The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (82 page)

Yeh, I could be in HU with a Gang, again. And in the “army” with another ominous group. STOP THAT THINKING IN THERE NOW! Because despite the rope (my man thought they said
robe
) a yella shit was dropped around me back brain, I had been moved by real beauty and resisted always the rubout of its transbluesency.

And that HU, another step, another nod at me as me madre's flying machine. Not really. Just more steps for steppin'. To walk in and out, as vector of rise, getaway. Eat your way through solid rock, your head, life, society. And come out the other side and there you are somewhere (the same place) else having to do it again.

The slightly clearer reality (of the unreality) of HU was, goddammit, educational. (Custer would have said that if he was hip!) I did learn about the colored world and the colored whirl in my own life, so quickly had it spun me, flung me, away, kicking among the stars.

I was no longer a student — very suddenly — flunked out and cut loose from these last yalla apron strings. The error farce was, he says with arrows sticking out of his ass and hat, very very educational. It was like being blown away, an airplane exploding, you're flying in the air, arms flung straight out. The next thing you know some actual cracker (repeat) cracker is breathing on your nose demanding symbolic tribute.

At Barringer, I could go home. I got to get on that 9 Clifton and flee back crosstown to the polyrhythms. But that was shit, was not about anything on top but white shit. Very white shit. Like an official entrance into the very white. The absolute cold. And against that, to register that all of it was just me steppin' (I hoped) gettin' (perhaps) risin' (oh, no) I swore to learn. And so moved on.

Wounded, alienated, ego-crazy, subjective, slapped around, but in that punch-drunk sojourn, young boy grasping for whatever — air food love life — I actually did, on a very formal side, learn. And I think I became a little bit of a poet.

The death stare of the army blew me into art. The bland sentence so many accepted as “raisin' hell.” That cheapness and easy drunken termination. You had to salute your executioners. Every time you saw one.

So I was flying when I got out or when I got
got
out. These books, these hundreds of hours of contemplation, the real and mock sorrows of the young dude, the black boy, brown-skin kid with poppy eyes, they were a
catapult in total, a catapulting out of that jail, I thought. I thought I was in a jail. And what was more important. More meaningful. Heavier. More heroic. Able to accept my distances and alienation. My spectrum of color understanding? Only art. And I could not paint. Art. It pushed around me. It stuck its tongue through my eyes. It sat in my mouth making acid jokes. It laughed and they thought it was me. It fought. It ran. It shivered. It screamed. That was art. I could feel myself touching it to understand. To draw out and back upon me knowing it for what it really was. Not stupidity nor homosexuality nor antilife — just sweet simple beautiful art.

I came to New York then in search of it. I thought it had something to do with intellectuals, intellectualism, white people, “classical” music, the smell of coffee downtown late fall. There were people who had told me this as well. I had inspected this landing field before being blown out of school. The people I'd met projected that. But then, later, as we ourselves were pried apart by our lives' trajectory, I could see some things I wish I'd known.

I came into New York hyped by the delusions, even pathology, of an older generation, one who when “the deal went down” scattered or sought the “primary source,” Europe, like there had never been a conference in Berlin in 1884 to divide up Africa like a pie. Essentially they were still living off the elitist alienation of those folks who finally could not deal with the well-advertised grossness of the big ugly — land of the pilgrim's pride, land where my fathers died. One could not hide from one's self if one ever wanted to understand who that self actually was. And to be one's self one also had to be responsible for one's history, confront it — including the monsters and devils raging beneath its surface — and change it with real fingers and mind in the deathly reality — those stars our hope, those stripes our torment!

But living in the bubble of fantasy the not gone away, the never dawned on to be exiles, of my own generation had created — it was only another elitist removal from the bloody sidewalks of our own time. There are several hundred explanations and rationales for not dealing with reality such artists, intellectuals, poseurs have already provided to them — by institutions, commercial establishments, success and succeeders, and their own class background. Certainly when I was downtown the “mass line” was
hedonism
. The political justification the “purity of art.” Yet at the asking most would whore for a pittance and not even be ashamed. A shrug would do, a purchased drink for the crowd of adulators, yearning themselves,
loudly or softly, to be bought on the spot by the big pimp in the sky. God's Ho's!

