by Amiri Baraka
The strings from my old life, the HU college crowd, the older darker Hillside Placers, the brown Cavaliers, high school, even the yellow agents of Bethany Church picnics, had been cut. Not just by attrition but a willful kind of de-identification process that had gone on in various stages and identified as various things since high school.
As far as I was concerned the air force had formally ended the great shot-from-cannons stunt of brown folk myth where they are blasted through the plastic tarpaulin of their obvious limitations out at the yalla sun of Jesus’ smile. He smile good jobs, “haimes,” prestigous “slaves,” maybe you could be a general or something, wear suits to work, be connected up with well known white folks? Maybe you could be T. Rockland Johnson, M.D. or H. Bernard West, D.D.S. “You remember Jinxy Red? He’s got a very good practice! You remember Wilson McCall, he’s a captain in the air force, flies a jet. When he gets out he’s going to start a practice.”
It seemed all I could see was brown bodies shot flailing into the air, flapping their arms like weird birds. It made me see the masques I’d danced and worn. The skins I’d already shed. And in my parents’ house I felt like I was wandering through a carnival of ghosts.
One evening at dinner, after I’d been “home” maybe a month, seemed a kind of farewell. I argued with my mother with all of the family members at the table. There was probably no reason except there had been some mention about what I was going to do. Was I going to get a job in Newark? I told my mother she just wanted me to get some factory job in Newark. (She probably wanted that even less than I did.) My confusion was showing and being sounded.
But what did I want to do? Why not work in a factory (the post office was probably more like it)? No, I wanted something else. For one thing I wanted to be gone from here. From Hillside Avenue and even, yes, from Newark.
I’d gone into New York a couple of times. And one day I started looking at the Times’ want ads. I had got close to two dudes I’d known before the service, who had not gone away to school. One was Tim Wilson, Cynthia’s brother, he was still talking about painting. The other was Brad Davis, the thin, thin haired acerbic vibraphonist with Jackie Bland’s band. He had also been aloof from the HU scene. It came out he also was thinking about moving to New York. Because that’s what had grown more clear in my mind. New York. The Village. An apartment of my own. Or at least with one or two roommates to keep the cost down. Brad worked in NY and had gone to a business school there. He worked down around Wall Street for an importing firm. He was always lithe and hip looking in his blue suits and shirts, the one lock of his straight hair hanging over his forehead like Horace Silver’s. Brad was the coolest talking and coolest walking dude any of us knew.
So we made a loose pact. We three would go to the Village. We would take our fantasies all the way into reality. We would be hip and cool and in touch, a peer of the mysterious and romantic names like Steve Korret and some others who apparently lived exciting meaningful lives there.
But in the end that was not the way it happened. I saw an ad in the Times to work in a bookstore on 47th Street. The Gotham Book Mart. I went over that morning on a bus and walked in and met the old grey civet of a woman and was told I could start the next day.
So I started everyday going to New York on the bus, getting off at 42nd Street and scrambling up to 47th between 5th and 6th to the Gotham Book Mart to work. I told my parents I’d gotten a job in a bookstore. I don’t know if it made sense. This announcement was not met with wild applause. Though my father did note it, putting a half question, half revelation on the end of the word “New York.”
Mrs. Steloff, the owner, was an impossible person to work for. I was a stock clerk and occasionally delivered books to nearby apartments and hotels. I once delivered a book to Thornton Wilder at a hotel and thought I would see him, but the doorman took the book away and I was left walking away drugged that I didn’t get a chance to see somebody famous.
Mrs. Steloff shouted at everybody, customers, the help. She seemed to get easily aggravated and impatient with any number of things. She screamed at me for not knowing where the stock was, not moving fast enough, the usual. Mrs. Steloff asked, after I’d been there a few weeks, if I was cripple — she was referring to the slightly dragged leg of the cool hipster hop I carried with me from Newark, a legacy of black. It was ironic to me, Shit, this bitch think I’m cripple and I’m hip.
