The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (23 page)

Miss Byrd taught us social science and whapped us cross the knots with Fichte and Kant and Hegel. She was OK, some of that obviously got through, without me even knowing it. She always looked like she had just woke up and that in itself was intriguing.

There was a Mr. McSweet (not his real name) who taught biology and who the mob (or prominent members of it, me, Bill, and Tony) almost drove crazy. Sometimes I feel sorry for this man even today. He was from Mississippi and a junior teacher not at Howard too long. And he had a Mississippi accent that we would wreak havoc with, especially in the kind of intolerant hippy elitism that I was being baked in there. I would stand up and repeat his name the way he pronounced it (Mac-Swe-at) and ask him some inane question. Like he pronounced intestines “in-test-eynes.” I would ask him, “Mr. Mac-Swe-at, what is an in-test-eyne??” Wide-eyed and cold as a brandished penknife. The class would crack up. He was so put upon by us that he told the three of us that we would most likely fail, that the highest mark we could get even if we got an A on the final would be a C. He was tired of being mocked. But we went into the office through an open window and stole the test, took it back to the dormitory, showed it to the mob members, then returned it. The next day in the test I finished so fast and looked up at McSweet, he knew something was up. He looked at me with real pain in his eyes. Goddam you, Jones, he was thinking. He said, “Mr. Jones, how is it you have finished so soon?”

“I studied, Mr. McSweet.” I softened the mockery because we had beat his ass to ribbons now. I got an A, the two others got B's in the final, so he gave us a C and couldn't flunk us after all. That's the real shit I was learning.

In the mob was Lattimer, who walked around like a sharp maestro, always carrying his trumpet on campus. He was one of my first real friends, a music major from Virginia. Quiet and a good sport, who threw jibes, though soft ones, with the rest of us. He became a dentist, dropping music in his last year.

Lee, the artist from East Orange. A yellow boy with a yellow pretty sister we never ceased to tease him about. Though sometimes he would pick up his omnipresent umbrella and chase us down the halls. Lee was super-cool, so cool it almost turned into its opposite. We were close. And it was he who called Tony “Hollywood,” to capture that neon sididdy attitude Tony always had, even amongst us. I mean, Tony was a snob even when dealing with us. And there were dudes among us who came from families that had much more money than Tony's. But with Tony it was a built-in attitude he'd probably been taught since his early days. He was from Douglass-Harrison, and his family lived in a tiny apartment where they had to fold down the “front room” (colored folks' living room) bed every evening so Tony would have a place to sleep. But still he was “Hollywood.” His nose in the air, loping across the campus with a bowlegged strut, a cold-blooded elitist. So much so we openly called him on it. But Tony never changed or even explained, that was the way he was and we took it or took it. We talked about him, but took it, nevertheless.

Stone from Chi, who carried scotch in his big briefcase. His family owned shrimp stores on Chicago's South Side, and he was always superclean even if he looked like he was about to come apart. Cashmere, desert boots, expensive tweed coats. But an open bad-mouthed two-fisted drinking dude. You just couldn't rely on Stone if you wanted something serious carried out. We lived together in an apartment in the city in our junior year and I had to speed home once a week after a late philosophy class to catch him before he spent up the allotment his parents sent him. He was told to buy food but he would buy alcohol. That's what he called it, “alcohol.” “You boys want any alcohol?” and he'd go in his briefcase. When you got to the spot the icebox would be loaded with alcohol. But all there'd be to eat would be hot dogs and those waffles you put in the toaster. And we didn't even have a goddam toaster.

Kurt, also from Chi, short and intense, another pre-law. He and Stone always argued, because they were childhood friends. Kurt I stayed with later when I was in Ilinois in the service. When I visited Chi on the weekends, I would crib at Kurt's place. He was a good friend, reliable, hot-headed (and I liked that). He took care of his school business but it was
never a problem that caused him not to be able to hang out. His father was a lawyer too.

That was most of them. Me, Bill, Tony, Shorty, and Stone roomed together one year and that was wild and focused our lives together, perhaps more tightly for a time than the others, but these guys were our dormitory crew.

