The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  It was Harvey and Arthur I had seen in a photo Korret sent me in Puerto Rico. Bird had some indirect hookup with this circle, I’d heard. Harvey Cropper had tried to teach Bird to paint in exchange for Bird teaching Harvey to play the saxophone. But Bird was dead by the time I got to the Village (contrary to what Ted Joans wrote in 1981 in Coda magazine saying that when I was around in the early days of beatnikdom I didn’t “consistently fly on bird wings”). Bird died when I was in the error farce. I remember Yodo and I talking about it. I didn’t reach the Village (except on leave from HU or the error farce) until March 1957!

  There were writers too in that circle. One I remember, Clyde Hamlet, who imitated Dylan Thomas. But many people did then. Korret’s work at this time was connected very consistently with Thomas, who was roaring around the Village, especially the White Horse Tavern. Hamlet was a very short, very dark brother with owlish eyes who ran with jazz musicians as well. He was reputed to have lived with Buhaina, Art Blakey, up in a loft on 29th Street. Hamlet was suave and sophisticated, I thought, he was hip to me. That’s why I couldn’t understand his poetry sounding so exactly like Dylan Thomas’s (nor Steve’s) when it seemed to me, once I’d read Thomas, that anyone reading him would realize immediately that their poems (especially Clyde’s) were simply Thomas imitations and little else.

  What I’d said before about how my reading was taking me into something and away from something at the same time is relevant here. Because this circle of Korret’s and indeed his influence, to a certain extent, was merely a continuation of the other “whitening” influences I had been submitting to enthusiastically under the guise of information, education. That was true. But, again, there was something else being taken in. I guess not for the first time, but adding weight to whatever other similar tendencies come with anything you take in in this white supremacy society.

  So that Europe as intellectual center was yet another stone to the weight of “alienation” from black (if that is not too strong a word) that was building up in me. Exiting from one world and entering another. That’s the way this learning I’d committed myself to had taken shape. As fragmented and personal as that learning was, the sources I went to most consistently had more the weight of the white than the brown or black (though the yellow trailed its source, as it does, like a shadow).

  And I learned quickly that the Cages and Cunninghams were very highly esteemed in that circle. Almost mythological beings, and ditto “Dylan,” as Korret called him, like they were cutbuddies. So I was heavy into Dylan and Yeats too because Steve Korret quoted Yeats so often. He’d even quoted “Lapis Lazuli” in a letter to me in Puerto Rico, and I treasured those few lines and eagerly sought to know their source. “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread./All men have aimed at, found and lost;/Black out; Heaven blazing into the head.”

  There were deep assumptions these people lived by and I did too, but who knew what they were? I didn’t, and I am clear that unconsciousness is a ubiquitous condition. The rule of confusion is terrifying. But I followed now, eagerly, happily, assured in myself that this, finally, was what I had been looking for. Not only as the place where my intellectual pursuit would take place, but the life there, as I knew it, as it seemed to me then — this was the life I wanted.

  When Charlene, Steve’s wife, served cheese omelet and black bread along with ale, for me it was the sheerest revelation. Korret’s white apartment to me was the essence of hip bohemianism. I knew nothing (consciously) about omelets (nor black bread, nor ale). It was “Village food” and I adored it. I had known nothing about white apartments. Even the word “bohemian” I thought of as intriguing, positive, something to be found out about and emulated. The conversations, both their form and content, heard around Steve or in those coffeehouses, or around Washington Square and MacDougal or Bleecker. The long-haired mysterious women with their eyes painted, “free-looking” in sandals. Dudes with berets or bookish pipe-smoking people. I was drawn to all of them and all of it. Who knew that all of this sat in a particular way in the world of meaning? Who knew the significance of all of it measured against a real world? The world Norman called (since he worked at not having to work) “The World of Effort.” Echoing the superhip metaphyiscs of Bodhidharma or the second Patriarch.

  But it is significant that most of those blacks I met through Steve Korret, who were artists, left this country, finally, never to return. Virginia Cox lived for years on Bedford Street, very near where Steve Korret lived before he went to Scandinavia in 1960. Vincent Smith, who was perhaps the most legitimately bohemian (in the sense that he had no money and was not just some middle-class juvenile having his way paid through bohemia, as I later was to find out some of the white folks I met were, but coming out of a Brooklyn ghetto had to struggle against society and even against what it tried to make him into, in order to paint). And then finally, when he began to paint consistently, Vincent developed a style that was thoroughly black; completely connected to the history and tradition of Afro-American painting, but at the same time, original and fresh. Vincent still lives in the U.S., and though he still, even at his high level of artistic accomplishment, has difficulty getting major shows, this is also part of the black tradition in this country, and will be until we get our own cultural institutions. But his work is still strong and still triumphantly beautifully black, and all those streets and voices and music course through his images with a daring and sense of color that is his alone yet collective as the African American experience itself.

  At the time Vince was joked about, not harshly but lovingly, in Korret’s circle, because he was such a hard liver. (Though, thank goodness, this changed many years ago.) He was a wine bandit, for a minute, the talk had it. And he lived in a loft that had neither heat nor light. It was the bohemianism of necessity, in one sense, rather than the fake poverty of the well-to-do little boys and girls. But Vincent’s vision was black, and the soul that pulsed through his work was dark as our history and he has survived!

