The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (69 page)

But the most indelible evening of the rebellion for me was the night I had got beaten. After the police station they had taken me up to City Hospital. The “doctor,” a white man with glasses, peered at me and asked was I the poet? I told him. He said, “Well, you'll never write any more poetry!” Then he gave me fifteen stitches on my forehead and another five in the hairline, with no anesthetic, like some primitive Gestapo butcher.

I was left in the hallway, handcuffed to a wheelchair, completely covered with the drying blood, my head on fire. Then I heard Sylvia screaming in the hallway. She had run, barefoot, from Stirling Street to the hospital, at least ten or twelve blocks, after a brother named Otis had called his mother on Stirling Street, letting her know that he had seen me getting beaten. His mother told Tarik's mother and she came across the street and told Sylvia, who gave the baby to the women at the house to mind and took off, frantically running to the hospital.

She was screaming at the policemen, hammering at them. There were two of them standing near the wheelchair, as if I would break the handcuffs and do something wild. “Are you going to kill me now?” she was screaming. “Are you going to make me look like this?” A black cop intervened and pulled her away. The white cops were cursing her and I was weakly straining to come up out of the chair. But I could barely raise my head. This was it, the real America, the America of slavery and lynching. I could feel an absolute kinship with the suffering roots of African American life.

Ironically, the Second Black Power Conference opened in Newark just as the rebellion was subsiding. Karenga, Rap Brown, Phil Hutchinson of SNCC, Gaidi of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), all came up to the
Spirit House for a press conference which I had called, demanding intervention by the UN, showing the photos of the brutal murder of the young boy at Jo-Rae's. We raised Malcolm's correct dictum that the black struggle in the U.S. was the struggle of a non-self-governing people against genocidal oppressors.

Carmichael had gotten arrested in Atlanta, and a rebellion had jumped off down there. Rebellions popped like deadly firecrackers in city after city that summer. But the week after the Newark rebellion, Detroit went up in even more flames. Forty-three dead, over 7000 people arrested, $44 million damage. They brought in 14,000 paratroopers and National Guard. Yeh, even the airborne, with machine guns, because bloods in Detroit had come up with automatic weapons, not just the pop-pop of .22s.

For me, the feeling I had downtown New York was being borne out fully; it was a war. The Black Liberation movement was raising up full out. It was a war, for us, a war of liberation. One had to organize, one had to arm, one had to mobilize and educate the people. For me, the rebellion was a cleansing fire. I must come all the way, I had come all the way, I would go all the way. What I had screamed while they were trying to kill me. “Al Homdulliah!” All Praise the Power of Allah, the Power of Blackness. I felt transformed, literally shot into the eye of the black hurricane of coming revolution. I had been through the fire and had not been consumed. Instead, I reasoned, what must be consumed is all of my contradictions to revolution. My individualism and randomness, my Western, white addictions, my Negro intellectualism.

I stopped drinking and smoking (I had smoked a pack of Gauloises a day). I remember going someplace to speak, shortly after being released, wearing a bright-colored dashiki and fila (hat). I had a bandage down my forehead and the rage that came out was boiling deep and utterly genuine. If I had been able to agitate and propagandize before, now it was raised up another notch in intensity. I felt the clubs, the guns; they had even bashed one of my teeth out and loosened some more with fists and clubs. I would be scarred for life. The hottest rage had become a constant of my waking personality.

Not long after the rebellion two men came to see me; they described themselves as Sunni Muslims. Malcolm had become a Sunni just before he was killed, moving out of the social orbit of the Nation of Islam. This had left a deep impression on many of us. Kamiel Wadud was one man's name; he was tall and well built, bearded, handsome, with a mocking smile that
made one think he had different ploys and approaches to anything one cared to mention.

He said he wanted me to meet Hajj Heesham Jaaber, who was the Islamic priest who had buried Malcolm X. Kamiel was light-skinned with straight hair, because, he said, he was mixed with the Italians. Kamiel was a kind of gangster at one time (anytime), but he had received the religion of Al Islam and it had transformed him into the righteous messenger whom I now beheld.

The gist of what they said was that leadership had been thrust on me, and if I really wanted to be a leader I had to have “leading information.” Kamiel talked in a personal and Islamicized symbolism, mixed with the street lingo of the “wise guys” who ran the Italian sector of organized crime.

