The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  One later afternoon, as was my wont, I wandered into the Five Spot, the one on the corner of St. Marks and Third Avenue. I’m sitting there sipping and probably glancing at a paper or something when two bloods come up to me. Blues People had come out recently and I was elated and surprised in a way because it was my first book from a mainstream publishing house and I was impressed because of the hardcover. The publisher had even had a party for me at the New School, where I was teaching a course in poetry. Ornette Coleman came, and there is a photograph with the two of us grinning. My mother and father came as well, but one of the biggest disappointments was that my grandmother had died before I had a chance to show that book to her. She probably would’ve cried and told me, “Practice makes perfect.”

  But one guy says to me, “You LeRoi Jones?” I probably just nodded or grunted. One of these dudes is sort of big-headed and bulky, the other taller, with midnight-dark glasses and a rough complexion of skin stretched tight in what I’d have to call an ambiguous smile. The big-headed one says, “I like your prose. I don’t like your poetry.” The other guy just continues smiling like he knows a secret.

  “Oh?” I left it pointed up like someone had let a pigeon shit on my shoe, but said no more. But the big-headed one wanted to go on and he did, saying some other things. But then he introduced himself and his companion.

  “My name is Ishmael Reed. This is Calvin Hernton.” And so I’d met Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton, but I didn’t know them from Adam’s house cat. Though it did seem that Hernton’s name rang some kind of bell, someone had mentioned it or I had seen it. But the introduction seemed to me like some challenge, I didn’t know, casual or not. But I took it as such, the way you had to deal with these various ersatz artsy gunfighters roaming around the Village who thought that confrontation in the name of art was the highest form of hanging out.

  But I didn’t take the bait. After that intro, I kept sipping my drink. And in a few minutes, Sonny Murray or Marion or White or somebody came in and we got into our serious drinking in peace, probably conjuring up our next bag chase. Reed and Hernton sat awhile and then eased into the early evening. I remember questioning my buddies about them and was told something about Umbra, the folks in it and what it was about. It sounded interesting but I still didn’t know why Reed had wanted to come on like Skippy Homeier looking for Gregory Peck.

  We used to hang in the Five Spot in the late afternoon/early evening too, drinking and bullshitting. There’d be a mixture of the artists in the area — musicians, writers, painters. It was a good easterly drinking spot in the daytime. One time Sonny Murray came in and told me he had got into a hassle with Charlie Mingus and had to break a chair over Mingus’ back. Charlie was always in the habit of cursing musicians who were his side men right up on the stage, in front of the public. It was really humiliating. I heard him one night cuss out Lonnie Hillyer, Charlie McPherson, and Jaki Byard, using all kinds of wild language. I wondered how they had gone for that.

  A few evenings later, after Sonny related his confrontation with Mingus, allegedly about Mingus calling Sonny “jive” for his free style of drumming, I meet Mingus outside of The Five Spot. I say something to Mingus, like “What’s happening?” or whatever, just a typical greeting. Mingus starts talking some off-the-wall stuff, most of which I didn’t even get with. But then he pushes me, and I’m laughing like it was a joke, which I figured it ought to be. But then he advances, as rapidly as he can with all that weight — Charlie was about a hundred pounds overweight — and he slapped me! It was light, partially because he was off balance and partially because as I saw it coming I tried to pull my head back.

  I said, “Hey, man, what’s going on? What’s happening?”

  And Mingus starts this spew of profanity, saying something like “You goddam punk,” and I could hear that it had something to do with something I’d written, that I was sympathetic with the avant-garde musicians, or something like that. But this time when he came forward, I went into my Newark Sugar Ray stick and run, jab and duck, and started popping him side his fat head. After a round-and-round of a few minutes Mingus stops and people all around us are telling us we oughta stop and stop acting crazy. I didn’t think I was acting crazy, I was defending myself as best I could against some two- or three-hundred-pound nut.

  Mingus stops, then he puts out his hand to shake. He says, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I was wrong.” I guess he meant because he thought he could just slap me and walk away, having chastised some jive intellectual. But I’d ducked and dodged around some much-meaner-with-they-hands mf’s than Charlie Mingus. Like I said, in many ways, the downtown scene was completely cardboard.

