The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (58 page)

“It's Shriver,” Dave told me.

“Fuck Shriver.” And Dave carried the message back. And looking out of the window you could see the white faces turning red and the Negro faces turning Negroier.

So it was about this time that word of the “racist” Black Arts program began to surface in the media — “teaching racism with government funds”! In retrospect, that obviously wasn't cool. With a good grasp of skating on the thin ice of government grants and with a smart grantsman around, we could have not only bit deeper into the federal pie, we could have gotten some of the foundation money. But we were too honest and too naive for our own good. We talked revolution because we meant it; we hooked up programs of revolutionary and progressive black art because we knew our people needed them, but we had not scienced out how these activities were to be sustained on an economic side. Later, after the word “black” had cooled out some and the idea of even “black art” had sunk roots deep enough in the black masses, where it could not simply be denied out of existence, the powers-that-be brought in some Negro art, some skin theater, eliminating the most progressive and revolutionary expressions for a fundable colored theater that merely traded on “the black experience,” rather than carrying on the black struggle for democracy and self-determination.
Then the Fords and Rockefellers “fount” them some colored folks they could trust and dropped some dough on them for colored theater. Douglas Turner Ward's Negro Ensemble is perhaps the most famous case in point. During a period when the average young blood would go to your head for calling him or her a knee-grow, the Fords and Rockefellers could raise themselves up a whole-ass knee-grow ensemble. But that's part of the formula: Deny reality as long as you have to and then, when backed up against the wall, substitute an ersatz model filled with the standard white racist lies which include some dressed as Negro art. Instead of black art, bring in Negro art, house nigger art, and celebrate slavery, right on!

But we made it easier for them to take us off — we acted so wild and woolly (get it?). From the point of our publicly nutting out on Shriver, news of our “black racism” steadily accelerated. And the funding of the most obviously successful arts and culture program any poverty program ever had was made “highly controversial.” But we thought we could simply trample the racist rulers with the sincerity of our feelings. We hated white people so publicly, for one reason, because we had been so publicly tied up with them before.

There was, however, a positive overall effect of the Black Arts concept that still remains. We showed that we had heard and understood Malcolm and that we were trying to create an art that would be a weapon in the Black Liberation Movement. In August of that year, while we were still conducting our nightly black art in the streets, our Operation Bootstrap program, Watts went up in flame and blood, and a war raged in Watts for five days. That's what we thought, that it was out-and-out war. When Malcolm was murdered we felt that was the final open declaration of war on black people and we resolved to fight. The Harlem move was our open commitment to this idea. In our naive and subjective way we fully expected the revolution to jump off any minute, Watts or Harlem style. There had been rebellions in many cities since the year before, when Jacksonville and Harlem went up. For us, it meant black people had taken the offensive and we despised those who did not equally commit themselves to the struggle. Young writers and other artists were drawn to this stance and its furious patriotism and outright despising of whites. Poets Sonia Sanchez, Clarence Reed, Clarence Franklin, playwright Ronald Drayton were among those that flowered out of the Black Arts. Sonia, then a wide-eyed young woman, quiet and self-deprecating, was herself coming out of a bad marriage and she came to our programs announcing very quietly and timidly that she was a poet. The two Clarences had walked the streets of Harlem
all their lives, but the Black Arts saw them flower as poets. Sam Anderson and Ed Spriggs developed out of that Black Arts movement, participating in the readings we gave, at places like the Club Baron and the Celebrity Club or in the small Black Arts auditorium. We had one hugely successful reading at the Baron, Milford Graves on drums, plus the African dance company from Oserjeman's Yoruba Temple.

