by Amiri Baraka
I liked Bing Crosby better than Frank Sinatra (that was a raging controversy in junior high school, though the Hershey bar receiving teacher told us in his high wisdom that the best voice of all was Perry Como!). And stuff like Rosemary Clooney and Vaughn Monroe and Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine (“Mule Train”). Even my father told me he was a “Jew boy singing like a colored fellow.” That was what the Hit Parade pumped at us.
But how strange is the human mind that it can receive all kinds of things from all kinds of places. Be put in weird situations (like at the end of the 9 Clifton run), yet retain some connection with its richest sources. Like the African slaves worshiping Catholic saints, yet St. Michael and St. Stephen, when you get up close on the slave converts renderings of them, have tiny cuts etched in their alabaster faces. These cuts speak of another world, another culture and language and life. You could hear some deadbeat in a turned around collar who’s been jerking off for thirty-five years scream, “Why these are tribal marks, Father Noel. Tribal marks! These heathen have been deceiving us all along!”
So that I was stretched between two lives and perceptions. (I’ve told you it was four — Black Brown Yellow White — but actually it’s two on the realest side, the two extremes, the black and the white, with the middle two but their boxing gloves.) And when I returned on that bus ride from Barringer and swung down onto Belmont Avenue, blues took me. Black people surrounded me. And that was the element I felt easiest in.
Even inside my brown house, as secure as it was (and that was its most carryable beauty, its security, that I never once had to wonder who and what was going on or where my next anything was coming from. My father and mother and grandmother, Jim, were solid as a rock), there was a certain posture you had to take on, after all, whatever yo mama wanted you to be, you was gon’ be that, to some extent, or get yo ass turned into a neon artifact. The casual lectures, casual in that they were constant and could accompany any other activity — combing your hair, washing your face, putting on your clothes, doing your homework (or having not done it), coming in late, wanting to take drawing lessons instead of piano lessons, you could be the recipient of an instant lecture on why you better do something other than you was doing or look or be better than you were, with immediate reference to somebody who was, were constant.
It was the normal guidance of what one assumes is the normal parent-to-child relationship, yet it is turned wherever the parent is turned and its specifics shaped by whatever the parent is and has been shaped by.
Moving in the blue/black streets there was a freedom, a possibility of becoming anything I could imagine. I was completely on my own (and even more so once I realized it), and everything in that world began and was defined by me, in me, by music. The blues heaviest and most constant. The quartets like the Orioles and the Ravens are Belmont Avenue near Spruce Street. I could look out my back window Saturday mornings and watch a young black girl hanging up clothes singing “The Glory of Love.” And she was just accompanying the jukebox or record player from somewhere. (In those days black radio was not as widespread, so most of the sounds were on 78s or jukeboxes or out of people’s mouths.)
And as I got older I could move in those streets with more ease and direction and go to hear specifically what I wanted to hear. In the house, from the beginning Amos Milburn might be playing “Bad Bad Whiskey” or “Let Me Go Home, Whiskey” or “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.” Louis Jordan, our main man, and His Tympany Five had me steppin’ from before I could even read. “Knock Me a Kiss,” “Don’t Worry about That Mule,” “Caledonia, Caledonia, What Makes Your Big Head So Hard? Mop!” The drama of “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” We was rocking till the break of dawn. And even later when he went calypso with Ella Fitzgerald and did “Run, Joe” and “Stone Cold Dead in de Market,” he was our man. He was cookin’ in our language. That’s what “jive” was. And why jive was jive? Well, it had to be for us to stay alive.
The lyrics of the blues instructed me. Explained what the world was and even how men and women related to each other, and the problems inherent in that. Even later so basic a communication as “Work with Me, Annie,” then “Annie Had a Baby (Annie Can’t Work No More),” could just about sum up some aspects of life in the black ghetto part of the western hemisphere.
But the blues singers were oldest and most basic. My grandfather even dug Lonnie Johnson, Amos Milburn, and Louis Jordan singing “Don’t Worry about That Mule.” The blues was old and basic, and everywhere, for us. There was people sitting on the fender of somebody’s car singing something. And you might stop or laugh as you went by. But it spilled out of windows and soon even out of car windows. It was the party and the party goers. It was old people and young slick-haired dudes.