  People like Pharaoh Sanders also began to show up on the scene. When he first arrived, everybody called him “Little Rock” cause that’s where he was from. Pharaoh had the wildest walk, like he was stepping over them rows in the fields. It actually made you break up to watch him bobbing up and down as he walked toward you, horn in hand. But from the first time I heard him play, it was obvious that he was something very much else.

  The power and beauty of that music was something again. And now there was so much of it coming out and everybody was talking about Freedom.

  I had also got an offer from the Communist Party to edit their literary magazine. I had got some modest name, I guess, as a black intellectual, with an obvious left bent. One day I get a message from a photographer I knew who tells me that someone will be calling me from the magazine. I go over to the building the CP had the magazine’s offices in. The building is dusty, the office is dusty. The whole impact on me was of dust and oldness. I thought maybe these people had been sitting there with cobwebs twisted around their heads since the ’30s. But what was wild is that this guy makes me an offer to become editor of their literary magazine. I wasn’t in the CP, I knew very little about them, except the clichés that we tossed around about the “failure of the ’30s,” not even really knowing what that meant. Though the CP, since its 1957 Congress, had become even formally revisionist, saying that socialism could be brought in the U.S. through elections. I guess they were offering me this job to bring in some new blood, but the whole operation looked too dead to me. I was really flattered, but refused. Later, they started a “black magazine” called Dialog and made the photographer the editor.

  I’d also started contributing articles, mostly on music, to a magazine called African Revolution, corning out of Algeria. The progressive Ben Bella government was putting the magazine out and it featured writings from people all over the world. Richard Gibson later became associated with that magazine when he had to leave the U.S. when the government tried to frame him by implicating Fair Play for Cuba in the Kennedy assassination. But before that, Fair Play had been having harder and harder times, based on the fact that as U.S. policy toward Cuba stiffened, many of the liberal types that had supported Fair Play cut out. Also, there was a great deal of internal struggle caused by the SWP and the CPUSA slugging it out in their sectarian battles within the organization and creating chaos and havoc.

  But a year or so after Gibson got over to Algeria, the Boumedienne coup came and the left-leaning Ben Bella was overthrown and Gibson and his staff had to run for their lives, barely getting out of Algeria with their skins.

  It was a bizarre time, in so many ways. Attempts at new ways of life were clashing with the old. India and China had gotten their formal independence before the coming of the ’50s, and by the time the ’50s had ended, there were many independent African nations (though with varying degrees of neocolonialism). Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah had hoisted the black star over the statehouse in Accra, and Nkrumah’s pronouncements and word of his deeds were glowing encouragement to colored people all over the world. When the Chinese exploded their first A-bomb I wrote a poem saying, in effect, that time for the colored peoples had rebegun. Frantz Fanon’s books were popular, Grove Press had brought out The Wretched of the Earth. My own reading was broad and wilder than I knew. I was reading people like the ri
ght-wing Sorel’s Reflections on Violence as well as the Italian Marxist Gramsci. But it was all mixed up and unsorted. However, I was plodding “forward” at the quickstep.

  New ideas were clashing with old ones too. For one thing, with all of our attempted forward thrust, we were still chippying, and for some it was even more serious. White was now bordering on being strung out. He seemed at times to come back, but then for long stretches every time you saw him he’d be nodding. One night a group of sick white boys bashed me in the head on St. Marks Place and left me on my back wondering what hit me. I’d run up and down the streets trying to locate them and when I saw them eating in a Second Avenue Romanian restaurant, I’d gone into a phone booth across the street and called White trying to get some help. There were four or five of them. When I got him on the phone he sounded wasted. A few minutes later he responded and came walking around the corner. I could see him from where I was, hanging, high as planets. I told him to go home, shit, it was better just to be out there by myself. White would get killed trying to pug blind as he was.

