The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (59 page)

Vashti and I were living on Seventh Avenue right up near 145th Street. After struggling with the Arts all day I would walk up Seventh Avenue to our little three-room flat which overlooked a courtyard full of new, middle-aged, and ancient garbage. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, over a West Indian bakery. So I was always eating them hip meat pies smoking hot, but I could never deal with the ginger beer. We went to the Zambesi bar across the street, and around the corner was the Lagos, African named even before our new African consciousness. We hung out up and down Seventh Avenue. Count Basie's and Wells', home of the famous chicken and waffles, were our special hangouts. We'd fall by the Red Rooster, the stakeout joint of the black middle class. For special meeting meals with whites or certain kinds of Negroes we'd go to Frank's on West 125th Street, which had, at the time, white waiters who circulated playing Gypsy violins! Occasionally we might go by Shalimar, across the street from Sugar Ray's, or Small's (which Wilt Chamberlain had bought). I saw Redd Foxx in there one night and he made a joke about black militants and I said something to him from my table. It was a brief exchange but I could see his embarrassment come out from under those red freckles. They made a Sammy Davis film, A
Man Called Adam
, about a weird Louis Armstrong-Miles Davis combination, at Small's, and we got some of our actors on as extras. I even met Cicely Tyson and exchanged pleasantries while Vashti smirked just off camera.

Not just Vashti and I, but some of the dudes from the Arts and myself would hang out. We were always in the Apollo. I even went backstage and talked to Dionne Warwick, whom I fancied I had a crush on, trying to get her to do a benefit for the Arts. Some brothers opened a coffeehouse right around the corner from the Arts called The Truth. It was meant to cater to the Black Arts and those with similar tastes. There had been a rush of folks from downtown up to Harlem, but also from outside New York. People had come into New York as usual, but now there was a very definite magnetism to go up to Harlem.

Harlem had its share of nuts and bolts. Not all of them came with us, but we did bring more than our share. There were resident paranoids and schizophrenics we ran into as well as sane people reacting normally to our abnormality. Most people were not running away from white people and a
“shadowy” life as “King(s) of the Lower East Side.” So sometimes we probably confused some people's normal reaction to our nuttiness as nutty reactions to normality! But, all things considered, like they say, there were some bona fide nuts we ran into and some of the best people we have ever met in life.

Around us, at this point, there were people from RAM and also from the
Liberator
magazine, run by Dan Watts. There were the Garvey people, young and old. The neo-Garveyite followers of Carlos Cooks, like the AJASS society (African Jazz Arts Society) led by Elombe Brath, who first featured the “Naturally” programs that made natural hairstyles popular among some advanced groups of black people. They also modeled African clothing styles with their “Grandassa” models. And they definitely had some grand assas. Some fine ones too.

There were all kinds of other nationalists. The street-corner variety, which included not only the Garveyites but folks like Eddie “Porkchop” Davis, who was on the ladder daily giving white people hell. There were the cultural nationalists like the Nation of Islam, the Yoruba Temple, and even smaller cults and the orthodox or Sunni Muslims, who also had many variations, and the black Jews or Hebrews, the Egyptian Coptics, and various other “consciousness-raising” religious cults and sects. There were black militants of all persuasions and those on the left like Bill Epton around the corner at the Progressive Labor Party. Epton got arrested during the '64 rebellion and charged with “criminal anarchy.” Bill was a soft-spoken likable dude whose relationship with the black community, from a little ramshackle office over top of a restaurant on Lenox Avenue, gave PLP a little credibility before it came out with its bullshit position that “all nationalism is nationalism,” negating the revolutionary aspect of liberation struggles against imperialism which are not direct struggles for socialism. The white chauvinism and petty bourgeois subjectivism of would-be white leftists like PLP have always left them isolated from not only the black community but also the other oppressed nationalities, and their connection with white workers is even more dubious.

