The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  Mrs. B. was head of the Flower Committee. The symbolism was clear — some flowers or some aid. They had different ways (and different things) they wanted to worship. And it was manifest all over if you would pick up the words and looks. Ultimately, I guess, that struggle was really between those who wanted to eliminate a “black church” and those who wanted Xtian worship to be a form of African American culture. Simple now? (I remember throwing out, even before writing Blues People, how you could tell much about black people by what church they went to. And under investigation the concreteness and correctness of that staggered me.) The “purest” African Xtian church in the U.S. is the sanctified — with drums, horns, tambourines, dance, and song. The poorest too — in storefronts, little halls off alleyways, over delicatessens. I’d like to list all the black churches in Newark one day — their names are so weird — take pictures of some — living mythology, dreams housed in despair. The big ol’ churches, stone and steel and huge stained glass, are more European. White. More bourgeois. Less emotional. A church based on money and spurious rationalism. Like Pascal’s cold pensées — “Hey, we better believe in god, along with Money. First: Suppose there is a god after all, we’ll really be up shit’s creek!” But the passion of the black church, which even some white peasants go to in the black belt South, is very different!

  My mother dropped it several times how Nana and Mrs. B. didn’t get on. I figured it was because Mrs. B. was out of her mind. Nana liked most people. I could not penetrate to the actuality of their dispute, but my perception confirmed that the little Minnie Mouse-looking Mrs. B., who put layers of pink and white powder on her pale pink face and “put on airs” as even my mother pointed out, was frantic with corniness.

  The S’s were hooked up with Mrs. B. The S. clan’s mama B.S. wore pince nez, yeh yeh yeh whew! Really. I didn’t know what the fuck they were. A couple dizzy bitches in Bethany wore them. Yes. White bourgeois apes in yellow. It was a weird church.

  And just as in any class struggle, much undermining and jockeying for positions and rear actions and frontal assaults went on. For one thing, Mrs. B. was always trying to get note. She was the senior yellow lady rep, Mrs. S. her junior minister. Invariably, they’d appear, after the services when announcements were made, to rah rah for the Flower Committee and get people to wave their fans back and forth (applause wasn’t dignified).

  My grandmother made announcements most times to mention the next regular meeting of the Ladies Aid. She was an usherette too, on special church occasions and she wore those white church uniforms with white shoes.

  One reason the Flower Committee could get over is that one member of the family, F., worked for a florist. Later he became an apprentice undertaker for Beckett’s. F. was the loudest (the most human, actually) of the clan — a brown Mickey Rooney tied by everything to yellow life.

  But flowers, flowers. Look — hey — we’ve arranged you see, for flowers flowers.

  Snide remarks, grimaced conversations. My mother would drop it about “Mrs. Banks and them.” My grandmother never said anything. She just met with the Ladies Aid and kept aiding, doing her work.

  B., the junior partner in the yellow flower line, had other illustrious posts in the church. Plus her husband was a supervisor with the P.O. while my father still drove a truck. The son, W., was a prototype, neat haircut and clothes and Vaselined yellow kid. He was as famous at church picnics as Andrew Young. Actually, if there was any stereotype of yellow, as kid, it was W. Bland, glasses, grinning, goofy, “sissified.” The kind of thing your mother would beat you in the head with. A yellow brownjack to pop you with. “W. got W. did” and on and on, a razz for your disconnection from her program of upward and forward to where? The yellowest part of brown? (A question?)

  But the real life of where we lived what I perceived as strongest was not any of that but black. That was the life I was tied to — even “shot from guns,” like famous (brown) toasted cereal, the connection I made was with black life.

  So that the yellow church was dry and boring at one side — yellow and artificial at another. And even if I’d wanted to (which I never did) there was no way you could bring no yellow shit in the streets or walk with that in no playground without gettin’ laughed at minimally, chased if you pushed it and beat the hell out of if you blew altogether.

  No matter the browns and the yellows could collect minusculely — in the streets of our lives, black life shaped us. We were judged by it and defined (to ourselves by ourselves) by it.

