The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (55 page)

When the “going uptown” talk started to surface and be talked about, with whatever bias, naturally still more relationships got disrupted. Some of the white women who were with black men (and I guess those white men with black women — though I knew far fewer) got visibly uptight. C.D.'s wife, Françoise, stopped talking to me, and when I started to cross St. Marks Place to talk to him one afternoon, he crossed quickly to say a few words and she stayed on the other side of the street glaring.

I didn't know most of those who formed this downtown Black Arts “core” very well. But I'm sure some stuff passed publicly that took everything that might be said around me even further out. After all, I had obvious limitations, as leader, hooked up with the white woman. There was some antagonism now between some old friends.

Both of the Hackensacks always made me nervous because I couldn't understand them. I hadn't known them long enough or seen them in action and, apparently, they and Askia formed part of the militant wing of
Umbra
. I found out later, someone had threatened someone else's life.

But Shammy showed at my house and seemed to want to be my friend-student. Tong was distant and had a bitter cast about him, dipped in a kind of acid silence, that made him seem edgy and challenging. Both were writers, Tong a poet, Shammy a playwright. At a number of places, Shammy, Vashti, and I became a trio.

I got appointed as guest lecturer in drama at Columbia, for one semester, as a result of
Dutchman
. There was an article I'd written in the
Voice
, probably it was an interview. Vashti, Shammy, and I were sitting in the West End Bar and Grill after class. I went to the bar to get a beer and these two white guys approached. One a smallish eyeglass-wearing person, the other, a half step behind him, large and bulky. The little one said, “You're LeRoi Jones?”

“Yes.”

“I saw that statement you made in the
Voice
about whites. You're sick.”

I stood, flat-footed, a mug of beer in my hand, and eyed them carefully.

“Why don't you stop spouting sick things about whites in the paper? It's blacks that cause the problems.”

“Yeh,” I said. The big guy was grinning.

“I wanted to talk to you.” It was the little guy. “I brought my football-playing friend so you'd agree.”

My forehead heated up quickly at the idea of a henchman intimidator.

“You gonna talk to us?”

“Fuck you.” I was turning to go to my table. The big dude moved forward hesitatingly. I hit him full in the forehead with the beer mug and, with no break in the motion, bopped the other one headside as well. They screamed, the small one fell, others stood and shouted. Vashti and Shammy were at my side. We backed out of the West End like gunfighters.

“Very good, Mr. Jones,” was Shammy's comment. Vashti laughed and pulled on my arm.

One other event to show how far the thing had gone. I was sitting with Shammy, who had begun to accompany me different places, in line with our paramilitary pretensions. We were in the restaurant of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where I'd met with my editor about some book. As we ate, unknown to us, C.D. entered the sleek restaurant. He came up to our table and said to me and Shammy, “Leave me alone. Leave my family alone. I'm not going uptown.” He touched his belt. “I have a gun here. If anyone bothers me or my family, I'll shoot them!” He turned and left.

Shammy and I laughed, but for me, it was a deadly portent somehow. C.D. had been one of my oldest friends in New York. But the two of us at the table made light of it. He was hooked on white women, etc. I could talk.

February 21, 1965, a Sunday. Nellie and I and the two girls were at the Eighth Street Bookstore, at a book party. I had a cap, hunting jacket, and round dark glasses, the dress of our little core. I was being personable and knowledgeable. Both Vashti and Shammy and some others were in the bookstore, discreetly separate from my party.

Suddenly, Leroy McLucas came in. He was weeping. “Malcolm is dead! Malcolm is dead! Malcolm's been killed!” He wept, repeating it over and over. I was stunned, shot myself. I felt stupid, ugly, useless. Downtown in my mix-matched family and my maximum leader/teacher shot dead while we bullshitted and pretended.

The black core of us huddled there, my wife and family outside that circle. We were feverish and stupefied. McLucas wept uncontrollably. I called a couple fellows in the corner over, but they were dazed and couldn't
hear immediately. Joel Oppenheimer said, “That's the trouble with the black revolution. Roi's giving directions and nobody listens!”

