The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (84 page)

It was a reality less caked with the unnecessary gesture. The fantasies we stepped into had to do with our misunderstanding. As usual. The mixture of half Yorubaist, Malcolm's death-fascination Islam, bourgeois politics, black nationalism, insecurity, subjectivism, and bohemianism, still, dogged my steps. There were many of us across the country creating various weird structures. Out of the same confusion and metaphysics.

I was not as into an open metaphysics ever until going into nationalism. I could attach names and a blatant embrace of this stuff as “blackness.” The feudalism, reformism, male chauvinism, all crept in or rushed in under the rubric of nationalism. Blackness. Even the apotheosis of cultural nationalism I took on because it was the best-organized form of the abstraction “blackness.” Some kind of complex and funny Rube Goldberg machine of the mind.

Yet despite the downright absurdity of that trip it was still part of a long march to better understanding. To some more objective clarity. The Spirit House, the Committee for Unified Newark, the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, all have many elements to them that we still need. A theater—you know it; a black united front based on unity and struggle to fight for democracy and self-determination—of course, only it must be led by a real majority and not salesmen in cheap suits which they will switch backstage for the same thing in African. Not mediocre civil servants with cuffs. Not little-boy intellectuals serving a penance for almost whiting out. Not “Oriental” karate freaks, et cetera. Lying politicians. The numb, the dumb, the fantasized, the hiders from Afro-America. And something to consciously focus the blacks of this earth on their common attacker, of course. But not congealed in the mind-set of the above or atavists or baldhead killers or charisma students or pseudo-semi-soi-disant-aspirant-almost intellectuals or Negroes who believe Africa is a branch of Woolworth's (or the Chase Manhattan Bank).

Because then, for all your steps, our steps, we will be again where we are; if you will peer up from the book for a second and summarize the damage, the bodies, the broken hopes and lives, the still useless fantasists holding religious ceremonies in which black people's freedom is the drug of the set, for the ooooooo's and aaaaaaa's and jumping and twisting, with the same collection and the same ruthless preacher and his pitiful tastes.

I was a novice in search of blackness still and settled for a cultural/religious fiction that covered the reality of what we did, the real achievements, the actual accomplishments. It is safe to say that if we had known more, if we had known more that drift and drug. But that is a truth, if we had known more this city wouldn't be so hurting. Or we might be dead or in jail. Perhaps; that is something to consider as well. How much you are permitted to accomplish.

But I mean if all the jive and model-spaceship building I was into…all the…(denying the actuality of a life is what this is, I suppose) I'm just speculating that perhaps the fat Negro bureaucrat that squats upon our heads in this town, belching, would not be there. Because, yes, it's true. I was the drum major for that particular drum head. But, look, life is not over. The world is still here. There are still things that can be done. And I swear I do understand the world better. We will find out just how well. In words and deeds yet to be written and realitied out.

But even in that thralldom, that dumb thrall, we built some actual things, we laid out a process of learning. For the close readers. We did step through
madness and bullshit. But we were not just full-of-shit tourists. We did take the city away from the lowest level, and if the next level is sickening, the task is of a higher order, and its solution is the current day's work. Are we up to it, anyone, anywhere? Of course, is the roared refrain.

That is, for all the fantasy flags and subjective flying. Stopped lives and wasted motion. I think many of us, boys and girls who grew to men and women, did come away with something of value. And when a better evaluation is given they will find something of value too.

Even now, for all those who think that “Baraka the Marxist” is just the title of a new play, the latest of the lad's interesting gambols, they must admit to movement. For myself I think that struggle and defeat finally are useful if our heads are harder, our grasp of reality firmer. I think they are.

And yet again, the clear-headed will see the striking gain I've made since I did find a woman, in the real world, whose life was connected up with mine and mine with hers before we knew anything about each other. I was going to the Bethany Baptist Church right around the corner from where Sylvia grew up. I crossed that Howard Street, back and forth Saturdays going downtown from Belmont. Or as a grocery-carrying teenager, snaking back and forth in snow and sunshine. A few years, a few blocks, away. It was just that I had to grow in a certain way, fill out in a certain way, to be where I was supposed to be at the appointed time. Because I never did know anything about love, because I was never really ready to come out of my head long enough to relate to someone else. To be in the world with another person, listening to them, touching them, holding them, making a life together with them. For all the missteps and beatings, the lies and betrayals, that was, to me, and for us, I think, a reward. We, Sylvia, now Amina, and I, can curse many things. Drains, walls, frustrations, hatreds, the normal and abnormal disappointment of developing love. Plus, there is no way that anyone can overestimate my own capacity to disappoint, to hurt, to drive away. Yet we two have been on a journey together now some sixteen years. And that in itself is the subject of another, much better book. But suffice it to say, she has been in that rush of life, she has felt that pain, she has often lamented being tied to someone whose life at times seems an abstraction. And yes, for those only recently come to consciousness about women's oppression, and who have even got some notoriety for putting down black women who were involved in struggle during the '60s because they supposedly did not know about male chauvinism, such nonsense is cruel and stupid beyond belief. And one day that story will be told from some of those women's mouths how they had to stand up under the incredible
and bizarre neo-feudalist yoke of cultural nationalism. How they fought it for every inch. How they improvised and sidestepped and even threw real pots and pans to try to get free of their master the slave.

Because, fundamentally, there is no one I have ever been as close to as my wife. Not just because of that title, or that social expectation, but because we went to the university of false blackness together, even while, and at the same time, doing some real things, some important things, and most of all, even while learning some critical things about ourselves and the world.

