Years later, for it is now 2005, and Ray Charles is not only a figure of importance (some dare to call him a hero, a role model), but Ray Charles is now the name of a movie, nominated for five Academy Awards. And former president, Jimmy Carter, stood beside a white blues singer, Willie Nelson, singing “Georgia on My Mind” and smiled, and became black in his association with Ray Charles, a “citizen of Georgia,” previously a banned, drug-using addict, born in Georgia. And when the Georgia Legislature welcomed him “home,” the power of the song I had come to love, even before its performance in the run-down restaurant in the “tough section” of New Haven in 2002, I had already been imbued with the power of reconciliation that is a theme of this wonderful song.
It comes close, in my estimation, to the rendition of “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday.
But I’m back in 1963. And I am still in Harlem; and Leroi Jones has become Amiri Baraka; is directing the Black Arts Theatre from a theatre in Harlem, is wearing robes with an African touch of style. The Brooks Brothers sports jackets, the turned-down cloth hat, and the buttoned-down shirt collar, are all things of the past. And in more significant ways than the changing of a suit of clothes. This is a new cultural and racial image. The image of blackness.
The Black Arts Theatre not only was promoting “black plays,” but was devoted, through principle, and through what used to be called “the reality of being a Negro” in America, the bolstering of other forms of writing by blacks: poetry and the novel and the essay, into a “black arts movement,” dedicated to the liberation of all black Americans. Leroi had moved from the culture of the Greenwich Village avant garde intellectual, in the company of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Olson, writing mainly a poetry that had come to be known as “beat.” But Leroi, I use the name deliberately to show the effect of his new disposition of defining the black American through his literature and his music, changed his name into an African name. Not in the same frame of mind that caused Malcolm Little to become Malcolm X, and Cassius Clay to become Muhammad Ali, but a personal transformation of a more clear and professed religious rationalization. Leroi changed his name from Leroi Jones, first, into Imamu Amear Baraka. And never did he have the same reliance upon a Muslim theology to justify this “awakening,” as he couched his “redemption” into cultural-nationalist justification. And, as if renouncing the presumption that he was more bound by religion than he was by black cultural nationalism, it seems that he got rid of the “Imamu,” whose meaning would have brought him face to face with a religiousness, similar to James Baldwin’s storefront religiousness, when the thrust of his concerns was buried deep into what he came to call “black cultural nationalism.”
“The black writer, or the black artist, cannot afford to be interested in art for art’s sake,” he told me, just before I left Harlem, following my interview of Malcolm X in 1963. I waited a moment, to see if he would complete the conviction by criticizing the proponents of that literary theology, the French Existentialists. But he did not. He felt that I could make the connection on my own. And I did, in my mind. I was a writer at the edge of stepping off into the great blue yonder without a map, without a compass, without a briefing of the wind currents, brewing storms, empty-handed, and devoid of a “model.” What model? Who in Toronto, writing at this time — and most of the writers at the beginning of their careers — was interested in writing poetry? Very few were considering beginning their careers with the novel. Some had tried the short story. But I was a man in a desert with no idea of the geography of the surrounding landscape that was so barren as the desert itself. But Leroi was himself, probably at this stage, in the same questioning uncertainty about what direction his plays and poetry were going to take, having renounced the beat generation’s way of looking at literature, which I myself regarded as dead, and nihilistic, since, in my lexicon, “beat” may carry that connotation of the airy-fairy, not facing the surrounding harsh reality of racism, violence, and cultural brutality against the black American.
“The black artist has the moral obligation to make sure that everything he produces, is intended for the liberation of all black people.” This was the way he finished his thought. I went through my mind, evaluating the works of the black American writers I had read: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paule Marshall, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, and a few others, like Toni Cade Bambara, John O. Killens, to see whether their work honoured Leroi’s prescription. “The black artist can’t afford to be elitist,” he went on to tell me, “not in this time in America, with the way blacks are treated by the white man.”
