The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (46 page)

At home we screamed and I slapped her around. But she kept saying, “You were seeing Lucia. You were seeing Lucia.” I kept screaming at her, telling her that she was stupid and that Sashimi was stupid. Then I left her standing in the middle of the floor and rushed out, going back to Sashimi's. I got to his door, then looked for something to bash his head in. I found a metal post from an old bed that was lying in the street and charged up the stairs. I hammered on the door with my fists and then beat the door with the post but Sashimi, no fool, had either gone or wouldn't answer it.

I walked all the way back to Avenue C, not to see Lucia, but to find a friend of mine, Bob Thompson, a black painter I had gotten friendly with. Bob lived in a huge loft on Clinton Street. He was there with a couple of bohemians, getting high, shooting heroin. I didn't know he used it, but he was sending one of the bohemians out to cop. I dropped some money in the mitt and meanwhile used some of Bob's “smack” and we took off together, down, down, and right here! Bob and I were a number after that.

That's what that life had become. Joe Heisler was moving out of the Bronx too. He and Rene (he reluctantly) were splitting, and Rene and Mark were supposedly moving to New Mexico. Paul and Ceeny had also agreed to split. The thing with C.D. had been the last straw. But one Saturday I get a phone call, some of us were sitting around drinking. It's a guy I don't know named Richard Gibson and he asks me if I want to go to Cuba, as part of a delegation of black artists and scholars whom the Cuban government wanted to get a look and spread the word. Relations with New Cuba and the U.S. had not gotten outright funky but they were getting that way. The U.S. could dig a Batista, their boy, but Fidel Castro was making noises like a democrat and you know they can't abide that shit. The agrarian reform had already sent these white racist monopoly capitalists up the wall. I agreed to go, turning from the phone and telling people, “I'm going to Cuba!”

The Cuban trip was a turning point in my life. Langston, Jimmy Baldwin, and John Killens were supposed to go, but didn't. I was in a group that included Sarah Wright, the novelist, and her husband. Ed Clark, the painter, whom I knew. Harold Cruse, the writer, whom I also knew. (I'd met Harold in my MacDougal Street days, often in the Caf, Figaro at Bleecker and McDougal. He lived then in a furnished room on West 23rd or West 14th and was always complaining about how Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.) Julian Mayfield and his wife, Ana Codero, a doctor, born in Puerto Rico. Also with our party was a man I didn't know until then, Robert Williams. It was Williams who had organized the most militant NAACP chapter in the States, a chapter composed of black workers and returning veterans, in Monroe, North Carolina. They'd had “wade-ins” to integrate the pool in Monroe, and Rob had summoned black militant attorney Conrad Lynn down to North Carolina to defend a ten-year-old boy who had been
locked up
for kissing an eight-year-old white girl. Rob had also organized a self-defense group in Monroe and when he made the statement in 1959, after a white rapist of a black woman had been freed by an all-white jury, that blacks should “meet
violence with violence,” he was summarily ditched by Uncle Roy and the NAACP. Later, Rob led a group of armed blacks to surround a group of menacing Klansmen, disarm them, take off their hoods, and send them scurrying back into their rat holes.

He was wearing a big straw hat like a
campesino
(Cuban farmer) when I met him, with a wispy tip of beard. He was a big man, maybe six feet three inches and about 240 pounds, imposing, strong-looking. One never doubted that, aroused, Rob could be a mean mf.

Traveling with us, as well, were John Henrik Clarke, the historian, plus some other people — a black model, two strange-looking sisters who were members, along with Gibson, of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and a journalist from a Philadelphia newspaper. (For a detailed account of this trip, see “Cuba Libre,” an essay in
Home: Social Essays
.)

But we went to Cuba (this was 1959), after a false start courtesy of the U.S. government, and we stayed a couple days in Havana talking to various people, meeting various Cuban and Latin intellectuals and officials. I met the great Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who asked me straight out where was Langston and did I think that Langston had gotten more conservative. I smiled, but I did not know then that Langston had testified, under duress, before HUAC, denouncing some of his own earlier work, to keep great patriots like the filthy cracker bastard James Eastland off his ass.

