The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (24 page)

Finally he peeps, “So you ain't goin' to the D.C. Donut Shoppe?” That seemed obvious before. “Well, you know payback is hard, right, Jones? You gonna get yours.” Then he turns and stalks out the room. All these dudes start howlin', but somehow it was not that funny to me. But fuck
him, is all I could say. I definitely was not going to no D.C. Donut Shoppe in the middle of the night.

The frat, not just that one, but all of them, had a collection of creeps no doubt. There were some real lulus in the Alphas, but I'm knowledgeable just about them. The Omegas and Kappas had some easily identifiable nuts you could spot without even having to rub up against them too tough. But Henry Lucas, for instance, Reagan's new star knee-grow from California. He was the president of the Alphas when I was coming through. This dude wore a three-piece suit to school everyday. I never saw Henry Lucas on that campus, or anywhere else, without being totally “pressed.” He had that stiff goofus quality about him, very formal and mirthless with a gigantic set of lips that must have distressed so turned-around a dude as he. When he saw me he would say “Good morning” or “Good afternoon, Jones.” He always called me “Jones” like at Barringer. In all the years we knew each other on that campus we might have said a paragraph to each other. And even then when I saw him it was like seeing somebody official. Lucas was stiffer than even the professors and everybody called him by both his names, Henry Lucas, not one or the other.

That goddam Tim Bodie, who is now a three-star general in the air force, he was in there too. But he was a much nicer dude, though he was an ROTC freak even then. But Tim would laugh with you. He was an upperclassman but you see where that ROTC shit could lead.

There was a football player, a Kappa, Andy Chambers, who was a pretty popular dude on campus, he's a goddam admiral. I could rattle off a bunch more, not just frat dudes, although I bet these top-flight American warrior types were all frat dudes. But HU filled some of the needed spaces for yellow bellies. If you look and see how many of the chosen coloreds sashaying through America with “good jobs” you'll find the HU kids personable and finally in the shit after all.

Probably even psychopaths like Harry Johnston, Leon Harris, Don Bradford are hooked up somewhere. As a matter of fact I know Harris is a big-time dentist not far away in one of the suburbs, Johnston is also some kind of doctor (both these dudes were officers in the service for a while), and Bradford is some kind of bureaucrat in city hall, which was one constant hookup for folks like these. But these guys were all jangle-brained. Johnston, a light-skinned dude with a white streak down his chin like George Macready, he liked to torture people coming into the frat. He called himself a torturer. He would think of different ways to inflict pain on people.

Harris was just a violence lover. He loved to punch and beat. He always seemed slightly frantic about his kicks. Johnston was grim and chuckling — You never seen a George Macready picture?

Bradford was big, he played football until his grades got too shaky so he dropped it. He was barrel-chested and a good guy in some ways but he was so egotistical that being in the frat and an upperclassman meant that he thought he actually was a great great guy, so he could be used by real torturers like Johnston and Harris.

These, along with Skeffton, jammed me up once at one of the “sessions,” actually what the white frats and shit called “hazing.” We just called them “sessions.” They would take us somewhere and beat us. Behind my refusing to go to the D.C. Donut Shoppe these four got me, and Johnston and Harris actually rolled up
Esquire
magazines (these have been formative in my life), wrapped them in tape, dipped them in water, and put them on the radiator to dry, so they were hard. I was running track at the time and Skeffton with his ruined self got much pleasure saying this aloud as they prepared to beat and while they beat me, on the legs and thighs until red welts and large hardening black swellings covered my legs, thighs, and butt. I could barely walk when they got through.

At the next day's track meet I couldn't run. My coach hit the ceiling. He didn't like the frats anyway though he was a goddam Alpha himself. But who really got pissed off was my roommate Bill and the mob and some of the other athletes. For them, this was beyond the call and kin of what the frats were supposed to do. Yeh, everybody knew they paddled people, but this shit was out. (The Kappas actually got suspended for a year when Lee's sister's boyfriend, PeeWee, got his arm broke by the Kappas and he was a popular kid.)

