by Amiri Baraka
to my race. I read a little,
scratch against silence slow spring
afternoons.
The title of the poem was “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand.”
The static over the poem and the whole “blue plate” did crystallize some things. It made me see certain real differences among those of us in our little circle on West 20th Street. Differences which often registered anonymously in my head, registered near where the brown consciousness still existed, tied to a black soul base. I had wandered away only so far, though. I came to a Halloween party we gave at West 20th Street as a “shade,” with an old window shade around my neck and hanging down my back like a cape. A.B. and I were the only bloods. I still pronounced the brownness but saw how caught it was in the ironies of that context, a comic manqué of Halloween identity.
The morality of the place, of that crowd and personal stance. There was not much black I related to except deep within myself, however that was stirred. It was not, ever, that I consciously desired not to be black or the brown consciousness tied irrevocably to the black mass soul — I had just wandered off, had gotten isolated to the extent that almost all of my closest friends, the people I saw everyday, were white!
But none of that really registered as such. In the wildness of our groping lives there was a deadly hedonism that answered all questions. That offered all explanations. The pleasure principle, that finally was the absolute, what gave pleasure, and that alone. Our lives were designed (to the extent they could arrange themselves according to our love of spontaneity) around pleasure. “Anything goes” was the word. Like Raskolnikov’s line, “All is permitted.” The same stance.
Flashes of what that was, a rush of sparks, kicks, comings, lies, sadistic exchanges, masochism, a swarm of individuals sucking on life for instant gratification. It didn’t matter how. With the cover story of Art to provide an arrogance and sense of superiority for some finally low shit.
As part of the social circle at West 20th Street people blew into town announced or unannounced. Poet John Wieners, just out of some institution, came and stayed with us a few weeks. He was wearing a long ponytail before they were even in with the outs. I walked him around the Village, going to the Eighth Street Bookstore, with people’s heads turning, staring at John, who said maybe two words the whole time he stayed with us. John, like the rest of the younger poets, had picked a piece from this school and that. He liked Charles Olson’s work. John, from Boston, called him Chawles. He had a crazy half-black (maybe Cape Verdian) friend, poet Steve Jonas, who plagued him. Jonas rambled nonstop about Pound. Blacks and Jews and Poundians all, scrambled by talk of Art. We’d look at all the “kikes” and “niggers” in his work, gloss it, look over it, justify it, and right on, Pound, right on!
Ray Bremser was another dude that showed, but this after much backand-forth correspondence between us. Bremser’s weird rhythm and gnarled efflorescent style turned us on, plus his jailhouse humor. He and a young black poet, Harold “Wine” Carrington, wrote us from the joint. Bremser made it out, Carrington didn’t. Ray showed finally on West 20th Street and for a while I was his legal guardian. (In one publication on the Beats there are about ten poets whose address is c/o L. Jones, West 20th Street.)
Ray seemed determined to live out his own criminal projections as well as the myth of the Beats. Tall, hawk-billed, with the long slicked-down mop of the juvenile hoodlum, he was from Jersey City (no wonder!), but I liked the guy. He was wild but good-hearted and no punk (old usage).
One night Joel Oppenheimer comes into West 20th, blood everywhere. Some guy at the Cedar had bashed him. I pick up my iron pipe and say, “Let’s go!” That surely was the black connection; the response to that kind of personal aggression is “Fight!” But Joel didn’t want to go near a couple of those assembled, i.e., for help, not that we needed them. There were always some shoot-outs at the old Cedar. One night Sorrentino and I are standing in there swapping literary unniceties and in come these guys in grey flannel suits, sleek with ties, and for the hell of it they start some asinine conversations as to who we are, are we artists or what do we do, are we bohemians? In fact, whatever we’re talking about this one slob wants to connect on. The conversation went from bad to worse. With these guys finally waving the flag or something and I raised Little Rock and one guy says, “You’re just saying that because you’re colored.” Which was true or could have been — but then, no, there’s whites who would’ve objected to Orval Faubus. Gil would’ve, as unpolitical as he was. So I spit in this guy’s face. But I got to hand it to the guy, he was all class. I say, “So what do you think of that?” The spit is literally hanging off his starched and stiff puss. I say, “Spit is dripping down your face.”
