by Amiri Baraka
We did the workshop performance and it was very successful. I even got Marion Brown a job as an extra and quite a few people I respected dug the play. So it was decided to do a commercial production. In February 1964, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie opened on Broadway, directed by Burgess Meredith, and, while it had mixed reviews, it was one of the great theater experiences of my life. A deeply touching “dangerous” play for Jimmy, it not only questioned nonviolence but had a gutsy (but doomed) black hero and his father go at each other’s values, echoing the class struggle that raged between Dr. King and Malcolm X. Al Freeman played Richard, the Malcolm type, though Jimmy couched his rebellion in sexual symbolism (including, as far as I’m concerned, the character’s name). Diana Sands, as Juanita, gave a marvelous performance, showering us with Jimmy’s questioning even of “God in his heaven” for his part in the conspiracy that leaves us powerless and our young men killed. It was an extremely powerful work, so powerful I believe that the bourgeois (mainly white) critics at that point read Jimmy out of the big-time U.S. literary scene. He had gone too far. And as critical as I had been before of Jimmy and what I perceived as his stance of avoiding reality and confrontation, now I was elated and almost raised up off the ground by this powerful play.
Dutchman opened the next month, downtown, at the Cherry Lane, with Robert Hooks and Jennifer West in the leads. I went out late that night after the opening, up to the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue, and read the reviews. They were mixed too, but there seemed to me a kind of overwhelming sense from them that something explosive had gone down. I had a strange sensation, standing there like that. I could tell from the reviews that now my life would change again. I wasn’t sure how, but I could perceive that and it sent a chill through me. I walked back home slowly, looking at my name in the newspapers, and I felt very weird indeed.
When the magazines and electronic media coverage of the play and local word got out, I could see that not only was the play an artistic success, despite my being called “foul-mouthed,” “full of hatred,” “furious, angry,” I could tell that the play had made its mark, that it would not quietly fade away.
Suddenly I got offers to write for the Herald Tribune and the New York Times. One magazine wanted me to go down South and be a civil rights reporter. I got offers to rewrite Broadway plays in tryout, including Golden Boy, with the producer flying me down from Buffalo, where I’d gone as visiting lecturer in American poetry, to eat breakfast in his well-appointed brownstone on the Upper East Side. There was all kinds of interest and requests and offers and propositions. It was as if the door to the American Dream had just swung open, and despite accounts that I was wild and crazy, I could look directly inside and there were money bags stacked up high as the eye could fly!
It was clear, I could get it. An article came out in the Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, “King of the Lower East Side.” The phone leaped with people calling for interviews, my name began to pop up all over the place, coming out of the mouths of people I didn’t even know. It was a swirl of attention, pregnant promise was being popped for my pleasure. Oh? I could feel myself being raised, lifted by some strictly finite presence, but it was like some wind, full of names, some historic presence that I could casually identify as anything. Anything I understood. But that was the ripper, señor, the contradictory motions of my life must make it obvious, how confused I was. I had to read the play Dutchman again, just to understand it. And those words led in all directions, away from the page and into my life and memory. And what was it really saying, after all? I was asked that again and again. A confrontation between two people, between two symbols? I improvised from my deepest feelings. “It is about how difficult it is to become a man in the U.S.” That, I knew, was true and honest. But a naive black youth, a soi-disant intellectual murdered by a mad white woman he had hoped to seduce? Shit, and it was only that crazy Dolly I’d dressed up and set in motion and some symbols from out of my own life.
I was at Barbara Teer’s house when she was married to Godfrey Cambridge. It was Barbara Ann’s party, they were mostly her friends. Godfrey sat in the kitchen fiddling with a camera. Barbara Ann and Bobby Hooks were close. Later, they even started an actors’ group that evolved into the Negro Ensemble Company, somehow without Barbara Ann. There was an actor-model who also wrote plays, and he was alarmed that my play had gotten some attention. All of us know that there is no black person but ourselves that deserves to be that noble savage in the buttermilk, but ourself, dammit, ourself, goddammit, and double, ourself!! So he says to someone else, really as a gibe flying in my direction, “That’s why the guy gets killed, hahahahaha.”
