The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
LEROI
JONES

Works by Amiri Baraka

Poetry

Preface to a 20 Vol Suicide Note (1961)

The Dead Lecturer (1964)

Black Art (1967)

In Our Terribleness (1968)

Ifs Nation Time (1968)

Black Magic Poetry (1969)

Spirit Reach (1971)

Afrikan Revolution (1973)

Hard Facts (1976)

Selected Poetry (1979)

Reggae or Not (1981)

Fiction

Blues People (1961)

The System of Dante's Hell (1963)

Home (1965)

Black Music (1967)

Tales (1968)

A Black Value System (1970)

Raise Race Rays Raze (1971)

Selected Prose and Drama (1979)

Daggers & Javelins, Essays
74–79 (1982)

Anthologies

The Moderns (1963)

Afrikan Congress (1971)

Black Fire (1972)

Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (with Amina Baraka, 1982)

Drama

The Baptism (1964)

Dutchman (1964)

A Black Mass (1965)

Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965)

J-E-L-L-0 (1965)

The Slave (1965)

The Toilet (1965)

The Death of Malcolm X (1966)

Great Goodness of Life (1966)

Home on the Range (1966)

Madheart (1966)

Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself (1967) Police (1967)

Slave Ship (1967)

Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969)

The Sidnee Poet Heroical (pub 1980) (1970)

Junkies Are Full of Shhh (1972)

Columbia The Gem of The Ocean (1972)

S-l (1976)

The Motion of History (1977)

What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production (1979)

Money (Jazz Opera)
(1979),
Production, New York City, January
1982,
Workshop, LaMama Theater

Boy & Tarzan Appear in a Clearing (1980), Production, October 1981, New York City, Henry Street Theater

Dim'Crackr Party Convention (1980), Production, July 1980, Columbia University

AMIRI BARAKA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baraka, Imamu Amiri, 1934–

The autobiography of LeRoi Jones.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-55652-231-2

1. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, 1934- –Biography. 2. Authors, American – 20th century – Biography. 3. Revolutionists –United States –Biography. 4. Afro-Americans –

Politics and suffrage. I. Title

PS3552.A583Z463 1997

818'.5409 [B]

83-20576
CIP

The author is grateful to the following for permission to reprint material:
From THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS, words and music by William “Smokey” Robinson,
Warren Moore, and Marv Tarplin, © 1965, Jobete Music Company, Inc.
Cover photo courtesy of Frederick Ohringer

© Imamu Amiri Baraka 1984, 1986, 1997
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, without permission.

Published by Lawrence Hill Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 1-55652-231-2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my wife, Amina
who is responsible
for any
truth
in this,
or in the chapters
to come!

When Amiri Baraka's
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
was first published, by Freundlich Books in January, 1984, the publisher made substantial cuts to the text of the original manuscript. This new Lawrence Hill Books edition has reinstated all the excised material under the careful direction of the author. What you will read here is in effect the first complete edition of
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
.

The last writing of this stopped somewhere in 1974, when we had become Communists finally, Amina and I. From there, there has been a whole whirl and world of changes and contradictions, unions and struggles until we gets into 1996.

The politics is the underlying catalyst, though. And it always is in all of our lives, were we conscious of it. The fact that I became a Communist is not startling to me, as much of a stompdown cultural nationalist as I at one time was. I was sincere, but I usually always am. The abject racism and economic superexploitation, denial of rights and national oppression, and the imperialist overbeing was pressed upon me even in the eastern city of LaLa Land, “The Village.” It grew, this sense of it, as I grew, intellectually, experientially, ideologically … whatever. I had seen a pattern, social, aesthetic, and ideological, that had worked on me, among those who spose' to be the whatever of the whatitis. And that was cold funky, spaced out above the real, which got to be corny or wrong, since laying in the cloud of ain't-I-hip here in the capital of anything goes, how could the who-ain't-here be anything but not?

Then the rush that Malcolm's murder pulled the trigger on. What Malcolm was saying, what he was for me, was a trigger, a maximum weapon
of legitimate resistance to the whole bullshit of the place from its wholeass America to its corny EVillage streets. It was the same, after all, however you code it in your mind. Supremacy and Oppression and Collaboration and Double Consciousness.