He says, “No, it’s not.” Goddam. Now tell me that’s not the height of absolute subjectivism. That’s how these people can torture, kill, and oppress people. “No, it’s not,” he says, with my nasty saliva rolling down his cheek.
Big John, the bartender, who was always grumpy in his good-natured way, comes over and looks at these two solid citizens and says, “What are you guys, starting trouble?”
I was beginning to see Lucia DiBella every so often. She’d resisted that liaison, protesting about Nellie. But finally it went down. Lucia was an arch-bohemian, the writer (person) on the fringe of society, par excellence. She liked that projection and held up the continental models of Cocteau and that crowd as historic disrupters of manners. And she was first and most deeply a literary person, a creature after and of the Arts. Always in jeans, her long red hair twisted almost any kind of way, so little she thought of that kind of style. Nellie was a much more “middle-class” person. She could be the homemaker, the wife, though she was a great help with the magazine. Lucia and Nellie were clearly in contrast. But in that life of hedonism, all that finally matters is the pleasure one gets from something or someone, little else, everything else recedes into the background.
But one night I’m in Lucia’s house and I pop awake and it’s maybe two in the morning. I sit up and say, “Wow, I’ve got to get out of here, get home.”
Lucia, I guess not wanting me to leave then but at the same time letting me in on something that she thought would transform our relationship, looks at me and says in a soft but signifying voice, “Suppose I told you you didn’t have to go back now, that Nellie is not there?”
“What?” I sat straight up. “What?” Ah, the injuries of spirit the male chauvinist must endure, doing his thing, but certainly in no way ready for the woman to do hers. I threw on my clothes. Lucia is protesting, “Why are you goin’ now? She’s not even there.”
But I was on the street in a few minutes, sprinting almost all the way from Avenue C and Houston to West 20th Street and 9th Avenue. When I got in the house, it was true, Nellie was not there. A.B. is on the couch sleeping. I prod him awake. “Where’s Nellie?” I shouted. He shook his head, shaking off sleep. “Where’s Nellie?” I shouted again, right close to his face. And then it hit me. Every week Nellie had gone out with Celento’s wife, they were going to “dance class” and then they’d go have a drink at the Cedar, the girls hanging out. The notorious Ceeny was seeing CD and one night I’d walked in and Nelly’s sitting with her talking to a painter, Luke Sashimi, a Japanese. It didn’t make any difference at the time, but now it did. I said to A.B., “Sashimi? Is she at Sashimi’s?” He nodded yes.
I knew where Luke Sashimi lived because it had been pointed out to me before. He was a friend of Frank O’Hara’s, an abstract expressionist of the Kline school. I ran over to his loft, which was only a few blocks away, shot up the stairs, and began hammering on the door. Sashimi opened the door and Nellie was sitting inside, on the side of the bed, as if she was waiting for me. All I said was, “Let’s go. Come on.” She began to cry. Sashimi walked toward me and I stood with my fists balled up. But this bastard had offered once to teach me judo.
He said, “We civilized people. We civilized people.” I got Nellie’s arm and pushed he
r out the door.
At home we screamed and I slapped her around. But she kept saying, “You were seeing Lucia. You were seeing Lucia.” I kept screaming at her, telling her that she was stupid and that Sashimi was stupid. Then I left her standing in the middle of the floor and rushed out, going back to Sashimi’s. I got to his door, then looked for something to bash his head in. I found a metal post from an old bed that was lying in the street and charged up the stairs. I hammered on the door with my fists and then beat the door with the post but Sashimi, no fool, had either gone or wouldn’t answer it.
I walked all the way back to Avenue C, not to see Lucia, but to find a friend of mine, Bob Thompson, a black painter I had gotten friendly with. Bob lived in a huge loft on Clinton Street. He was there with a couple of bohemians, getting high, shooting heroin. I didn’t know he used it, but he was sending one of the bohemians out to cop. I dropped some money in the mitt and meanwhile used some of Bob’s “smack” and we took off together, down, down, and right here! Bob and I were a number after that.
