The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (14 page)

Yet within it there was the brown and the black. The black folks would scream and fall out. The brown would fan themselves and fall out from time to time, but not regular like the black, who would “get happy” at the drop of a note or a word.

The preacher in that church (I mean the
minister
, only the black got preachers, the yellow got ministers and the browns be strung out as usual somewhere twixt the two, over here with it, over there without). The minister, Rev. H., was white as snow. His hair was white as snow. Rev. H. was whiter (in complexion) than white folks ever thought about being. And, to me, if he wasn't exactly what God would look like, from my training, then I couldn't picture what God would look like. God had to look exactly like Rev. H. Tall, slender, solemn, cold blue eyes (or green?), and white as air. Or snow.

But dig, the struggle in that church was classic too. Class and Classic and Class-sick struggle. The browns vs. the yellows and the blacks with the browns vs. the yellows. Under the huge tarpaulin of the white. (Amen!) Like it would be very clear most times around the music. The yellow wanted Handel and Schumann and Lieder with some switching flit with a dull crokinole to conduct while trying to point his hiney at some protein projectile.

Easter and Xmas, Jim, you was took down and off. HALLELUIA it was spelled in gold leaf on the hymnal with white cherubim straight from heaven. The stark raving corny nongrandeur of those stiff shows would make great films for our archive of torture and cultural aggression. You
thought you was being moved (those chills through you) but that was rigor mortis on your ass with hobnailed boots.

And the black and the brown who they rescued from yellow death as plastic persons would be agitating for some heat, some feeling and description of themselves, not going to white heaven so much as crossing that Jordan and escaping finally from the horrible pain. They wanted the old warm hymns, the sorrow songs, and gospel, some modern stuff. Me grandma and Sarah Vaughan's mother was part of that cadre — they sang in the group called the William P. Sims Gospel Chorus, whose obvious aim was to bring some life and some warmth, some word of black Jesus and black God and black heaven translated to mean some good that included them, some life after death in which they would be much more than silent servants on the fringe of reality.

So struggle would be going down in there. (Known to me only recently as class struggle.) But I did perceive it as struggle. I knew, for instance, that my sweet grandmother for whom I would have done anything and the actually yellow-colored Mrs. B. did not like each other. My grandmother as head of the Ladies Aid with her faint smile and glasses going to sleep in the “front room” of our house making believe she was watching television.

Mrs. B. was head of the Flower Committee. The symbolism was clear — some flowers or some aid. They had different ways (and different things) they wanted to worship. And it was manifest all over if you would pick up the words and looks. Ultimately, I guess, that struggle was really between those who wanted to eliminate a “black church” and those who wanted Xtian worship to be a form of African American culture. Simple now? (I remember throwing out, even before writing
Blues People
, how you could tell much about black people by what church they went to. And under investigation the concreteness and correctness of that staggered me.) The “purest” African Xtian church in the U.S. is the sanctified — with drums, horns, tambourines, dance, and song. The poorest too — in storefronts, little halls off alleyways, over delicatessens. I'd like to list all the black churches in Newark one day — their names are so weird — take pictures of some — living mythology, dreams housed in despair. The big ol' churches, stone and steel and huge stained glass, are more European. White. More bourgeois. Less emotional. A church based on money and spurious rationalism. Like Pascal's cold pensées — “Hey, we better believe in god, along with Money. First: Suppose there is a god after all, we'll really be up shit's creek!” But the passion of the black church, which even some white peasants go to in the black belt South, is very different!

My mother dropped it several times how Nana and Mrs. B. didn't get on. I figured it was because Mrs. B. was out of her mind. Nana liked most people. I could not penetrate to the actuality of their dispute, but my perception confirmed that the little Minnie Mouse-looking Mrs. B., who put layers of pink and white powder on her pale pink face and “put on airs” as even my mother pointed out, was frantic with corniness.

The S's were hooked up with Mrs. B. The S. clan's mama B.S. wore pince nez, yeh yeh yeh whew! Really. I didn't know what the fuck they were. A couple dizzy bitches in Bethany wore them. Yes. White bourgeois apes in yellow. It was a weird church.

