by Amiri Baraka
What was different was that I was there, with them, in a higher grade than some, though we were generally the same age. I was there with them. In whatever this was. And I didn’t know what it was. I was trying to find out, trying to see myself clearly, find a place for my feet to go down solid on.
As the “Jersey boys” grouping came together and its various departments from other states, Bill and I roomed together. One of the same Sutter boys who’d come swooping in in the bicycle raid to bomb us flat. Bill was a good guy, just a fraction of an inch taller than I but thick and muscular, a solid 140 pounds or so. My mother wondered did his mother feed him vitamins. That was in the days when vitamins were new and still had mystical advertising qualities. “Carrie must feed that boy vitamins the way he’s growing.” But she put it in a question as if it was something clandestine. And that was the only reason he was thicker and more muscular than her son. I was short and skinny and even though they came from families with taller, larger people, my mother and father were short and slight, in those days, as well. But I guess that didn’t occur to her at that moment.
Bill was an athlete, even short as he was. He was a football player and baseball player. In college, most colleges, football is the most holy of all athletics and the football players are regarded with the awe once reserved for the mendicants of the sacred orders. The Dragon Slayers and Crusaders, the rescuers of fair maidens. (And the unfair too, I found out.)
It meant that the room we had together became a kind of center. Bill the athlete, and the rest of the crowd that I hung with. So we had the football and baseball players there plus the sulky little mob I belonged to. This did not happen immediately, but it represents the most typical arrangement of myself there at HU. One highlight of my integration into that society, whatever that meant.
The room got to be called “The Boys Club” and I put a sign on the door: “13 Rue Madeleine,” which was the name of a Jimmy Cagney movie — Gestapo headquarters in the film. Perhaps the name meant to me some kind of subversive relationship to the whole — to the ideas I thought the school had of itself.
I was a member of the mob, of really great guys, in the sense of those times. We were great bullshitters (a trait I apparently appreciate), and we spent hours, months, years, sitting around bullshitting. And in the mob were my closest friends at the school. We thought of ourselves as city boys, somehow sophisticated, for all our youth.
The New Yorkers were the coolest and most sophisticated, we thought, I guess because they were from New York and that was the relationship Jersey had with New York and especially Newark to New York City. We thought they were among the coolest dressers. One of the coolest of the cool was a dude named “Smitty from the City,” who was for us the epitome of what school cool meant. Well dressed, “dap,” “clean,” “hooked up,” “down” were some of our words for what Smitty was. (He became an air force officer and later a dentist.) Smitty was around us, lived on the same floor, bullshitted with us, but Smitty was older and into some other things than the mob core. But he was one example we followed.
The dudes from Chicago we felt were the cleanest finally. Though they did not always, not all of them, show it. But they had, it seemed to us, the heaviest vines. The first time I ever peeped desert boots was on one of them dudes and it shot me out. What the hell are those, I thought, and immediately felt primitive because I’d never seen them before. Cashmere sweaters. This one dude Kurt had about five or six and another dude, Stone, had about ten of them! (There are probably white boys in some of these schools got thirty, but wouldn’t nobody hip go to those schools in the first place!)
Dress, style, those were some of our standards. How you dressed and how you carried yourself was a big part of it. Though what you had to say, I guess, went with how you carried yourself. Were you “cool,” “down,” or were you corny or “flait” (a Howard word which meant worse than corny, of no value, worthless, etc.)? A couple of dudes in the mob were not especially good dressers but they were “heavy,” meaning smart, and had a good rap. So they were in. Though sometimes the slicker cats would get on them about the way they looked. If they were too way out and still wanted to hang, they were the butt of unmerciful unending taunts.
