The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

Amiri Baraka

• Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781556522314
• eBook ISBN: 9781613745892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The complete autobiography of a literary legend.

Ten
A Continuing Journey

The same motion that had been rising when we left Newark was at a higher point when I got back. The hot bubbling surface speaking of depths of frustration and unrest. The medical school issue had gotten even sharper. There were several different groups contending with the powers about this obvious ripoff, and a main coalition pulling people together to fight was agitating throughout the city. I got active in this and drew the forces around the Spirit House very active in this as well. Groups of us would go to the meetings and attack the various administration spokesmen, city or state. I also began to identify various groups and trends in the city and enter into general discussions about Newark politics. It had become obvious to me that, since Newark was at least 60 percent black, Black Power here meant that we had to control the politics of the city. I printed leaflets and stated this thesis in the issues of the Stirling St. Newspaper. When I made public appearances I would dwell on this issue, intent on raising the national consciousness of the black masses in Newark.

Another equally incendiary issue was the question of the appointment of a secretary to the Board of Education. Wilbur Parker, a black CPA, had gotten to be the favorite of the black community for the job. He had a master’s degree and was certainly academically and technically qualified. But Addonizio resisted. He wanted to appoint one of his cronies, as usual. In this instance there was a catch. Addonizio’s man, Callahan, was only a high school graduate. His major qualification was that he was white. Like the medical school conflict, this issue was one that could tighten the jaws of all classes of blacks, whether black workers or black professionals. Both issues were attacks on the whole of the black community.

Another factor in the general increase of tension was the constant incidents of police brutality. The Newark police whipped heads with impunity under the neo-fascist police director Dominick Spina, a “kindly” gray-haired administrator who reminded me of one of Mussolini’s murderers. I had had already, since returning home, several direct conflicts with Spina, and not just the general ones. In any public gathering where he was, I never resisted the opportunity to talk bad to and about him. I was told later, by one of Spina’s paid informers, that Spina was a member of the Klan. It seemed that the Klan in New Jersey had become progressive enough to recruit Catholics.

We were still putting on plays and using the Spirit House for community meetings, broadening the block association and focusing much heat up at the Robert Treat school. Newark was a city of widespread and clearly understood corruption. Everybody in public office was known to be on the take, and not just from hearsay — most people had had some direct experience of it. Calvin West was one of Addonizio’s “classiest” niggers and Cal had the kind of personality that might make one spray a room with Lysol after he’d passed through it with one of his outsized cigars.

All these things were in the bubbling. Black Power pressed these issues at a higher level. It pointed out the straight-out apartheid in the South and the neo-apartheid in the North. It raised the issue of black political self-determination and the need for self-sufficiency. The Nation of Islam preached about “doing for self” and how black people were indeed oppressed by the filthy white devil. Black nationalists talked about “the beast” getting big on black people’s flesh, and Addonizio and company were living proof of all these nationalist examples. And I’m sure the “left,” wherever it was, was also pushing in whatever ways it could. Tom Hayden and his classmates were around being “troublemakers,” which could only add yeast to the whole mixture.

Adam Powell had gotten removed from Congress over some obvious bullshit, though white liberals would’ve told you, “We’ve formed the Urban Coalition and just appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first Negro on the Supreme Court.” But as it got warmer that summer, all talk of white liberals just added some numbers to the thermometer. All over the country black people were marching or rising up. You heard often not only of Dr. King and the Nation of Islam but of Stokely and Rap and Huey Newton and the Panthers, of CORE and SNCC and Black Power. The newspapers and television, the radio and people’s mouths, carried the word. Even the New York Times that year reported that the civil rights movement was over. I don’t remember if they remarked on the rising motion of the Black Liberation movement. There was an antiwar movement against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam that was also in motion. Even Dr. King had announced his intention to come out against the war. A current of dissent was everywhere, open rebellion was not only justified and justifiable, but examples of it were growing ubiquitous: demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, arrests, civil disobedience, clashes with the police, cities going up in smoke. There was, in Newark, an atmosphere of oppressive tension. As spring moved into summer, each day and evening held a quiet, heavy aura. It was clear the medical school was going ahead, the largest on the planet. It was clear that Callahan would get the job and not Parker. Spina’s blueshirts had run into a Muslim home near East Orange because it was reported that there were men in the building “armed.” No arms were ever produced, though the place did serve as a kind of “dojo” for martial arts training, which apparently pissed Spina off. His boys shot the place up and brutalized some people. That word was passed around swiftly and bitterly.