And just as in any class struggle, much undermining and jockeying for positions and rear actions and frontal assaults went on. For one thing, Mrs. B. was always trying to get note. She was the senior yellow lady rep, Mrs. S. her junior minister. Invariably, they'd appear, after the services when announcements were made, to rah rah for the Flower Committee and get people to wave their fans back and forth (applause wasn't dignified).

My grandmother made announcements most times to mention the next regular meeting of the Ladies Aid. She was an usherette too, on special church occasions and she wore those white church uniforms with white shoes.

One reason the Flower Committee could get over is that one member of the family, F., worked for a florist. Later he became an apprentice undertaker for Beckett's. F. was the loudest (the most human, actually) of the clan — a brown Mickey Rooney tied by everything to yellow life.

But flowers, flowers. Look — hey — we've arranged you see, for flowers flowers.

Snide remarks, grimaced conversations. My mother would drop it about “Mrs. Banks and them.” My grandmother never said anything. She just met with the Ladies Aid and kept aiding, doing her work.

B., the junior partner in the yellow flower line, had other illustrious posts in the church. Plus her husband was a supervisor with the P.O. while my father still drove a truck. The son, W., was a prototype, neat haircut and clothes and Vaselined yellow kid. He was as famous at church picnics as Andrew Young. Actually, if there was any stereotype of yellow, as kid, it was W. Bland, glasses, grinning, goofy, “sissified.” The kind of thing your mother would beat you in the head with. A yellow brownjack to pop you with. “W. got W. did” and on and on, a razz for your disconnection from her program of upward and forward to where? The yellowest part of brown? (A question?)

But the real life of where we lived what I perceived as strongest was not any of that but
black
. That was the life I was tied to — even “shot from guns,” like famous (brown) toasted cereal, the connection I made was with black life.

So that the yellow church was dry and boring at one side — yellow and artificial at another. And even if I'd wanted to (which I never did) there was no way you could bring no yellow shit in the streets or walk with that in no playground without gettin' laughed at minimally, chased if you pushed it and beat the hell out of if you blew altogether.

No matter the browns and the yellows could collect minusculely — in the streets of our lives, black life shaped us. We were judged by it and defined (to ourselves by ourselves) by it.

W. was a “sissy-punk” where I was most comfortable. That East Orange shit was another world. You saw its products on Sundays. One dude, H., a yellow comedian with glasses, called me “Gloom” every Sunday in honor of my seriousness (?) and the black life he peeped had grown me a blue soul.

At some point I envied yellow its neat haircuts (wavy) and new moccasins. Its cars and exotic addresses. The pretty little girls that grinned at you accidentally or never. I might fantasize about these in some way (depending upon the chronological maturity of my genitals) but that never seemed real.

Except down South there was a girl who lived next door to my folks with a high hill-like lawn at the top of which was her red and white house and a lawn chair you could swing in. The group of us, my two cousins, my sister and I, and her, S.J., would swing there and scramble across and up that high hill lawn. That was a terrible knife in my young heart that she should be forever and always out of my reach. It was so pitiful because I never told her how I felt. It was too ridiculous. She was too distant, haughty, light-skinned gorgeous. With a doctor father. I could not even pretend to mention my passion. But sometimes if strange waves pushed through me, a physical dazzle to my head turned awry staring past a blurred bird at his wind, I'd think, “These are my S.J. moments,” and sigh.

