by Amiri Baraka
So it was the end. Formal as a season.
Nine Chester Ave. Mahomet. The sick tribes of Aegina. Black skies of christendom, (the 44 pulled up near his house & I ran thru the snow right to the door. A blue light leaned up from the basement & high laughter & The Orioles). A world, we made then. Dead Columbus “its first victim.” Spread out the world, split open our heads with what rattles in the cold. All sinners, placed against mute perfection.
They, the Dukes, came in like they did. Slow, with hands shoved deep in pockets. Laughing, respectable (like gunfighters of the west. When air stirred years later, and we rode out to the sea).
Now they spread out among us, & girls’ eyes shifted from their men to the hulks sucking up the shadows. The Orioles were lovely anyway, & the snow increased whining against the glass.
SURE I WAS FRIGHTENED BUT MAN THERE WAS NOT A GODDAMNED THING TO DO. IN THIS CONCEPTION OF THE ENTIRE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY WE TRACE EVERYTHING BACK TO MAN AND FINALLY DEMAND AN ETHICS SUITABLE TO THE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY, IF, INDEED, WE WISH TO CARRY THINGS THAT FAR.
They had taken up the practice of wearing berets. Along with the army jackets (& bellbottom pants which was natural for people in that strange twist of ourselves, that civil strife our bodies screamed for . . . Now, too, you readers!).
So everyone, the others, knew them right away. Girls wdn’t dance with them & that cd start it. Somebody trying to make a point or something. Or if they were really salty they’d just claim you stepped on their shoes. (Murray warned me once that I’d better cool it or I was gonna get my hat blocked. I was grateful, in a way, on W. Market Street: that orange restaurant where they had quarter sets.)
Tonight someone said something about the records. Whose property or the music wasn’t right or some idea came up to spread themselves. Like Jefferson wanting Louisiana, or Bertran deBorn given dignity in Hell. There was a scuffle & the Dukes won.
(That big fat clown, slick, the husky sinister person, bigeyed evil bastard . . . the one that didn’t like me had a weird name I can’t think of and well-tailored “bells.” Rabbit, Oscar (a camp follower) and some other cowboys.) They pushed the guy’s face in and the light, hung on a chain, swung crazy back and forth and the girls shot up the stairs. He, the n.nwk. cat, got out tho, up the stairs & split cursing in the snow. Things settled down & the new learning had come in. A New Order, & cookie clicked his tongue still cool under it, & I sat down talking to a girl I knew was too ugly to attract attention.
This wd be the second phase in our lives. Totalitarianism. Sheep performing in silence.
He came back with six guys and a meat cleaver. Rushed down the wooden stairs & made the whole place no man’s land. Dukes took off the tams & tried to shove back in the darkness. Ladies pushed back on the walls. Orioles still grinding for the snow. “Where’s that muthafucka.” Lovely Dante at night under his flame taking heaven. A place, a system, where all is dealt with . . . as is proper. “I’m gonna kill that muthafucka.” Waved the cleaver and I crept backward while his mob shuffled faces. “I’m gonna kill somebody.” Still I had my coat & edged away from the center (as I always came on. There. In your ditch, bleeding with you. Christians).
Now the blood turned & he licked his lips seeing their faces suffering. “Kill anybody,” his axe slid thru the place throwing people on their stomachs, it grazed my face sending my green hat up against the record player. I wanted it back, but war broke out & I rushed around the bar. They tried to get up the stairs, the light girls & n.nwk. people. All the cool men bolted. I crouched with my mouth against the floor, till Cookie came hurdling over the bar & crushed my back.
The Dukes fought the others. And were outnumbered (we wd suffer next week . . .) Nixon punched them (& got his later in Baxter with a baseball bat). And they finally disappeared up the stairs, all the fighters.
When we came out & went slow upstairs the fat guy was spread out in the snow & Nicks was slapping him in his face with the side of the cleaver. He bled under the light on the gray snow & his men had left him there to die.
Personators (alchemists) Falsifiers
If I am a good man, godfearing, brought from the field to myself, in music, this round eye of mind, Jesus’ flesh is world to me, in words, thoughts heavier than myself.
