by Amiri Baraka
The world of Howard University and its brown and yellow fantasy promise had faded, leaving a terrible frustration and sense of deprivation. That I had, through my own irresponsible acts, deprived myself of something valuable. I thought the sharp and relentless striving to become intellectual was the answer to this void. At some point I wanted to be back at Howard, at another point, and more and more consistently now, I was almost contemptuous of it and the people there, children. Though the constant self-pity I felt being there “among heathens” was an endless rebuke.
And then, on top of all this, I would actually, every once in a while, see some Howard people. Officers now. We were completely removed and separated from each other now. And the class realization I got from that, the class consciousness, was stunning to me. I could see that we were in different spheres. Of course I could not verbalize it as class, etc., but my perception of it as class, as a separation upheld by the society itself, was keen and staggering. Most of those Howard dudes who were officers in the air force simply avoided me. One I did meet at a base in the South and we talked in his room, and it was cold and frustrating. Our speech had been separated by reality. We no longer linked up. Our interests were different. I could hear the simplistic careerism. The prepared sheepdom of the readied-for-the-slaughter Negro pursuing his “good job” into hell itself. And “Who was I?” was going though my head. Who was I? Where did I fit in? Standing now on the side of the road as the select browns and yellows marched by heroically, triumphantly, toward that shaft of gold leaned out the sky to call them home to yalla jesus. Some calendar shit! I mean it reminded me of the somber glories of the calendars one got in funeral parlors right across the street from the yalla folks’ church.
There were a few black officers at Ramey. One was even on the same crew with me. N-45 “Not ready” was what the N meant. It meant we were a bunch of trainees, or ne’er-do-wells, or misfits. Gadsen, the Negro officer on that crew, was classic, I guess, though I never knew many of them well. He was dark brown but absolutely yellow in his aspirations and kind of brownish despite it all. He was a link with the past, in some sense, for me. I think he’d gone to Lincoln. He had a big blue car with a plaid top, a convertible, and was considered, by whomever, the most eligible black bachelor on the base. He was young, not much older than me, a second lieutenant, so he fit into the power structure in a commendable way, plus he was single and independent and could fly back and forth up the island pursuing what limited pleasures the island might offer to someone in the service. Though, for sure, we all surmised that those pleasures were much more than we would ever be exposed to. It was rumored that Gadsen always had one woman leaving the room as one was entering. And he enjoyed a kind of prestige among some of the base’s blacks, a mixed love-and-hate thing emotionally. But the white boys, ever cognizant of the caste-class structure of the real America, constantly made Gadsen the butt of their jokes, so he could not be too uppity, at least in their heads.
That was probably a weird position to be in, like the yellow/brown situation generally in the context of working for white America and somehow relating in some way to the rest of it, including black America. One fat first lieutenant, a yellow Negro straight out, got caught up in some weird stuff that socked it home to me, the sheepish quality expected of the careerist Negro. A fat white master sergeant got into a “game” being played by some of the younger officers near the flight line. They were tossing each other’s hats around, which was questionable in the first place, what with the Articles of War, the so-called RHIP (Rank Has Its Privileges, the motto in the service that spells out the class structure of that society and U.S. society in general clearer than I’ve ever seen it elsewhere). But they’re tossing hats and fat Sergeant Mullarcy gets in it. Catches this black lieutenant’s hat and tosses it, but too far for one of the other officers to catch. The black officer tells him to pick up the hat and the fat sergeant refuses!
A guy stood me up in front of the barracks one day, a white first looie, and made me salute over and over because he didn’t dig the black salute (though Laffy saluted the same way). Black troops had a tendency to bend their heads sideways down to their hand when saluting rather than bringing the hand all the way up military style. This guy made me salute maybe twenty-five times until he was satisfied. I was determined in my sly way not to understand what he was talking about and went on saluting in the hot goddam sun and he stood there over me, the gung-ho sonafabitch! And it went on and on.
