by Amiri Baraka
My father had asked me one day, “Why do you want to be a bopper?” Who knows what I said. I couldn’t have explained it then. But bebop suggested another mode of being. Another way of living. Another way of perceiving reality — connected to the one I’d had — blue/black and brown but also pushing past that to something else. Strangeness. Weirdness. The unknown!
I guess that’s what it was. The music took me places I’d never been. Literally. One night I found myself snaking through the darkness up to the Orange Armory for a dance. The dance had Larry Darnell as one part of the bill and Stan Getz as the other. I remember the fags was cuttin’ the fool with Bermuda shorts in bright plaid colors. I came in and stood in front of the stage unmoving and checked two sides of that equation out. To show the mix of the times. Getz and Max Roach had played together as part of the BeBop Boys on records. I dug Getz’s “The Lady in Red.” That wispy romantic tone. And a lot of the bebop groups were mixed in that period. Later, I even dug Stan Kenton and went down to Symphony Hall when he had his band with Art Pepper, Maynard Ferguson, Bob Graettinger, June Christy, Frank Rosolino. I bought that album which consisted of pieces named after the players, plus something of Bob Graettinger’s called “City of Glass.” And that stuff was really weird. But I dug it, for that reason, and it seemed linked to the whole experience that bop had opened up for me. The fact that they were white people meant nothing to me. What they were playing was linked to something I dug.
But my deepest experience of that period was with Miles. For me Miles was what cool meant. (And later, over the years, his various getups on the record covers, and the music that went with them, have always remained the highest explanation of that definition.) My last year or so in high school I ran into Miles’s “Venus de Milo” and “Move.” In fact all the tunes in that series of recordings he made with the big band: Max, Lee Konitz, John Lewis, J.J., Gerry Mulligan, and those tunes by Mulligan, Denzil Best, George Wallington, John Lewis, Bud Powell and Miles himself, Johnny Carisi, Cleo Henry. To me that was where the definition of “high art” began. But especially “Venus de Milo,” “Move,” and “Darn That Dream.” I liked all of the tunes and once I found out it was a whole series, I pursued all those records, which you had to get on 78s then.
The music was heavy to me almost like what they called “classical” music, which had only interested me in those terrible themes they played in the movies. I liked movie music and I dug Aaron Copland’s music “Salon de Mexico” in one of those Esther Williams MGM musicals. And somewhere I heard the “Firedance” of de Falla, but it was all in tune with the movie happenings, though I did continue to think about “Salon de Mexico” for a long time. And I’d heard and liked the popular themes from Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin the movies played.
I would be carrying packages across High Street delivering them. (There were still some white families, mostly Jewish, living then on High Street, in what were then spacious luxury apartments and some one-family houses. Some black doctors had moved in there and on a couple of streets some other links in the black middle class. But only a couple blocks away, even then, was nothing but bloods, though they were a little more mixed in with Polish Jews and Catholics.) I’d be whistling “Venus de Milo,” then “Move,” then “Darn That Dream.” I would sing “Darn That Dream.” like I was Pancho Hagood, who sounded like a hipper kind of Mr. B. to me. Cause I always dug Mr. B. and even had a couple shirts with “Mr. B.” collars earlier, around the time he was in the movies and sang “I Left My Hat in Haiti.”
I was delivering packages and singing “Darn That Dream” or hearing those wild harmonies of “Venus de Milo.” I’d hum and whistle the opening of that tune over and over. The big band weight of the music and strange harmonic voices made me think of “classical” music but it was my classical music, because it meant something to me. Something serious and personal and out there. It was weird.
The trumpet teacher I had was an Italian classicist and he had me blowing those hard round whole notes like I was playing the overture from some Italian opera or at least that’s what I thought. He was really trying to teach me to play “legitimate” trumpet, if you can dig that. But I didn’t want that. I wanted to play like Miles Davis, so I had to slide the horn to the side of my mouth sort of to try to get that sound. Because the way the trumpet teacher was teaching me, only those big old round notes would come out and I thought they were square. (Though I listened to Maynard Ferguson play those same kinds of notes. But he was playing so high up in the stratosphere the novelty of that hid the fact that he was playing the same kinds of notes as my trumpet teacher was trying to mash on me!)
