The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  Nat and his brother Billy and a couple other members of that band (like Pretty Boy F., who turned out to be a four-hundred-pound cop) went to Barringer and I knew them, but they were older and in higher grades. Nat and I even ran track together one year and got to be pretty good friends.

  All that music was at the Masonic. Some I was very familiar with and some new stuff I heard and began to dig. It was all part of the same cultural matrix to us — black from every which a way and brown plus even yellow and white translated by our main men stomping on the stage.

  K. and R. and I also did some other steppin’. We might go to Lloyd’s Manor, which had a different crowd plus some of the same folks who was at the canteen. I met Little Esther at Lloyd’s one night. She had a big hit (and she was about my age, fourteen or fifteen or so) “Double Crossin’ Blues” with Johnny Otis. Between sets I came up to her and she was foolin’ around with the bandleader’s trumpet. I wanted to say something. She had really big pretty lips, bright red, and her hair cut short and straightened. She was smiling and talking to one of the musicians. I just looked and thought, Hey, I got close to Little Esther. She and Mel Walker and Johnny Otis would sing (and I would too in those bright blue Saturdays of my teenagedom.)

  L.E.:

  You way out in the forest

  Fightin’ a big ol’ grizzly bear.

  M.W.:

  How come you ain’t out in the forest?

  L.E.:

  I’m a lady!

  M.W.:

  They got lady bears out there!

  We also went to mambo sets which were coming in about that time too. Once at Lloyd’s there were so many people mamboing you couldn’t move. We were stuck fixed in the crowd, breathing everybody’s passion. (It was also the first time I ever remember seeing what I later found out was a Puerto Rican. Two young girls near my own age, one with a blond streak in dark reddish brown hair at the corner of Belmont and Springfield, going somewhere. I didn’t even know what they were.)

  This was also around the same period my cousin George lent me (forever) some of his bebop records. I had listened to a couple in his house on Wallace Street. Then he brought some over to my house on Belmont.

  They were Guilds, Manors, Savoys (a Newark company), with groups like Charlie Parker’s Reboppers, Max Roach and the BeBop Boys, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ooopapadow,” “Hot House,” “Ornithology,” “The Lady in Red,” and waboppadapaDam! my world had changed!!

  I listened to bebop after school, over and over. At first it was strange and the strangeness itself was strangely alluring. Bebop! I listened and listened. And began learning the names of musicians and times and places and events. Bird, Diz, Max, Klook, Monk, Miles, Getz, and eventually secondary jive like Downbeat, Metronome, Feather, Ulanov, began to be part of my world and words.

  I want to explain how much bebop changed me. Not in the superficial movie way that said, look, yesterday the hero wore glasses and had a limp, today he’s whole and looks more like Ronald Colman than he did with that funny disguise. Maybe there were some changes on the top some people could peep. But mostly it was interior. I heard this different music and different ideas, different images came to me. I thought about different things.

  I was still in the Central Ward, up over the oil heater Polish couple, and could look down on Belmont Avenue weekends and see slick folks strut and drunks stagger into the Chinese restaurant for some chow mein. I was still going to the canteen on Sundays, and the National, and hanging out most times with the Hillsides, but mostly K. and R. But now some other kinds of yearnings turned me around. I wanted to go to some other kinds of places, and usually by myself. Not because I suddenly felt “estranged” from people or whatnot. But because bebop, “The Music,” had got into me and was growing in me and making me hear things and see things. I began to want things. I didn’t even know what.

  And I wasn’t even sure what the music was. Bebop. A new language a new tongue and vision for a generally more advanced group in our generation. (Though that could always be turned around by the rich and the powerful and this will be the case until the oppressed have control over their own lives!) Bebop was a staging area for a new sensibility growing to maturity. And the Beboppers themselves were blowing the sound to attract the growing, the developing, the about-to-see. Sometimes even the players was carrying out the end of another epoch as they understood it. Though they knew they was making change, opening a door, cutting underbrush and heavy vines away to make a path. And where would that path lead? That was the real question. It is the real question of each generation. Where will the path you’ve shown us lead? And who will take it?