No official shit went down in my case but there was a kind of mass uprising. A few nights later at another session down on Banneker Field the pledges led by Bill and a couple other footballers erupted and turned Johnston and the others on their heads, knocked them in the mud, and generally whaled the daylights out of the big brothers under the cover of night and confusion. I ripped a few shirts and fell on a couple motherfuckers.

But that was it for me anyway. The shit seemed too unconnected to my real desires. What were they? I donno. But this shit wasn't in me. I now got much more passive about the frat. I just was not available for anything. Neither meetings nor anything else. Where before I would have great fun ducking these nuts, now I was just not around. It didn't matter too much. Both Shorter and I got blackballed (only one blackball could keep you
out). Shorter used to show up for ROTC without his socks and with a “war hat” with no grommet in it so it was pulled down over his eyes like Diz might wear it. Shorter was playing tenor then. And I told you the frats were full of ROTC freaks, later generals; you know what they thought about that “weird” Shorter. In fact, I heard that's why he got blackballed, being weird. But that was not true. For me, it was said that I was a snob, that I did not mix well. But that was not true, I was still much mixed in the middle of me own mob and we would hang out with anybody (long as they wasn't square). But the real trick was that my grades had got so out that I didn't have the grade average to join the fraternity anyway. I got drunk one afternoon and fell out up against a clothes hamper lamenting my waywardness which always seemed to disqualify me for what I wanted, though who knew what I wanted. “Pre-med” would come out of my mouth, but that was so far up and away from what me wanted, when I said it it echoed like in a huge open corridor, no lights, just echoes. And sometimes it hurt my ears.

It was clear to me even then that if Howard represented something, it was something quite different from blue Newark. I said the urban troops had some special panache on the campus because we brought a kind of outside blue/black quality onto the campus. We were aware of that, too. Just as we were aware of the group of actually yellow folk who sat in the cafeteria together. And just as we were aware of the parties we weren't invited to. Like the ones given by the Turtles. They even had a password, but it got leaked due to some romance between the colors. “Are you a turtle?” was the question they threw at you on the door. “You bet your sweet ass I am” was the countersign. Except if you were not known (i.e., were a trifle brown and unruly, etc.) you couldn't make it. We mostly ignored such shit, though Tony was always sniffing around for just such as that so he could try his luck. Tony and Rip did connect and got into a lot of the high-yellow sets. Rip could have qualified anyway, though he was broke, but he had some jingling money cause he was an only child. Tony was an only child too and a cheap motherfucker, so he was always pulling hidden dough out of his safe-deposit vault somewhere inside his room. But the two of them was high up into such things as the Turtles and whatnot and other light-skinned stuff.

The med students were the pinnacle of that society. If you was light-skinned and a med student and had a car
and
an apartment, you were on a par with Zeus or one of them other gods. Dent students were next, then law students. I mean up in the med, dent, and law schools, not the “pre's.” Tony and Rip's conversations always had a lot to do with what the fashionable
med (and dent and law) students were doing. The sets they'd been to and how grand life at the top was. We listened but it was like movies to us, something to pass the time until somebody thought up something really out to do like that time we played hockey on the second floor with brooms and bottles till old man Butts came up on the floor and we scattered. He came to the door of Rue anyway, and busted all of us. “Mr. Jones,” he'd say, “Mr. Jones. What can we do about you?” In real despair.

The doings of the real socialites at HU were relayed to us by yellowish-brown Negro radio, two of 'em, so that's really as close to that shit as we got. We did get uptight one day in the cafeteria and was close to popping some little pale Negro motherfucker in his jaw for saying something too far out while he was sitting with a dazzling collection of yellow babes all with their noses pointing at other galaxies. (Of course we were jealous, and we hated that part of it, too, since we knew they were vapid little flowers of unknowing, yet why should they be allowed to think they shit didn't stink?!)

But the divisions on the campus were
known
by all but the most unconscious. And we could get very loud talking about “sididdy yellow bitches and these jive lames” who are gonna get their asses broke in a minute. Tony and Rip, however, were tipping on all those scenes.

