The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  The Esquires were really Los Ruedos, Golden Boys, etc., plus a few stragglers like me now pumped in my college. We gave one big successful set which was the social hit of our circle that summer. But the one dude who didn’t go to college and who’d got a rep as a kind of drugstore Lothario/cut-rate pimp got accused of lifting some dough from the kitty and Bill and a couple of the athlete dudes jacked him up in the back. I guess it was true.

  We went to parties in the Oranges and Montclair, exotic places. Me and a dude named Joe Brown would sit on the stoop outside the parties after passing through looking at the babes. We’d sit outside and talk to whoever or just with each other, or sit in the car with the door open. Joe was the key, he had the short. We’d be out there listening to Symphony Sid and talking shit, passing comments on the women that went in and out and the dudes too. Joe was very hip, a little like me I guess, but carried to the extremes. Joe would not talk to anybody he didn’t know, not because he was some kind of snob but because he was shy and he didn’t know how people would react to the things he wanted to talk about and be about. Joe ended up a writer as well, plays and short stories. But in those days we’d talk about the music, about the girls, about our Northeastern version of the mob. He was going to one of those local colleges as well.

  The other cats would be inside cattin’. Moving around in there talkin’ to babes and drinkin’ punch and we’d be outside bullshittin’ on the steps or in the front seat with the car doors open listening to Sid.

  To me the whole party thing we did, though I really liked it, to get away from Newark and soar up through these other sparkling places, was more Howard stuff. Though I didn’t think I felt anything about Howard except digging it. The funny shit was just that, funny shit, but I dug Howard, it had become my identification of myself to myself. Yet really? Beneath that? What were the other modes of response being built up? I cannot say with any more precision than this narrative.

  It was tinselly, glittery in an artificial way. There were people I liked in between all that. For instance, though I looked many many of those little girls up and down with serious intent it was no realer than what I thought the rest of that tableau was. It was admiration. But I couldn’t even conceive of what I would say to any of them, I didn’t know what they talked about. When I took a girl out I still went out most times with Betty, and the people she hung with were still on a basically Newark scene. But the college thing always threw a damper on those kinds of romances unless one had pledged undying love, which we hadn’t, even though we seemed to like each other, and still rolled around clutching each other in her house or mine on couches or on beds or cots or whatever. I wish I knew what she was thinking about all this. I do know that one evening I was talking and said “Bawston” for some reason, maybe that was the first evening I ever said it, certainly I have not said it too much before or since. And Betty said, “What? What are you saying?” And grinned.

  And I repeated it, “Bawston.” And that probably told her something. Also since I had gone away to school, actually just before I left, I had started spelling my name with an “i” on the end instead of as it was given, Leroy. My justification was that my father’s name, seeing his birth certificate named him Coyette Leroy, was French, so why wasn’t the “y” an “i”? But also I’d read that summer, just before I went away, Roi Ottley’s New World a Comin and I think that’s what did it. At any rate, after my first year at Howard I spelled my name with a capital “R” and an “i” on the end. LeRoi.

  I knew what I was doing saying “Bawston” to Betty and she knew what she heard (maybe she even knew what I was doing too) but the grin, later a laugh, “What are you doing?” was all she asked. (And then we made love in a new, more exotic way — but that was later!)

  A sense of isolation had developed again. It had never left, maybe. Just quieted down by the roar of new surroundings, new faces, and a new set of customs to imbibe and assimilate. Driving around to the parties was great, sitting out front with Joe listening to Sid was great, but what? I worked in the grocery store, went to summer school trying to take scientific German. It was at Seton Hall in Newark. Across the street was a bar that looked like it had been shipped straight from Heidelberg. After the last class we all went over, mostly whites, and each bought a round — about ten of us in the class. So that was ten glasses of beer (they only cost about fifteen cents apiece) and I got really trashed for the first time in my life. Wobbly spitting-up drunk. I got home some way. We had moved when I went away to school that first year down to Hillside Avenue, across Clinton Avenue. We lived in a two-family house with the colored landlord downstairs. A little brown and yellow house with a porch on the first floor and one on the second out through our living room. I reached the downstairs porch and plopped into the rocking chair and fell out sick and twisted. My mother and father had been out that night too, so they came in and there I was blasted flat like some ominous casualty. My mother cried, she clutched my father and cried at her poor son her only son her oldest son and so forth being dead drunk right out on the street. I tried to explain the next day, it wasn’t serious, but the words did not even impress me, coming as they did through the Plexiglas construct of the great primordial hangover I had. I thought I was dying.

