The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (11 page)

But later I could tell that something was happening in the whole of that Dey Street/Newark Street/Lock Street world, bounded by Central and Sussex Avenues, when Augie began to say certain things. Like one time we were sitting on the auditorium steps in the playground bullshitting about
something and he was combing his hair. Augie loved to comb his goddam hair, and I think his little brother was with him and fat (white) Norman and maybe staring Johnny, who had the weird disease that made him go into trances at odd times. So I says to Augie to lemme use the comb. My hair was always cut very close, we called them “Germans” the way our hair was cut. And later a little longer on the top and front was called a “German bush.” But Augie nixes me and says, “Don't mix the breeds.”

I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, “Don't mix the breeds.” Huh? I said. Huh? Whatta you talking about, ol' bean, don't mix the breeds? (Not exactly in those words, ya know?) But he says it again. And I did get the meaning. I got it the first fucking time, not literally but generally and emotionally and psychologically I understood exactly what he meant. And hey, I didn't even get mad. It didn't even faze me. Actually it confirmed some upside-down shit I had in my head. That we were white and black. And I knew the abstract social history of that. I also knew what I saw everyday in various ways that manifested some meaning and connection with what Augie was saying.

Shit, I saw Mantan Moreland and
Amos 'n' Andy
and
Beulah
and Stepin Fetchit. I knew what “Feets, don't fail me now” meant. And who Birmingham really was. And why Ellic in the Bob Hope picture
Ghost Breakers
had got so scared in the clock that when it opened he stood there shivering and turned completely white. I had seen Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. I had seen the wild-eyed woogies in Tarzan and how knowledgeable Tarzan was. I had seen Al Jolson do his bullshit — hey and most of that
was
funny. HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa HaHaHaHaHaHa (except Al Jolson, he wasn't shit). But still, anyway, down beneath that actual laughter there was something else. Besides the embarrassment and even shame for the feeble-minded, beneath all that, boys and girls, there was something else that it took me a long time to fully dig. (I'll tell you about it later!)

Sure, I knew exactly what my best white friend Augie was saying, and I knew instinctively that his mother had probably put that shit in his head. What could have been the expression on my little round brown face with the big comical eyes? But what does it mean then, on the actual sidewalks and playgrounds of our lives? Whatever I said, it could only have been an acknowledgment of the time, the place, the condition. Like a fucking flag salute.

Another time, I'm hiking Augie, like his mother had all this grey hair and I'm calling her the Grey Terror, like we did. But Augie, then, pauses
and asks me what color my mother's hair is. And I, like a sap, say black, which it was. And Augie looks half-eyed at I donno who, Normie or somebody, and says, “The Black Terror.” It was a good hike, I guess. I ain't gonna be an objectivity freak — it's my funking memoirs — but more than the hike qua hike was the thing it really raised, that Augie really was putting into the game that which could not have been kept out in any real take on the world. But it let you know that all that was abstract to you, about black and white and all that, was not really abstract, that it all could not be waved away, or laughed away, or forgot or not known about. It meant to me that there was real shit over which I did not have total control, that I did not even properly understand. And I could be, on such occasions, quietly stunned. Turned inward and set adrift in a world of my feelings I couldn't yet deal with.

Those were some of the steps, the paths, of our divergence. And I told you how in high school (at least for me) the old relationships completely fell apart. For one thing, it was an Italian high school and junior high I went to. (Heading for college prep in my jumbled-up but crystal-clear head.) And so all things were openly reversed. The Italians now sat in center stage and controlled the social life of those two institutions. And year after year (only four, really), I went through various kinds of bullshit and humiliation that actually made me feel at one point that I hated Italians straight out.

(Earlier, in the seventh grade, we'd gone to the Bronx Zoo, and I'm lagging behind in the elephant house, holding my nose but wanting to check close up on the elephants. So I see this guy, he's cleaning up or something in there, and I ask him, “Wow, how do you stand it in here?” Meaning the terrible odor of elephant shit. So he says to me, “I don't mind it. I live in Harlem.” Yeh, a white guy said this, and it went through me like a frozen knife. And I knew exactly what he meant. Except I also wondered, even right then at that ugly moment, why he wanted to drop that kind of shit on me. I knew he was attacking me, saying a bad thing to me, my big eyes must have wheeled and caught his face for a second, then dropped down into the zoo dirt, and carried the rest of me out of there. But what did that do, I wonder, for Mr. Elephant Shit Shoveler to say that? Did it make him feel good or heroic or like he wasn't really shoveling elephant shit? And all that was nestled tightly in me gourd by time I got out of grammar school. And Augie's words and news of “race riots” and even a couple runins my mother had with cut-rate racists, one in a candy store downtown — the lady wanted to sell her some “nigger toes” and my mother says, “Those
are Brazil nuts, lady,” grabs my hand, and stalks out. Later she had a near-rumble with a bus driver who wanted to talk to her funny. I took all that in, and carried it, carried it with me — who knows when you need such experiences? I felt subconsciously.)

But I was totally unprepared for the McKinley and Barringer experiences in which the whites ran the social and going to school/academic part of that institutional life. And I put up with many nigger callings and off the wall comments and intimidations, even getting cussed out regularly in Italian. I even learned Italian curse words (though not many precise meanings) and would fling them back sometimes. But I tried to hold my own. For instance, when a big schizophrenic white boy — a blond dude named Joe S. — threw a ball at me in the McKinley playground not long after I got there, I flung the bat at his head. The other white dudes kept him off me.

And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy's ear, from mouths and radios). But the white thing was only periphery in me young days, a fringe thing I didn't even recognize. And then to go into McKinley and then Barringer and be in a white world ruled by white Italians whose most consistent emotion regarding me was unconcern, that took me up by the ankles and dangled me in
no
space and put
not
's in my head and not
me
's.