Now I began to read the real estate section. Apartments to Let. It gave me something to do on the bus in the mornings or during the forty-five-minute lunches Mrs. Steloff gave us. Talking to Tim and Brad was occasionally encouraging. They wanted to move too. They were ready. But then one morning I saw an ad in the paper for an apartment on East 3rd Street. An ex-UN worker was leaving, he had sublet the apartment, down just off First Avenue, and now he was splitting to go somewhere! Lunchtime I found my way down there. I’d wanted the Village proper, but this was close and it cost only $28 a month for three rooms, a cold-water walkup. But to me it was right. When I walked in the apartment a couple of people were there talking to an Indian-looking guy about this and that and various qualifications. I walked in saying, “I’ll take it! I’ll take it.” It didn’t matter to me. I’d take it! And in a few minutes the business was all but concluded.
An apartment in New York? What? How can you handle that? These kinds of questions bounced subtly off the walls of my parents’ house. (I didn’t have much to take. Most of my civilian clothes had thinned out being in the air force. I had no great library to transport. It wouldn’t be that bad.)
“But how can you deal with the rent? That job?” Fifty dollars a week was what Mrs. Steloff was paying me. I’d have money to spare. I had no other responsibilities and besides I’d have roommates. But Wilson and Davis squared up on me. They never left Jersey at all.
At the Gotham, I was constantly picking up on whatever in all directions. Authors’ names I’d never heard of before, books I knew nothing about. Gotham has always been the home of “We Moderns,” as it was listed in the catalogue: the post-WWI explosion of Western art and literature that brought these expressions into the 20th century, redefining the form and content of Euro-American life, still explosive as the French Revolution and Commune of 1871, but distorted by the cynicism and disillusion created by World War I and the abject crumbling of the Brotherhood of (white) Man on the battlefields of Belgium, France, and Germany. The maturation of Imperialism!
The New Directions books, the sacred texts of ’20s modernity: Sartre, Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Stein, and the contemporary bridge into our own day, existentialism. The Little Review, Blast, stream of consciousness, the mythology of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Shakespeare & Co., Hemingway, the Cantos, all these things I was picking up on much deeper than before, buying books and carrying them back on the bus readying for my move.
Then one day I went over with my few things and few books. It was after work one evening I went over. There was a little furniture, a bed, a couple chairs. My father drove me, my mother went with us, searching East 3rd Street and First Avenue for some sign she could understand or feel comfortable with. The joint looked even grimmer inside, going up the narrow dark halls, opening the door and into the tiny cold-water flat. I could see my mother’s eyes misting over. She looked hurt. My father went on talking about how I had better get some furniture. (They’d given me some sheets and towels, a blanket.) He was trying to make a joke of it all. I guess he knew, at least, that I was determined to do it, that I was off on my own, like it or not! And that, in itself, was encouraging. But my mother could barely see or speak. She mostly grunted at the place and whatever she thought the future held. And suddenly I was alone!
There were no lights burning. Con Ed hadn’t yet turned on the power. There was no gas. I couldn’t even cook — not that I knew how. I was using candles and they shed their eerie light, stuttering and crooked. I was where I wanted to be, I thought. Living by myself. (I’d wanted that, hadn’t I?) Throughout the service I’d groa
ned under the weight of different roommates from the unobtrusive to the repulsive.
But now I was alone. Yet I sat up in the candle glare and was almost feeling regret. I knew no one for miles. I was a stranger in New York. The few friends I still knew in Jersey had vanished. Wilson and Davis had copped out. I had no phone, I couldn’t even call anybody. That’s a lonely feeling. But I had an apartment and a job. I was in New York on my own, by my lonesome, and that was good enough for me!
I started walking around now after work, mostly on the West Side, Greenwich Village. Looking. Watching people. I walked around Midtown where I worked. I had very little money. I’d gotten the gas and electric turned on. I made contact with Steve Korret and would go there once in a while. He seemed amused that I’d moved over. “So many had said they were coming (like Tim and Brad) and they were never strong enough to do it,” he said. Like some ominous editorial. But I didn’t want to hang around him too much. The stuff he was doing was on another level. Though I longed to be really included in his circle of friends. I’d seen a few people on the streets and spoken. “Yes, I’ve moved to New York. I’m on East 3rd Street.” Not the Village, but close, they seemed to say. (This was before the Lower East Side became fashionable. It was then just outside of the Village, the romantic center.)
