The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  So if “Hate Whitey” was our war cry, it was also reason for me to be attacked. That was Tong’s main method of undermining and attacking — to point out how a few months ago I lived downtown with white folks, now here I was directing black people. Plus, the press and the white power structure had definitely set us up, exploiting my recent fame to turn it to infamy, before people’s eyes. Larry Neal and Eddie Ellis had articles on this phenomenon in the Liberator magazine, but I still slept what they were saying, that I was being propped up so I could become an all-purpose whipping boy to show the absurdity of our cries of Black Art.

  We faced both internal and external conflict. Every day brought a revelation of one aspect or the other. One day Shammy got into a struggle with a dude from the Yoruba Temple over a woman that Shammy wanted and the Yoruba dude did too, plus Shammy had talked wise to one of Oserjeman’s wives. When I looked up, the entire Yoruba Temple, which numbered a couple hundred in those days, came over to the Arts. They had come, they said, “for satisfaction.” One of their priests’ wives had been insulted and it must be rectified.

  At first our people wouldn’t let the Yorubas in, but I came downstairs and let them all file in. They stood silently around the wall, some with walking sticks, a couple, I suppose, with heat. Shammy wanted to act mock-heroic and defiant, but finally I got him to beg the priest’s pardon and so his face was saved and likewise Shammy’s ass. But Oserjeman lectured us on our bad manners and our lack of African perspective. We could not come up to Harlem and act like Europeans. I was boiling mad and embarrassed again by one of the Hackensack brothers.

  The program that summer built a great rapport in all sectors of the community, especially since we were able to give out some jobs. We worked constantly to agitate the community and to further inflame it against the white racist system. But it seemed that fools like the Hackensacks did everything they could to break down that rapport and isolate us. When the program was over, we faced the bleak prospect of trying to raise money to continue our programs at the level to which we’d grown accustomed. I went downtown one night, backstage, to see Sammy Davis in Golden Boy. He made me a gift that night of $500 in brand-new $100 bills right out of his pocket. We also got Sammy to come uptown and do a benefit for us. It was at a HARYOU facility on 125th Street. Sammy appeared with his entire entourage and made those surroundings seem even more spartan than they were. It was wild how white Sammy’s act seemed in Harlem. But he did all right by us, whatever his motives.

  There was one school of thought, not wholly shared by me, that we could simply gorilla the bux out of anyone, that we needed not only black celebrities but the government as well. That proved wrong on both counts. We pulled some thoroughly juvenile delinquent shit on Harry Belafonte after demanding some money which he wouldn’t give up, writing his name on some paper and then tearing the paper up as if that signified his imminent disposal. But it didn’t work, Belafonte wasn’t cowed by such shallow theatrics. Or at least I didn’t think so.

  Our trips down to the various regional offices of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was the funding agent for HARYOU, were legion. We still have photos of Dr. Proctor (later pastor of Adam’s Abyssinia) sitting with his head in his hands listening to our frantic spontaneous treatises on why we had to have some money, or some more money, etc. We felt that we had a right to demand money for our operations — some of us, I guess, felt we had a right to demand money for our personal lives, but I never had that problem.

  So this gorilla attitude did permeate one aspect of our public image. While I did not think such an image was an absolutely correct one, there were only a few things I could do about it. I mean, I thought it was all right to present that image to the state, i.e., to the white racist government and those linked up with it ideologically or through employment. But I did not think that that should be our image as far as black people were concerned. With the Hackensacks and Tong’s clique on the scene, that problem was also a constant. They were always having some confrontation or another with someone and then justifying it in the name of blackness. So I spent a lot of my time cooling out that image, trying to rectify it, or in hassles with our own perpetrators.

  What our image was at large, outside of Harlem, I can only guess. Though the large motion in black communities to set up Black Arts equivalent institutions meant to me that the image was, in the main, positive.

