by Amiri Baraka
One emotional center of my earlier life was my special relationship with my father. My father loved sports, and playing sports was the prerequisite for being part of the community of youth I ran with. I’d read the Daily News sports pages from way back in grammar school. And he’d take me to football games, baseball games, I mean the pros.
And, as I’ve said, there was a special grandeur to going someplace with my father and having all the “you look just like your father” folks identify us as such. There was a pride in that, I mean for the persons saying that, not just for my old man and me. But in the people it seemed to be a kind of high joy that such a genetic miracle could be produced. And that it was a sleek brown kid that had been produced — Eureka! — down to the sky-drinking eyes.
But the specialest feeling was when my father took me down to Ruppert Stadium some Sundays to see the Newark Eagles, the black pro team. Very little in my life was as heightened (in anticipation and reward) for me as that. What was that? Some black men playing baseball? No, but beyond that, so deep in fact it carried and carries memories and even a politics with it that still makes me shudder.
Ruppert Stadium was “Down ’Eck,” down below the station, in the heavy industrial section, and then mostly whites, including the Portuguese, lived down there. But we were never really thinking about that when we went there. The smell or smells, and I always associate them with Newark, could be any wild thing. Sometimes straight-out rotten eggs, fart odor, or stuff for which there was no known identification. Just terrible Newark Down Neck smell.
But coming down through that would heighten my sense because I could dig I would soon be standing in that line to get in, with my old man. But lines of all black people! Dressed up like they would for going to the game, in those bright lost summers. Full of noise and identification slapped greetings over and around folks. Cause after all in that town of 300,000 that 20 to 30 percent of the population (then) had a high recognition rate for each other. They worked together, lived in the same neighborhoods, went to church (if they did) together, and all the rest of it, even played together.
The Newark Eagles would have your heart there on the field, from what they was doing. From how they looked. But these were professional ballplayers. Legitimate black heroes. And we were intimate with them in a way and they were extensions of all of us, there, in a way that the Yankees and Dodgers and whatnot could never be!
We knew that they were us — raised up to another, higher degree. Shit, and the Eagles, people knew, talked to us before and after the game. That fabulous year they were World Champs of the black leagues (two years later they were gone!). The Negro National League. We was there opening day, Jim, and Leon Day pitched a no-hitter! Opening Day! And the bloods threw those seat cushions all over Ruppert Stadium and the white folks (also owners of the New York Yankees) who owned that stadium wouldn’t let us have the things after that. We noted it (I know I did) but it didn’t stop nothin’.
That was the year they had Doby and Irvin and Pearson and Harvey and Pat Patterson, a schoolteacher, on third base, and Leon Day was the star pitcher, and he showed out Opening Day! But coming into that stadium those Sunday afternoons carried a sweetness with it. The hot dogs and root beers! (They have never tasted that good again.) A little big-eyed boy holding his father’s hand.
There was a sense of completion in all that. The black men (and the women) sitting there all participated in those games at a much higher level than anything else I knew. In the sense that they were not excluded from either identification with or knowledge of what the Eagles did and were. It was like we all communicated with each other and possessed ourselves at a more human level than was usually possible out in cold whitey land.
Coming in that stadium with dudes and ladies calling out, “Hey, Roy, boy he look just like you.” Or “You look just like your father.” Besides that note and attention, the Eagles there were something we possessed. It was not us as George Washington Carver or Marian Anderson, some figment of white people’s lack of imagination, it was us as we wanted to be and how we wanted to be seen being looked at by ourselves in some kind of loud communion.
And we knew, despite the newspapers, radios, Babe Ruth candy bars, who that was tearing around those bases. When we saw Mule Suttles or Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard or Satchel Paige and dug the Homestead Grays, Philadelphia Stars, New York Black Yankees (yes!), Baltimore Elite (pronounced E-Light) Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, Birmingham Black Barons, and even the Indianapolis Clowns! We knew who that was and what they (we) could do. Those other Yankees and Giants and Dodgers we followed just to keep up with being in America. We had our likes and our dislikes. “Our” teams. But for the black teams, and for us Newarkers, the Newark Eagles was pure love.
