The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  That was most of them. Me, Bill, Tony, Shorty, and Stone roomed together one year and that was wild and focused our lives together, perhaps more tightly for a time than the others, but these guys were our dormitory crew.

  Some of us were in pre-law or government. Some in pre-med, pre-dent, some were taking just general courses, trying to figure out what kind of degree. I was taking, as I said, pre-med, a chemistry major. But I didn’t care nothing at all about that. So school was not the worst of my worries on the real side, although it clearly should have been.

  It was a brown mob — I guess — really. That was still the stance from which I tried to understand and be in motion in America. (To the extent I understood that.) But look! C.D.-petty bourgeois/father a lawyer — yellowish. But Donny was a little smarter than that. He fell for certain doofdum but he could make fun of it, look at the whole of that, even his father’s little country squire bullshit (in really nowheresville) as essentially comic.

  Anyway, Donny was brown and black, from Philly’s urban twist. And Woolright, black dude, scholarship-cunning to try to deal with America, USA! Bill, more yellow than brown, and Tony the same. This ain’t got to deal with skin color, exclusively — Tony was darker than me, skinwise!

  Lee, straight yellow (on the rambunctious side), his brown quality — and so there’s a blue side to that.

  Shorty, the criminal as middle class. If you mix black and yellow what do you get?

  Our internal villain, Rip, was a penniless yellow. The worst kind. All grimace and illogic with the merest civil servant’s economic base upon which to base his wild antisocial acts and ideas.

  Kurt and Stone, the Chi connection, the middle middle and even the pitiful small capitalist himself. Hey, if we had called Stone an “upper-class Negro,” he woulda grinned and said, “Look, Leee-Roy, kiss my ass!”

  We were not inside the rumble of crazy Negro yellow Crazy. The stiff middle-class lie. We were touched, some bashed-smashed-ruined by it, but in the mob, our collective sense stared that shit down and laughed at it.

  Johnny Jackson and Ned Smythe, two footballers who ran in on us noondays with my roommate, were brown kids from D.C. “D.C. boys” we called them, though that had real meaning only with the big hat wearer of S.W. And maybe Johnny was connected blacker too and came out on a scholarship tip. Though HU was playing “Ivy” and pretended not to give athletic scholarships. But they did, some kinda way.

  (I had a track coach named Hart at Howard, reminds me now of Malcolm, those glasses and penetrating stare — ironic smile. He’d say, “Jones, I don’t know if you really want to be an athlete. You don’t want to work hard enough.”)

  We even had connections with gorillas like Tippy Whittington the all-star fullback who rumor said had been at Howard ten years. He’d come in the room from time to time with his stiff-necked growling pronouncements. The other footballers joked about him and imitated his noncommunicative speech.

  But it was a brown mob. Connected to reality, to black life, and the blues. You see, Howard itself was a blinding yellow. So eye-melting some out people might say “white” and try to mash it on the Capstone. (That’s what some of them dead yellow MF’s had thought of to call it, “The Capstone of Negro Education.” Boy, we mocked the shit out of that.) It reeked of it, that stiffness and artificiality, that petty bourgeois Negro mentality! And the top-upper Negroes is in on that, too.

  We could define ourselves by where we’d come from. The teeming black cities. A whole other thing the “urban” shit defined.

  So in a sense we stalked the campus as city boys connected to direct agonies of the black streets. (Though when we spun the combinations to the doors of our houses and went in off those streets, we were somewhere else.)

  The geographic hookup was a social hookup. The jibes we used to throw at “South” and “country.” Even on big money, big shoe, big hat Texas friends, we talked about funny for coming from outside the urban thing. Though that wasn’t always altogether true.

  All black schools have more peasants’ and workers’ children in them, though except for the very small schools, it is the yellow and brown sectors of the petty bourgeoisie that constitute their majority.

  We had a sense of ourselves as being something other than the mainstream HU student, too. Even with the couple a buzzards we had in our group. The nuts were nuts because of their pretension. Not money. The really rich dudes did not hang with us nor we with them. Though Stone was the black bourgeoisie, in brown smoked glasses wobbling across campus with his bag of tipsy-getter. But Stone was cool. His problem (ain’t it?) is that he wanted to spend all his little bitta money on the wrong shit! Shit, Stone, we need somethin’ to eat! Not just no “alcohol.”

