The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  So it was in the air, it was in the minds of the people, masses of people going up against the apartheid South. It was also coming out of people’s horns, laid out in their music. People like Max Roach spoke eloquently for an older, hip generation. He said “Freedom Now,” and Sonny Rollins had his “Freedom Suite.” And nutty Charlie Mingus was hollering his hilarious “Fables of Faubus.” I even got into a hassle with a bald-headed German clerk in a record store on 8th Street. I’d come in and asked for Jackie McLean’s terrible side “Let Freedom Ring,” and the clerk wanted to give me a lecture about how “you people shouldn’t confuse your sociology with music.” (It was mostly a European concert music-selling store). I told him to kiss my ass, right now. Yeh, kiss my ass … that was also getting into it.

  So there was a newness and a defiance, a demand for freedom, politically and creatively, it was all connected. I wrote an article that year, “The Jazz Avant-Garde,” mentioning people like Cecil, Ornette, and the others, plus Trane and the young wizard Eric Dolphy, the brilliant arranger and reed player, Oliver Nelson, Earl Griffith, onetime Cecil Taylor vibist, and my neighbor Archie Shepp, who had come on the scene, also shaking it up.

  I also wrote a piece for Kulchur called “Milneburg Joys, or Against Hipness as Such,” taking on members of our various circles, the hippies (old usage) of the period who thought merely by initialing ideas which had currency in the circles, talking the prevailing talk, or walking the prevailing walk, that that was all there was to it. I was also reaching and searching, life had to be more than a mere camaraderie of smugness and elitist hedonism.

  Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” the completely “free” improvisational record, with the cream of the new players, had set the tone. It was as if the music was leading us. And older players like Trane and Rollins took up that challenge. Trane played chordal music, but he got frantically chordal. The critics called it “sheets of sound,” many at a loss for words, like they’d been when Bird had first appeared. Downbeat and Metronome had to re-review all those old records, because they had put them all down as fakery and they were classics of African American music, so they tried to clean up.

  What was being generated by the new blacker circle I mostly hung with was quite different in effect than the earlier circles. Our overall large circle was, of course, well integrated. But now, I’d be sitting and talking to Marion or White or both, or three, add Bob Thompson. Or we’d be at Bob’s loft, checking his wild paintings, all kinds of different-colored women with scenes taken from the Italian renaissance classic painters and reinterpreted through Bob’s way-out mind. White was painting wry symbolic abstractions, where instead of the pure motion-paint of the “action paintings,” White relied on more or less “organic”-looking shapes swirling and dancing on his canvases. I still wonder what White’s work would have been like today had he lived. Or Bob’s, had he lived. Overstreet, at the time, was doing brilliant but highly sexy drawings. And usually we’d be getting high, about to get high, or talking about getting high.

  We had some bigger, wilder parties at Cooper Square, in Archie’s loft, with some of the hippest music of the time. And Archie and I used to do some mean tipping around those streets, or when he played we’d go cheer him on. Sometimes with Bob and White and Marion and me, Tom might be walking with us, or hanging with us, and sometimes Elvin Jones or Hank Mobley. Dudes be sitting around heads about to wear they chest out and Elvin would look like he wasn’t even high, smiling his lit-up smile like a neon sign. But Hank eventually got into bad times.

  One time I was sitting with Marion and White and somebody else up in my study at Cooper Square and we were shooting cocaine. Somebody also had given us a vial of liquid procaine, which was like fake cocaine. I get the bright idea to melt the real cocaine in the liquid procaine and shoot it up. I had got the needle out of my arm and I feel the rise coming but this time it’s sweeping up through my body to my head like it won’t stop. I was sitting in the big overstuffed desk chair for my rolltop and this hot surge seems to sweep up past my eyes shooting out the top of my skull. I rose up, almost paralleling, I guess, the rise of the drug. I said, “Whooo-ooo,” and then wheeled around in the middle of the room and fell over backwards like I’d been shot. And then, on the floor, semiconscious, it seems to me like some big blue thing is trying to hit me between the eyes. They say I was thrashing around on the floor, turning my head frantically from one side to the other. I thought I was trying to keep the blue thing from hitting me between the eyes. I didn’t know nobody could OD off “coke,” but that felt mighty close to something bad, and it scared the shit out of me. But it didn’t stop me or our drug activities.

  We were in the old Half Note on Hudson Street watching Trane slay all pests. Between sets, Bob (who was a great friend of Elvin’s), White and I go up the street, fetch a bag of whatnot, then Bob wants us to stop by this painter’s house he knew, a pretty hip white dude who lived down there. We all high, but Bob wants to go up and talk to the dude. His wife comes to the door in her gown and lets us in. It was a very sheer gown and you could just about see through it. there’s some music playing so after Elvin is introduced, he starts dancing with this dude’s wife, grinding like he’s trying to start a fire. I’d always thought the shit made you unsexual, but it didn’t affect Elvin that way at all. We’d be nodding and he’d go back and play the drums like mad.

