The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (16 page)

“I am tough,” I said. Why? Who's to say? Maybe Jimmy Ricks's heavy notes had aided me, and after him on the box, a stream of them. “Sixty Minute Man,” “Charles Brown,” or some of the Honkers. Finally, the grinning one acknowledged his grin and Pigfoot, the other one, a real sweet guy, started laughing and stuck out his hand. “You just moved around here, didn't you? I seen your sister. Man, you got a fine sister.” And that friendship lasted until I went away to college to duke with the white and the yellow.

“This is The Poet,” he said of the other guy, whose hand was also pushed out. Poet was his street name, given because he had an elaborate exaggerated way of speaking and being. And later, as my own pretensions toward poetry emerged, I thought of this Poet so natural in his outpouring it was
acknowledged as part of the scene. My own poetry was more difficult to come by because it began much less naturally.

But that transition, from outsider to through the door anyway, was accompanied by the sounds in the frozen custard store, as was every other event in our time, by the sounds. Just a few doors from my house, across the street, music came out of the Four Corners. Where the Fly and the Swift sped in and out. I could watch late nights sometimes from my window which looked right out on Belmont. (Though the window to my room looked out on the backyard and all the way to Livingston Street, where the more intimate life of The Hill would go on.)

At all the parties we went to the slow drag was the premier sound and the rhythm “fast tunes” were next. The blue or red light drug us in. And it would be so dark you had to stand in the corners for a while till you recognized somebody you knew. You had to make sure you could see, no matter how dark it was. To see who was with who and who was doing what, and whether any bad guys or gangs was in there. If it was a gang in there I'd hit the silk, especially when I went to parties alone. And I did a lot of that once I'd moved from the West Side back to The Hill and had a period when I didn't run regular with the Cavaliers or had yet hooked up with the Hillside Place dudes.

The quartets were what was happening at the parties. The Orioles was the stars and with them a host of other birds, Ravens, Flamingos, Swallows, Cardinals, etc. Larry Darnell and Wynonie Harris, one on the soft crooning side (another poet), the other shouting and driving us across the floor or up the street, had to be at your party.

Remember Ivory Joe Hunter? “When I Lost My Baby I Almost Lost My Mind.” That was the hit that night the Dukes started some shit up in North Newark and one dude got beat with a meat cleaver. But that was so pretty. “… I almost … lost … my mind.” We were rubbing and the odor and heat would go through us and we tried to press the sister for all we was worth and sometimes had to get off the floor quick cause our spirits had suddenly rose.

On Belmont Avenue, I lived right down the street, the next block, from two social centers, so to speak. One was the National Theater, a movie that showed reruns, that was truly the neighborhood movie. More conversation ran around between the audience than you could hear on the screen. But it was a good place to go to catch up on what you missed or to see the goodies once or twice more. I was a teenager now and my parents let me
go to the National fairly late Fridays and weekends or not too late other nights.

I got some note in there one night when
The Three Musketeers
was playing, the one with Gene Kelly as D'Artagnan. They find his girlfriend's bag or brooch and it has her initials “C.B.” on it, and as they handed the bag up before the camera I shouted out, “Crime Buster,” which was Dick Tracy's funny-paper crime fighters. People howled and a couple of the dudes in the neighborhood liked that. I saw a lotta people going in and out of the National.

And I guess I had started running into the Hillside Place dudes around that time. I had seen some of them earlier in a renegade boy scout troop up at Camp Mohican that counselors warned us to eschew. Some of them had been hooked up some way with this Charlton Street boy scout troop but only to go to the free summer camp.

Then I discovered, when I moved back to The Hill, that a bunch of them lived right around the corner a couple blocks away, on Hillside Place. Little Jimmy Scott lived around there too, also Babs Gonzales's family. I ran with Babs's younger brother T-Bone, who was part of the Hillside Place group. Little Jimmy was always singing around in Newark somewhere and gambling in the hallways of Hillside Place. But we all dug his “The Masquerade Is Over” and imitated him everyday, including his caved-in-chest stance and sway as he whispered his tragic blues.

But it was at the Masonic Temple that I got really involved with the Hillside Placers and we became great friends. Every Sunday night at the Masonic Temple they had a “canteen.” I guess they had got the name from the teenage canteens that were popular in the movies taken from the troop cool-out shelters, the Stage Door Canteens, the USO used to hook up or make believe they did during World War II.