  Downtown some people still smarted over the disrupted social organization that the “mass” move uptown had caused them. (Fifteen years later a white woman came up to me in a bar and talked to me in a bitter accusing tone about how I had personally estranged her black husband away from her. With my wife, Amina, sitting there listening to her. It was sad.) The downtowners who came up to work and contribute to the Arts, I guess, had some contradictory words to put out against the straight-out maniac line that was being run by some. We heard fragments of the tales and emotional dislocation coming from downtown, from both black and white, and it was curious to me, like listening to one’s obituary. Perhaps like Cross Damon in Wright’s The Outsider.

  One night a group of the black downtown residents came up for a reading at the Arts. Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton among them. Vashti got into an argument with one poet, Luther Rupcity, about the nature of the Arts, what we were trying to do. What we were trying to be would have been Rupcity’s phrasing. He and Hernton were very close and Vashti had little use for either one. Calvin had a problem with black women downtown and up that year because he had come out with his book Sex and Racism in the USA, which roots the problems of black national oppression in sexual conflicts and psychological antagonism stemming from those conflicts. Interesting that both Cleaver and Jimmy Baldwin, to varying degrees, also made this analysis. Calvin’s statement that lit many sisters up was that many sisters are lesbians because black men do not relate to them sexually.

  Rupcity was spouting some aspect of Hernton’s theories and Vashti lit into him and Hernton with such ferocity that everyone else in the small gathering suddenly stopped to check out what was happening. Vashti was gesturing and backing Luther up, when Luther stopped talking to her and turned to me with his hands palms up and said, “Will you get this lesbian off me?”

  There were at least a dozen persons in that room who would have gladly and without remuneration beaten Calvin, Ishmael, Rupcity, and entourage into fragments and slivers of confusion and foolishness. But obviously I had been called. As I stepped toward Luther, he began crying, like real tears formed and rolled. My jaw was tight and my fists obviously shaking with anticipation. Rupcity says to me, “Don’t hit me. What do you want to do, hit me? I know you’ve got those big hands. You want to hit me?” And he was quite right, that idea did cross my mind. But his display was further out than I expected and it unnerved me. I felt sorry for them. I jawed at him, talked bad to him, and then they all dragged out of there.

  Vashti and I were living on Seventh Avenue right up near 145th Street. After struggling with the Arts all day I would walk up Seventh Avenue to our little three-room flat which overlooked a courtyard full of new, middle-aged, and ancient garbage. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, over a West Indian bakery. So I was always eating them hip meat pies smoking hot, but I could never deal with the ginger beer. We went to the Zambesi bar across the street, and around the corner was the Lagos, African named even before our new African consciousness. We hung out up and down Seventh Avenue. Count Basie’s and Wells’, home of the famous chicken and waffles, were our special hangouts. We’d fall by the Red Rooster, the stakeout joint of the black middle class. For special meeting meals with whites or certain kinds of Negroes we’d go to Frank’s on West 125th Street, which had, at the time, white waiters who circulated playing Gypsy violins! Occasionally we might go by Shalimar, across the street from Sugar Ray’s, or Small’s (which Wilt Chamberlain had bought). I saw Redd Foxx in there one night and he made a joke about black militants and I said something to him from my table. It was a brief exchange but I could see his emba
rrassment come out from under those red freckles. They made a Sammy Davis film, A Man Called Adam, about a weird Louis Armstrong-Miles Davis combination, at Small’s, and we got some of our actors on as extras. I even met Cicely Tyson and exchanged pleasantries while Vashti smirked just off camera.

  Not just Vashti and I, but some of the dudes from the Arts and myself would hang out. We were always in the Apollo. I even went backstage and talked to Dionne Warwick, whom I fancied I had a crush on, trying to get her to do a benefit for the Arts. Some brothers opened a coffeehouse right around the corner from the Arts called The Truth. It was meant to cater to the Black Arts and those with similar tastes. There had been a rush of folks from downtown up to Harlem, but also from outside New York. People had come into New York as usual, but now there was a very definite magnetism to go up to Harlem.

