by Amiri Baraka
After an hour or so, the couple of us from the Spirit House got off the line, which was still moving, more people having come, others splitting. We had to go home to get ready for rehearsal and another community meeting. So we started to go home, rolling slowly across Belmont Avenue, past the abandoned Krueger brewery and over to Springfield Avenue. It seemed there were knots of people, ever moving, people in small groups, looking, peering, as if they too sensed what was ready to loose itself.
It was later in the afternoon when we got to the Spirit House. I had to eat. Sylvia and the boy were there, also Barney’s girlfriend, Beverly, and Shorty’s friend, Helen, who was an old friend of Sylvia’s. We ate and talked and began to get ready for the evening when some of the young boys who came in and out of the Spirit House rushed in. “They’re breaking windows on Springfield Avenue” was the word. Moving outside, it looked, for some reason, like the sky had a long, wide reddish streak to it. It was low and wanted to burn. It sizzled and carried images and words, buzz turning to roar. Its smell got in your nose and made you blink. You could see people in motion, like a slow-motion flick speeded up. Moving in all directions.
We stood for a second, all of us from in the house. Then Shorty, Barney, and I jumped in the bus; it was a new Volkswagen I’d bought recently, but I still didn’t know how to drive. “Where’re you going?” Sylvia called, and I said something, but we were around the corner and onto Springfield Avenue. When we got there the shit was already on! Farther up the street we could see figures moving fast. The sun was falling to hide them quick. Suddenly, sirens. We could see some smoke, hey, then glass started to break close to where we were.
The spirit and feeling of the moment a rebellion breaks out is almost indescribable. Everything seems to be in zoooom motion, crashing toward some explosive manifestation. As Lenin said, time is speeded up, what takes years is done in days, in real revolution. In rebellions life goes to 156 rpm and the song is a police siren accompanying people’s breathless shouts and laughter. (See “Newark: Before Black Men Conquered.”)
All that was pent up and tied is wild and loose, seen in sudden flames and red smoke, and always people running, running, away and toward. We wheeled the wagon around and began to head up toward what looked like the eye of what was growing mad and gigantic and hot. We went straight up Springfield, not fast, not slow, but at a pace that would allow a serious observer to dig what was happening. It had got dark fast, like the dashing bloods had reached up and pulled night down by its silver string and slam! it was down and they got on with they shit.
Boxes of stuff were speeding by, cases of stuff, liquor, wine, beer, the best brands. Shoes, appliances, clothes, jewelry, food. Foodtown had turned into Open City, some dudes jumped the half story out the window to the ground. There were shifts of folks at work. The window breakers would come first. Whash! Glass all over everywhere. Then the getters would get through and get to gettin’. Some serious people would park near the corner and load up their trunks, make as many trips as the traffic would bear. Some people would run through the streets with shit, what they could carry or roll or drag or pull. Families worked together, carrying sofas and TVs collectively down the street. All the shit they saw on television that they had been hypnotized into wanting they finally had a chance to cop. The word was Cop & Blow! And don’t be slow.
Then the fire setters, Vulcan’s peepas, would get on it. Crazy sheets of flame would rise behind they thing. Burn it up! Burn it up! Like Marvin had said: Burn, baby, burn! They were the most rhythmic, the fire people, they dug the fire cause it danced so tough, and these priests wished they could get as high and hot as their master the Flame.
Now we circled and dashed, zigzagged, tried to follow the hot music’s beat. We were digging, checking, observing, participating, it was a canvas, a palette no painter could imagine. A scale no musician could plumb. (Why do you think Trane and Albert sounded like that? They wanted the essence of what flailed alive on all sides of us now.)
The police were simply Devils to us, Beasts. We did not understand then the scientific exegesis on the state — though we needed to. Devils! Beasts! Crisscrossing in their deadly stupor of evil. The people were like dancers whirling around and through the flames. A motorcycle leaped through Sears’s window! with a blood, head down, stuck to it, booting and smoking up Elizabeth Avenue. Rifles strapped to his back. The last firearms sold legally in Newark disappeared in all directions out of Gene’s and the same Sears. Devil-cars spinning meanwhile as they shot at everything that moved, everything with any grace.
