by Amiri Baraka
But it didn’t come from my grandmother. His “Old Miss.” She was with him, close by him, waiting on him, even to her own detriment, until he died. Until they cut down one of his black coats so I could wear it to his funeral.
Now my grandmother was my heart and soul. She carried sunshine around with her, almost in her smile. She’d have some little hat cocked to one side and she strutted when she walked. Rocked when she was a little weary. But full of fun, her eyes sparkled. You cross her, you were gonna get at least pinched. Like mess up in church, be talking, or fidgeting, she’d cop your flesh between her fingers and rival the inquisition with their more complicated shit. And she had to do that to me quite often in church because I would go completely out, like some kind of menace. A little big eyed monster, yapping, running up and down stairs, giggling and laughing. One time I turned off the electricity down in the basement for the whole church and the organist (another Miss Ada) was pushing on the keys and people rushed to her thinking she was having another stroke. They caught me just as I came up out of the basement. Even the special policeman, Mr. Butler, wanted to smash me. But I got ate up when I got home.
My grandmother was deeply and completely religious. Her life was defined by Jesus and the holy ghost. Every aspect of her life either had God in it or she hooked him up in some way. And the church was her world. She was head of the Ladies Aid Society, an usherette, and a teacher in the Sunday School. And now and again she’d get “happy” in church and start fanning and weeping, rocking back and forth, but most times she’d just sing and listen and amen, under her little flat-top hat trying to see God from behind her rimless glasses.
It was my grandmother who most times fed us and kept us, and her spirit is always with us as part of our own personality (I hope). I loved my grandmother so much because she was Good. If that had any meaning in the world. She’d tell you, “Do Unto Others as You’d Have Them Do Unto You,” and you knew that’s what she believed and that’s what she practiced. She’d tell me when I was doing something she approved of, “Practice makes perfect!” Maybe it was being polite, emptying the garbage like I was supposed to, or having shined shoes, or even getting good grades in grammar school. “Practice Makes Perfect.”
And she was funny, really. Like all those various “teams” on radio and later television whose names she’d turn around. I’m not sure why — was it intentional or why she had to twist it up — but it always cracked my sister and me up. Like she’d talk about Abner and Lum or Costello and Abbott. And when she came out with Andy and Amos I thought she was putting us on, but she would pull it with a straight sincere look and it cracked us up.
And she dug The Road of Life, Life Can Be Beautiful, Ma Perkins, Young Widder Brown, Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones (and his wife, Belle). She’d be listening when we came in and then the kid adventure stuff would come on and she’d fade to do her dinner, preparing stuff, though sometimes she listened with me. Hop Harrigan, Jack Armstrong, Captainnnnnnn Midnight, Tom Mix (and Wash White). And then later she’d be into Beulah, Andy and Amos, and them. When I was sick and had to stay in bed I heard all those soaps along with her while I sprawled. All had organ music and a voice-over telling you what was up. It was a crazy world of villains in civilian clothes.
Plus when my grandmother was working up at those Fortes’ house and the other rich white folks’, when she’d come back, Jim, she’d have a bundle of goodies. Clothes, books, I got the collected works of Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and random books of Pooh Bear, Sherlock Holmes, and even an almost whole set of Rudyard Kipling, if you can get to that! They were gifts, is what she told us. The white folks was just giving stuff away. I guess they had better stuff, or they needed room. Some of the stuff she brought my sister would have “Anna Marie Forte” sewn on labels in the collars. I always wondered about those goddam Fortes, how they could have all that stuff up there in Essex Fells, how they looked and what they had to say. But I never found out.
My grandmother also had gone to Poro beauty school and she talked about that. She was a hairdresser. The shop she worked in in Newark still sits there on Norfolk Street. So sometimes Elaine and I would be out in front of the beauty parlor, weekends, running around, but connected to the hot curling irons and pressing combs of Ora’s beauty parlor and our grandmother sitting there talking and straightening hair with that hunk of grease on the back of her hand.
