by Amiri Baraka
I bumped into friends, mob members mostly, and told them some criss-crossed stuff about why I wasn’t coming back. Rip was with a group and said, “Hey, look at bohemy look at bohemy.” And I realized then that my trips to the Village were known about and not only that but had been judged, by one group. “Hey, look at this little beard” and he plucked at a little nothing growth of peach fuzz on my chin. I had never shaved or had reason to. Maybe since seeing Steve Korret’s beard the idea of it had poked out at the point of my chin. That’s the only explanation I got, I certainly didn’t think I had any beard.
Some more bantering, distorted discussions, lies, bullshitting, and laughter and I felt myself leaving, waving for real and now in my head waving at that place. What had I learned? A great many things, most of which I could not speak about. I had not the tools. For one thing we were being made sick. We were being gathered with the fondest motives but being made sick. (And I was not with the sickest, or only a few.) The brownness of me, in me, I certainly had been touted off of and me always yearning for an even darker explanation. At least that was what had been my measure, the blue/black streets of Newark. The gray steel of its relentless hardness. Love, for me, was music and warmth, high-pitched sounds and jagged or regular heavy grinding rhythms. It was collective and so dark you had to tighten yourself up to look it in the eyes. Stop your shakin’. Is that the way you want your hat to look? Is this the way you want to walk? How you sound? On the real sound, who did you sound like, the yellow picnic churchboy alien or the smooth blue rolling down the streets laughing at your collective hipness? (It was always dangerous, in Newark, to be alone! Or anywhere else.)
We’d been readied for the blowout, the vertical sweep up to sunkissed heaven. It was clothes and words and postures, the seeking of a secular Jordan. In coldly sociological terms, under national oppression, it was the Sisyphus myth given numbers to chart the exact degree of pain. Or ants piling up tidbits of zero to build the Empire State Building, and then not even own it. But the piling-up motion was all. We were not even being taught to pile up, like the common petty capitalist of the xenophobically abused South and East Europeans. All we were being readied for was to get in, to be a part of the big ugly which was that ugly because it would never admit us in the first motherfucking place! We were being taught integration and nothing of the kind existed. If so, why were we here in the second motherfucking place? We were readied for a lie as a lie. We were readied for yellow and the best of us were black and brown. We were readied for utopia and that is bullshit in the third motherfucking place. Only craziness could be the result. (E. Franklin Frazier was on leave when I was in school. Locke had retired. Sterling Brown taught his best classes unofficially on his own time.)
We were not taught to think but readied for superdomestic service. (Super to who?) The school was an employment agency at best, at worst a kind of church. Hypnosis was employed. Old cult practices. Collective individualism. A church of class and caste conceit. Church of the yalla jeeeesus. And so we worshiped there and loved it.
HU was the great launching pad of the flight to this God’s heaven. The launching pad of the projected verticality. The pimple of pretended progress by the “colored” few. But because within that desire is a legitimate need by the whole black of us to rise up in reality, the sugar and butter on white bread sandwich can get over to some extent in places you wouldn’t expect.
So you say, Come on, prove the pathology, Jonesy.
My roommate became a Secret Service man. After playing a little professional baseball (double or triple A) he was magnetized to the “good job,” some place he could use the muscle and continue to drink the excitement of the field. And so he’s been a field man, going ahead to make certain that various cities are safe for the president. To see if all the known nuts have been sequestered or are under surveillance, like his old roommate. He has been in the protective entourage for Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. He who slept on the other side of the room.
At least five of us became generals, and many more at lower levels. An admiral or two. Reagan’s top Negro. Agnew’s top Negro. Negroes at all levels of state bureaucracy and madness. Negroes in the society pages. Negroes grinning just behind the robbin’ hood on television strewn through the pages of our ebony sepia hue jet Afro-defender dam news. Mostly hugging a lie and laughing or hugging a laugh and lying. — He works for She works for He’s the first Negro to murder white people for bigger white people You remember whassaname, well she Remember whatnot, he got they got we got Still masquerading at the top of a hill distant silhouettes removed from the blue/black streets of our collective reality. The cheap little political manipulators and bureaucrats gesturing hypnotically in black people’s faces promising freedom but delivering more bondage. The yellow rat on a chain dancing for the slave masters’ amusement as “the best” of “the worst.”
(And do not intentionally misunderstand, the black schools have taught most of us. What we have of value and what we must despise. We did not even consider these other folks at these white schools as being in it. They’ve got their own sad stories to tell! You bet. Howard. The barbarians at Lincoln. Fisk. Hampton. We fought with the niggers at Morgan and broke folding chairs over their heads. In our crackpot little elitist world, if you didn’t go to these schools you wasn’t even in the world. No, really. You wasn’t even in the world. But what did we know?)
I turned with tears in my eyes and whispered so that I couldn’t even hear it in my brain, Goodbye!!
Five
Error Farce
I was completely unslung. Disconnected. I was isolated before, sometimes I seemed even to enjoy it. I never understood it. But I knew I was somehow “alone” even in the middle of a loud bunch.
