The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (53 page)

When I talked to Nellie on the phone, she could only say, “Why are you still there? Come back. You should come back, now.” It was like she could sense something was very much awry. There was a note of desperation in her voice.

At home, a collecting up of this heavier black circle went on, still casually, but fueled by reality. I could sense some distance now between Nellie and me that had never existed before: a darkness into which words disappeared. I saw Shammy again, he began hanging around this little gym where we played basketball, where my kids were in nursery school. He'd be on the sidelines cheering, though I could sense he could play, too. But he could see that I was no stranger to the court, and if I made some hook or jump shot it seemed to connect him to me more closely. I guess he could see I was a real person.

Since our struggle with the SWP in On Guard, a couple of the black SWP cadres had come around and I'd talked to them. The one I got closest to was Cornelius Suares, called Corny. He was a black worker, working almost all his adult life (except for the time he was in jail) in the garment district, pushing, as he called them, “them Jewish airplanes.” He pushed the garment racks up and down the streets. Corny was the loudest person on record, check the
Guinness Book of Records
. He had a hard and willfully rough exterior but he was a very sweet and gentle dude in many ways. If he felt really put upon or pissed off, he'd break down and cry.

His running buddy, whom I also got to like a lot, was Clarence Franklin, another worker, doing New York City messenger work. He was once SWP's candidate for mayor and is a sensitive poet, though Clarence talks only as a last resort. Plus, Clarence's brothers Doll and Robert, who are the talkingest dudes, next to Cornelius, you're ever likely to meet. All of these brought another air into my life, a wind of further reality, of actual concrete life.

I went to Buffalo for a month that summer, with my family, as a lecturer in poetry, in some program put together to get Charles Olson, Creeley,
and some of the other new poets up there lecturing. I still had a great admiration for Olson. I had gone up to his house a couple of times, up in Gloucester. Once in the late fifties with McClure and Wieners, later with Don Allen and Irving Rosenthal who had just quit as editor of the
Chicago Review
, to write a novel,
Sheeper
. Olson had taken us one night to this castle in Gloucester that this rich dude had imported stone for stone from Europe. And now it sat in Gloucester, overlooking the bay. The guy's father had invented the electronically controlled boat. And he used to steer these boats by remote control up and down in that harbor.

We had some interesting evening. Olson, center stage as usual, was telling these stories and the son or grandson of the inventor, who was now master of the house, had a few friends over, all, I think, gay. I think the only non-gay persons in the crib were Olson and I. The castle was full of statues and hanging tapestries. At one point, the owner excused himself and then we heard organ music. We figured it was him, but then he returned and the organ was playing, we were told, by remote control. He then started to make weird effects — slurs, eerie moans, and ghostly sounds — on the thing. Olson and I were catching each other's eye, but Olson kept talking.

When we go to bed that night, I got a room that's right off this patio in the middle of the castle. After midnight sometime, I hear this noise like splashing and men's voices high and tittering. I go to the door and prop it open and this guy's friends are diving from a second-story balcony down into this pool in the middle of the patio. They're butt naked. It was like being woven into a tapestry of exotic otherness, but the next day when we get back to Olson's place he is roaring with laughter at the whole business.

What fascinated me about Olson was his sense of having dropped out of the U.S., the “pejoracracy.” He said in his poems we should “Go Against” it. That we should oppose “those who would advertise you out.” It was a similar spirit that informed the most meaningful of the Beats, and Olson was a heavy scholar. His “Projective Verse” had been a bible for me because it seemed to give voice to feelings I had about poetry and about society. When Charles came down to Cooper Square, there was another sense that what we were doing he could use, that it was something he thought useful and correct, the
Zazens
and Totem Press and the rest of it. I had even seen remarks he made at Berkeley letting me know that he thought
Dutchman
was an estimable work. It was Olson, because of his intellectual example, and Ginsberg, because of his artistic model and graciousness as a teacher, whom I thought most about in terms of the road I
was moving along. Where would they be in all this? Also, my friend Ed Dorn, the poet, who was living out in Pocatello, Idaho, in a place so American it didn't understand itself. How would he relate? We wrote many letters back and forth. And the book
The Dead Lecturer
, which came out that year (1964), is dedicated to Ed. It included the comic-book hero Green Lantern's code: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight/Let Those Who Worship Evil's Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern's Light!”

Ed and his family and Nellie and I and our children lived together briefly up in Buffalo that summer. It was like the last touching of the old places, though I didn't know it. I liked Ed so much because he had (and has) an intellectual toughness that perceives the worst in the U.S., but he has the energy needed to survive that worst. His Idaho and New Mexico sojourns, I think, were meant to keep him from the sickness of big-time America. Yet the leaks of that sickness are themselves communities, even on the geographic outskirts of the various big apples and pears and plums of gimmegotcha melican society.

These white men saw that I was moving away from them in so many ways and there was some concern, because it wasn't that I didn't like them any longer, it was just a feeling that where I was going they couldn't come. Where that was, I couldn't even articulate. Those who were physically close to me, the old New York crowd, I was less concerned about, because we had our day-to-day confrontations. There was no room for decent concern or sentimental concern either, we were too concretely close and for that reason getting away from them was a physical and intellectual syllogism.

While I was in Buffalo, the Harlem Rebellion broke out. There had been a couple rebellions in other cities just before Harlem went up, in Jacksonville and then in a suburb of Chicago. But Harlem had the media coverage. It was like the proof that the ticking inside our heads had a real source and was not subjective. It bore out what Malcolm had said at the beginning of the year. It made
Blues for Mr. Charlie
and
Dutchman
seem dangerously prophetic.

