by Amiri Baraka
Ed and his family and Nellie and I and our children lived together briefly up in Buffalo that summer. It was like the last touching of the old places, though I didn’t know it. I liked Ed so much because he had (and has) an intellectual toughness that perceives the worst in the U.S., but he has the energy needed to survive that worst. His Idaho and New Mexico sojourns, I think, were meant to keep him from the sickness of big-time America. Yet the leaks of that sickness are themselves communities, even on the geographic outskirts of the various big apples and pears and plums of gimmegotcha melican society.
These white men saw that I was moving away from them in so many ways and there was some concern, because it wasn’t that I didn’t like them any longer, it was just a feeling that where I was going they couldn’t come. Where that was, I couldn’t even articulate. Those who were physically close to me, the old New York crowd, I was less concerned about, because we had our day-to-day confrontations. There was no room for decent concern or sentimental concern either, we were too concretely close and for that reason getting away from them was a physical and intellectual syllogism.
While I was in Buffalo, the Harlem Rebellion broke out. There had been a couple rebellions in other cities just before Harlem went up, in Jacksonville and then in a suburb of Chicago. But Harlem had the media coverage. It was like the proof that the ticking inside our heads had a real source and was not subjective. It bore out what Malcolm had said at the beginning of the year. It made Blues for Mr. Charlie and Dutchman seem dangerously prophetic.
I left Buffalo, to get closer to what was happening. The events rang in me like the first shots of a war, which I not only knew would break out but one that I had to get into because I felt I had helped start it. I remember getting a .45 automatic from where I had stashed it. Lana Solon looked surprised, I hadn’t seen her in months. But I had left a piece there back behind some suitcases. She said, “I knew you’d come. I felt it.” I got the piece from where I’d hidden it, put it in my gas mask bag, and split. I never saw her again.
After the Harlem Rebellion it was a rush of events, confrontations, tempers, even histories that I witnessed and was part of. For one thing, the sense of being more and more estranged from Nellie was reaching an openly rising quantitative peak. We were seldom together now, the way we had been. I was hanging out and meeting with mostly young black dudes, both my brothers from the earlier Cooper Square circle and the later crowd of people. Shammy, his brother Tong, who I still did not feel comfortable around; he gave me a cold and clammy feeling. Jimmy Lesser came by now, usually with Shammy. He dressed like a classic Black Muslim and I accepted him as that. One of White’s old junkie friends also began to dress up like a Muslim and he seemed to have cleaned up as well. But that didn’t bother White, Jim; he was still getting higher and higher. Corny, usually with Clarence, would show. Plus, Overstreet might breeze by and we’d drink a bottle of vodka. One time White, Overstreet, and I go to a party around the corner and Overstreet and I get into a fight, or I should say a “fight.” I don’t know what happened and he claim he don’t know either, but when we woke up the bottle of vodka was empty, most of my clothes were ripped off, and Overstreet was laid out drunk. We didn’t know where White had gone.
Marion and Archie were around and Bob when he wasn’t drilled flat by the scag. A young dude named Dave, light-skinned, heavy glasses, interested like all of us in the music and also poetry. Both of the Hackensack Brothers were part of Umbra and I began to get more word on what that was or had been. I found out later that they had had some intense struggle over a poem that was to be published that was critical of JFK. One group wanted to can the poem because Kennedy had got iced, the other, more militant group thought the poem still needed to be printed. And there were all kinds of recriminations. I still saw C.D., but not in the same way as before. He was very much married and the French lady had, it seemed, a rather abbreviated tether.
I’d see Tom Perry, and if Tom and White and I got together with maybe Marion or even Bob when he could see, we still got wasted. And walked around, in and out of parties, being even more removed by the shit, and our sense of removal from that whole scene. But even that enlarged circle had its sectors, and it would, at a later time, split in half as well.
The public verbal shootout that remains most clearly etched in my memory is one that was held at the Village Gate. In this there were questions from the audience and I had now grown into a stance of actually putting down white people. I had long done this in my writing, from a concrete point of origin. These torturous years the African and African American have spent as slaves and chumps for this white supremacist society obviously provided enough factual resources to support a tirade against whites. The Muslim example, particularly and most inspirationally the role of Malcolm X, supported my attack. But still I was married to a white woman; I still had many white friends. I still thought very highly of innumerable white intellectuals and artists. But I felt justified in talking about the horrible bullshit that white people had put on the world, bullshit they are still putting on the world (though now my view is tempered by the science of class analysis — but then so many whites go for the ghost of white racism, and whether they actually benefit from it or not, still do go for it and actively support it — and the poison of white chauvinism warps some of the otherwise hippest white minds in extant).
A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn’t any whites help? I said, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.” She seemed flabbergasted. Another mentioned Goodman and Schwerner, they had been slaughtered along with black James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Klansmen in police uniforms. And certainly their sacrifice is to be upheld and the willingness of young whites to put their lives on the line for the struggle for democracy is a noble thing, an important thing, and any people sincerely interested in making revolution must have allies. Only people not really serious about making revolution can dismiss sincere allies. But in my fury, which had no scientific framework, I could only thrash out at any white person. The fact that Chaney was never mentioned, and Goodman and Schwerner were, pissed the hell out of me. I told the woman, “I have my own history of death and submission. We have our own dead to mourn. Those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences.”
