The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  School was classes and faces and teachers. And sometimes trouble. School was as much the playground as the classroom. For me it was more the playground than the classroom. One grew, one had major confrontations with real life in the playground, only rarely in the classroom. Though I had some terrible confrontations in the classroom I can remember. Around discipline and whatnot. The only black teacher in the school at that time, Mrs. Powell, a tall statuesque powder brown lady with glasses, beat me damn near to death in full view of her and my 7B class because I was acting the fool and she went off on me (which apparently was sanctioned by my mother — it probably had something to do with conflicting with the only black teacher in the whole school and that had to be revenged full blood flowingly at once as an example to any other interlopers). But Mrs. Powell was one of the only teachers to take us on frequent trips to New York. And she had us publish a monthly newspaper that I was one of the cartoonists for. But apparently I did something “out” and she took me “out.”

  But in school when I was in kindergarten I got sick (went off with the whooping cough, then the measles). And I learned to read away from school — my first text Targeteer Comics — and when I came back I was reading — and haven’t stopped since.

  I skipped 3B a few years later — I can’t tell you why. But the 3A teacher was drugged for some reason or more likely I drugged her with my perpetual motion mouth and she made me skip around the room. (For some reason it makes me think of my son, Amiri!)

  I have distorted in various books and stories and plays and whatnot iron confrontations in the school with the various aspects recalled at various different times. The seventh grade beating by Mrs. Powell. The weird comic strip I created/semiplagiarized, called The Crime Wave, which consisted of a hand with a gun sticking out of strange places holding people up. For instance, as a dude dived off the diving board the ubiquitous hand would be thrust up out of the water holding a gun and in the conversation balloon the words “Your money!” A series of those all over the goddam place and only “Your money!”

  I think I saw the concept somewhere else but I was attracted to it and borrowed it and changed it to fit my head. But why “Your money!”? No cabeesh.

  When the curious old Miss Day, the white-haired liberal of my early youth, shuffled off into retirement as principal there came Mr. Van Ness, hair parted down the middle and sometimes seeming about to smile but sterner seeming than Miss Day. We loved Miss Day, we seemed to fear Mr. Van Ness, probably because he seemed so dressed up and stiff. (The irony of this is that I just had drinks with old man Van Ness two months ago, up at his apartment with my wife and a lady friend of his — a black woman! — and we went over some of these things. Because, as it turns out, Van Ness was an open investigating sort, actually a rather progressive person!)

  Van Ness even took some interest in the fact that my mother had been to Fisk and Tuskegee. And based on these startling credentials he could ask me what was proper, “Negro” or “Colored.” I said “Negro” and Van Ness told the students, “Remember, there’s a right and a wrong way of saying that.” You bet!

  In the eighth grade we had a race riot. Not in the eighth grade but in Newark. And in them days race riot meant that black and white “citizens” fought each other. And that’s exactly what happened in Newark. It was supposed to have jumped off when two white boys stopped a guy in my class named Haley (big for his age, one of the Southern blacks put back in school when he reached “Norf”) and asked him if he was one of the niggers who’d won the races. He answered yes and they shot him. They were sixteen, Haley about the same age even though he was only in 8B and most of us in our earlier teens — I was about twelve.

  The races they’d talked about were part of the citywide elementary school track meet. The black-majority schools had won most of those races and this was the apparent payoff. So rumbles raged for a couple weeks on and off. Especially in my neighborhood, which confronted the Italian section. The Black Stompers confronted the Romans — a black girl was stripped naked and made to walk home through Branch Brook Park (rumor had it). A white girl got the same treatment (the same playground rumor said). But two loud stone and bottle throwing groups of Americans did meet on the bridge overpassing the railroad tracks near Orange Street. The RR tracks separating the sho-nuff Italian streets from the last thrust of then black Newark. The big boys said preachers tried to break it up and got run off with stones. It was the battle of the bridge.

  Beneath that fabric of rumor and movement, the bright lights of adventure flashing in my young eyes and the actual tension I could see, the same tensions had rose up cross this land now the war was over and blacks expected the wartime gains to be maintained and this was resisted. Probably what came up on the streets of Newark was merely a reflection of the Dixiecrats who declared that year for the separation of the races. But whatever, New Jersey became the first state to declare that year a statute against all discrimination — (I just found that out a few seconds ago, you see a cold vector from out my past illuminating itself and the present where I sit) so maybe it was connected and it’s all connected to me. I to it.

  But the whys of any life propel it, the hows it forms and means. We want to know why we got to here, why we was where we was (our parents), why we thought and think the way we did and do now. Why we changed our thinking, if we did. When we did.

  As a child the world was mysterious, wondrous, terrible, dangerous, sweet in so many ways. I loved to run. Short bursts, medium cruises, even long stretched-out rhythm-smooth trips. I’d get it in my head to run somewhere — a few blocks, a mile or so, a few miles through the city streets. Maybe I’d be going somewhere, I wouldn’t take the bus, I’d just suddenly get it in my head and take off. And I dug that, the way running made you feel. And it was a prestigious activity around my way, if you was fast you had some note. The street consensus.