I knew what would have happened if I had just nutted out and refused to go through the saluting game. And at the end, I don’t think I’d really changed my salute, but he was satisfied that he got me some extra duty or extra harassment for taking such liberties. But the fat sergeant refused to pick up the hat. I was squatting in the corner with some other airmen watching. And there finally was some compromise, like somebody else picked up the hat. But why? Why hadn’t the officer just given the fat master an Article 15 or got one of his stripes? The fat sergeant was an old soldier, the yellow lieutenant, a short-timer, and probably in transition to his dentist’s office in a few years. But still, to me and the others that watched and heard of this, this was a clear display of the dickless stance such yellow status predicted.
But I never felt really part of all that. In it, I was, for sure, and it pained me like the great tragedies of my reading. And I began to scrawl my agonies into my journal regularly. My findings. The ideas that came out of the books. Proust and Auntie Mame. Hemingway and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. And Joyce, Faulkner, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Flaubert, Cummings, Lawrence, Pound, Patchen, Hardy, James, Balzac, Stendhal. I would read Bonjour Tristesse and Robert Graves in the same day. A book on Buddhism and The Communist Manifesto in the same afternoon. I enjoyed plunging into long books that I’d read were difficult to get through. The Proust and Dostoyevsky were glad tasks for me. I’d find an author and read everything of his or hers I’d find. Puerto Rico made that difficult, but being the night librarian aided this quest. And when I was given guard duty, which was always, I would squat out in the hot sun twelve hours trying to read clandestinely, because reading was not permitted during guard duty. Plus Harrison said we were to have nothing on display on our dressers or windowsills, so that after a while the books I began to amass had to be put inside my closet or otherwise stashed, though at times I got sloppy and put them on the dresser with a bookend like normal people.
I also began writing poetry more regularly. I’d written some light verse and some Elizabethan doggerel during my HU days, mostly hooked up with the doctor’s lady, Liz. But now I was more serious (though still not altogether) with what I was doing. I was at least trying to put down what I knew or everything I thought I felt. Straining for big words and deep emotional registration, as abstract as my understanding of my life.
At the Green Door, I’d also stumbled into the literary magazine. Accent, a small magazine from somewhere in Illinois, impressed me most. With the strange abstruseness of doctrinaire modernism heretofore unknown to me. “Pity Poor Axel the Spinhead” was the name of one story, author now unknown. I tried to penetrate its murky symbolism. The poetry also swept past me. I had since been getting the Partisan, Hudson, Kenyon Reviews, even Sewanee from time to time. I was getting beat over the head with the New Criticism and didn’t know it. I strained to understand, to find something for myself in those words. I read Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and plowed into all the fashionable literary McCarthyism coming out then, as my entrance and baptism into the world of serious letters. All the time a radio would be screaming in hillbilly at the top of its voice and drunken airmen would be clattering through the hall goosing each other in memory of the most recent puta they’d banged.
I’d say the irony of all this is what someone far removed might think of as “delicious.” The reality of my day-to-day air force life fairly terrified me — despite the collective resistance of our salon elitism. The daily grind of guard duty, or fortnightly “alerts,” fake missions announced
by the screaming of hellish sirens which sent us scrambling down to the flight line and up into the very wild black yonder, were driving me up the wall, or at least to drink. Yet the reality from which I wanted to escape was replaced by my reading, which often was the most backward forces in American literature, teaching me the world upside down and backwards. But despite the New Criticism and the word freaks and the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive propaganda that I imbibed as often as I could as a supposed antidote to the air force, it gave me enough solid reflection on real life so that it had to change me. That and the service.
I began to send poetry out to these magazines. And unerringly in a few days, rejection slips would come in. I wish I had saved these. For a time I did, but they disappeared somehow. I got rejection slips from all the quality magazines and Accent and some others I dug up. The Saturday Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly. They all showed the good taste and consistency to turn me down flat and very quickly. And these rejections only served to fuel the deep sense of despair, so ultimate and irreversible with a twenty-two-year-old. None had any use for my deathless immortal words but I kept trying.