Another girl, in Newark, I went to see down on Waverly Avenue. Another light-skinned — off to the side — kind of pretty girl. Was so proper and quiet and grinned little quiet jokes. I'd go to see her in my late high school days. She had a very old light father who I never talked to, only saw a few times before he passed. Her mother was young, in her thirties, and tall dark brown and lovely. She always seemed, I guess in contrast to her husband,
athletic and vigorous, like she was on her way to a dance or tennis match. Her stepdaughter had much of her father in her, quiet and old even as a teenager. And I made her house a pilgrimage of sorts, consciously to sit, clean and smiling and pressing my suit, which was no suit at all. It was just that I felt good sitting there nice and all like a good boy but I never took it seriously though I might have thought I did. But I never even thought that. She was too quiet and yellow. I could not have told anybody she was my girlfriend. Even when I was fairly sure that I was the only one seeing her. And certain people did think our thing together was somewhat serious. Still I never thought she thought it was other than a mild surface pastime. I was too brown. Too gross. Too bounded by malevolent experience. Too grimy. My hands were dirty (another little brown chubby girl said). I could never talk to her about some things, that wiggled and screamed and bluesed my head up. I could never tell her my feelings, even about her. Which were dry enough for a “big-time” marriage with pictures in the Afro. “Dr. Jones, I presume,” neither bone nor contention. But it was all like something I saw walk past. Pretty girl. Quiet little yellow girl. Sitting there across from me in her quiet father's home. Her mother and she, she told me always, were like sisters. And her mother was sleek and brown and it was she — sad confession — who really turned me on, on the real side. (Is this Oedipal and shit?) So did I think — my other sister? No, not flat-out like that. But something like that, cool and quiet and on your best behavior — a quiet almost like in a photograph or five-and-ten repro. I was gone from that no matter what postures I made, I was gone from that, just walking.

But none of this can be totally separated from Music. Because that was the great definer and link, the extension chord of blackness in me. And so everything (else) had a music to it. A shimmer of sound you heard as you saw it, or you saw as you heard it. The blues hugged me close to the streets and the people. That was what we breathed and Saturdays was when we breathed (full out).

But the brown yellow white tip was a constant too, by contrast, so you knew the real did exist more totally and in you more completely as the informant, creator, and disperser of mystery. Barringer and McKinley were certainly white — and the newspaper — and voices on the radio. Though I transformed the radio in my transmutating mind so it told brown tales somehow. (Yet you understand the term brainwash and must acknowledge certain brain damage. Yet I claim the transduction of certain impulses, so
that the output was not just white noise, but a heroic grimace when I smile that contains absolute desire for the destruction of evil.)

My terror was white, and racists (who I knew since the Elephant House, and Augie's slaps and Birmingham's rolling eyes, etc., and tales my grandmother told. And when I was thirteen I read
Black Boy
, the alternate selection of Book-of-the-Month Club, and I feared for R.W.'s life and wondered how he dared say such things and still walk around. Yeh, I knew in my young life about “crackers” as my grandfather called them) yes, they were white, and scrunched up dudes and ugly ladies arguing with my mother in buses and Fanny Farmer candy stores. They were most assuredly white. And the unknown monsters my grandmother told me had cut off a young boy's “privates” near Dothan, stuck 'em in his mouth, then gathered the young black girls to see, so a lesson would be taught. They were definitely white. And the killers of Emmett Till, whose ruptured swollen horrible body I saw in
Jet
, swallowing hard and being actually afraid. No, they were very very white. But mostly it was the outside limits of our world. In the distance, and cold, like the end of the world, beyond which you fell off (?). Who knew?

There were teachers, interesting that they were all rec teachers, who were white and who were real enough to talk to. They would even throw me out of the playground for “cursing.” Mr. F., Mr. R. were the main dudes. I had a bad mouth, Jim, a bad mouth. Withering in its obscene intensity. But the white was merely distance or, close up, terror. And even the Italian dudes that I knew when I was young were somewhat removed and that was the definition.

The yellow was always a combatant. Distant (somehow) colored people, whom you did not know well. Made up shit, painted up shit. Stiffness — corniness. Sissified, dull shit. Stuff in church. The Y where they made you sing. Lessons. Picnics your mama carried you off to when there was real baseball games to be played — shit to be explored. The Secret Seven to be hung around with. Or, later, just the blues streets to be walked and the bigassed black girls to be stared at from within the brown recesses.

The yellow was a promise you could never keep. A challenge you did not want. A frustrating distant thing some mama threw up in your face that you did not care about but just did not want to be compared with. The so 'n' so's or little So 'n' So or Master So 'n' So, against which your mama would rank you and you knew you could never measure up. (I could make the sound of a madman at this point ahhhhhddgggggggggggg to show my frustration!)