by Amiri Baraka
But the divisions on the campus were known by all but the most unconscious. And we could get very loud talking about “sididdy yellow bitches and these jive lames” who are gonna get their asses broke in a minute. Tony and Rip, however, were tipping on all those scenes.
There was some big hullabaloo when a brown (skinned) girl, really gorgeous babe named Pat Adams, was elected Homecoming and Alpha Queen. She was a very stiff number on the real side and split for nothing but bananas, her boyfriend was Mordecai Johnson’s son. When Mordecai was stalking out of his house right across from the girls’ dormitory, like God walking across campus. (Mordecai used to have our ass for a whole semester sitting in chapel every Sunday, mandatory if you were a freshman or transfer student. Chicks had to be in at 7 P.M. their first semester and it would be light outside and warm and great love affairs would be getting formed. And much thrashing and moaning and loud lamentations as to the cruelty, etc., of fate and Mordecai but that made it like some Romeo and Juliet shit and that spiced it up for some.)
The frats and yellow folks ran Howard’s official student life. Everything else was improvisation. We’d find ourselves trailing through black night in southwest Washington headed for parties. Dudes would say, “Some a them D.C. boys gonna split your heads open!” But we, being officially fearless, would go on and come to a joint looked just like those sets we’d left back home. Big hats and all. And the only problem we ever had was one night Tony went with us and some little black chick he wanted to impress threw an aspirin bottle at his ass, and we all thought it best to vanish.
The D.C. connection was then a connection with real black life, though Howard itself to a certain extent is black life no matter its yellow distortion and the class repression the one-sided class struggle on campus enforces. (Though probably in the ’60s there could’ve been something else happening for the same reasons, mass uprising and a general influx of black and brown types from the cities came on campus. You’ll have to ask Stokely Carmichael about that!)
The woman thing could spell it out further. All the time I was on campus I went with about four girls, and “went with” is too strong in most of those instances. On campus it was only three on the real side. Elizabeth Donald and I were tight, after a fashion. I took her to a couple of them dress-up things when I first was getting hooked up with campus life. They seemed flashy enough, but no real laughs though Liz seemed happy to be there amongst it all. She in a gown and I in a black tie. We talked to some people and posed and even danced.
But we were tighter than that. We had a couple of classes together. Zoology and physics. I was beginning to write some poetry, at first, under the Elizabethans — Sidney, Vaughan, Shakespeare, the rest. I would send her fragments of poems for her to add a stanza, then I would add another stanza, this is while the class was going on. By the end of the class we’d have a whole poem of sorts. But it was great fun and we would write poems about Peanuts (the comic strip characters) juxtaposed with our “Zo” teacher’s ear or some acquaintance’s droop in a chair close by on the way to a peaceful sleep.
And Liz was a really nice girl. She was always cheerful and smiling and I think she was a “Zo” major, on the heavy side. (Her sister went with one of them goddam Alphas, a big brother, now a New Jersey architect. I came to the house one time this blood gets drugged thinking I’m coming to see his squeeze, such cross-eyed explaining especially in those days I thought the Alpha gestapo would mash me up but he cooled out but was never what you’d call pleasant.) I think we went to a couple of movies, a couple of dances, I walked her home a few times, more than a few. Anyway, I began to think that Liz and I were “going together.” Dudes would drop her name in a certain way so it seemed like people were picking up, had picked up that that was happening.
Then one day I said something at a mob “meeting” as to how I was gonna take my old lady out somewhere and these dudes all looked at each other and me with a smirk like I had just shit on the floor. (Or like the time Mr. Butts was banging on the door to make us shut up and I didn’t think it was him and I called out “All right Butts, grease your nose and slide under.” Then we opened the door and it’s him — that kind of look.) There’s a skinny four-eyed turkey whose name I can’t remember (fuck you Freudians) to this day. Or was it another guy? Hmmm. But anyway there’s this four-eyed dude who had been around a few times, no he was known to all of us, Philip, I think his name was. He says, like a guy asking directions of a traffic cop, “Your old lady?” These dudes look at me, Woolright is about to split open with his jive ass. “Liz and I are going together.”
