The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  Basketball was our maximum game. In elementary school I was number 6 man, in junior high I got moved down, by high school I was about 8, definitely not a starter. But I almost never minded because we had a great team within our limitations (which we occasionally were well exposed to) and a great street rep that made you strut just to be a Cavalier, Jim. I was a playmaker, a guard, me and Barry would bring the ball down and set up the plays. I was never a great shooter, but I could move the ball and connect with those passes. I got big off assists. But if I got matched with a small man I would go into my scoring act — such as it was.

  Sometimes, in those games, in those various leagues we played in, even in some neighboring towns, as we got older, there was some element of violence, like we thought we might have to fight. And we would if pressed but we was, like gentlemen, athletes and lovers, not no head beaters.

  We’d even tease each other after such encounters about how we knew we was going to fade. Especially we’d get on Love, everybody always teased him, because he was such a great player but so totally unsophisticated and country-like off the court. We’d say, “Love’s ass was already down the street when this other dude was looking to fight. He’d have to be Rocket Man to catch Love’s ass.” But, in reality, we would do whatever the moment called for but we never fancied ourselves pugs.

  I had the most mouth on the court. Constantly talking to the other team, harassing them, face-guarding them, stealing the ball. I guess to make up for my light shot. And that could stir up the other team where they wanted to “kick that little nigger’s ass” but that never happened. Once we did get run out of this “country” town just west of Newark called Vaux Hall. We played baseball up there in what looked like a cow pasture. And we always had stories about the Negroes in Vaux Hall. But one night we played basketball up there and at the end of the game, because of some kind of encounter, we had to motor on down Springfield Avenue for several blocks until we got out of harm’s way. We blamed that on Love, too.

  The focus of that club changed as we got older. Love and Hines, who were best friends, both went on to Central High School, and they were the emotional and spiritual center of our group, especially as an athletic team. And they began to gather dudes from Central High onto the squad. There was a heavy social underpinning to the club/team and when we were all in Central Avenue that was the focus. I went off to McKinley Junior High and later Barringer, which was almost all Italian, so I couldn’t bring too many onto the squad or into the social circle that formed the basis for our team. So my influence, such as it was, lessened. Though Sess, who was a high school star, did come in from Barringer and he brought Ray, who went to South Side (now Malcolm X Shabazz), because they lived in the same project on Waverly Avenue cross town. Later I moved back cross town, onto The Hill again, around my junior year in high school, so Sess and Ray and I got tight. But Leon, Bobby, Earl, Dick, Barry (plus Love, Hines, and Snooky) were all Central High dudes, so that was the social and athletic center of the team when we were in our early high school days.

  From time to time I see some of the old Cavaliers, and there is still that bond of fondness held high by memory. I know now that the club/team was a mixture of the lower middle class and the workers (and a couple of peasants turned workers just a couple minutes ago). But by high school the winnowing process had seriously begun. Central was a technical and commercial high school, Barringer supposedly college prep. And we had a couple dudes from West Side and South Side (a mixture of both, plus business) and so we got sprayed out into auto plants, utilities, electronic tube factories, mechanics, white-collar paper shuffling, teachers, small businessmen, security guards, commercial artists, and even a goddam poet.

  For us, athletics was art, a high expression of culture. And as athletes the only expression of that, within the other framework of society, was as cool, dignified, profilin’ dudes, self-sustaining and collective, but individually distinctive. That was at our best. At our worst, wow, we would mess with people. Especially egged on by one dude Love and Hines hooked up with later. Although we was all mischievous and even at times, from the narrow perch of that limited collectivity, somewhat arbitrary and cruel. I mean sometimes we would tap old dudes on the shoulder walking down the street, or say out of the way things to women minding their business, or flip somebody’s hat off they head, and shoot up the street laughing. We were great agitators. And mostly we agitated among ourselves. We would throw each other’s hats and bags, flip each other’s sneakers and run off with them. Talk about each other like dogs and about each other’s mamas even worse. But we were comrades most of us — as it went on, some gaps grew in that fabric, because of the different social situations we got into, but at its strongest it was something to be treasured and now looked back at with great feeling.

  By high school I’d gotten into several different sectors of community or social life that complicated my life somewhat, even more than I knew. But that was a constant in my life I recognized, change. And though sometimes it saddened me and I regretted it, I saw after a while that that was what was happening.

  So there was a mist-life while very young on Barclay Street in the Douglass-Harrison apartments (And I always, for a long time, dug those small red buildings and park in the back with green slat benches. And even the people that seemed to live there. Sometimes I longed for those people, in some not totally explained to me way), but we had to cut out. And then Boston Street, two sites, one near South Orange Avenue and then for a minute in my grandparents’ house up the street, near West Market. (I had a late-night knee operation in the last house. Under oil lamps my knee formed a silhouette against the greenish wall and a baldhead doctor with a red wig — a blood with red freckles — meticulously picked the glass out of my messed up knee while the family stood in one corner and watched.) That was right down the street from my grandfather’s store which had closed in the Depression, though the tale persisted in our family that it was because my grandfather gave out too much credit — it was implied — to ungrateful niggers. Which meant simply that that is the myth they wanted to invest their lives with, not understanding the actual political economy of this United Snakes. And how depression always kills off the petty and small bourgeoisie rat away!

