by Amiri Baraka
When Tong and Shammy found out I had split, moved out with Vashti, they got nuts, I guess. They went running up to the apartment and threw whatever was left around. Then they stormed around Harlem, claiming they were looking for me. For a couple of months, whenever I came to New York, I carried a sawed-off shotgun inside my hunting jacket in such a way that I could put my hand on it, open the coat, and fire almost simultaneously. But happily I had no confrontations.
In the first heat of that split, there was a casualty. Apparently Larry Neal, Askia, and some others went to inquire of Dave about my whereabouts and were met with even more hostility from the now thoroughly lost and desperate survivors at the building. Now there was no money, the programs had stopped. Of those still around, only Dave would do anything consistently to put together the programs, and now there were no resources. Shammy was frustrated and angry because I had split. Tong was now free to run amuck and that amuckness ended up with Larry being shot as he emerged from a subway by Shammy. It was a small-caliber weapon and Larry was hit in the leg. But now it seemed a war threatened to jump off, of forces colliding in the vacuum of my sudden removal. But I didn’t care, except for some twinges of feeling about my failed responsibility. When I saw Larry he questioned me and said that some other folks wanted to know why I had brought those nuts into the community and then left them up there.
But now I had other things to think about. Like, what was I doing back in Newark? I had just completed a book of essays called Home, which meant coming back to one’s self, one’s consciousness, coming back to blackness. I ended the introduction to the book: “By the time you read this, I will be even blacker.” That was true, albeit the grand stance. But I could also have said: “and confused like a motherfucker.” But, at least, I was, literally, Home.
Nine
Home
It was just after Christmas, the last few days of 1965, when Vashti and I arrived at my parents’ home on Eckert Avenue in Newark. Now a state of shock started to develop in my mind, faced with being back in Newark, an unknown quality, except in my brown memory. I had left New York. In a week or so it was behind me. But what was ahead?
We sat and absorbed the atmosphere and brooded a lot. But in that frenetic high-strung way those suffering from anxiety do. There was now, also, a continuing relationship with the two young brothers, Donny and Barney, who’d helped to cart our stuff over. They brought us news about the nursery of maniacs left at the Arts, their foolishness and increasingly manic actions. The shooting of Larry Neal shocked me. That was the reason for carrying the sawed-off shotgun. In March the news came out that the police had raided the Black Arts. Headlines: “Arms Cache and Six Seized in Harlem”! Tong, Tub, Lesser, Majid had coalesced into some weirder stripe of destroyer. Now to some extent hooked up by metaphysical ideology — some loose, some actually calling themselves Hanafi Musulman.
The police said they had found guns and a basement shooting range. (That was Shammy.) My name came up in the papers: “Police Raid LeRoi Jones Theater: Find Guns, Bomb.” Implicated by association, but I had been gone for several months when the bust came.
Later, Tub was arrested, with two others, for attempted bank robbery and the name Hanafi Musulman came up again. Tub, a believer, got fairly heavy time.
Majid got involved with a Washington, D.C., orthodox Muslim group that the Black Muslims (Nation of Islam) were accused of assassinating. The assassins killed wives and babies, plus a couple of the men, in what was a horrible crime. The leader of the assaulted group went on television accusing Elijah Muhammad and swearing revenge. Still later, this same group occupied the offices of B’nai B’rith in a protest against vulgarization of the Prophet Muhammad’s life in a film. Majid was the negotiator with the police, in that incident, for his father-in-law, the head of the group.
In a year or so I saw Tong again, now haggard and gaunt, wandering through New York City streets claiming to be Pharaoh and talking unintelligibly. Shammy I saw many years later in Washington, D.C. He had just come back from West Africa, where for several years he made a living selling drugs on the continent. Dressed like a real operator in a white double-breasted suit, he was with a tall blond woman he introduced as his wife. She looked like the high-powered wife of a high-powered drug dealer. We talked quietly and listened to music.
In Newark, I was somewhat at loose ends. First of all, being back in my parents’ house had so many overtones and shadows obscuring some aspects of reality, but at the same time overemphasizing certain other aspects. Vashti and I weren’t married, yet I’d brought her home as if she were my wife. We were staying in the guest room in the little two-family house I’d lived in during my final days at Howard. At first I had not even thought about this point — what my parents, certainly my mother, would think. But in a week or so it occurred to me that maybe they might not like it. Vashti and I acted the way we acted. We had good times together, but at the same time we fussed and fought in a very open way, and I know my parents didn’t dig that. But I was trying to figure out what to do.