Some of us were very much influenced by the Yorubas. When we first arrived in Harlem, Oserjeman's group was very political. They dressed as traditional West Africans from Nigeria but upheld the right of black self-determination, declaring that Africans in Harlem must control it. We gave many rallies at which Oserjeman or some other speaker from the Yoruba Temple spoke. I had known Baba Oserjeman through a host of image changes. He was Francis King from Detroit, a friend of Steve Korret's, where I first met him. He was always spoken of then, by his friends, as a kind of con man/hustler. He wore English riding outfits and jodhpurs and affected a bit of an English accent. He then became Francisco Rey, Spanish for a minute. Then he became Serj Khingh, a little Indian, and he opened one of the first black-owned coffee shops (of that era) on the Lower East Side, called Bhowani's Table, where some of us used to go. The next I heard of Oserjeman, he had become Nana Oserjeman of the Damballah Qwedo, “practicing the religion of our fathers.” And finally (?), Baba Oserjeman, chief priest of the Yoruba Temple.

I had no formal definition of cultural nationalism. I didn't even correctly know what it was. But certainly it was all around us then, the Nation of Islam the most known. But Malcolm's death ended any would-be hookup with the Nation for me and most of my friends. Lesser stoutly maintained he was a follower of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, but he belonged to no mosque and his commitment to the Nation seemed to be the carrying of a Qur'an and the wearing of the funny little suits and bow ties popularized by the Nation, plus carrying a briefcase and standing sluefooted (“45 degrees”) the way he thought a good Muslim should.

All of our politics were confused. Tong and his boys thought they were focused on a kind of Islam, but the only results I saw were negative. Some of us were influenced by the Yorubas because we could understand a connection we had with Africa and wanted to celebrate it. We liked the African garb that Serj and his people wore. The lovely long dresses, the bubbas and lappas and geles of the women. After so much exposure to white women, the graceful dress of the sisters in their African look, with their hair natural, turned us on. Plus, Oserjeman and the rest talked about and practiced
polygamy, and certainly for some of us who were used to ripping and roaring out of one bed and into another, this “ancient custom of our people” provided a perfect outlet for male chauvinism, now disguised. But that was a basic cultural nationalist influence.

All of the various influences focused on white people as enemies, devils, beasts, etc., and our thinking fell in perfectly with this. One question white reporters never seemed tired of asking me was if I hated all white people, were all white people the enemy? When the last question was asked I would say, well, I haven't met all white people. It was our intention to be hard and unyielding in our hatred because we felt that's what was needed, to hate these devils with all our hearts, that that would help in their defeat and our own liberation.

So if “Hate Whitey” was our war cry, it was also reason for me to be attacked. That was Tong's main method of undermining and attacking — to point out how a few months ago I lived downtown with white folks, now here I was directing black people. Plus, the press and the white power structure had definitely set us up, exploiting my recent fame to turn it to infamy, before people's eyes. Larry Neal and Eddie Ellis had articles on this phenomenon in the
Liberator
magazine, but I still slept what they were saying, that I was being propped up so I could become an all-purpose whipping boy to show the absurdity of our cries of Black Art.

We faced both internal and external conflict. Every day brought a revelation of one aspect or the other. One day Shammy got into a struggle with a dude from the Yoruba Temple over a woman that Shammy wanted and the Yoruba dude did too, plus Shammy had talked wise to one of Oserjeman's wives. When I looked up, the entire Yoruba Temple, which numbered a couple hundred in those days, came over to the Arts. They had come, they said, “for satisfaction.” One of their priests' wives had been insulted and it must be rectified.

At first our people wouldn't let the Yorubas in, but I came downstairs and let them all file in. They stood silently around the wall, some with walking sticks, a couple, I suppose, with heat. Shammy wanted to act mock-heroic and defiant, but finally I got him to beg the priest's pardon and so his face was saved and likewise Shammy's ass. But Oserjeman lectured us on our bad manners and our lack of African perspective. We could not come up to Harlem and act like Europeans. I was boiling mad and embarrassed again by one of the Hackensack brothers.

The program that summer built a great rapport in all sectors of the community, especially since we were able to give out some jobs. We worked
constantly to agitate the community and to further inflame it against the white racist system. But it seemed that fools like the Hackensacks did everything they could to break down that rapport and isolate us. When the program was over, we faced the bleak prospect of trying to raise money to continue our programs at the level to which we'd grown accustomed. I went downtown one night, backstage, to see Sammy Davis in
Golden Boy
. He made me a gift that night of $500 in brand-new $100 bills right out of his pocket. We also got Sammy to come uptown and do a benefit for us. It was at a HARYOU facility on 125th Street. Sammy appeared with his entire entourage and made those surroundings seem even more spartan than they were. It was wild how white Sammy's act seemed in Harlem. But he did all right by us, whatever his motives.