My normal reaction would be to say something really low as to this dude’s gender or sexual orientation or maybe just about the sexual orientation of his father or mother or both. But I just looked in his direction and smiled really as pleasantly as sulphuric acid could. And that was because I could tell, even though I hadn’t heard the entire remark, that there was some element to it that was, indeed, legitimate.
But in the barrage of attention and unbalanced huzzas, I went inside. When I got an assignment to write an article in the Tribune’s magazine section, I took it as the main question being asked and I wanted my main answer. I can see now, it was just my confusion that allowed so much of the Great White Way to flow in my direction. It was the contradictions in my life and thinking, the unresolved zigzags of my being that permitted them to hoist me up the flagpole to wave, for them.
So as I wrote that article, “LeRoi Jones Speaking,” there came over me this most terrific sense of purpose and focus. It rose up within me like my grandfather’s ghost. Yeh, I was some colored bohemian liberal living on the Lower East Side in hedonism heaven, yet I could not sound like that. What “fame” Dutchman brought me and raised up in me was this absolutely authentic and heartfelt desire to speak what should be spoken for all of us. I knew the bullshit of my own life, its twists and flip-outs, yet I felt, now, some heavy responsibility. If these bastards were going to raise me up, for any reason, then they would pay for it! I would pay these motherfuckers back in kind, because even if I wasn’t strong enough to act, I would become strong enough to SPEAK what had to be said, for all of us, for black people, yes, particularly for black people, because they were the root and origin of my conviction, but for anyone anywhere who wanted Justice!
The article was really, then, a commitment to struggle. I said, “Let them know this is a fight without quarter, and I am very fast.” Brash, arrogant, sophomoric, but it was smoke from a moving vehicle! There now began in my downtown environs and elsewhere a dervish of forums, speakouts, intellectual shootouts, not just in reflection of my own mind’s motion but as reflection of what the whole society had become and was still to become.
One forum at Carnegie Hall with Lorraine Hansberry, I remember as the kind of document of this event, which was packed to the rafters, me jumping up and furiously putting down liberals and liberalism with such vehemence that it made not a few people’s teeth rattle. The Village Voice and several of the other liberal journals carried sympathetic disclaimers of the event for the liberals.
There was also another kind of motion downtown. Added to the initial coming together of blacks in the Village there was now a distinctly militant kind of black emerging as well. I began to come in contact more and more with them.
One night at a party at Marzette Watts’ loft, who lived on the first floor of the Cooper Square place, there was some kind of battle, a fight it turned out and finally Sonny Murray had it out with this bone-slim wiry dude with a permanent bitter smirking smile on his face. What wigged me is that this dude, Tong he was called because of his Asian-looking eyes, had popped Sonny in the nose and broke it. I couldn’t conceive of anyone beating Sonny. But then, as it turned out, I didn’t even know this dude. And he is posturing over in the corner talking to a friend of his and his brother and when I come up he says, “Yeh, I did just what I thought I could do, broke this motherfucker�
�s nose.”
The blood rushed into my head and I got into the dude’s face, “So what you spose to be, bad? You can get killed, too, my man. You know, you can get laid out right here in the street.” It was not even with a desire to fight, or maybe it was, but it was anger and shock at seeing Sonny disabled. Tong said nothing to me, he just put on his coat and hat with the jerky, manic motion I was to become familiar with and with his running buddy, Jimmy Lesser, split. His brother, Shammy (real name Chase Hackensack), didn’t go with his brother Tony (real name Bobby Hackensack). I guess to show there was some distance between him and his brother, he laid. But though I’d seen him before, I didn’t really know him. But now I would.
There was another forum down at the Village Vanguard, probably on a Monday night. It was Archie Shepp, Larry Rivers, somebody else, and myself. We were discussing racial problems in the U.S., and Larry, I guess, because we had been friends and had had a lot of laughs together, did not feel particularly threatened by me or Archie, both of whom he had sopped up much alcohol with. Larry was even an old scag man from way back when he was an uptight young Jew looking to play the alto like Charlie Parker.
