The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (13 page)

V., my other walking buddy, was also completely uncoordinated and a silent (though super-opinionated, egoistic, and talky with us) shy lonertype figure. He had a potbelly and looked middle-aged at sixteen and thought about smoking a pipe. V. fancied himself an intellectual and he was. But that was his defense against the mainstream life of Barringer. That he was other because his head was somewhere else.

He was Italian but totally disconnected from the Italian life of that place. Plus he wanted to be a writer and it was with V. that I first exchanged young vague ideas about writing. V. had read some books. He liked
The Red Badge of Courage
(I think because he lived in a place named after Stephen Crane) and he wrote short stories and poems like Crane's.

J., I think because of V.'s influence, later began to say that he wanted to be a sportswriter. All three of us went to a writing class in Barringer our senior year given by a hard-faced unsmiling teacher named Miss Stewart (but she turned out to be a caring human being).

So in my homeroom I swung with two bloods and in my other classes with two white intellectuals. Maybe all three of us were and came on like intellectuals. I know I didn't feel like no goddam intellectual. I just felt drugged being isolated and alienated and surrounded by such bullshit in white Barringer.

Swinging down off that 9 Clifton, on the other side, at the Four Corners, I faced an entirely different reality. On the corner a liquor store (still there), the Foxes, and next to that, coming toward my house, a black frozen custard and hot dog place; next was a black cleaner's, a Polish tin-smith, a house, then our house, 154 Belmont Avenue. On the top floor, the Joneses and Russes, and on the second floor, Dr. Bell, a young black dentist who had just got out of school. (He lived there a hot minute but this was his office mostly. He was also the building's landlord.) On the first floor, a Polish oil stove place run by this Polish man and woman who must have been a hundred.

When we got to Belmont there were still a few Poles there, mostly stores. And you could get some good kielbasy — Polish sausage. And down the street in the other direction there was still a good sprinkling of Jews, probably Polish, too. But the Poles lived mostly in that one block between Spruce and 17th Avenue. The remains of a larger community, just as was the sprinkling of Jews, but centered by a huge church, which is still there, for the Polish Catholics. I went to boy scout camp with some of the Polish kids because even though most of them had moved out of Newark their troop was located at St. Stanislaus on Belmont Avenue and so they belonged to the Robert Treat Council, which covered Newark. One of the funniest dudes from that Polish troop who regularly used to crack us up at camp was Sigmund Pilch, who was like a nonstop wisecracking slapstick artist, who I never saw once we came back into Newark after camp.

Across the street, on the corner, was the Four Kegs, where you could stand outside and peep into and see the highlife going on thick and fast on
the weekends but happening at top speed any night. And down Spruce Street the straight-out ghetto, which I still had to investigate with my teenage legs and eyes and ears. And that came in on time. But early in my Barringer days and the horrible incarceration at McKinley I was stretched out like some despairing quiet animal not even sure what was wrong. But I knew.

I grew up on one side of town and part of my head was shaped by that ice and alienation, that hostility and silence in the face of adversity. And I grew up on the other side of town too and that is something else.

I was run home a few times from Barringer by the warring white boys. Tricked and insulted any number of times. Looked at funny by teachers (one of whom now in black Newark is trying to grin and skin his way past that old arrogance — whoa!). I looked at the white girls and their boyfriends and tried to see through the wall of our separation at what that would be like. But I never went with a white girl in high school (shit, that couldn't happen in Barringer). But I didn't go with any black girl either who went to the school. I just looked and fantasized about all of 'em.

The awards and the honors, the straight-out teenage joys, the simple concern, was never mine and I thought that I existed in that place in a separate piece of space where I thought my thoughts and had my resentments. And I openly did not like it. That separation and white-out. I did not like it. And it did not like me. I think it did something to me too. Like how could some nonstop sardonic-mouthed joker and quick-start artist like me be banned to an island of noninterest and overlook and uncomprehending babble. Perhaps I lusted after the life of the real inhabitants of that place. In my weakest moments I must have. But most of the time I was just passing through, even as words were coming out of my mouth or doing whatever I was doing. I was not wholly there, I felt, but the part of me that was, suffered.

