The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (20 page)

I began to go to a store on Raymond Boulevard. A kind of English store the likes of which are found no more in Newark, obviously, but maybe still exist in some of these wealthy Connecticut or New York towns. With saddles and riding boots and crops for decoration, cloth laid about. Very traditional and English and it impressed the hell out of me. That was a new world, too. And the clothes now I began to buy out of that mold. The English conservative clothes that the Ivy tradition is the natural extension of. I guess what was called Ivy League was the commercial surface of the older English and Eastern school tradition.

The son of the owner was there every day and I would stare in awe at his oxford flannel pants and red belts and plain-toed shoes and button-down blue shirts and paisley ties. I would stare around the store in amazement at the very hip clothes. Some I'd only heard described that now I saw.

It was part of the
coolness
the music conveyed to me. And it was a vector from black and blues with veins, tributaries going all directions. We were cool because we were not “country,” not first generation. We'd been up here and dug what it was and we could sound like we had been up here and knew what was going on. The hot quality of R&B we dug, but we translated that into
frantic
I guess because that described us to ourselves and what we sounded like.
Frantic
. In sharp endless motion. But even frantic was cool in the blues sense. Because weird, frantic, hip, cool all meant to be
other
than that which was everywhere perceived deadly in its dead-end of day-to-day horrible American reality. The life of America that it talked about in the movies and on the radio was one thing, there was some imagination and vision, some honesty in that, but that was not American life. The dead end of American life meant that you could go
nowhere
. It was nowhere. It was not sharp (what the Egyptians called the “Angle of Success”), it was blunted, going nowhere,
square
. What the Egyptians called
the “Angle of Failure.” And we perceived most of these things only semiconsciously.

Our cool, which went hand in hand with bop (not the later commercial definition), meant other than regular America — we were not in gangs, we were not loud and unruly, we did not want to get sweaty and still be frustrated (when just a minute ago we were sweaty as we could get under Lynn Hope and Big Jay McNeely). We still might go up to parties and dance to Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” and that was in us, but even in those sanctums we was cool, we moved through those blue lights under those red lights trying to sidestep the ugliest parts of our American ghetto reality.

We did not want to be beat up by headwhippers or have our hats blocked by the Dukes or Geeks. We did not want to get some little girl “jail bait” pregnant and end up tied to our mutual frustration; we did not want to fail school or get thrown out or have to go get a job and just work. We did not want to be from the South or be so poor people felt sorry for us or talked bad about us. Where I was comin' from, the brown side, we just wanted to keep steppin'. The black had shaped us, the yellow had taunted us, the white had terrified and alienated us. And cool meant, to us, to be silent in the face of all that, silent yet knowing. It meant knowledge. It meant being smart, intelligent too. So we hooked up the weirdness and the intelligence. Dizzy's hornrim bebop glasses, the artist's tam, these spelled some inner deepness to us. It was a way into ourselves further, and sometimes because we went into ourselves, we seemed quiet on the street.

But throughout my life, our lives, there is music. And for me our attachment to it is one deep definition of who we are and where we think we're going. Bop was deep in its connections, its frantic side its cool side. Flame itself has different colors. The old blues, spirituals, quartets, and rhythm and blues, the jazz and bebop plus the multicolored pop, the identifiable American flying object — like Martin Block or movie and stage music (I could even speak to what we called “hillbilly” when I got in the air force and collective ignorance — my own included — was used to torture me). All this and there is a
beyond
we already know about, from here, all this has made its mark, is shaping and has shaped a world and complex interconnections within that world. They cannot be exclusive, yet we are “hung on a line” (as Chas. Olson said), somewhere or everywhere these collectively or singly or however we perceive them, are located. We know people by what moves them, what they use as background sounds for their lives,
whatever they seem to be. We are talking about feeling and thought, emotion, aesthetics, and philosophy (and science). We will investigate all of them to one extent or another.