We had our own language, on campus generally, but inside the group there was a sharper focus to it. Some of the stuff was even made up by us. Pretty girls were “phat,” pronounced “fat,” ugly ones were “bats.” We would even go to elaborate metaphors to let people know what we thought about their companions if they wasn’t up to snuff. We’d call somebody with an ugly girl “Bruce Wayne” (meaning Batman) or say something smart like “He the cat be with Robin all the time.” Or we’d make flapping motions with our arms like a bat flying when they approached. Or go up to the cat while he was with this unlucky child and say, “How do you do, Mr. Wayne, I’m a reporter from the Daily Planet.” The dude might just get embarrassed or get pissed off. But mob members took it as just our way of being with each other.
Really ugly girls (or objectionable people) we’d “blow up.” We’d make motions like we were throwing a grenade. I developed a variation on that which was to walk up to the person and make believe I was putting a wire in their hand or on their person, then retreat a few feet and make mashing down motions like I was pushing a detonator box. This was big in our circle. We would even “throw grenades” at teachers. Or we might go up toward the front to throw a piece of paper in the wastebasket, make the “contact,” then go back to our seats and blow the whole front of the classroom to kingdom come.
Something great was “way,” meaning past merely “too much” (the standard applause), but “way too much,” which was shortened to “way.” Oh, man, it was “way”! People could be “heavy,” meaning really bright or good in school or generally intelligent, or they were “light,” meaning they had nothing upstairs but the wind rustling through the trees. Woolright’s standard putdown of such people was that they were “lightweights.” He’d say, “All you lightweight cats gonna get run outta that valley.” The “valley” was just down a flight of stone stairs from the main campus where the physics and chemistry buildings were housed. One knew you had to be heavy to be in the valley. If you wasn’t, you would soon “punch out,” which meant flunk out of school.
Woolright was an austere, acerbic little dude who was a main part of our mob. He was not a great or flashy dresser but he was very very heavy. Plus he had a black background from Philly, a scholarship student who later had trouble passing the bar because of a slight juvenile record from gang bopping in the city of brotherly love.
Woolright was like a commentator of the mob’s doings, always slightly amused but never releasing more than a mere mirthless chuckle. He was a good man, very straight and trustworthy. Our conversations were like ironic exchanges, with Woolright (who was small himself, just about the same size as I was) calling me “this little cat.”
The footballers who edged into the mob on the fringes, really because of my roommate, came up with some of our language. “Over you” meant to hell with you, loosely. “Up your chest” meant you had been defeated verbally, in some activity or in some commentable way. That could be embroidered sometimes to “up your chest for ten yards” or “over you for a TD.” “Over you’s” and “Up your chest’s” were sprinkled liberally in all our conversations.
Plus one of the mob, a guy from Upstate New York, introduced a method of speaking which also caught on. He would say, “It’s me saying” or “It’s him saying” or “It’s me thinking” and we picked that up. He also called people suspected of or jokingly teased about fucking homosexuals “Dick Brown” for obvious reasons.
So we might sound like this: “It’s me saying that my man over here, the lightweight dude with the funny sky [hat], is nothing but Bruce Wayne disguised as Bruce Wayne. Now if you wanta see some phat babes, it’s you checking me out, as all the babes I have on my arm, Jim, are phat and way way too much.”
It was a campus argot mixed with the language of th
e black streets with the spice of the jazz musician. The core of that mob was like this. Woolright, I talked about. Donny, also from Philly, another heavy dude from a browner background, but he and Woolright were old friends before school. Donny was always thought the heaviest of our crowd. He was in chemistry and went on to become a doctor. He was curly-haired and always smiling. A guy who never got angry, straight and true.
Shorty, from the city, even shorter than I was and distinctive not only because he was always “clean” and had a little dough, but because he tried never to tell the truth, about anything, no matter how small. The dough he got from his old man, who was a gangster (on the real side, though he always embroidered his activities), he spent quickly and steadily. He was like the jester of the group in one sense but everybody liked him and he was a legitimate part of the mob. The only thing is that all of us got to know him better than to believe him.
