The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (10 page)

Actually not much went on, there was much scrambling and twisting. Some blows got struck, none decisive. I think before it went too far both sides had somehow intervened. Perhaps neither the Baxter Terraces nor we Central Avenues wanted this conflict to go full up. It would have been too damaging. There was such fire in the preliminaries, and the feeling that this was it. That an Armageddon lurked in this conflict for us. Perhaps the world would blow up or split into pieces.

But for all that playground diplomacy, that tiff was deep. I know I kept some tension and distance with regards to Baxter Terrace after that, though I certainly had friends, even a couple girlfriends, over there. But the feeling that the place and the people were
other
remained. And when we played their teams baseball or basketball that tension and resentment always partially surfaced.

So despite our various lives somehow there was a collective passion, a collective life, generated by our presence together on those streets, in that playground, and in that school. A collective description of us (whatever it was) that we had internalized. There were no real gangs at my age group (turning thirteen) but under that generalized dome of our youth there were indeed factions that could be mobilized more tightly by some threatened hostility. And that existed as a loose collage of sees and dos.

I did belong to a basketball team, actually it was an ASC (Athletic Social Club) — most of the clubs and teams were termed such. Ours was the Cavaliers. This was junior high and early high school, when we were tightest. Really from late grammar school to middle high school, I guess. We won trophies in the junior league inside Central Avenue (which was an elementary school). Some of us had been in school together for some time. There was Love, Hines, Johnny Boy, Snooky, Skippy, Barry, J.D., and me at one time. Later, Johnny Boy, Skippy, and J.D. dropped out and Bob and Earl Early came in, then Leon and Dick plus Sess and Ray and toward the end even big Sleepy, who coulda been a pro. We gave a couple dances through the years. When we got into high school we gave a few sets at Club Harold and made a little money. (Also most of us were on a baseball
team called the Newark Cubs and with our country manager with big ideas we thought we were semipro and still in high school.)

But we could play ball and we had a good reputation, as ballplayers. We never came on like fighters. We were ballplayers and a couple dudes thought they was lovers.

We got our name from a group of older boys, also athletes, that we admired, called the Caballeros. And we picked out Cavaliers because it sounded like Caballeros, and now I know it's the same word. And that was our sense of ourselves, Knights, gentlemen of a certain kind. Later we even got some way-out jackets — red, white, and blue — reversible jackets with a white satin side and a blue wool side, both with the head of a Cavalier, slightly cross-eyed and staring off into space. I wanted hoods on the jacket, but that was voted down in some strange manner I have never been able to fathom. I thought we had decided to get hoods but when we got to the store that Saturday afternoon after we had paid all our money and the guy brought out the jackets, there were no hoods. I said, “Where's the hoods?” And everybody laughed. I was embarrassed and dropped the subject, but I never understood what happened to the hoods. But probably somebody undermined that idea behind my back.

I treasured that jacket, and would probably wear it today if it didn't get lost or stolen. I spilt ink on the satin side (which I am still doing today). But otherwise, until I got deep into high school and got a letter jacket, my Cavalier jacket was me in my high street style.

Basketball was our maximum game. In elementary school I was number 6 man, in junior high I got moved down, by high school I was about 8, definitely not a starter. But I almost never minded because we had a great team within our limitations (which we occasionally were well exposed to) and a great street rep that made you strut just to be a Cavalier, Jim. I was a playmaker, a guard, me and Barry would bring the ball down and set up the plays. I was never a great shooter, but I could move the ball and connect with those passes. I got big off assists. But if I got matched with a small man I would go into my scoring act — such as it was.

Sometimes, in those games, in those various leagues we played in, even in some neighboring towns, as we got older, there was some element of violence, like we thought we might have to fight. And we would if pressed but we was, like gentlemen, athletes and lovers, not no head beaters.

