by Amiri Baraka
So I found myself cleaning and painting yet another group of rooms, yet another place. I was moving to the third floor. Bumi would come, too. Barney wanted to move into one of the rooms with a little girl he’d hooked up with, the daughter of a famous black novelist. Ben figured he wanted to move out of the hotel, after that last incident. So he was going to move in, too. In a minute, Shorty would move over, too.
I wanted the downstairs floor to be a theater, something like the Black Arts. So we tore the walls down again. Joe Overstreet came over to help and at one point the whole ceiling nearly collapsed on our heads. Joe thought it was funny. There was a bunch of young boys in the neighborhood I soon got to know and they helped us. While we were clearing the theater part I even put together a quirky little film in which the kids starred. Putting that building together gave me more of a sense of purpose than I’d had in a long time. It was possible to do work in Newark. I was not an exile from New York. I could do work in the city of my birth. And that positive idea began to grow.
One of the first things I did was organize the Afro-American Festival of the Arts. The World Festival of Negro Arts was being put together in Dakar under Monsieur Senghor’s direction. The idea of a world festival of Negro arts was a drag, many of us agreed about that. But the overall idea was a great one. But there was no mistake, Leopold Senghor was a prominent Negro!
The Newark festival took place mainly outside in the park of the Douglass-Harrison apartments. Those were the most successful sessions. The speeches and music and dance got over biggest. We were supposed to have a few forums and roundtables inside but they were not well attended. But the outside programs were very successful.
Ben Caldwell designed the brochure, which showed some folks sitting on the steps of 33 Stirling Street. The festival brought Stokely Carmichael, Harold Cruse, Baba Oserjeman, and the Yoruba Temple Dancers and Drummers into Newark. While some of the things didn’t work, some worked very well. Carmichael, for instance, had just projected the concept of “Black Power” in the press. When I read it, in the Times, quoting Stokely down in Georgia or Alabama calling for Black Power, it lit me up. I had heard some things about Stokely when I was in New York and he still at Howard. I followed the SNCC struggles, of course, and the change that had occurred in SNCC, from a replica of the black preachers’ SCLC until now, when under Malcolm X’s influence, a nationalist perspective was growing in SNCC. Many of the whites had left. And now Carmichael was talking about Black Power. Next to the article I penned: “God bless you, Stokely Carmichael!”
The festival was my first really organized attempt to bring political ideas and revolutionary culture to the black masses of Newark. Though, in retrospect, a lot of what was said could hardly be looked at now as revolutionary. Though it all was resistance to imperialism in one aspect or another. The festival also connected me to many of the young people in Newark who were trying to do something in the arts and alerted some of the political types in that city that something “new” was happening.
We published a magazine called Afro-American Festival of the Arts, which featured works by Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Spriggs, Yusef Iman, Ben Caldwell, Clarence Reed, S. E. Anderson, and myself. Later it was called An Anthology of Our Black Selves. I met a young writer who worked for Johnson Publications, David Llorens, and he followed us around from place to place taking notes which in a year or so blossomed into a feature article in Ebony on our work in Newark.
Art Williams was running the Cellar just down the street from where I lived. He brought New York musicians in on the weekends. There were some very good sets. He also had poetry readings and I even read there myself one evening with a poet, Ronald Stone, who later changed his name to Yusef Rahman. Yusef’s poetry was a revelation to me. He was like Bird in his approach to the poetry, seeming to scat and spit rapid-fire lines of eighth notes at top speed. It was definitely speech musicked. This was my first exposure to his work and I was mightily impressed. It confirmed some of the things I had learned in the first surge of the Black Arts movement, how different the black poetry was that emerged in that rush of new blackness that came upon us then. Poets like Larry Neal and Askia Tour, were, in my mind, masters of the new black poetry. Larry coming out of straight-out bebop rhythms, but actually a little newer than bop, a faster-moving syncopation. Askia had the songlike cast to his words, as if the poetry actually was meant to be sung. I heard him once up at the Baby Grand when we first got into Harlem and that singing sound influenced what I was to do with poetry from then on. To me, Larry and Askia were the state of the art, where it was at that moment. Yusef was good, in some ways on a par with Larry and Askia, but Larry’s syncopation was a little more elegant. Yusef was dead-on a Charlie Parker bebop, straight ahead, blue wings flapping up a hurricane of funk. But Yusef was a definite new measure in the poetry, an innovative style that had to be absorbed by any who wanted to reflect where the word was circa 1966.