Rip Day, from Newark, I’d seen maybe at some games in Baxter Terrace. He had cousins that lived there. I think he lived up the street somewhere, but I didn’t know him until I got at school. He was the “superstar” of the group, in his terms. Most of us thought he was a blowhard, full of shit, and not really a nice guy in the final go-down. A self-centered, grasping individual who was big and strong enough to threaten most of us, though we agreed he was corny. The dialogue that went on among us, between he and we, about how great he was and how corny we thought he was, was the unending background music of our collective relationship.
C.D. (the initials were his name), from North Carolina, later a little no-horse town in Virginia. He’d first shown up on the campus with highwater pants and a Mickey Rooney hat with the brim pinned up in front. I’d thrown the hat in the reservoir because it was obvious that if C.D. was going to hang with our mob he couldn’t do it with that sky. He was our archetype of a country boy, but in a few months he’d gone through some kind of thorough change, for the most part, though even as clean as C.D. attempted to get over the years, we would never let him forget how country he had been. And even when he did jump into our version of Ivy League, there would always be something about C.D. that was just a little off or sticking out.
We had our first argument about who was the best tenor player in jazz, Charlie Ventura or Charlie Parker, but he painfully recanted that and later used that as an example of how far he’d come in his sophistication process. C.D. was perhaps my closest friend on that campus. Certainly he was one of the longest-lived, though I still see Shorty even today, but he is much changed as well, for the better.
But C.D. also became a writer, though at the time he was pre-law. In fact C.D. and I later were among those few students at Howard that the great Sterling Brown taught something about African American music in a series of unofficial classes in the Cook Hall dormitory. At that time, Howard still did not admit nigger music to its campus. I think the first jazz to get on in an official concert was Stan Kenton. (AAAAHHHHGGGGGGG!!!!!!) Shit, I was liking Gerry Mulligan and them and Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond when I was at Howard. Along with Lloyd Price and Claude McPhatter. “Work With Me, Annie” and “Annie Had a Baby” etc. A dude used to walk around in the hallways of Clark Hall and make up words for Buzzy that went: “Better get yourself a white girl, a colored girl ain’t no good.” That kind of stuff was always being shot at us.
For this reason and others with our background, what constituted “the intellectual life” was always complex and unclear. C.D., for instance, went high up into the Howard Players, whose plays I think I went to only once the whole time I was on campus. I thought they were just in some yellow shit, some sideways upside-down shit I didn’t have no use for. But then when I was in school, the idea that I might be an intellectual never occurred to me. Not really.
C.D. got in the goddam Howard chorus, too, the one hundred famous colored voices. The high point of their number was the choral part of Beethoven’s Ninth, which they got sent up to NYC to sing. I thought all of that was boring, not to mention corny. In fact, like I said, the only thing I know I did a lot of at school was sit around and bullshit. Tell jokes, lie, insult people, and try to get out of schoolwork. I learned to drink at school, to smoke cigarettes, and something else a little deeper but then I wasn’t even aware of that part of it.
I sat up in some heavy folks’ classes, too. Sterling Brown. The music classes were something intimate and wonderful to me. He was opening us up to the fact that the music could be studied and, by implication, that black people had a history. He was raising the music as an art, a thing for scholarship and research as well as deep enjoyment. Brown’s music classes were the high point of my “formal” Howard education. Almost everything else of value I learned outside my classes.
Nathan Scott, in a humanities class, gave me something, too. Not in the actual materials that he taught (though I did go back to some of them because of him) but in the enthusiasm of his teaching. He seemed actually to dig what he was teaching, to love it. Brown’s taking us into another context outside any provided by the school showed his love of us and of the material. But Nathan Scott’s preaching about Dante conveyed an intellectual love for literature that I hadn’t seen. It was like some minister pushing us toward Christ, but Scott was pushing us toward Dante Alighieri. And it was directly due to this that I later went back to Dante to read what I was able.