If I were myself, at last, brought back
(the field turned
round
so it chatters under wind like leaves wave the day
back slowly.
Winter, for myself, the god man, the lover, who has
neither, nor
will it help sprawling, like this, across.
They had to shake my belief in the seasons. (If they could, coming in here like that, drunk, cracks in the street, tar taste. I could walk under those signs looking for their loves, or run out, like later, and bleed to death of old age. I could come back around those corners, down those hills (not saturday bright money, or the red-haired ladies of the consul.) But bullets, and the aroma of Negroes, finally. All of them in that movie, or living silently in pink houses.
* * *
So what becomes of me if Joe Louis and Roosevelt are caught here? As the leaves lay flat on the gray ground. As they will, each time I look. Wind in trash, moves. If they stand with me, as death will. As you can, lying flat and alone without me. As your love could, were it made of softer breath.
They are our life. As Gods, or the signal raised over the city. The bright planes, and smokes of the summer. The ball’s descent, splendid, bouncing if I picked it up and made the proper move. So, smells sit around us, seducing our years.
* * *
Those 12 years of God, all strength followed (and the walks into halls, and their dusty windows. They would quote something, or remember who was who. Who was placed, made to enter the pure world of system. As our lives slip through the fingers of giants. Their voices ruling the radios. (Notes there dissolving. As prayers will. Now his mouth is shut. He will not pray again.
Fat, or how they moved. Sullen, lies about them later. To push it in. All, all, what he tasted in his bottoms. At his soul’s hurt, days would crawl in place. Each thing at the top of buildings looking down, across to where he died. Years later this was.
But God should be here. Should have his station, his final way of speech. More powerful than our dim halls, or the white mustache of the polack.
Hand could barely reach him. They’d scrape his chest / he pulled it back. Dancing away, left hand down. Shuffling. This God, on an orange porch, they listened with their sticks. Their travels out of hell, hells of the eastern city. Our country grew, its savages were given jobs. So it should, she wd laugh you to pieces, laugh you drunkenly at your hope.
He moved, and was with us in our shops. Our old men listened to the arms chop the air. Across the various yards, black gravel and white slat fences of the rich, who know nothing. Who are not jewish, even now they live where they do, with things around them grown to words. Their hands miss me. Their eyes twisted, packed with slender days.
The 12 years of God, are the last night. The Twelfth, that same thick evening air, summers, or when the last of the men got in. Winter, near christmas, they pulled in, swung down off their mounts. Shakespeare rattled drunkenly in the fog, folksingers, a thin Negro lying to his white girlfriend. Near parks, sitting cold in the scaly light like an empty room birds walk thru. Birds walk thru.
(And who was it drunk had told me unconvinced? His mother’s rules. The groups walking with their trees. To make our proof . . . that there were Gods, whose world sat wet in the morning with our own.)
“So, I went for it. What the hell. Buncha drunks pissing on the corner. Plainclothes cat leaning out his black car window whistling. We move back toward the stoop. Turning both ways for Dukes.” (Earlier or later, the cars would move away from the curb toward our lives. We had made it so far. This other group, my lieutenants, admirals, dentists.)
And they came thru it. Knew the punch, the stories, and how the doors sat open, and adults were ashamed to be so old th
ey could not cry. They looked, if they would, or do now at what shows up saturdays needing a guide to place his life, his soul in their huge dark hands.
THE LATER GROUP
(if we die for the two big men. Satyr play shd move next! Change the scenery. Get the faggot off, and try to sober him up. Chrissakes. Clank (Airthefugginplaceout)
. . . WAS TP (Hollywood Ted & Co.) Everyone alive is a contemporary. As the man who beat Louis, or the Georgia heat where Roosevelt’s head split. We know them together as part of our time.
And TP fit there. A Friend of The Family, really (as you people are now. Knowing so much). But I envied them, tony, sonnyboy, the rest. And it’s so easy to cross them now. They’ve failed. Suppliants. Their dancing saved them those early times. Their coats. But it changed. The sun moved . . . our Gods, I said, had died. We weren’t ready for anarchy . . . but it walked into us like morning.
