The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (5 page)

But would ya tell from me mischievous ways the stuffings inside me round peapicker knot? A trained eye, ye say? Oh?

So, Boston Street. And “Bunny” and “Princess” across the street. His mother tortured him in the bathtub with green water. I couldn't help him — he was weeping and shit. I was froze and puzzled, standing there. What was in that water? Or was it just he didn't want no bath?

Boston Street.

Ellie the painter raved in them parts. Crawling over the fences in spotted coveralls, drunk as the social system. We lived in two houses on that street — at one address I tumbled off the stone porch and busted my collarbone. And a preacher blew his wife to smithereens around the corner. It was a spooky house with a narrow path. And Miss Rhapsody across the street gettin' ready for evening so she could put on her purple flower and go out and sing the blues. (She had a fine-ass daughter. Blue, stiff, and beautiful!)

But all that soon was in the wind. We moved, ya see? Looked up and we were way cross town near the Italian border. I was born in the center of the city (New Ark) in a hospital named for a yellow doctor, Kinney Memorial. But by age five or six we'd spaced — dot-dot-dash-dot, communications — going somewhere. Wound up on a little street the other side of nowhere.

And we were all in there. Mama Daddy Nana Granddaddy Uncle Elaine and me. On Dey Street. The niggers were so cynical they called it
die
— the white folks so full of shit they called it
day
. Take your pick!

Orange house with a porch you sit on, or crawl under and plot shit. Living room, dining room, kitchen, left turn, bathroom. Back door and little yard, edged by cement and a two-car garage. Second floor: narrow bedroom (Uncle), middle bedroom with big oak bed with a back tall as a man and footpost taller than a six-year-old (Nana and Granddaddy). Front bedroom (Mama and Daddy and little kids, us).

A red-nosed Irishman (Ol' Man Doyle) and his wife on one side next to a vacant lot and right next door Angel Domenica Cordasca (female), a little nonromantic Italian playmate. Next to Doyle, the playground at the edge of which sat Central Avenue School. Next to Angel, a factory. Across the street from Central Avenue School, a row of brown houses. Clarence P. (funny), his older brother (weird), his mother (church stalker). Danny W., a confederate, short and curly-haired. Fast but plump. Another lot for an auto parts store. (They got the whole block now.) Then Pooky, a little Italian troublemaker, his twin sisters, snotty-nosed midgets. The Davises next, eight black curly-headed all-sized colored kids — actually light brown in color, black in socio-eco terms. Who knew Mr. D.? Mrs. D. was always called Ms. as far as I know. And she ran that bunch, literally, up and down the street. Frank, big and away soon to the army, never to return. Evelyn, big and fine with that wavy, straightish hair them kinda folks had, but way outta my generation. Sam called Lon-nell. It was Lionel. Orlando called “Board,” meaning Bud. Algernon called “Algy.” Jerome, real name “Fat.” “Rookie,” given name unknown, and Will, the pee wee. The D's always seemed like more than they were. At least ten or twelve. They were a standard of measure around those parts. Their name called by my mother meant “many” or “dirty” or “wild” or something like that. Algy and Board were running buddies of ours. Board was a desperado. And my mother didn't dig us running together. Nutty as he was, I didn't dig it too much. Algy was wild too, but cooler. Lon-nell you liked to have on your team as one of the “big boys.”

Next to the Davises, Dominick, an Italian iceman, and his brood. Some more Italians, a couple, next to him, with a red and white very clean house. Dominick's house was yellow and brown. The red and white house had cherries in the back of it and you know we hit on them whenever our ass stopped aching from the last hit reported to the mama authorities. But those cherries, and I think some hard green knot peaches, like that cause we never let 'em stay there long enough to ripen, were cause for much adventure and repeated instruction in cause and effect.