My own naivete (and why belittle theirs?) helped buy my ticket into the bubble. I
did
want to create, and as I discovered that, that seemed to be enough. Except there is a persona you accept as your own. A cover and a covering. Middle-class Negroes try to buy their way into America through ignorance—like middle-class anybodies—but the oppression
has to
be
demonstrated
somehow, even unbeknownst to them. They could wear it like a badge and that might be simply the denial of its existence! Working people's lives are their awareness of it. So if I ended up for a time in a little white gang (not wholly, ever) grimacing at my own sensitivity like a special flick of agonized sunlight, that was what I had learned had translated real feeling into. It was an art-stance for, I thought, art-ing.

But I was digging, literally, my way through. Disciplines, doctrines, and personalities. There is a Tonto complex that comes with the given, a Sammy Davis/Frank Sinatra sunlight that can always be rid off into by the willing. You can be famous in America as Jackie Robinson or Paul Robeson. (You remember that collision?) You has but to remove your “e” to get “in.” This is not necessarily conscious, like that, either. There are some I could name who
do
very plottingly conscious put on the mummy uniforms snickering at their wisdom and good fortune. I spotted a group, one evening, emptying spittoons and bedpans down their throats and calling out “of course of course” and laughing. I understood that, like the profile of Dracula's condominium can lurk inside you years after ye pass it. The spooky vines and shit, the wet noises. I was never wholly there. Its whiff and poot deeply frightened me. The dead things' eyes colded my song I trembled and could not laugh I was so scared—could not laugh, get to that, someone like me, who is always, always laughing.

I bought a bourgeois design. White art, my connections and accomplices, a little fat white wife, cute as a kewpie doll full of popcorn. But that was like having your pockets and ears filled up by running near a lake. Thinking you were jogging, you know, stepping always somehow toward your heart's desire. There are children, even.

But regardless of the design inside the gourd, the world proceeds in its objective arc. You might be picking up odds and ends of it. You might be whistling the dates and certain events. You're in it anyway. I, You (singular), He, She, It are—We, You (plural), They—all are in it, regardless of their specific delusion.

But I was still learning, dyed beyond my own understanding or merely completing the trajectory of ignorance I inherited as a little round colored boy from Bethany Baptist Church, Newark, New Jersey, in the reign of the yalla Lord. (Black help us!)

The desired book-success story, frozen in the middle, in the act of, because at the very moment of climax, the hero (victim) becomes conscious—sees the Lord, the path, the wheels, the grimy advertisements of extinction, pinned to the ground like Gulliver infested everywhere by flesh-eating kewpies.

But it is a whole epoch one is part of, a whole movement of life, of specific people. One is part of one's time, however that is ascertained, in whatever definition. So the doldrum '50s, the bitter FBI-McCarthy '50s, the Korean War/college days '50s, the Beatnik '50s, is also the civil rights '50s. “With all deliberate speed” did actually apply to some of us.

We began to boycott buses and form organizations, and go where we wasn't wanted or expected. We began to sit in and march. We wanted to live out ideas, involved with various disciplines and religions. We came to understand that frustration was transferable, that energy was itself valuable. That the
cool
of death, of isolation and self-imposed alienation, was not what we meant.

We, even in spite of the tight fit of an alien world, began to like ourselves better. To hear ourselves and see ourselves better. We did not hate ourselves, BeBop! We did not even hate the brown skin so many loved to touch. And the aggressive black and blue heart our childhood had given us was beating now faster than before. It threw signals to the surface in those polyrhythms. We became, at that instant, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, Max Roach and Clifford Brown, Horace Silver and them. Messengers of ourselves, reaching deeper.