And in this last outrageous diatribe I was confusing Schwerner and Goodman with the young white poseur-liberals who sashayed safely through the streets of Greenwich Village, the behind-the-lines bleeding hearts. When, on the real side, if I could have stood some hard truth, Schwerner and Goodman were out there on the front lines doing more than I was! But Chaney had been beaten beyond recognition; he had so received the fury of those maniacs but all these people wanted to talk about was the white youths’ deaths.
I guess, during this period, I got the reputation of being a snarling, white-hating madman. There was some truth to it, because I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell I could instinctively sense surrounded my own dash for freedom. I guess I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground of reality. And during this period, whether publicly or not, there was a lot of snarling, and cussing out of white folks, and punchin’ people in the mouths to justify our growing sense of ourselves.
Albert Ayler had come on the scene around this point. He appeared at my house one afternoon with a dude named Black Norman. I had heard of Albert and think I’d even heard him on some record where he was still playing with a group that was sounding the standard bebop changes, My Name Is Albert Ayler. But Albert had already moved beyond that. Albert had this white shock of beard that shot out of his chin, though he was a little short stocky dude, that made him look extra weird. Plus the intensity in his eyes and voice. Norman was his sidekick mystic, chuckling always about something the rest of us was just a little too square to dig.
Albert had asked me about the music and about my writing on the music. I think he wanted to challenge me because I didn’t really know
who he was. He asked me did I think it was about me? He said, “You think it’s about you?” I did and didn’t know what he meant. In some ways, I guess, I did think it was about me. Albert meant it was really about Spirit and Energy. This is what it, life, everything, was really about. Not personalities and their yes-and-nos. Albert was always jumping on folks by saying of corny people, “He thinks it’s about him,” with the “him” said so disdainfully, as only Albert could say it, so you really could dig that was some stupid shit. “It ain’t about you!” Albert would say. “He thinks its about Him! And it ain’t about Him.” And he’d stretch his eyes wide and maybe spit out a jagged hunk of laugh.
Plus, Albert, we found out quickly, could play his ass off. He had a sound, alone, unlike anyone else’s. It tore through you, broad, jagged like something out of nature. Some critics said his sound was “primitive.” Shit, it was before that! It was a big massive sound and wail. The crying, shouting moan of black spirituals and God music. Pharaoh was so beautiful and he had a wildness to him too, a heavy force like the world could be reopened, but Albert was mad. His playing was like some primordial frenzy that the world secretly used for energy. Yeh, the music. Feeling all that, it touching us and us touching it, gave us that strength, that kind of irrevocability we felt. Like the thunder or the lightning or the ocean storming and mounting, crushing whatever was in its path.
At Lincoln Center one night, Trane’s group with Eric Dolphy and Pharaoh too, plus Cecil Taylor, was on the same bill and Art Blakey and the Messengers. It was a beautiful night of music, but the high point was when Albert, whom I had come up to the hall with, came out on the stage, at Trane’s invitation. He came out in the middle of one tune, horn held high up in the air, blowing like the world was on fire. His monster sound cut through all the music, he was blowing so loud, the timbre was so big. People in the audience and the musicians on the stage were electrified. After the performance, backstage, Trane asked Albert, “Hey, man, what kind of reed you using?” I could dig that!
Marion and some other people were playing in D.C. Marion and I were very close in those days, he’d come by and tell me all his plans and projections and co-sign some of mine. Marion sometimes seemed very bohemian and disconnected. He was heavily introspective, I guess like many of us. But he also had a practical, opportunity-seeking side of him. He wanted to meet people and when he finally did decide he wanted to go back to the Music, being in and around Cooper Square got him quickly connected up with Archie Shepp. And just as Shepp’s first major side was “4 for Trane,” so Marion’s first side was “3 for Shepp.” So Marion was quietly but efficiently building his own career while watching close up on mine.
So I wanted to go down to D.C. to hear him play in what amounted to his first big gig with his own group. A group of us were going down, but as we were getting ready a feeling of dread descended on me. Like nothing that I had ever felt before. I found myself dreading taking Nellie down to D.C. with me. I was perspiring and agitated as the time approached. I was pacing around in the house, trying to get high and drunk at the same time, but doing neither. I was cold sober. It was the feeling that Nellie was outside of my concerns, that we did not connect up. I think now I resented her. It was the black-white thing, the agitation, the frenzy, always so deeply felt and outer directed. It had settled in me directed at my wife. I had begun to see her as white! Before, even when I thought she was white, I had never felt anything negative. Even to the point of our beginning debates in the Village and the rising political consciousness I was developing. I had never felt anything abstractly negative about Nellie.