Leroi himself had experienced this treatment of blacks during the Newark Riots, when he was bloodied by the revolver and the billy club of a Newark policeman, and this closeness to the “revolution,” the revolution of black demand for justice and equality, caused him to make the next step in the logic of his new black cultural nationalism, to say, “We are all connected to the nigger in the street.” Making the unspoken chilling reality that black people throughout the world understand in a most palpable way, that the policeman does not ask you if you have a degree, or if you are poet, before he shoots you, or breaks your skull with his billy club, or aims the high-powered water hose at your naked body, already stripped naked by the force of racism.
“We are all niggers to him!”
Around this time, in 1963 Leroi Jones wrote Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It. In this book, he laid out his philosophy and his analysis of racism against “American Negroes.” In the first few chapters of Blues People, he comes very close to the analysis made by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, published in English in 1967. It explains, also, the psychology in the white American’s racialism against the “American Negro.” Leroi said:
Colonial America was the complete antithesis of the African’s version of human existence. This idea seems to me one of the most important aspects of the enslavement of the African: the radically different, even opposing “Weltanschauung” which the colonial American and the African brought to each other. Each man, in whatever “type” of culture he inhabits, must have a way of looking at the world — whatever that means to him — which is peculiar to his peculiar culture. It is extremely important to understand that these diametrically opposed interpretations of life would be in conflict normally in the most minute human contacts. But when a man who sees the world one way becomes the slave of a man who interprets the world in an exactly opposite way, the result is, to my mind, the worst possible kind of slavery.
It is 1968, and I have left Harlem and the receptionist at the Amsterdam News, and the Apollo Theater, and Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach behind; and Paule Marshall my hostess; and the Harlem Y, and I am now in New Haven, at Yale; and it must have been the weekend, for I have made plans, from Sunday night, to escape the barren culture of New Haven, and its little hostility toward black people. At this time, New Haven is a little caught up in the net of what Frantz Fanon called “Negrophobia.” I would escape to New York, and Harlem, and Greenwich Village; and listen to Thelonious Monk, wearing his porkpie hat (later to be replaced by a Muslim-looking cap, like a Jewish yarmulke, only bigger and covering the entire head); and Miles Davis and Jimmy Witherspoon; and visit the Red Rooster with Larry-Neal-the-poet; and I would have tracked down Leroi Jones at his home in Newark, a large house which served, or so it seemed to me, as his theatre and his study and his private quarters. His wife was there, though in the background, giving us privacy to talk and to have the interview recorded without background noise, except the constant humming of the stereo player, dispensing John Coltrane, and John Coltrane, and John Coltrane. I learned everything I know about jazz, and about John Coltrane, from Leroi Jones.
So, in 1968, down from Yale, to breathe the healthy, easier air of Greenwich Village and visit Small’s Paradise, to remind my soul and body of the taste of chicken and waffles … and Newark was like some streets years ag
o, in Beirut; and today, like many streets in Bagdad, the neglected aftermath of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have always wondered why, considering his greater image in the North, there was not the same outpouring of anger and frustration and suicidal “psychoexistential complex” animosity for white America, at the assassination of Malcolm X.
We sat down in Leroi’s second-floor drawing room, in easy chairs, with the smell of bullets and gunfire coming up the hill into our company, for the painting of desolation, over and above the dilapidation of some streets in Newark, which seemed to have been chosen as a battlefield on which white America was bent upon reminding the “Negro” of his everlasting inferiority, we sipped lemon, listened to “Chasin’ the Trane” and I began the interview, using the borrowed Nagra — which I had now mastered, and could operate it, as my mother would say, “with my two eyes closed!” — and asked him this first question.
“Leroi, when I was talking with you the last time, about a couple of months ago, you hinted at some new intensive search into religion, a special interest in the East. I am wondering whether in the search you have explored, even if only intellectually, the Black Muslim religion?”