I met Pablo Armando Fernández, the poet, and people at La Casa de Cuba, an arts center. We also visited various ministries and got lectured to about what Cuba was trying to do. I talked to a young minister in the National Agrarian Reform Institute, António Nuñez Jiménez, and was very much impressed. And then we traveled, with thousands of other people, on a slow train to Oriente Province, on the eastern tip of the island, where the revolution was born. I met intellectuals from all over Latin America, including a young woman, Rubi Betancourt, from Yucatán and Jaime Shelly, a poet from Mexico. These young people assaulted my pronouncements about not being political. It was the first time I'd been taken on so thoroughly and forcefully and by people my own age, my contemporaries. I was not Eisenhower or Nixon or Faubus, I protested, I was a poet. And so you want to write your poetry and that alone, while most of the world is suffering, your own people included. It is bourgeois individualism, they screamed. That is all it is, bourgeois individualism. For twelve or fourteen hours on the train I was assailed for my bourgeois individualism. And I could see, had seen, people my own age involved in actual
change
, revolution. In my sinister American cynicism, my inherited world-weary arrogance
of theoretical know-it-all-ism, I was little better than my friend who'd said, “I hate guys in uniforms.” In fact, I was the same.

I could fight back with what I knew of my own seeming disagreement with my U.S. peers, how I did have sensitivity to what was going on. But that seemed puny in the face of what I'd already seen in Cuba and in the faces of these young Latino activists and intellectuals, already politicized, for whom Cuba was the first payoff of a world they had already envisioned and were already working for. I was the oddball, the weary traveler/tourist from the U.S. of A. As much hot hatred as I could summon for the U.S., its white supremacy, its exploitation, its psychological torture of schizophrenic slaves like myself, I now had to bear the final indignity—which made my teeth grate violently, even in reflection — the indignity and humiliation of defending its ideology, which I was doing in the name of Art. Jesus Christ!

In Oriente, we went up into the Sierra Maestra for the celebration of the July 26 invasion of Moncada by Fidel Castro and his forces, who called themselves the July 26th Movement. There were hundreds of thousands of people up there. It could have been easily a million people. We trucked and walked and wound up and up. I rode partway with Françoise Sagan, the French novelist, who had attendants everywhere, befitting her great celebrity. I had known her from the covers of her books I read down in Puerto Rico in the error farce. All of us were thirsty, the hot sun whipped our ass, plus the long walk. But we made it up to where the celebration was held. And I heard Fidel Castro speak for perhaps two hours nonstop, relating the entire history of the revolution to the
campesinos
, soldiers, intellectuals, and foreign visitors. I even got to meet him and say a few words. It was a rare moment in one's life and if the harangues of Rubi and Jaime and the others weren't enough, this final stroke was, my head spinning with recognition, revelation, and the hot-ass sun.

We had a few more days in Havana. I hung out with Rob Williams one day, and everywhere he went people in the street cheered him. The Cubans had made his confrontations with the Klan and
yanqui racismo
known to people throughout the island, even though in the U.S. they tried to play it down.

Even when he was in Havana, Rob got word from the Cubans that the Klan was stirring again, trying to intimidate his family. Rob, with me trailing along with him, went to see the U.S. ambassador. Rob was wearing a shoulder holster and his language was so hot you could hear him through the door. “If the U.S. government don't protect them, then I got people there who will.” (And he did!)

A year or so later the government framed Rob in the famous Monroe kidnap case, when Rob saved two whites who'd wandered into the black community, during a shootout with the racist state police, from being jacked up by a crowd of blacks incensed by the state police's racist terror tactics. He went to Cuba, Algeria, and finally China, where he never ceased to be a thorn in the U.S. racists' side with his militant publication
The Crusader
. When we got back to the U.S., the newspapers even pretended that the Cuban celebration had been rained out.