The vows I made from the streets of Chicago, as a young smart-ass just got put out of Howard University that I “would learn something new every day,” till ejecting out of the error farce, to the eventual “shot out of guns” into Harlem and the Dangs and crazies there, but it was still the deep commitment I had made, not just with my intellectual self, but with everything that kept me alive and sane. That we would raise this fight to the highest intensity, we would not be slaves like this. No!

So then Newark, and the way I came, and what I wanted to do, and what I did, and my meeting Sylvia Robinson, who became my wife, Amina Baraka, and all we did together in tune or in opposition, was who I would become, certainly, but there is always the shadow that being and doing makes. The “Other,” like my mad phenomenologist friend, Peter Schwartzburg, used to say. What it all had dragging behind it, what it, my being, being and doing caused, is the question.

The question is important because everybody knows the answer … that there is a specific question, the same folk are less clear. The question that tracked me was about my other former life, everybody had a hold on it, every body, but fewer minds.

I mean all the mad speculation and rumors and total lies. Plus, remember, for all the mix-and-serve hype of the now, then, was another story. Oh, yes, it was. What amazes me is that the stories pile up behind you like cities you have escaped clutching your sanity like a naive virgin.

Certainly, as my wife is fond of saying, my writing tells much of the story. Who I was, who I wanted to become, and what became of all that. Yet it is not wholly there, and for the many who knew LeRoi Jones and his works, and even might have dug them or not, there are many fewer, as of yet, who know this Baraka chap. The bosses aim to keep it that way. Like the good doctor, DuBois, when he finally put on his Red Star and proclaimed it to the world, he understood, as he expressed it: “Now the little children will no longer know my name.” But, dig, Doc, we gonna make sure that don't last.

Anyway, as the book out and inlines, escaping from the place or places I had journeyed to and travailed in was much more difficult than I thought. Like Dr. DuBois I proclaimed it, all right, but the megatons of flying bullshit that flew back at me in return was more than I expected.

Looking back, the organizations that I had helped create were absolutely necessary. What they attempted to accomplish still must be done. And that is the real odor of Beelzebub that still won't let me rest. Through CAP, which was basically an alliance of local organizations centered nationally around the principles of Maulana Karenga's Kawaida (Swahili for tradition) doctrine. At first, armed with this nationalist fuel, we did some positive things.

It is still my contention that we were revolutionaries, albeit saddled with the weight of nationalism, which does not even serve the people. In fact, in the U.S., since White nationalism is the dominant social ideology, reactionary Black nationalism merely reinforces the segregation and discrimination of the oppressors.

I mean we were anti-imperialists, even as nationalists, which is what should be meant by the often-abused term “revolutionary nationalist.” We were fighting our national oppression as we understood it. That was manifest as “White people” to us for obvious reasons. That is the nature of the Big Bourgeois is the U.S. And indeed, the very development of imperialism divides the world into a tiny group of industrialized, mostly European nations, which feed on the rest of the nations of the world in the name of “supremacy” or progress or straight-out as money!

I was always anti-imperialist in essence; the works, the previous organizations show that. And I was not always a Black cultural nationalist. The book makes that obvious. But the fact that I had been so much a part of the liberal “integrated” Village scene, including marriage to a White woman, and a kind of growing recognition as a writer, &c., I guess created a whirlpool of tempest and shock among the people I had known in those islands of abstract intoxication, when I finally “changed up” and decided to “book.”

One thing must be understood, that all the people who benefited, or appreciated or whatever, from that Village scene were generally drugged at me for splitting—Blacks and Whites. Many have still not forgiven me! And certainly now, with the deadly plummet of the imperialist God's rock back down the mountain on Black Sisyphus's head, to try to obliterate the gains that the sixties' revolutionary democratic struggle produced, some of these same folks are guffawing in stereo that, “Hey, shit, Roy, I told you that shit wasn't happening. That you should have stayed down here with all us liberals and cryptofascists and anarchists and opportunists and got over like a big dog!”

The truth of this is that, yes, the Bigs do not want you to cry out, make known how to kill them. They understand that Black nationalism is a form
of bourgeois ideology, and that they will be able to negotiate with these darker bourgeois to keep the rest of us in our place (Dig Newark! &c.).