Some of us were in pre-law or government. Some in pre-med, pre-dent, some were taking just general courses, trying to figure out what kind of degree. I was taking, as I said, pre-med, a chemistry major. But I didn't care nothing at all about that. So school was not the worst of my worries on the real side, although it clearly should have been.

It was a brown mob — I guess — really. That was still the stance from which I tried to understand and be in motion in America. (To the extent I understood that.) But look! C.D.-petty bourgeois/father a lawyer — yellowish. But Donny was a little smarter than that. He fell for certain doofdum but he could make fun of it, look at the whole of that, even his father's little country squire bullshit (in really nowheresville) as essentially comic.

Anyway, Donny was brown and black, from Philly's urban twist. And Woolright, black dude, scholarship-cunning to try to deal with America, USA! Bill, more yellow than brown, and Tony the same. This ain't got to deal with skin color, exclusively — Tony was darker than me, skinwise!

Lee, straight yellow (on the rambunctious side), his brown quality — and so there's a blue side to that.

Shorty, the criminal as middle class. If you mix black and yellow what do you get?

Our internal villain, Rip, was a penniless yellow. The worst kind. All grimace and illogic with the merest civil servant's economic base upon which to base his wild antisocial acts and ideas.

Kurt and Stone, the Chi connection, the middle middle and even the pitiful small capitalist himself. Hey, if we had called Stone an “upper-class Negro,” he woulda grinned and said, “Look, Leee-Roy, kiss my ass!”

We were not inside the rumble of crazy Negro yellow Crazy. The stiff middle-class lie. We were touched, some bashed-smashed-ruined by it, but in the mob, our collective sense stared that shit down and laughed at it.

Johnny Jackson and Ned Smythe, two footballers who ran in on us noondays with my roommate, were brown kids from D.C. “D.C. boys” we called them, though that had real meaning only with the big hat wearer of S.W. And maybe Johnny was connected blacker too and came out on a
scholarship tip. Though HU was playing “Ivy” and pretended not to give athletic scholarships. But they did, some kinda way.

(I had a track coach named Hart at Howard, reminds me now of Malcolm, those glasses and penetrating stare — ironic smile. He'd say, “Jones, I don't know if you really want to be an athlete. You don't want to work hard enough.”)

We even had connections with gorillas like Tippy Whittington the all-star fullback who rumor said had been at Howard ten years. He'd come in the room from time to time with his stiff-necked growling pronouncements. The other footballers joked about him and imitated his noncommunicative speech.

But it was a brown mob. Connected to reality, to black life, and the blues. You see, Howard itself was a blinding yellow. So eye-melting some out people might say “white” and try to mash it on the Capstone. (That's what some of them dead yellow MF's had thought of to call it, “The Capstone of Negro Education.” Boy, we mocked the shit out of that.) It reeked of it, that stiffness and artificiality, that petty bourgeois Negro mentality! And the top-upper Negroes is in on that, too.

We could define ourselves by where we'd come from. The teeming black cities. A whole other thing the “urban” shit defined.

So in a sense we stalked the campus as city boys connected to direct agonies of the black streets. (Though when we spun the combinations to the doors of our houses and went in off those streets, we were somewhere else.)

The geographic hookup was a social hookup. The jibes we used to throw at “South” and “country.” Even on big money, big shoe, big hat Texas friends, we talked about funny for coming from outside the urban thing. Though that wasn't always altogether true.

All black schools have more peasants' and workers' children in them, though except for the very small schools, it is the yellow and brown sectors of the petty bourgeoisie that constitute their majority.

We had a sense of ourselves as being something other than the mainstream HU student, too. Even with the couple a buzzards we had in our group. The nuts were nuts because of their
pretension
. Not money. The really rich dudes did not hang with us nor we with them. Though Stone was the black bourgeoisie, in brown smoked glasses wobbling across campus with his bag of tipsy-getter. But Stone was cool. His problem (ain't it?) is that he wanted to spend all his little bitta money on the wrong shit! Shit, Stone, we need somethin' to eat! Not just no “alcohol.”

We were kind of like outlaws in a way. Neither school nor mainstream HU yellow-ass social functions were our real thing. (Though most of the dudes hung with us did get out in the normal way without “punchin' out” like your reporter!) Our real thing was hanging out, bullshittin' — talking bad to each other and about everything else.

