The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  At a program we had at the Baron, the Yoruba dancers are wailing and then Olabumi, or Bumi as we called her, falls out. One of the Yorubas then spreads the story that I was staring at her so intensely it made her faint. At any rate, I found myself going by her place, but then I found out she lived with two other women and one of the Yoruba, a dude who sold incense. I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t care. Maybe I was interfering with some of their polygamy. Anyway, we found ourselves in one of the worst flophouse hotels in Harlem, but once getting in there she said she had no intention of doing anything. She said that Olatuni, whom she lived with, was her guardian, nothing more. But she would not give it up. So this became one focus for my after-Arts hours, trying to catch up with this little teasing Bumi.

  I met another woman at the same time, a little light-skinned woman with glasses who walked like she thought she was a musician or at least a street hipster. This Lucille had been downtown and had moved up, but she was living in Harlem and hanging downtown and had come uptown before most of us. When I ran into her she was staying with some girl-friend and implying she might be going to lead a life of Lesbos. Goddam, I thought, why I always have to run into these.

  The influence of the cultural nationalism on all of us at the Black Arts was real. For instance, when I finally succeeded in getting Bumi to come up to 145th Street and spend the night, I immediately got the idea that both Bumi and Lucille could move in, that I should begin to live as the Yorubas at Serj’s temple. As an obvious justification for male chauvinist bed rambling there is little to discuss, but the extent to which these ideas had penetrated my thinking on the real side is what is interesting. But not only my thinking. I did convince the two of them to move into 145th Street. Bumi, a teenager, an African dancer, child of the new age, seeking some new revelation of changed black reality. Lucille, an office worker who loved the music, whose quest for blackness was made all the more ironic (but necessary) by her very light skin.

  Lucille, the office worker, liked the idea (but maybe she just wanted to get next to little Bumi), but Olabumi, who was associated in the temple with polygamous marriages, seemed less impressed with the idea. The three of us sat and discussed it, with Lucille marveling at Bumi’s sewing machine, a portable she was carrying with her to make bubbas and lappas for wearing and for the temple’s performances. But why had I found it necessary now to offer such a relationship to these sisters? I had never asked any of the white women I had been with to enter into some polygamous relationship. Though that is just a formalism, since the many affairs and one-night stands that went on amounted to something like polygamy. Engels says adultery is the partner of monogamy. None of that went through my mind; the idea of polygamy was “new” and “black,” so we went for it.

  After a day or two, this relationship, such as it was, got reported back to me by Lesser, who said, “I understand that you’re living according to one of the most illustrious traditions of our ancestors.” But by the time he said that shit, it was already just about over. Vashti had decided she was coming back, so these other sisters had to cut out.

  Things at the Arts were getting dire. When the summer program was going and money was flowing in, things were great, there were conflicts but they could be handled. The noise Tong and company sold, the antipathy the community people, professional artists, and the like felt for them, I could cool out somewhat, at least keep the shooting war off. But without the cash flow, raising money here and there with handouts and our programs, people started to get more sullen. People kept coming to me with plans to dump Tong or Tong and Shammy in the river or off the roof. One old friend of Tong’s from childhood sat in on one of these frenetic discussions and he agreed that the dude was dangerous and needed to be took off. Then he slips a note to Tong telling him to watch out.

  Tong bursts into my office and says he understands that somebody is planning to do something to him. That he is ready and that no one would survive. I had a huge blue-steel cowboy-style .357 Magnum I used to carry in my briefcase. And while he is woofing I run my eye over the briefcase and his eyes drift in its direction as well. He knows full well what is in there. But I keep scribbling notes for a play I’m trying to write and look up at him only barely. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he goes back into his office. But the tension between us and his mob after that was unbearable. It was like you couldn’t do anything for fucking around and being fucked with by these unproductive nuts. One little dude took Tong out in Mount Morris Park and kicked his ass one afternoon after Tong kept woofing at him, and that made me feel much better. Tong thought he was bad bad, but the little dude was a boxer and jabbed and hooked him dizzy. We stopped it, why I don’t know.

