The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  But Dolly was not altogether all together. This began to register, some of her conversation was strange to me. She talked about things I didn’t completely get because they were out of different epochs and I had been scarcely educated formally. For instance, she talked about the radical ’30s. In fact, later I discovered she had been a Communist. She was still, she thought, some kind of fellow traveler. But her relationship, even ideologically, had grown vague and unfocused. She knew about the “fascists” and the “bosses” and she made reference to them in her conversation. But Dolly was no middle-class Jewish girl from an Ivy League school. She worked in some sweatshop. She had come from that kind of Jewish family, her people from the Lower East Side when it was full of Mike Gold’s people. The life she talked about seemed mean and cold, the product of a dying economic system. But it had done something to her psychologically — she spent half her weekly salary on a psychiatrist and had spent some time in at least one mental hospital.

  As the sun began to come up on Thompson Street she took me upstairs into her apartment, where I stayed until the middle of the afternoon. When I woke up Dolly had split for work. There was a note and stuff laid out to make coffee. But I didn’t like coffee. The apartment was small, maybe three rooms, and though it was cluttered, there was a sense of someone living there, not the chaotic storage space I lived in. She had a few books and records, though it was not the same kind of stuff one saw the youngish fashionable paperback readers carrying around. She was more into secondhand bookstores. The style was old-line radical bohemian, like the faded ’30s memories she reflected but really had no direct part in. I sat around, clearing my head. I’d had quite a bit to drink. I sat quietly, browsing through her meager library. There were also a few drawings of Dolly around, in different-colored charcoal, and little Villagey things here and there around the rooms. But there was a meanness, a poverty to the place, that brought something else in with it along with the easy label of bohemian. It was bohemian but it was bohemian poverty. A starkness and bareness that was in no way fashionable. I sat there idle and reflecting. I had slept with a white woman and I wondered what it meant. The act itself had been like any other, but there was a mental “excitement” that this hookup brought that was “other.” No matter that Dolly, as I said, was really an older woman and no goddam beauty queen. A mental excitement. I pondered it as I rose and went down those stairs, ducking my head as I met a few of the other residents of the building, who were mostly the local Italians. It seemed they were all scowling at me and so were the ones in the street, including the clutches of men standing and sitting in front of the private clubs and coffeehouses as I walked up the street a couple short blocks to the Trader offices.

  For a couple of days things went on as before. I was coming to the Trader, packing boxes, and going my way. I was still trying to write, scratching away when I could on my legal pads. I still had no typewriter. But then one afternoon Dolly came into the storefront. I had told her where I worked, and though I hadn’t tried to get in touch with her, had only barely thought about her, now she had come into the Trader and leaned up against the boxes grinning at me. In the light of day, even the half-light of the Trader, she looked even older. We talked a little about the party, about what I had done when I woke up. What she had done at work that day, how she felt. I was alone for an hour or so, but now Nellie and Dick came in one after the other. Dolly made a bad joke when she found out that Dick was my “boss.”

  “This guy don’t look like such a big-time capitalist,” she laughed. And Dick, of course, didn’t. I could see him peeping over and through his glasses as he prepared to take out his clarinet and practice. Nellie was making faces over at her tiny typing table. I guess they were signals, but I couldn’t pick them all up.

  Dolly spoke exactly like the stereotypical Lower East Side worker Mike Gold might write about, even though she had wandered around the Village for almost twenty years. That middle-class panache that is supposed to come with the bohemian life she had not picked up at all. She spoke almost exactly like a stage working-class white person and it embarrassed me a little (sad to say), that tough New York accent that bought trouble as easily as it described it.

  We left the Trader together, going into a coffeehouse and talking some more, and finally we went back to her house. I must’ve stayed there two or three weeks, maybe more, going back and forth to the Trader, and only occasionally back over to East 3rd Street, when I needed more clothes or to get something or other. Jim took it in stride. I was still giving him a little dough for the rent, and by now he was deeply involved with Bernice. He had heard that I was keeping company with Dolly from someone else, who it turned out even knew Dolly, so they said, so he just mentioned it to me to confirm it. He nodded and chuckled at the thought.