  But the bias of that description is to put down both Tom Russ and black people, but not the ugly thang that actual did de damage! And so the twist you inherit of seeing from who teaches you to see. I guess I carried the obvious putdown, of the bloods, on the top, cause that is what was most directly given. I carried less consciously the putdown of Tom which could then come full out when he was stricken and sat dying staring off into space. But the whole I came only much later to see and only now to sum up.

  From there we went to Dey Street and the orange-red casa of my coming to little-boy consciousness. That was the center of my little-boy life. Central Avenue School, the playground, the evening recreation program we called “the Court” for some reason, The Secret Seven, wild fights, my athletic training, the Cavaliers, some of the remembered paths and lessons and teachers of whatever style, and even my first full-up meeting with white folks, though on my turf.

  There was some other heavy stuff I found out and got into in them Dey Street days, a little romance, the church, and the Newark Eagles, and they need to be talked about. Why? Because they had something to do with it — the shaping, the answering — of the question How did you get to be you?

  For one thing, the whites, almost all Italians and a few Irish and a German or two around somewhere, were definitely at the fringe, as I said before, of most of the Dey Street world. Not that they were sealed off by us in any way. It was just how we related, the deep cultural connects and the invisible and not so invisible antecedents in all directions even then. And our West Ward thrust was some kind of frontier. We were aware that a few blocks away the world changed and Italians lived in growing numbers.

  And though they were on the fringe of the Dey Street life there were some distinct and concrete effects of their existence
among us, and out beyond us. A couple of them could play ball, like Augie D., for instance, but we thought in the main their game was baseball. As little boys we played mixed teams, but at another point the teams were mostly black, and then you could get a black vs. white game, which was still not much until we got older and it began to reflect and take on the tension of the whole society.

  By the time we were teenagers we were playing all-white baseball teams and those games were for something other than little-boy note. The baseball team we put together always talked about playing the white teams for cases of beer, but most of us were teetotalers and that didn’t mean much to us.

  Then there was the weird situation in which we actually by time of seventh grade or so began to take certain liberties with the white girls that we did not would not had better not take with the black ones. Like a couple big ol’ (for seventh grade) white girls I knew, we would “feel up” in the cloakroom. (I remember a couple of names but will graciously refrain.) It never dawned on me to delve into why, or maybe it did and I couldn’t. But we certainly liked quite a few of the little black girls we went to school with but we would no more think of feeling any of them except certain rogues I’m told did feel on certain of the wilder-repped sisters and that would cause a small shooting war in most cases. Maybe the other cases where that meant something else were kept from me young gourd by the benevolent moralists of me age. But some dudes later as we got into junior high would brag about women. What they did. But none of that was too clear to me anyway. That was real mystery. And there were a couple of these white girls who’d giggle and push you away, like they dug it. My god, what would they Italian fathers and brothers have said at seeing that. Wow, it makes me shudder even now.

  And Augie was the first in the neighborhood I knew about to get a TV. (I remember clear as a bell when we got our first telephone — on Dey Street. MI2-5921. Our first electric refrigerator — a Kelvinator, and we called it that, exchanging the brand name for the genre. We had to put quarters in it to keep it going. We didn’t get our first TV until I was about thirteen or fourteen, one year I came back from summer boy scout camp and walked into the house and there was a 14-inch Motorola, later we got a 17-inch, we never had a really big screen when it was hip to brag about that.) But we would, some of us, pile up in Augie’s house to watch the TV. Augie’s father was some kind of worker, a medium-sized guy with black hair grey at the edges. He never said much, just nodded to us. I wonder what he thought about the crowd of colored kids that would push in there to watch that early tube.

  But later I could tell that something was happening in the whole of that Dey Street/Newark Street/Lock Street world, bounded by Central and Sussex Avenues, when Augie began to say certain things. Like one time we were sitting on the auditorium steps in the playground bullshitting about something and he was combing his hair. Augie loved to comb his goddam hair, and I think his little brother was with him and fat (white) Norman and maybe staring Johnny, who had the weird disease that made him go into trances at odd times. So I says to Augie to lemme use the comb. My hair was always cut very close, we called them “Germans” the way our hair was cut. And later a little longer on the top and front was called a “German bush.” But Augie nixes me and says, “Don’t mix the breeds.”

  I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, “Don’t mix the breeds.” Huh? I said. Huh? Whatta you talking about, ol’ bean, don’t mix the breeds? (Not exactly in those words, ya know?) But he says it again. And I did get the meaning. I got it the first fucking time, not literally but generally and emotionally and psychologically I understood exactly what he meant. And hey, I didn’t even get mad. It didn’t even faze me. Actually it confirmed some upside-down shit I had in my head. That we were white and black. And I knew the abstract social history of that. I also knew what I saw everyday in various ways that manifested some meaning and connection with what Augie was saying.