If I have ever thought seriously about “Heaven” it was when my grandmother died because I wanted her to have that since she believed so strongly. I wrote a poem saying that. I’d been writing for a while when she died, mostly poems in magazines, and I always regretted that she never got to see a book of mine. I had the dust jacket of Blues People in my hand around the time she died, a few weeks later it came out. And I wanted her to see that all the dreams and words she’d known me by had some reality, but it was too late. She’d already gone.
I wrote a story about my grandfather in a magazine my first wife and I published called Zazen. It was called “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine?” She’d seen that and my mother told me she’d liked it. But it wasn’t a book. I wanted my Nana to see that I’d learned Practice Makes Perfect. But she was gone.
My uncle was the exotic personality in our house. On the road, and when he came home in checked sports coats. He was a man about town, like they say. And once he took me downtown Newark to a quality restaurant on Market Street, the Novelty Bar & Grill (so you see how long ago this was). And I felt slick and knowledgeable walking with him, and with that pastrami sandwich on the plate, I was dressed up myself, that was a new high in my life.
G.L. was my uncle’s name, he didn’t have any other. But pressure from Americans made my grandfather come up with George as a name to cool out various institutions who defied Southern mores with their chromeplated cold shit.
They tell me my uncle got married once, to some light-skinned babe, but I don’t know anything about that. But, whatever, it didn’t hold and he was a bachelor when I started knowin’ him. Uncle had his own stuff and it had a certain aura to it, of strangeness and sophistication. He had some quality things he had and he was no stranger to money, he just didn’t believe he could take it with him.
The railroad job let him travel and gave him that air of urbanity and sophistication. He had a porkpie hat he wore sometimes with the brim snapped down. He went to New York and did his shopping and spent a lot of time over there. Plus he thought up a scam that seemed like a hip idea the more I got to understand it. G.L. sold the sandwiches on the Pullman, those flat, dry sandwiches the railroad sold. But G.L. figured that he could sell some sandwiches too, for G.L., since it was free enterprise and whatnot. So he had my grandmother (and we helped too) make spiced ham sandwiches with cheese and mayonnaise, modest but colored-good. The whole kitchen table would be laid out with “G.L.’s sandwiches.” My grandmother turned it into a real cottage industry, and it was the focus of many family discussions. As to what and why I ain’t entirely clear, sometimes there seemed like there was some conflict about “G.L.’s sandwiches” but I can’t say. I just ate some. And figured as I got older that it was a hell of a good idea. Cause when the dry old RR sammiches give out (or before they give out) G.L. would slide Nana’s sammiches in there and take down the bux. I thought it was hip.
One day much later there was a heated argument, evening to late evening, and stomping around and actual bad words. And my uncle was calling my father “a nincompoop.” It shocked me. “A nincompoop.” Goddam. Why he have to be all that? And not much later we had broke up, the Russ-Jones family connection had broke up and for a while we went different ways. That really turned me around, but that was later.
Mao points out how we move from perception to rational knowledge to changing our practice, like the three levels of knowledge. And for much of our lives we are at the mostly perceptual level. We see and react, are touched by, moved, cry, scream, pout, taste, but that is all. So much moves just above us and we might call it anything. A lotta stu
ff go by we don’t even comment on, just turn our head or miss it as it moves, we are fundamentally baffled or it’s just too much too much what with the other stuff we got to walk with and be practically responsible for.
But then we try to make theories out of our perception. We try to explain what was or is making repeated indents upon our senses, life. We rationalize and give something a name, a number, try to recognize a persistent quality to some element of sorrow, distance, feeling.
Then we do something if we can. Based on that step up opening into higher consciousness, when this does come. Quiet desperation could sum up far too many in this sliver of world this sliver of time, passing, this dot of organism, part of the immensity of coming into being, development, going out of being, transformation. Ah well. From time to time we do reorder our lives.
The world has changed so much since my youth, and I could lay it out to what degree in many surface ways. Even some important fundamental ways. And I want, more than anything, to chart this change within myself. This constant mutability in the face of the changing world.