There was also contrast in that and all along this one-block center (Central Avenue to Sussex Avenue) there was a similar contrast from a similar dissimilarity — mixture. For now we'd (Jones/Russ) flashed into a
mixed
neighborhood. I was about six now. And already a veteran of three different abodes. This made the fourth. (Barclay Street, two on Boston Street, and now Dey.) But all those other places had been the Central Ward — or at that time the Third Ward — near round “The Hill,” center of black life. But this last move took us into the West (literally the West Ward) and a place where the black community trailed off in a sputter of Italians. Or likewise where the Italian community thinned and more and more blacks had moved in. So that in our block and all around in that area, there was a kind of standoff. Central Avenue School, it seems to me, was heavier black. The life there more controlled in the playground, in the hallways, by the black students. And the year the Warren Street contingent came in it was “The Hill” for sure pouring in. So that even in that part of the West headed North, the ambassadors from Central and even South brought those places to us. And so the Black Belt South — and so Africa.

But that mixture carried contradictions in it far beyond we youth, hey — even beyond many of the grown folks. We were friends and enemies in the non-final cauldron of growing up. We said things — did things — were things — and even became some other things that maybe could be understood on those streets, ca. 1940s.

So next to the red and white clean cherry and peach house, a lot with brown-grey gravel. A useless rusty lot that ended with a brick wall to no-where. The back of some factory. And like a miniature boundary line, that twenty feet of lot separated the lower-middle-class Italian Cleaney from Eddie Clay's brown and tan rundown clapboard shack.

And in that shack, like a ghost of the black South — a drunken building — it had some living ghosts, poverty struck and mad. Old toothless snuff-chumping ladies. Staring old men. People with hard rusty hands. A woman named Miss Ada (I always thought it was ATOR, a weird radio drama monster name) who wandered and staggered and stared and got outrageous drunk and cursed out history.

We made up stories about Eddie and teased Eddie. A veil hung over the house. A food like musk — an oldness strangeness. Yet Eddie was one of The Secret Seven (the kids who hung with us sometimes, my sister and I, Board, Algy, Norman, Danny, Eddie). We were The Secret Seven, which met under our porch at 19 Dey Street to plot the destruction of packs of Kits and jars of Kool-Aid.

And we'd all tease Eddie about his weird house. It was old and poor-looking, full of old country Negroes usually drunk. And sometimes Eddie'd chase one or a bunch of us when we talked about his creepy old house. Yet across the hard gravel were the anonymous cherry-growing Italians in their white, spotless, red-trimmed number. The best-looking house on the block.

Our orangish brown clapboard number seemed merely like “headquarters.” It seemed like it sagged a bit or leaned. Especially after a hurricane blew a big tree down on the bathroom and tore off the bathroom roof. It was on the street doing something, looking like something (to others), but what that was I really can't say. It was headquarters. Where I came out of and had to go back to — after school — after playground — after sneaking off — or after any stuff I'd got into — that leaning orangish brown house was my center, and my fate.

Next to Eddie's was my fake cousin Lorraine's red job. Red shingles and short brick steps. Her name was Jones so we could play cousins, though I liked her, from time to time, as a girlfriend, but that never went anywhere. But some older dudes thought she was my cousin on the real side and they would be trying to program me to drop their names on her. Some really vulgar types would tease me about what they was going to do to my cousin, like it mattered to me. (Though it did in the sense that I was jealous — not outraged like a relative, but the whole thing was so unreal that it was a very minor thing.)

Lorraine's house was short and squat, though it was three stories. Lorraine's mother looked just like her, chain smoking. A factory worker going back and forth during the war years like Rosie the Riveter. When we all had house keys tied on strings around our necks.

Then Mattie's narrow tall porched brown joint. I guess like Mattie herself. Tall narrow brown with glasses she'd be peering through. In street-wide gatherings when young and old kids big and little were together for some reason. Some summers, happenings or chance gatherings, Mattie would be there, a big stringbean girl (no matter what age). She had a kind of horsiness to her face that set the boys to razzing her about it when they were in that frame of mind. Sometimes they'd be saying some other things and Mattie'd turn on her long narrow heel.

A fence next to Mattie's, then Joycee's yard (her family shared it with the New Hope Baptist church). And that was the end of the block. On my side, across the street, after Angel's house, there was a factory that made boxes. They took up the rest of the block. The loading platform was the
only interest, otherwise I remember wondering why they wanted to make our block dull with their grey building business.

