by Amiri Baraka
Milford Graves was another regular, and Hugh Glover, who was just starting. Andrew Hill, soft-spoken, blinking, sometimes in disbelief, behind his cool glasses, was our music director for the summer program. Overstreet became our director of graphics along with Betty Blayton.
One of our first official actions was a parade across 125th Street. With Sun Ra and his Myth-Science Arkestra leading it, Albert and his brother Don blowing and Milford wailing his drums, the core of us, as it had grown, some other black artists from downtown and those in Harlem who’d now begun to come in, plus Baba Oserjeman and his Yoruba Temple. We marched down the street holding William White’s newly designed Black Arts flag. I’ve seen one photo that survives of this (in a magazine put out by Asian activist, Yuri Kuchiyama, North Star). A small group of sometimes comically arrogant black people daring to raise the question of art and politics and revolution, black revolution!
We had little money. But the mortgage on the brownstone was only about $100 a month and it was in generally good condition. I was the main source of funds. I had a couple of plays running downtown at St. Marks Theater, and we had put on a benefit just before we left, doing The Toilet; Charles Patterson’s Black Ice; another play of mine, which I directed, Experimental Death Unit #1; and a play by a guy named Nat White called The Black Tramp. We charged $20 a ticket, the audience was mostly white, and we used the money to pay down on the brownstone and help put the building in some shape.
Tong was supposed to direct my play Experimental Death Unit #1, but after a few days he had slapped the star, Barbara Ann Teer, so I took over and directed it. The slapping situation unnerved me, but I got it done. But slapping? Barbara wasn’t going for it, whatever the cause, and I could dig that. Yet Tong said it was Barbara’s fault, she had done something, it was implied that she wouldn’t let herself be directed. The problem was that Barbara knew theater, she was a professional, and Tong could probably never be. I sensed that at once. The problem was to get the play directed, not to make Barbara Ann Teer “submit” in some kind of way. But that was the kind of shit that Tong got into, with all kinds of people, many people I felt kindly toward or who were my friends. He even got into a hassle with my sister during our Operation Bootstrap summer program because my sister was given an office which Tong thought was too large for a woman, plus my sister smoked. She was another registered theater professional, probably thinking also that her brother would certainly make things easier for her, whatever the uncertainty. That was a major battle.
What began to be obvious to me before too long was that Shammy was volatile and unpredictable, but he had a basic respect for me as a writer, certainly for the downtown huzzas. But he was unpredictable. His brother had a deep malady, probably some kind of advanced paranoia. What was predictable about him was the negativity he carried with him, no, wore, like a wet suit.
Dave was younger than the other two, and influenced by both, but he was closer to Shammy. Dave and I were alike in a number of ways. Dave wrote poetry and music criticism. He was steady and assumed a lot of the daily arts programming and scheduling. He handled the artists and was a serious student of Sun Ra.
The first forum we had at the building was about which way the arts were going and the responsibility of the black artist. Tong, incensed by some point Sun Ra was making, leaped up and tried to walk toward him before being forcibly restrained, calling Sun Ra “an old woman.” I was literally shocked. I was deeply embarrassed. Certainly Dave didn’t like it either, but he could never be openly critical of Tong. In some ways Tong resented anyone who had some leadership role or qualities. For one thing, any intellectual who might shine in his younger brother Shammy’s eyes, Tong was jealous of. He was against Sun Ra because Sun Ra, in Tong’s mind, was alienating Dave. That’s the kind of wild paranoid Tong was.
The only person to try to give Tong what he needed as far as African American street therapy, a good ass-kicking, was his brother Shammy, and once, during the middle of an exhibit of painting, suddenly Shammy and Tong rolled into view, fighting each other, rolling on the floor, till the rest of us separated them. The two of them became the new talk of the Harlem nationalist and Black Arts community. I was told later, I think by Larry Neal, that these two dudes are always getting into that. Shit, now he tells me!
Shammy had a love-hate relationship going with me. He envied me, I think, the celebrity of the well-known writer, and liked, I think, being associated with me. But at the same time he did not like to be in my shadow and secretly he thought he could write as well as I. His brother Tong hated me, because Shammy emulated me in many ways, even down to mannerisms and the way we dressed. So not only would they fight, but I had to struggle with Tong because of his craziness, often directed at me. I also had to stop the wild-acting Shammy from getting jumped on by any number of Black Arts regulars and Harlem citizens who wanted to kick his ass. Finally, there were more people wanting to kick the two Hackensack brothers’ asses than you could kill with a submachine gun without a lot of extra clips. They were a major problem at the Arts.
After we had first moved in, one morning I see this tallish, long-striding figure coming down the street with a suitcase and a red tarboosh on his bald shaven head. It was the bony-faced, acid-looking Tong. He had not come up with us; in fact, he was, in our deliberations, against the move. We even thought he might just drop out and not hang with us. (I was hoping.) But then there he was, asking could he have an office and work with us. He touched the red tarboosh, which at the time I was unclear about, and said only, “Yeh, this is me.” Then he went inside and Dave found him an office. The fighting and other backwardness started not long after that.