  W. was a “sissy-punk” where I was most comfortable. That East Orange shit was another world. You saw its products on Sundays. One dude, H., a yellow comedian with glasses, called me “Gloom” every Sunday in honor of my seriousness (?) and the black life he peeped had grown me a blue soul.

  At some point I envied yellow its neat haircuts (wavy) and new moccasins. Its cars and exotic addresses. The pretty little girls that grinned at you accidentally or never. I might fantasize about these in some way (depending upon the chronological maturity of my genitals) but that never seemed real.

  Except down South there was a girl who lived next door to my folks with a high hill-like lawn at the top of which was her red and white house and a lawn chair you could swing in. The group of us, my two cousins, my sister and I, and her, S.J., would swing there and scramble across and up that high hill lawn. That was a terrible knife in my young heart that she should be forever and always out of my reach. It was so pitiful because I never told her how I felt. It was too ridiculous. She was too distant, haughty, light-skinned gorgeous. With a doctor father. I could not even pretend to mention my passion. But sometimes if strange waves pushed through me, a physical dazzle to my head turned awry staring past a blurred bird at his wind, I’d think, “These are my S.J. moments,” and sigh.

  Another girl, in Newark, I went to see down on Waverly Avenue. Another light-skinned — off to the side — kind of pretty girl. Was so proper and quiet and grinned little quiet jokes. I’d go to see her in my late high school days. She had a very old light father who I never talked to, only saw a few times before he passed. Her mother was young, in her thirties, and tall dark brown and lovely. She always seemed, I guess in contrast to her husband, athletic and vigorous, like she was on her way to a dance or tennis match. Her stepdaughter had much of her father in her, quiet and old even as a teenager. And I made her house a pilgrimage of sorts, consciously to sit, clean and smiling and pressing my suit, which was no suit at all. It was just that I felt good sitting there nice and all like a good boy but I never took it seriously though I might have thought I did. But I never even thought that. She was too quiet and yellow. I could not have told anybody she was my girlfriend. Even when I was fairly sure that I was the only one seeing her. And certain people did think our thing together was somewhat serious. Still I never thought she thought it was other than a mild surface pastime. I was too brown. Too gross. Too bounded by malevolent experience. Too grimy. My hands were dirty (another little brown chubby girl said). I could never talk to her about some things, that wiggled and screamed and bluesed my head up. I could never tell her my feelings, even about her. Which were dry enough for a “big-time” marriage with pictures in the Afro. “Dr. Jones, I presume,” neither bone nor contention. But it was all like something I saw walk past. Pretty girl. Quiet little yellow girl. Sitting there across from me in her quiet father’s home. Her mother and she, she told me always, were like sisters. And her mother was sleek and brown and it was she — sad confession — who really turned me on, on the real side. (Is this Oedipal and shit?) So did I think — my other sister? No, not flat-out like that. But something like that, cool and quiet and on your best behavior — a quiet almost like in a photograph or five-and-ten repro. I was gone from that no matter what postures I made, I was gone from that, just walking.

  But none of this can be totally separated from Music. Because that was the great definer and link, the extension chord of blackness in me. And so everything (else) had a music to it. A shimmer of
sound you heard as you saw it, or you saw as you heard it. The blues hugged me close to the streets and the people. That was what we breathed and Saturdays was when we breathed (full out).

  But the brown yellow white tip was a constant too, by contrast, so you knew the real did exist more totally and in you more completely as the informant, creator, and disperser of mystery. Barringer and McKinley were certainly white — and the newspaper — and voices on the radio. Though I transformed the radio in my transmutating mind so it told brown tales somehow. (Yet you understand the term brainwash and must acknowledge certain brain damage. Yet I claim the transduction of certain impulses, so that the output was not just white noise, but a heroic grimace when I smile that contains absolute desire for the destruction of evil.)