  But it was like being backed away from everything and everybody. And no whys came in. I knew what was happening to me, and even the “Bawstons” and name changes were false alarms, diversions, from what was happening to me. But what was happening to me? I felt like a lost child. When I wasn’t careening around the streets with Joe and them in search of the great party, I was, for some reason, feeling almost sorry for myself. But I did not know why. The isolation, the aloneness, sometimes it was almost sweet. And I had started reading in school. Whether from the urgings of teachers or what, but suddenly I was going into Howard’s library looking for Gertrude Stein. And who the hell was Gertrude Stein? I read her “Primer for Dogs Who Are Learning to Read.” I showed it to Liz Donald, a girl I “went with” for a while, and we laughed and quoted from it, but why was I reading that in the first place? I had had the Pound book, a thin little collection of selected poems, but I couldn’t understand much of that. What with the Greek, some of the Latin I could piece together, but I had no idea, for the most part, what he was talking about. I still read the Elizabethans. But I had got a book, a really heavy book, that I liked very much. It was Selden Rodman’s One Hundred Modern Poems with Apollinaire’s “Zone” and work by Blok and Lorca and Rilke. I couldn’t understand a lot of that either, but I liked that book and found myself looking at it from time to time trying to decode it.

  The next year at Howard was my last year, though I didn’t know it. I began by moving into the city with Bill, Tony, Shorty, and Stone. We painted the place a wild shade of pink. It was riotous. I was always walking in on Tony trying to seduce some suspecting charmer or we stayed up all night “studying,” drinking beer and scotch and wine and bullshitting. We hung in places like the Kenyon Grill, where the elite drank martinis and I learned to drink martinis too. But not many. I got drunk and fell out at one party just as I was about to impress this sensuous beauty (we met a few months ago and she is married to a white advertising executive) who thrilled me because she was a painter.

  Now that all my money was being sent directly to me again I was even broker than before. I would go to my aunt’s once a week in northeast D.C. and eat like a starving soldier. My Aunt Bessie would smile and fill up a big bag for me to take back. I would try to ease it in but the niggers would spot it and gobble it down like locusts.

  What Howard connect I still had weakened and drifted even further. Where before we would lay up in our corner room and watch Bill play football with our feet hung out the windows screaming, now we would only go to the stadium and get a big megaphone, put a bottle inside the megaphone, holding the bottle by the ring at its neck, and when something would happen we would “cheer” and by halftime drain a gallon of cheap red.

  I would go to class, hang around on cam
pus and up in Clark Hall, and then shoot home about four blocks over and a few blocks up. We liked living off campus because it made us feel more adult than we were. But most of the people we knew off campus were HU students and I could never get hooked to the little House of Love routine that these apartments were supposed to be according to student mythology. We had a couple of parties there, got threatened by the landlord; but personally it was just another step away.

  I found myself more interested in reading and personal revelation than in the laboratories and science courses I supposedly existed for. I had a philosophy course that was interesting, teaching us bullshit like syllogisms and useless logic, but at least I could understand what they were talking about. The great silent creep of my organic chemistry class, who came in and merely wrote equations on the board that we must commit to memory and who rarely talked longer than one sentence at a time (he was so heavy, said the yellow press), bored the shit out of me. I would be sitting in class dozing, shot out, uninterested, except in the chirping of the students afterwards, what they said and made out of the shit was more interesting to me but it didn’t stop me from being on Georgia Avenue alone, moving swiftly up the hill to see if Stone left any grit in the icebox.

  I began to live in a halfway world, of mostly shadows and silence. With advertising of unknown whatevers slowly crawling through my head in klieg lights and marquee-type bulbs. Dazzling obscurities, questions. Embarrassing gaps in my concentration. I had not the slightest idea what I was thinking about nor much of the time what I was talking about. Unless I was bullshitting with what part of the mob remained in some focus. I thought there was a sickness around that place. It was in the stiffness and artificiality, the walking-on-water quality of references to a life that none of us would ever see. We were being readied for “good jobs,” “professions,” prestige and wealth. I did not have the energy to be a doctor. I was not willing to try hard enough to master the things I had to master. I was not interested in any of the shit I could understand. I didn’t even feel like running too hard after the girls. I drank wine and smoked cigarettes because that was easy to do. I read books, but mostly thin ones because fat ones repelled me. I did go to movies whenever I could. I listened to music but the Howard jukebox went from Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck to “Work With Me, Annie” and few of us had record players. I went to the Howard Theater. I saw Diz and Bud Powell down there and that was something I did regular. I especially liked the midnight shows. I would go down-town where the big white folks’ stores were and look in the windows. I even put money down on a slick suit I saw at Lewis and Thos. Saltz and never got it, so they got my dough. I continued to go to parties out in the city. But something had drifted for good.

  I think I understood that I was not getting any closer to reality. Not understanding it any better. (Though I was, just that dissociation makes you heavier, by several ounces.) Words in the wind, dull classrooms, dead folks. Corny people laughing. Rules and regulations and customs and mores. What people did. I couldn’t use it.

  The second semester I even moved out of our apartment, or more exactly the landlord threw us out and Bill moved in with another footballer. Tony and Shorty and Stone moved back on campus and I moved just a few short blocks into a house that was filled completely with West Indians. In our U.S. chauvinism we called the African students the “Suji boys” and the West Indian students the “Mon boys.” And we mostly never mixed. They were rather separate circles. (Ain’t nobody knew nothin about no Pan-Africanism!) One of the guys was in my class and he told me about the space at this house they all rented and I jumped on it. I got to know a few of the West Indians, mostly Jamaicans and Trinidadians, well. But people wanted to know why I was with these Mon boys all the time now. I didn’t know. I lived with them. They had their own parties and I was in the house and started going. One night a bunch of white marines followed one dude who had brought a white girl and tried to turn the place out, so I found myself punching white dudes in the face and running in the street trying to smash some with bottles before the white police came and pacified us. But there was no more to the incident.

