The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (21 page)

My band had also come to an end, just wandered apart as a normal circumstance of our own growth and widening. Sometime that summer I told my parents I wanted to go to Howard University in Washington, D.C., a “Negro college.” I didn't really know why. Maybe it was the basketball game. My mother told me years later that she had kept showing me her Fisk and Tuskegee yearbooks and making suggestions. It must've worked and whatever else went into that “decision.” In the fall I was going to Howard. I was already saving money for clothes.

In some ways Howard was a continuation of the old black brown yellow white phenomenon. But now I was more conscious of what was going on. More conscious, yet not conscious enough and still with no means of full articulation. Inexplicably (and I didn't even think about it) I stopped playing the trumpet. I just did not think of it. But the whole process of what Howard was and what it meant and means begins when I started thinking about it. Because from that time I began to make changes and to change in a number of ways.

Right off the bat, by the end of the summer, the coming trip to D.C. seemed real adventure. I was off, going away, really for the first time. I had gone away to boy scout camp but that was only for two weeks at a time. Though that seemed a long time then. But now I was going to be going off on my own. And what kind of people would I meet? I thought about a Howard basketball game I'd seen while I was still at Barringer. The clutch of faces I could recall. The people there had a kind of “importance” (to themselves) that I liked but at the same time this put me off. Or made me feel maybe because they felt they were that important what would they think of me who was only a brown boy whose hair did not always seem wavy.

That ball game seemed a place of note. (And a track meet I'd gone to.) I couldn't think of much note I had — the “B” sweater and I could play football and basketball pretty well. I was fast. No note. Postman. Whitecollar worker. Night watchman. Ladies Aid Society. Hairdresser. Belmont Avenue. No note. Importance. (To whom? I never asked.) But that was
something gnawing at me — quietly — silently, I wasn't even clear that's what it was. Note?

But there was something about those faces, the dress, the carriage, the air, that both intrigued and turned me off at the same time. What?

Now I was riding on the train headed for D.C. A trunk had been sent ahead and I sat with a couple of suitcases overhead. We were near Delaware — that godforsaken place — and I was very hungry. I had a bag of fried chicken and biscuits, a tomato, and some potato salad packed for me by my black/brown grandmother. She'd given it to me. I heard her preparing it in the kitchen and winced. Damn, she want me to have to carry some greasy bag down there. People gonna make fun of me. But I took the bag, which had a few grease spots on it, and hugged my grandmother, who I loved anyway. It was just that she was old-fashioned. Some chicken in a greasy bag, damn!

But, Jim, when I got near Delaware, after having hid the bag carefully when I got on so the important passengers wouldn't see my brown origins despite my shiny face, I broke that bag open and ate like a savage. I didn't care really, or maybe I did, but that didn't stop nothing. I ate all but one piece and I stuck the bag rolled up tight back in its hiding place and ate it that night down in D.C.

In D.C. I finally got from the train via cab to the campus. And walked wobbling with the bags up the long campus walk to Clark Hall, my residence my whole stay down there. There were dudes sitting around on the campus. It was still warm and summerlike. I expected some stuff like when I got to Barringer or on The Hill, some kind of negative welcome from somewhere or another. But no, there was dudes sitting around rapping. Some in groups collectively “capping” on the women. And the women, wow, I screwed my eyes around and around, checking, the joint was full of a whole lot of women. And from what I could see they were very very fine.

I was taken upstairs on the second floor in a corner room overlooking the stadium and gymnasium. I was disappointed at first, because I wanted a room looking out on the campus so I could look out at the “gorgeous babes” (as they were called at HU). The first day I got there there was nobody in the room, though there were clothes being unpacked. I changed from my white bucks (too cheap and too new) and put on my sneakers. I walked out across the campus trying to look like I knew where I was going, but I was just going, walking fast as usual, but trying to take it all in.