The life of emotion, which is historical, like anything else, gets warped in high school I'm certain now. And to understand I must go back now several years to give a picture of one side of my life, feelings, mind, head, and then come back to this threshold of pain, then we can draw conclusions together!

One emotional center of my earlier life was my special relationship with my father. My father loved sports, and playing sports was the prerequisite for being part of the community of youth I ran with. I'd read the
Daily News
sports pages from way back in grammar school. And he'd take me to football games, baseball games, I mean the pros.

And, as I've said, there was a special
grandeur
to going someplace with my father and having all the “you look just like your father” folks identify us as such. There was a pride in that, I mean for the persons saying that,
not just for my old man and me. But in the people it seemed to be a kind of high joy that such a genetic miracle could be produced. And that it was a sleek brown kid that had been produced — Eureka! — down to the sky-drinking eyes.

But the specialest feeling was when my father took me down to Ruppert Stadium some Sundays to see the Newark Eagles, the black pro team. Very little in my life was as heightened (in anticipation and reward) for me as that. What was that? Some black men playing baseball? No, but beyond that, so deep in fact it carried and carries memories and even a
politics
with it that still makes me shudder.

Ruppert Stadium was “Down 'Eck,” down below the station, in the heavy industrial section, and then mostly whites, including the Portuguese, lived down there. But we were never really thinking about that when we went there. The smell or smells, and I always associate them with Newark, could be any wild thing. Sometimes straight-out rotten eggs, fart odor, or stuff for which there was no known identification. Just terrible Newark Down Neck smell.

But coming down through that would heighten my sense because I could dig I would soon be standing in that line to get in, with my old man. But lines of all black people! Dressed up like they would for going to the game, in those bright lost summers. Full of noise and identification slapped greetings over and around folks. Cause after all in that town of 300,000 that 20 to 30 percent of the population (then) had a high recognition rate for each other. They worked together, lived in the same neighborhoods, went to church (if they did) together, and all the rest of it, even played together.

The Newark Eagles would have your heart there on the field, from what they was doing. From how they looked. But these were professional ballplayers. Legitimate black heroes. And we were intimate with them in a way and they were extensions of all of us, there, in a way that the Yankees and Dodgers and whatnot could never be!

We knew that they
were
us — raised up to another, higher degree. Shit, and the Eagles, people knew, talked to us before and after the game. That fabulous year they were World Champs of the black leagues (two years later they were gone!). The Negro National League. We was there opening day, Jim, and Leon Day pitched a no-hitter! Opening Day! And the bloods threw those seat cushions all over Ruppert Stadium and the white folks (also owners of the New York Yankees) who owned that stadium wouldn't let us have the things after that. We noted it (I know I did) but it didn't stop nothin'.

That was the year they had Doby and Irvin and Pearson and Harvey and Pat Patterson, a schoolteacher, on third base, and Leon Day was the star pitcher, and he showed out Opening Day! But coming into that stadium those Sunday afternoons carried a sweetness with it. The hot dogs and root beers! (They have never tasted that good again.) A little big-eyed boy holding his father's hand.

There was a sense of completion in all that. The black men (and the women) sitting there all participated in those games at a much higher level than anything else I knew. In the sense that they were not excluded from either identification with or knowledge of what the Eagles did and were. It was like we all communicated with each other and possessed ourselves at a more human level than was usually possible out in cold whitey land.

Coming in that stadium with dudes and ladies calling out, “Hey, Roy, boy he look just like you.” Or “You look just like your father.” Besides that note and attention, the Eagles there were something
we
possessed. It was not us as George Washington Carver or Marian Anderson, some figment of white people's lack of imagination, it was us as we wanted to be and how we wanted to be seen being looked at by ourselves in some kind of loud communion.

And we
knew
, despite the newspapers, radios, Babe Ruth candy bars, who that was tearing around those bases. When we saw Mule Suttles or Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard or Satchel Paige and dug the Homestead Grays, Philadelphia Stars, New York Black Yankees (yes!), Baltimore Elite (pronounced E-Light) Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, Birmingham Black Barons, and even the Indianapolis Clowns! We knew who that was and what they (we) could do. Those other Yankees and Giants and Dodgers we followed just to keep up with being in America. We had our likes and our dislikes. “Our” teams. But for the black teams, and for us Newarkers, the Newark Eagles was pure
love
.

We were wilder and calmer there. Louder and happier, without hysteria. Just digging ourselves stretch out is what, and all that love and noise and color and excitement surrounded me like a garment of feeling. I know I thought that's the way life was supposed to be.

And my father was a part of that in a way that he was part of nothing else I knew. The easy comradeship among the spectators, but he even knew some of the players. And sometimes after the games he'd take me around to the Grand Hotel (used to be on West Market Street), right down the street from our church. Right next to the barbershop my father took me to.
(And going to that barbershop was almost as hip as going to the Grand or the games. Them niggers was arguin' in there one day about something and one guy mentions something that MacArthur had said and another dude, some old black man, said there wasn't no such thing as MacArthur! That has
always
blown my mind, what that meant!)

At the Grand Hotel, the ballplayers and the slick people could meet. (That was when Baba, Russell Bingham, was in his high-up thing with the digits and whatnot — clean as the Board of Health.) Everybody super-clean and highlifin', glasses jingling with ice, black people's eyes sparklin' and showin' their teeth in the hippest way possible.

You could see Doby and Lennie Pearson and Pat Patterson or somebody there and I'd be wearin' my eyes and ears out drinking a co-cola, checking everything out.