  The sound itself. The staccato rhythm and jagged lines. The breakneck speed and “outside” quality. Joe Carroll sang “In the Land of Oobladee.” “Outside.” Strange. Weird. Weird. That word I read and heard. Weird. Thelonious. That’s a weird name. What did it mean? Why were they sounding like this? They even looked weird.

  My first hero was Diz, Dizzy Gillespie. That’s because he was the wildest. For the same reason the media picked up on Diz. I looked in Esquire (which my father used to subscribe to) and there was an article on Diz. “The High Priest of Bebop” (later I got to understand that that was Monk). The title of the article hit me. “To Be or Not to Bop.” The Shakespearean overtones, the picture magazine hype, turned me on. Diz in windowless hornrims. Also the shades and beautiful beret. I had never really looked at a beret before. We called them “tams.” And there were dudes and women who wore them. But Diz (and the magazine) provided a pique I’d never checked before. A guy down the street from me who went to Barringer named G. and I began to hang out. He was a bass player. He played with the school band and also made some of the gigs with the various teenage bands around town. He hung with with a trumpet player named Pinball who I thought was one of the hippest dudes in the world. He even had a sound like Miles.

  I had gone from piano lessons to drawing lessons to drum lessons and now I was at trumpet lessons. My mother kept throwing yellow W. in my face as someone who would stick to piano lessons. (He had an uncle who played piano occasionally for the church. He, the young uncle, was yellow with a slanted high side part, the epitome of yellow mischief as far as I was concerned. Glasses. A sort of Hollywood character actor type. Had a name like Percy, dig?)

  Bebop had brought a wind of other connections, interconnections in all directions. Like wires strung up and looping out of the Third Ward, yet that, for me, was its center, where you had to be to pick up all the communications coming in. I had a skate box, without skates as I remember, because I couldn’t really skate. Though I went to the rink a few times. But that was a social thing. Thursdays was Colored Night in those days, even in Newark. The joint was called Dreamland and other nights you’d get turned away. Those were for white kids and the joint was really in the next town, Elizabeth, and there was always talk that if you showed up the other nights not only would you be turned away but you’d get into a rumble with the white kids.

  Usually, I’d just show up down at the White Castle hamburger place on Elizabeth Avenue and check out the cars until I saw people I knew and we’d rap. I’d check the beauties and maybe see a couple of my familiar fantasies. Sometimes I’d get a ride back to Belmont, other times I had to hoof it. But it was a regular stop. The only thing I ever did pertaining to skating was paint the skate box, which was made of plain wood. I had some red sticky paint and painted Dizzy’s picture, with the bebop glasses and bebop tam and around the hopeless painting I scrawled “To Be” on top of the picture and “Or Not to Bop” underneath. I don’t even know if I took that skate box out of the house. I might have taken it to Dreamland a couple of times, I’m not sure, cause once I got into Dreamland, I’d just stand around and watch. Even when I put on skates. But that was it, I never even had skates. When I went down there I had to rent skates. So it woulda been stupid to carry the box. However, I mighta carried it.

  But I did show the picture a couple times in some context. I began to
buy records now to try to add to my core collection which was really my cousin George’s. George had also given/loaned me some “Jazz at the Philharmonic” (JATP) records. The Norman Granz production of everybody in those mostly blowing sessions that traveled around the country. Bird, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Flip Phillips. He asked me if I had any records, bop records, and up until that time I would only occasionally buy an R&B or quartet record. Like Orioles, Ravens, Honey Dripper, or Hucklebuck. I showed him my parents’ album (those four-record 78 collections) of Nat King Cole’s trio. And they was pretty hip but that was all I had.