They had been sent to convert me to Islam, orthodox Islam. Malcolm's break with Elijah had raised this as a possibility for many of the black militants. The mixture of weird symbolic “logic” and conversion-oriented preaching that came out of this general historical phenomenon has to be heard to be understood. (Except today, after years of prison, Rap Brown is a Sunni Muslim and the non-Black Muslim sects of Islam are enjoying more popularity in the black community than ever before, all from the same fundamental historical source.)

I met the tall, slender, beautifully dark-skinned Heesham, Hajj Heesham, signifying that he had made the Hajj, the journey to Mecca required of all Muslims. Although Malcolm X was supposedly the first of the Black Muslim group to make the Hajj, a move that further distinguished him from the homemade Islam of Elijah Muhammad. It was Heesham who gave me the name Ameer Barakat (the Blessed Prince). Sylvia was named Amina (faithful) after one of Muhammad's wives. Later, under Karenga's influence, I changed my name to Amiri, Bantuizing or Swahilizing the first name and the pronunciation of the last name as well. Barakat in Arabic is pronounced “Body-cot”; the Swahili drops the “t” and accents the next-to-last syllable, hence Baraka. Amiri with the rolled “r” is pronounced “Amidi.”

The name change seemed fitting to me. Not just the flattery of being approached by these people, especially Heesham, and not just the meaning of the name Blessed Prince, but the idea that I was now literally being changed into a blacker being. I was discarding my “slave name” and embracing blackness. It is Chancellor Williams, the historian, who points out, however, that the many new Yusefs and Omars should remember that those Arabic names for black people are as much slave names as Joseph and Homer. One from American slavery, the other from Arab slavery.

Kamiel and other Sunnis and Heesham would come around to the Spirit House. They would drop in at odd times. They would talk to me, really recruiting. We had long discussions about the meaning of Islam. They wanted me finally to become a Muslim, to take Shehada with them. They began teaching me the five pillars of the Islamic faith and taught me how to make Salat (prayer). Kamiel and his wife tended toward the mystical. He showed me how he could put his finger in a glass of water and make it sweet. He smoked chain fashion, but he said he knew the correct prayer to say after smoking to cool it out. He interspersed Masonic lore with Islam and never ceased telling me that Masons aspired to be Muslims, that that was the Europeans' way into Al Islam. And that at the 33rd degree of the Masons, the secret or code word was Allahu Akbar (Allah is the greatest!).

At one point, the Spirit House even became, unofficially, a Jamat, or gathering place for the faithful. There were classes in Arabic offered and religious instruction, though the plays and community meetings still went on. I was also beginning to meet other people in Newark, more specifically political people. They came in and out of the Spirit House, for the plays, the classes, or to talk politics. I organized weekly Sunday meetings for the political group. Harold Wilson, a childhood friend from Central Avenue; his brother Jackie (Jim Nance); John Bugg, who sold furniture and clothes and worked with Harold; Russell Bingham, an older man, even my father's senior, a retired numbers man and elegant old-time Newark swifty. He had been with the team that put Irvine Turner into office years earlier. I'd known him when I was a child being squired to the Newark Eagles games and the Grand Hotel by my father.

As we began to meet regularly, our small circle grew. Harry Wheeler, from an “old” Newark family, exactly as his name suggested, except add “Dealer.” Harry was a schoolteacher who'd been niggling around politics most of his life. Earl Harris, an old half-slick Republican, who'd been a freeholder, started coming later. Teddy Pinckney, an old school friend from HU; Jim Walker, a civil servant with political aspirations; David Barrett, a Rutgers-trained mathematician; Donald Tucker, a community activist from the East Ward, along with his pal Al Oliver. Ken Gibson, a civil engineer in City Hall who had run for mayor in 1966. What we were getting was the more politically oriented middle class, those whose imaginations had also been turned on by the fact of Newark's black majority.