  This was 1957. Eisenhower was president and jokes were made about his backwardness, much like the gibes that were tossed at genius Gerry Ford. The Montgomery bus boycott had just scored a success, desegregating Montgomery’s buses. Martin Luther King, the leader of this black victory, was just coming into the public’s eye when he had cooled out large numbers of armed black people who were spoiling for a fight as a reaction to racists’ bombing of King’s home. This had taken place on national television. A few months later SCLC — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — was born. This was the year that Jimmy Brown, the great fullback, also shot into national prominence. Later that year, Orval Faubus and Little Rock would also come to widespread public notice.

  So this was a time of transition. From the cooled-out reactionary ’50s, the ’50s of the cold war and McCarthyism and HUAC, to the late ’50s of the surging civil rights movement. And I myself was a transitional figure, coming out of the brown world and its black sources but already yellowed out a bit by the Capstone employment agency on The Hill. And then to add insult to injury, or maybe attempted homicide to assault, I had offered myself to the totalitarian “whiteness” of the military. Running away from it, I dived into the books, only to get involved in a deeper, more “profound,” more rational version of the same thing. And then suddenly the unaware chump, seeking escape, runs into, strangely, a slender white woman with painted eyes, ponytail, and sandals with a copy of Strindberg under one arm.

  The Village, of course, is where I first met with white in any social situation portending equality (though that is a story still to be told). The underlying tone of that social circle was that black men and white women could make it, if they wanted to. Steve was not hooked up with a white woman nor had he been that I know of. In fact, later, when I began to go out with one white woman I met (whom I later married), Steve spoke somewhat disapprovingly of this, in his way. And I believed, for some reason at that time, that he did not even like white people, though I had never thought of it before. But when he said
what he said to me about the white woman I was seeing he tried to embarrass both of us saying that she had caught me “with coon fruit” (watermelon). And seeking to legitimatize his seeming objection to this woman or at least understand it, I said Steve hated white people. Though it never occurred to me that he did, or for that matter that anybody did or would bother.

  Strange then, that after Korret left for Scandinavia he would marry a white woman and be content to live over there with her and the family they created. Though I guess it is not strange, since if you are going to stay in a place where there are mostly white people, there is certainly a greater chance of becoming hooked up with one. And then, like we used to say, So what?

  That circle, however, did seem to have the white woman/black man connection as one of its underlying themes. Certainly, Clyde Hamlet was always hooked up with one white lady or another. And so were many of the now emigré painters of that group. But I thought nothing of it except that it was hip. The idea that you could go with a white woman seemed like one of the “down” aspects of the whole bohemian scene. Before coming to the Village I had never really thought about white women. In Barringer High, I certainly looked at the various sweaters and skirts and insinuating walks and lyrical smiles of the mostly Italian female student body. But that was nothing and barely registered. (At least I didn’t think it did at the time.)

  I think that was the tone of perhaps a whole generation or two of black intellectuals, who, seeing segregation and discrimination as the worst enemy, sought a more open contact with the world. And certainly, those who were taught that Europe (the Holy Grail of “whiteness”) was the source of intellectual life and measure could have that understanding shaped in some specific social context into a liaison or affair or long-term relationship with whites, a romantic connection. This was one of the advertised characteristics of the bohemia I came into. Though a black and white couple could still cause a few heads to turn, even in the Village. But by the late ’50s such connections and relationships were on the obvious increase.

  Bird was probably the patron saint of the generation preceding mine, as he was an arch-bohemian in the downtown Village sense, including his famous trysts and marriages with several white women. Wild flights of art, heroin blind, and “pulling grey bitches” were Bird’s trademarks. Or so at least it was told. Jimmy Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son had come out about that time and I stared at it in the old Eighth Street Bookstore, admiring the cool black face that stared back at me. And to me, Jimmy was the last great black arts figure who related to Europe as center. But even Jimmy is transitional in this sense, since he began to travel back and forth and was no longer the classic black exile in Europe.

  I was like blotting paper for any sensation. All perception, watching and looking, listening, trying to emulate and understand. A young boy just back from the outlands, still outlandish himself, but wanting to learn whatever anybody claimed was valuable to be learned.

  And now I wonder what I looked like then. Wandering the streets trying to check something out, not only thinking that almost everyone I saw or met hungered and thirsted after knowledge the way I did, but figuring that they had been around the Village, that they had been on the scene for a while. I doubted anybody I saw in the San Remo or Pandora’s Box or Rienzi’s had been stuffed away in the brown-and-yellowness of HU or imprisoned in Aguadilla in an air force suit. Who could be that stupid and gullible? Only your reporter.

  Meanwhile, I no longer had a job. One afternoon I went to lunch and never returned. I really went out to lunch. Suddenly, leaving the Gotham Book Mart with Mrs. Steloff’s freshest hoydenisms ringing in my ears convinced me that on my newfound freedom trek I did not need any new top sergeant. So I simply split, no explanation, nothing, just gone gone gone.