I got a couple of scholarship offers through the cotillion. One was a four-year scholarship to Seton Hall, something else to Holy Cross, and a two-year scholarship to Rutgers Newark. I also got an offer, as a result of a test I took at the Y, for a two-year scholarship to Lincoln. A couple of these offers were even in the colored papers.

I decided I didn't want to go to Seton Hall (or Holy Cross) because I wasn't interested in religion. (Though, for some reason, much later I was to tell people that I once wanted to study religion!?) But I had the good sense then at least to nix the religious aggression. Some of the people I'd met at cotillion practice did accept those holy assignations. A doctor, a politician, a schoolteacher were the result and perhaps the conversion of a girl I knew's brother to become a priest, a few years later.

I suppose the cotillion was some preparation for me going to college. Those were the people that made me focus on that more than I ever had before. The cotillion hookup was brown children for the most part (with both black and yellow connections) being readied for yellow farm. The underlying animation was definitely yellow with the necessary white blessing. Not just Mrs. B., who ran the thing, she was a light-skinned social
worker-teacher, a frantic do-gooder who sped around rooms almost tearing her hair she so much wanted all of us to be somebody.

There was a dullness to these proceedings that stunned me and made it obvious to me that whatever this represented I wanted no part of it. We practiced waltzing and marching. And kids from Morton Street would be looking through the windows, under the shades, and sometimes banging on the windows. And after practice we went home in groups and I ended up walking with one group all the way into Clinton Hill, where blacks were beginning to move now in large numbers.

My partner in the practice was a slightly plumpish, oddly taciturn brown girl named Betty, who apparently had made a deal with another girl, a friend of hers whose partner I was at first, to switch up. And so we became partners, walked home together with the group, once or twice a week. And later she was my partner at the cotillion. But these partnerships in the cotillion did not necessarily mean that those two were “going together.”

In my mind, at that time I was going with D., the little light-skinned advertisement for sitting quietly in living rooms on one's best behavior. It was her long brown mother I watched very carefully. But I assumed that I would be taking D. to the cotillion. But, as usual, the day-to-day contact with brown Betty took its toll. I found myself, on leaving after dropping her off, up across the tracks on Jeliff Avenue, wanting to kiss her and one night I did.

From D.'s friend, who was also in the cotillion, I began to hear that D. had got a special dress for this set and was wondering why I hadn't yet asked her. Actually I was just shy, but I did think that we would be going.

From Betty's friend, who walked with us in the group to their house after practice, I also found out that Betty thought I would eventually be more than just her partner at the official part of the cotillion, and I was moving closer and closer to asking her.

I had never before had such troubles. Not from my closemouthed perspective to the various subjects of my would-be amour. When I was little I had great numbers of instant loves easily forgotten. On the real side, one little girl sent me a note to meet her at the movies. But she didn't show up. Another brown beauty with glasses she used to grin behind told me she “liked” me and I started walking her home to Baxter Terrace and we squeezed up in the hallway kissing. I thought I went with her too but then some rogue knocked her up and tearfully we took our leave. There'd been some little-boy attempts to rock and roll with a couple of brown girls and a
few black ones too, but they were surprisingly minimal. I was young, I guess, even when I thought I was in full control of my senses.

But the Betty and D. thing I'd never been in before. Now, from a loose and quick-moving blue brown wraith of Belmont Avenue (and points in all directions) I found myself caught up in some stuff I didn't even properly understand. The D. thing was dry and staid, like I said. Though it maybe could have been otherwise, had I been otherwise. But I was as what went on in these pages (and a buncha other things) had made me.

Finally, I think I took D. to the cotillion. Though Betty and I were still dance partners in the grand march, so called. When I told Betty a week or so before the cotillion that I was taking D., her face got pulled tight, her eyes rolled around like fire would come out of them. And when I left I could hear her crying.