But Archie made some distance, and when the question of struggle and change and, yes, revolution came up, Larry backed off. But I cut into him perhaps too cruelly, for that context. I said, “Hey, you’re all over in these galleries, turning out work for these rich faggots, you part of the dying shit just like them!” That shocked a lot of our friends who were there, not so much what was said, I suppose, but the viciousness of it, the absolute distance raised, not only between Larry and ourselves but whole bunches of folks tied to him, who likewise had thought there was some intellectual and emotional connection between us. But now it seemed there was fire in me that could rush up and out even directly into the faces of some of my old friends.
For Nellie, this period was also a contradictory thing. Obviously, the attention and celebrity of Dutchman pleased her. I guess it was, in one very nasty sense, some justification, even legitimization, of our marriage to all her old familial connections. The inner-circle hauteur that only the cognoscenti who read Zazen or Evergreen Review could appreciate had now been replaced by a wider spread of public talk. It was not just some colored guy, she was married to somebody. (Apologies to Jesse Jackson.) The rounds of cocktail parties and receptions we got invited to, the “sudden” literary presence that even her old employers at Sectarian Review must have appreciated, obviously warmed her. In the same year the book Dutchman was published (although with another play she distinctly did not like, The Slave). Dutchman won the Obie Award as Best American Play, and since I was out of town during the awards dinner, she had to accept the award on my behalf. I know these are the kinds of things she had unconsciously prepared for, though in another context, a great part of her life.
The trouble was that now there was some kind of slow drift by me away from her. For the past period the liaisons I had with other women had grown less frequent, but now, from no open or conscious plan I put forward, the women I began to see were black. Though they were hooked up or on the fringes of the same shit. Plump brown Rose and I staggered out of the Five Spot together late one night, down to her place in Brooklyn, which looked like a hurricane had hit it. Or yellow Joanie, trying to make it in advertising, from one of those schools, saying goodbye in the subway station and roaring off rather than be used by some white woman’s man after business hours.
I was invited to a writer’s conference at Asilomar, Monterey, “The Negro in American Literature.” My recent celebrity made me the bull’s-eye of the joint. Not only to be shot at but hit on. I found myself inundated with lovely black women. I mean, just to sit and talk and remember what they were like. What it meant when I put my hand out and they put their hands out to shake, innocently enough, to see how our hands matched so and to hear their voices lilting, full of questions about my work, or Baldwin’s or Wright’s, was kind of thrilling. Not to mention the heavier stuff that went on later in the evening, in this small cabana-like apartment with a glass door opening down to the beach.
The last sister I was with and I roared up the coast in her MG after the conference was over and we stayed at her place in Oakland for a couple of days, walking around Berkeley, going into San Francisco. I even got into a fight with this white writer, later a famous novelist, who was then a lousy poet (I’ve never read his novels). It was really, I think, about the same kind of thing as the Village Vanguard shootout. He wouldn’t fight but the woman he was with, a poet of deservedly small reputation, tried to jump me for roaring at her man. I mean, she wanted to scratch me or jump on me with her hands and I swatted her while the young sister, Gwendolyn Buck, full of southern petty bourgeois gentility, watched in a state of half alarm, half amusement. And we discussed the episode over drinks into the wee hours.
While I was in Oakland, a local dude and his friends heard I was there from this sister, Gwen’s running buddy, who’d been at the conference, and he came over to get his copy of Blues People autographed. He was working as a standup comedian in a local nightclub, his name was Bobby Seale. A couple of years later, he and Huey Newton were to put together the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense!
When I talked to Nellie on the phone, she could only say, “Why are you still there? Come back. You should come back, now.” It was like she could sense something was very much awry. There was a note of desperation in her voice.