Duke and Count and Jimmie Lunceford I associated with my parents. Those songs like “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (Hibbler sang it “enty-moooore”) or “Move to the Outskirts of Town” or “One o’Clock Jump” or “Jumping at the Woodside,” I heard from them or with them or at their social events. That was more sophisticated to me, like highballs and the wartime upsweeps my mother wore. But we all liked Louis Jordan, everybody. It made me think of all of us, laughing at his jive.
Erskine Hawkins and Lucky Millinder were on the posters of the public dances where my folks would go with Ritz crackers, chicken, and whiskey on the table. Down at the Terrace or Wideway Hall or wherever they went in those early days.
When I first came back into the Central Ward I went to the frozen custard bar and two guys came up and checked me out. One a big barrel-chested guy who looked like he had a two-by-four shoved up his ass that also resulted in a grin approaching cretinous proportions. The other a dark squat husky dude with a homburg pushed back on his head. He looked absolutely serious but in the long run he had the most humor. “What’s your name?” the grinning one said, in a way that suggested he thought there was a leer on his face. Maybe he thought he looked terrifying. “Leroy,” I said, without saying much.
“You live around here?” the same one said.
“Yeh, up the street.” I was looking for the woman to get my order, talking tight-lipped with real tension.
“You gonna give us your money?” the barrel-chested guy said.
“No,” I said, so direct it frightened me. “Not a chance.” And stuck out my chest. Dinah Washington was playing in the background and her wide arching penetrating notes musta gave me something. Maybe I knew with Dinah in the background I couldn’t turn to stone and I couldn’t melt anyway. I stuck out my chest and ordered my hot dog. Not frightened but frozen.
“This guy thinks he’s tough,” the stiff one kept on. Now the bass-voiced singer with the Ravens was talking and singing “Ol’ Man River” and I wondered what they’d do next.
“I am tough,” I said. Why? Who’s to say? Maybe Jimmy Ricks’s heavy notes had aided me, and after him on the box, a stream of them. “Sixty Minute Man,” “Charles Brown,” or some of the Honkers. Finally, the grinning one acknowledged his grin and Pigfoot, the other one, a real sweet guy, started laughing and stuck out his hand. “You just moved around here, didn’t you? I seen your sister. Man, you got a fine sister.” And that friendship lasted until I went away to college to duke with the white and the yellow.
“This is The Poet,” he said of the other guy, whose hand was also pushed out. Poet was his street name, given because he had an elaborate exaggerated way of speaking and being. And later, as my own pretensions toward poetry emerged, I thought of this Poet so natural in his outpouring it was acknowledged as part of the scene. My own poetry was more difficult to come by because it began much less naturally.
But that transition, from outsider to through the door anyway, was accompanied by the sounds in the frozen custard store, as was every other event in our time, by the sounds. Just a few doors from my house, across the street, music came out of the Four Corners. Where the Fly and the Swift sped in and out. I could watch late nights sometimes from my window which looked right out on Belmont. (Th
ough the window to my room looked out on the backyard and all the way to Livingston Street, where the more intimate life of The Hill would go on.)
At all the parties we went to the slow drag was the premier sound and the rhythm “fast tunes” were next. The blue or red light drug us in. And it would be so dark you had to stand in the corners for a while till you recognized somebody you knew. You had to make sure you could see, no matter how dark it was. To see who was with who and who was doing what, and whether any bad guys or gangs was in there. If it was a gang in there I’d hit the silk, especially when I went to parties alone. And I did a lot of that once I’d moved from the West Side back to The Hill and had a period when I didn’t run regular with the Cavaliers or had yet hooked up with the Hillside Place dudes.
The quartets were what was happening at the parties. The Orioles was the stars and with them a host of other birds, Ravens, Flamingos, Swallows, Cardinals, etc. Larry Darnell and Wynonie Harris, one on the soft crooning side (another poet), the other shouting and driving us across the floor or up the street, had to be at your party.