  Everything was still 78 and very fragile. One of the first records of the new music I bought was Charlie Parker’s Repetition. I hadn’t heard it, but something I read in one of the magazines turned me on. I pored through those magazines and the mystique and the fact that they were mentioning landmark sides which I didn’t know anything about and dropping names and showing flicks and I knew nothing at all about them — except the little bit of knowledge I got from George’s present — made it seem that I was being let in, now, on something very heavy that had been going on all around me without me knowing anything.

  I had just started trying to play the trumpet and still didn’t know how to read music very well. The band I started was embarrassing in that regard, cause I had to have them play the heads over and over till I could read it, I was so slow. We wanted to play Shearing’s “September in the Rain” and a tune we’d heard Sarah Vaughan sing, “Tenderly.” That’s when we discovered that those were really the same tune.

  The alto and drums were the only really consistent members of the “band.” The bass player, G., was too advanced for us. (And of that band the bass player is a street vendor, the drummer an architect, and the altoist a commercial artist, the trumpet player does write something about the music, but he sure can’t play!) The band was a brown enterprise connected in its strongest tone to black and blue. But my mother let us play in her living room on her sacred hardwood floors. She “didn’t mind,” in fact I’m sure she was happy we was there rather than snakin’ through the streets which was pure black and blues.

  And then I was going through some other changes as I was about to leave high school. In school my grasp on the day-to-day academics had slipped altogether. Though I still got passing marks in most stuff, I had just waved my hands at stuff like algebra and just sat up in the class listening to the white boys crack jokes. The teacher we had, Mr. H., was no teacher at all but just the brunt of cruel high school First Ward jokes. The kids would sometimes curse him out in Italian or call him names consistently like “Baccala” (fish) which invariably cracked everybody up. I laughed because the others did. But I could ask V. sometimes what the Italian words meant and he would tell me. Where before I’d been much more serious and concerned about my grades and school behavior now I cared less and less.

  In fact around my junior year I’d begun to take off (play hooky) from time to time. Mostly, when there was something happening downtown at the Adams, when they had live shows. Like the whole of the Newark school system turned out for Nat King Cole. But why would they have an 11:00 A.M. show? Once they had a guy come on stage and get a rah rah session going where he said, “Everybody from Barringer,” and they’d cheer. “Everybody from Central,” and they’d cheer. “Everybody from South Side,” and they’d cheer. And so forth. And then they busted all those that raised their hands and any others they could see and made ’em go back to school.

  The bass player and I used to cut together. We lived near each other, on the same street, way cross town. But still went to Barringer. How we got over there I’ll never know. He was older than I was and was actually driving a truck. I think it was his father’s fish truck, (though I could never understand how his father could use it to sell fish if G. had it daytimes cattin’ around with us).

  But that was superhip for its time, that fish truck. A few of the selected would meet near the school and take off. Or else we’d be in school and after letting them mark us present in their homerooms we’d break, meet outside, and take off. Just the idea of riding around in that fish truck while school was going on thrilled us. We felt real big time. Though we had deep paranoia about the truant officers and our parents. Much more probably than is possible today when the truant officers are so secondary in the present “philosophy” of education that they have been fired in Newark because of budget cuts. So your child could be absent any number of days these days and you wouldn’t know it. In those days you couldn’t do that. They would be onto your case in a minute.

  We’d go the Adams, if there was a show. We’d go to other high schools’ lunchtimes and hang out. We might go to somebody’s house. For instance, G’s girlfriend Mary was living with an aunt, and the aunt would be away at work. We might pick up Pinball or Calvin, a drummer, or some other developing hipsters (later the word was “hippies,” before white youth took the word over in the late ’50s) and just breeze around being cool.

  Because if the blues and rhythm and blues especially had made us hot as blue flame, now we, in hooking up one way or another to bebop, wanted to be cool. As we got more conscious of bop we got more conscious of wanting to be cool. (The word as it was used before Chet Baker and Lee Konitz absorbed it.)