I walked off campus finally, down by Freedman's Hospital, where Howard's medical students, dentists, and nurses trained. There was a basketball
court down there and a group of HU students (it seemed) playing a pickup game. I got in it and played hard, hard as I could to dispel some of my anxiety. A couple guys in the game I knew later on, but that day, after the game, I walked back to the campus, sweaty and alone, and wondered what would become of me.

I had a roommate who was not altogether suitable (I remember he was square in a number of ways). But what was interesting and important is that everyday I met someone else, many from New Jersey and Newark itself. I'd known there were some Newark folks at Howard but I didn't think it would be a bunch. But it turned out to be quite a few. And the New Jersey-Newark thing became a kind of binding point for some of us. We were “Jersey boys.” In fact throughout the campus there was a joining together to a significant extent of students who came from the same state and town. The “Philly cats,” the “New York cats,” who we considered the most sophisticated. Cats from “Chi” were high up in that pantheon. NJNY-Philly-Chi hung close together plus for some strange reason some Texas cats as well. There were sprinklings in our mob from North Carolina, Florida, even East St. Louis, but the NJ-NY-Philly-Chi grouping was the core of our thing. Because not long after being there on the campus and up in falling-down Clark Hall (built in 1880-something) I was part of a little mob, “the boys,” and we were something else again.

In this travailing motion from me to me (which is the underlying question in putting all this down, how did you get to be you?) different questions come up at different stages and states. We answer them in motion, casually, with our actions, no matter what comes out of our mouths. Whatever may be going through our heads. We are, meanwhile, actually doing something, actually going somewhere. There are all kinds of scenes (seens) on that road, all kinds of stops (like on an organ), what we call changes, chords, in traveling the way we do, in making the map of ourselves, though some of us may never even look at it, or even understand that it exists.

If I could have asked a question here? (And I asked many questions every day.) But the heaviest question. The question that would have summed up where I had come from and where I was and where I was going, right then, what would it have been?

Sometimes such a question can be heard inside other questions. For instance, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (That's a question from an earlier period.) At this stage, and stop, it might be heard inside statements like my own protestation that I was “taking a pre-med course,” therefore one would assume, as I did, that I wanted to be a doctor.

Obviously that did not prove to be true. Though I have been known to doctor on the truth. But why did I say it? (Which is the question on the inside, which one ought to prepare oneself to answer when one can.) So where did the “doctor” bit come from? I mentioned I had said that same thing in grammar school to a little dude who had the good sense to deny it. But where?

Perhaps it was a standard “intelligence,” a reaction to what others considered important. Obviously, if I had some of the Bethany banana tone stuck to me, trips to the Y when the masses were not there, practices for cotillions behind drawn shades, the Gettysburg Address at the Old First Church, some “good hair-bad hair” training, strange picnics and pacts, and lived in a vault of hardwood floors on the other side of a secret passage which would let you out on Belmont Avenue right in the middle of a group of unsuspecting black people. All this could contribute. Though my folks, I've said, denied they had a hand in that “decision.” “A doctor” is what I would say if pressed. “I'm taking pre-med.” Which sounded regular at Howard. Pre-med sounded about best.

The Secret Seven, Cavaliers, Hillside Place brothers were mostly lost to me. The canteen was gone and dark night trips to Lloyd's. Though not so strangely, one dude I met, who was later a close friend of mine at HU, had been at the canteens and when he said it I remembered him in a flash. He'd been there once, I remembered. Over at the side of the stage. He and a dude named Split with a congealed wave over one eye. There were maybe four dudes and four girls with them and they did a “routine.” Prepared steps in unison, throwing the girls out and spinning them, together. It was like an MGM musical —
Brownies Uptown
. The one girl, Harriet, was considered the femme fatale of them neck of the woods for a certain circle, though not in the one I ran in mostly. But we Hillsides looked over at them and smirked and B. made an ominous suggestion that would have squashed that routine all over the Masonic. It was too cute and artificial, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in brownface. And they were the yellowest of the browns and/or the brownest of the yellows. Actually, what we called “sididdy,” “hincty,” “stuck up,” “snobbery”-time motherfuckers. They gave that off the way they stood and related to each other and the rest of us. In the big black smashed-flat vat of our American concentration, we did not even hear the word “ghetto” then (unless maybe we remembered headlines from Poland in World War Two).