“I have always been interested in religion,” he replied. “I think a black man has to be very brainwashed to consider himself completely free of religious tendencies, and I’ve always studied religion. When I was younger, I studied Christianity and then Buddhism, but I think that religion is, finally, the most admirable attempt that man makes to shape his life. I know that, because of what we may call ‘priest-craft,’ religious ideals can often be twisted by the people who are supposedly keeping those ideals alive. A lot of times, the ideals are distorted to further the worldly, non-religious ambitions of the priests.
“This is especially true of Christianity, where it is all ‘priest-craft’ and no religion. The black man who is an Oriental, and Eastern man, is naturally a religious man, just as most people from the East are religious. Religion comes out of the East. Even Christianity comes out of the East. It’s an Eastern religion and Christ, or Esonumarian, was an Eastern man. Our whole tradition has to do with religion rather than with the speculative philosophy of the Western mind.”
“Do you think that by going back and searching out this religion you could begin to know yourself better than if you had done it through philosophy or through politics?”
“It is not a matter of going back so much as it is cutting through the mass of lies and distortions we have been subjected to here in the West.… We can find the substance of our real life-force. And then, once we know the powers we have, we can find out who are the gods that we are really supposed to worship. Then we’ll understand we cannot possibly be a subject people, because our gods won’t allow it.
“Most of the Negroes and the ‘niggers’ — and I use the term because that’s what they are, self-admittedly so — they pray to a god who allows them to be slaves. Now if you pray to a god who allows you to be a slave, you are a fool. When we say you should find out who your god is, it means going back to a time when the black man was powerful. Because then (if one finds that ancient god) the god he worships extends power to him, not subjection, not a kind of diseased humility — because humility in the right context is desirable.
“Take the Black Muslims, for instance. As I said, I have always been interested in Eastern philosophy and, although I certainly understand the wisdom of a great many of Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, I am not a member of the Nation of Islam. I am an Orthodox Sunni Muslim.”
It was at this point in his religious and intellectual re-evaluation that he became known, first, as Imamu Amear Baraka. From then, and until his death in 2014, he was Amiri Baraka.
Chapter Fifteen
The townhouse on Asquith Avenue, joined like a Siamese twin to Number 44, which houses an old man, a retired policeman, and a younger man, a commercial artist, who wears thick, black-rimmed glasses and wears only white shirts, and black trousers, as if he is practising and studying to be a priest and does not quite have the nerve to go on, and wear a black cassock and a white surplice, and who never goes next door, westward, to the French restaurant, whose afternoon preludes of cooking onion soup has to hit him strong, first, before it rides with the wind to my rented townhouse, number 46, this man “looks after George.” George no longer now wears his billy club and his revolver. But he sits in the main room, downstairs, amongst piles of paper and boxes and things to be delivered by special delivery, and in Metro taxis, and he says, and goes on saying, “Hello, Austin!” even when I have walked out of his eyesight. And then, “Afternoon, Austin,” and then, “How’s the writing?” And then I know he has not fallen off into that good night. Pleasant in his retirement, secure and safe, and “well-attended-to” by this much-younger man, carving out and painting out his career as a commercial artist. And suddenly, I want to become a commercial artist. And upstairs, up the narrow, steep stairs, is Gord. Gordon Peters, another commercial artist, whose speciality is “retouching” photographs, and images of men and women, and things, on paper, and sending them back by special delivery and in Metro taxis, with a fine covering over them of paper that looks as if it has been dropped, but only for a moment, and watched with eagle-eyes, in water that contains something to make the sheet look like silk, and that almost can be seen through. Gordon Peters became a successful, famous painter of watercolours; but that is another story.