Particularly I remember there was some kind of deadly set coming up and Liz and I had been discussing whether we wanted to go to that (the on-campus dress-up) or see the ballet. But obviously there wasn’t much discussion going on on the real side. I remember this Philip saying, or was his name Al, “Liz and I are going together.” Uhh, man, did that sting. And these cats fell out. You could see some concern in some of their eyes but they had to laugh, otherwise it would have been admitting too much and they didn’t want to have to go through that so they howled.
“God damn,” was about all I could get out. “God damn.” And took his word. I saw Liz a day or two after and she was gentle and somewhat melancholy but she did confirm that she and Al were going to the campus set, but it was more than that and we both knew it. (Plus half the goddam campus!) I spoke to Liz the rest of my time on campus and we remained good buddies in class, but not like before by no means. And she went with this dude, a pre-med who actually did become a med, and they lived happily ever after, I guess.
Liz was a brown girl, she was, hooked up by the same yellow strings of gold and manipulation. But she could laugh at certain of the things that make those little phony worlds go round and this is what I liked. I couldn’t understand why she did what she did. Perhaps she was always going with the dude and I was imposing my dull ass in the way. Maybe she should have told me if that was the case. No, I think it was the pattern of lackadaisicality she saw in me. Perhaps I was too casual and my jibes were too shrill. Certainly she saw that my steps did not lead into med school and I was almost ready to admit that too. This dude was also on his way into the frat. He was a good solid dude. And what was I?
No sour grapes now, Jim. But that could tell somebody something, I hope. I went with two other girls on campus, one named McKeesport. That’s not her name, it was Blanche or something, I can’t even remember. So that will tell you about that. She was inordinately skinny and quiet and from that ugly steel town. We went out a couple of times and became friends more than anything else.
Audrey, from another wild place, a West Virginia coal mining town. These were both brown girls. Audrey was very tiny and plump with big, almond shaped eyes. Also quiet. I never found out what she liked. But we went to a few flicks. (I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Some of the movies blacks couldn’t even go to. We used to drive these crackers in the Peoples Drugstores crazy by ordering stuff then they’d bring it in a bag, like a Coke or something. And we’d say we wanted to drink it there. And they would say they couldn’t serve us and we’d leave the shit on the counter. But you had to hat up cause they would call the law.)
The only girl I could really say I went with, in a kind of heavy way (and even that didn’t get heavy as all that — not on the flesh side), was Baby. That was her name — not a nickname, her parents named her that. So she was from the country, High Point, North Carolina. She came from the same town an old crazy vet we used to holler at lived in, Terry. Terry was drunk a lot and loud but a very good dude. Kinda dude you liked to drink with. Could think up all kind of weird shit to talk about.
I mighta met Baby through Terry. She was a student at Miner Teachers College, which was right down the street, cross the street, from HU. Shootin’ at Miner girls was a pastime for one sector of Howard students. But it was generally frowned upon by the mainstream. Hey, they was who? They had no note. A lot of ’em talked country (Baby shure did!). There was a few cracke
d yellow ones but not many. The Miner ladies was at another level (“lower” than our own coeds on The Hill. That meaning had changed for me. “Hill” now meant the yalla lights, the Capstone, not Third Ward/Central Ward black and blue folks). That was vouchsafed.
But I ran into Baby. And she was not brown, dear readers, she was very black. Skin color and whatever otherwise. Black gleaming skin unblemished and these bright sparkling eyes, behind pinkish-brown plastic frames.
It didn’t strike me as anything until I got the campus reaction. Baby was sweet and the way she sounded, that black belt peasant twang tripped me out. But she was high up into readying for the teaching thing. She was maybe a year ahead of me and was already getting ready to practice teach.