These are some basic colors of my life, in my life. A kind of personal, yet fairly objective class analysis that corresponds (check it) to some real shit out in the streets in these houses and in some people's heads.

Belmont and Spruce was a corner in (of) black life. The people moving back and forth on Belmont, Livingston, 18th Avenue, and down the street on Broome and Prince and Morton and Charlton, or up the street on Waverly or round the corner on Hillside Place or over on West Kinney. That was black life full and open, bent under its history, yet that bend sometimes would seem like blue streamlining — hey, especially on the weekend with everything in front of you but absolute reality.

I had come back from the West, which was black life too, but on The Hill a different kind of thing went down. Like on Newark Street, yeh, but The Hill was more open and spread out, blacker in its spread and magnitude. The blues was our black footsteps, our basic reality, the ideological material of our lives. The mashed down flat social geography of the African American community put all kinds of dents and strokes and twists and turns in that black and blue base. There was the fundamental horizontal quality of an oppressed nationality — yet we were not all completely at the same level of being bent. Some of us did have more money, and in those
days before the suburbs opened up for blacks to a certain extent, almost all of us were piled along in one place or another within the same general community though sections of it were better than others.

There were people who lived in East Orange, even Orange and Montclair. And we did look at them different — though they were part of a basic
yellow
reality, that had some presence in official white world as black, but that was meaningless to us in our day-to-day lives.

The black was fundamental black life, the life of blues people, the real and the solid and the strong and the beautiful. But I developed these understandings as I went. And The Hill was the laboratory in which they developed.

The brown was my family and me, half real and half lodged in dream and shadow. The connected to reality by emotion (and logic). The walking through the streets and ambushes of that harshest reality unscathed except psychologically. The house with hidden insides and unknown wild projections. Not us exclusively, but personally, from my inside looking out, in those days.

The yellow, the artificial, the well-to-do, the middle class really. Described by a term like petty bourgeoisie with steel precision, but something else of caste was what my definition came to mean even without me understanding or saying that. The high-up over the streets avoiding disaster by several hundred thousand feet and some straight hair.

The browns had to weave in betwixt and between the harshest disasters, getting cut in the street, locked up by police, living in places with smelly halls, having hair “standing all over your head,” being “Blue” (a nickname) or “Liverlips” or having a drunk father or mother or a falling-down house, or a tiny apartment decorated with rotogravure covers. Or failing in school, being left back, put back for being from the South, dropping out to go to work, having parents that couldn't speak “good English.” Browns barely escaped all this and actually had to be tested by yellows and whites or yellow and white “reality” to see if they passed.

Because the black was also the damned, the left behind, the left out, the disregarded, the abandoned, the drunk and disorderly, the babbling and the staggering, the put down and the laughed at, the heir of the harshest of lives I could see.

But the brown, while caught between the black and the yellow, did not, in spite of themselves, like the yellow. They hated it, them, even worse than white, even worse than white folks (normally) because white folks didn't exist with the same day-to-day common reality. The yellow would
be around bugging you, having a haircut neatly parted with well-greased legs and knees. The yellow would be sitting with new moccasins and striped tee shirts and newly creased shorts. They would be laughing and having always good exclusive times, usually at your expense, even if it didn't have nothing to do with you.

Brown sensitive to this even unable to speak of it, sensitive to it watching it. Touched by both streams of life and consciousness yet being its own being shaped by both and the white other. I mean I could come out of my brown house (no matter its color) into the streets and be facing a black reality. A blue shimmer pushing off the streets and twisting round the corner catching me, caressing me, and being a background for everything, the motion behind the motion which is itself's full dimension.

Or you could come out of your house (be brought out by your brown (and yellow) mama) and find yourself at the Y being laughed at by the yellow for having your hair cut close or being brown or not having a mother who was a “fashion model.”

