The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (41 page)

We were working at the
Trader
and generally going home together after work. We'd go to a few places, very few, because neither of us had much money. We might go out in the company of Dick and Barbara and some of the other
Trader
regulars. It was light stuff. People around us, I think, took
our hookup as light stuff—casual. Ribbon winked and chuckled when he found out. But it was all still vague and offhand, even to us.

Occasionally I would go back to East 3rd Street and holler at Jim and whoever. Sit down and talk with Tom Perry. I might bump into Tim, but I didn't see Korret that much anymore. I was taking on a new group of friends, or at least drifting away from one circle.

Nellie and I did talk, about a lot of things. Our plans, I suppose. What we saw or wanted to see for ourselves. Who we thought we wanted to become. For one thing, Nellie had something of an inferiority complex. First, she'd been out in Long Island under the heavy sun of gentile suburbia, trying to grow and having to relate to whatever the dominant image and peer pressure was for the Jewish middle-class yearning for American middleclassdom but finding only Jewish middle-classdom. Plus she was very tiny but almost chubby, “zoftig” I heard a store owner friend of ours describe her, with a very Semitic-looking face (if such a concept is scientific). But the prescribed stereotype, East European, prominent nose of aquiline proportion, etc.

Going to Mary Washington had done nothing to eradicate her feeling of inferiority. The black middle class suffers from the same kind of malady, a lack of self-esteem caused by the great nation chauvinism that is so much a part of American life. White supremacy, anti-Semitism, they not only work on the victims to deprive them of material and spiritual ease but they can, with some of the victims, actually convince them that they are hated for correct reasons, and the victims take up this same view, only, of course, it is now self-hate.

With Nellie, this lack of self-esteem took on a personal cast. It was not so much expressed as being anti-Jewish as by feeling that since she was small and plain looking, she could not be a glamorous figure in the theater or the world of lights and action. She was also attacked psychologically by the effects of struggling to overcome the anti-Semitic stereotypes syndrome. The attack that national minorities feel or the immigrants before they got integrated into the great white (racist) American Dream. I read in a diary of hers one night: “I think I'm losing my Jewishness… . Grrr, what is that?” That is, a debate about whether there was such a thing as “Jewishness” and, if so, was it a quality worth maintaining? The cultural aggression that is the norm of U.S. life creates such paradoxical questions in the minds of its victims. And so the swarm of self-doubts that confused the young Nellie Kohn.

I read in that same diary a list of men's names. It was shocking for some reason. (Where had I obtained such fake morality?) Nellie actually listed the names of the men she had slept with — at least that's what I took it to be. I wanted to remember the names, most of them I didn't know. But since I saw my name, “Roi,” at the bottom of the list, I assumed that's what it was. Plus, my man Guy's name was there just before mine. I wondered why a person would have such a list, what it portended. It was no short list either, and I wondered if perhaps it went back into high school or something. Another thing she had in that diary was a running day to day or every few days entry about what was going on in her life. I had stumbled on the diary rummaging around in things, as I usually did when I awoke and Nellie was already out looking for a new job. I'd go through things, and look at things, read different books — at least a few pages of ones I was only a trifle interested in. Being in the calm white apartment, in an orderly clean setting, was new to me since the beginning of my Village days, so I was fascinated. Being in the apartment gave me a sense of well-being, plus I was very nosy.

I stumbled upon a recent entry that seemed the dreamy reflections of a young woman — “What is ahead for me? What am I going to do with my life?” And then she added: “I'll be all right if Roi doesn't continue to live here.” Well, that hurt. Nellie and I seemed to get on smoothly enough, though there was no great passion. There was sex, fueled up a little higher maybe by the mutual curiosity each of us felt about the other. We mentioned sometimes different stereotypes we'd heard about black-white romantic relationships and we'd laugh, above and beyond such stupidity. But mentally we'd check to see if such was true about us.