But who and what was I to give anything, or he to make such a statement? “It's all bullshit!” went through me. “All!”

In a few days I had gotten my stuff out and gone uptown. We had seen a brownstone on West 130th Street and this was to be the home of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.

My little girl, the older one, Kellie, picked up instinctively a sense of my departure. She said to me, “You can't go anywhere. You're one of the funny things.”

But in a minute or so, I was gone. A bunch of us, really, had gone, up to Harlem. Seeking revolution!

The arrival uptown, Harlem, can only be summed up by the feelings jumping out of Césaire's
Return to My Native Land
or Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth
or Cabral's
Return to the Source
. The middle-class native intellectual, having outintegrated the most integrated, now plunges headlong back into what he perceives as blackest, native-est. Having dug, finally, how white he has become, now, classically, comes back to his countrymen charged up with the desire to be black, uphold black, etc… .a fanatical patriot!

When we came up out of the subway, March 1965, cold and clear, Harlem all around us staring us down, we felt like pioneers of the new order. Back in the homeland to help raise the race. Youth in their fervor know no limitations, except they are celebrations of them. Narrow, because they lack experience, yet fervent, super-energetic, super-optimistic. If we had known what faced us, some would've copped out, some would've probably got down, to study, as we should've, instead of the nowhere shit so many of us were involved with.

The building on 130th Street was an old brownstone, like you can find in Harlem. Right off by Lenox with its crab sellers, the permanently out of
work taking a stroll or in knots, summing up USA, its working people going and coming. Grey with black is the dominant color. Brown gives it flair, the yellow an edge to its conceits. The occupation army of white police beady-eyed and ubiquitous, stupid as the one-day-to-be-slaughtered-without-knowledge-of-why-they-died.

We set up shop and cleaned and swept and painted. We got a flag, White designed, the “Greek” theater masks of comedy and tragedy, rendered Afro style, like a shield, with spear behind, all in black and gold. The Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.

Malcolm's death had thrown people up in the air like coins in a huge hairy hand. Even before I'd left Cooper Square people had showed up. Carrying various perceptions. Some crazed or halfway there. John Farris, the poet, showed for the first time, like he was Malcolm's bodyguard, and told stories about imminent revenge. The mosque on 116th Street burned up and took the edge off, but people were vowing to go to Chicago and kill Elijah.

Whatever Malcolm had laid out was now just in the wind to be grabbed on the fly. The Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), the united front structure Malcolm wanted to build, styled after the Organization of African Unity (OAU), was not completely put together. There was no doubt it would soon be gone. The fact of Malcolm's death meant, for us, that the Nation, of Islam, had also died. Though there were arguments about who was right: Malcolm or Elijah? But up close to us, Malcolm, Malcolm, semper.

The mood? I came downtown one time during these early days and was sitting in the Orchidia Restaurant, down on Second Avenue. We had just come from the St. Marks Theater, Vashti and I, where I'd been talking about plans to stage my plays
The Toilet
and
The Slave
. Lonnie Elder and Douglas Turner Ward were sitting there, loud in conversation. Elder said something about Malcolm. “Why did Ossie [Davis] call him a prince? He wasn't no prince.”

I came out of my chair like the black plague. “Don't ever say anything about Malcolm. Nothing. Don't let nothing come out of your mouth ever about Malcolm.” Whatever the rage did to my face made them quiet. They only stared. I got Vashti and we went back uptown.

What was really interesting during this period is who came up and who didn't. Some, of course, the smaller core, augmented by a few uptown heads, were at the Arts every day and night trying to do whatever they thought they were doing. Others constantly came by and helped, many
artists from various disciplines who contributed what they could. Doing programs, being in forums, helping us with our major arts project in the streets that coming summer. Still others we saw from time to time wanted to help in deeper ways, talking to us, trying to counsel and help us. There were others whom we very seldom saw and then mainly downtown. There were others we never saw who nevertheless, in being true to the vanity of illusion and dubious social distinction, were also there, invisible except for their inadequately disguised disdain.