We moved through looking until the rage and madness’s dazzle had reached its peak. I thought it must be like what a war is, to be in the middle of it. Then we saw people getting hit. The Devils were spraying the dancers; they were enraged by their own poison. We saw a man fall near Springfield and Belmont and the police quickly swallowed him up. We had to move quickly and keep some distance and the correct angle between ourselves and them. At Belmont and Spruce we saw another brother hit, he fell into a sitting position, shot through the leg. Blood streamed down his pants and the case of shit he was carrying was smashed to the ground. His legs stuck out into the street, a car twisting suddenly around the corner would have mashed both of them off. We pulled up and dragged him into the van, then we sped off toward the city hospital.
Inside the hospital it was really a war zone. People were staggering in, people bandaged everywhere. Police brought some in. We brought the brother, Rabbit, carrying him like he was in a chair. Blood on the floors and walls, smeared on aprons, falling out of people in gasps. We got a doctor to look at him. Talked to Rabbit, who was trying to smile, he had been talking a mile a minute in the car. He seemed OK, and there were too many police in the joint so the three of us got back in the wind.
It was late at night now as we spun round and round in the streets. It looked like the crowds were somewhat thinner. We had picked up Tom Perry a little earlier and he was with us too, ducking and dodging through the streets that night. Another hour or so, another couple people picked up, and we went down to the Key Club for a drink. As wild as it seemed, there were people in there, a few, sipping and talking low about what was loose in the streets. We met Grachan Moncur, another hip Newark boy, we went past his crib and passed the peace pipe around, talked some more about what the future held for ourselves and our people.
It was very late now. Leaving Grachan’s we headed up the hill to where Tom was staying. He came over now regularly because his daughter Tania was staying with his mother. His wife, Maureen, had run off with one of Monk’s less exciting bass players. That had been the corniest thing that had happened to Tom since he had got old enough to bring some control into his life. And it finished him. He went from merely chippying as a working man who liked to get high regularly but not dependent to somebody chasin’ the bag for a dying. One of my dearest friends, Tom later moved to Harlem, where he died violently in some drug-related situation. One of the hippest and kindest and sweetest people I had the pleasure to know well and swing with. I loved to see Tom coming, his whole life was style. And in the end it was an uncool world that killed him. (I said to him once — we were talking about his slow plunge into the abyss — simply, “Why?” And his answer: “I know what you’re talking about. With what I know, you want to know why I don’t live according to religion.” Tom meant Zen and the Mahayana doctrine of the Wisdom Religion. That was our last conversation.)
But now, we were shaking hands. “It was a great night,” he was saying. “A really great night.” He stood on his mother’s stoop watching us pull off. The streets were quiet, eerie quiet, and it was pitch black and maybe one in the morning. We were moving slowly down South 7th Street — we had crossed Springfield and were approaching South Orange Avenue — when we saw the lights. Red lights like vicious eyes blinking. A riot of red lights blinking. Like Devils or pieces of hell. We were slowing down, and the lights seemed to get frantic, batting and winking, little silent splinters of scream. Then we could see und
er the streetlights piles of police cars, maybe five or six. For one instant we started to stop and back up or try to U-turn or even speed up on the sidewalk and go past. But the fantasy had stopped. All of us could sense that if we did anything we would die. We could see the shotguns and helmets. They had the street blocked and as we slowed pulling up to them we looked at each other and got ourselves ready.
A mob of police surrounded the van, two of them pulling open the front and back doors. They had their shotguns and handguns trained on us as they dragged us out the doors. Shorty, Barney, and I. I heard one guy say, “These are the bastards who’ve been shooting at us!”
Another shouted, “Where are the guns?”