We had been building a following at the Spirit House. We were rehearsing plays. Giving poetry readings. We even made a record, “Black and Beautiful,” with rhythm and blues and chants and poetry of black struggle and nationalism.

Sylvia and I had also been struggling, in a different way. The child had come, Obalaji, and I viewed this with the mystical focus I had then. It was very significant to me that the white woman, Nellie, had not produced a boy child, only girls. It was clear I had gone in the right direction (more chauvinism). The boy was named after a young boy I’d known in Harlem with Oserjeman’s temple, a little fresh dude full of life. Obalaji (God or the King’s Warrior), Malik for Malcolm, and Ali after Muhammad Ali. But for all that, I was not ready to get married. I had not thought of it. It seemed unnecessary. Yet my son was on the scene. Sylvia and I had traveled around together, I had taken her with me on many of the poetry readings and speaking trips I went on. I had been drawn to her deep, lovely sensuality. The San Francisco business had created a tension between us I would forget more quickly than she. How selfish and subjective men can be when it comes to women. I knew I wanted Sylvia. I knew I wanted us to live together. I was full of joy that we had had a son. Yet I did not think we had to get married. It was half bohemianism, some plain-out insensitivity, but may it not have been also a kind of unconscious disregard for black women? I had offered to marry Nellie in a similar situation. Yet, with Sylvia, there I was haggling and contentious about the same kind of act. The irony is that I felt closer to Sylvia, we were more “together,” there was much more heat to our relationship, much more passion. I had even been moved to the point of telling her how much I loved her, which I could not do before with women I’d been with, even Vashti, even though I’d taken the sparkling relationship we’d had as a love relationship.

Our explosions inside the Spirit House were in tune with the whole siege of tension that stalked the day-to-day streets of the slowly simmering town. There might have been rumors about us up and down those streets just as there were broader rumors twisting through the streets of the whole city as it heated up and hidden tension became open tension, and open tension became confrontation.

One afternoon I heard something about a demonstration over at the precinct across from the Hayes Homes. It was about a cabdriver who’d gotten beaten by the police the night before. When we got there, there were maybe fifty to one hundred people. It was still afternoon and most people were still working, so this was a good crowd on the line. It was thick over there. There were younger people standing across the street, watching, occasionally calling out or laughing. The picket line was being led, ostensibly, by CORE and its chairman in Newark, Bob Curvin. We talked briefly, and the couple of us who’d come over from the Spirit House got in the line. There were young people and middle-aged on the line. They chanted and walked and as we joined them it was obvious to me that it was not like a picket line at a strike or the lighter kinds of demonstrations. People talked, but there was a presence on the line and in the scattered crowd that gathered on the other side of the narrow street. It was the same precinct where we had demonstrated for a black police captain to replace one of Spina’s cronies. It was like the air itself was a container for something that was pushing against it trying to break out. People turned and looked at each other, sensing this presence. They grinned nervously or squinted up at the precinct at the mostly white police who stood outside frozen or the ones who would occasionally scowl through the windows of the precinct or move quickly by, snarling, as they got out of their police cars and went into the building.

After an hour or so, the couple of us from the Spirit House got off the line, which was still moving, more people having come, others splitting. We had to go home to get ready for rehearsal and another community meeting. So we started to go home, rolling slowly across Belmont Avenue, past the abandoned Krueger brewery and over to Springfield Avenue. It seemed there were knots of people, ever moving, people in small groups, looking, peering, as if they too sensed what was ready to loose itself.

It was later in the afternoon when we got to the Spirit House. I had to eat. Sylvia and the boy were there, also Barney’s girlfriend, Beverly, and Shorty’s friend, Helen, who was an old friend of Sylvia’s. We ate and talked and began to get ready for the evening when some of the young boys who came in and out of the Spirit House rushed in. “They’re breaking windows on Springfield Avenue” was the word. Moving outside, it looked, for some reason, like the sky had a long, wide reddish streak to it. It was low and wanted to burn. It sizzled and carried images and words, buzz turning to roar. Its smell got in your nose and made you blink. You could see people in motion, like a slow-motion flick speeded up. Moving in all directions.