  I only knew what was in my parents’ minds through their practice. And children can’t ever sufficiently “sum that up,” that’s why or because they’re children. You deal with them on a perceptual level — later you know what they’ll do in given situations (but many of their constant activities you know absolutely nothing about). Later, maybe, deadhead intellectuals will try to look back and sum their parents up, sometimes pay them back for them having been that, one’s parents. Now that we are old we know so much. But we never know what it was like to have ourselves to put up with.

  My family, as I’ve tried to tell, was a lower-middle-class family finally. For all the bourgeois underpinnings on my mother’s side, the Depression settled the hash of this one black bourgeois family. And those tensions were always with us. My mother always had one view, based on being conscious and taking advantage of any opening. I cannot even begin to describe the love factor in my mother and father’s relationship, what brought them together aside from their bodies and some kind of conversation.

  My father from the widowed wing of the lower middle class, a handsome high school graduate from the South, a barber, a postal worker, who tells the old traditional black lie that he thought Newark was New York and it wasn’t until much later that. His family was upwardly mobile, of course, that’s the ideological characteristic of the class. But what if the ruined sector of the black bourgeoisie and the bottom shadow of the petty bourgeois come together? The feudings in that, the fumings, the I-used-to-be’s and We-woulda-been’s and the many many If-it-wasn’t-for’s oh boy oh boy all such as that. The damaged aristocracy of ruined dreams. The open barn door of monopoly capitalism. What a laugh. I mean, if some big-eyed dude was to step in and give a lecture, no, if suddenly there in the darkness of my bedroom I (or whoever could pull this off sleeping in my bed) could have stepped forward into the back and forth of sharp voices trying to deal with their lives, in our accepted confusion of what life is, and say, “Look, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation always faces a tenuous existence, the petty bourgeoisie of any nation is always shaky. And yeh they can get thrown down, like in a fixed rasslin match, thro
wn down among that black bubbling mass. Yeh, they can get thrown down and all lit-up fantasies of Sunday School picnics in the light-skinned church of yellow dreams could get thrown down, by the short trip home, to the vacant lots and thousands of dirty Davises, and what you-all is doin’ is class struggle of a sort, yeh, it’s only that, translated as it has to be through the specifics of your life, the particular paths, crossroads and barricades, but that’s all it is ya know?”

  I guess their, my parents, eyes would’ve lit up, for a second, and then a terrible hard loss would’ve settled there, because they would’ve figured the goddam kid is crazy, he’s babbling outta his wits. What? And they’d look at each other in the halfdark, and exchange looks about what to do. I’m glad I wasn’t that smashed up. What I did do, with a taste of Krueger’s beer in my mouth my mother had let me sip out of her glass earlier that night when they had friends over, I just opened my eyes so they glowed softly bigly in the dark and said nothing. I heard my sister’s slow deep breathing in the bed under mine.

  I went through school because I had to. Going where? I didn’t know. I don’t know if my parents did either. At one point later I pretended they wanted me to be a doctor. But my mother claims this wasn’t true. My father says, “Hey, we didn’t care what you did. You could do what you wanted.” Graduating from grammar school, I was the third or fourth from the shortest of the boys. And it was a two-way track, I guess, the actuality of being a black kid in Newark in a public school in the West Ward in the 1940s United States. Son of a postal worker and an office worker. (My mother had got away from the piecework in the dress factories and her smart turned-down fedora and neat-cut suit let you know she wasn’t thinking about going back. Though we were always back in the sense of the flatness, the horizontal character of our community and nationality — we were not laid back, we were held back. Black. I think we were colored and Negroes then.) But also remember the flashy zoom projection of the inside black bourgeois mind, the lockstep black middle class frantic not to be totally connected with the flat-out black majority. Brain sweat and soul shivers would come, my mother’s waking nightmare, perhaps, that you would be only invisible, only connected to the mass pain, an atom of suffering, that you would not amount to anything. Whew! (How much??)

  We were we surrounded by the world. A world I thought I knew better than I did. The playground taught me. The black running masses there. Even the poetic line of speech comes from my heart is theirs, so purely, the cutting edge of life description, was once simple dozens. The cynicism, the echoing blues, hollow laughter, bright and distance-filled, kids around my way would hear everyday, from a little big-eyed dude in short pants and a blue shirt, cutting across the playground.

  I had the sense of a Jones-Russ life/universe that was an extension of everybody’s. All the bloods mostly. The others I didn’t understand, except as I could describe them and make some differentiation or make some similarity. As for instance when I went to my mother and asked, because Anthony Ar and I got picked out of Miss Hill (a terrible old bitch)’s art class to go down to Bamberger’s and build the boat we’d put together out of clay and painted. I asked if Catholics was the same as Baptists. Anthony had said they were. My mother disagreed. I kept this to myself. Shit, it didn’t really matter to me.

  It didn’t really matter that the whites lived in the white part of Baxter Terrace. Where else would whites live? It didn’t matter at the top that the Davises lived like they lived or Eddie or Norman or the Hills or the colored people on Newark Street, which was our metaphor then for very poor. It didn’t matter to me on the top, they was just people, phenomena to my wheeling big space-eating image-making eyes.