Remember Ivory Joe Hunter? “When I Lost My Baby I Almost Lost My Mind.” That was the hit that night the Dukes started some shit up in North Newark and one dude got beat with a meat cleaver. But that was so pretty. “… I almost … lost … my mind.” We were rubbing and the odor and heat would go through us and we tried to press the sister for all we was worth and sometimes had to get off the floor quick cause our spirits had suddenly rose.
On Belmont Avenue, I lived right down the street, the next block, from two social centers, so to speak. One was the National Theater, a movie that showed reruns, that was truly the neighborhood movie. More conversation ran around between the audience than you could hear on the screen. But it was a good place to go to catch up on what you missed or to see the goodies once or twice more. I was a teenager now and my parents let me go to the National fairly late Fridays and weekends or not too late other nights.
I got some note in there one night when The Three Musketeers was playing, the one with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan. They find his girlfriend’s bag or brooch and it has her initials “C.B.” on it, and as they handed the bag up before the camera I shouted out, “Crime Buster,” which was Dick Tracy’s funny-paper crime fighters. People howled and a couple of the dudes in the neighborhood liked that. I saw a lotta people going in and out of the National.
And I guess I had started running into the Hillside Place dudes around that time. I had seen some of them earlier in a renegade boy scout troop up at Camp Mohican that counselors warned us to eschew. Some of them had been hooked up some way with this Charlton Street boy scout troop but only to go to the free summer camp.
Then I discovered, when I moved back to The Hill, that a bunch of them lived right around the corner a couple blocks away, on Hillside Place. Little Jimmy Scott lived around there too, also Babs Gonzales’s family. I ran with Babs’s younger brother T-Bone, who was part of the Hillside Place group. Little Jimmy was always singing around in Newark somewhere and gambling in the hallways of Hillside Place. But we all dug his “The Masquerade Is Over” and imitated him everyday, including his caved-in-chest stance and sway as he whispered his tragic blues.
But it was at the Masonic Temple that I got really involved with the Hillside Placers and we became great friends. Every Sunday night at the Masonic Temple they had a “canteen.” I guess they had got the name from the teenage canteens that were popular in the movies taken from the troop cool-out shelters, the Stage Door Canteens, the USO used to hook up or make believe they did during World War II.
The Masonic was right next door to the National, one flight up off the street. Proceeding up either of two grand curved staircases, you got to the main ballroom, where the canteen was held. The canteen was simply a dance, not too expensive, that was held every Sunday, with various groups. One dance got so wild, Lynn Hope and his turbaned screamers were on the set, that we all ran out into the street, Lynn Hope included, and disrupted traffic for a couple hours. (Vide: “The Screamers.”)
But most Sunday nights it was just a lot of black teenagers, some a trifle elderly, grindin’ and dancin’ fast to the sounds of that time and place. We loved Ruth Brown, and tunes like “Teardrops from My Eyes” were not only our dance favorites but emotional anthems of our lives. Dinah Washington and the many bird quartets also thrilled us. And Larry Darnell and Wynonie Harris and Charles Brown and a young dude who called himself Mister Blues who used to sing “I’m a real young boy just sixteen years old/I’m a real young boy just sixteen years old/I need a funky black woman to satisfy my soul!”
The Honkers really turned us on when we wasn’t grinding, doing the “slow drag” off Ivory Joe or Earl Bostic’s beautiful sound (“Flamingo”). We would be going crazy with Big Jay McNeely when he laid out flat on the floor blowing his soul with his legs kicking. Jay had a shirt that glowed in the dark and he played with that on sometimes. Or Illinois Jacquet (his detractors called him “lotta noise racket” but they was square). Bullmoose Jackson, Lynn Hope, Hal “Corn Bread” Singer. What about Joe Liggins and his Honey Drippers? I thought “The Honey Dripper” was a perfect piece of music. I could listen to that over and over. And you had to if you lived near Spruce Street and the shoeshine parlor with the jukebox blasting out into the open air.