  My terror was white, and racists (who I knew since the Elephant House, and Augie’s slaps and Birmingham’s rolling eyes, etc., and tales my grandmother told. And when I was thirteen I read Black Boy, the alternate selection of Book-of-the-Month Club, and I feared for R.W.’s life and wondered how he dared say such things and still walk around. Yeh, I knew in my young life about “crackers” as my grandfather called them) yes, they were white, and scrunched up dudes and ugly ladies arguing with my mother in buses and Fanny Farmer candy stores. They were most assuredly white. And the unknown monsters my grandmother told me had cut off a young boy’s “privates” near Dothan, stuck ’em in his mouth, then gathered the young black girls to see, so a lesson would be taught. They were definitely white. And the killers of Emmett Till, whose ruptured swollen horrible body I saw in Jet, swallowing hard and being actually afraid. No, they were very very white. But mostly it was the outside limits of our world. In the distance, and cold, like the end of the world, beyond which you fell off (?). Who knew?

  There were teachers, interesting that they were all rec teachers, who were white and who were real enough to talk to. They would even throw me out of the playground for “cursing.” Mr. F., Mr. R. were the main dudes. I had a bad mouth, Jim, a bad mouth. Withering in its obscene intensity. But the white was merely distance or, close up, terror. And even the Italian dudes that I knew when I was young were somewhat removed and that was the definition.

  The yellow was always a combatant. Distant (somehow) colored people, whom you did not know well. Made up shit, painted up shit. Stiffness — corniness. Sissified, dull shit. Stuff in church. The Y where they made you sing. Lessons. Picnics your mama carried you off to when there was real baseball games to be played — shit to be explored. The Secret Seven to be hung around with. Or, later, just the blues streets to be walked and the bigassed black girls to be stared at from within the brown recesses.

  The yellow was a promise you could never keep. A challenge you did not want. A frustrating distant thing some mama threw up in your face that you did not care about but just did not want to be compared with. The so ’n’ so’s or little So ’n’ So or Master So ’n’ So, against which your mama would rank you and you knew you could never measure up. (I could make the sound of a madman at this point ahhhhhddgggggggggggg to show my frustration!)

  Cotillions and Mrs. B. found them and drug a few selected (mostly brown) ghetto kids outta the hopeless muck of their lives and shot them off upward and onward (fake style) into the bull’s-eye of yellow enterprise. Now that was banana yellow. In tuck-see-dose and evening gowns, we lidda brown and yellow chilruns were readied for our entrance into the waiting warren of slaughter. Where our brains would be took out and placed in a safety deposit box for Mister Big Guy, one day, to make use of.

  The cotillion, which I approached as a high school youth, was designed so that brown and yellow ladies could be presented to society. (There was also the Debutantes’ Ball, which surfaced at the same time but had less note.) And we practiced our bows and turns and went to practice week nights, walking home in groups afterwards. Chubby brown Betty was my partner and we went together for three or four years on and off.

  I was awarded scholarships, and the four of us, mother, father, sister and I, sat downtown at the Terrace Ballroom and watched the proceedings. There was a real effort to include the brown folks in this. But somehow we sat just outside of the connected up “human” thrust of that (was there any?) and the animating stream of yellow life made that run like an escalator to nowhere.

  And see there was one group of “friends,” acquaintances, from rehearsal that you took up with on one level. You want to know the complexity of my young life? Well, I still knew the Cavaliers but by late high school we’d drifted in a real sense. I’d see S. and R., they were even in the cotillion and they lived on The Hill and were fairly tight. But the others, the boys I’d known earlier, had mostly faded except at odd times around odd occasions. Games we played in together were getting fewer and fewer and by the time I got out of high school and started going to the Newark branch of Rutgers I did not see them at all nor play any ball with them.