When I was in grammar school I would take my father’s clothes and wear them to the Court, the late night recreation program. He must’ve known it but I guess that’s one of the trials of parenthood. His sweater and shirts and even a couple of ties I would wear, like it was secret, and then try to slip them back in his closet when I came home on Dey Street.
They bought clothes for me at Larkey’s (where a friend worked and they could get deals) and Ripley’s which leaned a little toward Hollywood. They used to have a store in Newark with palm trees sitting outside like it was Hollywood and I went in there too.
In high school my ideas must’ve changed somewhat. I know by the time I got a high school letter, the big one, I had on a red corduroy jacket to go with the white “B” sweater. But earlier in high school some guy had made fun of me for wearing a green sweater and blue pants. My clothes thing was fairly scrambled up.
In the canteen I’d got, I mentioned, the checkered “swag” coat we called it (a single-breasted English type overcoat with slit pockets). The green Tyrolean, I guess both of these were influences of my peers, and the peacock band I saw somewhere. I know. I was reading Esquire because my father subscribed to it for a long time. And I looked at the fashions and as I got older began to try to buy some of the things. I know that’s where I saw Dizzy and the Esquire jazz polls which dropped all those names I picked up.
It’s complex though. I did not just leave out of The Hill or up off it. The Masonic and the house parties and the Hillside Placers and the yellow mob plus white high School Barringer all continued to have some influence. For instance grey flannel was being talked about. That’s what college dudes was beginning to wear, so spake the whatever that I picked up, maybe it was Esquire. So I went where those of us who was hip on The Hill had our clothes made, Wohlmuth’s, and had a grey flannel suit made. The only thing was that it was a Hill suit with twenty-two-inch bottoms. (The style on The Hill was bellbottoms at the time.) I remember a girl at the Jones Street Y say it was a “black wool” suit. But she said it was a hip suit, a hip black wool suit. It was a black suit, dig it?
I went to a Howard-Lincoln basketball game for some reason at the Newark Armory and checked out those people. I was a little kid, by myself. Knowing no one, really, though there were some folks there I thought I dug. And something about that was really hip, but something else about it was disturbing. I was going to the Golden Gloves matches up there by myself and the basketball game was OK too, my parents seemed to approve.
I saw white bucks being worn. And I’d read (again, Esquire?) that that’s what college kids were wearing. And also that they wore them dirty. Dirty? That was weird. But I bought a pair. And a couple of corny people remarked on the white shoes how dumb they were. (They bought them a year or so later and wore them until they really were dumb!) One Negro, B.P., a yellow stuck-up nee-grow from way back (he was a cheerleader for Barringer briefly till he gave that up and began driving the library truck which was some uppity shit for bloods in them days. The first nee-grow cheerleader was, yes, from yellow headquarters, and never spoke that I knew of. He ran on white approval, much like Jeckie Raw-bean-son. He was soft, like a pudgy yellow mistake. And only made sounds when cheering, “Gimme A, B,” etc., clapping with pudgy little yellow paws) actually took the lead in kicking dirt on the shoes. He thought it would make me mad. What made me mad wa
s the idea that this turkey would kick dirt on my shoes. But the result was what I really desired. At least I knew that was supposed to be hip, so I didn’t really mind. In fact I treated it like they were just doing work for me, saving me the work, of having to dirty them myself. I even ran around the track with them after school at track practice to show the stupid buggers that I wanted them dirty. And what was so satisfying was that these very dudes was the kind of stiff five-and-ten-cent Ivy Leaguer types who a few years later would have to have them a pair of such shoes.
I began to go to a store on Raymond Boulevard. A kind of English store the likes of which are found no more in Newark, obviously, but maybe still exist in some of these wealthy Connecticut or New York towns. With saddles and riding boots and crops for decoration, cloth laid about. Very traditional and English and it impressed the hell out of me. That was a new world, too. And the clothes now I began to buy out of that mold. The English conservative clothes that the Ivy tradition is the natural extension of. I guess what was called Ivy League was the commercial surface of the older English and Eastern school tradition.
