The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (27 page)

But that summer I was drifting into something else of complete unintelligibility, to me. Me and Willie hung and a couple of other guys. I tried to press his sister and she seemed willing but in a way unavailable. But it was probably me, cause I was twisted up inside in so many ways. Who knows what I sounded like or looked like or seemed to want? I might have thought I was saying one thing but something distinctly else was coming out.

I think I might have gone over to Steve Korret's house with Cynthia one day. Korret was “married” or maybe really married, I didn't know. It didn't matter. His wife was a black Canadian who'd lived in Newark for a few years and they'd come to the Village to live. Steve Korret was the talk of one aspect of one part of one circle of Newark's college-aged youth. Cynthia and I rode the subway that day and she had on some sandals with a little flower that came out between her toes where the strap was. I really dug those, and the way her feet looked in them. We'd talked when I came up to see Willie, and then I was coming up to see her and Willie, and then came up to see her alone. But Willie and I were still tight. We were cool with something else rolling in us. What? The music? He talked about painting. I knew nothing about that. He had some books I knew nothing about. Or
maybe just enough to talk surface about. But now Cynthia and I sat up in Steve Korret's bright orange and white apartment on Bedford Street. And he talked, in an English accent, and she was very impressed. So was I, really. Plus his wife, Lita, was very slender and brown and lovely, with an accent that was her real Canadian one and that was fascinating. They had a wall of books in the apartment that I glanced at but that was all. Somehow we were speeding through this visit, though it obviously pleased Steve to impress us. But I had the feeling of being rushed out and suddenly we were outside starting home. I had heard some words I didn't understand, some I did, but in new contexts, from people who lived outside of Newark, I mean way outside of Newark, and maybe in what? Another world?

In the fall I returned to Howard, but I couldn't get back in school. I knew that anyway, but went down just for the trip, I guess. Just to see people coming back to school. September, the fall. I like the new tweeds and flannels dudes wear then. The raincoats and hats. The briskness of the air without its being a menace. The clarity of it, the seeming clarity of it.

I wandered around campus a day with nothing really to do once I was certain I was being put out. I could come back next semester or the next year, if I could go somewhere else and pull up my chemistry grades. But I gave not even a small shit about chemistry, except not giving a shit carried a penalty which I only began to understand. I hadn't known any other kind of life but a student life.

I bumped into friends, mob members mostly, and told them some criss-crossed stuff about why I wasn't coming back. Rip was with a group and said, “Hey, look at bohemy look at bohemy.” And I realized then that my trips to the Village were known about and not only that but had been
judged
, by one group. “Hey, look at this little beard” and he plucked at a little nothing growth of peach fuzz on my chin. I had never shaved or had reason to. Maybe since seeing Steve Korret's beard the idea of it had poked out at the point of my chin. That's the only explanation I got, I certainly didn't think I had any beard.

Some more bantering, distorted discussions, lies, bullshitting, and laughter and I felt myself leaving, waving for real and now in my head waving at that place. What had I learned? A great many things, most of which I could not speak about. I had not the tools. For one thing we were being made sick. We were being gathered with the fondest motives but being made sick. (And I was not with the sickest, or only a few.) The brownness of me, in me, I certainly had been touted off of and me always yearning for an even darker explanation. At least that was what had been my measure,
the blue/black streets of Newark. The gray steel of its relentless hardness. Love, for me, was music and warmth, high-pitched sounds and jagged or regular heavy grinding rhythms. It was collective and so dark you had to tighten yourself up to look it in the eyes. Stop your shakin'. Is that the way you want your hat to look? Is this the way you want to walk? How you sound? On the real sound, who did you sound like, the yellow picnic churchboy alien or the smooth blue rolling down the streets laughing at your collective hipness? (It was always dangerous, in Newark, to be alone! Or anywhere else.)