That’s what that life had become. Joe Heisler was moving out of the Bronx too. He and Rene (he reluctantly) were splitting, and Rene and Mark were supposedly moving to New Mexico. Paul and Ceeny had also agreed to split. The thing with C.D. had been the last straw. But one Saturday I get a phone call, some of us were sitting around drinking. It’s a guy I don’t know named Richard Gibson and he asks me if I want to go to Cuba, as part of a delegation of black artists and scholars whom the Cuban government wanted to get a look and spread the word. Relations with New Cuba and the U.S. had not gotten outright funky but they were getting that way. The U.S. could dig a Batista, their boy, but Fidel Castro was making noises like a democrat and you know they can’t abide that shit. The agrarian reform had already sent these white racist monopoly capitalists up the wall. I agreed to go, turning from the phone and telling people, “I’m going to Cuba!”
Seven
The Black Arts Politics, Search for a New Life
The Cuban trip was a turning point in my life. Langston, Jimmy Baldwin, and John Killens were supposed to go, but didn’t. I was in a group that included Sarah Wright, the novelist, and her husband. Ed Clark, the painter, whom I knew. Harold Cruse, the writer, whom I also knew. (I’d met Harold in my MacDougal Street days, often in the Caf, Figaro at Bleecker and McDougal. He lived then in a furnished room on West 23rd or West 14th and was always complaining about how Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.) Julian Mayfield and his wife, Ana Codero, a doctor, born in Puerto Rico. Also with our party was a man I didn’t know until then, Robert Williams. It was Williams who had organized the most militant NAACP chapter in the States, a chapter composed of black workers and returning veterans, in Monroe, North Carolina. They’d had “wade-ins” to integrate the pool in Monroe, and Rob had summoned black militant attorney Conrad Lynn down to North Carolina to defend a ten-year-old boy who had been locked up for kissing an eight-year-old white girl. Rob had also organized a self-defense group in Monroe and when he made the statement in 1959, after a white rapist of a black woman had been freed by an all-white jury, that blacks should “meet violence with violence,” he was summarily ditched by Uncle Roy and the NAACP. Later, Rob led a group of armed blacks to surround a group of menacing Klansmen, disarm them, take off their hoods, and send them scurrying back into their rat holes.
He was wearing a big straw hat like a campesino (Cuban farmer) when I met him, with a wispy tip of beard. He was a big man, maybe six feet three inches and about 240 pounds, imposing, strong-looking. One never doubted that, aroused, Rob could be a mean mf.
Traveling with us, as well, were John Henrik Clarke, the historian, plus some other people — a black model, two strange-looking sisters who were members, along with Gibson, of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and a journalist from a Philadelphia newspaper. (For a detailed account of this trip, see “Cuba Libre,” an essay in Home: Social Essays.)
But we went to Cuba (this was 1959), after a false start courtesy of the U.S. government, and we stayed a couple days in Havana talking to various people, meeting various Cuban and Latin intellectuals and officials. I met the great Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who asked me straight out where was Langston and did I think that Langston had gotten more conservative. I smiled, but I did not know then that Langston had testified, under duress, before HUAC, denouncing some of his own earlier work, to keep great patriots like the filthy cracker bastard James Eastland off his ass.
I met Pablo Armando Fernández, the poet, and people at La Casa de Cuba, an arts center. We also visited various ministries and got lectured to about what Cuba was trying to do. I talked to a young minister in the National Agrarian Reform Institute, António Nuñez Jiménez, and was very much impressed. And then we traveled, with thousands of other people, on a slow train to Oriente Province, on the eastern tip of the island, where the revolution was born. I met intellectuals from all over Latin America, including a young woman, Rubi Betancourt, from Yucatán and Jaime Shelly, a poet from Mexico. These young people assaulted my pronouncements about not being political. It was the first time I’d been taken on so thoroughly and forcefully and by people my own age, my contemporaries. I was not Eisenhower or Nixon or Faubus, I protested, I was a poet. And so you want to write your poetry and that alone, while most of the world is suffering, your own people included. It is bourgeois individualism, they screamed. That is all it is, bourgeois individualism. For twelve or fourteen hours on the train I was assailed for my bourgeois individualism. And I could see, had seen, people my own age involved in actual change, revolution. In my sinister American cynicism, my inherited world-weary arrogance of theoretical know-it-all-ism, I was little better than my friend who’d said, “I hate guys in uniforms.” In fact, I was the same.