  We were kind of like outlaws in a way. Neither school nor mainstream HU yellow-ass social functions were our real thing. (Though most of the dudes hung with us did get out in the normal way without “punchin’ out” like your reporter!) Our real thing was hanging out, bullshittin’ — talking bad to each other and about everything else.

  “Shit, this funny-lookin C.D. and his homeboy Wilsey.” (Woolright talking typically one afternoon.) “Y’all is so funny lookin’, it’s a wonder they even let you on this campus. Funny lookin’ dudes.”

  “Woolright say your mama funny lookin’ too.” (Shorty agitatin’.)

  “Woolright, how you gonna call somebody funny lookin’?” (C.D. countering.) He laughs loud so everyone will get his point.

  Woolright goes over and pinches C.D.’s big schnozzola. “Look at this big schnozzola. Colored people don’t have big schnozzolas like that, C.D. Who gave you this Jimmy Durante smellin’ machine?” (Woolright cappin’ — we howlin’.)

  Donny: Who got the wine?

  Me: You can’t drink no wine!

  Donny: Woolright can. I’m his manager.

  All: A wine drinkin’ contest. Get the wine. Get the wine!

  And so to work. There were bid-whist freaks (some for poker, some bridge, but mostly freaks for real). Day and night and weekends and holidays. Chess dudes we thought of as visitors. But we didn’t play none of that shit heavy. A poker and blackjack game occasionally. But even that shit was too much effort. You had to pretend to be serious to play. And the dudes that was serious about bid-whist we talked bad about. A fuckin’ bid-whist freak!

  We wasn’t in no mock-serious, artificial, school-time shit nor the unofficial official extracurricular stiff shit of the yellow peril. At first I did go to a few dances. You had to get “tight in the collar” for real — black tie. Some dudes wore white tie, tails, to the shit. Various frats and sororities giving their stiff funny shit. Naming various “queens” and super-Negroes to reign over that banana republic.

  But the glamour of that shit ran out for me pretty quick, plus the other problems I had — like who was I gonna take, and whatnot. (A Jack Scott phrase — the same guy who gave us “It’s me saying,” etc.)

  All of that was part of the fraternity-sorority hype in which we were all involved — at one degree of brainwash or another. Greeks! We wanted to be Greeks! Alpha, Kappa, Omega-AKA-Delta, and the rest.

  Our mob were not real frat types (except for Tony and Rip) but some of us kinda drifted into one or another, we even took some sides around the shit. But it was never a passion for any of us. Most of the frat dudes were assholes as far as we were concerned. All that rah-rah shit. The Alpha sentiment, in the main, touched our group. That’s because there were bunches of Alphas from Jersey on campus. And they had a considerable influence.

  I tried out for the shit the first part of my junior year and flubbed. For one thing, so-called big brothers banging on our doors or the door to 13 Rue were met with a variety of responses, mostly negative. They’d be coming in to get some note and try to order new pledges around. In Alpha, the new pledges were called Sphinxes. And me, Bill, Tony, Allan Shorter (Wayne’s brother) because we were older had pledged and were officially Sphinxes. The name had to do with some of their secret ass rituals and being inducted
, which was characterized as “crossing the burning sands”!

  A dude named Skeffton came into Rue one night. After we open the door, about six of us inside, we see this reject-lookin’ motherfucker. He was a third-string defensive lineman on the football team, even though one of his arms was withered.

  Skeffton snorts, my roommate wasn’t there was the first answer he got. He snorts again, looking sterile, inamicable, around at our good-for-nothing faces. Like I said, most of us didn’t play on any of the teams (though I was on the track and cross-country teams), wasn’t in this dude’s accepted social whirl — that being the aroma of cheese back behind the mousetrap — so he feels, what with him being a “big brother,” not vaguely but distinctly superior. So he says, to nobody in particular, but actually to me because I was the only Sphinx in the room, “I need something from the D.C. Donut Shoppe.” D.C. Donut Shoppe was all the way downtown around them government buildings and shit. All them dudes in the room, their eyes light up like somebody flipped a switch and they all peepin’ over at me.