We'd been readied for the blowout, the vertical sweep up to sunkissed heaven. It was clothes and words and postures, the seeking of a secular Jordan. In coldly sociological terms, under national oppression, it was the Sisyphus myth given numbers to chart the exact degree of pain. Or ants piling up tidbits of zero to build the Empire State Building, and then not even own it. But the piling-up motion was all. We were not even being taught to pile up, like the common petty capitalist of the xenophobically abused South and East Europeans. All we were being readied for was to
get in
, to be a part of the big ugly which was that ugly because it would never admit us in the first motherfucking place! We were being taught integration and nothing of the kind existed. If so, why were we here in the second motherfucking place? We were readied for a lie as a lie. We were readied for yellow and the best of us were black and brown. We were readied for utopia and that is bullshit in the third motherfucking place. Only craziness could be the result. (E. Franklin Frazier was on leave when I was in school. Locke had retired. Sterling Brown taught his best classes unofficially on his own time.)

We were not taught to think but readied for superdomestic service. (Super to who?) The school was an employment agency at best, at worst a kind of church. Hypnosis was employed. Old cult practices. Collective individualism. A church of class and caste conceit. Church of the yalla jeeeesus. And so we worshiped there and loved it.

HU was the great launching pad of the flight to this God's heaven. The launching pad of the projected verticality. The pimple of pretended progress by the “colored” few. But because within that desire is a legitimate need by the whole black of us to
rise up in reality
, the sugar and butter on white bread sandwich can get over to some extent in places you wouldn't expect.

So you say, Come on, prove the pathology, Jonesy.

My roommate became a Secret Service man. After playing a little professional baseball (double or triple A) he was magnetized to the “good
job,” some place he could use the muscle and continue to drink the excitement of the field. And so he's been a field man, going ahead to make certain that various cities are safe for the president. To see if all the known nuts have been sequestered or are under surveillance, like his old roommate. He has been in the protective entourage for Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. He who slept on the other side of the room.

At least five of us became generals, and many more at lower levels. An admiral or two. Reagan's top Negro. Agnew's top Negro. Negroes at all levels of state bureaucracy and madness. Negroes in the society pages. Negroes grinning just behind the robbin' hood on television strewn through the pages of our ebony sepia hue jet Afro-defender dam news. Mostly hugging a lie and laughing or hugging a laugh and lying. — He works for She works for He's the first Negro to murder white people for bigger white people You remember whassaname, well she Remember whatnot, he got they got we got Still masquerading at the top of a hill distant silhouettes removed from the blue/black streets of our collective reality. The cheap little political manipulators and bureaucrats gesturing hypnotically in black people's faces promising freedom but delivering more bondage. The yellow rat on a chain dancing for the slave masters' amusement as “the best” of “the worst.”

(And do not intentionally misunderstand, the black schools have taught most of us. What we have of value and what we must despise. We did not even consider these other folks at these white schools as being in it. They've got their own sad stories to tell! You bet. Howard. The barbarians at Lincoln. Fisk. Hampton. We fought with the niggers at Morgan and broke folding chairs over their heads. In our crackpot little elitist world, if you didn't go to these schools you wasn't even in the world. No, really. You wasn't even in the world. But what did we know?)

I turned with tears in my eyes and whispered so that I couldn't even hear it in my brain, Goodbye!!

I was completely unslung. Disconnected. I was isolated before, sometimes I seemed even to enjoy it. I never understood it. But I knew I was somehow “alone” even in the middle of a loud bunch.

Sometimes I felt nutty. Sometimes just stupid. Like how could I flunk out of school, who had never had any problems in school? I was supposed to be some kind of prodigy (I never understood why). I could read early, they said, and I had some kind of early verbal skills. I even won a spelling bee in grammar school during the summer program and that was in the paper. The news of scholarships in the colored papers. The Gettysburg Address in a boy scout suit, etc.

