In the 1920s a "psychic epidemic" called Jes Grew sweeps America out of New Orleans — an anti-plague that enlivens rather than wastes its hosts, moving people to dance, speak in tongues, and abandon their assigned roles, and carrying Black music and movement with it wherever it spreads. In Harlem, PaPa LaBas — HooDoo priest, conjure man, and detective of the Jes Grew Kathedral — searches for the missing Text, a sacred anthology descended from ancient Egyptian sources, which Jes Grew needs if it is to endure and not be dismissed as mere entertainment. Against him stand the Atonists: the Wallflower Order and its agents, heirs of the Knights Templar, who defend a single, Eurocentric "civilization" and mean to locate and destroy the Text; among them is the publisher Hinckle Von Vampton. On the other flank, LaBas's former associate Berbalang leads the Mu'tafikah, who raid the Center for Art Detention to liberate the world's stolen artifacts and return them to the cultures that made them. Reed's best-known novel — nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction — is at once a detective story, a satire of the Harlem Renaissance, and a re-mythologized history of Black culture's recurring cycle of creation, appropriation, and suppression.
Author: Ishmael Reed · Original publisher: Doubleday (Garden City, New York), 1972