We'd even tease each other after such encounters about how we knew we was going to fade. Especially we'd get on Love, everybody always teased him, because he was such a great player but so totally unsophisticated and
country-like off the court. We'd say, “Love's ass was already down the street when this other dude was looking to fight. He'd have to be Rocket Man to catch Love's ass.” But, in reality, we would do whatever the moment called for but we never fancied ourselves pugs.

I had the most mouth on the court. Constantly talking to the other team, harassing them, face-guarding them, stealing the ball. I guess to make up for my light shot. And that could stir up the other team where they wanted to “kick that little nigger's ass” but that never happened. Once we did get run out of this “country” town just west of Newark called Vaux Hall. We played baseball up there in what looked like a cow pasture. And we always had stories about the Negroes in Vaux Hall. But one night we played basketball up there and at the end of the game, because of some kind of encounter, we had to motor on down Springfield Avenue for several blocks until we got out of harm's way. We blamed that on Love, too.

The focus of that club changed as we got older. Love and Hines, who were best friends, both went on to Central High School, and they were the emotional and spiritual center of our group, especially as an athletic team. And they began to gather dudes from Central High onto the squad. There was a heavy social underpinning to the club/team and when we were all in Central Avenue that was the focus. I went off to McKinley Junior High and later Barringer, which was almost all Italian, so I couldn't bring too many onto the squad or into the social circle that formed the basis for our team. So my influence, such as it was, lessened. Though Sess, who was a high school star, did come in from Barringer and he brought Ray, who went to South Side (now Malcolm X Shabazz), because they lived in the same project on Waverly Avenue cross town. Later I moved back cross town, onto The Hill again, around my junior year in high school, so Sess and Ray and I got tight. But Leon, Bobby, Earl, Dick, Barry (plus Love, Hines, and Snooky) were all Central High dudes, so that was the social and athletic center of the team when we were in our early high school days.

From time to time I see some of the old Cavaliers, and there is still that bond of fondness held high by memory. I know now that the club/team was a mixture of the lower middle class and the workers (and a couple of peasants turned workers just a couple minutes ago). But by high school the winnowing process had seriously begun. Central was a technical and commercial high school, Barringer supposedly college prep. And we had a couple dudes from West Side and South Side (a mixture of both, plus business) and so we got sprayed out into auto plants, utilities, electronic
tube factories, mechanics, white-collar paper shuffling, teachers, small businessmen, security guards, commercial artists, and even a goddam poet.

For us, athletics was art, a high expression of culture. And as athletes the only expression of that, within the other framework of society, was as cool, dignified, profilin' dudes, self-sustaining and collective, but individually distinctive. That was at our best. At our worst, wow, we would mess with people. Especially egged on by one dude Love and Hines hooked up with later. Although we was all mischievous and even at times, from the narrow perch of that limited collectivity, somewhat arbitrary and cruel. I mean sometimes we would tap old dudes on the shoulder walking down the street, or say out of the way things to women minding their business, or flip somebody's hat off they head, and shoot up the street laughing. We were great agitators. And mostly we agitated among ourselves. We would throw each other's hats and bags, flip each other's sneakers and run off with them. Talk about each other like dogs and about each other's mamas even worse. But we were comrades most of us — as it went on, some gaps grew in that fabric, because of the different social situations we got into, but at its strongest it was something to be treasured and now looked back at with great feeling.

By high school I'd gotten into several different sectors of community or social life that complicated my life somewhat, even more than I knew. But that was a constant in my life I recognized, change. And though sometimes it saddened me and I regretted it, I saw after a while that that was what was happening.

So there was a mist-life while very young on Barclay Street in the Douglass-Harrison apartments (And I always, for a long time, dug those small red buildings and park in the back with green slat benches. And even the people that seemed to live there. Sometimes I longed for those people, in some not totally explained to me way), but we had to cut out. And then Boston Street, two sites, one near South Orange Avenue and then for a minute in my grandparents' house up the street, near West Market. (I had a late-night knee operation in the last house. Under oil lamps my knee formed a silhouette against the greenish wall and a baldhead doctor with a red wig — a blood with red freckles — meticulously picked the glass out of my messed up knee while the family stood in one corner and watched.) That was right down the street from my grandfather's store which had closed in the Depression, though the tale persisted in our family that it was because my grandfather gave out too much credit — it was implied — to ungrateful
niggers. Which meant simply that that is the myth they wanted to invest their lives with, not understanding the actual political economy of this United Snakes. And how depression always kills off the petty and small bourgeoisie rat away!