Sometimes I felt nutty. Sometimes just stupid. Like how could I flunk out of school, who had never had any problems in school? I was supposed to be some kind of prodigy (I never understood why). I could read early, they said, and I had some kind of early verbal skills. I even won a spelling bee in grammar school during the summer program and that was in the paper. The news of scholarships in the colored papers. The Gettysburg Address in a boy scout suit, etc.
But now I didn’t know what to think. I’d flunked out of school. All the people I knew were in school. The old Cavaliers and Hillside Placers, where were they? I didn’t even know how I would relate now. I had been shot so full of yellow. Pumped so full of middle-class fakery. That was my partial perception though I certainly hadn’t raised it to the theoretical level. I was going on touch and sound and smell, moving on vague feelings.
I came back home but didn’t go out. I had to do something. I didn’t think I could be walking Newark’s streets when I was supposed to be in school, and I couldn’t even explain it. What had happened or what I felt. I talked to a few people. Maybe if I’d gone back over to New York, something else would’ve happened. But I didn’t think that. That was all too vague for me. I didn’t even have an understandable pattern.
So, for some reason, I joined the air force. I did. It sounded weirder and weirder all the time. But in those few days that all this went down, I justified it. It was something I could grasp at some level. It was escape.
The streets, the thoughts of Howard, pressed me. I didn’t know what my parents thought. My grandmother. My sister. Relatives. I never thought clearly about it, I just acted. That was how I could get away, get off these streets, disappear again, and be somewhere other than being stared at by people who were putting together their own explanations of what had happened to me.
So I went down to Broad Street to the recruitment station. The common (dumb) understanding among the young college-age youth was that the army was shit but the air force was OK. Who started that lie need to be … but maybe it ain’t a lie, or probably the thing should go, the army is shit and the air force is, too.
Going down there and waiting, then standing amid those strange unrelated kids unnerved me too. I had no idea of what that would be. I looked around the room qui
etly, depressed more than I had ever been because it seemed now suddenly as if I was being swept down the sewer or something. I could see no recognition in any of the other faces. They probably saw none in mine. A practiced observer would have seen pain in mine, though. I could not see pain in the other faces, just reaction to the various subdued stimuli.
We had to take an oath. We were quiet, unconnected, a few kids mumbled. We were taken to a bus; I’d brought a few clothes. When I’s told my immediate family, I didn’t think there was any undue concern I could see. But my grandmother told me to take care of myself. That whatever I did, do it the best way I could. My mother looked sadder than most times I’ve seen her. My father grabbed my arm and said write, let us know how you’re doing and where you are. My sister looked tearful. And I’d gone down to where the swearing-in was.
When the bus pulled out, rolling through grey Newark, I remembered it was the day before my twentieth birthday and the city was quickly behind us.
Sampson Air Force Base was cold, grey, ugly, resembling nothing but empty hopelessness. No one sang “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” Pat O’Brien did not greet us (or maybe he did). Nor was there any other memorable background music, though later that was taken care of. I was in basic training now. We went through the usual — the haircut, the giving up of our clothes, the issue of fatigues and uniform and other equipment. For weeks we would be trained to be in the air force. I was there from October until just before Christmas.
What was most impressive about the service and especially basic training was how quickly any self-esteem was erased and with what dispatch one was transformed from Mister Whoever to nobody at all. And for me having fallen from the great yellow tower of upward to everything (admittedly a lie, but that was known only partially at that time by me) to the ground of least concern was a rude jolt to my tender sensibilities.
The class and caste shaping that the Capstone gives tells you you’re somebody great even if that caste and class madness is beating your ass with its open and implied exclusion every day. I mean you can know that the little yalla boys and girls or the med and dent students are “igging” you and be igged and conscious (to the degree you are conscious) of it, but still because you are even permitted to let that house slave artifaction pass gas in your face (AS TRAINING, BOY, TO READY YOU FOR THE WHITE FOLKS) you feel like somebody special. Some extra-cool Nigra passing through the streets of yon ghettoes. We were permitted to float a sixteen-millionth of an inch off the ground — of course we thought it was slightly higher — as chosen Negroes of the yalla god. But bam whap mash like Jack Palance as the mad magician fell out of the tower to show he was not God (God was with Paul Newman and them) we were dashed to the hard ground by some social mishap like this. Was that what my grandfather and them felt like, having been thrown out of the nigger bourgeoisie all the way to the lower middle class? I see. It’s rough, as Conrad Lynn would say. Rough!
Because now I found myself in crowds of people going nowhere. Or being rushed to someplace where you then had to wait for hours. For what? Nothing you would like or give a shit for. You were always standing with groups of boys your own age, black and white, not knowing what was going on. Having to do things thought of by what dumb motherfucker? (You might think that if you could raise up enough energy to put such an edge on!) Mostly you just dragged to the next place. Submitted to the next indignity, colorless and dull. You were herded and crowded and pushed and pulled and talked stupidly to and disregarded or harassed.
