The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (6 page)

So the war brought that change to us as it probably brought some kind of change to a great many people. One thing it meant now was that my grandmother was raising my sister and me almost exclusively. And sometimes when my grandmother was taking that long ride up to Essex Fells, where the rich white folks lived, to curl up somebody's hair or cook or clean for the Fortes, my sister and I went real wartime and had to get our own lunches in a lunchroom across the street from the school. My mother paid in advance and we'd come in and get our sandwich and milk. Tuna fish salad or bacon lettuce and tomato or bologna and cheese. We used to crack up over this one big four-eyed white boy — Ralphie — who everyday, without fail, got the same sandwich, grilled cheese. Somehow I thought he was being tortured or something. (Just like my friend Bunny, who I saw bathing in green smoking water and crying. I thought his mother was torturing him or something, it looked so out to me.) God-Lee, Ralphie is having to eat grilled cheese sandwiches everyday. Ga-uhd-Lee, and my sister and I laughed at him, but still I suspected some grimmer motivation.

But the war against the Germanies and the Japaneses, the Germans and the Japs we came to call them, took up much of my time, and was the background panorama of my young life. At one point some genius on our block had offered the hypothesis that since the Japanese were “yellow” the Germans must be green. (Was it me?) But that was quickly disproven. We'd go to movies and see Germans doing they evil shit. They looked like white people to us, though that didn't register as such, what with those wild uniforms.

The difference between Germans and Nazis was not outlined for us. It was just Germans that was doing the shit — all of 'em. Somehow the Italian fascist participation in the war was muted and muffled in that neighborhood. But we never connected our Italian running partners with Mussolini and Co. They had different uniforms. Plus we weren't clear on what an “Italian” was. The kids we knew were Augie, Anthony, Thomas, Angel, Pookie, Dolores, Marian, and they were white kids first but even that was muted. We ran with some and didn't run with others, that was final enough for us then.

But they were the contrasting shape of our environment. Augie D. was my closest white friend. Him and Anthony Arlotta. Anthony, a school friend,
lived over in Baxter Terrace, the white side. Augie D. was around the corner on Newark Street. And while The Secret Seven was the main force of my daily young life of shaping, the whites like dots and dashes or points of contrast doing what they did completed the whole. They were not “us” though they were close enough to us — we lived on the same streets, went to the same schools. But the adult world held us apart in ways we didn't even understand.

Actually we most times were in different groups, gangs, had different white and black friends we were most intimate with, but then we criss-crossed at points, came together at times around whatever. I often wonder what those guys and girls carried away from that experience with us and what they make of it. (I know one guy, Tommy R., a pretty advanced white dude, an engineer, who comes back to Newark to see his mother, who still lives in Baxter Terrace, though there's no more white side; it, like most other things in town, is very very black. But I've yet to talk to him and try to find out what he got, what he found out about all that, and what it means to him.)

I'm not totally clear what I got out of all that. All those experiences and impressions. All that touching and going. For instance, what was elementary school? Then? Now it's, as I mentioned, a shuffling of shadows and images. Odd textures and fragments. Names and the lies memory tells.

But what was it then? What did I think it was? School was what? I knew I went because that's why my mother waked me up and got me dressed. Going to Central Avenue School, I could hear the first bell from my house and still get there on time, so close we lived. A vacant lot and one house, the playground (you could go through there) or the green door on the Dey Street side.

I went to school because I was supposed to go. Nothing in grammar school was hard (to me). Except keeping quiet. Otherwise it was just something you did because, well, you did it. I didn't think I was “learning” or anything like that. I just went cause I was supposed to go. In fact I never had any pretensions ever about “learning” till I'd gotten run out of college and was in the air force. Then I started to appreciate the “learning” process. And actually did, then, become attached to that activity. I mean it was then I fell in love with learning. But only after I'd come out of school.