There was some big hullabaloo when a brown (skinned) girl, really gorgeous babe named Pat Adams, was elected Homecoming and Alpha Queen. She was a very stiff number on the real side and split for nothing but bananas, her boyfriend was Mordecai Johnson's son. When Mordecai was stalking out of his house right across from the girls' dormitory, like God walking across campus. (Mordecai used to have our ass for a whole semester sitting in chapel every Sunday, mandatory if you were a freshman or transfer student. Chicks had to be in at 7
P.M
. their first semester and it would be light outside and warm and great love affairs would be getting formed. And much thrashing and moaning and loud lamentations as to the cruelty, etc., of fate and Mordecai but that made it like some Romeo and Juliet shit and that spiced it up for some.)

The frats and yellow folks ran Howard's official student life. Everything else was improvisation. We'd find ourselves trailing through black night in southwest Washington headed for parties. Dudes would say, “Some a them D.C. boys gonna split your heads open!” But we, being officially fearless, would go on and come to a joint looked just like those sets we'd left back home. Big hats and all. And the only problem we ever had was one night Tony went with us and some little black chick he wanted to impress threw an aspirin bottle at his ass, and we all thought it best to vanish.

The D.C. connection was then a connection with real black life, though Howard itself to a certain extent is black life no matter its yellow distortion and the class repression the one-sided class struggle on campus enforces. (Though probably in the '60s there could've been something else happening for the same reasons, mass uprising and a general influx of black and brown types from the cities came on campus. You'll have to ask Stokely Carmichael about that!)

The woman thing could spell it out further. All the time I was on campus I went with about four girls, and “went with” is too strong in most of those instances. On campus it was only three on the real side. Elizabeth Donald and I were tight, after a fashion. I took her to a couple of them dress-up things when I first was getting hooked up with campus life. They seemed flashy enough, but no real laughs though Liz seemed happy to be there amongst it all. She in a gown and I in a black tie. We talked to some people and posed and even danced.

But we were tighter than that. We had a couple of classes together. Zoology and physics. I was beginning to write some poetry, at first, under the Elizabethans — Sidney, Vaughan, Shakespeare, the rest. I would send her fragments of poems for her to add a stanza, then I would add another stanza, this is while the class was going on. By the end of the class we'd have a whole poem of sorts. But it was great fun and we would write poems about Peanuts (the comic strip characters) juxtaposed with our “Zo” teacher's ear or some acquaintance's droop in a chair close by on the way to a peaceful sleep.

And Liz was a really nice girl. She was always cheerful and smiling and I think she was a “Zo” major, on the heavy side. (Her sister went with one of them goddam Alphas, a big brother, now a New Jersey architect. I came to the house one time this blood gets drugged thinking I'm coming to see his squeeze, such cross-eyed explaining especially in those days I thought the Alpha gestapo would mash me up but he cooled out but was never what you'd call pleasant.) I think we went to a couple of movies, a couple of dances, I walked her home a few times, more than a few. Anyway, I began to think that Liz and I were “going together.” Dudes would drop her name in a certain way so it seemed like people were picking up, had picked up that that was happening.

Then one day I said something at a mob “meeting” as to how I was gonna take my old lady out somewhere and these dudes all looked at each other and me with a smirk like I had just shit on the floor. (Or like the time Mr. Butts was banging on the door to make us shut up and I didn't think it
was him and I called out “All right Butts, grease your nose and slide under.” Then we opened the door and it's him — that kind of look.) There's a skinny four-eyed turkey whose name I can't remember (fuck you Freudians) to this day. Or was it another guy? Hmmm. But anyway there's this four-eyed dude who had been around a few times, no he was known to all of us, Philip, I think his name was. He says, like a guy asking directions of a traffic cop, “Your old lady?” These dudes look at me, Woolright is about to split open with his jive ass. “Liz and I are going together.”

Particularly I remember there was some kind of deadly set coming up and Liz and I had been discussing whether we wanted to go to that (the on-campus dress-up) or see the ballet. But obviously there wasn't much discussion going on on the real side. I remember this Philip saying, or was his name Al, “Liz and I are going together.” Uhh, man, did that sting. And these cats fell out. You could see some concern in some of their eyes but they had to laugh, otherwise it would have been admitting too much and they didn't want to have to go through that so they howled.