But now I didn't know what to think. I'd flunked out of school. All the people I knew were in school. The old Cavaliers and Hillside Placers, where were they? I didn't even know how I would relate now. I had been shot so full of yellow. Pumped so full of middle-class fakery. That was my partial perception though I certainly hadn't raised it to the theoretical level. I was going on touch and sound and smell, moving on vague feelings.

I came back home but didn't go out. I had to do something. I didn't think I could be walking Newark's streets when I was supposed to be in school, and I couldn't even explain it. What had happened or what I felt.
I talked to a few people. Maybe if I'd gone back over to New York, something else would've happened. But I didn't think that. That was all too vague for me. I didn't even have an understandable pattern.

So, for some reason, I joined the air force. I did. It sounded weirder and weirder all the time. But in those few days that all this went down, I justified it. It was something I could grasp at some level. It was escape.

The streets, the thoughts of Howard, pressed me. I didn't know what my parents thought. My grandmother. My sister. Relatives. I never thought clearly about it, I just acted. That was how I could get away, get off these streets, disappear again, and be somewhere other than being stared at by people who were putting together their own explanations of what had happened to me.

So I went down to Broad Street to the recruitment station. The common (dumb) understanding among the young college-age youth was that the army was shit but the air force was OK. Who started that lie need to be … but maybe it ain't a lie, or probably the thing should go, the army is shit and the air force is, too.

Going down there and waiting, then standing amid those strange unrelated kids unnerved me too. I had no idea of what that would be. I looked around the room quietly, depressed more than I had ever been because it seemed now suddenly as if I was being swept down the sewer or something. I could see no recognition in any of the other faces. They probably saw none in mine. A practiced observer would have seen pain in mine, though. I could not see pain in the other faces, just reaction to the various subdued stimuli.

We had to take an oath. We were quiet, unconnected, a few kids mumbled. We were taken to a bus; I'd brought a few clothes. When I's told my immediate family, I didn't think there was any undue concern I could see. But my grandmother told me to take care of myself. That whatever I did, do it the best way I could. My mother looked sadder than most times I've seen her. My father grabbed my arm and said write, let us know how you're doing and where you are. My sister looked tearful. And I'd gone down to where the swearing-in was.

When the bus pulled out, rolling through grey Newark, I remembered it was the day before my twentieth birthday and the city was quickly behind us.

Sampson Air Force Base was cold, grey, ugly, resembling nothing but empty hopelessness. No one sang “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” Pat O'Brien did not greet us (or maybe he did). Nor was there any other
memorable background music, though later that was taken care of. I was in basic training now. We went through the usual — the haircut, the giving up of our clothes, the issue of fatigues and uniform and other equipment. For weeks we would be trained to be in the air force. I was there from October until just before Christmas.

What was most impressive about the service and especially basic training was how quickly any self-esteem was erased and with what dispatch one was transformed from Mister Whoever to nobody at all. And for me having fallen from the great yellow tower of upward to everything (admittedly a lie, but that was known only partially at that time by me) to the ground of least concern was a rude jolt to my tender sensibilities.

The class and caste shaping that the Capstone gives tells you you're somebody great even if that caste and class madness is beating your ass with its open and implied exclusion every day. I mean you can know that the little yalla boys and girls or the med and dent students are “igging” you and be igged and conscious (to the degree you
are
conscious) of it, but still because you are even permitted to let that house slave artifaction pass gas in your face (AS TRAINING, BOY, TO READY YOU FOR THE WHITE FOLKS) you feel like somebody special. Some extra-cool Nigra passing through the streets of yon ghettoes. We were permitted to float a sixteen-millionth of an inch off the ground — of course we thought it was slightly higher — as chosen Negroes of the yalla god. But bam whap mash like Jack Palance as the mad magician fell out of the tower to show he was
not
God (God was with Paul Newman and them) we were dashed to the hard ground by some social mishap like this. Was that what my grandfather and them felt like, having been thrown out of the nigger bourgeoisie all the way to the lower middle class? I see. It's rough, as Conrad Lynn would say. Rough!