Because even looking Dr. King in the eye we knew who he was, that brown dignified man. “Didn't Dr. King tell them, honey? Naaow, let them crackers do what they will. They'll never be as intelligent as that man. That Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. No saw!”

Didn't we all know who that was. Want us to come inside the church and quit running up and down in front all round the side after them Italian Hot Dogs. “A double to go, please!”

And given that reliable, that number popping up on the board. We knew if the good doctor with that magical colored intelligenk “accent” was saying what he was saying. Hold on, Jimmy—hold on, this shit is done riz up.

What you need to embrace is yourself you yourself. “Come on now, boys, come in the church.” And what was the church saying? What it always be saying. “We shall overcome!”

From Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Ivy League's ascension. Miles was at least as hip as JFK and Miles, though cool, would fight.

The steps reflected themselves more. The breathing was more regular. You could be whatever you wanted—that had been the direction, surrounded by models of monsters. What gangs we were in we now could begin to understand more objectively. Or at least we'd begin to stalk our own design. Our own voice. From our own sources. We could actually hear
Freedom Suite
. We knew what it meant.
Freedom
Now.

The discussions would go on everywhere. Talking to ourselves. Trying to identify ourselves, who are our friends, our enemies. Arguing with friends, and the distance that had always existed now real and perceived. Our experience must also be in the world. Otherwise who and where were we? And even on a path described in an old way from an old design, some other stuff was happening. New transmission. Though for us semiliterate intellectuals of the oppressed—trained by our people's beaters to see that the beat goes on—underdevelopment in our circles means, you shoulda known that before. Oh, if I had only known that (them, those) before!

So Malcolm X was something out of nature to us. The world speaking, for once, directly to us. Demanding clarity.

He was a path, a way, into ourselves. The black sector of the working calls come back, like on the streets in Newark, I recognized that voice and knew, like there, what was happening. That that was how that was.

A whole swirl of turnarounds hurricaned from him. The world was going through changes and that world was in us too. We had to reevaluate all we knew. There were lives in us anyway filled with dynamite. We had a blackness to us, to be sure. It was always in us, we had but to claim it. And it claimed us.

The world's a prison for black people. The most imprisoned, those who cannot dig it. There was a time when a black wind circled. The streets were tingling. Popping. It began inside the people. Inside the rearranged world. The whole earth could be bubbling, shapes changing. Changing into. Transforming. A constant. But at times there is eruption, explosion, rapid movement.

I was a child and growing through zones and degrees until I became who this was when I wrote it (even when this is a book, I'll be gone gone gone again).

The bitterness and sweetness of becoming an adult. My adolescence extended through bohemia. When Malcolm reached me I was a spindling boy. Ensconced in a life so lightly taken it could be blown away.

Echoes of warfare reached me. And of another kind of life. I was still stepping trying to go faster. At one point I grew so bitter at a world whose values became reversed. I had built a life out of casual gestures and closed moods. Out of read lies and institutional distortions. It was camping out in a lone meadow where I could say anything, disconnected from the real, and by that, be anything. Thinking that, saying that, world of fiction. (And you could get rewards for fiction riding!)

But from cool to hard bop to what come next. It's chaos! Anti-jazz! Sheets of Sound! Bullshit! Cruelty! Can it be explained in the laboratories of Zat the Rich? All that!

News came in, images. Things I did in reflection of the world, connected individuals, as all are. And even in my theoretical exposition, I was yapping, conceiving. Not just pushed by wind and invisible things. I had ideas. Conceptions. Wrote essays. Went to Cuba. Argued with colleagues about whether the world and the word were connected.

Star avalanche.
I thought I was finding out stuff.
I knew I was changing.
Life was a fiction
A table setting
Unromantic romanesque
Free and easy, on the draw
Ol' hoboes could describe it.
I was still in college.
And the world happened by.
I looked at my hands, my fingers
I stared into my
face.
The niggers on television
were getting
beaten.
I wanted to tell
my grandfather
I understood
his world
.