I was writing poetry, naturally enough. Nothing could affect that. A poet writes because he has to. It is like breathing — you can stop only at grave peril. But what should I do now? Vashti began taking classes at the College Division of Arts High. I was writing various articles and working on some plays as well. I even did a script for a film I figured might not ever be shot: The Death of Malcolm X. But what this did was get me interested in making films. I bought a camera, a 16mm Bolex, some editing equipment, including a Moviola for viewing what I shot. I began to do pieces of film, a couple reels, mostly mood studies of Vashti and environs. I even wrote a couple of mini-scripts. (Ten or eleven years later, when I got copies of the COINTELPRO papers the Freedom of Information Act entitled citizens to, there was mention of one film I was making out in my parents’ backyard that involved a noose and an American flag!) I enlisted a few other people’s services in making the film. Donny was a filmmaker himself. And I began to meet some of the arts-oriented people in and around Newark. Only Shorty from the Arts came over a few times to visit and fill me in on what was going down in New York. Ben Caldwell, the playwright and painter, lived in Newark then. He was painting and managing a rundown old transient hotel on Broad Street. He came over one day, invited by Barney, to participate in the filmmaking. He brought a young woman with him who was interested in acting. Her name was Sylvia Wilson. By 1967 she was my second wife!
I was doing various things but I didn’t know overall what I was doing. Or why I was doing. However, I was meeting people and getting reoriented to Newark. I felt that I had failed in New York. The last days at the Black Arts had thoroughly disgusted me. Rather than continuing to struggle with Tong and the others, I had opted to cut out. There was no particular event or incident. I had just gotten filled up with all that. I had wanted to create a revolutionary art and a revolutionary institution to bring that art to the black masses. And while we had made some real contributions we (I) had also gotten bogged down with nonproductive nuts. Why? was what plagued me. Why had all that happened? Probably it was something about me. The guilt I carried about my life in the Village always undermined the decisive actions I had to take to preserve any dynamic and productive development in the Black Arts. Plus, obviously, I didn’t know enough. I knew that, but what I thought I needed to know about was not what I really did need to know about. I needed to know the art and science of politics and how to run an institution. It was a long time before I learned either.
But something had happened that was good. The idea of the Black Arts, the concept of the black revolutionary artist organizing arts institutions, particularly theaters, in the black community, caught on. By the summer there was word that people in Detroit had pulled together the same concept. They even had a Black Arts Convention there. There was also talk of a Black Arts West opening in San Francisco, and word came from several other places of similar activity. In fact, by the middle of the year it became evident that there was a Black Arts movement
spreading throughout the United States. Traveling around to these cities and speaking and reading poetry was another one of my activities and a source of income. Word of the concept of the Black Arts far exceeded what we had actually done, but the concept itself was important.
In Newark, Vashti and I had a few friends. Donny, Barney, Ben, a friend of his, Russell Lyle, an alto saxophonist, and his older brother Henry. My mother and Vashti became famous friends. They’d even go down to the Owl Club and sit and drink cocktails and rap to each other. But by now it was evident that we had to move out of there. I had been asked to direct a local staging of Dutchman at Arts High, produced by a black Newark production company, the Calabar Society, which was run by some childhood friends of mine, Wilbur McNeil and Gene Campbell. Rehearsals would soon get started and I had some of the feeling of getting back into the theater.
After a month or so of being in Newark, Olabumi called me and told me she was pregnant! That wiped me out altogether. Pregnant? Shit, how? Hey, goddammit, I felt, we only made it a couple of times. But apparently, according to some scientists, one shot can do it. I arranged to meet her in New York to discuss it. I was pissed off. “How’d you get pregnant?” was behind any words I spoke to her. We stood near a statue of George M. Cohan on Broadway and I was not warm and friendly. “So what’s going to happen?” was what I was saying.
“What’s going to happen?” Bumi got furious — she was young and now she was hurt. I was throwing her favors back in her face. Now what’s going to happen? So she spun away from me, running into the Broadway crowd crying, “I hope the baby dies. I hope the goddam baby dies!” I was left alone in the swirling crowd, and wound my way forlornly to the Newark bus.
In a few days Bumi called me again and we talked. I felt there was nothing I could or wanted to do. “Get an abortion” was my counsel. I thought I ought to convince her. So I told her to come over to Newark. I would meet her down at Ben’s hotel to discuss it further. When she got down there I couldn’t convince her to get an abortion. Not only that, she stayed the night down there and I stayed with her.
Vashti was smoking the next day when I saw her, making up some lie or other. What was really outside was the fact that Bumi didn’t want to leave the hotel. It was the world’s worst place (or at least no better than the world’s worst). It was a flophouse, full of prostitutes, hustlers, petty thieves, and some recent Southern immigrants. Ben ran it like a big commune and several of the guests were weeks behind in their rent. And Ben seldom pressed them. When I went down there to hang out with Ben, we’d sit and bullshit, drinking bottles of very cheap wine in his cramped little room, which he also used as a painting studio and storage space, or we might sit out in the “lobby” of that stinking joint and have a quick forum about anything. All the other guests who wandered in would join the discussion. What was so interesting about Ben and the joint is that I had forgotten that there were people outside of New York who painted, wrote, danced, etc.
So Bumi began staying at the hotel. I didn’t want her there, but now here was some other guilt, her pregnancy, to whip my head. I thought maybe Ben and she had got tight and that’s why she wanted to stay, but that seemed so convenient an out for me I rejected it. I’d been going down to that hotel from time to time to bullshit with Ben anyway, but now I’d go down more often. Vashti became more and more aggravated and stayed on my case about my late-night returns and absences. Some of those nights, however, I was just sliding through black Newark streets, going in some Central Ward bar I’d stumbled on, just to sit and rub my head wondering what the fuck I was doing with my life.