We were wilder and calmer there. Louder and happier, without hysteria. Just digging ourselves stretch out is what, and all that love and noise and color and excitement surrounded me like a garment of feeling. I know I thought that’s the way life was supposed to be.
And my father was a part of that in a way that he was part of nothing else I knew. The easy comradeship among the spectators, but he even knew some of the players. And sometimes after the games he’d take me around to the Grand Hotel (used to be on West Market Street), right down the street from our church. Right next to the barbershop my father took me to. (And going to that barbershop was almost as hip as going to the Grand or the games. Them niggers was arguin’ in there one day about something and one guy mentions something that MacArthur had said and another dude, some old black man, said there wasn’t no such thing as MacArthur! That has always blown my mind, what that meant!)
At the Grand Hotel, the ballplayers and the slick people could meet. (That was when Baba, Russell Bingham, was in his high-up thing with the digits and whatnot — clean as the Board of Health.) Everybody super-clean and highlifin’, glasses jingling with ice, black people’s eyes sparklin’ and showin’ their teeth in the hippest way possible.
You could see Doby and Lennie Pearson and Pat Patterson or somebody there and I’d be wearin’ my eyes and ears out drinking a co-cola, checking everything out.
The movies I dearly dug but you never got to go behind the screen and shake hands with the heroes. But at the Grand Hotel you could and my old man saw that I did.
It was black life that was celebrated by being itself at its most unencumbered. Mrs. Effa Manley, who owned the team, would even come through and Baba or somebody would buy her a drink. Or my father would push me forward for an introduction and Monte Irvin would bend down and take my little hand in his and, Jim, I’d be all the way out.
In the laughter and noise and colors and easy hot dogs there was something of us celebrating ourselves. In the flying around the bases and sliding and home runs and arguments and triumphs there was more of ourselves in celebration than we were normally ever permitted. It was ours. (Not just the ownership of the teams, the Negro National League, though that had to be in it too.) But our expression unleashed for our and its own sake. It made us know that the Mantans and Birminghams were clowns — funny, but obviously used against us for some reason. Was it a big creep in a white hood somewhere in charge of trying to make black people feel bad? I thought so. But the clowns we knew were scarecrows, cardboard figures somebody was putting out trying to make us feel bad. Cause we knew, and we knew, that they wasn’t us. Just clowns. Somebody got hooked up. We was out on the field at Ruppert Stadium, Jim. And we was even up in the stands diggin’ it. Laid back in a yellow shirt with the collar open and white pencil-stripe pants. We was in the sun with a hot dog and a root beer having our hands shook by one of our father’s friends. We was cheering for Mule Suttles or seeing Larry Doby make a double play. We was not clowns and the Newark Eagles laid that out clear for anyone to see!
But you know, they can slip in on you another way, Bro. Sell you some hand magic, or not sell you, but sell somebody somewhere some. And you be standin’ there and all of a sudden you hear about — what? — Jeckie Rawbeanson. I could te
ll right away, really, that the dude in the hood had been at work. No, really, it was like I heard the wheels and metal wires in his voice, the imperfected humanoid, his first words “Moy nayhme is Jeckie Rawbeanson.” Some Ray Bradbury shit they had mashed on us. I knew it. A skin-covered humanoid to bust up our shit.
I don want to get political and talk bad about “integration.” Like what a straight-out trick it was. To rip off what you had in the name of what you ain’t never gonna get. So the destruction of the Negro National League. The destruction of the Eagles, Grays, Black Yankees, Elite Giants, Cuban Stars, Clowns, Monarchs, Black Barons, to what must we attribute that? We’re going to the big leagues. Is that what the cry was on those Afric’ shores when the European capitalists and African feudal lords got together and palmed our future? “We’re going to the big leagues!”
So out of the California laboratories of USC, a synthetic colored guy was imperfected and soon we would be trooping back into the holy see of racist approbation. So that we could sit next to drunken racists by and by. And watch our heroes put down by slimy cocksuckers who are so stupid they would uphold Henry and his Ford and be put in chains by both while helping to tighten ours.