  This made for problems though, like cash. I was not sure what I would do. Didn’t think about it and in the suddenness of my “decision” didn’t even care. I just walked, and was glad to. It crossed my mind a couple days later that maybe I could get on unemployment. I hadn’t worked long enough, but I remembered someone had told me that veterans had some weeks of unemployment compensation coming. But then the contradiction to that, I thought, was that I had been Undesirably Discharged. Maybe that would cancel out that unemployment. I had to find out.

  The little apartment on East 3rd Street was stark and cold. When they said cold water they were not shitting. I turned on the slender gas range, opening the oven door and lighting up all the “eyes” on top. Sometimes I’d sit reading with my feet thrust into the oven, the chair tilted back, with a heavy sweater on. I had also begun to write a little, a few scratchings, but not much. Everything was still too new, too strange to do any real writing. I didn’t even know what I wanted to write about. Except the kind of poems I’d written in Puerto Rico, abstract and big-worded, talking about stuff of which I had only the remotest idea.

  For eating, I’d usually buy a few canned foods. I shouldn’t say “foods” because the shit I ended up getting was only marginally edible. I couldn’t (and still can’t) cook, so mostly what I did was heat up canned garbage. I’d always be eating something like Spam (ugg!) or canned Chef Boyardee spaghetti (double-ugg!), really loathsome stuff like that. Sometimes I’d heat that shit up, then didn’t want to eat it. And it would sit there getting cold in an already cold apartment and I’d stare at the concoction I was supposed to dump down in my stomach. Usually, I would get hungry enough to gobble it down very quick and still be hungry.

  The hungriest I’ve ever been was at HU, where, spending the money my parents sent me right away, I had no money left for the cafeteria (before my mother and father got wise and started sending the money directly to the cafeteria food plan). Broke, I’d live off Nabs (those little Ritz cracker and peanut butter sandwiches) and orange soda.

  But even in that hunger there was a kind of collective kid glee, probably at the prospect of actually being hungry, a virtually unknown phenomenon, so I guess that was kind of exotic. East 3rd Street hunger maybe had a little of that element in it. Alone, in my cold-water flat, knowing almost no one in the whole of that huge city, and now without a job and very little money, the exoticism was not the factor that I thought about. Such a hunger as can come to exist in such circumstances has a much more dire impact, because of the aloneness, the kind of solitary nature of your situation.

  I could have called my parents, but I absolutely did not intend to do that. That would have been an admission that I had failed, that I was still a little boy. I was twenty-three, an adult, I could take care of myself. Actually, the college and air force stints had made me more self-reliant and even though I was getting ready to get in a bad fix, I knew I could handle it.

  So I sat with my feet in the oven and read or tried to scribble on a yellow legal pad. Or I would walk around peeping in windows, looking at books and people, finding out things I thought I needed to know. And had no money. But I started to react in more aggressive ways to my new state. I began going into various delicatessens, usually on the far West Side, Greenwich Village proper, and trying to boost certain things I needed to survive. My best shot was those nice barbecuing chickens they sit on the counter after taking them off the spit. Occasionally, I’d catch the store clerks in the right position, off one of the chickens, and hat. I also began to discover various ways of advancing my economic position (at least easing my hunger) just like the big corporations, and in the true spirit of American free enterprise I began to rip off what I could, modest enough, but effective. I discovered that the bread trucks and milk trucks left their wares in the doorways of the stores before those stores were open. I’d shoot out early in the morning and cop a couple quarts of milk and a half dozen rolls. So I had breakfast. Somehow I’d cop some hated Spam or some cheese and I had lunch. Dinner I’d deal with the flying chicken routine, when I could.

  Sometimes Steve Korret invited me to dinner and that was, to me, unbelievably great. Sitting in that neat white apartment with all those books and talking and eating,
staring respectfully in awe at Steve’s gorgeous wife, Charlene. I’d also begun to meet some other young people on my own, usually around the coffeehouses I’d stop in from time to time. There was Ernie, a young brother from the West Indies, who was also trying to write poetry. And we hung together, after a fashion. Sometimes he’d even come over to my scrambled-up little joint and we’d sit around talking about poetry, looking at each other’s work, and figuring out how to survive with no money. (Some years later I think Ernie did go back to the West Indies and away from the hated cold weather.)

  There was Ed, who was still in school up at CCNY, majoring in philosophy. Ed was a robust, actually a big fat dude, always smiling or about to smile. He was a poet as well, but deep off into Eastern philosophy. Both Ed and Ernie knew Korret, but they were too young to be in that circle. The three of us would sit in Rienzi’s over cider or cappuccino (I never liked espresso) and talk about what we knew and what we didn’t. We liked the idea of sitting around being young poets, young black dudes trying to find a way in the world. Sometimes that world seemed wayless, sealed up, surrounding us with high walls of anonymity, racism, pennilessness, the norms of U.S. life for young black men (or old black men, or young black women or old black women, or middle-aged, etc., etc.). But we all gave off optimism like life rays, and actually encouraged each other by our willingness to be out there in that world saying, “Hey, we gonna be writers, dig it?” And not caring what anybody thought about that.