One afternoon I had gone to San Juan by myself. I had found some places in Old San Juan I could walk around. They had a tourist section, fairly arty. There was a painter there named Juan Botello (a funny name) and I would go in his shop and walk around that area trying to get close to some professional art. I had the New York Times under my arm. I was in civilian clothes and I remember I was reading The New Yorker. I’d stopped at a bench and sat down near a square. It was quiet and I could see a long way off toward the newer, more Americanized part of the city, the Condado Beach section, where I could only go if in uniform, so they would know I was an Americano and not a native. I had been reading one of the carefully put together exercises The New Yorker publishes constantly as high poetic art, and gradually I could feel my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was crying, quietly, softly but like it was the end of the world. I had been moved by the writer’s words, but in another, very personal way. A way that should have taught me even more than it did. Perhaps it would have saved me many more painful scenes and conflicts. But I was crying because I realized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it. I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with what this writer was and what that magazine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my poetry.
The verse spoke of lawns and trees and dew and birds and some subtlety of feeling amidst the jingling rhymes that spoke of a world almost completely alien to me. Except in magazines or walking across some campus or in some house and neighborhood I hadn’t been in. What was so terrifying to me was that when I looked through the magazine, I liked the clothes, the objects, the general ambience of the place — of the life being lived by the supposed readers and creators of the New Yorker world. But that verse threw me off, it had no feeling I could really use. I might carry the magazine as a tool of my own desired upward social mobility, such as I understood it. I might like some of the jokes, and absolutely dig the soft-curving button-down collars and well-tailored suits I saw. The restaurants and theater advertisements. The rich elegance and savoir faire of all I could see and touch. But the poem, the inside, of that life chilled me, repelled me, was impenetrable. And I hated myself because of it, yet at the same time knew somehow that it was correct that I be myself, whatever that meant. And myself could not deal with the real meanings of the life spelled out by those tidy words.
I made no dazzling proclamations as a result of this crying into the New Yorker experience. I still felt sad as I took a publico back. I still wrote the same kinds of deadly abstractions about love, death, tragic isolation. I still went on reading whatever I could get or find out about. Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, anthologies of poetry. I learned about Apollinaire and Rimbaud. I read every novel of Evelyn Waugh’s I could find and wondered often how to pronounce his name. I thought Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited was marvelous! I still got the reviews and stiff magazines. I even subscribed to Partisan Review. And I went on scribbling nightly or whenever, but regularly, in my journal. Writing haughty reviews and deep analyses of what I read. I was aware of an intellectual world — it had existed all this time — people were walking around knowing about it, knowing these various ideas, books, phrases, histories, relationships, and I didn’t. Why hadn’t I caught on in school? That there was an intellectual life that could be pursued. A life of ideas and, above all, Art.
I brought no great selectivity to my reading, though I began to understand after a while that some literature was more serious, more probing and thought-provoking than other, lighter stuff I might mash on myself as a result of reading The New York Times Book Review. But I found signposts and guides, references and printed directions. I might see a certain reference in a book or magazine — for instance, I saw the word “Kafka” in Esquire. What was a Kafka? I looked in dictionaries, no Kafka. Finally I stumbled on an article in some literary review about his work. The stiff abstruse language of the article only bade me rush harder after its sense. And all the sub- and counterreferences, the foreign words and jargon of the New Critics, I tracked down like Basil Rathbone, but it was not elementary.