“Shit, this funny-lookin C.D. and his homeboy Wilsey.” (Woolright talking typically one afternoon.) “Y'all is so funny lookin', it's a wonder they even let you on this campus. Funny lookin' dudes.”

“Woolright say your mama funny lookin' too.” (Shorty agitatin'.)

“Woolright, how you gonna call somebody funny lookin'?” (C.D. countering.) He laughs loud so everyone will get his point.

Woolright goes over and pinches C.D.'s big schnozzola. “Look at this big schnozzola. Colored people don't have big schnozzolas like that, C.D. Who gave you this Jimmy Durante smellin' machine?” (Woolright cappin' — we howlin'.)

Donny: Who got the wine?

Me: You can't drink no wine!

Donny: Woolright can. I'm his manager.

All: A wine drinkin' contest. Get the wine. Get the wine!

And so to work. There were bid-whist freaks (some for poker, some bridge, but mostly freaks for real). Day and night and weekends and holidays. Chess dudes we thought of as visitors. But we didn't play none of that shit heavy. A poker and blackjack game occasionally. But even that shit was too much effort. You had to pretend to be serious to play. And the dudes that was serious about bid-whist we talked bad about. A fuckin' bid-whist freak!

We wasn't in no mock-serious, artificial, school-time shit nor the unofficial official extracurricular stiff shit of the yellow peril. At first I did go to a few dances. You had to get “tight in the collar” for real — black tie. Some dudes wore white tie, tails, to the shit. Various frats and sororities giving their stiff funny shit. Naming various “queens” and super-Negroes to reign over that banana republic.

But the glamour of that shit ran out for me pretty quick, plus the other problems I had — like who was I gonna take, and whatnot. (A Jack Scott phrase — the same guy who gave us “It's me saying,” etc.)

All of that was part of the fraternity-sorority hype in which we were all involved — at one degree of brainwash or another. Greeks! We wanted to be Greeks! Alpha, Kappa, Omega-AKA-Delta, and the rest.

Our mob were not real frat types (except for Tony and Rip) but some of us kinda drifted into one or another, we even took some sides around the
shit. But it was never a passion for any of us. Most of the frat dudes were assholes as far as we were concerned. All that rah-rah shit. The Alpha sentiment, in the main, touched our group. That's because there were bunches of Alphas from Jersey on campus. And they had a considerable influence.

I tried out for the shit the first part of my junior year and flubbed. For one thing, so-called big brothers banging on our doors or the door to 13 Rue were met with a variety of responses, mostly negative. They'd be coming in to get some note and try to order new pledges around. In Alpha, the new pledges were called Sphinxes. And me, Bill, Tony, Allan Shorter (Wayne's brother) because we were older had pledged and were officially Sphinxes. The name had to do with some of their secret ass rituals and being inducted, which was characterized as “crossing the burning sands”!

A dude named Skeffton came into Rue one night. After we open the door, about six of us inside, we see this reject-lookin' motherfucker. He was a third-string defensive lineman on the football team, even though one of his arms was withered.

Skeffton snorts, my roommate wasn't there was the first answer he got. He snorts again, looking sterile, inamicable, around at our good-for-nothing faces. Like I said, most of us didn't play on any of the teams (though I was on the track and cross-country teams), wasn't in this dude's accepted social whirl — that being the aroma of cheese back behind the mousetrap — so he feels, what with him being a “big brother,” not vaguely but distinctly superior. So he says, to nobody in particular, but actually to me because I was the only Sphinx in the room, “I need something from the D.C. Donut Shoppe.” D.C. Donut Shoppe was all the way downtown around them government buildings and shit. All them dudes in the room, their eyes light up like somebody flipped a switch and they all peepin' over at me.

I told him I had a sore foot or sore knee or had a stomach hurtin' or something, but I wasn't goin' to the D.C. Donut Shoppe. But these dudes in the room couldn't let well enough alone, they start agitatin'. Like, Woolright with his shit, “Hey, man,” to the lame “Ain't this little cat over here supposed to be your little brother, a pledge and stuff?” Dimwitted Skeffton is getting more heated up. C.D. throws in some stuff. Donny comes in with some stuff. Skeffton still rising.