The Masonic was right next door to the National, one flight up off the street. Proceeding up either of two grand curved staircases, you got to the main ballroom, where the canteen was held. The canteen was simply a dance, not too expensive, that was held every Sunday, with various groups. One dance got so wild, Lynn Hope and his turbaned screamers were on the set, that we all ran out into the street, Lynn Hope included, and disrupted traffic for a couple hours. (Vide: “The Screamers.”)

But most Sunday nights it was just a lot of black teenagers, some a trifle elderly, grindin' and dancin' fast to the sounds of that time and place. We loved Ruth Brown, and tunes like “Teardrops from My Eyes” were not only our dance favorites but emotional anthems of our lives. Dinah
Washington and the many bird quartets also thrilled us. And Larry Darnell and Wynonie Harris and Charles Brown and a young dude who called himself Mister Blues who used to sing “I'm a real young boy just sixteen years old/I'm a real young boy just sixteen years old/I need a funky black woman to satisfy my soul!”

The Honkers really turned us on when we wasn't grinding, doing the “slow drag” off Ivory Joe or Earl Bostic's beautiful sound (“Flamingo”). We would be going crazy with Big Jay McNeely when he laid out flat on the floor blowing his soul with his legs kicking. Jay had a shirt that glowed in the dark and he played with that on sometimes. Or Illinois Jacquet (his detractors called him “lotta noise racket” but they was square). Bullmoose Jackson, Lynn Hope, Hal “Corn Bread” Singer. What about Joe Liggins and his Honey Drippers? I thought “The Honey Dripper” was a perfect piece of music. I could listen to that over and over. And you had to if you lived near Spruce Street and the shoeshine parlor with the jukebox blasting out into the open air.

Johnny Otis's “Harlem Nocturne” I loved so much. I'd whistle it Saturday afternoons in anticipation of the Sunday sets. One time I sat up in the laundromat waiting for the clothes to wash and dry and whistled the whole Masonic repertory and the little pretty girl who worked there who I saw in the canteen from time to time asked me if I was a musician. I was whistling “Harlem Nocturne,” “The Honey Dripper,” “It's Too Soon to Know,” “Tear-drops from My Eyes,” etc. All those words and those sounds carried what I knew of the world, they brought me as face to face with it as I could be then.

I hear that music and not only does the image of Belmont and Spruce, the Four Corners, The Hill, come in but also names like Headlight, Bubbles, Rogie, T-Bone, Kenny, Sonny Boy, Rudy, my main men from Hillside Place. When I first went into the Canteen, it was like a minefield, you had to watch your step, like really. Somebody wanna pull a Fanon slash on you. You know, Fanon says, the oppressed, because they will not kill their oppressors, take out their suppressed violence on themselves, their brothers, every weekend we kill each other for minute affronts, while The Hill itself is a major affront.

So you had to watch out. Dudes was bashing each other for stuff like stepping on each other's shoes. “Hey, motherfucker, you stepped on my suedes, I'm a fuck you up!” Also who was going with who and who was looking at who and who danced with who or tried to rub against who. Or maybe dudes fell into disfavor with headwhippers because they was going
with someone who put said headwhipper down, little dudes going with real pretty girls that headwhippers figured was too small to go with girls looking that good. There was many reasons you could get your head beat about a girl.

But once I started hanging with K. the rest was cooled out a little. We watched folks do they thing. The heavy dancers in our group would do they number and we would cheerlead or razz lead. If they got a really nice looking girl we'd line up to get a dance after them, if it wasn't one of their special numbers. But I was as interested in looking, checking everything out, as I was in dancing. Though I would get down a few times a night.

With the brothers from Hillside Place it was not a sports thing they were into, though some could really play any sport. But they were more into a social number. Going to parties and dances and a lot of times just standing around bullshitting. We went in and out of some dark dark joints, Jim, blue light red light “rub” records on the box, and nothing but big hats all around the walls. The silhouettes was frightening. But we had strength in our collective sense. K., short and bright, who hiked people almost bad as I did. He was much like me only K. was black. R. was my walking buddy it turned out. We spent a lotta time together. He looked like Malcolm a little, red top and mariney looking skin. He stuttered when he got excited. R. and K. were the most thoughtful of the bunch. And red or not, R. was definitely black. He had two brothers who also ran with us, one older and one younger. The older one was a sweet dude but crazy as daylights. He didn't like to argue, cause he couldn't talk that well. So if you pressed him it was like pressing a button. And he was a Golden Glover, could knock dudes cold with a stroke.