Bill and I appeared on programs together and got along all right, but I was a nationalist and he a Marxist. We argued about whether PLP would come to his defense adequately. I told him I thought they would leave his ass to rot, while letting him take the weight. PLP did get him out, though I think he later resigned from the organization and joined a mainly black organization based in Harlem. PLP did, however, leave another of its black
cadres in prison to rot and take the weight and expelled this brother as a “nationalist.” I never found out what Epton thought of this.

There were also the basic working people, moving out of Harlem most times to work and struggle and then returning at night to the indignities of ghetto life. There were Harlem office workers and bureaucrats and politicians. There were other cults like Democratic and Republican blacks. We disrupted several of their rallies, at one of which Mayor Lindsay was to speak. There were right-wing nationalists like James Lawson who acted as bodyguards for the white and black politicos, and we had constant run-ins with them. There were people like Charles Kenyatta who got great notoriety as “Malcolm's former security.” Kenyatta spoke on the ladder every day as well. But our comment was terse: “Motherfuckers who say they was Malcolm's bodyguards need to be killed. They shoulda died along with Malcolm.” And HARYOU, because it had got some dough, drew all kinds of hustlers and con men, religious and secular. There were people like baldhead Omar, who wanted to talk his way up on some money and power, or Donald Hassan, who got a reputation for being as crazy as Shammy, trying to gorilla his way up on same. There were the good-timers who wanted to hang out all day and night. Corny would lead us around to the various after-hours joints, where he would hold forth and introduce me to everybody and we would argue about Shammy and Tong and whether there was a black middle class or not. Corny said there wasn't. (Years later Cornelius was shot to death in just such an after-hours joint by some gunmen who, when robbing the place, turned for no reason and suddenly filled Corny full of lead!)

There were the gangsters and hoodlums and people in “the life” and all kinds of people who had been overlooked or peeped and popped. There was, as in any large urban black community, all kinds of promise and all kinds of frustration and bitterness. The sickness, the pathology that Fanon talks about that exists in the communities of the oppressed, it was all full out and openly roaring around and over and through and within us. The Black Arts itself was a pastiche of so many things, so many styles and ideologies. We had no stated ideology except “black,” and that meant many things to many people, much of it useful, much of it not. But we shot from the hip, came always off the top or near the top of our heads. Our sincerity was our real ideology, a gestalt of our experience, an eclectic mixture of what we thought we knew and understood. What we wanted. Who we thought we were. It was very messy.

Vashti and I were a pair for those times. She young and aggressive, so full of her own sense of what everything was (even as she was in the act of finding out) that she was intimidated by nothing. Probably some white women hated Vashti (some black ones, too) because she was not just a symbol of something new, she was the whole drum set. People must have thought, this young girl, how'd she get into so much? But the brash young lady from D.C. was just what the doctor ordered and she knew it. Whoever it was — nuts, nationalists, Muslims, Yorubas, artsy types, politicians — Vashti handled them. “Hey, you betta get outta my face!” was one of her favorite statements. And our struggles were many and varied, for whatever reason. But we took all that in stride because we knew we had something deeper, we knew we actually dug each other, that we were
friends
as well as lovers.

Even my waywardness and roving eye she tried to deal with straight up and straight ahead. She'd say, “Roi, you gonna make me kill this bitch,” of any object of my dalliance she would perchance to spy. And there were those. At Dolores Soul, the actress, Vashti merely laughed. “That old bitch!” And at Maria Cuevas, the writer, she just put her hands on her hips and when either of them was around the Arts she'd stand and watch them so intensely they felt a laser on their intentions that cooled them into distance.

One time we fought about my intentions. Vashti wanted to know when I was going to get a divorce. She said, “You think I'm just living with you for my health?” And we went off. I stalked out the door, headed for somewhere. The next day I went to the bank, and goddam Vashti had withdrawn all the money and split for somewhere. Then she called me up at the Arts, laughing. “Fooled your ass, didn't I?” I was rising in smoke like the Phoenix. I got home and she'd bought a goddam antique rocking chair.