I began to stop by the few places I knew or heard Steve went to. Rienzi’s, a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street. The San Remo, a bar at the end of the block. I found out about Romero’s, on Minetta Lane, run by a flashy mulatto, Johnny Romero (who later left for Puerto Rico, it was rumored, because of some run-in with the Mafia). It seemed to be the maximum hangout spot for many blacks in the Village then.
There was also a coffeehouse on West 4th near Sheridan Square called Pandora’s Box, where Steve McQueen used to sit on the steps and watch the passing parade until he went off to Hollywood and became one of its drum majors. Coffeehouses, at that time, were very popular. The post-WWII decade of American visitors to Europe had brought back the coffee-house as one evidence of a new reacquaintanceship with continental cool. Certainly, for me, the coffeehouse was something totally new. Downtown New York coffee smells I associate with this period of my first permanent residence in the city. When you came up out of the subway or the PATH, the smell of coffee seemed to dominate everything.
I made the rounds of the coffeehouses, checking them and the people in them out. I’d heard certain names around Steve Korret. In fact one afternoon we’d gone over to Rienzi’s and had espresso, caf, au lait, hot cider, or cappuccino, which I really liked. That might even have been before I got out of the service. But coming in the old Rienzi, with its gestures in the direction of continental sophistication, had turned me on. I thought everyone in those places was a writer or painter or something heavy.
Even when I got out of the service and was floating in and out of these places, I still thought for a while that all the customers were heavyweight intellectuals. Intellectual paperbacks were just coming out about that period as well. And people could be seen with the intriguingly packaged soft pocket books, folding and unfolding them out of bags and pockets. Sipping coffee and poking deeply, it seemed, into Moses and Monotheism or Seven Types of Ambiguity or Aristophanes’ comedies, mostly reissues with the slick arty covers that made merchandising moguls attribute “genius” to the young men who conceived and orchestrated this paperback explosion.
But I was struck by the ambience of the place. People in strange clothes. (One dude I saw on the streets then dressed up like a specter from the Middle Ages, like some jongleur wandering through the streets, complete with bells and all. I wondered then, what wild shit lurks behind this creature’s eyes?) The supposed freedom well advertised as the animating dream of that mixed-matched Village flock I believed as well. It was what I needed, just come out of the extreme opposite. Suddenly, I was free, I felt. I could do anything I could conceive of. Some days walking down the streets, with the roasted coffee bean aroma in my nose, I almost couldn’t believe I had gotten out of the service and could walk down the street. And though I still had to get up work-early, to get uptown to the Gotham Book Mart and Mrs. Steloff’s madness, I felt liberated on the real side.
My reading had prepared me for this trip as well as my friendship with Steve Korret and what I had perceived to be the life of “the Village” through his spiritual stewardship. My last few months in the air force I’d even started getting The Village Voice and began to read more specifically about contemporary Village types. I even wrote a note, a letter to the editor, that was printed, regarding a controversy about the “meaning” of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. My first signed article, “E. L. Jones, Ramey AFB, Puerto Rico.” “Godot means God and/or Death. The ending of the word is simply death in German turned around.” Such intellectual pomposity leaning up out of the 73rd Bomb Squad.
I first met Ted Joans, then a surrealist painter, in those pages. With his beret and symbolic rhinoceros. He had a small gallery somewhere on the East Side and featured in one show the works of Reggin Nam. Gross, but at that point fascinating. Though I wondered why. But I had then, even from across the sea, some forming image of what was going on downtown.
The idea that the Village was where Art was being created, where there was a high level of intellectual seriousness, was what I thought. And the strange dress and mores that I perceived even from the distant jailhouse of air force blue I thought part of the equipment necessary to have such heavy things go on. The trips home, on leave, and before that, from school life, helped cement these notions in my mind. So that I did think that coffee-house after coffeehouse and the other establishments down around West 4th and MacDougal, Bleecker or 8th Street, were filled with World Class intellectuals. And I felt a little uneasy just appearing on those streets or inside those places with no real qualifications save desire.