The son of the owner was there every day and I would stare in awe at his oxford flannel pants and red belts and plain-toed shoes and button-down blue shirts and paisley ties. I would stare around the store in amazement at the very hip clothes. Some I’d only heard described that now I saw.
It was part of the coolness the music conveyed to me. And it was a vector from black and blues with veins, tributaries going all directions. We were cool because we were not “country,” not first generation. We’d been up here and dug what it was and we could sound like we had been up here and knew what was going on. The hot quality of R&B we dug, but we translated that into frantic I guess because that described us to ourselves and what we sounded like. Frantic. In sharp endless motion. But even frantic was cool in the blues sense. Because weird, frantic, hip, cool all meant to be other than that which was everywhere perceived deadly in its dead-end of day-to-day horrible American reality. The life of America that it talked about in the movies and on the radio was one thing, there was some imagination and vision, some honesty in that, but that was not American life. The dead end of American life meant that you could go nowhere. It was nowhere. It was not sharp (what the Egyptians called the “Angle of Success”), it was blunted, going nowhere, square. What the Egyptians called the “Angle of Failure.” And we perceived most of these things only semiconsciously.
Our cool, which went hand in hand with bop (not the later commercial definition), meant other than regular America — we were not in gangs, we were not loud and unruly, we did not want to get sweaty and still be frustrated (when just a minute ago we were sweaty as we could get under Lynn Hope and Big Jay McNeely). We still might go up to parties and dance to Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” and that was in us, but even in those sanctums we was cool, we moved through those blue lights under those red lights trying to sidestep the ugliest parts of our American ghetto reality.
We did not want to be beat up by headwhippers or have our hats blocked by the Dukes or Geeks. We did not want to get some little girl “jail bait” pregnant and end up tied to our mutual frustration; we did not want to fail school or get thrown out or have to go get a job and just work. We did not want to be from the South or be so poor people felt sorry for us or talked bad about us. Where I was comin’ from, the brown side, we just wanted to keep steppin’. The black had shaped us, the yellow had taunted us, the white had terrified and alienated us. And cool meant, to us, to be silent in the face of all that, silent yet knowing. It meant knowledge. It meant being smart, intelligent too. So we hooked up the weirdness and the intelligence. Dizzy’s hornrim bebop glasses, the artist’s tam, these spelled some inner deepness to us. It was a way into ourselves further, and sometimes because we went into ourselves, we seemed quiet on the street.
But throughout my life, our lives, there is music. And for me our attachment to it is one deep definition of who we are and where we think we’re going. Bop was deep in its connections, its frantic side its cool side. Flame itself has different colors. The old blues, spirituals, quartets, and rhythm and blues, the jazz and bebop plus the multicolored pop, the identifiable American flying object — like Martin Block or movie and stage music (I could even speak to what we called “hillbilly” when I got in the air force and collective ignorance — my own included — was used to torture me). All this and there is a beyond we already know about, from here, all this has made its mark, is shaping and has shaped a world and complex interconnections within that world. They cannot be exclusive, yet we are “hung on a line” (as Chas. Olson said), somewhere or everywhere these collectively or singly or however we perceive them, are located. We know people by what moves them, what they use as background sounds for their lives, whatever they seem to be. We are talking about feeling and thought, emotion, aesthetics, and philosophy (and science). We will investigate all of them to one extent or another.
Four
Howard (Black Brown Yellow White Continued)
I got a couple of scholarship offers through the cotillion. One was a four-year scholarship to Seton Hall, something else to Holy Cross, and a two-year scholarship to Rutgers Newark. I also got an offer, as a result of a test I took at the Y, for a two-year scholarship to Lincoln. A couple of these offers were even in the colored papers.