Childhood is like a mist in so many ways. A mist in which a you is moving to become another you.
What the school says you learned and were responsible for is way off far away from what you came away with in a practical sense. The reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, social studies, shop, history, penmanship, gym we got was one thing. But learning about dicks and pussies and fags and bulldaggers. Seeing the reaction to cocksuckers and motherfuckers and sonafabitches and bastards. Understanding what fucking was and what it had to do with sucking. All these things and such as that.
The games and sports of the playground and streets was one registration carried with us as long as we live. Our conduct, strategies, and tactics, our ranking and comradeship. Our wins and losses. (Like I was a terrible terrible loser and still am.) I would fight, do anything to stop losing. I would play superhard, attacking, with endless energy to stop a loss. I would shout and drive my team on. Stick my hands in the opponents’ faces, guard them chest to chest, or slash through the line from the backfield and catch them as they got the pass back from center. Or take the passes and cut around end and streak for the goal. Or double step, skip, stop, leap, jump back, ram, twist, hop, back up, duck, get away, hustle, and rush into the end zone. I could leap and catch passes one-handed, backwards, on my back, on the run, over someone’s shoulders, and take it in. And mostly I never got hurt. I had a fearlessness in games and sports. A feeling that I could win, that I could outrun or outhustle or outscramble or rassel or whatever to pull it out. I would slide head first into home, even first. On tar and cement. I would turn bunts into homeruns, by just putting my head down and raging around the bases.
And we learned in our own gatherings, like The Secret Seven, our youngest collective, led, I guess, by me, with Board as the official outlaw. We’d roam those streets getting into things, climbing over roofs, “exploring,” going around the corner two or three blocks — strange places. Confronting mysteries daily and giving childish explanations or shrugging our shoulders and pulling off the leaves of a “poverty tree” to play “sord fighting” like Tyrone Power in The Black Swan. Our thing was roaming and registering, laughing and eating candy when we were lucky. Board, the bad one, Algy, his younger skinny brother, fast and usually snotty-nosed, who got my baseball suit cause I went off and stayed in the movies all day till dark and said the devil made me do it.
Norman, long-head colored Norman was our designation so as to distinguish him from white Norman. Norman was fast, a good ring-a-leerio man, and would go off with you anytime you wanted to do some serious exploring. Eddie, of the tilted old smelly house, was strong and fast and very recent. Like so many of us he had just come up from the black belt a few minutes ago.
My sister, a tomboy, dogged my tracks. I was always looking over my shoulder as I scaled another fence, when we took it in our minds to try and “duck” her. I would get furious when we couldn’t and she would get furious when we could. I know we had begun to get older when I began to be able to beat her running, I guess from the added weight of hips and breasts. But in them early days it was hell getting loose. Her job, it seemed to me, in The Secret Seven was to see that I didn’t get too far out.
Board liked to fight and steal. He was a little bit of a bully, a big bit on the real side. And people at one age were afraid of him. But he lived across the street, so we got tight in a standoffish kind of way. (I think he liked my sister.) Running with him finally got me in trouble cause we started lifting stuff out of cars. I watched him get popped in a trap set up by the local company. He’d got the stuff out the car window (simple shit glove compartment stuff). But this time they were waiting for him/us and they caught him as he climbed on his bicycle and tried to pull away. I was standing in S’s yard in back of the playground watching it from behind a billboard. It scared me as much as anything in my life.
Also we’d gone into the school a couple of times and lifted silly shit. Pitch pipes, school materials, but then played vandal and threw shit every which way. I was deeply paranoid after that and thought any minute we were sure to get busted. But Board must’ve squealed when they got him at the car because in a few weeks I had to go down to police headquarters. My father and mother sat by my side and the white man gave me some vague lecture. Afterwards my father said that he and my mother had “decided to stick by me.” (I’d figured that, it surprised me to hear him say that and it sounded a little artificial to me. So I wondered why had he said that. But sometimes my father could be curiously formal. My mother would usually just bop me in the head.)
