The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (57 page)

What Tong wanted, I don't really know. Leadership of the Arts, perhaps. Though once, when he was borrowing some money, because he had no job and his rent was not paid, he told me that I was the quarterback and I
ought to keep my fullback (him) in good shape. He was a strange, often deadly quiet man who probably fancied himself many things, but the only thing I knew he was good at consistently was making trouble.

The Supremes' “Where Did Our Love Go?” and Mary Welles' “My Guy” reached me in 1964. And Dionne Warwick's “Walk on By.” These tunes seemed to carry word from the black for me. Monterey, the downtown streets of the forming Black Arts core, the dazzle that black women presented to me now. Marvin Gaye's “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” was playing when we got uptown. “Keep on Pushing,” which poet David Henderson made into a great poem, was one of our themes, and all of us would try for Curtis Mayfield's keening falsetto with the Impressions. Plus their “We're a Winner” also moved us and spoke, it seemed, directly to our national desire.

It was as if I had a new ear for black music at that point in the middle '60s. I was a jazz freak, though we rhythm-and-bluesed to Ray Charles' “I Got a Woman” and “Drown in My Own Tears” at our downtown loft sets. But now the rhythm and blues took on special significance and meaning. Those artists, too, were reflecting the rising tide of the people's struggles. Martha and the Vandellas' “Dancing in the Streets” was like our national anthem. Their “Heat Wave” had signaled earlier, downtown, that the shit was on the rise. But “Dancing in the Streets,” which spoke to us of Harlem and the other places, then Watts and later Newark and Detroit, seemed to say it all out. “Summer's here and time is near/for dancing in the streets!”

We did the Philly Dog and the Boston Monkey, whirling and being as revolutionary in our dancing as we were in our own thoughts. Somebody told me that Tong had said that I “danced like a white boy.” I guess that was part of the reason he thought he should run the Arts. I used to dance pretty well back home, but when I heard that, I figured maybe my living downtown had cooled my cool. Ruined my rhythms. That was part of the whole sense of myself that I carried at the Arts as well. I
was
guilty for having lived downtown for so long with a white wife. I think that was the kind of trump card that Tong and them thought they held. And it did make me reluctant at times to come down hard on people who obviously needed exactly that, because I was still insecure and tender-headed about my recent life. So certain people could play off that, and probably did. Certainly, Tong and company did.

I even stopped going downtown, and I'm sure certain aspects of the stances I took were based on my feeling of revulsion when my Greenwich
Village days were focused on. Others in that Harlem community mouthed similar kinds of charges. Though most of what they said, on the legitimate side, was that most of us were from downtown and knew next to nothing about Harlem, which was very much correct.

An opportunity presented itself that we were lucky enough and hip enough to seize upon. We had no money for any really well advertised programs at the Arts, but we did the best we could. We turned out flyers and little booklets which Dave had designed and circulated them, building up our audience. We did
Dutchman
again and a new play of mine,
Jello
. I also wrote the play A
Black Mass
in my office at the Arts. It is a work that dramatizes the Nation of Islam's mythology about the origins of the white man, having been created by the mad scientist Yacoub. Patterson's
Black Ice
was another of our staples. In trying to get money to put on programs, we searched for various sources. One very successful set was a benefit concert which was recorded by ABC Impulse. I knew the producer of Impulse, Bob Thiele, fairly well, having done liner notes for him, one the enormously important
Live at Birdland
album, for which I interviewed Trane in the little telephone-booth dressing room in the back. So Thiele liked the idea of doing an album dedicated to the avant-garde in black music, which he could then market as an anthology and as a sampler of albums he would bring out later. He called the album
The New Wave in Jazz
and it featured Trane, playing the beautiful and frightening “Nature Boy,” and groups led by Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Grachan Moncur, Bobby Hutcherson, and Charles Tolliver. The only person left off the tape, which infuriated me, was Sun Ra. Dave did one section of the liner notes and I did the other. So we got some money for our programs and also got a very hip record out.