  At the same time, for several years I’d taken up with some brothers around the corner on Hillside Place. The Cavaliers were brown compared to the Hillside Place brothers, who were definitely black. And for most of my high school years, after white school, black Hillside Place was who I ran with. (Though I had a brown band I put together, R. on alto, D. on drums, me on trumpet, and we played upstairs in my house on Belmont Avenue, “Tenderly,” “September in the Rain” [the same song], “Perdido,” etc.) Yellow church shit and Y stuff and Jones Street Y stuff, which was much browner, were all shot in there.

  But the black was the constant. The people, the life, the rules, the mores, the on-the-street definitions of what was beautiful or hip. The constant background of our breathing, the blues, was always everywhere. And Saturdays raised up like a great space mural (blues as) companionship of thought and feeling; it was feeling. The real good-looking girls and tough dudes, who you wanted to make laugh and impress, the style you had to perfect was black — black and blue.

  And though I came striding out of a brown house with plenty of bullshit packed between my eyes. There was nowhere to go but the black streets and the people who ran those streets and set the standards of our being were black. And no matter where we would go and what we would get into, when we were true to ourselves, when we were actually pleasing our deepest selves, being the thing we most admired and loved, we were black (and blue).

  Three

  Music

  I’ve said that one constant for me from the time of any consciousness in helping to define the world has been music. The various kinds of music, of course, gave dimension to the world. There was/is not just one music. There are many. (Though when I talk with black jazz musicians we say, sometimes, The Music, meaning African American improvised music. What we’ve called, in our deeper moments, Jazz. Directly from the African, jassm, orgasm, i.e., “come music.” I guess that stuck because that’s where white folks first heard the music, in New Orleans whorehouses, and that’s what they were doing when they heard it, jassing, or trying to jass. The word first means sexual intercourse.)

  Music is the term for this chapter because I want to lay out an entirety of my feelings about The Music and Music and connect them precisely to the growth of my perception and its history. Because music is both an emotional experience and a philosophical one. It is also an aesthetic experience and the history of my moving from one music to another, the history of being drawn most directly to one music or another, is another kind of path and direction in my life. Part of the answer to the question How did you get to be you?

  In our brown house was spirituals and gospels and blues and jazz and white and brown and yellow “popular” songs. We was not heavy (thank goodness) into “classical” (meaning European concert) music. So I did not have to do too much shedding of that from the inside when I thought I needed to shed that. I picked up that stuff much later.

  At the yellow church I told you they would pile Handel and Bach and Mozart on our ass but that was lightweight on the real side except for the Hallelujah Chorus and stuff mashed on you around Xmas. Ev
en in that yellow fortress, spirituals mostly dominated and my grandmother and them tried to ease the gospel number in on them but that was limited.

  The school, you know, had some white stiff shit to mash on you when they could. I was in the All-City Chorus and they had us singing something called “The Song of Man,” a mixture of idealism and straight-out metaphysics that identified Humanism. In my music lessons or in the school auditorium we would have snatches of The Classics bounced off us but that was not my main diet.

  We also had the radio jugging with you (and later on television in some small way) and movie background music I would use to “sord fight” around and across people’s cars parked unsuspectingly on our street, or as the mouthed background music for our playground and vacant-lot shootouts.

  The radio carried the Make Believe Ballroom, turned on when I was younger by my parents. Somehow I connect it up with my father. Martin Block with that sinuous voice. On the weekends they had the Hit Parade, and I remember as an early high school baseballer hanging my portable radio over the handlebars and listening between innings to Ezio Pinza sing songs from South Pacific — “Some Enchanted Evening,” “This Nearly Was Mine,” also Mary Martin. Plus songs from The King and I or Wish You Were Here or Guys and Dolls as well as the other crazy stuff like “Rag Mop, R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P” (a black song in whiteface), almost as crazy as the “Mairzy Doats” and “Hut Sut Ralston” of earlier times when I was small before I had my own radio.

  Sometimes Nat King Cole would come on, like with “Nature Boy” or once in a while the hip “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” But that Hit Parade, though it had some tunes I did like, for the most part I thought of as composed of lace glass lemon peels — some bounce for the ounce but something to be looked at, waved at, as it passed. Though I liked the show tunes.