And Danny whose brother was gay in those days when we called them “sissies.” And that carried a weight then, Jim. “He’s a sissy.” Wow. And the dude did pitch and switch when he walked and his hair was done up rococo and curled up, his eyes and mouth were pornography. Danny was dusty and slightly off speed, a little plump. He was kept by his grandmother, a lowdown church lady. She was always dragging Danny off to church and since it was sanctified they went every other day, it seemed to us, and we giggled and teased him to distraction. One great cap on Danny was imitating his speech, as for instance he would tell us he was going to his sister’s “wettin’.” He had a cousin just a little older than us who also was “funny,” who fanned up and down the street like he was on his way to mind the seraglio. So Dan had to hear about that. But there was calmness and loyalty in Danny and a quiet palship you always counted on. But he was a great source of merriment, as for instance when his grandmother had him by the ear pulling him toward Sanctified Heaven. We fell off the stairs and rolled on the sidewalk.
The radio, I’ve told over and again, was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed. The TV must serve the same purpose now for kids. The daily adventure stories after school and before dinner. And the later night shows like The Lone Ranger and Inner Sanctum (the creaking door), Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, I Love a Mystery, Mr. District Attorney. The weekend shows like Sam Spade and Gangbusters. But two of the most meaningful to me were The Shadow and Escape. My father even took me to see The Shadow over there in Radio City. I got to see the actors, with scripts in their hands, saw them make the sound effects, and saw the guy who played the Shadow go into a booth when he “became invisible” (so his voice sounded weird and spooky). “The Hypnotic Power to Cloud Men’s Minds So They Cannot See Him.” That seemed deep. Or “The Weed of Crime Bears Bitter Fruit!” Wow. Or the laugh. “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eheh-eh The Shadow Knows” was deep.
Escape came on later after we had left Dey Street. They did more literary stories. Tales by H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, tales of the fantastic, the strange, science fiction. It came on late at night but I would play the radio soft in my room in the dark and listen, fantasizing the most strange and spooky world that could fit in that room and my head. One night I heard Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big a
s the Ritz.” Another time “Leiningen and the Ants.” Wells’s “The Valley of the Blind” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” And one strange story about people who lived in department stores after closing who buried their dead by turning them into display dummies. They were changed by people in the store called the Dark Men and the story was found on a note outside a department store left by a guy who had been trapped in there and grabbed by the Dark Men because he wanted to leave and give away their secret. The guy reading the note looked up as he finished reading and a dummy in the window fitting the writer’s description stared out from behind the glass with unseeing horror-fixed eyes! Scared the shit out of me!
Saturday stories from the little kids’ Land of the Lost, with Red Lantern, a fish who led kids down below the sea to find their lost toys. (He was not to be confused with Green Lantern, a caped crusader from the comic books I also dug. I put his incantatory dedication to fight against evil in my book The Dead Lecturer. To wit: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern’s Light.” A green ring he recharged in front of a green lantern which gave him all kinds of powers. Powers, I guess, to reach the absolute.)
I heard Let’s Pretend, when younger, the Grimms’ fairy tales dramatized for radio. And later Grand Central Station, which came on when it was “high noon on Broadway.” That was exciting and somehow even then described New York to me with its anonymous dramas in a way that I wanted to check out. And Junior Miss with Peggy Ann Garner, who lived in the story in an apartment high up, on West 87th Street or nearabouts, and lived the life of the bright middle-class New York kid in those days before white flight.
I heard heroes and saw them in my mind and imagined what evil was and cheered at its destruction. In the movies too, in film after film, evil could be destroyed. By Errol Flynn — Robin Hood will probably be ruled subversive by Strom Thurmond in a minute — and Tyrone Power, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Stewart Granger, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda. They taught us that evil needed to be destroyed. I saw it every weekend. I heard it on almost every radio show I listened to. That evil needed to be destroyed. And I believed that — impressionable as I was at those young ages — but the trick is that I still believe it! (And this, I was later to find out, can get you killed!)