haitian Vodou. No central authority is in control of Louisiana Voodoo, which is organized through autonomous groups.
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