The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (25 page)

“God damn,” was about all I could get out. “God damn.” And took his word. I saw Liz a day or two after and she was gentle and somewhat melancholy but she did confirm that she and Al were going to the campus set, but it was more than that and we both knew it. (Plus half the goddam campus!) I spoke to Liz the rest of my time on campus and we remained good buddies in class, but not like before by no means. And she went with this dude, a pre-med who actually did become a med, and they lived happily ever after, I guess.

Liz was a brown girl, she was, hooked up by the same yellow strings of gold and manipulation. But she could laugh at certain of the things that make those little phony worlds go round and this is what I liked. I couldn't understand why she did what she did. Perhaps she was always going with the dude and I was imposing my dull ass in the way. Maybe she should have told me if that was the case. No, I think it was the pattern of lackadaisicality she saw in me. Perhaps I was too casual and my jibes were too shrill. Certainly she saw that my steps did not lead into med school and I was almost ready to admit that too. This dude was also on his way into the frat. He was a good solid dude. And what was I?

No sour grapes now, Jim. But that could tell somebody something, I hope. I went with two other girls on campus, one named McKeesport. That's not her name, it was Blanche or something, I can't even remember. So that will tell you about that. She was inordinately skinny and quiet and
from that ugly steel town. We went out a couple of times and became friends more than anything else.

Audrey, from another wild place, a West Virginia coal mining town. These were both brown girls. Audrey was very tiny and plump with big, almond shaped eyes. Also quiet. I never found out what she liked. But we went to a few flicks. (I didn't know what I wanted to do. Some of the movies blacks couldn't even go to. We used to drive these crackers in the Peoples Drugstores crazy by ordering stuff then they'd bring it in a bag, like a Coke or something. And we'd say we wanted to drink it there. And they would say they couldn't serve us and we'd leave the shit on the counter. But you had to hat up cause they would call the law.)

The only girl I could really say I went with, in a kind of heavy way (and even that didn't get heavy as all that — not on the flesh side), was Baby. That was her name — not a nickname, her parents named her that. So she was from the country, High Point, North Carolina. She came from the same town an old crazy vet we used to holler at lived in, Terry. Terry was drunk a lot and loud but a very good dude. Kinda dude you liked to drink with. Could think up all kind of weird shit to talk about.

I mighta met Baby through Terry. She was a student at Miner Teachers College, which was right down the street, cross the street, from HU. Shootin' at Miner girls was a pastime for one sector of Howard students. But it was generally frowned upon by the mainstream. Hey, they was who? They had no note. A lot of 'em talked country (Baby shure did!). There was a few cracked yellow ones but not many. The Miner ladies was at another level (“lower” than our own coeds on The Hill. That meaning had changed for me. “Hill” now meant the yalla lights, the Capstone, not Third Ward/Central Ward black and blue folks). That was vouchsafed.

But I ran into Baby. And she was not brown, dear readers, she was very black. Skin color and whatever otherwise. Black gleaming skin unblemished and these bright sparkling eyes, behind pinkish-brown plastic frames.

It didn't strike me as anything until I got the campus reaction. Baby was sweet and the way she sounded, that black belt peasant twang tripped me out. But she was high up into readying for the teaching thing. She was maybe a year ahead of me and was already getting ready to practice teach.

I'd go up there a couple times a week. She had a new yellow Ford. An apartment she shared with another Miner student. And she dug me, I'd say. She'd even cook most times I showed, or at least had something ready. Which was great because my old man only sent me $30 a month for odds and ends. The food money he sent directly to the cafeteria people after I'd
spent it up a couple times in a week then had to go broke for the rest of the month.

But she'd have some grit because everybody knew most of the Howard students was walking around kinda hungry. Except the blindingly yellow! Mostly we'd talk and laugh a lot. She was a bright girl. She was always teasing about my (HU) origins and how HU students acted generally, which was wild to hear from that side. It even made me clearer that there were sides. But she was definitely country. Terry'd come up there sometimes and we'd get to drinking, though I still wasn't no heavy drinker.