We stood for a second, all of us from in the house. Then Shorty, Barney, and I jumped in the bus; it was a new Volkswagen I’d bought recently, but I still didn’t know how to drive. “Where’re you going?” Sylvia called, and I said something, but we were around the corner and onto Springfield Avenue. When we got there the shit was already on! Farther up the street we could see figures moving fast. The sun was falling to hide them quick. Suddenly, sirens. We could see some smoke, hey, then glass started to break close to where we were.

The spirit and feeling of the moment a rebellion breaks out is almost indescribable. Everything seems to be in zoooom motion, crashing toward some explosive manifestation. As Lenin said, time is speeded up, what takes years is done in days, in real revolution. In rebellions life goes to 156 rpm and the song is a police siren accompanying people’s breathless shouts and laughter. (See “Newark: Before Black Men Conquered.”)

All that was pent up and tied is wild and loose, seen in sudden flames and red smoke, and always people running, running, away and toward. We wheeled the wagon around and began to head up toward what looked like the eye of what was growing mad and gigantic and hot. We went straight up Springfield, not fast, not slow, but at a pace that would allow a serious observer to dig what was happening. It had got dark fast, like the dashing bloods had reached up and pulled night down by its silver string and slam! it was down and they got on with they shit.

Boxes of stuff were speeding by, cases of stuff, liquor, wine, beer, the best brands. Shoes, appliances, clothes, jewelry, food. Foodtown had turned into Open City, some dudes jumped the half story out the window to the ground. There were shifts of folks at work. The window breakers would come first. Whash! Glass all over everywhere. Then the getters would get through and get to gettin’. Some serious people would park near the corner and load up their trunks, make as many trips as the traffic would bear. Some people would run through the streets with shit, what they could carry or roll or drag or pull. Families worked together, carrying sofas and TVs collectively down the street. All the shit they saw on television that they had been hypnotized into wanting they finally had a chance to cop. The word was Cop & Blow! And don’t be slow.

Then the fire setters, Vulcan’s peepas, would get on it. Crazy sheets of flame would rise behind they thing. Burn it up! Burn it up! Like Marvin had said: Burn, baby, burn! They were the most rhythmic, the fire people, they dug the fire cause it danced so tough, and these priests wished they could get as high and hot as their master the Flame.

Now we circled and dashed, zigzagged, tried to follow the hot music’s beat. We were digging, checking, observing, participating, it was a canvas, a palette no painter could imagine. A scale no musician could plumb. (Why do you think Trane and Albert sounded like that? They wanted the essence of what flailed alive on all sides of us now.)

The police were simply Devils to us, Beasts. We did not understand then the scientific exegesis on the state — though we needed to. Devils! Beasts! Crisscrossing in their deadly stupor of evil. The people were like dancers whirling around and through the flames. A motorcycle leaped through Sears’s window! with a blood, head down, stuck to it, booting and smoking up Elizabeth Avenue. Rifles strapped to his back. The last firearms sold legally in Newark disappeared in all directions out of Gene’s and the same Sears. Devil-cars spinning meanwhile as they shot at everything that moved, everything with any grace.

We moved through looking until the rage and madness’s dazzle had reached its peak. I thought it must be like what a war is, to be in the middle of it. Then we saw people getting hit. The Devils were spraying the dancers; they were enraged by their own poison. We saw a man fall near Springfield and Belmont and the police quickly swallowed him up. We had to move quickly and keep some distance and the correct angle between ourselves and them. At Belmont and Spruce we saw another brother hit, he fell into a sitting position, shot through the leg. Blood streamed down his pants and the case of shit he was carrying was smashed to the ground. His legs stuck out into the street, a car twisting suddenly around the corner would have mashed both of them off. We pulled up and dragged him into the van, then we sped off toward the city hospital.

Inside the hospital it was really a war zone. People were staggering in, people bandaged everywhere. Police brought some in. We brought the brother, Rabbit, carrying him like he was in a chair. Blood on the floors and walls, smeared on aprons, falling out of people in gasps. We got a doctor to look at him. Talked to Rabbit, who was trying to smile, he had been talking a mile a minute in the car. He seemed OK, and there were too many police in the joint so the three of us got back in the wind.

It was late at night now as we spun round and round in the streets. It looked like the crowds were somewhat thinner. We had picked up Tom Perry a little earlier and he was with us too, ducking and dodging through the streets that night. Another hour or so, another couple people picked up, and we went down to the Key Club for a drink. As wild as it seemed, there were people in there, a few, sipping and talking low about what was loose in the streets. We met Grachan Moncur, another hip Newark boy, we went past his crib and passed the peace pipe around, talked some more about what the future held for ourselves and our people.