  Cool, for us, was to be there without being into nothing dumb. Like, the whole thing. The society — right? But this was an accretion, a buildup of consciousness. Though we were talking about being cool in that fish truck or when we played hooky or as we strode out of Barringer homeroom on the way outside and down to the Adams, we were being cool. We did not want to be attached to anything stupid, though in those days we did not yet understand how widespread stupidity was nor how valuable to those who ruled us.

  I got a job, my mother got me a job, really. Next door to where she was working then. The white-collar experience my mother had in the war she had used since (once the war was over and they started letting the war boom people go, especially the black [include brown] Rosie the riveters, as the slogan went). She now had a job at the community hospital as an assistant administrator (the administrator’s name was Romeo Brigs) and she got me a job, working Fridays after school and Saturdays at a grocery store next door to the hospital. After I checked out OK I began working everyday after school and all day Saturdays. It was OK with me because it was a new experience and kept a few coins in my pocket. I was making about forty-five big ones a week, which allowed me to start buying my own clothes and go the various places I was coming to decide I wanted to go and to buy my own records.

  I was a more solitary night traveler now. Though sometimes I would walk around with G. to someplace where music was playing or with a dude we called “Limes” because people thought he dressed and carried himself like Harry Limes (Orson Welles in the movie The Third Man. Limes is now a New Jersey politician and he still looks like Limes). The trombone player, Little Jay Jay, was another one of my sometimes late night walking buddies. (He was called that cause he worshiped J. J. Johnson.) Because that late night walking was more and more about music. I might meet them at one of the various places we knew where the music was being played. We were looking for bebop. The Hillside Place dudes I didn’t see as much now because they were still going to the canteen. Sometimes I would go to the canteen and see them or just go around to K. or R.’s house or they come round to mine. But they did not dig bop like I did.

  I was with G. or Little Jay Jay the night we went to the Silver Saddle on Clinton Avenue and checked Bird. It was a burst of magic to me. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a burst of magic. It was blue and pink and white (or were those the lights over the bar, which whirled around and shot spears off a globe of many refracting surfaces?). It was blue — but a blue that shattered into many unknown moods. Moods unknown to me. Different modes of thought. The playing in the bar shattered (was it the lights?), it showered me with blue and red dancing things held in blinding light. It was moods. Modes. Ones breaking into twos and
them breaking. It was a burst of magic.

  The dark crowd that night — you walk up Belmont to Avon, then turn left, go down three blocks, turn right at Hayes Circle and the Silver Saddle is right there — I couldn’t even see them clearly. They might have been one large head bouncing under the music taking it in! But the music was magical and it covered me over and turned me into myself.

  Afterwards, I was by myself now (for some reason), I came out and began walking down Clinton toward Hayes Circle and there was Bird sitting there smoking a joint with a white woman. I didn’t know that’s what they were doing because up till that time I didn’t know anything about marijuana, just as some strange reference in the magazines. The idea of heroin seemed to me some crazy jail-death idea that people wanted to down you with. I didn’t fully understand it or even what it was.

  But it was the woman who had played piano with him in the club. (I found out later her name was Lorraine Geller.) But I passed close to them and Bird was talking and Lorraine was lighting up the joint he had just handed to her. They didn’t even pause as I came close and I did not even pause though I had them fixed in my eyes and in my head as I passed, turned the corner, and went up the street. When I got a little distance up the street I turned and looked back at them and they were still smoking and talking and joking. A white woman, I thought, that’s weird!

  Saturdays I brought my trumpet to work with me. Steve, the owner, said I could take a long lunch cause that’s when I took my trumpet lessons, not far from the store, over on Springfield Avenue. And I loved the idea of walking with my trumpet, in a brown imitation leather bag I’d got that looked like the trumpet bags Diz and Miles carried. I didn’t want the hard square cases, I had what they called a “gig bag” and I tucked it under my arm and bopped those five or six blocks to Springfield and dug the idea of people looking at me thinking I was a trumpet player.