The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  And so the trip through metaphysical nationalism, the breakup of that camp. The conflicts with madmen and murderers, the most recent motion to Marxism. All were part of a joint journey which, meanwhile and at the same time, was most times hidden from the world, because the owners of it prefer it that way. Amina and I were raising a family, strong, beautiful, brilliant children who will be a match for all this shit, mark my words. At the same time their parents wrestled with a more primitive world.

  So in comparing and measuring, in summing up, all the roads I’ve traveled have been the preparation, as hopefully, this present period is more preparation. And in conversation many nights and afternoons or mornings, Amina and I run through the many changes and preparations we’ve been through, even while dealing with the scabs and scarecrows, the monsters and senseless things of the present, we recall all that past we’ve been through, our disguises and apprenticeships. How we loved movies and music and black people. And how, even as the Marxists we both are, listening intently to our children’s growing songs and pains, we are relieved that we grew up to be even this close to ourselves. Unconscious, whited out, blacked out, out in space, African clothes world, corridor of uneventful aftermath supposed to take you out, after you miss the slam dunk which would have ended the game, as Champion. (And I do know that Mao said that five hundred years from now, most of what we say will seem like children’s singing!) But when you can look up and see some sophisticated black woman, beautiful even in her forties, brown skin, close curly hair, leg crossed perhaps, sipping something, in discussion with you or someone, anyone, about the world, and about how that world needs changing, yes it does, be it a jazz solo or a figure of dance or the workers climbing up the back of the world to reconstruct it all so the future will indeed be the future. You know then your path has not been just bullshit. Just because you had to read every book on the New York Times Book Review best-seller list, you didn’t know any better. Just because you had to be a white intellectual then a black nationalist even though you always had the hole card on that class struggle, and its yellow brown and blue black contrasts that spell out a world in this time and this place. And even though you left New York, runned away, and built a paper house of nigger mediocre domestic Mobutus as the postdoctoral study for the black masses, and yourself—the fact of Amina is herself confirmation that I have not been all the way crazy, not all the way full of shit. The fact of my lovely brown wife who is tuned in as she is herself to what seems important to both of us, and a tall boy with drumsticks and quoting Dr. J.’s ballet, and a big-eyed one wants to be a leader as he plays trumpet and reads the book of practical cats, and a tiny teeny little girl thing with her cat Sojourner Mooty-Toot who wants to play the violin and hates nasty stuff, or the round-headed big-eyed boy who rises at seven each morning to go through his papers and stare out the window or sing little songs hoping to wake everybody else up, or the little bad dude from outer space, the professional pest, who knows already he wants to be a painter and who walked through the Metropolitan Museum grading them dudes, all this, and our big red house, and our collective strength and beauty and our collective intelligence and the fact, dig this, that we are still very young!!!! That lets me know that I wasn’t all the way crazy, not just bullshit mad. And even when they attack me, these agents of slowness and primitivism. Even while they try to hide pictures of me smiling or word that I am alive and well and still not crazy or pessimistic. Or hide the reality of my marriage or the identity of my wife and still publish books by catatonics trying to prove the world of catatonia is the only real world, and you was a fool to leave it, big boy. I can get happy, in spite of the frustration and racism, and attempts to kill us all. Even while they try to make it seem I am a wife beater and madman and stopped writing or stopped breathing, I can get happy anyway, like my laughter is bullets and bombs, my joy a poison gas to the haters of democracy, because despite all that, I have already survived, living not completely quietly, in fact still full of animation and almost endless energy. Still very much on the case of the place trying to turn it around and unwilling to accept no for an answer. Then that is the sharp laughter in me you hear. That runs through all of this telling despite the bad situations and backups, the stupid contexts I looked up to find myself in. The misunderstanding and mistakes. That is what you feel and hear. That I am still alive and in the company of the people I love most in the world.

  So if you see us anytime, Amina and me, somewhere, myself like I look and this tall beautiful woman, maybe we are in the lobby of a theater looking at each other and laughing about something. It might just be something in the past we are laughing at, some fool or narrow escape, some sudden revelation of beauty. Understand, we are in tune with the majority, of all languages and nationalities, no matter we might look like Nick and Nora Charles in brown to some or Zora Neale and Langston to others or like a brown boy and brown girl, well dressed and sophisticated, given to irony and sudden passion, lovers of poetry and music. Make no mistake, we are serious about our lives and about our destiny, and the lives of our people and indeed of the majority of people. I guess this is what makes us dangerous, we will not die around some bullshit tip. We will not be taken out easily. In fact, we are still growing, getting stronger and more knowledgeable, and just when you get used to that, hesitate a moment and you will see a crowd of little ones surround us. That’s right, they are listening for instructions, some of which they will follow, some of which they won’t. They are worse than we are. And we think we can win!

  Consider the rightness and strength of that, the easy effortless beauty. We are alive! Alive and conscious and in love! It has taken some years to reach that state of clarity and feeling. And this is but partial evidence.