But the bias of that description is to put down both Tom Russ and black people, but not the ugly thang that actual did de damage! And so the twist you inherit of seeing from who teaches you to see. I guess I carried the obvious putdown, of the bloods, on the top, cause that is what was most directly given. I carried less consciously the putdown of Tom which could then come full out when he was stricken and sat dying staring off into space. But the whole I came only much later to see and only now to sum up.

From there we went to Dey Street and the orange-red casa of my coming to little-boy consciousness. That was the center of my little-boy life. Central Avenue School, the playground, the evening recreation program we called “the Court” for some reason, The Secret Seven, wild fights, my athletic training, the Cavaliers, some of the remembered paths and lessons and teachers of whatever style, and even my first full-up meeting with white folks, though on my turf.

There was some other heavy stuff I found out and got into in them Dey Street days, a little romance, the church, and the Newark Eagles, and they need to be talked about. Why? Because they had something to do with it — the shaping, the answering — of the question How did you get to be you?

For one thing, the whites, almost all Italians and a few Irish and a German or two around somewhere, were definitely at the fringe, as I said before, of most of the Dey Street world. Not that they were sealed off by us in any way. It was just how we related, the deep cultural connects and the invisible and not so invisible antecedents in all directions even then. And our West Ward thrust was some kind of frontier. We were aware that a few blocks away the world changed and Italians lived in growing numbers.

And though they were on the fringe of the Dey Street life there were some distinct and concrete effects of their existence among us, and out beyond us. A couple of them could play ball, like Augie D., for instance, but we thought in the main their game was baseball. As little boys we played mixed teams, but at another point the teams were mostly black, and then you could get a black vs. white game, which was still not much until we got older and it began to reflect and take on the tension of the whole society.

By the time we were teenagers we were playing all-white baseball teams and those games were for something other than little-boy note. The baseball team we put together always talked about playing the white teams for cases of beer, but most of us were teetotalers and that didn't mean much to us.

Then there was the weird situation in which we actually by time of seventh grade or so began to take certain liberties with the white girls that we did not would not had better not take with the black ones. Like a couple big ol' (for seventh grade) white girls I knew, we would “feel up” in the cloakroom. (I remember a couple of names but will graciously refrain.) It never dawned on me to delve into why, or maybe it did and I couldn't. But we certainly liked quite a few of the little black girls we went to school with but we would no more think of feeling any of them except certain rogues I'm told did feel on certain of the wilder-repped sisters and that would cause a small shooting war in most cases. Maybe the other cases where that meant something else were kept from me young gourd by the benevolent moralists of me age. But some dudes later as we got into junior high would brag about women. What they did. But none of that was too clear to me anyway. That was real mystery. And there were a couple of these white girls who'd giggle and push you away, like they dug it. My god, what would they Italian fathers and brothers have said at seeing that. Wow, it makes me shudder even now.

And Augie was the first in the neighborhood I knew about to get a TV. (I remember clear as a bell when we got our first telephone — on Dey Street. MI2-5921. Our first electric refrigerator — a Kelvinator, and we called it that, exchanging the brand name for the genre. We had to put quarters in it to keep it going. We didn't get our first TV until I was about thirteen or fourteen, one year I came back from summer boy scout camp and walked into the house and there was a 14-inch Motorola, later we got a 17-inch, we never had a really big screen when it was hip to brag about that.) But we would, some of us, pile up in Augie's house to watch the TV. Augie's father was some kind of worker, a medium-sized guy with black hair grey at the edges. He never said much, just nodded to us. I wonder what he thought about the crowd of colored kids that would push in there to watch that early tube.