  I told him I had a sore foot or sore knee or had a stomach hurtin’ or something, but I wasn’t goin’ to the D.C. Donut Shoppe. But these dudes in the room couldn’t let well enough alone, they start agitatin’. Like, Woolright with his shit, “Hey, man,” to the lame “Ain’t this little cat over here supposed to be your little brother, a pledge and stuff?” Dimwitted Skeffton is getting more heated up. C.D. throws in some stuff. Donny comes in with some stuff. Skeffton still rising.

  Finally he peeps, “So you ain’t goin’ to the D.C. Donut Shoppe?” That seemed obvious before. “Well, you know payback is hard, right, Jones? You gonna get yours.” Then he turns and stalks out the room. All these dudes start howlin’, but somehow it was not that funny to me. But fuck him, is all I could say. I definitely was not going to no D.C. Donut Shoppe in the middle of the night.

  The frat, not just that one, but all of them, had a collection of creeps no doubt. There were some real lulus in the Alphas, but I’m knowledgeable just about them. The Omegas and Kappas had some easily identifiable nuts you could spot without even having to rub up against them too tough. But Henry Lucas, for instance, Reagan’s new star knee-grow from California. He was the president of the Alphas when I was coming through. This dude wore a three-piece suit to school everyday. I never saw Henry Lucas on that campus, or anywhere else, without being totally “pressed.” He had that stiff goofus quality about him, very formal and mirthless with a gigantic set of lips that must have distressed so turned-around a dude as he. When he saw me he would say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon, Jones.” He always called me “Jones” like at Barringer. In all the years we knew each other on that campus we might have said a paragraph to each other. And even then when I saw him it was like seeing somebody official. Lucas was stiffer than even the professors and everybody called him by both his names, Henry Lucas, not one or the other.

  That goddam Tim Bodie, who is now a three-star general in the air force, he was in there too. But he was a much nicer dude, though he was an ROTC freak even then. But Tim would laugh with you. He was an upperclassman but you see where that ROTC shit could lead.

  There was a football player, a Kappa, Andy Chambers, who was a pretty popular dude on campus, he’s a goddam admiral. I could rattle off a bunch more, not just frat dudes, although I bet these top-flight American warrior types were all frat dudes. But HU filled some of the needed spaces for yellow bellies. If you look and see how many of the chosen coloreds sashaying through America with “good jobs” you’ll find the HU kids personable and finally in the shit after all.

  Probably even psychopaths like Harry Johnston, Leon Harris, Don Bradford are hooked up somewhere. As a matter of fact I know Harris is a big-time dentist not far away in one of the suburbs, Johnston is also some kind of doctor (both these dudes were officers in the service for a while), and Bradford is some kind of bureaucrat in city hall, which was one constant hookup for folks like these. But these guys were all jangle-brained. Johnston, a light-skinned dude with a white streak down his chin like George Macready, he liked to torture people coming into the frat. He called himself a torturer. He would think of different ways to inflict pain on people.

  Harris was just a violence lover. He loved to punch and beat. He always seemed slightly frantic about his kicks. Johnston was grim and chuckling — You never seen a George Macready picture?

  Bradford was big, he played football until his grades got too shaky so he dropped it. He was barrel-chested and a good guy in some ways but he was so egotistical that being in the frat and an upperclassman meant that he thought he actually was a great great guy, so he could be used by real torturers like Johnston and Harris.

  These, along with Skeffton, jammed me up once at one of the “sessions,” actually what the white frats and shit called “hazing.” We just called them “sessions.” They would take us somewhere and beat us. Behind my refusing to go to the D.C. Donut Shoppe these four got me, and Johnston and Harris actually rolled up Esquire magazines (these have been formative in my life), wrapped them in tape, dipped them in water, and put them on the radiator to dry, so they were hard. I was running track at the time and Skeffton with his ruined self got much pleasure saying this aloud as they prepared to beat and while they beat me, on the legs and thighs until red welts and large hardening black swellings covered my legs, thighs, and butt. I could barely walk when they got through.