  There were now a few lofts scattered around where you could hear the music as well as European avant-garde music. I especially liked Morton Feldman’s music, Cage’s audacity and some of the other things. But we were mostly into the new black music. Coffee shops like Take 2, the White Whale, also had the young musicians in when they couldn’t work in the larger clubs. In one of those coffee shops one night a really wild episode went down. It told me something about downtown and myself and some of my friends. Archie Shepp had been playing in this place on 10th Street, the White Whale, the decor even had a big anchor on the wall with huge chains hanging down. It was early and people were sitting around talking and, at a couple of tables, playing chess. There’s one guy sitting there, they called him Big Brown. He was big, about six feet three inches, and much darker than brown. He was slender like he was in shape. Plus, he had this slow, bent-knee hop he walked with that was more peculiar than hip. Brown made his mark downtown by first standing around various places like Washington Square Village profiling. He had muscles, so he liked to preen and twist, stand like a body builder in a show. He was a proto Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Brown’s whole demeanor used to turn me off. But even worse was the fact that not only would he always be in his exaggerated strut, but during the summer months he’d walk the streets in a loincloth, like an Indian fakir or something. And sometimes he’d come into the Cedar when we’d be sitting there and he would come walking down the aisle rubbing his crotch, like he was showing off his wares to the various females. One night he even came up to a booth where one couple was sitting and stood rubbing his crotch just a few inches from this woman’s face! Her companion said something and Brown talked in rhymes putting the dude down. Brown loved to recite singsong versions of Shakespeare or the Rubaiyat or his own rhyming doggerel. A couple of times, I saw him get in some woman’s face who was sitting with some man and I vowed inside my head that that motherfucker better not ever do that to any woman I was with. In fact, when he’d walk down the aisle I’d loudly ridicule him, and one time he cut his eyes over my way, scowled, made some remark, and kept swaggering on up.

  But as he was playing chess, the dude he was playing checkmated him, calling “Check!” I laughed, as it happened just as I was passing close to the table where he was sitting.

  I said, “Wrong again!” and broke up. Some of my friends, notably A.B., Marion, and Joe, were in there and this cracked them up and some others nearby. Brown always pulled his shit off in the spirit and demeanor of “Bogarting” people. He would run his silent or rhymed gorilla act on people and they were supposed to be intimidated. But I didn’t dig him.r />
  So Brown says something, maybe “Fuck you” or “What you got to do with it?” or something, but the catalyst was me saying, “Big Brown, the African Queen!” So he leaps to his feet and goes into his menace/gorilla stance. But I kept talking, kept putting him down. Not only “African Queen” but all kinds of other things my instinctive sense of danger now has blanked out. Not only that, I start taunting him: “You supposed to be bad. You ain’t bad, dressed up like some fuckin’ genie or something. You just silly. A silly-ass nigger! Shit, I bet you can’t even fight.” Yeh, it really got out. And I can see with some kind of split vision my various buddies flung about the room, frozen stiff as respective Statues of Liberty or Colossi of Rhodes or whatever. (A.B. told me later he kept thinking, “Shut up, little nigger, shut up.”)

  I can’t even say what made me go so far. Except I felt Brown’s whole thing was an act, some second-rate vaudeville. Actually, he looked like the dude who used to run with Mandrake, because he wore a turban sometimes. But in some fit of absolute frustration, most likely, Brown reaches and grabs the chains from the wall decor and holds them like he’s going to bash my head in. So I started laughing and taunting him even more. “Yow, a six-foot-three two-hundred-pound bad dude got to get a chain to bash me!” I cracked up. “Hey, man, you must be pretty bad, you gotta get a chain. God damn!” And that broke it open. It was absurd. And in the end, the room was bathed in laughter and Brown stood there with the chain in his hand, then slowly let it fall to the floor. He turned and grimly stalked into the night. My nerves shot more laughter up and out after him, then we got some wine, threw it down telling various bullshit versions of the same event, and trailed out of the joint, with people still pointing and cackling. We looked both ways when we got outside though we still were animated by a frivolity that both masked and carried our deep sighs of relief.

  Hey, it wasn’t even the real world. I guess that was my reasoning. In the real world, of Newark’s steel-gray streets, all that mouth would’ve got me killed or at least forced me to set a new indoor and outdoor Olympic hat-up record. But down there, wow, even the bad dudes was cardboard Lothars afraid of their own shadow.

  The work with On Guard on Rob Williams’ defense and the Fair Play Committee had given me another and, I think, deeper perspective. I could reflect on revolution and struggle as concrete phenomena. It made the posturing and fakery of much of the downtown residents even more absurd. Though I was still involved in quite a bit of it myself. Lucia DiBella had gotten pregnant. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t mine. And Lucia had one dancer friend of ours living with her from time to time. I thought maybe it was his. But he was a homosexual, a beautiful but tragic dancer who was always slightly fantasizing about himself as a young Nijinsky. One night at a cocktail party, probably high on acid, he stepped through the open window, claiming he could fly, and killed himself. Plus one of the dancer’s men friends, piqued by something he, Neddie, had done, or both of them mutually pissed off at each other, had ended their relationship and the friend, a tall blonde fashion model, Chris Bartlett, and Lucia were rapidly becoming fast friends. However, such “might be’s” and “maybe’s” didn’t change the reality. No matter how many of the endless one-night stands I might get involved with, I’d always show up at Lucia’s.