A basic core was the Hackensacks (Shammy definite, Tong most of the time), Jimmy Lesser, Dave, McLucas, a friend of Tong's who came along, Tub, a largish, sourly succinct dude; and after work, Corny and Clarence, and, a little later, Clarence Reed, the poet, who was hanging around on Lenox Avenue at the Progressive Labor Party offices, due in large part to his friendship with their black organizer, Bill Epton.

Larry Neal was one of those who was always in and out, helping with programs and giving us some rational counsel. Askia was there a lot in that same role and from time to time Max Stanford. Vashti was there all the time, trying to deal with some of the people who started acting like “crazy niggas,” as she called them, often at the top of her voice. Tong was married, but I don't think his wife ever came around. She was always at home or at work. But I think Tong never encouraged her to come by the Arts or else it was her own idea. All the rest of those brothers had various, often frequently changing, lady friends, but I was the only one of the core who had a regular, fairly stable relationship.

I developed a great deal of affection and respect for Larry Neal, but I think Larry knew a little more about the nature of some of the more nutty dudes the Arts was to attract, so he was in and out, but constantly on the scene. We picked up a lot of people in those few months. It was a socially and intellectually seismically significant development, the leaving of some of us (and more we didn't even know) from downtown and the implied and actual cutting of certain ties, and the attempt to build a black arts institution, and that in the heart of the past capital of African American people in the U.S., Harlem. The reality set many fresh and needed ideas in motion. The idea set even more ideas in motion and more concrete realities. In many ways it was something like the period of the Harlem Renaissance. Black intellectuals drawn to a common spot out of the larger commonality of their national experience. A rise in black national consciousness among the people themselves is what set both periods in motion, and whenever there is a high level of black national consciousness, a
militant affirmation of the African American national identity, then the whole country is in the midst of wrenching social movement, eventually revolution.

But even more than the Harlem geography, the Black Arts movement reflected that black people themselves had first moved to a political unity, despite their differences, that they were questioning the United States and its white racist monopoly capitalism. And they were doing it with
mass action
! Just as the Garvey movement, the African Blood Brotherhood, the thousands of socially conscious actions in the '20s agitated an “African” consciousness and a spirit of African American self-determination in the black artists identified with the '20s renaissance, both within Harlem and all over Afro-America, so in the '60s the struggle of Dr. King and Rob Williams and the Nation of Islam and SNCC and Malcolm X had agitated a young black intelligentsia who could not find self-respect except in opposition to black oppression. The people themselves were in motion, the artists just reflected it!

The emergence of the independent African states and the appearance of African freedom fighters, fighting guerrilla wars with white colonialism, had to produce young intellectuals (and older ones, too) who reveled in that spirit and sought to use that spirit to create art. An art that would reach the people, that would take them higher, ready them for war and victory, as popular as the Impressions or the Miracles or Marvin Gaye. That was our vision and its image kept us stepping, heads high and backs straight, no matter some of the wacky bullshit we got into on occasion.

Sun Ra and Albert Ayler were always on the scene. For some, Sun Ra became our resident philosopher, having regular midweek performances in which he introduced the light-show concept that white rock groups later found out about and got rich from. When Ra would play his “Sun-Organ,” when he played low notes, deep blues and dark colors would light up on it. When he played high notes, oranges and yellows would light up, and we sat, sometimes maybe with fifteen or twenty people in the audience, and thought we were being exposed to the profundity of blackness. Jim Campbell directed the bigger plays at the Arts and that's where I first met Yusef Iman. When we got our regular programs going, concerts, readings, plays, in the downstairs auditorium we made by tearing down a couple of walls, black artists flowed through those doors. Some for single performances, some for longer relationships, some to absorb what it all was. We were all trying to grow together.