At first we were just run around and walked around and only a few deadass directions, “instructions,” were given to us. It was definitely a kind of punishment. You got that early, if you were awake. It was a penalty — everything, walking, running, standing, waiting. The only humor provided those first days, except the jokes we began to make after we could feel at least our common lot, was the food. Eating was funny! I mean you sat and were confronted suddenly with this stuff. You would turn and look at some dude you didn’t even know and he would be looking back at you, at first shyly, then after a few of these displays and performances, more casually, and grin. The grin got wider. In a week, there was laughter. Not gay, not grim, but a nervous release. An alternative to the banal pushing and standing and waiting and rushing to nowhere that went on otherwise.
“Like what is this shit?” we would whisper finally. “Have you tasted this shit? Wow!” I think this conversation went on initially among the most sensitive and intelligent. That’s how we could tell each other. Some others would just keep their head down and ladle it in. But that was something else that was at least for me part of the penalty that the “army” is. You can find some motherfuckers in the service dumb as their surroundings, dumber than the chairs and tables. The table could get up and leave some of them there holding the food. Naturally, on the food trip, the blood relation was strongest because the food was also not only bad but the complete opposite of their national cuisine. Tasteless, bland, gravyless. You could pour a ton a salt on some of the shit and it would suck it in like the Blob. So they would grumble and talk shit about it first, rolling their eyes at each other.
After a couple weeks of being walked and run and dragged around we got to recognize a few faces among us (a few had come in together) and we’d venture some exploratory phrases. It is the same general process, I guess, in any structure of society at any level. How the herd gets sectioned off. How friends are made, acquaintances. Sometimes you can only get close to some people in situations like the one you meet them in. In any other situation, you might not have anything to say to that person at all. It was like that for me in Barringer, Central Ward, Howard, and now the process was unfolding again at Sampson Air Force Base, Geneva, New York.
In situations which are ostensibly mixed like the service, you can also see the national character define the various groups that form. And within those national forms, regional forms, the culture pinpointing itself. So for the most part the blacks hang out with the blacks, the whites with the whites, and northern and southern contingents of each larger group also tend to hang together.
In basic I found myself with bloods from South Jersey mostly, for some reason. Dudes from Camden and Trenton, mostly black dudes looking for a way off the streets. Trying to keep out from under the final bust. Seeing in that air force blue some trace of sky that they might get away in.
So the friend, acquaintance, “buddy” it’s called in the service, thing gets hooked up like it always does. Around common experience (which might just be only the one you find yourself in then), common desires or understanding or even common misunderstanding. Certainly, most of us, after just a few weeks, knew we had made a terrible mistake to come in “this shit” and began the drawn-out mumbling and grumbling that goes on in the service as long as most of us are in.
In a couple of weeks whenever we were herded or whenever we would be run somewhere to wait (“Hurry up and wait,” we called it) I would be more and more with a specific group of dudes. I guess another collective formed basically for defense and commiseration. You had to have somebody (if you were at all well) to talk bad about the shit to and to hear them talk bad about the shit. So that you knew you were still alive in the world and not in some hell of your own imagination.
We were not nationalists but we thought white dudes mostly presented a problem. They were the ones in power, in authority, or that wanted to act like they were. They were the ones who would give you the most hassle even if they were just Airman Nostripe, Airman Basic like ourselves. Though some, obviously, were better than that. For the most part the black troops, while not looking for prejudice or racism or bias or any bullshit and not carrying an excessively large chip on their shoulders, would invariably come to face all that bad shit just by being somewhere alive.
The service itself is such bullshit that the white noncoms and officers because they are the face of that authority, the “reasoning” behind that structure, are identified with it and are responsible for its stupidity and ugliness. Wha
t mitigates that somewhat is that there are white boys in there, too, catching hell and complaining just like us, and the louder they complained the closer we’d be to them. But the ones who thought the shit was good or correct or to be obeyed to the letter we thought of as simple-minded shitheads and said they better keep their ass over the fuck where they was and away from us.
Roy and Henry were two dudes that I got closest to. Two black dudes with conked heads (which the people made them cut out) straight out of the Camden ghetto. Roy never played nothing, no sports or anything, just cards. He was one of those dudes that wore a chain with his fatigues from his belt into one pocket, looped like he had on a zoot suit. He rolled his fatigue pants tight on the bottom so the knees would droop and take on a draped look. The dude always carried a knife no matter what the activity. He was a nice smiling cat could talk shit with the best, but he was not to be played with.
His man Henry (they had known each other on the streets and agreed to come in together to escape a bust for something) was a tall straight athletic dude with a short fuse. When Roy went off, death was imminent. Henry was always going off and threatening people. Plus thay had a few dudes they walked with, actually we walked with, from down around that neck of the woods. A big fat dark dude who cracked jokes all the time and was always getting into trouble with the training instructors or somebody. I think his name was Humphrey. No, that wasn’t his name. We called him Humphrey cause that was a big fat dude in Joe Palooka comics. Humphrey didn’t like to be called Humphrey. Sometimes we called him Humph when we were in normal relationships; sometimes we called him Humph when we wanted to bruise his gigantic ego (Humphrey thought he was strong); or when we wanted him to go crazy, on anybody but Roy and Henry who he had the good sense not to mess with, we’d call him, very sweetly, Humph rey, Oh, Humph rey! and he would chase us.