The fact of music was the black poet’s basis for creation. And those of us in the Black Arts movement were drenched in black music and wanted our poetry to be black music. Not only that, we wanted that poetry to be armed with the spirit of black revolution. An art that could not commit itself to black revolution was not relevant to us. And if the poet that created such art was colored we mocked him and his inspiration as brainwashed artifacts to please our beast oppressors!
Another poet I heard during this period had a great influence on me, Amus Mor (once David Moore) from Chicago. I heard him read in Chi his masterwork, “We Are the Hip Men.” The way Amus put the music directly into the poem, scatting and being a hip dude walking down the street letting the sounds flow out of his mouth — putting all that into the poetry — really turned me on. We wanted to bring black life into the poem directly. Its rhythms, its language, its history and struggle. It was meant to be a poetry we copped from the people and gave them right back, open and direct and moving. Reading in the vacant lots and on the sidewalks and playgrounds of Harlem that summer of ’65 had opened many of us all the way up. We had been able to reach deeper into ourselves than ever before. We had been able to touch sometimes that dark brown feeling that is always connected with black and blues.
Reading with Yusef was a good heavy experience, like playing opposite another horn (his an alto, maybe, mine a tenor) and wailing blue/black magic for the soul’s use. I began to come down to the Cellar often. It was only a block and a bit from my house. I became a regular, showing for most of the programs, sipping the beer and wine and mingling with the folks, digging the sounds. Maybe Barney and Donny and Ben and I would show. I was writing a column called “Apple Cores,” meant originally for Ed Dorn’s magazine Wild Dog. I had published a couple of columns in Downbeat. I began to fill them with what was going on at the Cellar.
Actually, Art Williams, who ran the Cellar, I knew before I left home. His younger brother and I had been fairly close even though we went to different high schools. Art was a bass player, much maligned by some musicians, who called him “the silent bass player,” because Art’s sound was so small. But Art was a good dude at heart, one of those classic free spirits that float through the black community trying to raise up beauty in the midst of ugliness. He’d been part of the Jazz Arts Society, which ran the third floor of the building the Cellar was housed in. But they’d split up because there was a growing Muslim influence on the Jazz Arts, resulting in them not wanting to deal with whites either as performers or as audience. Art had no such restraints on what he wanted to do. He wanted to bring in the music, whoever was playing it and whoever wanted to listen to it, and groove.
I was hooking up a production of A Black Mass and Jello, two plays written at the Black Arts. Calabar was putting up the bread and we were using the Proctors, an old movie theater that no longer functioned as that. Marvin Camillo, Barry Wynn, and Yusef Iman had the leads. Olabumi was in Mass, and Sylvia Wilson. Yusef and Charles Barney, a Newark actor, had leads in Jello, and Bobbie Riley, the mother of the major-league catcher Earl W
illiams, played Mary Livingstone. I thought it was a good evening, a professional production and aimed at the many.
It was during the rehearsals of these two plays that I came to know Sylvia Wilson better. She played the role of Tiila in A Black Mass, the young woman whom the beast (Bob Davis) touches and changes into a raving creature. Sylvia always drew applause the way she acted out the transformation.
Bumi and I were living together, but that was a thing of circumstance and inconvenience. I felt like her father more than her lover. She wore her Yoruba gele up and down those Newark streets and made friends with the young kids in the neighborhood. But we were in two different worlds. I could, however, and did feel responsibility for her quickly rising stomach and no matter what I felt, I was determined at least to serve that responsibility as best I could.
I found myself staring at Sylvia Wilson, who was married and had two children. One night at the Cellar she asked me was I really staring at her. Yes, I mumbled, maybe I shook my head, uh-huh, I had been. You know, some people get off just by staring. Sylvia was in the midst of separating from her husband. It was over already, the moving out was all that was left. In a few nights we found ourselves hugged together up in the loft, thinking it was just a brief coming together caused by our propinquity at the rehearsals.
