The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (50 page)

So Brown says something, maybe “Fuck you” or “What you got to do with it?” or something, but the catalyst was me saying, “Big Brown, the African Queen!” So he leaps to his feet and goes into his menace/gorilla stance. But I kept talking, kept putting him down. Not only “African Queen” but all kinds of other things my instinctive sense of danger now has blanked out. Not only that, I start taunting him: “You supposed to be bad. You ain't bad, dressed up like some fuckin' genie or something. You just silly. A silly-ass nigger! Shit, I bet you can't even fight.” Yeh, it really got out. And I can see with some kind of split vision my various buddies flung about the room, frozen stiff as respective Statues of Liberty or Colossi of Rhodes or whatever. (A.B. told me later he kept thinking, “Shut up, little nigger, shut up.”)

I can't even say what made me go so far. Except I felt Brown's whole thing was an act, some second-rate vaudeville. Actually, he looked like the dude who used to run with Mandrake, because he wore a turban sometimes.
But in some fit of absolute frustration, most likely, Brown reaches and grabs the chains from the wall decor and holds them like he's going to bash my head in. So I started laughing and taunting him even more. “Yow, a six-foot-three two-hundred-pound bad dude got to get a chain to bash me!” I cracked up. “Hey, man, you must be pretty bad, you gotta get a chain. God damn!” And that broke it open. It was absurd. And in the end, the room was bathed in laughter and Brown stood there with the chain in his hand, then slowly let it fall to the floor. He turned and grimly stalked into the night. My nerves shot more laughter up and out after him, then we got some wine, threw it down telling various bullshit versions of the same event, and trailed out of the joint, with people still pointing and cackling. We looked both ways when we got outside though we still were animated by a frivolity that both masked and carried our deep sighs of relief.

Hey, it wasn't even the real world. I guess that was my reasoning. In the real world, of Newark's steel-gray streets, all that mouth would've got me killed or at least forced me to set a new indoor and outdoor Olympic hat-up record. But down there, wow, even the bad dudes was cardboard Lothars afraid of their own shadow.

The work with On Guard on Rob Williams' defense and the Fair Play Committee had given me another and, I think, deeper perspective. I could reflect on revolution and struggle as concrete phenomena. It made the posturing and fakery of much of the downtown residents even more absurd. Though I was still involved in quite a bit of it myself. Lucia DiBella had gotten pregnant. I tried to tell myself it wasn't mine. And Lucia had one dancer friend of ours living with her from time to time. I thought maybe it was his. But he was a homosexual, a beautiful but tragic dancer who was always slightly fantasizing about himself as a young Nijinsky. One night at a cocktail party, probably high on acid, he stepped through the open window, claiming he could fly, and killed himself. Plus one of the dancer's men friends, piqued by something he, Neddie, had done, or both of them mutually pissed off at each other, had ended their relationship and the friend, a tall blonde fashion model, Chris Bartlett, and Lucia were rapidly becoming fast friends. However, such “might be's” and “maybe's” didn't change the reality. No matter how many of the endless one-night stands I might get involved with, I'd always show up at Lucia's.

Actually, the magazine I ran with Nellie,
Zazen
, had continued to issue No. 8, coming out the same time as
The Fleeting Bear
, the sheet that Lucia and I put out. Lucia's pregnancy alerted Nellie, however, and she asked
me what I knew about it. I didn't know anything about that, just because I went over there to put out the
Bear
didn't mean anything. But it did. I had asked the poet Harry Schulman, who was a friend of Lucia's, over the phone, “What does the baby look like?” And he said, “White.” I felt relieved. But in a few days, Nellie came home with our babies from hanging out in Tompkins Square Park near Avenue A where the Lower East Side mothers congregated, as the West Side mothers did in Washington Square Park. She said to me only that she had seen Lucia's baby and it was “one of those black-and-white kind.” Then she cried some, asking me from time to time, “How could you?” And that was a very good question. I wondered myself.

To make bad things worse, in a few months the house next to ours was vacant and Lucia moved there, baby, model friend, and all. I had said before, it was like Brook Farm. Eventually, the model assumed fathership of the baby, and Lucia and he even had a baby of their own. Lucia called the child she'd had by me Dominique, in honor of the Frenchified LeRoi.

I was now taking published potshots at the nonviolence movement. “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents” was one article, “What Does Non-violence Mean?” another.
Kulchur
had published the first, and the conservative Jewish publication
Midstream
the other. I was becoming much more openly involved with movement questions. The mood downtown was changing, there were many more signs of some people getting involved with various struggles, especiallly the Cuban struggle and the student struggle. Plus, there were now a great many more blacks downtown than when I had first arrived half a decade before. I had been on the scene now from the period when there were relatively few blacks and when the sets had gotten fiercely integrated, but now there seemed to be further change. More and more I found myself sitting and talking or walking and making parties with black dudes. We began to feel a certain kind of community, perhaps a kind of solidarity as blacks that was unspoken in the old MacDougal Street days, but was now an openly acknowledged emotional binder. And the various sets we'd go to would always take on a distinctly different tone once we'd enter. Especially with Bob Thompson laughing at the top of his voice and “snatching bitches,” as the saying goes. And White and Marion and I would be blind as the night.