We had a real falling out another time about something very similar. She says she's tired of my bullshit, she's going home to D.C. When I get up to 145th Street that evening she has taken most of her shit and gone. I was depressed not only with this personal wipe-out; the day-to-day shit at the Arts could be extremely depressing with that cast of nuts to deal with. I was trying to figure out how we were going to sustain the program now that the federal moneys had been stopped. The phone rings and it's Brandy, a friend of Vashti's she'd met through Shammy. (Shammy's female thing was astonishing. He ran through so many women so quickly it was impossible to keep track. They'd appear, be on the set a few minutes, and then disappear
as if Porto Rico, the dude with the hook at the Apollo amateur night, had pulled them off accompanied by crazy music.)

Brandy was a Shammy ex and she'd got real tight with Vashti. But now she's on the phone and I tell her that Vashti is not in. She says, “I know. Do you want me to come over?” In truth, the only reason I said I was busy, some dudes were coming over, was because suddenly I got the image of Shammy and that crazy-ass Vashti converging on me with waving swords and I couldn't handle it.

A few minutes later, Vashti calls from Washington. She asks me what I'm doing. She says, “I bet you got some woman over there, don't you?” It was funny now, so I told her about her friend Brandy and Vashti goes up in smoke right on the phone. “That bitch. I was the one who told her I was going to D.C. and to watch out for my interests. That bitch. Wait till I get my hands around her throat!”

But when she didn't come back I got into all kinds of dubious shit. For one thing, during the summer cultural program, the Yorubas had sent people over for some of the jobs. One of them, a young little girl named Olabumi, caught my eye. She was tiny but built like a dancer, with, as the nationalists say, an impressive history (a shapely behind). I started watching her go up and down the stairs at the Arts wondering what was under the long African lappa she wore.

At a program we had at the Baron, the Yoruba dancers are wailing and then Olabumi, or Bumi as we called her, falls out. One of the Yorubas then spreads the story that I was staring at her so intensely it made her faint. At any rate, I found myself going by her place, but then I found out she lived with two other women and one of the Yoruba, a dude who sold incense. I didn't know what it meant, but I didn't care. Maybe I was interfering with some of their polygamy. Anyway, we found ourselves in one of the worst flophouse hotels in Harlem, but once getting in there she said she had no intention of doing anything. She said that Olatuni, whom she lived with, was her guardian, nothing more. But she would not give it up. So this became one focus for my after-Arts hours, trying to catch up with this little teasing Bumi.

I met another woman at the same time, a little light-skinned woman with glasses who walked like she thought she was a musician or at least a street hipster. This Lucille had been downtown and had moved up, but she was living in Harlem and hanging downtown and had come uptown before most of us. When I ran into her she was staying with some girl-friend
and implying she might be going to lead a life of Lesbos. Goddam, I thought, why I always have to run into these.

The influence of the cultural nationalism on all of us at the Black Arts was real. For instance, when I finally succeeded in getting Bumi to come up to 145th Street and spend the night, I immediately got the idea that both Bumi and Lucille could move in, that I should begin to live as the Yorubas at Serj's temple. As an obvious justification for male chauvinist bed rambling there is little to discuss, but the extent to which these ideas had penetrated my thinking on the real side is what is interesting. But not only my thinking. I did convince the two of them to move into 145th Street. Bumi, a teenager, an African dancer, child of the new age, seeking some new revelation of changed black reality. Lucille, an office worker who loved the music, whose quest for blackness was made all the more ironic (but necessary) by her very light skin.

Lucille, the office worker, liked the idea (but maybe she just wanted to get next to little Bumi), but Olabumi, who was associated in the temple with polygamous marriages, seemed less impressed with the idea. The three of us sat and discussed it, with Lucille marveling at Bumi's sewing machine, a portable she was carrying with her to make bubbas and lappas for wearing and for the temple's performances. But why had I found it necessary now to offer such a relationship to these sisters? I had never asked any of the white women I had been with to enter into some polygamous relationship. Though that is just a formalism, since the many affairs and one-night stands that went on amounted to something like polygamy. Engels says adultery is the partner of monogamy. None of that went through my mind; the idea of polygamy was “new” and “black,” so we went for it.