Cornelius, as the various struggles between the Hackensacks or between them and any number of other people would go on, used to ask why I put up with it. He would say, “Goddam, LeRoi, these mf’s must have something on you.” Later, it got so bad that Corny and the others would come in with plans for the two brothers’ destruction, which I would naysay. They even came in with a smiling bespectacled murderer friend of theirs (who was a very sweet dude) who would have left either or both of the brothers in an alley perforated in some deadly manner.
Dave was all but frozen stiff trying to function rationally and get the real work we wanted to do in motion. He was always caught between the two brothers, ideologically and factionally. And there were different factions throughout the Arts. For one thing, Shammy would work. And he would do most of what we agreed on, though he might come up with some improvisation or alternative reading of it that would be puzzling. He wrote plays of some real value and was ready to direct them and find actors and do the work necessary for us to get an audience. Tong did nothing. He would sit in his office with a small court that quickly developed. Jimmy Lesser, who looked like a Muslim and talked Elijah Muhammad’s program up a storm. He was sort of Tong’s left-hand man, because Lesser had a relationship with Shammy, but Lesser would always hook up with where he thought the momentum was careening, which he assumed to be Tong. Tong’s right-hand man was Tub, about six feet three, two hundred pounds of muscle. Tub was actually a good man, dependable, but he had been swept up all the way by the red tarboosh rhetoric of Tong Hackensack and he functioned mostly as Tong’s yea-sayer and enforcer. When I last saw Tub, he had become a Hanafi Musulman, a small sect of Islam associated by some with religious fanaticism.
At the time I knew little of Islam, either the orthodox, Sunni kind or any other kind. What I knew of the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims, I had picked up, like most people, through Malcolm X. The religious practice interested me less than the black nationalism. It was only after I left Harlem that I became more interested in the religion of Islam. But, apparently, in Tong’s office the study of orthodox Islam became the central focus and people were warned that they could not smoke in Tong’s office. What went on in that office mostly was discussion, we used to call it bullshitting, but I don’t know if the aspirers to Sunni truths bullshit or not. Maybe it is called something else.
With the smallish Majid, a pleasant, smiling little brown intellectual with horn-rim glasses, the basic Tong faction was formed. What they did was mostly criticize and undermine whatever went down in the Arts. They opposed most programs if only by doing nothing. Yet they were even more arrogant than the most arrogant of the rest of us. But they never proselytized for their faith in front of me, for some reason. So I knew even less of the formal mechanisms of their “worship” than I needed to. They were content, in the main, to talk bad about and undermine the rest of us, any way they could.
Perhaps what Tong had in mind was to become the de facto “leader” of the BARTS. I sensed that often enough. He thought he was a superior person. He had not been downtown wasting his life as a traitor to black people. He lived downtown, yes, but he was married to a black woman. A light-skinned proper-acting lady from Philly. I think she was a Philadelphia social worker. But all during the time I knew Tong I saw him with his wife socially perhaps only once.
Tong had not been downtown married to a white woman. He had not just hung around with white dudes trying to screw every white woman who had been turned away from the Miss America pageant. I know that the light of Islam helped that rhetoric, scowling at the swine-eating, wine-drinking dudes the rest of us were. But I have never met a person as violently male chauvinist as Tong. He would make women (at least black women) walk several feet behind him, and he was consequently always getting into struggles with most of the women around the Arts who didn’t even know what the fuck he was talking about (i.e., the religious “justifications” for his bullshit); they just wasn’t buying it.
Vashti was slick enough to stay away from Tong. Though she would light up most of the Arts dudes when they were bullshitting, which was often. But with Tong, Vashti just smiled her slightly lopsided smile and would say to me, nodding her bead, “Tong is crazy, Roi, really pretty crazy.” And I’d look at her and roll my eyes.
The first large rally we held, out on Seventh Avenue in front of the House of Proper Propaganda, created the first major open conflict between Tong and me. The older black nationalists always talked on their ladders across the street in front of the Hotel Theresa. Larger forums were held in front of Mr. Michaux’s bookstore, called, affectionately, the House of Proper Propaganda. Malcolm had spoken in front of the store often and there was a sign in front of the store ringed by Pan-African leaders from everywhere in the black world. There was a major reason for our rally, probably mobilizing people against police brutality. We got out the literature, even got a car to use a sound system. But just as things were ready and we were about to proceed down the one long block to Seventh and then down to 125th, Tong declared to a small group of us left at the building that he opposed the rally.
The people were already assembled, new music was playing out of the speakers, which was the trademark of our rallies, the use of the most avantgarde black music, and our people were there waiting. I was momentarily speechless. I didn’t believe he had said that, and certainly I had no understanding of why he had said it. “What?” I said, staring as if at a monster. “Why are you saying that?”
“Suppose it’s a setup? Suppose the cops just let us put this together so they can attack?”