School was classes and faces and teachers. And sometimes trouble. School was as much the playground as the classroom. For me it was more the playground than the classroom. One grew, one had major confrontations with real life in the playground, only rarely in the classroom. Though
I had some terrible confrontations in the classroom I can remember. Around discipline and whatnot. The only black teacher in the school at that time, Mrs. Powell, a tall statuesque powder brown lady with glasses, beat me damn near to death in full view of her and my 7B class because I was acting the fool and she went off on me (which apparently was sanctioned by my mother — it probably had something to do with conflicting with the
only
black teacher in the whole school and that had to be revenged full blood flowingly at once as an example to any other interlopers). But Mrs. Powell was one of the only teachers to take us on frequent trips to New York. And she had us publish a monthly newspaper that I was one of the cartoonists for. But apparently I did something “out” and she took me “out.”

But in school when I was in kindergarten I got sick (went off with the whooping cough, then the measles). And I learned to read away from school — my first text Targeteer Comics — and when I came back I was reading — and haven't stopped since.

I skipped 3B a few years later — I can't tell you why. But the 3A teacher was drugged for some reason or more likely I drugged her with my perpetual motion mouth and she made me
skip
around the room. (For some reason it makes me think of my son, Amiri!)

I have distorted in various books and stories and plays and whatnot iron confrontations in the school with the various aspects recalled at various different times. The seventh grade beating by Mrs. Powell. The weird comic strip I created/semiplagiarized, called
The Crime Wave
, which consisted of a hand with a gun sticking out of strange places holding people up. For instance, as a dude dived off the diving board the ubiquitous hand would be thrust up out of the water holding a gun and in the conversation balloon the words “Your money!” A series of those all over the goddam place and only “Your money!”

I think I saw the concept somewhere else but I was attracted to it and borrowed it and changed it to fit my head. But why “Your money!”? No cabeesh.

When the curious old Miss Day, the white-haired liberal of my early youth, shuffled off into retirement as principal there came Mr. Van Ness, hair parted down the middle and sometimes seeming about to smile but sterner seeming than Miss Day. We loved Miss Day, we seemed to fear Mr. Van Ness, probably because he seemed so dressed up and stiff. (The irony of this is that I just had drinks with old man Van Ness two months ago, up at his apartment with my wife and a lady friend of his — a black woman! — and we went over some of these things. Because, as it turns out,
Van Ness was an open investigating sort, actually a rather progressive person!)

Van Ness even took some interest in the fact that my mother had been to Fisk and Tuskegee. And based on these startling credentials he could ask me what was proper, “Negro” or “Colored.” I said “Negro” and Van Ness told the students, “Remember, there's a right and a wrong way of saying that.” You bet!

In the eighth grade we had a race riot. Not in the eighth grade but in Newark. And in them days race riot meant that black and white “citizens” fought each other. And that's exactly what happened in Newark. It was supposed to have jumped off when two white boys stopped a guy in my class named Haley (big for his age, one of the Southern blacks put back in school when he reached “Norf”) and asked him if he was one of the niggers who'd won the races. He answered yes and they shot him. They were sixteen, Haley about the same age even though he was only in 8B and most of us in our earlier teens — I was about twelve.

The races they'd talked about were part of the citywide elementary school track meet. The black-majority schools had won most of those races and this was the apparent payoff. So rumbles raged for a couple weeks on and off. Especially in my neighborhood, which confronted the Italian section. The Black Stompers confronted the Romans — a black girl was stripped naked and made to walk home through Branch Brook Park (rumor had it). A white girl got the same treatment (the same playground rumor said). But two loud stone and bottle throwing groups of Americans did meet on the bridge overpassing the railroad tracks near Orange Street. The RR tracks separating the sho-nuff Italian streets from the last thrust of then black Newark. The big boys said preachers tried to break it up and got run off with stones. It was the battle of the bridge.