So, look, for the first time at Anonymous Negroes and Harry S. Truman. (How’s that grab you?) yall?) Anarchy, for a time.
Lucky, at first the war held. And we could think in that. I had a gun. But we didn’t realize except what bled. And it had for youth. That when God is Killed, talking to oneself is a sign of nuttiness. (Our grandparents suffered.
And I watched them dance knowing that God was dead . . . and now, what it meant. I bought a checkered coat, green hat, kept alone, late, nights, till finally in a restaurant I met another man, and he stayed with me till my life was public.
* *
This lousy vaudeville group. (Historically, only a later development of The Golden Boys and Los Cassedores.) But the net had been drawn tighter. And new loves grew out of stone.
(A Story Of The New Group THE RAPE
CIRCLE 9: Bolgia 1—Treachery To Kindred
The Rape
I’d moved outside to sit. And sitting brought the others out. (The NEW group, I thot about them with that name then.) The New Group. What had been my distance. Looking across the crowd at the motion and smoke they raised. Jackie’s listless band, exciting, in it. Junkies humped over their borrowed horns and sending beams of cock up niggers’ clothes.
Now I’d move past. They had come too. To see me. Or see what the great “sharp” world cd do. Their white teeth and mulatto brains to face the ofay houses of history. THE BEAUTIFUL MIDDLECLASS HAD FORMED AND I WAS TO BE A GREAT FIGURE, A GIANT AMONG THEM. THEY FOLLOWED WITH THEIR EYES, OR LISTENED TO SOFT MOUTHS SPILL MY STORY OUT TO GIVE THEIR WIVES.
The fabric split. Silk patterns run in the rain. What thots the God had for us, I trampled, lost my way. Ran on what I was, to kill the arc, the lovely pattern of our lives.
Summers, during college, we all were celebrities. East Orange parties, people gave us lifts and sd our names to their friends. (What was left of the Golden Boys, Los Ruedos, splinter groups, and only me from the Cavaliers.) We’d made our move. They had on suits, and in my suit, names had run me down. Stymied me with pure voids of heat, moon, placing fingers on books.
Now, the party moved for us. And we made all kinds. This one was hippest for our time. East Orange, lightskinned girls, cars pulling in, smart clothes our fathers’ masters wore. But this was the way. The movement. Our heads turned open for it. And light, pure warm light, flowed in.
I sat on a stoop. One of the white stoops of the rich (the Negro rich were lovely in their nonimportance in the world). Still, I sat and thot why they moved past me, the ladies, or why questions seemed to ride me down. The world itself, so easy to solve . . . and get rid of. Why did they want it? What pulled them in, that passed me by. I cd have wept each night of my life.
* *
A muggy dust sat on us. And they made jokes and looked at me crooked, feasting on my eyes. Wondering why they liked me.
Sanchez, one of Leon’s men, came out, whistled at the crowd of Lords, got his drink, and listened to a funny lie I told. He got in easy.
School came up, my own stupid trials they took as axioms for their lives. Any awkwardness, what they loved, and told their mothers of my intelligence. Still it sprung on them, from sitting in the trees. Silent with the silence; delighted in itself for thinking brutal concrete moves.
They Could Not Come To Me. It would be a thrust, or leave it home! Move the bastards out! A New Order(?) what came later returning to New York, to see Art, outside my head for the first time, and 200 year old symphonies I’d written only a few months earlier.
* *
A drunken girl, woman, slut, moved thru the trees. Weaving. I folded my arms and watched the trees, green almost under the porch lamp paste her in. They turned to me to see what noises I was making. Stupid things I’d thought I heard.
Foot slid down steps: up. Marking time, lime. Pulling at my tie, I watched and none of our girls was out. The party pushed noise into the dark. Only the cellar lights in the house spread out, light brown parents pushed their faces into pillows and hoped the party made their son popular.
She was skinny, dark and drunk. Nothing I’d want, without what pushed inside. They sd that to themselves, and to each other. What a desperate sick creature she was, and what she wanted here in their paradise.