  Living there with Dolly was a little out, because Dolly was not a little out. The longer I knew Dolly, the more I could see that she was very deeply disturbed. To her the world was a horrible, frustrating place (as it is under the rule of the ancient minority). In this sense she was like Tim and his wined-up, cynical self. But Dolly not only had the radical background, she had gone for the Freudian psychological trip as well. So she actually, literally, spent $20 a week out of a $75 salary on the headshrinker. And she had been doing that over ten years! She told me this as matter-of-fact exposition, though she seemed, upon my naive open-eyed questioning, to be a little embarrassed because the shit had not worked. The pain she felt, she still felt, and all those $20s going to this slick psychiatrist had not changed any of that.

  She had another male friend she talked about incessantly. An older dude who, as the ironies of class society would have it, was the brother of a friend of my sister’s. The woman, Shelley Ransome, went to Teachers College with my sister, and Shelley’s brother, Luther Ransome, had come to New York seeking to be a sculptor. They were his drawings strewn around the house. But “Mensch,” as she called him, seemed only to hook up with Dolly when he was broke. And while they had lived together in a loft on Great Jones Street, Dolly said she couldn’t take his beatings, his arguments, his blaming of the world’s ills on her, his taking her money and her love and leaving her nothing but the imprint of his flailing hand on her face.

  The whole story chilled me. In fact, Dolly’s life, the apartment, the weekly psychiatrist, all chilled me. A little boy from a little brown house and family. All these things, including her speech, seemed out to lunch to me, too extreme and pathological. And Dolly peeped as much, telling me what a child I was, what a little boy. She even told me one blue night high up over the street that I didn’t know anything about sex. What with the straight-ahead stuff I knew, the same thing going in the same place, that was truly humbling and humiliating, though thinking about it, how much could I know? Though I had sneaked and read Krafft-Ebing when I was in high school and The Kinsey Report, but I had scant experience except with Betty from Newark and I never saw her anymore. She had never complained except that she thought that doing it during my lunchtime on the family couch was a little abbreviated.

  But I was still mostly there at Dolly’s but drawn away in a funny way, tilted away from her. I had never been there all the way I guess.

  One night after work Nellie’s boy on the motor scooter didn’t show and I walked her home. She lived just a few blocks from the Trader, in the opposite direction, on Morton Street. In the central, more fashionable Village where the middle-class, hardly bohemian residents cribbed. We had talked in pieces every day I went to work, but it was distanced and polite. She was always friendly and helpful. I always wanted to ask her why Will Ribbon greeted her the way he did. But Nellie was funny. I’d seen her one night dressed in black, leotards and top, from head to foot. She was so little she reminded me of a mouse. But she had been jumping up and down talking to someone, the scooter guy (his name was Guy, as well), and it knocked me out. She seemed so antic and clownish.

  Nellie said she had wanted to be a clown. She liked circuses and show biz. She liked making people laugh,
with her little hopping walk and neat Mary Washington clothes, combined with instant bohemian getups. I was walking her home, I had no other intentions, maybe because we worked together everyday, and that was as far as I saw it. But when we reached Morton Street, she quickly invited me up for coffee. I didn’t drink coffee, so she offered me a piece of watermelon she had in the refrigerator. (The source of Korret’s gibe a few months later.)

  We talked about literature, she could see I was serious and that made her want to know how come and what it meant or maybe she just wanted to get laid, I donno. Anyway, by the early morning hours I was still there and still talking. We were talking about Shakespeare, Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth when I made my move.

  Nellie lived in a one-room efficiency-type apartment, painted white with bullfight posters and Mexican hats on the walls. She had a narrow wall of books, many of them from school, a white rag rug, a tiny kitchen section with a table and refrigerator and stove and not much else. But it was in a really fashionable West Village area and one paid for that.