But I carried so much back with me that I was never the same again. The dynamic of the revolution had touched me. Talking to Fidel or Juan Almeida, the black commander of the revolutionary army, or to the young minister of agrarian reform, Nuñez Jiménez, or Jaime or Rubi or Pablo Fernández. Seeing youth not just turning on and dropping out, not just hiply cynical or cynically hip, but using their strength and energy to
change
the real world — that was too much. The growing kernel of social consciousness I had was mightily fertilized by the visit.

When I returned, I was shaken more deeply than even I realized. The arguments with my old poet comrades increased and intensified. It was not enough just to write, to feel, to think, one must act! One
could
act.

First, I wrote an essay about my Cuban experience, “Cuba Libre.” I remembered that the Cubans had changed the name of the Hilton Hotel in Havana to Havana Libre, and a U.S. telephone operator, in making the hookup of a call there, insisted the hotel was still the Havana Hilton. But the. Cuban operator would have none of it. “Havana Libre!” she shouted. “Get used to it!” That was the spirit I wanted to invest in the essay. It won an award after being published in the
Evergreen Review
. The award was $300 and was the most money I'd ever gotten for something I'd written.

At the same time I had begun a long prose work. It was as if I wanted to shake off the stylistic shackles of the gang I'd hung with and styled myself after. I consciously wrote as deeply into my psyche as I could go. I didn't even want the words to “make sense.” I had the theme in my mind. My early life, in Newark, at Howard, in the air force, but the theme was just something against which I wanted to play endless variations. Each section had its own dynamic and pain. Going so deep into myself was like descending into hell. I called it
The System of Dante's Hell
.

I would focus on my theme and then write whatever came into my mind as a result of that focus. I called them (later) “association complexes.” I was tearing away from the “ready-mades” that imitating Creeley or Olson provided. I'd found that when you imitate people's form you take on their
content as well. So I scrambled and roamed, sometimes blindly in my consciousness, to come up with something more essential, more rooted in my deepest experience. I thought of music, I thought of myself as an improvising soloist. I would go into almost a trancelike state, hacking deeper and deeper, my interior rhythms dancing me on. Only in the last section is there what I called “fast narrative,” something approaching a conventional narrative. It was almost like what Césaire had said about how he wrote
Return to My Native Land
. That he was trying to break away from the heavy influence that French Symbolist poetry had on him. So he decided to write prose to stop writing poetry. And what he came up with was a really profound new poetry, showing how even the French language could be transformed by the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and perception. (Though I did not find this out about Césaire until almost twenty years later!)

I wrote in jagged staccato fragments until at the end of the piece I had come to, found, my own voice, or something beginning to approximate it. We were also going through the process of moving. Another little girl child had been born, Lisa, so we had two little girl babies. We were moving to East 14th Street, between First and Second Avenues, into a terrible though huge barnlike apartment over a Gypsy storefront. It was not the sleek, quiet West Side apartment in Chelsea. We moved into the grimy East Side just before the still vague East Village changed abruptly into Chelsea East. Our lease had run out on West 20th Street. The rent had been high for us in the first place, but now I had also gotten fired from my job for having gone off to Cuba. I had to get back on unemployment, so there was no way we could support West 20th Street.

It was a weird time for me altogether, what with the political impulses the Cuba trip had set in motion. There was an unused metal sign over the Gypsies' place on which in some critical moment in U.S.-Cuban relations I'd painted “Cuba Si-Yanqui No!”

When I finished
Dante's Hell
, it was Lucia to whom I thought I should show it, and she thought it should be published immediately. I also showed it to a friend, John Fles, who was publishing a one-shot anthology of new work, along with Artaud, whom Fles dug. It was called
The Trembling Lamb
. I felt, then, that I was in motion, that my writing, which I'd been deadly serious about, was now not just a set of “licks” already laid down by Creeley, Olson, etc., but was moving to become genuinely mine. I felt that I could begin to stretch out, to innovate in ways I hadn't thought of before. And in all my poetry which comes out of this period there is the ongoing
and underlying contention and struggle between myself and “them” that poetry and politics, art and politics, were not mutually exclusive.