And it took hold of me then. Who she was. Why I moved myself. Who she was, and what wd be the weight her face wd make. So I looked at them and crossed my eyes so they would think, for an instant, what I thought.
The chick was drunk. And probably some dumb whore slept to the end of the Kinney line. From the 3rd ward, she found herself with us. Trees. And the gray homes of the city, the other city, starting to fade on the hill.
She came to me. Direct. Even slit eyes gave me away. She moved straight. And paused to pat her coat. (Sanchez gave her a Lucky Strike.) She asked me with the fire making a shadow on her forehead where was Jones St.
We all knew that was Newark. And I had got the thing stirring.
* *
But how long till the logic of our lives runs us down? Destroys the face the wind sees. The long beautiful fingers numbed in slow summer waves of darkness?
Never. Never. The waves run in. Blue. (Our citizens are languid as music. And their hearts are slow motion lives. Dead histories I drag thru the streets of another time. Never.
* *
Five, with me. And the woman. Huge red lips, like they were turned inside out. Heavy breath, almost with veins. Her life bleeding slow in the soft summer. And not passion pushed her to me. Not any I could sit with magazines in the white toilet wishing love was some gruesome sunday thing still alive and fishy in my clothes. Still, smelling, that single tone, registered in our heads, as dirt paths where we lay the other ladies naked, and naked bulbs shown squarely on their different flesh.
I said, “Jones St.” and that held over the street like drums of insects. Like some new morning with weird weather swam into our faces. The meanings, we gave. I gave. (Because it sat alone with me . . . and I raised it. Made it some purely bodily suck. The way my voice would not go down. A tone, to set some fire in dry wood. An inferno. Where flame is words, or lives, or the simple elegance of death.)
Sanchez showed his teeth (I think, he stood sideways looking at the car. Jingling the keys at the tone of my words.) The others moved. “We’ll take you there.” I almost fell, so moved that what I could drag into the world would stay. That others could see its shape and make it something in their brittle lives. “I’ll take you there.”
* *
Calvin, Donald, Sanchez, Leon, Joe & Me.
The Woman.
* *
They made to laugh. They made to get into the car. They made not to be responsible. All with me. (Tho this is new, I tell you now because, somehow, it all is right, whatever. For what sin you find me here. It’s mine. My own irreconcilable life. My blood. My footsteps toward the black car smeared softly in the slow shadows of leaves.) The houses shone like naked bulbs. Thin laughter from the party trailed us up the street.
Sanchez threw the car in the wrong gear, nervous. It made that noise, and Donald (the dumb but handsome almost athlete jumped
10 feet . . . the others laughed and I chewed skin quickly off my thumb . . .) the woman talked directions at the floor.
Donald was at the woman’s left, I at her right. The others packed in the front. Looking at us, across the seat. (Sanchez thru the mirror.) The whole night tightened, and it seemed our car rumbled on a cliff knocking huge rocks down a thousand feet. The thunderous tires roared. And roared.
The laugh got thinner. And the woman had trouble with her head. It flopped against her chest. Or her short brittle hair wd jam against my face, pushing that monstrous smell of old wood into my life. Old wood and wine. What there is of a slum. Of dead minds, dead fingers flapping empty in inhuman cold.
I winced (because I thot myself elegant. A fop, I’d become, and made a sign to Calvin in the mirror that the woman smelled. He grinned and rubbed his hands to steady them.
Hideous magician! The car rolled its banging stones against the dark. Ugly fiend screaming in the fire boiling your bones. Your cock, cunt, whatever in your head you think to be, is burning. Tied against a rock, straw packed tight into your eyes. POUR GASOLINE, SPREAD IT ON HIS TONGUE. NOW LIGHT THE STINKING MESS.
* * *
Shadow of a man. (Tied in a ditch, my own flesh burning in my nostrils. My body goes, simple death, but what of my mind? Who created me to this pain?)
Oh, the barns of lead are gold. You have abandoned God.
Now, he abandons you! Your brain runs like liquid in the grass.