It was very late now. Leaving Grachan’s we headed up the hill to where Tom was staying. He came over now regularly because his daughter Tania was staying with his mother. His wife, Maureen, had run off with one of Monk’s less exciting bass players. That had been the corniest thing that had happened to Tom since he had got old enough to bring some control into his life. And it finished him. He went from merely chippying as a working man who liked to get high regularly but not dependent to somebody chasin’ the bag for a dying. One of my dearest friends, Tom later moved to Harlem, where he died violently in some drug-related situation. One of the hippest and kindest and sweetest people I had the pleasure to know well and swing with. I loved to see Tom coming, his whole life was style. And in the end it was an uncool world that killed him. (I said to him once — we were talking about his slow plunge into the abyss — simply, “Why?” And his answer: “I know what you’re talking about. With what I know, you want to know why I don’t live according to religion.” Tom meant Zen and the Mahayana doctrine of the Wisdom Religion. That was our last conversation.)

But now, we were shaking hands. “It was a great night,” he was saying. “A really great night.” He stood on his mother’s stoop watching us pull off. The streets were quiet, eerie quiet, and it was pitch black and maybe one in the morning. We were moving slowly down South 7th Street — we had crossed Springfield and were approaching South Orange Avenue — when we saw the lights. Red lights like vicious eyes blinking. A riot of red lights blinking. Like Devils or pieces of hell. We were slowing down, and the lights seemed to get frantic, batting and winking, little silent splinters of scream. Then we could see under the streetlights piles of police cars, maybe five or six. For one instant we started to stop and back up or try to U-turn or even speed up on the sidewalk and go past. But the fantasy had stopped. All of us could sense that if we did anything we would die. We could see the shotguns and helmets. They had the street blocked and as we slowed pulling up to them we looked at each other and got ourselves ready.

A mob of police surrounded the van, two of them pulling open the front and back doors. They had their shotguns and handguns trained on us as they dragged us out the doors. Shorty, Barney, and I. I heard one guy say, “These are the bastards who’ve been shooting at us!”

Another shouted, “Where are the guns?”

Then another cop stepped forward, I think he was saying the same thing. What was really out is that this cop I recognized, we had gone to high school together! His name was Salvatore Mellillo. The classic Italian American face. “Hey, I know you,” I said, just as the barrel of his .38 smashed into my forehead, dropping me into half-consciousness and covering every part of me with blood. Now blows rained down on my head. One dude was beating me with the long nightstick. I was held and staggering. The blood felt hot in my face. I couldn’t see, I could only feel the wet hot blood covering my entire head and face and hands and clothes. They were beating me to death. I could feel the blows and the crazy pain but I was already removed from conscious life. I was being murdered and I knew it. I screamed, “Allahu Akbar. Al Homdulliah!” Spitting the rage and pain back out at them.

But then I could hear people shouting at them. Voices calling, “You bastards, stop it. Stop it. You’re killing them. Motherfucking bastards, stop it.” From the windows black people were shouting at the police. From a tall apartment building overlooking the scene. People screamed at them. They started throwing things.

I could hear the policemen shouting at each other. “Put ’em in the car. Put ’em in the car!” But once in the car, the torrent of blood was falling out of my head so fast that one of them started cursing. “Get him out of the fucking car. He’s bleeding all over the fucking car!” I never lost consciousness, but I lapsed into an even lower state of semiconsciousness. I felt myself being lifted into the paddy wagon.

The next thing I knew I was being dragged out of the wagon and up the back stairs of the police station. Just before we went through the door of the station, one of the police dragging me wheeled me around and tried to drive his knee into my nuts, but I slipped it or he just missed. “You faggot,” I was screaming. Shit, I knew I would make it now!

Inside the police station I was thrown on the floor in front of a high desk and then dragged to my feet. I could see in front of me the police director, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Stages Memoirs
• One: Young
• Two: Black Brown Yellow White
• Three: Music
• Four: Howard (Black Brown Yellow White Continued)
• Five: Error Farce
• Six: The Village
• Seven: The Black Arts: Politics, Search for a New Life
• Eight: Harlem
• Nine: Home
• Ten: A Continuing Journey
• Eleven: To Sum Up