  The white boys spotted me. When I wheeled around from dealing with White they were not in the restaurant, but as I was walking toward the corner they suddenly leaped out from behind a car on a side street just off Second Avenue. I whipped out me trusty blade as the four of them spread out, one of them with an old burned Christmas tree. But the myth(?) of the crazed Nigra with a knife worked. I screamed that one of them would have to die and they couldn’t decide which, so they threw the tree, which cut my hand pretty badly somehow, but split, up the street and back to their caves.

  Bob Thompson had also gotten much the worse for wear, from his constant use of scag. Whereas some of us were merely chippying, Bob and White had been serious. Perhaps because the frustration in the painting world was more intense. Though Bob was beginning to get some recognition and shows. He had even finally gotten hooked up with the Martha Jackson Gallery, which was one of the more prestigious of the galleries dealing with the downtown folk.

  Bob had married one of the white bohemian women and her sister was also hooked up with a black dude I knew. Bob’s sister-in-law went with a dude from the South who had been one of White’s best friends, and both this dude, Earl, and Bob were hooked on shit! Earl’s nodding was notorious around us; a once handsome dude, he’d gotten progressively more like Dr. Hyde with each bag he shot up. It got so bad with Bob that he could no longer shoot shit into the veins of his arms, but now stuck needles in his legs and hands, even the tips of his fingers, looking for uncollapsed veins. He started wearing woolen gloves, even in the summer, to hide his ubiquitously punctured hands. One of the musicians we hung around with had developed a huge black knot of a vein on one of his arms, where he shot up all the time, and it seemed all he had to do was jam the spike anywhere in that huge black knot and blood would creep up in the dropper indicating he’d hit. This brother was and is a famous musician, but the last time I saw him, he was so blasted and pitiful he couldn’t even recognize me.

  A major point of change for us came with John Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy, for many of us, even unconsciously, represented something positive. The Kennedys were liberals. (The liberal wing of the bourgeoisie, at least.) JFK’s pronouncements were meant to be progressive-sounding. And his and Jackie’s style, their youth — “They bought paintings from” was one repeated line you could hear at the Cedar. But many of us did have some emotional investment in the so-called Camelot and the New Frontier.

  The day Kennedy was assassinated, Bob Thompson and I were walking down Cooper Square and radios and televisions everywhere carried the grim scenes. Bob walked out in the gutter, near my house, and wept openly. That shook me up, because though I was disturbed, curious, about the assassination, I hadn’t realized it until I saw Bob sitting now on the curb, weeping uncontrollably about Kennedy’s death. I wrote a poem which had to be tipped into the winter issue of Kulchur called “Exnaugural Poem,” with a subtitle, “for Jackie Kennedy who has had to eat too much shit.” I was trying to move to a revolutionary position, but I was still ready to weep for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy!

  Malcolm X had begun to reach us. I’d heard of the Nation of Islam and had even heard Malcolm speak on television and he charged me in a way no one else had ever done. He reached me. His media appearances made my head tingle with anticipation and new ideas. He made me feel even more articulate and forceful, myself, just having seen him. But I was not clear about the Nation of Islam and not being in a black community am sure I did not receive the full impact of Elijah Muhammad’s teaching and image, but Malcolm had begun to get some media coverage.

  When Malcolm was silenced by the Nation for commenting on Kennedy’s death — that it was “chickens coming home to roost” — I was very deeply puzzled and disturbed because I didn’t understand why Elijah Muhammad would do that. Malcolm was his sword, his chief, the most articulate man in the world, as far as I was concerned. Why had this happened? When he had said that the March on Washington was a black bourgeois status symbol, I’d roared.

  Also, I’d read about how Malcolm had led a small army of Black Muslims to a Harlem police station to stand in silent protest against police brutality and how the precinct finally had yielded to Malcolm’s cold dignity. They knew they were not playing with some schizophrenic Negro but a strong black man, a black leader.

  To me, the March on Washington, which happened the same year that JFK was assassinated, marks the end of the second phase of the civil rights movement, in which SNCC and the students had come to center stage, even though King was still seen as the maximum leader. Malcolm’s cold class analysis at Selma, talking about the House Slaves and the Field Slaves and how the House Slave identified with his white Master so completely that when the Master got sick, the House Nigger did too, and when the Master’s house caught on fire the House Nigger would scream, “Boss, our house on fire!” But the Field Slave would fan the flames. That bit of class analysis dug into me, cutting both ways.