But that was not the case. We saw each other again. We held hands and walked around Lincoln Center. Sylvia was tall and very slender, a brown woman with long, straightish-looking hair. I had seen her in the loft world a few times, before the tryouts that got her the part in A Black Mass. One night she was dancing in a company doing African dances and her halter slipped down, but she was so intense about the dance she didn’t even bother to pull it up. I wondered about that, was that just for effect or was she intense enough to let the damn halter stay down. Bumi had snickered when we saw that, saying she thought Sylvia was “phony,” but by the time the production at the Proctors was over, we had gotten tight indeed.
Sylvia also performed with Yusef Rahman, dancing while he read his swooping jazzical lines. It was my idea that Yusef liked Sylvia as well, even though he had a wife, Aishah, who had moved away from him for a time. Sylvia was one of the initiators of the Jazz Arts Society, which tried to bring some new art into the city, but the split meant she and the folks upstairs at the Jazz Art Society went one way and Art Williams another. But nobody could deny that what Art was doing downstairs was successful.
So her own cultural work was in and around Newark, against much heavier odds. But it was hooked up objectively to the same kind of thing we were doing at the Black Arts. In those cities like Newark, grim industrial towns in the real world, these kinds of projects are necessarily smaller but at the same time tougher and blacker because they are rooted in the absolute necessities of people’s desired sensibility. People must fight to bring art to a place like Newark; it is not the tourist stop or great advertised mecca of commercial intellectualism as New York has been styled.
And so she had a whole life as cultural worker in Newark that paralleled what we were trying to do at the Black Arts in many ways. Therefore, a sensibility that was like mine in some ways, but without the tiresome “spaciness” of the middle-class intellectual, subjective and selfish as I and much of the New York crowd tended to be. There was much less room or tolerance for the “fake art” syndrome that is so ubiquitous in Manhattan, therefore much less fertile soil for the maddening and finally vapid “artsycraftsy” personality type. Art was literally lifeblood in a place like Newark and its tenders and developers were, given the limitations of resources etc., dedicated valuable people, with usually a great deal more of a sense of responsibility than their average New York counterparts.
The unwavering focus of responsibility, especially as it relates to the African American people, was what the whole of the Black Arts movement was about. People like Sylvia, in the Newarks all over North America, had had that sense of focus and responsibility because, finally, there was much more of a black working-class underpinning for what they were doing. Such an intellectual and philosophical basis for their efforts was a given. For me, on the other hand, it was something I was still trying to win, even when I met her.
Our new relationship moved swiftly toward some resolution. Sylvia fascinated me. Before I’d gotten to know her I was still trying to hook up again with Vashti, but now that was surely over forever. We’d met once more in a bar, after an African wedding Bumi and I had gone to. Vashti stood there holding my arm, telling me it was all over. That we had had some fun but it was over. “We had some fun, didn’t we?” She was crying, at first softly and then racked by more tears. “Didn’t we?” Bumi had walked out so that we could talk. “Why can’t I be the one in the beautiful African clothes?” she said, weeping, referring to Bumi’s Yoruba dress. “Why can’t I be the one that is beautiful in the African clothes?” And then we parted.
I heard that after our final split Vashti took up with a cameraman. A year or so later, I heard that she and the photographer had gone to Mexico for a vacation. It was in Mexico that Vashti went swimming one day and drowned.
What to do now? Bumi was a girl, yet she was about to become a mother. Sylvia was from Newark, too, though she’d been born in North Carolina, but she’d lived mainly in Newark, mostly the Central Ward, what used to be called the Third Ward. And she’d lived for a long time as a child, with her grandmother and father, on the Ward’s most famous street, Howard Street. What seemed so strange to me now was that I had made something of a full circle. To have gone away so far, so many places, yet to be back with a black woman from the Central Ward. The irony was somehow mocking. I told her how many steps we’d wasted only to come back to our source, love in black life.