Then another cop stepped forward, I think he was saying the same thing. What was really out is that this cop I recognized, we had gone to high school together! His name was Salvatore Mellillo. The classic Italian American face. “Hey, I know you,” I said, just as the barrel of his .38 smashed into my forehead, dropping me into half-consciousness and covering every part of me with blood. Now blows rained down on my head. One dude was beating me with the long nightstick. I was held and staggering. The blood felt hot in my face. I couldn’t see, I could only feel the wet hot blood covering my entire head and face and hands and clothes. They were beating me to death. I could feel the blows and the crazy pain but I was already removed from conscious life. I was being murdered and I knew it. I screamed, “Allahu Akbar. Al Homdulliah!” Spitting the rage and pain back out at them.
But then I could hear people shouting at them. Voices calling, “You bastards, stop it. Stop it. You’re killing them. Motherfucking bastards, stop it.” From the windows black people were shouting at the police. From a tall apartment building overlooking the scene. People screamed at them. They started throwing things.
I could hear the policemen shouting at each other. “Put ’em in the car. Put ’em in the car!” But once in the car, the torrent of blood was falling out of my head so fast that one of them started cursing. “Get him out of the fucking car. He’s bleeding all over the fucking car!” I never lost consciousness, but I lapsed into an even lower state of semiconsciousness. I felt myself being lifted into the paddy wagon.
The next thing I knew I was being dragged out of the wagon and up the back stairs of the police station. Just before we went through the door of the station, one of the police dragging me wheeled me around and tried to drive his knee into my nuts, but I slipped it or he just missed. “You faggot,” I was screaming. Shit, I knew I would make it now!
Inside the police station I was thrown on the floor in front of a high desk and then dragged to my feet. I could see in front of me the police director, Dominick Spina. He was smiling, his neck and head like one grizzly object of yellowish skin with grey crew-cut hair.
“Mr. Spina,” I called. “Hello, Mr. Spina.” I wanted to say more but my energy was failing me rapidly.
He turned and looked at me. “They got you,” he said with the forth-rightness of a well-advertised poison. He continued to smile.
“I’m alive,” I said. “You didn’t kill me.”
He nodded and the police roughed me away.
So I was locked up the first night of the Newark rebellion. In its entirety the rebellion went on for six days or so. Thousands of blacks were arrested and thousands more were injured. The official score was 21 blacks killed and 2 whites, a policeman and a fireman. But there were many more blacks killed, their bodies on roofs and in back alleys, spirited away and stuck in secret holes. It was no riot, it was a rebellion. The $10 million damage, mostly in the black community, was mainly to white businesses. Whole blocks of small white businesses disappeared, never to reappear again. The Kerner Commission stated that the only way to change the cities was to “enhance the ghetto,” which ain’t happening, or convince the blacks to leave. So the Newarks of the U.S. still exist like they did in 1967, trying to drive the blacks out to the hopeless exurbs, so that the whites can urban renew, having found out the ancient teaching of Ibn Arabi is true, that the cities are the chief repositories of culture and the highest thrust of human life. Plus, they are the banking, communications, and transportation centers. Or having read Mao they know that the socialist revolutions in the Western industrial countries will begin in the cities and then move out to the countryside.
And these rebellions, check with Kerner, were not the work of the lumpen, i.e., those crushed already by capitalism, the pimps and prostitutes, dope addicts, that “dangerous class.” The rebellions were the handiwork, in the main, of the disenfranchised young black workers, enraged at racism and exploitation.
I was taken to the Newark Street jail (Essex County Prison), a joint I used to see all the time in my youth. Either walking with my grandmother over to the election-machine warehouse on Wilsey Street where my grandfather was night watchman or playing baseball in the huge vacant lot across from the jail. I had always wondered what went on behind those walls and now I would find out.