There was one school of thought, not wholly shared by me, that we could simply gorilla the bux out of anyone, that we needed not only black celebrities but the government as well. That proved wrong on both counts. We pulled some thoroughly juvenile delinquent shit on Harry Belafonte after demanding some money which he wouldn't give up, writing his name on some paper and then tearing the paper up as if that signified his imminent disposal. But it didn't work, Belafonte wasn't cowed by such shallow theatrics. Or at least I didn't think so.

Our trips down to the various regional offices of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was the funding agent for HARYOU, were legion. We still have photos of Dr. Proctor (later pastor of Adam's Abyssinia) sitting with his head in his hands listening to our frantic spontaneous treatises on why we had to have some money, or some more money, etc. We felt that we had a right to demand money for our operations — some of us, I guess, felt we had a right to demand money for our personal lives, but I never had that problem.

So this gorilla attitude did permeate one aspect of our public image. While I did not think such an image was an absolutely correct one, there were only a few things I could do about it. I mean, I thought it was all right to present that image to the state, i.e., to the white racist government and those linked up with it ideologically or through employment. But I did not think that that should be our image as far as black people were concerned. With the Hackensacks and Tong's clique on the scene, that problem was also a constant. They were always having some confrontation or another with someone and then justifying it in the name of blackness. So I spent a lot of my time cooling out that image, trying to rectify it, or in hassles with our own perpetrators.

What our image was at large, outside of Harlem, I can only guess. Though the large motion in black communities to set up Black Arts equivalent institutions meant to me that the image was, in the main, positive.

Downtown some people still smarted over the disrupted social organization that the “mass” move uptown had caused them. (Fifteen years later a white woman came up to me in a bar and talked to me in a bitter accusing tone about how I had personally estranged her black husband away from her. With my wife, Amina, sitting there listening to her. It
was
sad.) The downtowners who came up to work and contribute to the Arts, I guess, had some contradictory words to put out against the straight-out maniac line that was being run by some. We heard fragments of the tales and emotional dislocation coming from downtown, from both black and white, and it was curious to me, like listening to one's obituary. Perhaps like Cross Damon in Wright's
The Outsider
.

One night a group of the black downtown residents came up for a reading at the Arts. Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton among them. Vashti got into an argument with one poet, Luther Rupcity, about the nature of the Arts, what we were trying to do. What we were trying to
be
would have been Rupcity's phrasing. He and Hernton were very close and Vashti had little use for either one. Calvin had a problem with black women downtown and up that year because he had come out with his book
Sex and Racism in the USA
, which roots the problems of black national oppression in sexual conflicts and psychological antagonism stemming from those conflicts. Interesting that both Cleaver and Jimmy Baldwin, to varying degrees, also made this analysis. Calvin's statement that lit many sisters up was that many sisters are lesbians because black men do not relate to them sexually.

Rupcity was spouting some aspect of Hernton's theories and Vashti lit into him and Hernton with such ferocity that everyone else in the small gathering suddenly stopped to check out what was happening. Vashti was gesturing and backing Luther up, when Luther stopped talking to her and turned to me with his hands palms up and said, “Will you get this lesbian off me?”

There were at least a dozen persons in that room who would have gladly and without remuneration beaten Calvin, Ishmael, Rupcity, and entourage into fragments and slivers of confusion and foolishness. But obviously I had been called. As I stepped toward Luther, he began crying, like real tears formed and rolled. My jaw was tight and my fists obviously shaking with anticipation. Rupcity says to me, “Don't hit me. What do you want to
do, hit me? I know you've got those big hands. You want to hit me?” And he was quite right, that idea did cross my mind. But his display was further out than I expected and it unnerved me. I felt sorry for them. I jawed at him, talked bad to him, and then they all dragged out of there.