Beneath that fabric of rumor and movement, the bright lights of adventure flashing in my young eyes and the actual tension I could see, the same tensions had rose up cross this land now the war was over and blacks expected the wartime gains to be maintained and this was resisted. Probably what came up on the streets of Newark was merely a reflection of the Dixiecrats who declared that year for the separation of the races. But whatever, New Jersey became the first state to declare that year a statute against all discrimination — (I just found that out a few seconds ago, you see a cold vector from out my past illuminating itself and the present where I sit) so maybe it was connected and it's all connected to me. I to it.

But the whys of any life propel it, the hows it forms and means. We want to know why we got to here, why we was where we was (our parents), why we thought and think the way we did and do now. Why we changed our thinking, if we did. When we did.

As a child the world was mysterious, wondrous, terrible, dangerous, sweet in so many ways. I loved to run. Short bursts, medium cruises, even long stretched-out rhythm-smooth trips. I'd get it in my head to run somewhere — a few blocks, a mile or so, a few miles through the city streets. Maybe I'd be going somewhere, I wouldn't take the bus, I'd just suddenly get it in my head and take off. And I dug that, the way running made you feel. And it was a prestigious activity around my way, if you was fast you had some note. The street consensus.

I only knew what was in my parents' minds through their practice. And children can't ever sufficiently “sum that up,” that's why or because they're children. You deal with them on a perceptual level — later you know what they'll do in given situations (but many of their constant activities you know absolutely nothing about). Later, maybe, deadhead intellectuals will try to look back and sum their parents up, sometimes pay them back for them having been that, one's parents. Now that we are old we know so much. But we never know what it was like to have ourselves to put up with.

My family, as I've tried to tell, was a lower-middle-class family finally. For all the bourgeois underpinnings on my mother's side, the Depression settled the hash of this one black bourgeois family. And those tensions were always with us. My mother always had one view, based on being conscious and taking advantage of any opening. I cannot even begin to describe the love factor in my mother and father's relationship, what brought them together aside from their bodies and some kind of conversation.

My father from the widowed wing of the lower middle class, a handsome high school graduate from the South, a barber, a postal worker, who tells the old traditional black lie that he thought Newark was New York and it wasn't until much later that. His family was upwardly mobile, of course, that's the ideological characteristic of the class. But what if the ruined sector of the black bourgeoisie and the bottom shadow of the petty bourgeois come together? The feudings in that, the fumings, the I-used-to-be's and We-woulda-been's and the many many If-it-wasn't-for's oh boy oh boy all such as that. The damaged aristocracy of ruined dreams. The open barn door of monopoly capitalism. What a laugh. I mean, if some big-eyed dude was to step in and give a lecture, no, if suddenly there in the darkness of my bedroom I (or whoever could pull this off sleeping in my bed) could
have stepped forward into the back and forth of sharp voices trying to deal with their lives, in our accepted confusion of what life is, and say, “Look, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation always faces a tenuous existence, the petty bourgeoisie of any nation is always shaky. And yeh they can get thrown down, like in a fixed rasslin match, thrown down among that black bubbling mass. Yeh, they can get thrown down and all lit-up fantasies of Sunday School picnics in the light-skinned church of yellow dreams could get thrown down, by the short trip home, to the vacant lots and thousands of dirty Davises, and what you-all is doin' is class struggle of a sort, yeh, it's only that, translated as it has to be through the specifics of your life, the particular paths, crossroads and barricades, but that's all it is ya know?”

I guess their, my parents, eyes would've lit up, for a second, and then a terrible hard loss would've settled there, because they would've figured the goddam kid is crazy, he's babbling outta his wits. What? And they'd look at each other in the halfdark, and exchange looks about what to do. I'm glad I wasn't that smashed up. What I did do, with a taste of Krueger's beer in my mouth my mother had let me sip out of her glass earlier that night when they had friends over, I just opened my eyes so they glowed softly bigly in the dark and said nothing. I heard my sister's slow deep breathing in the bed under mine.