I could fight back with what I knew of my own seeming disagreement with my U.S. peers, how I did have sensitivity to what was going on. But that seemed puny in the face of what I’d already seen in Cuba and in the faces of these young Latino activists and intellectuals, already politicized, for whom Cuba was the first payoff of a world they had already envisioned and were already working for. I was the oddball, the weary traveler/tourist from the U.S. of A. As much hot hatred as I could summon for the U.S., its white supremacy, its exploitation, its psychological torture of schizophrenic slaves like myself, I now had to bear the final indignity—which made my teeth grate violently, even in reflection — the indignity and humiliation of defending its ideology, which I was doing in the name of Art. Jesus Christ!
In Oriente, we went up into the Sierra Maestra for the celebration of the July 26 invasion of Moncada by Fidel Castro and his forces, who called themselves the July 26th Movement. There were hundreds of thousands of people up there. It could have been easily a million people. We trucked and walked and wound up and up. I rode partway with Françoise Sagan, the French novelist, who had attendants everywhere, befitting her great celebrity. I had known her from the covers of her books I read down in Puerto Rico in the error farce. All of us were thirsty, the hot sun whipped our ass, plus the long walk. But we made it up to where the celebration was held. And I heard Fidel Castro speak for perhaps two hours nonstop, relating the entire history of the revolution to the campesinos, soldiers, intellectuals, and foreign visitors. I even got to meet him and say a few words. It was a rare moment in one’s life and if the harangues of Rubi and Jaime and the others weren’t enough, this final stroke was, my head spinning with recognition, revelation, and the hot-ass sun.
We had a few more days in Havana. I hung out with Rob Williams one day, and everywhere he went people in the street cheered him. The Cubans had made his confrontations with the Klan and yanqui racismo known to people throughout the island, even though in the U.S. they tried to play it down.
Even when he was in Havana, Rob got word from the Cubans that the Klan was stirring again, trying to intimidate his family. Rob, with me trailing along with him, went to see the U.S. ambassador. Rob was wearing a shoulder
holster and his language was so hot you could hear him through the door. “If the U.S. government don’t protect them, then I got people there who will.” (And he did!)
A year or so later the government framed Rob in the famous Monroe kidnap case, when Rob saved two whites who’d wandered into the black community, during a shootout with the racist state police, from being jacked up by a crowd of blacks incensed by the state police’s racist terror tactics. He went to Cuba, Algeria, and finally China, where he never ceased to be a thorn in the U.S. racists’ side with his militant publication The Crusader. When we got back to the U.S., the newspapers even pretended that the Cuban celebration had been rained out.
But I carried so much back with me that I was never the same again. The dynamic of the revolution had touched me. Talking to Fidel or Juan Almeida, the black commander of the revolutionary army, or to the young minister of agrarian reform, Nuñez Jiménez, or Jaime or Rubi or Pablo Fernández. Seeing youth not just turning on and dropping out, not just hiply cynical or cynically hip, but using their strength and energy to change the real world — that was too much. The growing kernel of social consciousness I had was mightily fertilized by the visit.
When I returned, I was shaken more deeply than even I realized. The arguments with my old poet comrades increased and intensified. It was not enough just to write, to feel, to think, one must act! One could act.
First, I wrote an essay about my Cuban experience, “Cuba Libre.” I remembered that the Cubans had changed the name of the Hilton Hotel in Havana to Havana Libre, and a U.S. telephone operator, in making the hookup of a call there, insisted the hotel was still the Havana Hilton. But the. Cuban operator would have none of it. “Havana Libre!” she shouted. “Get used to it!” That was the spirit I wanted to invest in the essay. It won an award after being published in the Evergreen Review. The award was $300 and was the most money I’d ever gotten for something I’d written.