I decided I didn’t want to go to Seton Hall (or Holy Cross) because I wasn’t interested in religion. (Though, for some reason, much later I was to tell people that I once wanted to study religion!?) But I had the good sense then at least to nix the religious aggression. Some of the people I’d met at cotillion practice did accept those holy assignations. A doctor, a politician, a schoolteacher were the result and perhaps the conversion of a girl I knew’s brother to become a priest, a few years later.
I suppose the cotillion was some preparation for me going to college. Those were the people that made me focus on that more than I ever had before. The cotillion hookup was brown children for the most part (with both black and yellow connections) being readied for yellow farm. The underlying animation was definitely yellow with the necessary white blessing. Not just Mrs. B., who ran the thing, she was a light-skinned social worker-teacher, a frantic do-gooder who sped around rooms almost tearing her hair she so much wanted all of us to be somebody.
There was a dullness to these proceedings that stunned me and made it obvious to me that whatever this represented I wanted no part of it. We practiced waltzing and marching. And kids from Morton Street would be looking through the windows, under the shades, and sometimes banging on the windows. And after practice we went home in groups and I ended up walking with one group all the way into Clinton Hill, where blacks were beginning to move now in large numbers.
My partner in the practice was a slightly plumpish, oddly taciturn brown girl named Betty, who apparently had made a deal with another girl, a friend of hers whose partner I was at first, to switch up. And so we became partners, walked home together with the group, once or twice a week. And later she was my partner at the cotillion. But these partnerships in the cotillion did not necessarily mean that those two were “going together.”
In my mind, at that time I was going with D., the little light-skinned advertisement for sitting quietly in living rooms on one’s best behavior. It was her long brown mother I watched very carefully. But I assumed that I would be taking D. to the cotillion. But, as usual, the day-to-day contact with brown Betty took its toll. I found myself, on leaving after dropping her off, up across the tracks on Jeliff Avenue, wanting to kiss her and one night I did.
From D.’s friend, who was also in the cotillion, I began to hear that D. had got a special dress for this set and was wondering why I hadn’t yet asked her. Actually I was just shy, but I did think that we would be going.
From Betty’s friend, who walked with us in the group to their house after practice, I also found out that Betty thought I would eventually be more than just her partner at the off
icial part of the cotillion, and I was moving closer and closer to asking her.
I had never before had such troubles. Not from my closemouthed perspective to the various subjects of my would-be amour. When I was little I had great numbers of instant loves easily forgotten. On the real side, one little girl sent me a note to meet her at the movies. But she didn’t show up. Another brown beauty with glasses she used to grin behind told me she “liked” me and I started walking her home to Baxter Terrace and we squeezed up in the hallway kissing. I thought I went with her too but then some rogue knocked her up and tearfully we took our leave. There’d been some little-boy attempts to rock and roll with a couple of brown girls and a few black ones too, but they were surprisingly minimal. I was young, I guess, even when I thought I was in full control of my senses.
But the Betty and D. thing I’d never been in before. Now, from a loose and quick-moving blue brown wraith of Belmont Avenue (and points in all directions) I found myself caught up in some stuff I didn’t even properly understand. The D. thing was dry and staid, like I said. Though it maybe could have been otherwise, had I been otherwise. But I was as what went on in these pages (and a buncha other things) had made me.
Finally, I think I took D. to the cotillion. Though Betty and I were still dance partners in the grand march, so called. When I told Betty a week or so before the cotillion that I was taking D., her face got pulled tight, her eyes rolled around like fire would come out of them. And when I left I could hear her crying.
I came home after the cotillion with D. and sat in her kitchen. My black bow tie untied, I talked and pretended I was drunk (I had had something in some Coca-Cola, probably Seagram’s Seven or some other abomination) and talked and talked, feeling daring in a way. But I never even made a real pass at her. A week or so later, Betty and I started sleeping with each other. It was my first time, on the real side. We made it on her couch mostly, after the family was asleep. But any and everywhere else we could. I think I might have talked to D. maybe another time or two several years later, when Betty and I had split. But for a long time, up into college, Betty and I were a well-advertised duet.