Can you dig that red-faced backwardness that would question whether Satchel Paige could pitch in the same league with who?
The Dodgers could take out some of the sting for those who thought it really meant we was getting in America. (But that cooled out. A definition of pathology in blackface would be exactly that, someone, some Nigra, who thunk they was in this! Owow!) But the scarecrow J.R. for all his ersatz “blackness” could represent the shadow world of the Negro integrating into America. A farce. But many of us fell for that and felt for him, really. Even though a lot of us knew the wholly artificial disconnected thing that Jackie Robinson was. Still when the backward crackers would drop black cats on the field or idiots like Dixie Walker (who wouldn’t even a made the team if Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard was on the scene) would mumble some of his unpatented ku klux dumbness, we got uptight, for us, not just for J.R.
I remained a Giant “fan,” cause me fadder was, even when J.R. came on the scene. I resisted that First shit (though in secret, you know, I had to uphold my own face, alone among a sea of hostile jerks!).
(So what? So Jackie came on down to D.C. town and they got his ass to put Paul Robeson down!! I remember that, out of the side of my head I checked that. I wondered. What did it mean? What was he saying? And was it supposed to represent me? And who was that other guy — Paul Robeson? I heard that name somewhere.)
The Negro League’s like a light somewhere. Back over your shoulder. As you go away. A warmth still, connected to laughter and self-love. The collective black aura that can only be duplicated with black conversation or music.
The road, the path, now I’m graduated out of grammar school (in the photograph the fourth from the end, next to Bruce Miller and little Sylvester who said quite accurately, “You’ll never be no doctor”). And I’m in McKinley, with all these white dudes. When we Cavaliers came down there for one a those street carnivals, we didn’t even know what they was. A big fat 400-pound dude, a nasty motherfucker I never really met but saw quite a bit in high school. A team manager. Water boy, really. He says to us out the side of his mouth — hissing it like a fat snake — “Get out! Get out!” But there was seven or eight of us, so we looked around a little while longer then we got out. But I had to come back to those parts to school in a day or two. And so it goes. So it went!
The Russ-Jones combine broke up about then as well. As I said, accompanied by loud declarations of still unclear resentment and perhaps rage. Certainly I heard frustration in that too, as you must whenever you are listening to African Americans.
The Jones section moved even further north, away from Dey Street, across the invisible borders down all the way into Italian land. That was short-lived and boy was I glad about that. But for a minute we lived on 8th Avenue, with some other strange person. We were boarders in her little house, down below Broad Street. So I went right up the hill to McKinley and even went to this nearly all-Italian Boys Club. Egad, they even had metal chains instead of nets on the baskets. I’d never seen that. So that instead of “swish” as the term of success it was “ching.” So much for cultural pluralism.
It was all spread out and vague and alien for me now. The old Dey Street/Newark Street/Lock Street breakdown had broke down. The Central Avenue playground crowd had vanished as far as I was concerned. And certainly some of that was subjective. You feel once you leave a place it’s literally “not there” anymore. But “the fates” had sent large sectors of my own age group scattering to the winds of high school.
I felt totally alone and isolated living down there on 8th Avenue. I felt totally alone and isolated going to McKinley Junior High. And I was contemptuous, frightened, and awed by the tons of white students I had to see everyday. But this was not a fancy private school, this was a largely Italian public school in the old First Ward (somebody could give you a list of the people that came out of there and some of them would be some wellknown gangsters as well as movie stars, singers, boxers, police, businessmen, etc.). A lot of these same kinds of students today would be in Catholic school way out in the suburbs. But quite a few would still be there — dealing with those Mean Streets.
In McKinley and in the 8th Avenue Boys Club I related only to what was inside my head. You want to know what alienation is? That was it. I had Italian teachers who told inside jokes to the Italian students and even knew them after school. One teacher even had the kids bring him Hershey bars, and they loved to do it. But it was intimidation to me. Especially since this dude one time denounced me — I mean made a class-stopping pronouncement — for having my sneakers sitting on top of the desk. Like they were some all-time PeeUuus! That was more than just funny, at least for me.