Each one of those children is like some living loving signpost of our own journey, its defeats and its victories. While we struggled in that university of the “half world” in the world, and finally one day graduated. And also, because at each twist and turn of the world, being thrown forward and sometimes backward in ourselves and on the real sidewalks, both of us knew even more about the other, and had to understand, fight, accept what that was, and for all of it grew closer. To me, sometimes I wonder how you can really be in love with someone without such knowledge. Because at each increment, at each turn and twist, there was a drawing closer, a redefined heart, a reunderstood touch or gesture. So that we could say I knew you and loved you when you was stone crazy. I like you much better now. That is the essence of it, that as you grow you also grow more in love. Because it is a ripening—sometimes you could pity the folks who miss it and many do—that all the various stages and faces we go through, there is a time, a period, when you can become your whole self, and have another whole self with you, who would be your choice of someone to be with even before, if you were conscious. And by the time that happens, your own consciousness, you can look up and there is, indeed, someone there, who's been there and growing with you, who knows all your bullshit ways and still has made those many moves, who says, “OK, what now?” Those are both your voices at the same time!

And so the trip through metaphysical nationalism, the breakup of that camp. The conflicts with madmen and murderers, the most recent motion to Marxism. All were part of a joint journey which, meanwhile and at the same time, was most times hidden from the world, because the owners of it prefer it that way. Amina and I were raising a family, strong, beautiful, brilliant children who will be a match for all this shit, mark my words. At the same time their parents wrestled with a more primitive world.

So in comparing and measuring, in summing up, all the roads I've traveled have been the preparation, as hopefully, this present period is more
preparation. And in conversation many nights and afternoons or mornings, Amina and I run through the many changes and preparations we've been through, even while dealing with the scabs and scarecrows, the monsters and senseless things of the present, we recall all that past we've been through, our disguises and apprenticeships. How we loved movies and music and black people. And how, even as the Marxists we both are, listening intently to our children's growing songs and pains, we are relieved that we grew up to be even this close to ourselves. Unconscious, whited out, blacked out, out in space, African clothes world, corridor of uneventful aftermath supposed to take you out, after you miss the slam dunk which would have ended the game, as Champion. (And I do know that Mao said that five hundred years from now, most of what we say will seem like children's singing!) But when you can look up and see some sophisticated black woman, beautiful even in her forties, brown skin, close curly hair, leg crossed perhaps, sipping something, in discussion with you or someone, anyone, about the world, and about how that world needs changing, yes it does, be it a jazz solo or a figure of dance or the workers climbing up the back of the world to reconstruct it all so the future will indeed be the future. You know then your path has not been just bullshit. Just because you had to read every book on the
New York Times Book Review
best-seller list, you didn't know any better. Just because you had to be a white intellectual then a black nationalist even though you always had the hole card on that class struggle, and its yellow brown and blue black contrasts that spell out a world in this time and this place. And even though you left New York, runned away, and built a paper house of nigger mediocre domestic Mobutus as the postdoctoral study for the black masses, and yourself—the fact of Amina is herself confirmation that I have not been all the way crazy, not all the way full of shit. The fact of my lovely brown wife who is tuned in as she is herself to what seems important to both of us, and a tall boy with drumsticks and quoting Dr. J.'s ballet, and a big-eyed one wants to be a leader as he plays trumpet and reads the book of practical cats, and a tiny teeny little girl thing with her cat Sojourner Mooty-Toot who wants to play the violin and hates nasty stuff, or the round-headed big-eyed boy who rises at seven each morning to go through his papers and stare out the window or sing little songs hoping to wake everybody else up, or the little bad dude from outer space, the professional pest, who knows already he wants to be a painter and who walked through the Metropolitan Museum grading them dudes, all this, and our big red house, and our collective strength and beauty and our collective intelligence and the fact, dig this,
that we are still very young!!!! That lets me know that I wasn't all the way crazy, not just bullshit mad. And even when they attack me, these agents of slowness and primitivism. Even while they try to hide pictures of me smiling or word that I am alive and well and still not crazy or pessimistic. Or hide the reality of my marriage or the identity of my wife and still publish books by catatonics trying to prove the world of catatonia is the only real world, and you was a fool to leave it, big boy. I can get happy, in spite of the frustration and racism, and attempts to kill us all. Even while they try to make it seem I am a wife beater and madman and stopped writing or stopped breathing, I can get happy anyway, like my laughter is bullets and bombs, my joy a poison gas to the haters of democracy, because despite all that, I have already survived, living not completely quietly, in fact still full of animation and almost endless energy. Still very much on the case of the place trying to turn it around and unwilling to accept no for an answer. Then that is the sharp laughter in me you hear. That runs through all of this telling despite the bad situations and backups, the stupid contexts I looked up to find myself in. The misunderstanding and mistakes. That is what you feel and hear. That I am still alive and in the company of the people I love most in the world.

So if you see us anytime, Amina and me, somewhere, myself like I look and this tall beautiful woman, maybe we are in the lobby of a theater looking at each other and laughing about something. It might just be something in the past we are laughing at, some fool or narrow escape, some sudden revelation of beauty. Understand, we are in tune with the majority, of all languages and nationalities, no matter we might look like Nick and Nora Charles in brown to some or Zora Neale and Langston to others or like a brown boy and brown girl, well dressed and sophisticated, given to irony and sudden passion, lovers of poetry and music. Make no mistake, we are serious about our lives and about our destiny, and the lives of our people and indeed of the majority of people. I guess this is what makes us dangerous, we will not die around some bullshit tip. We will not be taken out easily. In fact, we are still growing, getting stronger and more knowledgeable, and just when you get used to that, hesitate a moment and you will see a crowd of little ones surround us. That's right, they are listening for instructions, some of which they will follow, some of which they won't. They are worse than we are. And we think
we
can win!

Consider the rightness and strength of that, the easy effortless beauty. We are alive! Alive and conscious and in love! It has taken some years to reach that state of clarity and feeling. And this is but partial evidence.