I never mentioned to Nellie that I had read her diary. But in a couple days, over some pretense, I cut out for East 3rd Street. A few days later, while I was scratching away in the dank little pad, there was a knock at the door and Nellie stood outside asking could she come in. And I was back on Morton Street. A week or so later, I was supposed to meet her at the Randall's Island Jazz Festival. I couldn't go but wanted to hang around outside after it was over since I was always interested in jazz musicians and the people who dug them. I spotted Nellie standing talking to Dick and Barbara, and when I come up she colors — turns an unfashionable pink. I look from one to the other while we're exchanging small talk and by the by young Guy comes up wheeling his motor scooter. There are a few words, some embarrassed bullshit, then she climbs on the back of the scooter and goes off with Guy. So I was gone again. But in a few days the same thing
happens. She's tapping at the door and I come to the door and she's standing there with tears in her eyes. (It was my sister, Kimako, who said once, “You don't understand women.” The male chauvinism that would let me accept such a copout must be obvious.)

After that, though, there were other stages, other openings and closings in our relationship. For one thing, now it was certain that there was a relationship, whatever it was. It existed. Not only did we know each other, but we related to each other. We liked talking to each other, apparently. Maybe we liked sleeping with each other, but there was never any passion. But maybe that's idealism. Maybe I didn't know what passion was in the first place, since there's no truth in advertising. We always related to each other calmly and rationally.

We were living together now too. It was her apartment on Morton Street, but we went about what we went about like that was where we both lived. Nellie had gotten a job with a publisher. It wasn't quite what she wanted but it was more money and it was consistent. The
Trader
had just about gone down the tubes. I was still there. But Martin William had hooked me up with a job proctoring for examinations at New York Law School. I stood in the room so students couldn't cheat. It paid a few dollars and was a welcome addition to my lack of money.

For the first time, I was “going with” someone in New York. Some kind of stability had been reached in the relationship. We'd go to a few places. Movies, sometimes a club. That's when we ran into Steve Korret up near the old Loews Sheridan. He said, “You're the one who's been keeping him away from us,” glowering at Nellie in a mixture of mock outrage and his normal arrogance. When the story of the watermelon got told, he responded, “Coon fruit you got him with coon fruit!” A few more words and he was gone and I tried to explain what I didn't understand.

I did begin to understand what the interracial relationship was in this society. The stares from people on the street, the tension that rose in my own self in certain situations, though for the most part I didn't give much of a shit what anybody, not no white people anyway, thought about our hookup. But there is a mutual mythology that gets built in those relationships and built by the people in them. Information about the other's world becomes one main topic of discussion. Though, I think, black people by and large know more about the “white world” than whites know about the life and times of even the middle-class blood in America. But the differences in the cultures between the American culture and its various ethnic variations and the African American are points of departure for discussion.
The conflicting opinions that come with those lives are discussable as well and the dynamic that makes the meeting interesting. But white supremacy creates an inequality in those relationships that probably most of the people in them cannot identify by name but certainly they can by what emotions and ideas it produces. For me, suddenly, there were no more black women in my life and it had happened quietly, “normally,” without fanfare or recognition. Betty and Joanie I had struck out with in the nasty little East 3rd Street pad. Neither of them were bohemian. Betty had said openly the joint sickened her, Joanie hadn't said anything but she'd turned down my romantic blandishments flat. During one of Nellie and my split-ups I'd tried to get Betty to go to the apartment again. But she refused. And she'd heard that I was going with “some white girl” and that chilled her even more. What did I want with her? she said. “I heard you going with some white girl.” I took it only as jealousy, but it was really a farewell speech from the distaff side of the nationality. I didn't know.

One night Nellie and I got into a discussion about children. We'd been living together for a few months now. I was beginning to meet some of her friends. A couple of girls from school, a cousin, some old boyfriends. And we're talking about children, the subject having come up in some strange fashion. “I wouldn't want children,” Nellie was saying. “I wouldn't want them to grow up in this kind of world. Children in a mixed marriage would suffer.” (We'd never talked about marriage or anything that square before.)