I left Buffalo, to get closer to what was happening. The events rang in me like the first shots of a war, which I not only knew would break out but one that I had to get into because I felt I had helped start it. I remember getting a .45 automatic from where I had stashed it. Lana Solon looked surprised, I hadn't seen her in months. But I had left a piece there back behind some suitcases. She said, “I knew you'd come. I felt it.” I got the
piece from where I'd hidden it, put it in my gas mask bag, and split. I never saw her again.

After the Harlem Rebellion it was a rush of events, confrontations, tempers, even histories that I witnessed and was part of. For one thing, the sense of being more and more estranged from Nellie was reaching an openly rising quantitative peak. We were seldom together now, the way we had been. I was hanging out and meeting with mostly young black dudes, both my brothers from the earlier Cooper Square circle and the later crowd of people. Shammy, his brother Tong, who I still did not feel comfortable around; he gave me a cold and clammy feeling. Jimmy Lesser came by now, usually with Shammy. He dressed like a classic Black Muslim and I accepted him as that. One of White's old junkie friends also began to dress up like a Muslim and he seemed to have cleaned up as well. But that didn't bother White, Jim; he was still getting higher and higher. Corny, usually with Clarence, would show. Plus, Overstreet might breeze by and we'd drink a bottle of vodka. One time White, Overstreet, and I go to a party around the corner and Overstreet and I get into a fight, or I should say a “fight.” I don't know what happened and he claim he don't know either, but when we woke up the bottle of vodka was empty, most of my clothes were ripped off, and Overstreet was laid out drunk. We didn't know where White had gone.

Marion and Archie were around and Bob when he wasn't drilled flat by the scag. A young dude named Dave, light-skinned, heavy glasses, interested like all of us in the music and also poetry. Both of the Hackensack Brothers were part of
Umbra
and I began to get more word on what that was or had been. I found out later that they had had some intense struggle over a poem that was to be published that was critical of JFK. One group wanted to can the poem because Kennedy had got iced, the other, more militant group thought the poem still needed to be printed. And there were all kinds of recriminations. I still saw C.D., but not in the same way as before. He was very much married and the French lady had, it seemed, a rather abbreviated tether.

I'd see Tom Perry, and if Tom and White and I got together with maybe Marion or even Bob when he could see, we still got wasted. And walked around, in and out of parties, being even more removed by the shit, and our sense of removal from that whole scene. But even that enlarged circle had its sectors, and it would, at a later time, split in half as well.

The public verbal shootout that remains most clearly etched in my memory is one that was held at the Village Gate. In this there were questions
from the audience and I had now grown into a stance of actually putting down white people. I had long done this in my writing, from a concrete point of origin. These torturous years the African and African American have spent as slaves and chumps for this white supremacist society obviously provided enough factual resources to support a tirade against whites. The Muslim example, particularly and most inspirationally the role of Malcolm X, supported my attack. But still I was married to a white woman; I still had many white friends. I still thought very highly of innumerable white intellectuals and artists. But I felt justified in talking about the horrible bullshit that white people had put on the world, bullshit they are still putting on the world (though now my view is tempered by the science of class analysis — but then so many whites go for the ghost of white racism, and whether they actually benefit from it or not, still
do
go for it and actively support it — and the poison of white chauvinism warps some of the otherwise hippest white minds in extant).

A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn't any whites help? I said, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people with your death.” She seemed flabbergasted. Another mentioned Goodman and Schwerner, they had been slaughtered along with black James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Klansmen in police uniforms. And certainly their sacrifice is to be upheld and the willingness of young whites to put their lives on the line for the struggle for democracy
is
a noble thing, an important thing, and any people sincerely interested in making revolution must have allies. Only people not really serious about making revolution can dismiss sincere allies. But in my fury, which had no scientific framework, I could only thrash out at any white person. The fact that Chaney was never mentioned, and Goodman and Schwerner were, pissed the hell out of me. I told the woman, “I have my own history of death and submission. We have our own dead to mourn. Those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences.”

And in this last outrageous diatribe I was confusing Schwerner and Goodman with the young white poseur-liberals who sashayed safely through the streets of Greenwich Village, the behind-the-lines bleeding hearts. When, on the real side, if I could have stood some hard truth, Schwerner and Goodman were out there on the front lines doing more than I was! But Chaney had been beaten beyond recognition; he had so received the fury of those maniacs but all these people wanted to talk about was the white youths' deaths.

I guess, during this period, I got the reputation of being a snarling, white-hating madman. There was some truth to it, because I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell I could instinctively sense surrounded my own dash for freedom. I guess I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground of reality. And during this period, whether publicly or not, there was a lot of snarling, and cussing out of white folks, and punchin' people in the mouths to justify our growing sense of ourselves.

Albert Ayler had come on the scene around this point. He appeared at my house one afternoon with a dude named Black Norman. I had heard of Albert and think I'd even heard him on some record where he was still playing with a group that was sounding the standard bebop changes,
My Name Is Albert Ayler
. But Albert had already moved beyond that. Albert had this white shock of beard that shot out of his chin, though he was a little short stocky dude, that made him look extra weird. Plus the intensity in his eyes and voice. Norman was his sidekick mystic, chuckling always about something the rest of us was just a little too square to dig.

Albert had asked me about the music and about my writing on the music. I think he wanted to challenge me because I didn't really know who he was. He asked me did I think it was about me? He said, “You think it's about you?” I did and didn't know what he meant. In some ways, I guess, I did think it was about me. Albert meant it was really about
Spirit
and Energy. This is what it, life, everything, was really about. Not personalities and their yes-and-nos. Albert was always jumping on folks by saying of corny people, “He thinks it's about
him
,” with the “him” said so disdainfully, as only Albert could say it, so you really could dig that was some stupid shit. “It ain't about
you
!” Albert would say. “He thinks its about Him! And it ain't about Him.” And he'd stretch his eyes wide and maybe spit out a jagged hunk of laugh.