We had a couple flakes too with that bunch, B. the worst. He was a straight-out hood, a headwhipper from the word whip. But he ran with us and half of the time we were with B. it was keeping him from mashing somebody. Especially at the canteen. You be grooving and doing the one step you knew or rubbin' hard up against some queen of the night and look up out of the corner of your eye they'd be a disturbance and you'd see B's mouth and teeth working usually right up in some ill-fated pilgrim's face. I'd say, “Excuse me,” like some nut I saw in the movies and bolt over there to play Ralph Bunche. K. would usually get in on that too but sometimes he would slap B. side the head and say, “You always messing up the goddam party goddammit stop messin' up the goddam party.” But only K. could do that and even when he did it I felt like I was watching that crazy blond dude in Ringling Bros that let the lions and shit jump on him.

Somebody had (a) stepped on B's shoes, (b) rubbed up against B's chick, (b) took B's chick, (d) wanted to take B's chick, (e) looked like he wanted to do any of the above. Or was just a Mickey Mouse-lookin' mf.

The canteen was our world. Sundays our day to show out, to come slidin' in in our cleanest shit. By this time I had a green Tyrolean with a feather band and a checkered swag. And I would slide in too, happy to be with my comrades, and eager to be in that world and suck it all in.

We went to dances and parties all over The Hill. And sometimes we even ventured into other wards. There were a couple of gangs, but we weren't really into the gang thing on the offensive. Ours was mostly defense and camaraderie. We loved to bullshit and put each other down. But we dug each other and felt for each other and even worried about each other. Yet it was funny when one or some of the Hillsides came up to Belmont and came upstairs to my house, it was always a tentative thing. Ours was a little apartment, maybe five rooms with hardwood floors and a porch overlooking Belmont Avenue. Right near the crossroads of the world. But the floors were waxed (my gig), there was wallpaper on the walls (my old man put it up), a piano and television. New linoleum on the kitchen floor, and doilies, cabinets with glasses and dishes. All the remains of the yellow dreams of a brown family. As modest as that was, and it was very modest, the Hillsides could be very quiet and respectable in there. They tried to be on their best behavior. While in others of the boys' homes they were subdued to a certain extent, but never with the almost icy deference I saw in my spot.

And dig this, I was still going cross town every morning to the Vatican and watching white boys and girls do their thing and was bitter and envious at the same time. Yet when I would see them at some after school dance (I would be peeking in on the way to the 9 Clifton) it would crack me up. The little bouncy shit they did and doctrinaire “Lindy Hop” took me out. Though there was a couple of dudes like Frank B. who did not bounce when they danced and who talked just like we did on The Hill. I understand he is still locked up!

I was going from my sophomore year to my junior year. I wanted to try out for football. I knew I could make the team cause the playground ball we played was at a high level. I knew I was fast enough, yet the whiteness of the team, of the experience itself, put me off. I was embarrassed because I was small that they might not even give me a tryout, and I didn't want to get embarrassed by those dudes. (Like the shoes on the desk bit!) I went out for track and cross country because I had more confidence and made
those teams. I first got a junior varsity letter in track. It was a little white “B” with blue outline with a “2” inside it and I loved it. Especially since over on The Hill people wasn't as familiar with Barringer letters and didn't know quite the significance of it. The next year when I got a varsity letter, a big “B” in cross country, it actually got less play, even though it was much bigger, because it didn't have the little gimmick “2” on it.

We were City Champs in track my last year and that was a really big thing. I had a letter jacket and could stroll all over Newark showing it off. But I got the letter jacket when I got the JV letter and that was my special dressed up everyday look. The high school athlete tip carried more note than even the old Cavalier jacket and I alternated it, according to the crowd. I also got track medals for finishing fourth in the All City Broad Jump and fourth in the Low Hurdles and I was trying to figure out a way I could wear those, but my sister made necklaces out of them and lost them (along with my college track medals) once I left Newark for college.