During this period I also went home over another Christmas break. Again, I went to the Village and visited Steve Korret and his beautiful golden brown dancer wife. Their apartment on Bedford Street was stark white, except for the kitchen, which was orange. The books that ranged up and down one wall now pulled me to them and held me there. Steve laughed at me standing by his bookcase hungrily gobbling up titles. A lot of them Eastern and Buddhist. Steve had become a Zen Buddhist. I did not know how fashionable this was becoming in the Village and its counterparts elsewhere. It was still the middle ’50s (’56) and the tremendous popularity of the East in bohemian circles had not yet reached its full peak. Steve was an early acolyte. He even worked in an Eastern bookshop called Orientalia, around 12th Street. I came to the bookstore before I went back to Puerto Rico and I was transported by the hundreds of scholarly books on various schools of Buddhism and Eastern thought in general. I bought two of R. H. Blythe’s books on Zen, analyzing Western art for parallels with Zen consciousness. I was swept up.
Dylan Thomas was also very heavy in those days downtown. People passing through Korret’s house talked of “Dylan.” One black poet there lilted some of Thomas’ verses and then some of his own which were amazingly similar.
Korret was a writer! The idea of this made me drunk with wonder. A writer! What a thing to be — so weird — so outside of the ordinary parade of grey hellos and goodbyes I could begin to measure my life with. A writer. In the mysterious jumble of Greenwich Village.
Steve and his friends treated me like a little boy, which I guess I was. A little boy off in the goofy hopeless world of the army? No, the air force. How comic. How tragic. How odd. How romantic. How petty. I thought the last myself. These painters, dancers, writers, thinkers, witty makers of brilliant statements, and here I am on the fringe again. Unconnected and without note once again, just like at Howard.
I think it was now that the duffelbag incident occurred. Yes, it was now, at the end of this leave.
But I did get back to Ramey on time. Even sadder and more hopeless. I still had almost two years to go on my four-year enlistment. And my new intellectual life made soldiering harder and harder.
I had been moved to another crew, R-32, a “Ready” crew, which meant we were among the actual strike force of any bombing mission. It meant I had to go regularly to gunnery schools on base and in Tampa, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; Shreveport, Louisiana. In Tampa I met the Howard officer. In Mobile I shot down the drone aircraft during the gunnery sessions, because an old gunner told me in Puerto Rico that the shit was fixed and that the sight was rigged so you couldn’t hit the drone cause the drones cost
$10,000 apiece. So you had to use “Kentucky windage” — just shoot a little ahead of the thing, like deer hunting. And I brought it down, which meant I was supposed to go to a “Select” crew or at least a “Lead,” but I didn’t.
In Shreveport, Reilly, Burke, and I tried to go off the base together, but the locals discouraged it. I ended up two days AWOL. I had gotten lost and laid up with a sister down in the Bottom (one black community of Shreveport — see The System of Dante’s Hell) and finally came back rumpled and hung over and absolutely broke.
Once we got downtown, Reilly got on the same bus. At first neither of us recognized the other. I couldn’t recognize him because his face had been beaten till it was puffy and distorted. He couldn’t recognize me because his eyes were all but closed. He’d run into some little guy with a cowboy hat and they’d had some words about the jukebox. Cowboy hat, it turned out, was a professional boxer.
The new crew I was put on had an AC (aircraft commander) named Major Smart — no shit. He was from Mississippi and had gone to the eighth grade. He’d been a master sergeant when the war started (World War Two), got made a temporary captain and most recently a temporary major. He had a broad supernasal accent and looked at me with wicked twinkling eyes. I guess I was his cross — integration and all that shit.
He used to get to me by telling racist jokes over the intercom once we were upstairs. When he found out I would shut off the intercom, he’d put it on “command” so as to override all cutoffs and be heard simultaneously throughout the whole ship.
He would ask me how far in school I’d gone — it peeved him — and he would mock me, again on “command.” Jones is ed-ucated. He told a joke about a white man got on an airplane with a colored woman and the hostess brings them black coffee. The man says, “I didn’t want my coffee like this.”
The hostess says, “I thought you liked your coffee like you like your women, strong and dark!” I cursed in the isolation of my lower right rear gunner’s position but that was all. When the flight was over, Smart, with his narrow hooked nose and grey shit colored hair would stride past me, eyes twinkling.