Miss Byrd taught us social science and whapped us cross the knots with Fichte and Kant and Hegel. She was OK, some of that obviously got through, without me even knowing it. She always looked like she had just woke up and that in itself was intriguing.
There was a Mr. McSweet (not his real name) who taught biology and who the mob (or prominent members of it, me, Bill, and Tony) almost drove crazy. Sometimes I feel sorry for this man even today. He was from Mississippi and a junior teacher not at Howard too long. And he had a Mississippi accent that we would wreak havoc with, especially in the kind of intolerant hippy elitism that I was being baked in there. I would stand up and repeat his name the way he pronounced it (Mac-Swe-at) and ask him some inane question. Like he pronounced intestines “in-test-eynes.” I would ask him, “Mr. Mac-Swe-at, what is an in-test-eyne??” Wide-eyed and cold as a brandished penknife. The class would crack up. He was so put upon by us that he told the three of us that we would most likely fail, that the highest mark we could get even if we got an A on the final would be a C. He was tired of being mocked. But we went into the office through an open window and stole the test, took it back to the dormitory, showed it to the mob members, then returned it. The next day in the test I finished so fast and looked up at McSweet, he knew something was up. He looked at me with real pain in his eyes. Goddam you, Jones, he was thinking. He said, “Mr. Jones, how is it you have finished so soon?”
“I studied, Mr. McSweet.” I softened the mockery because we had beat his ass to ribbons now. I got an A, the two others got B’s in the final, so he gave us a C and couldn’t flunk us after all. That’s the real shit I was learning.
In the mob was Lattimer, who walked around like a sharp maestro, always carrying his trumpet on campus. He was one of my first real friends, a music major from Virginia. Quiet and a good sport, who threw jibes, though soft ones, with the rest of us. He became a dentist, dropping music in his last year.
Lee, the artist from East Orange. A yellow boy with a yellow pretty sister we never ceased to tease him about. Though sometimes he would pick up his omnipresent umbrella and chase us down the halls. Lee was super-cool, so cool it almost turned into its opposite. We were close. And it was he who called Tony “Hollywood,” to capture that neon sididdy attitude Tony always had, even amongst us. I mean, Tony was a snob even when dealing with us. And there were dudes among us who came from families that had much more money than Tony’s. But with Tony it was a built-in attitude he’d probably been taught since his early days. He was from Douglass-Harrison, and his family lived in a tiny apartment where they had to fold down the “front room” (colored folks’ living room) bed every evening so Tony would have a plac
e to sleep. But still he was “Hollywood.” His nose in the air, loping across the campus with a bowlegged strut, a cold-blooded elitist. So much so we openly called him on it. But Tony never changed or even explained, that was the way he was and we took it or took it. We talked about him, but took it, nevertheless.
Stone from Chi, who carried scotch in his big briefcase. His family owned shrimp stores on Chicago’s South Side, and he was always superclean even if he looked like he was about to come apart. Cashmere, desert boots, expensive tweed coats. But an open bad-mouthed two-fisted drinking dude. You just couldn’t rely on Stone if you wanted something serious carried out. We lived together in an apartment in the city in our junior year and I had to speed home once a week after a late philosophy class to catch him before he spent up the allotment his parents sent him. He was told to buy food but he would buy alcohol. That’s what he called it, “alcohol.” “You boys want any alcohol?” and he’d go in his briefcase. When you got to the spot the icebox would be loaded with alcohol. But all there’d be to eat would be hot dogs and those waffles you put in the toaster. And we didn’t even have a goddam toaster.
Kurt, also from Chi, short and intense, another pre-law. He and Stone always argued, because they were childhood friends. Kurt I stayed with later when I was in Ilinois in the service. When I visited Chi on the weekends, I would crib at Kurt’s place. He was a good friend, reliable, hot-headed (and I liked that). He took care of his school business but it was never a problem that caused him not to be able to hang out. His father was a lawyer too.