So I told Bumi about Sylvia. I told her I had been seeing her. Our relationship had just started. There was a fine intensity to it, a dazzling sensitivity to it, of us together, sensuous and alive. Sylvia was very slender, one could say skinny, but she carried with her (as so many dudes would remark to me while they were still in the running) an outright black sensuousness that was thrilling.
I felt my life had been blown around. I had been thrown by my own appetites across a whole cosmos of feelings and relationships. But the idea of Home was heavy on me, that I could come back. That I could somehow reclaim whatever I’d given up in going away. But there was Bumi and a baby coming. I thought she was too young and naive to handle it alone, which I guess was naivete of another sort, perhaps male chauvinism of one variety or another. So I proposed to Bumi that we practice polygamy, that we go to Sylvia and explain it and get her response.
The whole Yoruba cultural nationalism was influencing me. Bumi was still tight with Serj and the Temple folks. Olatuni even came to visit us with incense from time to time. We had a small altar in the house, as part of the religion. I did have a sincere belief in the need to go back to my roots. As Amilcar Cabral said of the black petty bourgeois intellectuals who have been so thoroughly wiped out by white society, they then all too many times freak out by diving headlong into a super-Africanism. (This was still to come!)
What we must have seemed like, the two of us, coming into Sylvia’s house with such a proposition, I cannot guess. Sylvia lived in one of the middle-income town-house complexes that the administration put up to try to make a gesture toward the black middle class. The only thing was, these town houses were only a few steps away from the lower-income straight-out projects, though they did look different. It was a well-kept apartment, with the dramatic gesture of art readily apparent. (Though we were critical because there were white people’s images in some of the paintings. I who just a couple years before not only had lived in a house full of paintings with white images, but had lain beside another white image, a flesh-and-blood one, as my wife. The pretension of these stances was fantastic, yet they came as a reflection of some legitimate desire to change.)
Sylvia did not like the proposition at all, except she did have some real feelings for me and that made her hesitate. She was also
in the act of leaving this home, separating from her husband. The two daughters by that marriage she had already taken to her mother’s to stay until she got herself situated. That marriage had already shattered. Her being with me had made it absolutely impossible for her to try to repair what was smashed and finished.
What our proposition did do was give Sylvia a place to move until she could see what she had to do. So she moved into Stirling Street with us. I had named the building the Spirit House, trying to raise up to another level the idea of what soul was to black people. The Spirit House was a place to raise the soul, to raise the consciousness. It was to be another edition of the Black Arts.
But no such thing as polygamy could work for us. Bumi was pushed because, even though she had been exposed to this madness, as an honorable black social form, she had her own instinctive feelings bred of being raised as a lower-middle-class girl in America. Sylvia did not want it either; her experience was completely the opposite. She was a light and a live wire in black Newark even with male chauvinism and a backward society. She had hung with musicians and artists, whom she made view her as equal and not as a piece of sexual baggage. But she would not say all this because of me. And I, so long whited out, now frantically claiming a “blackness” that in many ways was bogus, a kind of black bohemianism that put the middle class again in the position of carping at the black masses to follow the black middle class because this black middle class knew how to be black when the black workers did not. Hey, all that shit was yellow, very very yellow. Another kind of clique and elite. How to move from, say, Francis King to Baba Oserjeman and not miss a stroke.
Sylvia was in the house a few days when she decided she was moving out. The polygamous setup could not be consummated. The many head-to-head conversations we were having led Bumi to protest that she had been left out of this new family. But it had never been a family, only a bad idea sponsored by a middle-class black intellectual deeply confused and legitimizing male chauvinism. There was a party up on Clinton Avenue at someone’s house. I knew Sylvia was going to be there. I had been in New York dealing with my agent and trying to cash some checks. I got back and went up to the party. Sylvia and I talked. She could not go on with this sad charade that I had tried to put together. Maybe, sometime later, things would be different. I stared out into inner space, wondering what was going to happen now. Someone was calling me. There was a phone call. It was one of the older women on Stirling Street. Bumi had gotten sick, it was late in her pregnancy, but she had gotten suddenly sick. An ambulance had been called and they had taken her to the hospital. When I got there she was in a coma. She never regained consciousness.