  Our politics, first and ultimately, was the reason the program and its development were in such disorder. Our politics which flowed from our mix-matched and eclectic ideology. We had straight-out white supremacy bourgeois opinions mixed with mass-felt revolutionary ones. We wanted to destroy a system and didn’t realize that we still carried a great deal of that system around with us behind our eyes.

  In one of our confrontations, for instance, Jimmy Lesser, one of Tong’s black blacks, confessed that he could not get as deep into the militant thing as we could. (I didn’t quite understand the difference then between bourgeois nationalism that just wanted to get in on the exploitation and a revolutionary democratic view that wanted to destroy it, so-called revolutionary nationalism. I thought they were all the same. This is the reason so many of us slept on what it meant that Malcolm and Elijah had split. That split between the politics of an oppressed bourgeoisie and the politics of the exploited and oppressed revolutionary black masses.) Lesser then says, “Look, man, I have to admit I’m a traditionalist. I need a snowy blond white woman at my side, whatever I’m going to do.”

  I was so horrified because I realized I had been, was being, vilified by motherfuckers that wasn’t even as straight as I was, who had problems even much deeper than my own. The fact that I couldn’t believe there could be suckers much sicker than me was what had left me open to these clucks. And I resented it, deeply. It made me even more sardonic and terse in dealing with these dudes.

  The reason this conversation had come up was that all the lights had blown out in New York City, I guess for the first time. In Harlem this Great Blackout had a special effect. Suddenly, at the corner of Lenox and 125th, a group of white people were being taunted and robbed. The police swung into action — saving white people is their second most important function after their most important function, saving white people’s property. They had to do some property saving too. Windows were getting smashed and commodities were disappearing at an alarming rate, well below their established exchange value.

  We got the idea that we should agitate for more of what was going on, as if people needed us to tell them what to do. By the time we got our sound truck in action, one piece of 125th had been stripped as clean as most bloods’ pockets. But we started speaking over the loudspeaker, riding up and down Lenox and Seventh. “Now’s the time,” we shouted. “They can’t see you. Rip these stores off. Take everything. Come on out and get it!”

  We had just come back up the hill near 130th Street when police cars hemmed us in. White cops leaped out, guns drawn. They dragged us out of the seat, sticking a gun to my head. We were running off at the mouth, driving their temperature up even higher. They were dragging us to their car. I think it was me and Dave in the car. But just as they are getting us into the car a crowd forms. They came together instantly, those bars and corners emptied, and suddenly, yeh, the surrounders were themselves surrounded. And, Jim, if they thought my mouth was bad, they hadn’t heard nothing. Bloods lit them up on all sides. One old sister, her hands on her hips, stood between us and their car calling them “White motherfuckers! You white motherfuckers need to be killed! Leave them young boys alone, goddammit!”

  And the others joined in. There were maybe a half dozen police and now, very quickly, about fifty or sixty
people. The police had to decide what to do. They were caught between training their guns on us or the crowd, which was getting louder and louder and prettier and prettier (the cops would say “uglier”). Plus, the people were closing off the space, drawing the circle in tighter. But one cop gets on the radio and starts calling. The goddam precinct house was right around the corner at 135th and Seventh and they push us toward the car, pushing the confrontation toward its explosion point. But then some colored cops arrive. That’s why they were calling. The Buffalo Soldiers were needed once more and they arrived riding their trusty backwardness. We get smashed into a police car and talked bad to with a gun at our heads by the white cops. They are threatening to kill us. “Like Gilligan did? Huh?” we screamed. (Gilligan was the cop who had shot the young black boy in an incident that helped set off the Harlem Rebellion and wanted posters appeared the next day with the caption “Wanted for Murder: Gilligan the Cop!” The PLP was reputed to have done it and that’s why the police wanted to bust Epton.) The cop tried to strangle us.