  By now Nellie was looking for work in the mornings because it was clear that the Trader was not long for this world. She was gone when I woke up and I rummaged around and went over to the storefront. When she did come in we looked at each other from time to time and smiled, and after work, as Barbara and Dick looked on, we went off together towards her place. I didn’t have much at Dolly’s, maybe nothing at all. But whatever it was I got it out, though there was one scene where just before I left we were together one last night and then the next evening Dolly sees Nellie and me coming out of a coffeehouse. She called me at the Trader the next day and says, “You’re with me one night, the next night I see you with the little whosis. Do you think that’s right?” I said I didn’t, but that was the last time we spoke as people relating to each other intimately. I had “moved in” with Nellie and went on sleeping there and going back and forth to the Trader, while Nellie looked for another job.

  Though the relationship with Nellie had its tentative aspects as well, still there was much more a sense of us actually “going together,” to the extent that such a definition could apply to us. I was open, naive, in the sense that I did not know what such a relationship involved — i.e., the black-white thing. I don’t think Nellie knew much either, on the real side, about such a hookup. But she was much less naive than I thought about the general man-woman connect.

  We were working at the Trader and generally going home together after work. We’d go to a few places, very few, because neither of us had much money. We might go out in the company of Dick and Barbara and some of the other Trader regulars. It was light stuff. People around us, I think, took our hookup as light stuff—casual. Ribbon winked and chuckled when he found out. But it was all still vague and offhand, even to us.

  Occasionally I would go back to East 3rd Street and holler at Jim and whoever. Sit down and talk with Tom Perry. I might bump into Tim, but I didn’t see Korret that much anymore. I was taking on a new group of friends, or at least drifting away from one circle.

  Nellie and I did talk, about a lot of things. Our plans, I suppose. What we saw or wanted to see for ourselves. Who we thought we wanted to become. For one thing, Nellie had something of an inferiority complex. First, she’d been out in Long Island under the heavy sun of gentile suburbia, trying to grow and having to relate to whatever the dominant image and peer pressure was for the Jewish middle-class yearning for American middleclassdom but finding only Jewish middle-classdom. Plus she was very tiny but almost chubby, “zoftig” I heard a store owner friend of ours describe her, with a very Semitic-looking face (if such a concept is scientific). But the prescribed stereotype, East European, prominent nose of aquiline proportion, etc.

  Going to Mary Washington had done nothing to eradicate her feeling of inferiority. The black middle class suffers from the same kind of malady, a lack of self-esteem caused by the great nation chauvinism that is so much a part of American life. White supremacy, anti-Semitism, they not only work on the victims to deprive them of material and spiritual ease but they can, with some of the victims, actually convince them that they are hated for correct reasons, and the victims take up this same view, only, of course, it is now self-hate.

  With Nellie, this lack of self-esteem took on a personal cast. It was not so much expressed as being anti-Jewish as by feeling that since she was small and plain looking, she could not be a glamorous figure in the theater or the world of lights and action. She was also attacked psychologically by the effects of struggling to overcome the anti-Semitic stereotypes syndrome. The attack that national minorities feel or the immigrants before they got integrated into the great white (racist) American Dream. I read in a diary of hers one night: “I think I’m losing my Jewishness… . Grrr, what is that?” That is, a debate about whether there was such a thing as “Jewishness” and, if so, was it a quality worth maintaining? The cultural aggression that is the norm of U.S. life creates such paradoxical questions in the minds of its victims. And so the swarm of self-doubts that confused the young Nellie Kohn.

  I read in that same diary a list of men’s names. It was shocking for some reason. (Where had I obtained such fake morality?) Nellie actually listed the names of the men she had slept with — at least that’s what I took it to be. I wanted to remember the names, most of them I didn’t know. But since I saw my name, “Roi,” at the bottom of the list, I assumed that’s what it was. Plus, my man Guy’s name was there just before mine. I wondered why a person would have such a list, what it portended. It was no short list either, and I wondered if perhaps it went back into high school or something. Another thing she had in that diary was a running day to day or every few days entry about what was going on in her life. I had stumbled on the diary rummaging around in things, as I usually did when I awoke and Nellie was already out looking for a new job. I’d go through things, and look at things, read different books — at least a few pages of ones I was only a trifle interested in. Being in the calm white apartment, in an orderly clean setting, was new to me since the beginning of my Village days, so I was fascinated. Being in the apartment gave me a sense of well-being, plus I was very nosy.