Or you could come running out of your brown (and orange) crib and head for the Court and dash smack into the lovely brown E., whose long curly hair like a blood version of Shirley Temple and old man who sang on television (with
Your Show of Shows
) made them remote and yellow despite your secret protests of love and fantasies and stopped phone calls (“She's not here. Don't call here anymore!”), despite the fact they lived in Baxter Terrace, where, hey, some straight-out black was obviously lodged and a corresponding brown you would have sworn prepared them to love you.

(That was a long “alas” of my young life, one of the pitiful unrequiteds youth seems filled with.)

You'd sit looking at a yearbook of your mom's Tuskegee Normal High School days or of those slim tiny Woco Pep Fisk days (stopped by your appearance) and wander outside dead into a drunk man with wine-red lips threatening you with his existence.

Saturday afternoons the whole of The Hill was music. Up top the blues, all kinds, country and city, guitars and saxophones, screamers and moaners. I dug the Ravens, the Orioles, Amos Milburn, Dinah Washington, Little Esther, Ruth Brown was our heartbeat, Larry Darnell, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, Earl Bostic, Tab Smith. It was everywhere everywhere in that space, in the air, on the walls, in the halls, in the laundromats, whistled and sung and stomped to. It colored the vacant lots where barbecue was being perfected, it zoomed out of the bars and lit up our mouths,
it bluesed us along through those grey streets and carried the message and feeling of black life.

'Cause Newark was iron grey for me then and it is still but now ripped apart by piled-up despair. But in those days grey and steel were its thrusts into me, its dominant unwavering tone. And the strongest, the deepest, the basic construction element of its design was the black of its bottom of the lives whose majority it held and spoke for. Such an ugly place, so hard so unyielding it seemed — grey industrial city. But black life made it blue. Its beating heart was blue therefore rooted in black life and its streets strummed my head like a guitar.

Inside our house my sister and I were readied for brown stars that flickered in the yellow logic of my mother's prose like white twinkling distance we'd cover as easily as an amendment is written in the constitution. “Guaranteeing” you something you could only be guaranteed with power. Readied you in brown for white to be yellow. Is that the exact psychology of such beings as what was meing? Yet outside under the invisible white tarpaulin of held-down obstructed life called oppression there was black life and it was strongest everyday where we lived. And no matter the brown inside game plan your mama hammered out with piano lessons, drum lessons, art lessons, singing and dancing in summer school and at the Y in choruses of yellow and brown folks. Or ballet and tap lessons for my sister and pink toe shoes and boubous or our trips down South where we lived out in the suburbs of Columbia, S.C., between two rich yellow doctors (one housed my maximum passion of that time) — when you came out that house it was black people whose lives spelled out the direction and tenor of our day-to-day being.

The brown was like a reserve, an exit or quick passage to somewhere else. You look up you could be getting a scholarship somewhere or shaking Joe Louis's and Sandy Saddler's hand or being introduced by Willie Bryant as a bright Negro child, or reciting the Gettysburg Address in a boy scout suit down at the Old First Church, where George Washington was and most black people wasn't.

But I ran the streets and walked the streets everyday hooked up to black life. And it builded, however, despite the cold white shot of my daily Barringer trip that taught me to lust after abstract white life abstractly. Really, to be concerned with it in some abstract yet intimate way. While even as I moved, Larry Darnell would light up my insides and I could walk down the halls of that cold-ass place and be reciting with cool solemnity his blue tragic ballad:

You're right Up on top now
You want To be free
Why you're Afraid to be seen
With somebody like me
You're afraid to present me
To the friends of your set
Oh well, I guess
We'll forgive and forget
.

But you come back from white Barringer, bam, it was blues and black people everywhere I see. And that church my mother and grandmother took us to was classic in that regard. It was a yellow church, a yellow folks' church. In fact someone told me that they used to sing, “Only the yellow, only the yellow, will see God.” Some blunt agitprop.