There had even been a magazine satire about me as the great white-hating militant finishing one of my diatribes and then going back to the dutiful white wife. But that had not bothered me, it had not affected my sense of myself or my regard, in whatever way that was carried, for Nellie. But now it was different. There was within that shadow I described before not only a deep vacuum where words could disappear, there was now a coldness, a sharp disaffection that existed.
“Nellie, we can’t go down to D.C. together. I don’t want to go with you.”
She looked puzzled and tensed, somehow expectant. “What do you mean?”
“I’m black, Nellie. I’m black and you’re” I trailed off. “White. I can’t do this, Nellie. I’m black.”
That look in her eye then was of such deep hurt and confused amazement that I almost covered my face so I did not have to look at her face. “Oh, Roi,” she said. “That’s silly. You’re Roi and I’m Nellie. What are you talking about?”
What was the correlative or parallel scene being played all over the world which meant the same thing in all the different sectors and levels of human experience? That open call for that splitting up. As if the tragic world around our “free zone” had finally swept in and frozen us to the spot.
The play The Slave, which shows a black would-be revolutionary who splits from his white wife on the eve of a race war, was what Nellie called “Roi’s nightmare.” It was so close to our real lives, so full of that living image.
We talked awhile, saying really little else. Actually, we repeated the things we had already said, in other ways. But finally, I was gone, down to D.C., where Marion was playing. But when I got down there I had a kind of relapse. I thought I had done wrong to leave Nellie that way, though I was coming back. The serious business of what was to happen to us and with our marriage was still to be done. The set was in a hotel and I paced back and forth and called home, but no one answered. Nellie was wherever she had to go to deal with such conflict. I called again and again, pacing, now feeling somehow I was trapped in this high building, unable to get back and cut off from this woman I had lived with for almost seven years. I was nervous and confused and though there was a party after Marion’s set, I went to my room and laid up brooding about what the fuck I’d said and done. I called again; no answer.
Finally the drink I was nursing ran out, so I went down the hall to where the party was. When I stuck my head in looking around for the alcohol, there was a very slender red-brown black girl with the kind of “Mariney” red-brown haircut, very short and worn natural. She looked at me and smiled and not only did she not avert her eyes in some false modesty, she winked at me mischievously. I stood my ground, still looking for the big drink. But smiling, trying to be cheerful. So she comes over, drink in hand. She says, “You look hip, what’s your name?” Her name was Vashti.
We breezed out of that joint in a few, and wound up in my room, talking eight thousand miles an hour about everything we could think of. She was a young woman, still college age, but she had dropped out, she said, cause she wanted to be a painter. Vashti was skinny and had a tendency to be knock-kneed, but I thought she was one of the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen. It was like her quirky red looks turned me on, and the little knock-kneed walk and slightly protruding teeth. Plus, Vashti was dressed up, she was styled like she thought she was in some play where the woman painter goes to a cocktail party and meets the famous writer. Slouch hat pulled down over one eye, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Full of wisecracks and laughing at her own ironic humor or mine. We wound up in bed much much later in the morning with Vashti saying, “You better not give me a baby. I’m not playing.”
I told her she reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. She said, “Yeh, and you’re the Mad Hatter.” And so I referred to her as Alice for a while. I was going back to New York and she was staying in D.C. But I knew even then that I would see her again. I knew that she would come to New York.
The crowd of dudes I was hanging with had swollen, it seemed that that place on Cooper Square became a meeting place for a certain kind of black intellectual during this period. But it was not just a casual circle anymore, there was clearly something forming, something about to come into being. We sat around trying to talk it and coax it into being. I met Max Stanford, from Philly, who’d recently moved to New York. I didn’t know it at first, but Max was with the Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM), which had just formed. Larry Neal became a part of that group. Larry, clean as blue wind, would sit in and contribute to those discussions of what was going on in the world, who were we in it, what was the role of the black artist? What should our art be? Larry was a poet, and he too had come up out of Philly and was also, unbeknownst to me, with RAM.
One night, after talking to Max, who had communications with the exiled Rob Williams, and who was actually distributing his newsletter, The Crusader, I felt particularly whipped and beaten. Why? Because, to me, the young tireless revolutionary I saw in Max was what I felt I could never be. I had said outright that the black and white thing was over, but I did not think I could act. For one thing, the little girls, now, were walking around and there was certainly both a deep love and a sense of pressing responsibility there. It seemed to me I was caught, frozen between two worlds. I told this to Nellie, almost weeping, but dragged off to get high and tried to push it out of my mind.
One evening when a large group of us were together in my study talking earnestly about black revolution and what should be done, I got the idea that we should form an organization. On Guard had been long gone, because of its obvious contradictions. We needed a group of black revolutionaries who were artists to raise up the level of struggle from the arts sector. There was Dave Knight, White, Marion, C.D., Leroy McLucas, the Hackensack brothers (Shammy and Tong), Jimmy Lesser, Larry, Max, plus Corny and Clarence. We would form a secret organization. Tong asked me what would it be called, it came into my head in a flash, the Black Arts.