  Harlem had its share of nuts and bolts. Not all of them came with us, but we did bring more than our share. There were resident paranoids and schizophrenics we ran into as well as sane people reacting normally to our abnormality. Most people were not running away from white people and a “shadowy” life as “King(s) of the Lower East Side.” So sometimes we probably confused some people’s normal reaction to our nuttiness as nutty reactions to normality! But, all things considered, like they say, there were some bona fide nuts we ran into and some of the best people we have ever met in life.

  Around us, at this point, there were people from RAM and also from the Liberator magazine, run by Dan Watts. There were the Garvey people, young and old. The neo-Garveyite followers of Carlos Cooks, like the AJASS society (African Jazz Arts Society) led by Elombe Brath, who first featured the “Naturally” programs that made natural hairstyles popular among some advanced groups of black people. They also modeled African clothing styles with their “Grandassa” models. And they definitely had some grand assas. Some fine ones too.

  There were all kinds of other nationalists. The street-corner variety, which included not only the Garveyites but folks like Eddie “Porkchop” Davis, who was on the ladder daily giving white people hell. There were the cultural nationalists like the Nation of Islam, the Yoruba Temple, and even smaller cults and the orthodox or Sunni Muslims, who also had many variations, and the black Jews or Hebrews, the Egyptian Coptics, and various other “consciousness-raising” religious cults and sects. There were black militants of all persuasions and those on the left like Bill Epton around the corner at the Progressive Labor Party. Epton got arrested during the ’64 rebellion and charged with “criminal anarchy.” Bill was a soft-spoken likable dude whose relationship with the black community, from a little ramshackle office over top of a restaurant on Lenox Avenue, gave PLP a little credibility before it came out with its bullshit position that “all nationalism is nationalism,” negating the revolutionary aspect of liberation struggles against imperialism which are not direct struggles for socialism. The white chauvinism and petty bourgeois subjectivism of would-be white leftists like PLP have always left them isolated from not only the black community but also the other oppressed nationalities, and their connection with white workers is even more dubious.

  Bill and I appeared on programs together and got along all right, but I was a nationalist and he a Marxist. We argued about whether PLP would come to his defense adequately. I told him I thought they would leave his ass to rot, while letting him take the weight. PLP did get him out, though I think he later resigned from the organization and joined a mainly black organization based in Harlem. PLP did, however, leave another of its black cadres in prison to rot and take the weight and expelled this brother as a “nationalist.” I never found out what Epton thought of this.

  There were also the basic working people, moving out of Harlem most times to work and struggle and then returning at night to the indignities of ghetto life. There were Harlem office workers and bureaucrats and politicians. There were other cults like Democratic and Republican blacks. We disrupted several of their rallies, at one of which Mayor Lindsay was to speak. There were right-wing nationalists like James Lawson who acted as bodyguards for the white and black politicos, and we had constant run-ins with them. There were people like Charles Kenyatta who got great notoriety as “Malcolm’s former security.” Kenyatta spoke on the ladder every day as well. But our comment was terse: “Motherfuckers who say they was Malcolm’s bodyguards need to be killed. They shoulda died along with Malcolm.” And HARYOU, because it had got some dough, drew all kinds of hustlers and con men, religious and secular. There were people like baldhead Omar, who wanted to talk his way up on some money and power, or Donald Hassan, who got a reputation for being as crazy as Shammy, trying to gorilla his way up on same. There were the good-timers who wanted to hang out all day and night. Corny would lead us around to the various after-hours joints, where he would hold forth and introduce me to everybody and we would argue about Shammy and Tong and whether there was a black middle class or not. Corny said there wasn’t. (Years later Cornelius was shot to death in just such an after-hours joint by some gunmen who, when robbing the place, turned for no reason and suddenly filled Corny full of lead!)