I’d go up there a couple times a week. She had a new yellow Ford. An apartment she shared with another Miner student. And she dug me, I’d say. She’d even cook most times I showed, or at least had something ready. Which was great because my old man only sent me $30 a month for odds and ends. The food money he sent directly to the cafeteria people after I’d spent it up a couple times in a week then had to go broke for the rest of the month.
But she’d have some grit because everybody knew most of the Howard students was walking around kinda hungry. Except the blindingly yellow! Mostly we’d talk and laugh a lot. She was a bright girl. She was always teasing about my (HU) origins and how HU students acted generally, which was wild to hear from that side. It even made me clearer that there were sides. But she was definitely country. Terry’d come up there sometimes and we’d get to drinking, though I still wasn’t no heavy drinker.
We went to a few parties her friends gave in D.C. and to flicks and stuff in the D.C. community. I had already passed my dress-up frat period — which I guess is obvious. (And the stuff was just idle window shopping to Baby.) But I hadn’t summed up as a categorical anything. I was just going along, living my life, trying to love it and let whatever happened happen.
Baby, as I said, was not particularly interested in HU society either. I think myself (and Terry) were the closest she wanted to get at that point. But we had laughing, sometimes riotous, discussions about HU and environs and the mores and customs therein.
Baby came up on campus a couple times. One Saturday afternoon she pulled her bright yellow new Ford outside Clark Hall. I was supposed to be out front waiting, but was still inside bullshitting, so she tooted the horn. The front-step jockeys got her message and my name and began screaming them out. More from a few other reasons than mere communication or aid. One was they had nothing else to do. I could hear my name ringing outside, the horn, and now in the hallways. And they all wanted to sound like Baby, Leeeeeeeee Royyyyyyyyy Jooooooonessss. And I came running downstairs and when I hit the bottom step out in front, heads were thrust through windows all over the front of the building. It was somebody in our mob that started it but they were calling in unison Leeee RooooyyyyLeeeeee Rooooyyyyyy — and waving at us. You could even hear some of their comments as we got away — she had a convertible. “Broad with a car,” “Goddam,” “Who’s that chick?” etc., etc.
For Bill and Tony and Rip and some others, however, Baby’s looks (albeit her car and apartment), and the fact she went to Miner, made me Bruce Wayne. And that’s what I was greeted with when I returned. “Hey, Bruce” and whatnot. And these dudes kept it up, they even had some of their hambone friends continue it and they weren’t even proper in the mob. I’d cut my eyes funny at them. But mostly I just took it and continued seeing Baby, mainly cause I dug her and it was about the best place I knew to go around those parts (HU mores to the contrary). Anyway one time up in the room, I don’t know quite how it got started, Rip starts this shit about Bruce Wayne and he was going with this little limp starlet, a candidate for Homecoming Queen in a couple of years from the looks of her. And I made some remarks as to what a dead-ass bitch whassername was. Goin’ with her was like lookin’ at pinups in Esquire, all it did was get his whatname hard, as he definitely wasn’t gettin’ any of that! And what’s more, half these Negroes on this campus walking around talking about this girl like she’s Lena Home or somebody, so really, Rip, you sharin’ what you ain’t gettin’ with all the other dumb jerkin’ off lames on the campus.
Rip didn’t like that and began to imitate Baby’s speech. He built a great rep in his countless monologues about his prowess as a “cocksman.” And to have someone imply that he masturbated, that just wouldn’t do. But it got very nasty and ended with fists being rolled up though Rip was a big guy, a swimmer, and though there was a little dancin’ around the room no blows were struck. What was struck was a gong inside my knot that twanged some realization. The dudes in the mob generally did not give a fuck who I went with. Though there was a streak of plain out envy. These little babes on campus had to be in the dorm at certain hours and to get out overnight they had to go through elaborate lies and for those frosh and sophomores they wasn’t getting out except in extraordinary circumstances and most would not put their behind so squarely on the chopper as all that. So whatever Rip was doing, which wasn’t anything anyway, it had to be done in broad daylight, off campus. You went to flicks and ate dinner in Georgia Avenue restaurants, sat up in the dorms giggling, and held hands crossing campus with the Howard ladies. But stashed back in an old northwest apartment after finishing a big dinner and then sippin’ some grog squeezed up in the shadows of your own spot with a lady of your own choosing, that was what them med students and other royalty could pull off. But one of your own? “How the fuck did you luck up?” That was Woolright’s comment and Donny and the straight-ahead dudes. But we had, as I said, some yeller bellies in the group. The only good thing about that is that they were like antennae then for the rest of the joint, they would be letting us know what a whole lot of the messed up and soon to be messed up would be thinking about or not thinking about.