We went to a few parties her friends gave in D.C. and to flicks and stuff in the D.C. community. I had already passed my dress-up frat period — which I guess is obvious. (And the stuff was just idle window shopping to Baby.) But I hadn't summed up as a categorical anything. I was just going along, living my life, trying to love it and let whatever happened happen.

Baby, as I said, was not particularly interested in HU society either. I think myself (and Terry) were the closest she wanted to get at that point. But we had laughing, sometimes riotous, discussions about HU and environs and the mores and customs therein.

Baby came up on campus a couple times. One Saturday afternoon she pulled her bright yellow new Ford outside Clark Hall. I was supposed to be out front waiting, but was still inside bullshitting, so she tooted the horn. The front-step jockeys got her message and my name and began screaming them out. More from a few other reasons than mere communication or aid. One was they had nothing else to do. I could hear my name ringing outside, the horn, and now in the hallways. And they all wanted to sound like Baby, Leeeeeeeee Royyyyyyyyy Jooooooonessss. And I came running downstairs and when I hit the bottom step out in front, heads were thrust through windows all over the front of the building. It was somebody in our mob that started it but they were calling in unison Leeee RooooyyyyLeeeeee Rooooyyyyyy — and waving at us. You could even hear some of their comments as we got away — she had a convertible. “Broad with a car,” “Goddam,” “Who's that chick?” etc., etc.

For Bill and Tony and Rip and some others, however, Baby's looks (albeit her car and apartment), and the fact she went to Miner, made me Bruce Wayne. And that's what I was greeted with when I returned. “Hey, Bruce” and whatnot. And these dudes kept it up, they even had some of their hambone friends continue it and they weren't even proper in the mob. I'd cut my eyes funny at them. But mostly I just took it and continued seeing Baby, mainly cause I dug her and it was about the best place I knew
to go around those parts (HU mores to the contrary). Anyway one time up in the room, I don't know quite how it got started, Rip starts this shit about Bruce Wayne and he was going with this little limp starlet, a candidate for Homecoming Queen in a couple of years from the looks of her. And I made some remarks as to what a dead-ass bitch whassername was. Goin' with her was like lookin' at pinups in
Esquire
, all it did was get his whatname hard, as he definitely wasn't gettin' any of that! And what's more, half these Negroes on this campus walking around talking about this girl like she's Lena Home or somebody, so really, Rip, you sharin' what you ain't gettin' with all the other dumb jerkin' off lames on the campus.

Rip didn't like that and began to imitate Baby's speech. He built a great rep in his countless monologues about his prowess as a “cocksman.” And to have someone imply that he masturbated, that just wouldn't do. But it got very nasty and ended with fists being rolled up though Rip was a big guy, a swimmer, and though there was a little dancin' around the room no blows were struck. What was struck was a gong inside my knot that twanged some realization. The dudes in the mob generally did not give a fuck who I went with. Though there was a streak of plain out envy. These little babes on campus had to be in the dorm at certain hours and to get out overnight they had to go through elaborate lies and for those frosh and sophomores they wasn't getting out except in extraordinary circumstances and most would not put their behind so squarely on the chopper as all that. So whatever Rip was doing, which wasn't anything anyway, it had to be done in broad daylight, off campus. You went to flicks and ate dinner in Georgia Avenue restaurants, sat up in the dorms giggling, and held hands crossing campus with the Howard ladies. But stashed back in an old northwest apartment after finishing a big dinner and then sippin' some grog squeezed up in the shadows of your own spot with a lady of your own choosing, that was what them med students and other royalty could pull off. But one of your own? “How the fuck did you luck up?” That was Woolright's comment and Donny and the straight-ahead dudes. But we had, as I said, some yeller bellies in the group. The only good thing about that is that they were like antennae then for the rest of the joint, they would be letting us know what a whole lot of the messed up and soon to be messed up would be thinking about or not thinking about.

Rip and dudes like that were into the social fabric of the Capstone mainstream and their sashayin' across the campus like the Easter Parade being looked at by others under the glass bell was all they needed. It was a form that was being followed. The little limp yellow girl (his was a blonde),
being gladly and humbly craved by potential frat brothers, going back and forth to class or sitting in the cafeteria, was a distinct social form as well as a readying for service in the great lost cause of petty bourgeois hypnosis. Slave mores. Exactly what the racist gurus prescribe for keeping us under wraps. Except down in southwest D.C. or on U Street or T Street they wasn't under these kinds of wraps. They had to keep the blue/black actual strugglers under gun wraps, that's the only wraps that work on them.