So, from 46 Asquith Avenue, before the Reference Library was thought of, before Raymond Moriyama became nationally famous, before The Bay came and blocked my view of Bloor Street and Grand & Toy, and the small coach-house-looking house where Dora Mavor Moore told young men and women how to stand, how to talk, how to walk on a stage so that, one day, soon, before the money for their acting fees ran out, they might stand in better posture and better position on that stage, on Stratford, before all this “progress and development” that churned up the landscape like a construction site of sewers in the suburb of Scarborough, and had us walking through mud the colour not of mud — brown — but off-white like clay; and witness before our horrified eyes the beauty of red brick and yards and green lawns behind houses, and the quiet of voice and manner, and a tree, across from number 46, under which a man could sit during the day and dream of Barbados where there are more trees that produce shade, and under which, during the concealing night, a man and a woman could sit, and hold hands, and lean closer together when no one was looking, and “steal” a kiss; so I shall walk to Bloor, and cross the street, like a yacht in a sea of traffic, tacking in and tacking out, to reach the shore of the south sidewalk, and turn left and reach Church Street, and turn right, and continue in the canal of the street with the banks of houses — I almost said, private houses, exposing a meaningless extravagance: for most houses along Church Street, going south from Bloor, were private — walking to the CBC Radio Building, at 354 Jarvis Street, to discuss “story ideas” with Harry J. Boyle in charge of the Project Series; and with Robert Weaver, for Anthology, The Best of Ideas, and to peddle a short story on him, in case Alice Munro, his favourite, had not already taken up his entire budget. And just walking, and humming a song to myself. There were no Walkmans or iPods in those days. No men and women walked with their ears bombarded by the various noisy music of their choice; and if there were Walkmans, I certainly was not in the position to own one. Besides, I despised as a point of snobbish principle following too close on the heels of the latest fad. What was the fad at this time, in 1964 and 1965? Apart from the fads in fashions? Bell-bottoms? Blue jeans? The Afro — for black men and black women? The jumpsuit? Painting of the body? The smashing and the curving of spoons and forks to make bangles for jewellery? The dashiki — for black men and some white men; and for black women, and some white women? The obsession with silver — and not gold — to be worn as rings and bangles and sculpture to decorate the “pad.” And the favourite colour in which the “pad” was painted. BLACK. Everything was black in those days. Everybody
wanted to be black. For to be a black American was “the cool currency of cool,” in a new civil rights motto, and metaphor. No! It was not really the civil rights movement that came up upon this metaphor. It was a combination of ideas, floating around in the American air, in the South and in the North, to say nothing of the West and the Black Panther Party — it was Malcolm X; and Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown;and the Imamu, Amiri Baraka; and John Coltrane, Live at Birdland and elsewhere in the world: in Toronto on a small street named Asquith, and in London where Notting Hill came to have another meaning, beside the address of poor, black, cold, shivering, out-of-work West Indians; and Miles, Miles Davis, Someday My Prince Will Come. Black is beautiful. Black is beautiful, baby. Yeah! Black is beautiful.
If Phyllis Sommerville is in her office, I might stop by and sell her an idea for her programme, perhaps, snip off a piece of the Leroi Jones interview and sell it to her. She is a poet. And from rumour in the basement cafeteria, she is about to enter the Anglican ministry. (Imagine how life goes round and round before it expires. I attend the weekly sales on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, between noon and five o’clock at the Toronto Reference Library, on the first floor, past the three commissioners who smile at me, and say “Cold enough for you?” in winter; and “Damn humid today!” in June, July, and August; and immediately attend to the next person coming through the security line, in case he has sneaked a library book in his shoulder-strapping back pack. One of the twenty books I had bought that Saturday, was, I couldn’t believe my two eyes, as my mother would say, I almost dropped dead as I recognized the author’s photograph. I recognized part of the biographical note of Paule Marshall. I recognized the date. But I did not believe that I was holding in my hand, the book written by the woman, who was at the brink of her career, as I was on mine. But she with more sureness and succour and success, possibly through privilege, than was my case. But my love for her, as a fellow artist, contradicted those feelings of jealousy, and I went back in my mind to those afternoons, when we chatted lightly, skirting over and beside our ambitions to be writers, published writers, and went back to devote our time to the making of programmes and of making money.
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