  Actually they had a nice thing going down there. The woman who rented them the whole house said she liked to rent to West Indians because unlike these sorry U.S. bloods the West Indians had the dough and would pay. So now it was not only space but a cultural warp I had stepped through, a whole nother set of folks I found myself with. Not that I was cut off entirely from the old mob or the bloods on campus. But I could come down to the house, which was only a couple blocks from campus, and go into my room, which was clean and quiet. There might be some calypso playing somewhere, which I dug. And I’d be there mostly by myself. I could do homework (which I almost never did except the night before the test) or do what I did mostly look at stuff and think about stuff, maybe read something, or maybe go for a walk or eat or drink a beer, or just let strange stuff fill up my head in absolute silence.

  By now, it was clear that I was flunking out of school. I had some good marks but in my major I was hitting on naught but the lonely heart. I went through some frantic changes, told myself and some other people some tales. But in a month or so I had “punched out” and went reluctantly on my way. (Which was where?)

  Actually, I went through to the end of the semester and when I made my various goodbyes there were some deeper goodbyes being made. But still I thought maybe I would come back to school. I had nowhere else really to go, I thought.

  The summer was something else, and was actually prelude or preface to another stage of my life that began much later. But I spent some time that summer going to the Village, in New York. I hadn’t known anything at all about Greenwich Village, but now a guy I’d run track with and idolized in high school, Stephen Korret, was rumored to be living there and being “weird.” I did not know around what this weirdness manifested but I was vaguely interested. But somehow we got invited to a party, a dude named Willie Washington and I. His sister Cynthia really interested me, but Willie was a new acquaintance. I met him, I think, through Joe Brown. Willie was very hip, always clean, was interested in and followed the music. I saw him at a few parties I went to. Another guy I knew was trying to be an architect and had an apartment on Hillside Place painted all black. He was part of it. It had to do with music and maybe painting, I didn’t know. With some kind of social adventure I couldn’t quite piece together. A face here and there, a name. I was at a party then and Cynthia was there. I tried to see her a couple times that summer. But at this party she was enthralled by Korret, who was now tall, slender, dark as he had been, very dark, but bearded. I remember digging the beard, what it gave to his face.

  I had remembered him a slim half-miler in high school, city champ one year. Then rumor had it he had started living with a girl, her name was Cynthia too, but not Willie’s sister. Then he started getting beat and seemed out of shape. This is what the scuttlebutt was around the locker room. The fact that those kinds of rumors could be spread about him, true or not, made him even more fascinating from my point of view, though he always kept me at more than arm’s length. I was younger and screwy as hell I guess.

  But that summer I was drifting into something else of complete unintelligibility, to me. Me and Willie hung and a couple of other guys. I tried to press his sister and she seemed willing but in a way unavailable. But it was probably me, cause I was twisted up inside in so many ways. Who knows what I sounded like or looked like or seemed to want? I might have thought I was saying one thing but something distinctly else was coming out.

  I think I might have gone over to Steve Korret’s house with Cynthia one day. Korret was “married” or maybe really married, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. His wife was a black Canadian who’d lived in Newark for a few years and they’d come to the Village to live. Steve Korret was the talk of one aspect of one part of one circle of Newark’s college-aged youth. Cynthia and I rode the subway that day and she had on some sandals with a little flower that came out between her toes where t
he strap was. I really dug those, and the way her feet looked in them. We’d talked when I came up to see Willie, and then I was coming up to see her and Willie, and then came up to see her alone. But Willie and I were still tight. We were cool with something else rolling in us. What? The music? He talked about painting. I knew nothing about that. He had some books I knew nothing about. Or maybe just enough to talk surface about. But now Cynthia and I sat up in Steve Korret’s bright orange and white apartment on Bedford Street. And he talked, in an English accent, and she was very impressed. So was I, really. Plus his wife, Lita, was very slender and brown and lovely, with an accent that was her real Canadian one and that was fascinating. They had a wall of books in the apartment that I glanced at but that was all. Somehow we were speeding through this visit, though it obviously pleased Steve to impress us. But I had the feeling of being rushed out and suddenly we were outside starting home. I had heard some words I didn’t understand, some I did, but in new contexts, from people who lived outside of Newark, I mean way outside of Newark, and maybe in what? Another world?

  In the fall I returned to Howard, but I couldn’t get back in school. I knew that anyway, but went down just for the trip, I guess. Just to see people coming back to school. September, the fall. I like the new tweeds and flannels dudes wear then. The raincoats and hats. The briskness of the air without its being a menace. The clarity of it, the seeming clarity of it.

  I wandered around campus a day with nothing really to do once I was certain I was being put out. I could come back next semester or the next year, if I could go somewhere else and pull up my chemistry grades. But I gave not even a small shit about chemistry, except not giving a shit carried a penalty which I only began to understand. I hadn’t known any other kind of life but a student life.