I made no great rebellions, no explosions. (Cussing some future government bureaucrat out in his Ivy threads.) Just went on my way. Just moved on where I was going. Not even fully conscious, except I would do such and such and not do something else. I would like something for some reason and not like something else, and maybe not even have a reason.

I would sit up in the room sometimes with green glasses and put a yellow light bulb in the fixture. Why? Who knows? I would paint big paintings on the wall of the room — 3-D paintings of Tony's high society babes and put curtains over them so they could be drawn back dramatically to reveal the painter's madness. Or sit out on the campus eating half a watermelon and scandalize poor Butts and the patron saints of middle-class Negroes way off in Negro heb'n.

The next year is when some of us came off campus. We'd got too grown up to relate to dorm life anymore. Mr. Butts was clearly overjoyed. But that summer more wild things were happening, like being blown through a wind tunnel and the wind tunnel is inside your head. You trying to “concentrate” on something and a thousand-mile-an-hour wind is blowing behind your eyes, blowing all kinds of shit through your head blotting out your vision.

I had been blowing science courses regularly now. They didn't interest me, yet the form of what I was supposed to be doing called for science. Laboratories. I was blown out of organic like with a timebomb. I never understood qual and quant and rushed out of there in near panic. It seemed like I couldn't
understand
anything. I couldn't learn. Maybe that's why all the other shit was strange. Why I couldn't get in a frat or even get a “respectable” girlfriend. I was one center of a mob yet it seemed that that ring of friendly faces had receded to the edge of the horizon. The best of these dudes, the straightest of them, were my friends (some have remained close friends until this day and almost any of them I run into on the streets or in some airline terminal or wherever, we sit down and can get ecstatic talking about these HU days), but still, now it seemed there was more space around me than I could use. Space between me and them. Space where
strange lights and shapes and voices could get in. Weird decisions and postures. The frat thing, the woman thing, seemed like they cleared space around me or something.

That summer in Newark something similar was happening but it was happening under camouflage. I was now cut off from the Hillsides and had been cut off from the Cavaliers. But there was a whole new cast of friends and people to run with by way of the HU and general college hookup. The college thing in a town like Newark did provide a special bond and the college kids even from different colleges tended to run together. There was a social club formed, really while we were in school, called the Esquires. It seemed like the requirements for membership was going to HU or some of the other schools (a couple of dudes went to local colleges like Bloomfield, Newark State, etc.), paying the dues, and wearing Bermuda shorts, which were just coming out in our generation. The Bermuda shorts with the long socks, we thought that was really hip and that was our badge that summer. I had a cord jacket, tuxedo pants, and white sneakers I also started sporting, snaking through the streets late nights by myself.

The Esquires were really Los Ruedos, Golden Boys, etc., plus a few stragglers like me now pumped in my college. We gave one big successful set which was the social hit of our circle that summer. But the one dude who didn't go to college and who'd got a rep as a kind of drugstore Lothario/cut-rate pimp got accused of lifting some dough from the kitty and Bill and a couple of the athlete dudes jacked him up in the back. I guess it was true.

We went to parties in the Oranges and Montclair, exotic places. Me and a dude named Joe Brown would sit on the stoop outside the parties after passing through looking at the babes. We'd sit outside and talk to whoever or just with each other, or sit in the car with the door open. Joe was the key, he had the short. We'd be out there listening to Symphony Sid and talking shit, passing comments on the women that went in and out and the dudes too. Joe was very hip, a little like me I guess, but carried to the extremes. Joe would not talk to anybody he didn't know, not because he was some kind of snob but because he was shy and he didn't know how people would react to the things he wanted to talk about and be about. Joe ended up a writer as well, plays and short stories. But in those days we'd talk about the music, about the girls, about our Northeastern version of the mob. He was going to one of those local colleges as well.