And the block was, it seemed to me, fairly quiet. The scrambles of kids ran up and down and around the corner and around the other corner. I guess since Central Avenue School and playground sat on the block, it obviously couldn't have been quiet on school days, when those children ran screaming up and down the street. But Dey Street and, on either side, Newark Street to the west and Lock Street to the east, were like a swath of mixtures. Black heavy but still mixed, Italian and black. In fact, all the way to Orange Street, this mixture persisted. On the north side of Orange, you jumped into the Italian neighborhood. The old First Ward, now North Ward.

There was a mixture at the little-kid level which we carried most times successfully and at the tops of our voices. Adults fed us various poisons that pushed us apart as we grew, naturally. And by high school, almost miraculously, the relationships we'd had on the street level and in grammar school had disappeared. So quickly, I was startled. And I remember consciously taking note that this is what had happened. When I was a sophomore in high school I could see very clearly what had happened. That we had reached another stage, and those previous relationships were ended. And that while nobody spoke openly about this, we all, from our opposite sides of the nationality wall, knew what it meant, and acted accordingly. But that was a later stage; the open door onto it.

You wonder thinking back to Young, reflecting on memories of all that passed. What is left that coheres and brings it back, what does it mean now really? What it did mean then I guess is beyond us or we can glimpse occasionally an actual relationship, an actuality of that earlier life that gives deep recognition. I guess we understand ourselves better for today's steps and pauses.

So much does come back, flicks and flitting images. Faces and voices. A walk, a way of turning, a laugh, a silhouette just before darkness. We remember games, gangs, houses people lived in, general relationships and tales about all these. And from this we try to get an outline of we then. We try to understand who we're talking about. We're like snakes with billions of skins falling off like the blinks of an eye. And each skin a sensitivity that makes a certain specific identity. Though generally we're who we are, we're even who we were, though we learn different things, some of us go different places. Some of us don't go anywhere. We can be screamed at, locked
up, beaten, almost killed. We can read books or look at plays and films. We can be talked to a long time by people who shape us in some ways. In a school, an outfit, a bar — some
place
. Mostly factories — cold in winter, hot in summer. And we
do
change. Sometimes we grow. On the real side.

For me the slow whiz of my life is full of sparkling pictures, glittering sequin images that speak of times and places, people and feeling. I register these impressions in the polymedium of my life and now try to recall a pattern, an overview without overviewer (except myself, years later).

Of earlier historical family scuttlebutt ya knows what I tolt ya. The three previous places we lived, that is, a we that included me, we had left by the time I was about six. At six we were on Dey, Russes and Joneses together. (It seemed normal to me but maybe it wasn't. In the end there was loudness and tension — it seemed bad feeling and we went our separate ways.) But it seemed normal to me. What dry types call “the extended family” and whatnot.

Those were the war years, so my youth has one told-to-me background of the Depression and another background that I was conscious of, World War Two. The Dey Street years are the World War Two years — the Joe Louis years, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years (those were my maximum heroes!).

So I think I remember the Sunday the news of Pearl Harbor came. I didn't fully understand, then. But everything was heightened. There was excitement and fast talking. And I began to see obvious changes and as I understood more (reading the daily news everyday) I could see how the war moved things and changed things.

For one thing my mother, who'd been a college dropout because of my birth, now got a better, a college-type, job. Where before she had done piecework in various sweatshops she used to describe — on Beacon Street and Rankin Street — where there were sewing machines and dress patterns. A kind of Newark garment district. When the war came she got a job with the ODB (Office of Dependency Benefits) doing some of the administrative work that had to be done to see that the GIs' allotment checks got sent home to wives, parents, or whoever. And my mother got a job downtown, in a big flat red building they built in the center of town very swiftly. (Prudential insurance uses it as one of their ripoff points nowadays.)

So now she could dress up as an office worker and go off to do office work. It was better money, better surroundings, easier work, my mother said. Plus, you know, she could dig it with her background. My father was still on the mail truck then, delivering packages. He'd come home winter
times and stand on the grating the hot air came up through from the furnace, the “registers” we called them, and stand there trying to get warm. He was almost frozen stiff. (Before I got to high school he'd got inside the P.O., and by time of college he was a supervisor.)