I was put in solitary confinement by a Negro who had been an old friend of my father, “Jazz” Jones, who later testified in court that I had not been in solitary confinement. What was so strange about being in jail then is that we still knew that there was a rebellion going on outside. We could look out the windows even during the daytime and see its effects. One day, in the middle of the afternoon, we spotted a car coming around the corner and up New Street. The National Guard had been brought into the city and they were staked out in the vacant lot across from the jail. We could see them clearly from inside the prison. As the car came up the street the Guardsmen started firing at it. They didn’t know who was in the car or where it was going. I guess they could see it was black people inside. The firing brought the car to a halt and it was quickly surrounded. One door opened and a black man and woman stumbled out. The woman was wounded and was staggering and bleeding. A couple of the Guardsmen seized her and dashed her against a factory wall. The woman was slumping, obviously wounded from the gunfire. The man backed against the wall with his hands up.
All the inmates started screaming out the jail. There was no way the Guardsmen could hear us, but the cops inside the prison could and they walked around calling for order. I was screaming, “We need to do the same thing to some white bitch.” The cops ran up and down telling the inmates to shut up, but they kept screaming.
That night someone started shooting at the prison. They shot the lights out around the walls. The firing was coming from one of the factory roofs that extended down the block across the street from the jail. You could hear the pop, pop, pop of what sounded like a .22. Then the National Guardsmen opened up, blasting in the direction of the one .22 for about ten minutes. Then all was silence, except in the prison the guards turned up the canned music until it was almost screaming. It was Patti Page singing “We’ll Be Together Again.”
The Guardsmen were so frightened they had a tendency just to shoot and shoot without even bothering to aim or look squarely in the direction of what they were firing at. (Probably it was something in their own heads. The state policemen, on the other hand, were straight-out murderers. The job they did on a young boy they caught trying to liberate some liquor from Jo-Rae’s tavern on Bergen Street was one grim example. The boy was shot over thirty-five times. He had six or seven slugs through the top of his head. I got hold of the photo of his autopsy after I got out, printed it up, and circulated it. The police and sheriff’s department tried to catch us and lock us up for circulating the photo. The bloody killers were heroes!)
The same night of the shooting into the jail there was an escape plan that was supposed to be carried out. Word of this got to me and I agreed to go along with it, but I did not think we would make it. I wrote a piece in my notebook (published in Raise Race Rage Raze) which was meant to be a parting statement. It is full of Islamic and other metaphysical symbolism. It also speaks of my “wife,” Sylvia, who was not then my wife, and what she had taught me, even by then, of my own elitism and selfishness. It is a demand th
at black people evolve to a higher stage of life, an evolution that can be brought about only by fire!
When I was released on $25,000 bail, which was got by putting up some of my mother’s friends’ houses for collateral, I discovered that the case was a cause célèbre. First of all, $25,000 bail in those days was higher than most bails — it was a blatant ransom. The racist Judge Del Mauro, who was later removed from office for improprieties, gloated like a hate junkie full of his favorite drug when he called out the bail. As the Black Liberation movement went on, the bails got higher and higher, but the $25,000 was a landmark for that time, 1967.
Returning to the community it felt like a war had been waged and was still going on. The rebellions brought clarity to many blacks about who they were and where they were and who the U.S. government was. Tanks had rolled up and down these streets. Blacks had been stopped and searched like in Nazi movies. To get up on Stirling Street, where the Spirit House was, one had to show ID. And all the time I was in the slam the police and National Guard harassed my family, Sylvia and my baby son, Obalaji. One night they shot into the windows and Sylvia and the child had to get into a closet. Then the next night they broke into the theater and tossed things around and broke things up. They went down into the basement, where I had printing machines, and destroyed what they could, papers and materials. They started up the stairs, wandered around on the second floor, and started up to the third floor, where Sylvia and Obalaji lay crouched in the same closet. She was trying to keep the little baby quiet and he was quiet, remarkable for such a tiny baby. She had prepared some Afro-American napalm, lye and hot water, to throw on them if they came through the door, but fortunately they did not. Satisfied with the destruction they were able to commit, they left.