  And then, the little girls in the Birmingham church were murdered by a bomb planted by a white racist and King wanted to kneel in the streets and pray, but Malcolm talked bad about nonviolence, saying that those people who had done such a thing and indeed all the white racist crackers in the world could only be reached if one spoke the same language that they spoke. That language was not peace and love, said Malcolm.

  One night I saw Malcolm lay waste completely to Kenneth Clark, Constance Baker Motley, and some other assorted house Negroes, just as he had wasted David Susskind and Mike Wallace. (The Wallace program, “The Hate That Hate Produced,” had shot Malcolm X and the Nation into the public eye.) This kind of thing would thrill me so completely because what Malcolm said were things that had gone through my mind but he was giving voice to. Or he’d say things and instantly it’d make sense or confirm something I’d not even thought but felt.

  At one point, Kenneth Clark was saying, “Come, come, Mr. X, I don’t believe Negroes will act the way you say.” Malcolm had told him that blacks would not continue to turn the other cheek, that the young people would not stand still for the kind of white supremacy bullshit, of water hoses, police dogs, homegrown Nazis like George Wallace and Bull Connors. No, black people would not stand for it, especially not the young ones. But Kenneth Clark wanted to go on talking his house-slaveryism. This was early in 1964.

  I felt that way. Malcolm X spoke for me and my friends; Kenneth Clark did not. C.D. used to walk around during this period and ask us, “Suppose all the Negroes did leave America to be in their own nation, would you go or stay?” C.D. also had married a white woman, with a charming French accent and a bit of continental spice. That’s the way some of us saw the contradiction. Would you go or stay?

  For me, Malcolm’s words had me turning tricks whether I knew it or not. What it meant to my life immediately was words in my head coming out of my mouth. (I thought about Tim Poston, wandering down Third Avenue, completely off his rocker. He was mumbling, “The Jews are talki
ng through my mouth. The Jews are talking through my mouth.” And he tried to clasp his hand across his mouth, spitting these words out as if in terror. The society and the wine had done him in.)

  How did we act in the face of the world now, with all its steady wave of new meanings coming in? What did we do? How did we act?

  For one thing, unconsciously at first, but then very openly, dramatic dialogue began to appear in my poetry. Suddenly there were people, characters, talking in them. The tiny play The Eighth Ditch, which I put into the Dante book and had gotten me busted, some of the people connected with Lucia asked to produce — probably because they were gay and the play was about a homosexual rape. It opened on St. Marks Place in a place called the Poet’s Theater, but the police closed it after a few performances.

  I began to be interested more directly in drama. I’d written a play called The Baptism and one called The Toilet. The Toilet was published in the drama issue of Kulchur. (As editor, one of the plays I had turned down was Douglas Turner Ward’s take-off of Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air,” in The Martian Chronicles; Ward called it “Day of Absence.”)

  I can see now that the dramatic form began to interest me because I wanted to go “beyond” poetry. I wanted some kind of action literature, and the most pretentious of all literary forms is drama, because there one has to imitate life, to put characters upon a stage and pretend to actual life. I read a few years ago in some analysis of poetry that drama is a form that proliferates during periods of social upsurge, for those very same reasons. It is an action form, plus it is a much more popular form than poetry. It reaches more people and its most mass form today is of course television and, secondarily, film.

  I got involved with a drama/playwright’s workshop initiated by Edward Albee and his producers at the Cherry Lane Theater, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. The workshops were held down at the Vandam Theater, a tiny but attractive theater on Vandam Street, a few blocks below Houston Street. One night I sat up all night and wrote a play I called Dutchman. I had gotten the title from The Flying Dutchman, but abstracted it, because Flying Dutchman had been used and it didn’t quite serve my purposes, whatever they were. It took place in a subway and was essentially a confrontation between a slightly nutty (and wholly dangerous) white female bohemian and a young naive black intellectual. The director, Ed Parone, read it and liked it and so there was talk about doing a workshop performance.