I came home after the cotillion with D. and sat in her kitchen. My black bow tie untied, I talked and pretended I was drunk (I had had something in some Coca-Cola, probably Seagram's Seven or some other abomination) and talked and talked, feeling daring in a way. But I never even made a real pass at her. A week or so later, Betty and I started sleeping with each other. It was my first time, on the real side. We made it on her couch mostly, after the family was asleep. But any and everywhere else we could. I think I might have talked to D. maybe another time or two several years later, when Betty and I had split. But for a long time, up into college, Betty and I were a well-advertised duet.

Now I was out of high school and began to go to Newark Rutgers. It was even whiter than Barringer. I was now taking another bus downtown to Rector Street and Washington Street, where the school was located in two office-type buildings. I felt even worse than at Barringer, completely isolated, though at least here no one spoke in a foreign language. But they were like foreigners to me. It was so weird they had an intramural track meet and I won the 100, 220, 440, and took second in the mile. I knew I was in some strange place then. I was pretty fast, but there was no way even in Barringer I was Jesse Owens. This joint is fulla deadbeats is the only way I could figure it.

And in school itself everything did seem a foreign language. There was a midget named Marks (really!) who taught us English literature, heavy on the Eliotic trip, and that sent me rolling into Eliot and Pound. (I asked a guy in a bookstore near Public Service did he have a book of Ezra Pound's and the guy said I was “too erudite.” I didn't even know what the fuck he meant, and he probably knew it.)

I sat in a trigonometry class and learned absolutely nothing except that some process they were fooling with was called “identities.” I was still wearing my Hill grey flannels. I got a light grey pair with the dark pair of the suit, both with twenty-two-inch bellbottoms. And I still walked the streets with a few friends looking for “The Music.” I began to read e. e. cummings in the library quite accidentally and brought some of the poetry home one day, for some outside reason, and told my parents I had written it and must be going crazy. No telling what they said.

That summer I took a chemistry course and at the end I could not even remember the symbols for simple elements and made up some stuff on the test. (Wrong again!) But there was a guy (white) sitting next to me from Princeton who knew about as much as I did and cared about as much. Khaki pants, seersucker jacket, striped tee shirts, bucks and sneakers and Princeton cut and I checked him out. That's really what I learned that summer. My Hill suit was now an embarrassment.

The blue/black Hill was still the real world and downtown Rutgers some cardboard boredom somebody had dumped on me. I knew who it was, too. But could not have articulated it. The same isolation and alienation I'd felt at Barringer was the main decoration. Carrying books on a bus back and forth. It was the same.

I was in ROTC band that summer and we had to go up to Upsala campus in East Orange. There was an old white man who called us Sambo, me and a black kid named Conrad. He was telling us something about how to hold our horns. I was playing tuba in the band. I didn't say anything and I could see Conrad's eyes flinch and his skin turn sweaty. I walked off in a corner playing Miles licks I knew on the tuba and tried not to think about the sick gray old man even though he stood just a few feet away. Me and Conrad talked about the incident after practice, just briefly, but for me, I thought, fuck them. I'll throw that motherfucker down a staircase and be a locked-up little nigger wanted to go to college. That was it, really.

It was a time for me of mixing and swirling. Like smoke or mist or some way-out position you are in and somehow witness to but cannot even see clearly. Betty and I still went together though we didn't say a hell of a lot to each other. We were always together and she was always smiling or laughing, teasing me about something or being mock angry about something I did. She was a well-shaped little brown girl with pouting, smiling, luscious lips. And she was my companion just before manhood and I guess just before her own womanhood. There was another little girl I knew who lived closer to my house, but we were never intimate. I only saw her a
couple of times when Betty and I had fought or something. Her name was Lillian and I gave her one of my track medals. She looked a lot like Betty. Plump, brown, quick-humored, and capable of a healthy heat. She got some blood disease that summer and died quickly. And I was treated like her deep boyfriend, even though I wasn't. But I carried that because it seemed her parents wanted and needed it.