  When we got to the precinct they were pushing us into the back room, where they said they were going to finish us off, but as we entered I spied the newly appointed black commander of the precinct, Eldridge Waithe, a West Indian dude with a fairly good reputation, for a black cop. He came over, and we started screaming that these freaks were gonna kill us. So Waithe intervenes, questions the cops, questions us, and after an hour or so in which many of the Black Arts people had come over to the precinct or were calling the precinct over the phone, Waithe cut us loose.

  That’s what Lesser meant. He wasn’t as militant as us. He thought the revolution had to do with wearing bow ties and standing sluefooted. But at least that involved some activity. Some did even less.

  I was growing sick of most of these people, because even some of the more productive brothers and sisters would only come around at times when they thought they didn’t have to put up with the Hackensacks and the rest of that crew. Corny sat and broke down in tears one night because Shammy had said something to him and Corny wanted to kill him and, because he couldn’t, the frustration ate him up, and he wept, trying to threaten Shammy still, but at the same time wailing like a child.

  Askia, Dave, and I sat up all night after we got released from the joint, talking of revolution. The blackout itself was an agitating element of romance in our concept of revolution. We were still so unclear. We still did not even understand in anything approaching a scientific way what were the purposes or the methods for making real revolution. We were angry and we had heart. We thought those were most of the prerequisites. But the Hackensacks turned people like Larry Neal and Askia off. Larry thought they were seriously ill — “counterproductive,” he called them. But Larry was going through some personal problems himself. One of his close political comrades had run off with his wife. He’d told me in that same narrow little office. That seemed shitty and ugly, like it was happening in another world. The wild ins and outs of our various relationships I could take as they came, but something like that seemed, somehow, foreign. Like a bourgeois movie.

  After that, Larry had gotten involved with a sister that Tong had some design on, and that put even more distance between them, as if there needed to be any more. Plus, Larry had been openly critical of the way the Hackensacks, in general, liked to fuck things up. So there was bad blood between them.

  The screwy Tong, in what he conceived as some secret strategy, tried to get his young disciple, Majid, to follow me around. He was supposed to report on my activities, where I went and whatnot. I guess because he thought that allowed him to undermine even more, interfering with stuff he didn’t like. But then, also, I guess I was his meal ticket. There was no money changing hands anymore. The little money I got, from royalties and readings, I needed to support myself. But I did give up some few dollars to keep the Arts functioning. We did programs that brought in a little money and contributions, but we were just barely paying the bills. Tong and his nuts might have resented the fact that I did have some money, and they chose not to work, at anything, and that was yet another edge between us. I let Majid walk around with me sometimes, but when I wanted to I’d lose him easily, if I wasn’t in the Arts. I wasn’t doing anything, I just didn’t want him with me.

  But now the bullshit was rising so high that I was getting more and more distracted. When Vashti found out about my nutty liaison with the two sisters she went up in smoke, started throwing plates and pots, a steam iron, her fists, then she repacked her bags and split. She moved downtown with a girlfriend, or at least down to the East 90s. I guess I was wasted. When she’d been in D.C., that was one thing. I figured she’d be back and the separation didn’t seem permanent or the final solution. But this walkout had bodings of finality, termination. Plus, now, I felt naked. It was the kind of loneliness that can descend on you at the end of some personal relationship or phase of your life. Vashti had been for me, no matter my craziness, a real companion, an extension of myself, as I was, I guess, an extension of her. We’d always felt like two hip young things against a crazy world, and we were time enough for it. There was a groping tenderness to our relationship that came from experiencing sweetness in the midst of the unknown and clinging to that sweetness as life itself.

  So the days passed now with an edge of gloom to them, and the weight of the growing madness at the Arts weighed even heavier on me. For now, I literally could not stand the asshole Tong or his unpredictable brother. I hung with Corny and Clarence in and out of the Harlem bars or holed up in my office drinking cheap orange wine. The goings and comings of Tong and his litter of nuts did not interest me. The programs we put on, Dave and I took care of. The artists that came through, the two of us talked to. We regarded Tong and company as bad weather and dealt with them as little as possible.