Rehearsals started for Dutchman. It starred Iris Spielberg and Marvin Camillo (who later moved to New York and formed the theater group The Family, which produced Miguel Pinero’s Shorteyes). I thought the production was pretty good, even though Iris and I had a fight, in which I told her I didn’t like white people — she had complained that I hadn’t related to her enough as a director. She said I didn’t like white people because I was immature. There was probably some truth in that, though there are probably some other reasons white people could be disliked by any colored person.
The night of the opening, Bumi came up to see the production and Vashti spotted her. Vashti had gotten friendly with Sylvia and some other folks in Newark, and she had been complaining to them bitterly about my male chauvinism, my hanging out all night, and about Bumi, whom she had got word about. After the performance that night all of us went to the Owl Club down on Clinton Avenue. The place was founded by a friend of my grandfather’s, another black Republican and a prominent Elk. My grandfather was a Mason. So there was a mix most times of young middle-class types and the older bloods who’d been going down there for decades.
Vashti and I had a fight about Bumi, not only verbal, but she slapped me and I pushed her, right in the Owl Club. My mother was there and she was so embarrassed she came up to me with tears in her eyes, her voice and person shaking violently. “I have to live here. This is where I live!” So much for the brown promise of yellow spotlight. Tussling in a bar in front of the colored citizens. Wow.
For Vashti and me that was it. That was the finish. She went back to my parents’ house, got her stuff, and blew. She went back to New York to stay with a friend. I could not reach her. It was a very low point in my life. The Smokey Robinson hit “The Tracks of My Tears” was popular at the time, and for me that summed up what was going on in my own life. “Take a good look at my face/if the smile seems out of place/look a little closer it’s easy to trace/the tracks of my tears!” Fuckin’ Smokey, the poet of the age.
I got out of my parents’ house as well and went down to the flophouse to stay. As depressed as I was, that raunchy joint took me even further down and out. Bumi was a kid, almost completely unshaped. She was no Vashti, who was also youthful but sophisticated to within an inch of her life. Me and Vashti were like partners, like Nick and Nora Charles, brown style. Bumi knew next to nothing about music, art, poetry, politics — none of the stuff that animated my life. Yet for some absolutely stupid pathological reasons I found myself with her in some flophouse on Broad Street in Newark! The irony, the psychological cruelty of that punished me unmercifully. The same grey streets. The hopelessness and despair that walks through that city like its real owners. I was back here with it, without, even, the promise of youth.
First of all I had to get out of that hotel. I pored over the newspapers looking for some way out. The depression was unbearable. The wine drinking increased. Days filled with a listless frustration, a self-condemning tone to my thoughts mocked me without end. I spotted a house for rent on Stirling Street. Just as you left the downtown area of Newark you’d pass through the Stirling Street area, just above the courthouse and Hall of Records on High Street. It was a short street, bounded on one side by High, on the other by Howard. It was only a couple blocks away from my old church and right around the corner from the church my father told my mother he was a member of so he wouldn’t have to go to Bethany regular.
Also, there was a building just a couple blocks away from Stirling Street on Shipman Street where they had music and poetry readings down in the basement and an arts group upstairs. That building contained just about all of arty Newark. Plus, you could shoot right down the street and be at Penn Station or the bus station if you were removing. It was close to downtown, convenient, yet it was edged up into the community. It was about $200 a month to rent the whole wooden house, three floors. I went up and looked at it. I could get the $200 plus another $200 security, if I strained. And I had to strain, I had to get out of that hotel.
Something happened to flush me out even more quickly than I’d intended. The owner of the hotel sent a man down to check on why he wasn’t getting his rent money on time or no time. The reason was that Ben wouldn’t bug anybody for the man’s money. If you had it, cool; if you didn’t, that was cool too. Ben would say, “Hey, man,” to the nonpayers, “the white man gonna throw your ass out in the street,” and everybody would la
ugh. But the white man did come down, or at least sent someone down to harass the tenants.
Some people had come over from New York to see me, Shorty and some others. The money collector sees us coming through the lobby and he wants to know who we are and whatnot. One thing led to another and I’m saying, “Fuck you, kiss my ass,” which seems normal in these kinds of situations. The guy picks up a stick and charges me. I guess he was some kind of small-time enforcer. But luckily I kicked him with a fake karate kick right in his real testicles, and he keeled over, folded up like a newspaper. You mean you gonna kick some white man in the balls on Broad Street? Some landlord’s flunky? You can’t make that, my man. Something like that could have gone through my head as if it was Clarence Franklin talking slow and drunkenly inside my knot. For a second I froze. The guy was still laying in the floor like he was knocked cold. I backed off him, scrambled up the stairs to get what I could out of the room. Most of my stuff was still at my parents’ house. Then I split, jumped on a bus, and went just where any detective would look, my parents’ house. I didn’t think anybody at the hotel would say anything. I lay low a couple days, and when I got my money together, I headed for Stirling Street.