I disagreed with her. I thought I heard something else in that, that one shouldn't have children as the result of any mixed situation. I protested and acted, was, hurt. Not that I intended to marry her, but her saying that the issue of an interracial union was negative slightly inflamed me. The more I thought about it, the more inflamed I became. We had yet another split-up and I went to East 3rd Street. I called Betty but she wouldn't come. I could sniff her disapproval over the phone. “No, I'm not coming over there. For what?”

When we got back together, Nellie told me she was pregnant. That flattened me. Pregnant? Great balls of shit what was going to happen now? But I just smiled at her and touched her arm. “What are we going to do?” she was saying. “It's already a couple of months.” There was a fitful harassed look on her face.

I asked her what she wanted to do and she told me about some doctor in Pennsylvania who did abortions. In a week she had gone, stayed the weekend, and returned unloaded. But she looked drugged with the whole situation. I offered to leave for good. In a few more months she told me she
was pregnant again. “We'll get married,” I said. It came out of me without my having inspected it. Clear and audible: “married.”

When she repeated the word, I could hear it more clearly. But I have the kind of personality that will take on any kind of commitment if I can feel any real connection with it, and not blanch or shake (at least not outwardly) at whatever consequences. “Yeah,” I assured her. “We can get married.”

What I said had opened a trap door into our deeper feelings. Married? To whom? For what? Forever? I felt a little pushed, more than a little uncertain, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. What? Go get another abortion for crissakes!!? What was terrifying deep down was that I felt nothing really. There was no passion. It was quiet and rational. Our words back and forth. There were smiles. Nellie looked at me smiling, half smiling, uncertain. She didn't know what to do either. What kind of life would this be? How long would this last? Who was this, anyway?

The fact that this was a white woman that I stood close to in a small New York apartment talking about marrying was not significant at first, but it grew in significance the more I thought about what I'd said. Those same words, that same information, had to be relayed to various out- and inposts, this marrying, especially this marrying across the normal borders of cool. The running bohemians of the black-white hookups I knew didn't (I didn't think) get married. (But I didn't think about that anyway.) Hey, but here I was going off into some normal U.S. social shit, it was out. Some of that slopped around in my head, but at the same time I got the feeling that, after all, marriage was some normal U.S. shit, there was a fixture to it, a stasis I perceived (my youth in rebellion?) that I didn't know whether I dug or not. Hey, it was a kind of middle-class thing to do. I didn't come over to the Village for no regular middle-class shit, yet here I was in it. And what was so crushing, yet pulsing on the subtlest of emotional wires, was that I had a
responsibility
, I was expected to do something. I couldn't just walk away. And no, there was still no real passion.

We decided that we would get married in a Buddhist temple on the Upper West Side. It meant to me that I could avoid the normal straight up and down middle-class thing. Korret's prior coaching paid off in this expression. We contacted the Buddhist temple and arranged to be married there. Nellie's parents nutted out, and while her mother would at least talk about it, the father declared Nellie
dead
! (A male relative was sent to talk to us, but he was too young and the only thing we succeeded in doing was
getting drunk together and I put him on the train wondering was he going to make it.)

My parents took it in stride. There was not even any eye rolling or excessive questioning. (Such is the disposition and tenor of the oppressed, they are so in love with democracy.) They just asked me was I sure about what I was doing. “As long as you're sure,” my father said, looking at me not quite directly. They came to the wedding, and so did the Hallocks and Will Ribbon. That was it.

A few weeks before I got married, I met Tim Poston in the street and he was drunk as usual. He beat me on the back, whooping and hollering a mixture of greetings and biting commentary on why he hadn't seen me. “That's your girlfriend?” he was screaming. “That's your girlfriend? How're you, girlfriend?” he shouted, shoving his thick paw at Nellie. Then he grabs me around the shoulder and pulls me over to the side and in a mock whisper begins to harass me. “Whatta you, eatin' pussy now, Lee-Roy? Ha-ha-ha! Whatta you, eatin' pussy?” I pushed him away, telling him something he already knew, that he was drunk.