  Shit, I saw Mantan Moreland and Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah and Stepin Fetchit. I knew what “Feets, don’t fail me now” meant. And who Birmingham really was. And why Ellic in the Bob Hope picture Ghost Breakers had got so scared in the clock that when it opened he stood there shivering and turned completely white. I had seen Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. I had seen the wild-eyed woogies in Tarzan and how knowledgeable Tarzan was. I had seen Al Jolson do his bullshit — hey and most of that was funny. HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa HaHaHaHaHaHa (except Al Jolson, he wasn’t shit). But still, anyway, down beneath that actual laughter there was something else. Besides the embarrassment and even shame for the feeble-minded, beneath all that, boys and girls, there was something else that it took me a long time to fully dig. (I’ll tell you about it later!)

  Sure, I knew exactly what my best white friend Augie was saying, and I knew instinctively that his mother had probably put that shit in his head. What could have been the expression on my little round brown face with the big comical eyes? But what does it mean then, on the actual sidewalks and playgrounds of our lives? Whatever I said, it could only have been an acknowledgment of the time, the place, the condition. Like a fucking flag salute.

  Another time, I’m hiking Augie, like his mother had all this grey hair and I’m calling her the Grey Terror, like we did. But Augie, then, pauses and asks me what color my mother’s hair is. And I, like a sap, say black, which it was. And Augie looks half-eyed at I donno who, Normie or somebody, and says, “The Black Terror.” It was a good hike, I guess. I ain’t gonna be an objectivity freak — it’s my funking memoirs — but more than the hike qua hike was the thing it really raised, that Augie really was putting into the game that which could not have been kept out in any real take on the world. But it let you know that all that was abstract to you, about black and white and all that, was not really abstract, that it all could not be waved away, or laughed away, or forgot or not known about. It meant to me that there was real shit over which I did not have total control, that I did not even properly understand. And I could be, on such occasions, quietly stunned. Turned inward and set adrift in a world of my feelings I couldn’t yet deal with.

  Those were some of the steps, the paths, of our divergence. And I told you how in high school (at least for me) the old relationships completely fell apart. For one thing, it was an Italian high school and junior high I went to. (Heading for college prep in my jumbled-up but crystal-clear head.) And so all things were openly reversed. The Italians now sat in center stage and controlled the social life of those two institutions. And year after year (only four, really), I went through various kinds of bullshit and humiliation that actually made me feel at one point that I hated Italians straight out.

  (Earlier, in the seventh grade, we’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, and I’m lagging behind in the elephant house, holding my nose but wanting to check close up on the elephants. So I see this guy, he’s cleaning up or something in there, and I ask him, “Wow, how do you stand it in here?” Meaning the terrible odor of elephant shit. So he says to me, “I don’t mind it. I live in Harlem.” Yeh, a white guy said this, and it went through me like a frozen knife. And I knew exactly what he meant. Except I also wondered, even right then at that ugly moment, why he wanted to drop that kind of shit on me. I knew he was attacking me, saying a bad thing to me, my big eyes must have wheeled and caught his face for a second, then dropped down into the zoo dirt, and carried the rest of me out of there. But what did that do, I wonder, for Mr. Elephant Shit Shoveler to say that? Did it make him feel good or heroic or like he wasn’t really shoveling elephant shit? And all that was nestled tightly in me gourd by time I got out of grammar school. And Augie’s words and news of “race riots” and even a couple runins my mother had with cut-rate racists, one in a candy store downtown — the lady wanted to sell her some “nigger toes” and my mother says, “Those are Brazil nuts, lady,” grabs my hand, and stalks out. Later she had a near-rumble with a bus driver who wanted to talk to her funny. I took all that in, and carried it, carried it with me — who knows w
hen you need such experiences? I felt subconsciously.)

  But I was totally unprepared for the McKinley and Barringer experiences in which the whites ran the social and going to school/academic part of that institutional life. And I put up with many nigger callings and off the wall comments and intimidations, even getting cussed out regularly in Italian. I even learned Italian curse words (though not many precise meanings) and would fling them back sometimes. But I tried to hold my own. For instance, when a big schizophrenic white boy — a blond dude named Joe S. — threw a ball at me in the McKinley playground not long after I got there, I flung the bat at his head. The other white dudes kept him off me.

  And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy’s ear, from mouths and radios). But the white thing was only periphery in me young days, a fringe thing I didn’t even recognize. And then to go into McKinley and then Barringer and be in a white world ruled by white Italians whose most consistent emotion regarding me was unconcern, that took me up by the ankles and dangled me in no space and put not’s in my head and not me’s.

  The life of emotion, which is historical, like anything else, gets warped in high school I’m certain now. And to understand I must go back now several years to give a picture of one side of my life, feelings, mind, head, and then come back to this threshold of pain, then we can draw conclusions together!