Then we heard about the HARYOU Act programs around the corner functioning out of the Hotel Theresa. HARYOU was the first antipoverty program set up by Lyndon Johnson in his continuing assault on the Great Society. They were trying to set up a stop-riot program for the summer of '65, the summer after the “long hot summer” of '64. There was to be an Operation Bootstrap functioning that summer in Harlem out of HARYOU. What it would be was anybody's guess and we found out when we started coming around there that most of those folks at HARYOU didn't know either.

Livingston Wingate, now a judge, was the director of HARYOU. He was Adam Clayton Powell's man, I was told, and a very popular dude uptown. However, the guy running the summer program was an egg-shaped, light-skinned
man named Frank Stanley, who tried to be likable but seemed just a trifle on the slick side. Some said, more greasy than slick. My job was constantly to rush back and forth between Stanley and Wingate and a few other folks trying to get some money. Finally, we hit on the idea that we could do a summer arts and culture program. I wrote up the proposal with help from my old HU buddy Shorty, who was now an accountant with some firm. Shorty was also married to a white woman in the Bronx, but that spring of '65 when we met I was talking so much shit that Shorty soon moved out of his situation and was at the Arts as our accountant. Shorty knew a couple of Bronx operators on the semilegal side, Ricky and Tony, so they became the triumvirate of our financial dealing and accountability, which, with all the headaches, crazy niggers, crazy government, crazy whiteys, they did remarkably well.

There were always many versions of how much money we got out of HARYOU that summer for our Arts & Culture sector of Operation Bootstrap. But we must have got away with a couple hundred grand and even more in services when it was all over. It was really a great program, running that entire summer. We brought paintings into the street with outdoor art exhibitions. Overstreet designed the easels we used to show the paintings and he brought artists with him to oversee and contribute to the shows. Each night the show would move to a new location in Harlem.

We brought new music out in the streets, on play streets, vacant lots, playgrounds, parks. I think perhaps the Jazzmobile came from our first idea. We had trucks with stages we designed from banquet tables, held together by clamps (another Overstreet design). And Pharaoh, Albert, Archie, Sun Ra, Trane, Cecil Taylor, and many other of the newest of the new came up and blew. The only bad incident was when a white-media-famous tenor man came up with an integrated group and someone threw an egg at him. We told the musicians we wanted black groups and boycotted them if they refused to make their groups all black. But there was music at these different sites every night moving all over Harlem.

We brought drama out in the street as well. We set up our improvised stages and with a little fanfare we quickly got a crowd. One evening we sent Shammy with a pistol chasing one of the characters in
Black Ice
. The bloods seeing a brother with a gun chasing somebody who looked like a white man made a crowd instantly, and the show began! Or just the sight of us unpacking and setting up would be enough. We performed in projects, parks, the streets, alleys, playgrounds. Each night a different location, five nights, sometimes six, a week.

We brought street-corner poetry readings, moving the poets by truck from site to site. So that each night throughout that summer we flooded Harlem streets with new music, new poetry, new dance, new paintings, and the sweep of the Black Arts movement had recycled itself back to the people. We had huge audiences, really mass audiences, and though what we brought was supposed to be avant and super-new, most of it the people dug. That's why we knew the music critics that put down the new music as inaccessible were full of shit. People danced in the street to Sun Ra and cheered Ayler and Shepp and Cecil and Jackie McLean and the others. It was a great summer!

We set up crews for each of the arts, each with its own truck, sound equipment, stages, or whatever else was needed. Harlem residents were our technical staff and quite a few of the more sympathetic folks from downtown who came up, like Overstreet and White. All those beautiful people who did come together that summer whose names I cannot recall have that sweet memory as their final unspendable paycheck.

Getting paid at HARYOU was always a drag. There was always something happening which slowed the checks down. What we would do is simply unleash our staff and crew on the HARYOU bureaucrats and they'd sail over there and talk so bad and threatening that our checks, though late, would get there before the other projects.

Hanging out in front of the Theresa was hip anyway, because people always gathered there, plus the old Garveyites would be there on their ladders with the red, black, and green flags beating the white man to death every evening.