But now here I was with this dude Tony, and he was nice enough. With the same stuff going for him as then. The only difference was now that I
was closer to him it did not irritate me in the same way. I did not feel excluded (by him), but he radiated exclusiveness like a cologne.

Yet this dude did come from somewhere in the Third Ward, in fact he lived in the apartments that my father had to bring us out of during the Depression because they cost too much. I guess they had been considered akin to some kind of semi-luxury apartments then. But this was twenty years later almost, though the apartments were still fairly nice and most of the people who moved in them never moved out. (Just maybe their sons and daughters “moving on up” to higher ground.)

These people obviously did still consider these apartments, Douglass-Harrison, some kind of luxury or aristocratic exclusive enclave of the browns and yellows. I remember always liking those apartments. Though white folks, to show them where it was really at, finally surrounded those apartments with the poorest of the black projects; in fact, dropped in the highest concentration of population per square mile in the whole country, yeh, just to show them what was happening with that cardboard exclusiveness. Exclusiveness without real money or real power!

There were quite a few folks from Douglass-Harrison at Howard. I remembered some of them. I had even heard of a couple of them. Like magic yellow celebrities “at Howard” at those yellow parties or in the
Afro
or
Herald News
. A few of them, of course, were sons and daughters of some of my father and mother's friends.

There was a bicycle raid one early evening at Central Avenue playground. Somehow, through some connection my father or mother had made, a challenge was issued to the Sutter brothers, who were sons of a guy who had worked with my father at the P.O., but had moved up to work for the IRS. One of them was a good player and it was me who arranged the game. They all swept in on bicycles (which was unnerving in the first place). We never seen that many bloods on bicycles, about ten or eleven of them. They came in complete with bats and gloves and identical caps. And they were good. We had got together a pickup team, with some of the Cavaliers (called Newark Cubs for baseball) and some other playground stalwarts. But these other guys apparently played together all the time (we only did that with basketball) and they beat us. Then climbed back on their bicycles, without having said too much to any of us, and swept back off towards Douglass-Harrison. It was like those pictures about World War Two where you see the squadrons of planes coming in to do daylight low-altitude bombing. It made us feel like we were at Bremerhaven or Cologne.

While we playing, these guys kept to themselves and they would “keep a lot of chatter going” from the infield and outfield, just like in the big leagues, but that was all they said. You got the same kind of exclusiveness. That they were some kind of mystical unenterable lodge of Negro exquisites. And wherever I saw any of that crowd, I always got the same feeling. Some of them were in a social club called the Golden Boys. A little later they had a club called Los Ruedos. I always got the same feeling from them. The standoffish self-anointed wunderkinder. And that, all that, was very very yellow to me. They even had a
whistle
! Actually, it was the old slave whistle. The whistle the slaves gave when they wanted to contact each other in the process of some clandestine operation. The whippoor-will imitation. When I first heard it, I thought it was some exclusive invention of the Golden Boys, Los Ruedos (and a later spinoff called Los Cassedores) but I found out different once I began to consciously try to become conscious.

So now these were some of the guys walking around Howard and it made me uncomfortable. These dudes had never had anything to say to me, nor I to them, really. And now here they were. Plus I was a sophomore when I got to Howard. I had already been at Newark Rutgers, so I had to come into a sophomore class that had gotten seasoned down there last year, when it was the freshman class I tended to hang out with.

One by one and in small groups I ran into the Newark contingent, not only the freshmen and the sophomores but some of the older types as well who'd been down there for a time. East Orange, Montclair, and the like were also in evidence. People I couldn't have known any other way.