I was “Jones” then, to the teachers and to the students. And from a familiar figure appreciated and denigrated for my actualities, as had been the case on Dey Street, I was now all but invisible, and when not that, the butt of something unpleasant. Plus I was completely contemptuous of them as far as athletics, though for certain there were some good players there, in all the sports. But part of my defense, the defense of my psyche, was found in silently denouncing these dudes for their lack of athletic skill and art. I mean, even if a dude could shoot, most of ’em looked funny to me (I said) and it cracked me up.
And I would get out in the playground and wear some unsuspecting turkeys out, though if I ran into some quality players, which I did, I would get cooled out. But the sense in myself was of some wall — some dull and wholly uninteresting wall — between myself and the life and persons of the place. And I wondered often what I was doing there. Except there had come into my head and out of my mouth some vague “decision” to go to Barringer.
At the beginning of the tenth grade I did go on to Barringer. They had some junior high school system consisting of the ninth grade for some of the high schools and that’s what my sojourn at McKinley had been. (These days, the ’80s, McKinley, now named 7th Avenue, is like a New York City school jammed up with blacks and Latinos in the advanced stages of ghettofication.)
Barringer was larger and if possible an even more foreign place. It was larger and on the other side of Branch Brook Park. There was less of the narrow ghetto First Ward feeling to it because it was larger and up toward the more middle-class Italian areas. But that was another world. McKinley was ugly and baroque and teeming and narrow and ghetto Italian. Barringer was larger and more open but it seemed even more completely separated from my Dey Street life.
And we had moved again, around this time of my life. We had moved all the way back across town into the Central Ward. The old Third Ward. And right on top of The Hill. So this meant that I had to take a bus everyday all the way crosstown to school. Coming out of the geographical lookout post of the growing black ghetto, on Belmont Avenue and Spruce Street. What they called the Four Corners. And during them days
everybody and everything black passed across or under or over or around those streets either day or night. It was like X marked the spot of another kind of black life. Back over not far from where I was born and spent my earliest days, down the hill in Douglass-Harrison, but underneath my Belmont Avenue windows I began to be aware of the Fast Life.
It was like a sociologist’s joke. Up in the morning, come down from our third-floor apartment. (My grandmother and uncle were with us again, but in much smaller space.) Down into the street, to the corner of Belmont (beautiful mountain?) to wait for the 9 Clifton bus. Hey, and there were quite a few other refugees and cutouts from the mostly black (and a trifle Jewish) high school at the edge of the Central Ward, South Side. It was in my head, as well, to flee South Side. (How did that get in my head? The talk among friends? Overhearing adults? I donno. But it came out of my mouth, “I don’t wanna go to South Side. I wanna go to Barringer.”) And there were kids on that wild 9 Clifton. Some coming from even further south going to West Side and Central, even Vo-Tech, and the last stop, way cross town in another world, Barringer. There were a few of us made that long trip every day, back and forth, from the Central Ward and even the South Ward, all the way to Rome. (And yes, just below the school sat the Vatican. The still unfinished Sacred Heart Cathedral, that towers now, and towered then with a useless romanticism wasted on most of us black kids who went to Barringer who saw it simply as a hated landmark.)
The joke? From the Four Corners to Rome and back. And now I was completely disoriented (though calmer now, at home, because of less hostile surroundings). Because I didn’t know anybody at Barringer and I didn’t know anybody on Belmont Avenue. My friends, at that time, still lived around Central Avenue School, Baxter Terrace, on Norfolk and Sussex and Lock and Jay and Hudson and Warren. And for a time it was a drag at both ends.
At Barringer it was the amazingly dull process of being an outsider that I was involved with. Though there were a few black students there I got tight with. At least to joke with in school and release some of the tension built up by our being black in Italian Antarctica. (Of the two closest joke-time buddies in my homeroom in Barringer — that is, we would jive and put each other down and bump each other and grin in the hallways and maybe the lunchroom — one, Ken, is a detective lieutenant, the other a career navy man. And even these dudes, black though they was, called me “Jones.”)