  I stumbled upon a recent entry that seemed the dreamy reflections of a young woman — “What is ahead for me? What am I going to do with my life?” And then she added: “I’ll be all right if Roi doesn’t continue to live here.” Well, that hurt. Nellie and I seemed to get on smoothly enough, though there was no great passion. There was sex, fueled up a little higher maybe by the mutual curiosity each of us felt about the other. We mentioned sometimes different stereotypes we’d heard about black-white romantic relationships and we’d laugh, above and beyond such stupidity. But mentally we’d check to see if such was true about us.

  I never mentioned to Nellie that I had read her diary. But in a couple days, over some pretense, I cut out for East 3rd Street. A few days later, while I was scratching away in the dank little pad, there was a knock at the door and Nellie stood outside asking could she come in. And I was back on Morton Street. A week or so later, I was supposed to meet her at the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival. I couldn’t go but wanted to hang around outside after it was over since I was always interested in jazz musicians and the people who dug them. I spotted Nellie standing talking to Dick and Barbara, and when I come up she colors — turns an unfashionable pink. I look from one to the other while we’re exchanging small talk and by the by young Guy comes up wheeling his motor scooter. There are a few words, some embarrassed bullshit, then she climbs on the back of the scooter and goes off with Guy. So I was gone again. But in a few days the same thing happens. She’s tapping at the door and I come to the door and she’s standing there with tears in her eyes. (It was my sister, Kimako, who said once, “You don’t understand women.” The male chauvinism that would let me accept such a copout must be obvious.)

  After that, though, there were other stages, other openings and closings in our relationship. For one thing, now it was certain that there was a r
elationship, whatever it was. It existed. Not only did we know each other, but we related to each other. We liked talking to each other, apparently. Maybe we liked sleeping with each other, but there was never any passion. But maybe that’s idealism. Maybe I didn’t know what passion was in the first place, since there’s no truth in advertising. We always related to each other calmly and rationally.

  We were living together now too. It was her apartment on Morton Street, but we went about what we went about like that was where we both lived. Nellie had gotten a job with a publisher. It wasn’t quite what she wanted but it was more money and it was consistent. The Trader had just about gone down the tubes. I was still there. But Martin William had hooked me up with a job proctoring for examinations at New York Law School. I stood in the room so students couldn’t cheat. It paid a few dollars and was a welcome addition to my lack of money.

  For the first time, I was “going with” someone in New York. Some kind of stability had been reached in the relationship. We’d go to a few places. Movies, sometimes a club. That’s when we ran into Steve Korret up near the old Loews Sheridan. He said, “You’re the one who’s been keeping him away from us,” glowering at Nellie in a mixture of mock outrage and his normal arrogance. When the story of the watermelon got told, he responded, “Coon fruit you got him with coon fruit!” A few more words and he was gone and I tried to explain what I didn’t understand.

  I did begin to understand what the interracial relationship was in this society. The stares from people on the street, the tension that rose in my own self in certain situations, though for the most part I didn’t give much of a shit what anybody, not no white people anyway, thought about our hookup. But there is a mutual mythology that gets built in those relationships and built by the people in them. Information about the other’s world becomes one main topic of discussion. Though, I think, black people by and large know more about the “white world” than whites know about the life and times of even the middle-class blood in America. But the differences in the cultures between the American culture and its various ethnic variations and the African American are points of departure for discussion. The conflicting opinions that come with those lives are discussable as well and the dynamic that makes the meeting interesting. But white supremacy creates an inequality in those relationships that probably most of the people in them cannot identify by name but certainly they can by what emotions and ideas it produces. For me, suddenly, there were no more black women in my life and it had happened quietly, “normally,” without fanfare or recognition. Betty and Joanie I had struck out with in the nasty little East 3rd Street pad. Neither of them were bohemian. Betty had said openly the joint sickened her, Joanie hadn’t said anything but she’d turned down my romantic blandishments flat. During one of Nellie and my split-ups I’d tried to get Betty to go to the apartment again. But she refused. And she’d heard that I was going with “some white girl” and that chilled her even more. What did I want with her? she said. “I heard you going with some white girl.” I took it only as jealousy, but it was really a farewell speech from the distaff side of the nationality. I didn’t know.