Johnny Otis’s “Harlem Nocturne” I loved so much. I’d whistle it Saturday afternoons in anticipation of the Sunday sets. One time I sat up in the laundromat waiting for the clothes to wash and dry and whistled the whole Masonic repertory and the little pretty girl who worked there who I saw in the canteen from time to time asked me if I was a musician. I was whistling “Harlem Nocturne,” “The Honey Dripper,” “It’s Too Soon to Know,” “Tear-drops from My Eyes,” etc. All those words and those sounds carried what I knew of the world, they brought me as face to face with it as I could be then.
I hear that music and not only does the image of Belmont and Spruce, the Four Corners, The Hill, come in but also names like Headlight, Bubbles, Rogie, T-Bone, Kenny, Sonny Boy, Rudy, my main men from Hillside Place. When I first went into the Canteen, it was like a minefield, you had to watch your step, like really. Somebody wanna pull a Fanon slash on you. You know, Fanon says, the oppressed, because they will not kill their oppressors, take out their suppressed violence on themselves, their brothers, every weekend we kill each other for minute affronts, while The Hill itself is a major affront.
So you had to watch out. Dudes was bashing each other for stuff like stepping on each other’s shoes. “Hey, motherfucker, you stepped on my suedes, I’m a fuck you up!” Also who was going with who and who was looking at who and who danced with who or tried to rub against who. Or maybe dudes fell into disfavor with headwhippers because they was going with someone who put said headwhipper down, little dudes going with real pretty girls that headwhippers figured was too small to go with girls looking that good. There was many reasons you could get your head beat about a girl.
But once I started hanging with K. the rest was cooled out a little. We watched folks do they thing. The heavy dancers in our group would do they number and we would cheerlead or razz lead. If they got a really nice looking girl we’d line up to get a dance after them, if it wasn’t one of their special numbers. But I was as interested in looking, checking everything out, as I was in dancing. Though I would get down a few times a night.
With the brothers from Hillside Place it was not a sports thing they were into, though some could really play any sport. But they were more into a social number. Going to parties and dances and a lot of times just standing around bullshitting. We went in and out of some dark dark joints, Jim, blue light red light “rub” records on the box, and nothing but big hats all around the walls. The silhouettes was frightening. But we had strength in our collective sense. K., short and bright, who hiked people almost bad as I did. He was much like me only K. was black. R. was my walking buddy it turned out. We spent a lotta time together. He looked like Malcolm a li
ttle, red top and mariney looking skin. He stuttered when he got excited. R. and K. were the most thoughtful of the bunch. And red or not, R. was definitely black. He had two brothers who also ran with us, one older and one younger. The older one was a sweet dude but crazy as daylights. He didn’t like to argue, cause he couldn’t talk that well. So if you pressed him it was like pressing a button. And he was a Golden Glover, could knock dudes cold with a stroke.
We had a couple flakes too with that bunch, B. the worst. He was a straight-out hood, a headwhipper from the word whip. But he ran with us and half of the time we were with B. it was keeping him from mashing somebody. Especially at the canteen. You be grooving and doing the one step you knew or rubbin’ hard up against some queen of the night and look up out of the corner of your eye they’d be a disturbance and you’d see B’s mouth and teeth working usually right up in some ill-fated pilgrim’s face. I’d say, “Excuse me,” like some nut I saw in the movies and bolt over there to play Ralph Bunche. K. would usually get in on that too but sometimes he would slap B. side the head and say, “You always messing up the goddam party goddammit stop messin’ up the goddam party.” But only K. could do that and even when he did it I felt like I was watching that crazy blond dude in Ringling Bros that let the lions and shit jump on him.
Somebody had (a) stepped on B’s shoes, (b) rubbed up against B’s chick, (b) took B’s chick, (d) wanted to take B’s chick, (e) looked like he wanted to do any of the above. Or was just a Mickey Mouse-lookin’ mf.
The canteen was our world. Sundays our day to show out, to come slidin’ in in our cleanest shit. By this time I had a green Tyrolean with a feather band and a checkered swag. And I would slide in too, happy to be with my comrades, and eager to be in that world and suck it all in.