  But the Jones-Russ orangish brown house was one secure reality and the scrambling moving changing colors and smells and sounds and emotions world at my eye and fingertips was something connected but something else. I knew that many of the kids I ran with did not have the same bulk of bodies and history and words and articulation to deal with what kept coming up every morning when I’d rise. There was a security to my home life. That’s the only way I can describe it. A security that let me know that all, finally, was well. That I’d be all right, if I could just survive the crazy shit I thought up to do. And the wild shit some wildass people thought up to drop on you.

  It never occurred to me that my mother and father would be anything or anywhere but where they were and who they were. For that matter, it never occurred to me that my grandmother (my mother’s mother, Nana) could be anywhere or do anything but what I depended on for my understanding of life and reality. My uncle and grandfather were the most questionable parts of my household. My uncle because he was always on the road. A big tall brawny Pullman porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And my grandfather because I never knew much about him except what came from my mother or grandmother’s mouth. He was big and distinguished looking. A black businessman in a boater hat and three-piece suit and cane. He was a Republican, the legacy of Lincoln, and known as a “race man,” i.e., something of a Nationalist. I found One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers in his drawer, while “plundering,” as my grandmother would say. I also found Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a book on the Masonic mysteries, and a revolver. All of them were beyond me, at the time. Though the Rogers made some impact, I couldn’t figure out the point Rogers was making hooking up black people with so many wild things. Plus I didn’t think I could really use an idea like “Beethoven was black.” I wasn’t sure he was, but then even if he was, so what? I was very young.

  My grandfather was big in black Republican politics and after his grocery store folded in the Depression he got a patronage job as night watchman in the election machine warehouse for Essex County, on Wilsey Street in Newark. It was within walking distance of our house, right down the street from the Newark Street Jail. There was a big vacant lot across from the jail and I played baseball when I got up into high school as part of the Newark Cubs, complete with uniforms. A hundred years later I was locked up in that same jail during the Newark Rebellions and saw the National Guard shoot up a black couple’s car from that same vacant lot.

  My sister and I would accompany my grandmother with her slow rocking stride over to the warehouse where she would go with my grandfather’s dinner packed in a picnic hamper with big folding handles. The food was hot, complete with a thermos of coffee and cornbread or biscuits. And while “Old Miss” and “E’rett” talked back and forth as he ate, my sister and I would range up and down the long rows of election machines in a virtual frenzy of ecstasy. We could run down down the rows, in and out. We could flash as hard and fast as we could. We could hide, we could catch each other. And the best treat of all, we could climb up on top of the machines and run from one end of the warehouse, which ran an entire city block, to the other, streaking on top of the padded machines, leaping from one machine to the other, without stopping, playing war games and hero games and simply using up some of our boundless energy.

  As I said, my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School at the yellow and brown folks’ Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee. The trustees, after those collections, would rise up and file into the back. It was a kind of dignified swagger. It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job. And I could go through there and see them counting that money, the respected elder gents of the church. And a preacher white as God himself!

  But Tom Russ was a name to conjure with in those times. Important in the church, politically connected, but the failed business could not help but have lowered him in those folks’ eyes. Those yellow and browns he was ranked among. But he was the head of that house, in those early days. No doubt about it. And I think its stabilizing center.

  One night there was terror in our house, there was pain on everyone’s face, weeping and shouted unknown words — negative passion flaring. And then it was said my grandfather
had been hurt, he had got struck down on a street corner — where Springfield meets South Orange just down from the Essex theater. They told me a streetlight dropped out of the fixture onto his head! They did. That’s what they said. I repeated it but somehow never (to this day) believed it. A streetlight? From way up at the top of the pole with perfect random accidental accuracy smashing him right in the center of the head? Yeh, that’s what they said.

  And it all but destroyed Tom Russ. From the tall striding dignified family patriarch who swept my lil’ plump grandma up when she was fifteen (his second bride) and left a trail of funeral parlors, general stores, and colored productive force, he finally came home paralyzed and silent. In fact I never heard him utter another sentence. He merely sat in a chair, smoking his cigars and spitting, spitting, into a tin can. There was some money in a pension, but I never understood why the city wasn’t sued if that’s what had happened, an accident. They even took him up to Overbrook for a minute, a hospital for the insane and mentally incompetent. But they brought him back in a little while. Perhaps my grandmother just wouldn’t go for that. And she tended him the rest of his life. Frustration now shot out all the way into tragedy! And the pain in those stopped eyes, stopped from vision and transformation, was horrible, like death alive and sitting in a chair completely dominated by reality.

  My grandfather’s last years were all like that. Stopped motion, frustration turned all the way to tragedy. And the old image of Tom Russ slowly evaporated from our young minds and we cruel kids, my sister and I, would whisper to each other like savages about “Spitto” sitting there. We mocked him. But why could we create such ugliness in ourselves? How did it come to replace the awe and respect? Was it just the grossness and crudity of children or was there some impulse we picked up from the adults around us?