The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (3 page)

But also, now that the socialist mode of organization had been brought to CAP, some of her erstwhile closest comrades felt that the context was what they needed to struggle openly (more or less) with her for leadership. One line that crept up from the swamp was that just because a woman was married to the chairman of a local CAP branch she should not automatically be made chairwoman of that local women's division. Purportedly, this line had arisen about local CAPs, but Amina perceived that this was really aimed at her, though she was intellectually and ideologically qualified for leadership if she had never met me. But the introduction of the socialist line had broken down all the old leadership structure of CAP, and before it was over there were even physical blows struck.

Her resignation was very public, and she even got up in public forums to let people know that she didn't agree with me, that she was seeking unity with the true Bolshevik wing of the movement. The fact that later it would be proven, at least to me, that these people were incorrect and went on to prove themselves not even long-lived as Marxists, gave me some satisfaction, but it did not then. All I knew is that I had been betrayed. How could I be less capable theoretically than these people? How could she just throw our marriage out the window (my own chauvinistic, opportunistic b.s.) in exchange for “political correctness” that wasn't even correct? How could
she dismiss and belittle my work and study for some two-bit soi-disant “Bolsheviks” who turned out not even to be that?

There was in this a deeper contradiction than either of us understood. For me, I felt I was being belittled in the sense that I had spent my adult life in intellectual pursuits, and for the last decade in clearly political struggle, albeit in a mainly literary and arts context. And now it was being dismissed by someone who claimed to love me.

Whatever someone might think, I knew I was no fool. I knew I could finally grasp the depth of Marxist theory and I could not believe that Amina would feel that there were other forces out there who would have a superior understanding of “the science” or anything else.

How could this be true? Didn't she know that however incorrect I was in whatever juncture of this travail that ultimately I would find the clarity and correct political direction? How could our relationship be dismantled by some political disagreement? No matter how much we might differ, I thought that if we worked together, as husband and wife and as committed revolutionaries, we would come up with the correct political focus, together. But also, I could not understand how our being together could not be the result of a single underlying political unity of focus and commitment; I guess, like the bourgeoisie who think democracy is a form of competition.

But Amina's disconnection with the organization I took as a dismissal of me as relevant to the revolutionary struggle itself. How could you be married to somebody whose ideas you did not even respect? As well, cries were thrown at us that CAP had built a cult of personality around us and that this cult had negated whatever political errors I made for the sake of some metaphysical elevation of “Imamu.” And even though many of the features that seemed to do this — buttons with my picture, organizational celebrations of my birthday—had been advanced by Amina, she now felt that Marxist organization demanded the vocalizing of this anti-cult of personality line, which I felt was just an attempt to disrupt the organization and alienate the advocates from leadership.

The male chauvinist public image of CAP was another alienating factor. Many of the CAP women felt that unless they now were outspoken in their rejection of such atavistic male domination, in the new context of our public embrace of Marxism, they would be made ridiculous and pitiful, ignorant figures. Amina felt this. Always sensitive to what she measured as the opinions of the advanced, she felt doubly compromised by our cultural nationalist past.

In addition, the women's division was exactly that. Amina had taken the cultural nationalist division of men and women and created a women's group that in many ways always resisted the male chauvinist and opportunist aspects of the CAP leadership, including Karenga.

There was always a spray of negatives about me, surrounding us. As I said, I had never been forgiven by the Village denizens and their replicas internationally. Many of them, as they drifted into more contact with us after the partial inaccessibility the cultural nationalist organization had given us, now had more access to all of us. So that the many contradictions and oppositions that these people and I had had were now transformed into background stories that “Newark people” didn't know. Their continuing disagreements were given as simple statements of fact. And the resentment at my sudden swoop into hyper-Blackness and disappearance into Harlem and Newark would be represented as measures of my character by “old friends.”

My characterization as “wrong” and “always alienated from the people” and a “Johnny-come-lately” in the Black thing were represented as tales of insiders trying to inform the uninformed about my pre-Black days, but they were also attempts to legitimize their opposition or refusal to participate in the struggle in the mode I had chosen.

The predictable co-optation of the political movement I had helped give leadership to, by the petty bourgeois Negro politicians, or the resurgence of the Beat movement, which now used me to give it some connection to the Black Arts Movement, could be part of the explanation of why I had acted the way I had, and why I had thought the things I did, and why eventually I would be reabsorbed by the totally backward and betray all those who trusted me.

My first wife was one spearhead of continuous rancor and bullshit, both privately and publicly. Her strategy for harassment and undermining was that she would ingratiate herself with my parents (and many of the people I had disconnected from) and thus create a hookup to undermine and disrupt my public life, my marriage, and alienate my parents.

I knew this from the beginning and knew, as well, that the deviousness of the petty oppressor is as damaging, in a specific context, as the Bigs'. For one thing, she created an entire revisionist version of our life together for herself so she could fill our children's heads and everyone else's within wordshot with lies and self-legitimizing martyr stories. She created a lying picture of herself as a dedicated political activist who could not understand why I had left in the first place since she was always high up in the
movement. She said, as well, that she was a writer, but she had sacrificed her writing, even hidden it from me, because of the crushing weight of my male chauvinism and her selfless desire to forward my career.

In this endeavor of lie mongering, she has been helped by other empty-headed cryptoracists, whose statements printed or reported did have the positive aspect of eliminating the “crypto” from their description, and by the big superstructure of bourgeois untruth itself, particularly the literary sector. The woman herself published a book twenty-five years later explaining how she got to be my wife! Still using my last name as hers, since she never really liked her last name in the first place.