The streets themselves held a magic for my young self as well. Names like Minetta Lane and Jane Street and Waverly Place or Charles or Perry or Sheridan Square or Cornelia all carried with them, for me, notions of the strange, the exotic, and I dug it all, believed in it all.
I was meeting people or seeing them in one way or another through Korret. He was my center, and his circle the pinnacle of my social and intellectual aspirations. He had an integrated kind of court. His second wife was a dancer and she had danced with Merce Cunningham. Those groups of young white intellectuals were hooked up with Cunningham and John Cage and David Tudor; Korret and his wife, Charlene, knew and had some degree of social relationship. Though at the time these names were just part of the rash of information I had to file and build my own understanding with.
Steve worked in a bookstore, Orientalia, along with Cunningham and Cage’s and the Living Theater’s lighting designer, Nicky Czernovitch, whom I had now got to know going in and out of Orientalia, staring in awe at the thousands of titles relating to Eastern thought. Zen had come in even then with some groups of Village intellectuals. It was the so-called Beat Generation people who later popularized this attention to Eastern philosophy, especially Zen. But Korret, Czernovitch, Cage, Cunningham, Renny Charlip, and their circles were intimately involved with the philosophy even then. And because of Steve Korret, so was I.
The most obvious facet of the Zen trend in the Village in those days was the Zen “jokes.” People in that circle would make ironic statements, funny or with pretensions of being funny, that were supposed to reveal some basic Zen truth or insight. I guess this came because in the various books about Zen, especially Blythe and Alan Watt and Suzuki, humor was supposed to be an intrinsic part of the doctrine. And many times individuals were supposed to have gained “enlightenment” through laughter. In fact, the Zen masters and monks and other initiates were always supposed to be “roaring with laughter” in revelation of one Zen truth or another.
One of Korret’s friends was a painter named Norman, a Jewish dude who had strange, almost slanted eyes. I was sure this was because he was deep off into Zen. And Norman played the part. When I first met him, he
gave me one of his strange-ass paintings. It was a seated woman, painted very flat against a very flat background, with no eyes. I sat and looked at that painting for a long time trying to figure it out. I never did.
Norman, in his sandals and long reddish-brown beard, was for me, in those days, the prototype of the Village intellectual. A painter, involved with Zen and its high antic truths, who walked around in sandals (though with socks) even in the winter and a big turtleneck sweater, cracking ironic anomalies about a world I was still trying to understand.
Because of William White and his paintings and my own attempt at doing some painting under his influence while I was in the service, it crossed my mind a couple of times that maybe I wanted to be a painter. I remember standing in the cold-water flat on East 3rd Street batting painter or writer back and forth in my head for a minute. But then I settled quickly on being a writer since as broke as I was I could not buy the materials to paint with. Hence my decision.
Still, I was fascinated with painting. And Korret’s circle contained, I found out after a while, quite a few painters. The black painters, Harvey Cropper, Arthur Hardie, Walter Williams, Sam Middleton, Virginia Cox, and the great Vincent Smith, were all part of Korret’s circle, inner or outer. Later, many of these people went to Europe, convinced, probably, that the U.S. is really home only for barbarians.
Certainly, Europe was the intellectual center for many in Korret’s circle. I guess for one part of a whole generation, they were more connected to the vision the emigré Richard Wright or the 20s “modernists” had about America, with Europe as some sort of haven. There was a whole section of that generation that came just after Wright, Jimmy Baldwin’s generation, perhaps, who took up residence in Europe, or who came back and forth. Some finally deciding it was better to be formally foreign in a foreign land. There was still the mythology of black people being able to make it better in Europe, especially Paris, away from the diabolic torture of American racism. There was no doubt that for many black intellectuals, like their white counterparts, white intellectual Europe was the source and site of the really serious intellectual pursuits. But for black people this assumption has very serious implications. (It has, finally, for all Americans.) The intellectual worship of Europe is in one sense only the remnants of colonialism, still pushed by the rulers through their “English Departments” and concert halls!