  We had a public image. We still spoke at rallies and programs, firing away intensely as we could against the white beasts who oppressed black people. Earlier in the year 1 had finally published the book The System of Dante’s Hell. The moiling, twisted experience of my youth still moiled and twisted as an aesthetic form of rhythmic images, searching for a voice that finally begins to emerge at the end of the book and its “fast narrative” of a perpetually gloomy reality. But I had already gone past that stage in my life. (I hoped!) When I had, at the end of Dante, “woke up with white men, screaming for God to help me.” I had served that apprenticeship to my own real spirit. I had left the Village and that education I had given myself, reading and feeling myself through great parts of the Western world. I had dashed out at full speed hurling denunciations at the place of my intellectual birth, ashamed of its European cast. Arriving full up in the place of blackness, to save myself and to save the black world. Ah, the world-filling egos of youth.

  But now I felt more alone than ever, bereft of Vashti’s kindred spirit and love. Facing dumb dissembling motherfuckers who wasted time conspiring against advance and productivity. My head was a swirl of images, disconnection and new connection, its focus vague, dulled by my own subjectivism. Most of our intentions were good. We wanted to help free black people. We, ourselves, had got back a self-consciousness of our nationality, but we were bogged deep in nationalism, a growing, ever deepening cultural nationalism, it was to turn out. Malcolm’s death, certainly, had left many people scrambling and unprepared. There was no revolutionary party we understood. No science we could relate to. Those people calling themselves Communists we despised. They were stupid-ass white people — shit, they were part of the enemy. Hadn’t they even come around saying that “the nationalism of Malcolm X was just like the nationalism of the KKK” and that “Malcolm was a police agent”? Shit, they needed to be fired on.

  But we were a clutch of kids, some of us never even got past that and remain kids even to this very day. We needed to be directed, we needed guidance. We needed simple education. There were next to no black institutions where we could learn, that’s why we had tried to put one together. We could understand what it was to be
uneducated in a world of airplanes and skyscrapers. I, certainly, knew what it was to be suddenly conscious and then be made ashamed of your own unconsciousness which had ended only a few seconds before.

  When I finished whatever tasks I had given myself at the Arts I would take off, unless I was talking to some of the artists or Corny or Clarence or a few of the other people or Dave. But now there was little to say to the others, who had their own powwows, which produced nothing I could see but metaphysical double-talk and empty leers pretending toward consciousness.

  I discovered where Vashti was holed up and started calling her. I could tell that she hadn’t frozen up on me completely but she did think that I was too much trouble. There was too much wear and tear on the neurons. And was it worth it? But a couple of phone calls and we were at least sitting in some bar sipping drinks and staring out at the world trying to put something back together.

  The first night I slept over where Vashti was staying proved to be the beginning of the end of the beginning. We ate breakfast and talked. I was restless and she wondered why. I was supposed to show up at the Arts around ten o’clock, but I didn’t feel like it. It was nothing formal, just a bedraggled, out-of-it feeling.

  We went out to a bar, then we decided to go downtown to see a flick. They were doing Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and we sat through that. When we came out I told Vashti to call the Arts and see what was happening. She said they were wondering where I was. Tong had asked Dave and Dave passed it on. At that point I felt, “Oh, bullshit; fuck them.” I had Vashti by the hand and told her simply, “Hey, it’s finished. Fuck those people. I’m not going back there.”

  I went to the old apartment and packed a few clothes. I called Shorty and told him to watch my shit — I was cutting out for a while. Then we went to Vashti’s place and got her clothes and took off. At first I didn’t know where we were going, I just didn’t feel like seeing those gloomy nuts on West 130th Street. Finally, after several bars and another flick, I decided we should go home, to Newark, to my parents’ house. I called up, made arrangements, and then cut out. A couple of young people who had started coming up to the Arts were from Newark. We contacted them through Shorty and got them to help us move out our clothes and most of our belongings. Except I left a huge record collection, with Shorty supposedly minding it, that I never got back. Shorty let Corny and Clarence and some others know where we were, but that’s all. We didn’t even tell young reliable Dave, because Dave was always the object of manipulation by the Tongs and Shammys.