  Actually, the magazine I ran with Nellie, Zazen, had continued to issue No. 8, coming out the same time as The Fleeting Bear, the sheet that Lucia and I put out. Lucia’s pregnancy alerted Nellie, however, and she asked me what I knew about it. I didn’t know anything about that, just because I went over there to put out the Bear didn’t mean anything. But it did. I had asked the poet Harry Schulman, who was a friend of Lucia’s, over the phone, “What does the baby look like?” And he said, “White.” I felt relieved. But in a few days, Nellie came home with our babies from hanging out in Tompkins Square Park near Avenue A where the Lower East Side mothers congregated, as the West Side mothers did in Washington Square Park. She said to me only that she had seen Lucia’s baby and it was “one of those black-and-white kind.” Then she cried some, asking me from time to time, “How could you?” And that was a very good question. I wondered myself.

  To make bad things worse, in a few months the house next to ours was vacant and Lucia moved there, baby, model friend, and all. I had said before, it was like Brook Farm. Eventually, the model assumed fathership of the baby, and Lucia and he even had a baby of their own. Lucia called the child she’d had by me Dominique, in honor of the Frenchified LeRoi.

  I was now taking published potshots at the nonviolence movement. “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents” was one article, “What Does Non-violence Mean?” another. Kulchur had published the first, and the conservative Jewish publication Midstream the other. I was becoming much more openly involved with movement questions. The mood downtown was changing, there were many more signs of some people getting involved with various struggles, especiallly the Cuban struggle and the student struggle. Plus, there were now a great many more blacks downtown than when I had first arrived half a decade before. I had been on the scene now from the period when there were relatively few blacks and when the sets had gotten fiercely integrated, but now there seemed to be further change. More and more I found myself sitting and talking or walking and making parties with black dudes. We began to feel a certain kind of community, perhaps a kind of solidarity as blacks that was unspoken in the old MacDougal Street days, but was now an openly acknowledged emotional binder. And the various sets we’d go to would always take on a distinctly different tone once we’d enter. Especially with Bob Thompson laughing at the top of his voice and “snatching bitches,” as the saying goes. And White and Marion and I would be blind as the night.

  But we knew what was in our hearts, something open and bright. We wanted what was new and hip, though we were connected in a lot of ways with some stuff that was old and square. We knew the music was hip and new and out beyond anything anyone downtown was doing, in music, painting, poetry, dance, or whatever the fuck. And we felt, I know I did, that we were linked to that music that Trane and Ornette and C.T., Shepp and Dolphy and the others, were making, so the old white arrogance and elitism of Europe as Center Art was stupid on its face. We could saunter into a joint and be openly critical of whatever kind of show or program or party, because we knew, number one, it wasn’t as hip as the music, and, number two, it wasn’t as out as we were out, because now we began to realize or rationalize that we were on the fringe of the fringe. If the down-town Village/East Village society was a fringe of big-time America, then we were a fringe of that fringe, which put us way out indeed.

  Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA in 1961 to stop the newly freed Congolese people from nationalizing Union Minière and other Rockefeller properties. I found myself marching outside the UN in demonstrations, while others, mostly blacks, took off their shoes and threw them down in the gallery as the gallery guards were called in to toss the demonstrating blacks out. Sisters were bashing the guards in the head with their shoes and throwing the shoes down out the gallery. Ralph Bunche said he was ashamed and scandalized by such niggerism, while we were scandalized and ashamed of his negro-ass tom antics.

  Outside, in front of the U.S. mission to the UN, the police also attacked us. One sister, Mae Mallory, Calvin Hicks, and I were marching and we looked up at the top of the stairs just in time to see James Lawson, the so-called nationalist, pointing us out to the police, and then they attacked us, clubs flying. Mae put up a terrific battle and the police were sorry they ever put their hands on her. It took several of them to subdue her. She was one of the people in On Guard and she remained very active in the Black Liberation Movement.

  As the police put us into the paddy wagon, a couple of them would catch us by the elbows and hoist us through the back door, banging the top of our heads on the metal doorframe at the same time. You felt like you’d been whacked yet another time with a nightstick. Dazed in the back of the paddy wagon, I reached into my pockets and found some Benzedrine o
r Dexedrine pills that I took every once in a while to stay awake if I was writing all night. I threw them all in my mouth, figuring the nabs would charge me with possession of drugs. But I had taken so many I was jittery as a flea. The police must’ve thought it was nerves.

  I began to meet some young black intellectuals connected with the Black Liberation Movement and strike up friendships. One I met in this way was Askia Touré (then Rolland Snellings), the poet. We were on those picket lines and I didn’t even know he was a writer. We became friends as part of the movement.

  Sometime later I began to get some word of Umbra, a magazine that began to come out from the Lower East Side that featured black writers. Lorenzo Thomas, who published as a very young person in some of the places that the New York school writers published, I think I was aware of first. His work appeared about the same time that Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard, the Oklahoma free association semi-surrealists began to appear. I was especially impressed by Thomas and Berrigan, and very curious about Thomas because he was black.