At home, a collecting up of this heavier black circle went on, still casually, but fueled by reality. I could sense some distance now between Nellie and me that had never existed before: a darkness into which words disappeared. I saw Shammy again, he began hanging around this little gym where we played basketball, where my kids were in nursery school. He’d be on the sidelines cheering, though I could sense he could play, too. But he could see that I was no stranger to the court, and if I made some hook or jump shot it seemed to connect him to me more closely. I guess he could see I was a real person.
Since our struggle with the SWP in On Guard, a couple of the black SWP cadres had come around and I’d talked to them. The one I got closest to was Cornelius Suares, called Corny. He was a black worker, working almost all his adult life (except for the time he was in jail) in the garment district, pushing, as he called them, “them Jewish airplanes.” He pushed the garment racks up and down the streets. Corny was the loudest person on record, check the Guinness Book of Records. He had a hard and willfully rough exterior but he was a very sweet and gentle dude in many ways. If he felt really put upon or pissed off, he’d break down and cry.
His running buddy, whom I also got to like a lot, was Clarence Franklin, another worker, doing New York City messenger work. He was once SWP’s candidate for mayor and is a sensitive poet, though Clarence talks only as a last resort. Plus, Clarence’s brothers Doll and Robert, who are the talkingest dudes, next to Cornelius, you’re ever likely to meet. All of these brought another air into my life, a wind of further reality, of actual concrete life.
I went to Buffalo for a month that summer, with my family, as a lecturer in poetry, in some program put together to get Charles Olson, Creeley, and some of the other new poets up there lecturing. I still had a great admiration for Olson. I had gone up to his house a couple of times, up in Gloucester. Once in the late fifties with McClure and Wieners, later with Don Allen and Irving Rosenthal who had just quit as editor of the Chicago Review, to write a novel, Sheeper. Olson had taken us one night to this castle in Gloucester that this rich dude had imported stone for stone from Europe. And now it sat in Gloucester, overlooking the bay. The guy’s father had invented the electronically controlled boat. And he used to steer these boats by remote control up and down in that harbor.
We had some interesting evening. Olson, center stage as usual, was telling these stories and the son or grandson of the inventor, who was now master of the house, had a few friends over, all, I think, gay. I think the only non-gay persons in the crib were Olson and I. The castle was full of
statues and hanging tapestries. At one point, the owner excused himself and then we heard organ music. We figured it was him, but then he returned and the organ was playing, we were told, by remote control. He then started to make weird effects — slurs, eerie moans, and ghostly sounds — on the thing. Olson and I were catching each other’s eye, but Olson kept talking.
When we go to bed that night, I got a room that’s right off this patio in the middle of the castle. After midnight sometime, I hear this noise like splashing and men’s voices high and tittering. I go to the door and prop it open and this guy’s friends are diving from a second-story balcony down into this pool in the middle of the patio. They’re butt naked. It was like being woven into a tapestry of exotic otherness, but the next day when we get back to Olson’s place he is roaring with laughter at the whole business.
What fascinated me about Olson was his sense of having dropped out of the U.S., the “pejoracracy.” He said in his poems we should “Go Against” it. That we should oppose “those who would advertise you out.” It was a similar spirit that informed the most meaningful of the Beats, and Olson was a heavy scholar. His “Projective Verse” had been a bible for me because it seemed to give voice to feelings I had about poetry and about society. When Charles came down to Cooper Square, there was another sense that what we were doing he could use, that it was something he thought useful and correct, the Zazens and Totem Press and the rest of it. I had even seen remarks he made at Berkeley letting me know that he thought Dutchman was an estimable work. It was Olson, because of his intellectual example, and Ginsberg, because of his artistic model and graciousness as a teacher, whom I thought most about in terms of the road I was moving along. Where would they be in all this? Also, my friend Ed Dorn, the poet, who was living out in Pocatello, Idaho, in a place so American it didn’t understand itself. How would he relate? We wrote many letters back and forth. And the book The Dead Lecturer, which came out that year (1964), is dedicated to Ed. It included the comic-book hero Green Lantern’s code: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern’s Light!”