It was a great place to argue and I had some furious mouth shoot-outs at that site quite a few times. One of the most memorable was arguing with Robert McBeth, who later became head of the New Lafayette Theater, about black art. McBeth told me that there was no such thing as a boogie man. That art was simply art, that it could not be black. I said there's Russian art, French art, Spanish and Chinese and English art, etc., but not black art? My problem was that “black” is not a nationality and I wasn't clear on that. But African American art is the creation of African American people.

Barbara Ann Teer and I got into a similar argument, I think out in front of the Black Arts, slinging the pros and cons of black art. Though I think Barbara Ann was convinced, as her National Black Theater now attests.

Being able to hire people that summer gave a big plus mark to our cry of Black Arts! It was a powerfully constructive program and word of it spread
not only through the city, up and down town, but across the country. Not so weirdly, when I had done
Dutchman
downtown I had got an Obie Award, but uptown it was called by some newspapers “racist drama.” From the “fair-haired black boy” of Off-Broadway, as Langston Hughes called me with his tongue stuck way up in his cheek, I got to be a full-up racist. So strange that the victims, once they began to scream and shout at their oppressors, can now be termed the oppressors. We accuse whites of racism, so — Presto! Change-o! — “black racism” is the real problem. “Hate-whitey dramas” were what I and my colleagues on West 130th Street were writing. And, the white god help us, when we were trying to find out how we would carry out our all-black aesthetic when most of our plays had at least one white in them, it was Shammy who came up with the idea that we should do them in whiteface. We loved the idea and it became a tack one associated with the Black Arts. Blacks in whiteface! What racism! My God!

We also gave classes in playwriting, poetry, history, music, painting, and martial arts. A young black poet named Ojijiko was our resident martial artist. Harold Cruse was our history teacher and at one time he had two FBI agents in his classes. One, Donald Duncan, was later implicated in framing Max Stanford and Herman Ferguson for some bullshit FBI-fabricated attempt to assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. Another one of the agents had also penetrated Malcolm's OAAU. One guy was tall and light-skinned with red freckles. I'd see him going back and forth to Harold's class. Later we put out flyers and circulated them to many cities with these dudes' pictures and one of their lady friends, alerting people to these agents' presence.

Bringing art to the people, black art to black people, and getting paid for doing it was sweet. Both the artists and the people were raised by that experience. But we were just going on instinct and our own skills at what we did best, arts. We knew next to nothing about bureaucratic games or the subtlety needed to preserve so fragile a program as we had erected, so fragile because it was so important and we had no funds of our own and no correct understanding of the economic self-reliance needed to push a program calling for black self-determination, even in the arts.

We met a lot of people, many who had our best interests at heart, but we did not take some of the best advice. We did not benefit from the wisdom of our elders. We met Bumpy Johnson, the grand old man of organized Harlem crime. Bumpy was one of the first to insist that black dudes run their own rackets and stop paying off the white boys. He was a respected
elder, straight as a board, with an office in a warehouse that sold exterminator supplies (so help me!), a legit front for his widely known and widely respected operations. For an hour or so Bumpy talked to me like my father, telling me I had to meet different people and get hooked up really to the community and not get too far out so that negative folks could shoot me down. I listened and was proud to be there with the bald-headed, dignified Mr. Bumpy Johnson, but I couldn't really hear what he was saying. I didn't really understand. But Bumpy could see we were heading for trouble if we didn't get fully conscious in a hurry, but I was too naive to dig. I thought that if I roared and roared and took it all straight ahead, as hard as I could, relentless in attack, we would get over, we would win. The question was, would we survive?

Sargent Shriver, Kennedy's brother-in-law, was head of the antipoverty program. He came to New York to tour HARYOU's various programs. When he came with his entourage to the Black Arts building, we wouldn't let him in. Bad us! Dave came up to my office and told me Shriver was outside waiting to get in. I could peek out my front window and see the crowd of white D.C.-type bureaucrats along with some of the Negroes from around the corner. I told Dave, “Later for them motherfuckers.”