Rip and dudes like that were into the social fabric of the Capstone mainstream and their sashayin’ across the campus like the Easter Parade being looked at by others under the glass bell was all they needed. It was a form that was being followed. The little limp yellow girl (his was a blonde), being gladly and humbly craved by potential frat brothers, going back and forth to class or sitting in the cafeteria, was a distinct social form as well as a readying for service in the great lost cause of petty bourgeois hypnosis. Slave mores. Exactly what the racist gurus prescribe for keeping us under wraps. Except down in southwest D.C. or on U Street or T Street they wasn’t under these kinds of wraps. They had to keep the blue/black actual strugglers under gun wraps, that’s the only wraps that work on them.
I made no great rebellions, no explosions. (Cussing some future government bureaucrat out in his Ivy threads.) Just went on my way. Just moved on where I was going. Not even fully conscious, except I would do such and such and not do something else. I would like something for some reason and not like something else, and maybe not even have a reason.
I would sit up in the room sometimes with green glasses and put a yellow light bulb in the fixture. Why? Who knows? I would paint big paintings on the wall of the room — 3-D paintings of Tony’s high society babes and put curtains over them so they could be drawn back dramatically to reveal the painter’s madness. Or sit out on the campus eating half a watermelon and scandalize poor Butts and the patron saints of middle-class Negroes way off in Negro heb’n.
The next year is when some of us came off campus. We’d got too grown up to relate to dorm life anymore. Mr. Butts was clearly overjoyed. But that summer more wild things were happening, like being blown through a wind tunnel and the wind tunnel is inside your head. You trying to “concentrate” on something and a thousand-mile-an-hour wind is blowing behind your eyes, blowing all kinds of shit through your head blotting out your vision.
I had been blowing science courses regularly now. They didn’t interest me, yet the form of what I was supposed to be doing called for science. Laboratories. I was blown out of organic like with a timebomb. I never understood qual a
nd quant and rushed out of there in near panic. It seemed like I couldn’t understand anything. I couldn’t learn. Maybe that’s why all the other shit was strange. Why I couldn’t get in a frat or even get a “respectable” girlfriend. I was one center of a mob yet it seemed that that ring of friendly faces had receded to the edge of the horizon. The best of these dudes, the straightest of them, were my friends (some have remained close friends until this day and almost any of them I run into on the streets or in some airline terminal or wherever, we sit down and can get ecstatic talking about these HU days), but still, now it seemed there was more space around me than I could use. Space between me and them. Space where strange lights and shapes and voices could get in. Weird decisions and postures. The frat thing, the woman thing, seemed like they cleared space around me or something.
That summer in Newark something similar was happening but it was happening under camouflage. I was now cut off from the Hillsides and had been cut off from the Cavaliers. But there was a whole new cast of friends and people to run with by way of the HU and general college hookup. The college thing in a town like Newark did provide a special bond and the college kids even from different colleges tended to run together. There was a social club formed, really while we were in school, called the Esquires. It seemed like the requirements for membership was going to HU or some of the other schools (a couple of dudes went to local colleges like Bloomfield, Newark State, etc.), paying the dues, and wearing Bermuda shorts, which were just coming out in our generation. The Bermuda shorts with the long socks, we thought that was really hip and that was our badge that summer. I had a cord jacket, tuxedo pants, and white sneakers I also started sporting, snaking through the streets late nights by myself.