I must have been sputtering “What?” I wanted to keep saying it, but it would’ve betrayed my absolute lack of understanding of what was going on. Finally, I got myself to say, “That’s a pretty wild idea.”
Tong said, “You just want to get black people killed!” And his face twisted into the acid scowl it always threatened to be.
“I just don’t believe that it’s any setup,” I went on. “I think we should have the rally. We planned it and did the work to get the people out. We’ve got to get over there and do it.”
Tong stepped close to me. We were in the hallway, readying to go out onto the street. “You’re a wise guy,” he said, the terminology temporarily nonplussing me.
“I am wise,” I said. He had his face just an inch or so from mine, though he was taller and seemingly tougher. But I stuck my face close to his like in a cartoon.
“You know what I mean,” Tong went on. But after the freeze-frame face-to-face I walked around him, and the few of us went on to the rally.
I heard Vashti’s words echoing and this confirmed it for me on one level, though now I knew I would have to deal with this Tong openly and quietly as well. He was mad as the maddest goddam nut I’d ever met. Or was he just that intent on undermining my “leadership” and “taking over” the Arts? Tong’s faction held him as the real moral and spiritual leadership of the Arts, but even they had to retreat partially in the face of the reality of trying to set up a functioning black arts institution. His faction did very little of anything but sit around. Plus the artists, mostly, did not relate to them, plus the staff of folks that we took on when we did our summer program not only thought Tong and friends the lunatic fringe of the Black Arts, but despised them because they didn’t even think they were serious artists. Tub and Lesser made no pretensions of being artists, but neither did Cornelius. But Cornelius was our greatest propagandist. He probably talked to thousands of people a day and handed out literature. People running into Tub or Lesser or Tong would be put off from even wanting to be around us. Shammy had that charming way about him as well, but he was not in the Tong faction because of their conflicts.
Tong was so mad that he would try to disrupt the rally probably to become the real decider of direction in the Arts. As it was, he was constantly initiating little bullshit Islamic-related “rules” for his office. As hat-wearing a bunch of bloods as we were, Tub would announce when you came in Tong’s office, “Take off your hat. No cigarettes.” While the rest of us, informality’s children, would be wandering around trying to get stuff printed, or see that there was enough space for a rehearsal or a class, or talk to some artist about doing something with us or for us. While Tong and company scowled either behind the closed door or with the door left open, sitting back in tilted chairs, a red tarboosh on the desk, upon which not one speck of any productive labor crossed. So that when people would come up to the Arts you could figure out after a time where they were coming from by who they hung with. The Arts types would be swinging with Dave. Sometimes he and Sun Ra would stay holed up for hours. The arts/politics dudes and the political dudes would crowd into my narrow office, like Larry Neal or Askia or Ted Wilson or Overstreet and the others. The weirdo-mystical irritators would gravitate to Tong. It got so when I saw Tong and company coming I would get depressed, expecting open tension to reflect the constant tension that developed in the place.
What Tong wanted, I don’t really know. Leadership of the Arts, perhaps. Though once, when he was borrowing some money, because he had no job and his rent was not paid, he told me that I was the quarterback and I ought to keep my fullback (him) in good shape. He was a strange, often deadly quiet man who probably fancied himself many things, but the only thing I knew he was good at consistently was making trouble.
The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” and Mary Welles’ “My Guy” reached me in 1964. And Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By.” These tunes seemed to carry word from the black for me. Monterey, the downtown streets of the forming Black Arts core, the dazzle that black women presented to me now. Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” was playing when we got uptown. “Keep on Pushing,” which poet David Henderson made into a great poem, was one of our themes, and all of us would try for Curtis Mayfield’s keening falsetto with the Impressions. Plus their “We’re a Winner” also moved us and spoke, it seemed, directly to our national desire.
It was as if I had a new ear for black music at that point in the middle ’60s. I was a jazz freak, though we rhythm-and-bluesed to Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” and “Drown in My Own Tears” at our downtown loft sets. But now the rhythm and blues took on special significance and meaning. Those artists, too, were reflecting the rising tide of the people’s struggles. Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets”
was like our national anthem. Their “Heat Wave” had signaled earlier, downtown, that the shit was on the rise. But “Dancing in the Streets,” which spoke to us of Harlem and the other places, then Watts and later Newark and Detroit, seemed to say it all out. “Summer’s here and time is near/for dancing in the streets!”
We did the Philly Dog and the Boston Monkey, whirling and being as revolutionary in our dancing as we were in our own thoughts. Somebody told me that Tong had said that I “danced like a white boy.” I guess that was part of the reason he thought he should run the Arts. I used to dance pretty well back home, but when I heard that, I figured maybe my living downtown had cooled my cool. Ruined my rhythms. That was part of the whole sense of myself that I carried at the Arts as well. I was guilty for having lived downtown for so long with a white wife. I think that was the kind of trump card that Tong and them thought they held. And it did make me reluctant at times to come down hard on people who obviously needed exactly that, because I was still insecure and tender-headed about my recent life. So certain people could play off that, and probably did. Certainly, Tong and company did.