  At the next day’s track meet I couldn’t run. My coach hit the ceiling. He didn’t like the frats anyway though he was a goddam Alpha himself. But who really got pissed off was my roommate Bill and the mob and some of the other athletes. For them, this was beyond the call and kin of what the frats were supposed to do. Yeh, everybody knew they paddled people, but this shit was out. (The Kappas actually got suspended for a year when Lee’s sister’s boyfriend, PeeWee, got his arm broke by the Kappas and he was a popular kid.)

  No official shit went down in my case but there was a kind of mass uprising. A few nights later at another session down on Banneker Field the pledges led by Bill and a couple other footballers erupted and turned Johnston and the others on their heads, knocked them in the mud, and generally whaled the daylights out of the big brothers under the cover of night and confusion. I ripped a few shirts and fell on a couple motherfuckers.

  But that was it for me anyway. The shit seemed too unconnected to my real desires. What were they? I donno. But this shit wasn’t in me. I now got much more passive about the frat. I just was not available for anything. Neither meetings nor anything else. Where before I would have great fun ducking these nuts, now I was just not around. It didn’t matter too much. Both Shorter and I got blackballed (only one blackball could keep you out). Shorter used to show up for ROTC without his socks and with a “war hat” with no grommet in it so it was pulled down over his eyes like Diz might wear it. Shorter was playing tenor then. And I told you the frats were full of ROTC freaks, later generals; you know what they thought about that “weird” Shorter. In fact, I heard that’s why he got blackballed, being weird. But that was not true. For me, it was said that I was a snob, that I did not mix well. But that was not true, I was still much mixed in the middle of me own mob and we would hang out with anybody (long as they wasn’t square). But the real trick was that my grades had got so out that I didn’t have the grade average to join the fraternity anyway. I got drunk one afternoon and fell out up against a clothes hamper lamenting my waywardness which always seemed to disqualify me for what I wanted, though who knew what I wanted. “Pre-med” would come out of my mouth, but that was so far up and away from what me wanted, when I said it it echoed like in a huge open corridor, no lights, just echoes. And sometimes it hurt my ears.

  It was clear to me even then that if Howard represented something, it was something quite different from blue Newark. I said the urban troops had some special panache on the campus because we brought a kind of outside blue/black quality onto the campus. We were aware of that, too. Just as we were a
ware of the group of actually yellow folk who sat in the cafeteria together. And just as we were aware of the parties we weren’t invited to. Like the ones given by the Turtles. They even had a password, but it got leaked due to some romance between the colors. “Are you a turtle?” was the question they threw at you on the door. “You bet your sweet ass I am” was the countersign. Except if you were not known (i.e., were a trifle brown and unruly, etc.) you couldn’t make it. We mostly ignored such shit, though Tony was always sniffing around for just such as that so he could try his luck. Tony and Rip did connect and got into a lot of the high-yellow sets. Rip could have qualified anyway, though he was broke, but he had some jingling money cause he was an only child. Tony was an only child too and a cheap motherfucker, so he was always pulling hidden dough out of his safe-deposit vault somewhere inside his room. But the two of them was high up into such things as the Turtles and whatnot and other light-skinned stuff.

  The med students were the pinnacle of that society. If you was light-skinned and a med student and had a car and an apartment, you were on a par with Zeus or one of them other gods. Dent students were next, then law students. I mean up in the med, dent, and law schools, not the “pre’s.” Tony and Rip’s conversations always had a lot to do with what the fashionable med (and dent and law) students were doing. The sets they’d been to and how grand life at the top was. We listened but it was like movies to us, something to pass the time until somebody thought up something really out to do like that time we played hockey on the second floor with brooms and bottles till old man Butts came up on the floor and we scattered. He came to the door of Rue anyway, and busted all of us. “Mr. Jones,” he’d say, “Mr. Jones. What can we do about you?” In real despair.

  The doings of the real socialites at HU were relayed to us by yellowish-brown Negro radio, two of ’em, so that’s really as close to that shit as we got. We did get uptight one day in the cafeteria and was close to popping some little pale Negro motherfucker in his jaw for saying something too far out while he was sitting with a dazzling collection of yellow babes all with their noses pointing at other galaxies. (Of course we were jealous, and we hated that part of it, too, since we knew they were vapid little flowers of unknowing, yet why should they be allowed to think they shit didn’t stink?!)