So that the political meetings, the weekly “circles” we came to call them, went on during the same period as the heavy Sunni Islam influence on me and the Spirit House. Sundays, we sat and discussed politics, what was
going on in Newark, who was doing what. We began to arrange to be at certain meetings to make the points that we thought needed to be made. The issues of the medical school and the Callahan-Parker conflict were high on our priority list, plus Spina's police brutality and Addonizio's general corruption. As our meetings got larger and, we thought, more important, we began to discuss security. Just as the police had run into our rehearsals and seized scripts, we felt they might try to do the same thing with our meetings — especially as we began to focus on electoral politics. We wanted to run a candidate for City Council in 1968. So the Sunni Muslims began to pull security for us. (Although my personal security was Walter “Sonni” Koontz, a childhood friend who began pulling security as the Spirit House expanded. He continued until the Congress of Afrikan Peoples came into existence.) Kamiel and his constant associate at the time, a warm, amusing brother named Bassit, a park policeman, were inside and outside the meetings as security, also some of the other brothers from the group of Sunnis who lived around Newark and environs.

But the thing that most changed my life at the time was marriage. It was Sylvia who showed me the craziness of my ways and struggled with me as hard as she could to get me to change. I didn't like it. For one thing, the very hotness of her temper drugged me. I thought I was supposed to be the only one with that kind of heat stored up. Our struggles around the Spirit House got familiar to the actors who were around. The fire the police had lit my head up with changed me as well. I had the feeling that I wanted to get rid of my bohemian ways, plus the little Oba was already three months old. There was no doubt that I regarded Sylvia as a very singular woman, both sensual and intelligent, but I had thought that I would never get married again. I wanted to avoid those kinds of forever ties. But I loved the woman, so why all the bullshit? Sylvia Wilson and Everett L. Jones were married the first weekend in August 1967 by the Yoruba priest Nana Oserjeman in a Yoruba ceremony.

I was to be tried for possession of two weapons. The police, to justify their almost killing me and their beating of Barney and Shorty, said that we had two .32 revolvers in the van. Not only did they beat us almost to death, they destroyed the van so that I could never use it again. When the trial came up, I got Irving Booker, an acquaintance from childhood and one of the persons who'd sit in our Sunday circles, to defend me. Threehundred-pound John Love was Barney's attorney, and Booker got a Jersey City attorney, Louis Sanders, to represent Shorty.

The trial was like a comic opera. Booker thought that the best thing to do with the case was to change the venue. I was so preoccupied at the time I didn't object, but later I began to wonder why in the world he wanted to take the case out of Newark. I thought we might get more black jurors in Newark. But Booker got the case moved out to Morristown, a lily-white town in a lily-white county just west of Newark, up beyond the South Orange mountains.

When they were picking the jury, at one point I asked the judge (Kapp) could I make a statement. I wanted to raise the issue of how they thought they were going to try us with an all-white jury. Only Booker was there with us that morning, the other two attorneys were late. Kapp said I could speak only through my attorney. This infuriated me so much I told them that I was leaving. I said, “These people [the potential all-white jury] are not my peers, they are my oppressors.”

I turned to go, getting my briefcase. “I'll not be judged by any hundred white people!” As I turned, a big dark detective who acted as Kapp's bodyguard hit me from behind. He was about 260 pounds, six foot six, and I felt like a mashed-up scatback blindsided by Rosey Grier. But as this silly nigglow lay on top of me he breathed into my ear, “Hey, man, I'm in your corner.” Shit, if dropping his big-ass 260 pounds on top of my back meant he was “in my corner,” what the fuck would happen if I got on his shit list?

Kapp locked me up for contempt of court. I was stuck into the Morristown jail. The sentence was thirty days, Kapp said, but it was to be executed at the end of the other proceedings. My father came up to see me. I had been whipped half to death before, and now locked up for protesting an all-white jury. The sight of me behind bars and that beating radicalized my father. A year before, when I had first come back to Newark, the FBI had come snooping around. I had just moved into the Spirit House and my father told the FBI where I was, not knowing he didn't have to say shit to them. This burned me up and I wrote the play
Great Goodness of Life
, satirizing my father's attitudes, so hooked up with an America that has historically tried to castrate him. But the trial and lockup fired him up in a way I had never seen him before. I guess he knew that if they could do this to his son, whom he
knew
was not a criminal or bad person, then they deserved his contempt, perhaps his hatred. I heard him use profanity for the first time in my life.