So for all the years since that organization's emphatic marking of my own life's changes, the shadow, the “Other,” the dead past, has not been dead at all, but an animated agent of straight-out lies and harassment, from the shabby little autobiography full of plain untruths and opportunistic misdirection running into the willful distortions of White America that I really ceased to exist once I left the White folks! Like all opportunists, she now claims a “feminism” nowhere visible during our connection. But the open, racist dismissal of what I went on to do, with a sickening glorification of her cottage-industry martyrdom and self-effacing support of me, at least let more discerning people check her out in a way that explained the very shallow yet pompous nature of that Village life from another angle, as well as highlighting the sick and hardly subliminal national chauvinism of those masquerading as radicals and liberals. The underlying motif of all the exes in my life, even those of blood, and the various sycophants, revenge-filled guilty bystanders, racists, charming ignoramuses and weak liberals who waved, and will always wave, bye-bye at any real human upsurge, is that they have given a good portion of their energy and consciousness to being the subjective yet part of the objective (No for every Yes), the fake knowers like witches and devils, spreading delusion that passes as real life. Living human propaganda that serves as identity as part of the system's loyal opposition.

White America has been only too glad to help in this endeavor, because once I became a Marxist, they were not interested in publishing my opinion “enty way.” The struggles and transformations during this Marxist phase of my life were not documented at all. I had more and more problems getting published, while everyone associated with the “Other” was ubiquitous—both the Blacks who resisted Baraka's “Black Fascism” and refused to leave the Village, and the onetime radicals who more and more could be projected as they grew openly less radical. An entire revisionist account
of those times and their meaning grew up around us, which in bitter irony was actually believed by many of the people it was intended to hurt. And so it has hurt them even worse.

The fact that now I could not get published as easily, that the infrastructure of militant resistance I had built had dissipated and not only the old Village Black and White intellectuals could testify to my incorrectness, in bold print, but the political types around us, whether nationalists or on the Left, also “Amen!”-ed the same opinion about my “hopeless, self-deluded irrelevance,” left me, for a time, disoriented to a degree.

As CAP disintegrated I accepted a job at Yale as visiting professor. And using the subjective and chauvinist feeling that I had been betrayed and isolated, I took up with a wholly reactionary woman in the program I was teaching and had an affair, justifying it with my outrage at being “politically rejected” since I would say to myself that Amina must not care about our marriage any more if she is willing to publicly denounce me as some kind of political swindler and charlatan. But, alas, wasn't that proof?

When the first printing of this book appeared she was furious that I seemed to pay more attention to the Village and first wife than our lives or the lives of the people with whom I had worked and lived since. She began to say after a while that I had wasted her life by pretending to be a revolutionary and that the cultural nationalist CAP had finally not done much but empower the petty bourgeoisie. Plus, people, “old friends of mine,” had told her how sick I was in the first place. If she had only listened, she would lament.

Amina also feels this autobiography hides my abuse and betrayal of her and seems to paint the White woman, first wife, as a martyr while implying, when I speak of her at all, that Amina's life with me has been glorious fun and games — that I have hidden the many affairs I have been accused of and the cruel male chauvinism and covering of her life and work, which have locked her in a jail of nonrecognition by the world.

One clear expression of our embrace of Marxism has been Amina's emphatic identification with the working class, since that is her own class origin and her feeling that this in itself is reason to believe that she is correct about things I could not possibly understand. Though I have tried to convince her that twenty-nine years of marriage to a petty bourgeois intellectual means that the objective social context is petty bourgeois, and that working class now only refers to her class origins. But she still rejects that. And the fact of my own pitiful petty bourgeois origins, that class's social and cultural mores, the Howard University socialization, and most
importantly, my socialization in the White-dominated Village and marriage to a White woman, means that as a working-class woman there will always be obvious contradictions between us.

So her sharpened opposition to male chauvinism, with a yeast of guilt at having been publicly “taken in,” I feel — at having been in a cultural nationalist organization that preached the subjugation of women — has seen her move to a kind of social feminist position (I feel), where feminism has replaced Black nationalism, except that manifests itself now as an intense mistrust of petty bourgeois women, most of whom are White. (We are probably struggling about this right now!)

She also feels that she must take positions as publicly as possible in contradiction to mine since the petty bourgeois origin, White Village socialization (the Beat thing), the White-woman marriage, her longtime belief that my family (these “classic petty bourgeois Negroes”) is not only hostile to her but consciously undermining her and our marriage, plus the celebration of my first wife by the media and the children of that first marriage (and by me, she insists) as a conscious harassment of her, make her stance, to her, as necessary as it is consistent.

She also feels that I have always neglected her and our children, and that she cannot be petty bourgeois, nor can they, because they have never lived like that, just me. And in sharp contrast to the children of my first marriage and two others outside that marriage who have “gotten over,” our children have been locked up, shot, harassed (for being ours, but particularly because their mother is Black), and dismissed by me and the world.

What the affair did was convince her that she does not even have to seriously consider the relevance of much of anything “political” I say. She feels that the only way she can express her own individual feelings is to put them in sharp relief to my own. Amina still maintains that my autobiography is a book full of lies and attempts to denigrate and belittle her and give her accomplishments to other women. As much as I dispute this and say that the reader can be the judge, she refutes, saying, “How would the reader really know the truth?” What is true is that the development of political organization that came out of the Spirit House would never have happened in the ways that it did without her. This is one reason that her Left public alienation and what I felt as abandonment angered me so thoroughly. Whatever our disagreements, and like everyone else, we have always had them, I thought they could be worked out within the context of our private and political and organizational life. I did not expect to be
denounced as politically incorrect as the public polemic of an opposing political trend.