  There were the gangsters and hoodlums and people in “the life” and all kinds of people who had been overlooked or peeped and popped. There was, as in any large urban black community, all kinds of promise and all kinds of frustration and bitterness. The sickness, the pathology that Fanon talks about that exists in the communities of the oppressed, it was all full out and openly roaring around and over and through and within us. The Black Arts itself was a pastiche of so many things, so many styles and ideologies. We had no stated ideology except “black,” and that meant many things to many people, much of it useful, much of it not. But we shot from the hip, came always off the top or near the top of our heads. Our sincerity was our real ideology, a gestalt of our experience, an eclectic mixture of what we thought we knew and understood. What we wanted. Who we thought we were. It was very messy.

  Vashti and I were a pair for those times. She young and aggressive, so full of her own sense of what everything was (even as she was in the act of finding out) that she was intimidated by nothing. Probably some white women hated Vashti (some black ones, too) because she was not just a symbol of something new, she was the whole drum set. People must have thought, this young girl, how’d she get into so much? But the brash young lady from D.C. was just what the doctor ordered and she knew it. Whoever it was — nuts, nationalists, Muslims, Yorubas, artsy types, politicians — Vashti handled them. “Hey, you betta get outta my face!” was one of her favorite statements. And our struggles were many and varied, for whatever reason. But we took all that in stride because we knew we had something deeper, we knew we actually dug each other, that we were friends as well as lovers.

  Even my waywardness and roving eye she tried to deal with straight up and straight ahead. She’d say, “Roi, you gonna make me kill this bitch,” of any object of my dalliance she would perchance to spy. And there were those. At Dolores Soul, the actress, Vashti merely laughed. “That old bitch!” And at Maria Cuevas, the writer, she just put her hands on her hips and when either of them was around the Arts she’d stand and watch them so intensely they felt a laser on their intentions that cooled them into distance.

  One time we fought about my intentions. Vashti wanted to know when I was going to get a divorce. She said, “You think I’m just living with you for my health?” And we went off. I stalked out the door, headed for somewhere. The next day I went to the bank, and goddam Vashti had withdrawn all the money and split for somewhere. Then she called me up at the Arts, laughing. “Fooled your ass, didn’t I?” I was rising in smoke like the Phoenix. I got home and she’d bought a goddam antique rocking chair.

  We had a real falling out another time about something very similar. She says she’s tired of my bullshit, she’s going home to D.C. When I get up to 145th Street that evening she has taken most of her shit and gone. I was depressed not only with this personal wipe-out; the day-to-day shit at the Arts could be extremely de
pressing with that cast of nuts to deal with. I was trying to figure out how we were going to sustain the program now that the federal moneys had been stopped. The phone rings and it’s Brandy, a friend of Vashti’s she’d met through Shammy. (Shammy’s female thing was astonishing. He ran through so many women so quickly it was impossible to keep track. They’d appear, be on the set a few minutes, and then disappear as if Porto Rico, the dude with the hook at the Apollo amateur night, had pulled them off accompanied by crazy music.)

  Brandy was a Shammy ex and she’d got real tight with Vashti. But now she’s on the phone and I tell her that Vashti is not in. She says, “I know. Do you want me to come over?” In truth, the only reason I said I was busy, some dudes were coming over, was because suddenly I got the image of Shammy and that crazy-ass Vashti converging on me with waving swords and I couldn’t handle it.

  A few minutes later, Vashti calls from Washington. She asks me what I’m doing. She says, “I bet you got some woman over there, don’t you?” It was funny now, so I told her about her friend Brandy and Vashti goes up in smoke right on the phone. “That bitch. I was the one who told her I was going to D.C. and to watch out for my interests. That bitch. Wait till I get my hands around her throat!”

  But when she didn’t come back I got into all kinds of dubious shit. For one thing, during the summer cultural program, the Yorubas had sent people over for some of the jobs. One of them, a young little girl named Olabumi, caught my eye. She was tiny but built like a dancer, with, as the nationalists say, an impressive history (a shapely behind). I started watching her go up and down the stairs at the Arts wondering what was under the long African lappa she wore.