But we knew what was in our hearts, something open and bright. We wanted what was new and hip, though we were connected in a lot of ways with some stuff that was old and square. We knew the music was hip and new and out beyond anything anyone downtown was doing, in music,
painting, poetry, dance, or whatever the fuck. And we felt, I know I did, that we were linked to that music that Trane and Ornette and C.T., Shepp and Dolphy and the others, were making, so the old white arrogance and elitism of Europe as Center Art was stupid on its face. We could saunter into a joint and be openly critical of whatever kind of show or program or party, because we knew, number one, it wasn't as hip as the music, and, number two, it wasn't as out as we were out, because now we began to realize or rationalize that we were on the fringe of the fringe. If the down-town Village/East Village society was a fringe of big-time America, then we were a fringe of that fringe, which put us way out indeed.

Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA in 1961 to stop the newly freed Congolese people from nationalizing Union Minière and other Rockefeller properties. I found myself marching outside the UN in demonstrations, while others, mostly blacks, took off their shoes and threw them down in the gallery as the gallery guards were called in to toss the demonstrating blacks out. Sisters were bashing the guards in the head with their shoes and throwing the shoes down out the gallery. Ralph Bunche said he was ashamed and scandalized by such niggerism, while we were scandalized and ashamed of his negro-ass tom antics.

Outside, in front of the U.S. mission to the UN, the police also attacked us. One sister, Mae Mallory, Calvin Hicks, and I were marching and we looked up at the top of the stairs just in time to see James Lawson, the so-called nationalist, pointing us out to the police, and then they attacked us, clubs flying. Mae put up a terrific battle and the police were sorry they ever put their hands on her. It took several of them to subdue her. She was one of the people in On Guard and she remained very active in the Black Liberation Movement.

As the police put us into the paddy wagon, a couple of them would catch us by the elbows and hoist us through the back door, banging the top of our heads on the metal doorframe at the same time. You felt like you'd been whacked yet another time with a nightstick. Dazed in the back of the paddy wagon, I reached into my pockets and found some Benzedrine or Dexedrine pills that I took every once in a while to stay awake if I was writing all night. I threw them all in my mouth, figuring the nabs would charge me with possession of drugs. But I had taken so many I was jittery as a flea. The police must've thought it was nerves.

I began to meet some young black intellectuals connected with the Black Liberation Movement and strike up friendships. One I met in this way was Askia Touré (then Rolland Snellings), the poet. We were on those picket
lines and I didn't even know he was a writer. We became friends as part of the movement.

Sometime later I began to get some word of
Umbra
, a magazine that began to come out from the Lower East Side that featured black writers. Lorenzo Thomas, who published as a very young person in some of the places that the New York school writers published, I think I was aware of first. His work appeared about the same time that Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard, the Oklahoma free association semi-surrealists began to appear. I was especially impressed by Thomas and Berrigan, and very curious about Thomas because he was black.

One later afternoon, as was my wont, I wandered into the Five Spot, the one on the corner of St. Marks and Third Avenue. I'm sitting there sipping and probably glancing at a paper or something when two bloods come up to me.
Blues People
had come out recently and I was elated and surprised in a way because it was my first book from a mainstream publishing house and I was impressed because of the hardcover. The publisher had even had a party for me at the New School, where I was teaching a course in poetry. Ornette Coleman came, and there is a photograph with the two of us grinning. My mother and father came as well, but one of the biggest disappointments was that my grandmother had died before I had a chance to show that book to her. She probably would've cried and told me, “Practice makes perfect.”

But one guy says to me, “You LeRoi Jones?” I probably just nodded or grunted. One of these dudes is sort of big-headed and bulky, the other taller, with midnight-dark glasses and a rough complexion of skin stretched tight in what I'd have to call an ambiguous smile. The big-headed one says, “I like your prose. I don't like your poetry.” The other guy just continues smiling like he knows a secret.

“Oh?” I left it pointed up like someone had let a pigeon shit on my shoe, but said no more. But the big-headed one wanted to go on and he did, saying some other things. But then he introduced himself and his companion.

“My name is Ishmael Reed. This is Calvin Hernton.” And so I'd met Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton, but I didn't know them from Adam's house cat. Though it did seem that Hernton's name rang some kind of bell, someone had mentioned it or I had seen it. But the introduction seemed to me like some challenge, I didn't know, casual or not. But I took it as such, the way you had to deal with these various ersatz artsy gunfighters
roaming around the Village who thought that confrontation in the name of art was the highest form of hanging out.

But I didn't take the bait. After that intro, I kept sipping my drink. And in a few minutes, Sonny Murray or Marion or White or somebody came in and we got into our serious drinking in peace, probably conjuring up our next bag chase. Reed and Hernton sat awhile and then eased into the early evening. I remember questioning my buddies about them and was told something about
Umbra
, the folks in it and what it was about. It sounded interesting but I still didn't know why Reed had wanted to come on like Skippy Homeier looking for Gregory Peck.

We used to hang in the Five Spot in the late afternoon/early evening too, drinking and bullshitting. There'd be a mixture of the artists in the area — musicians, writers, painters. It was a good easterly drinking spot in the daytime. One time Sonny Murray came in and told me he had got into a hassle with Charlie Mingus and had to break a chair over Mingus' back. Charlie was always in the habit of cursing musicians who were his side men right up on the stage, in front of the public. It was really humiliating. I heard him one night cuss out Lonnie Hillyer, Charlie McPherson, and Jaki Byard, using all kinds of wild language. I wondered how they had gone for that.

A few evenings later, after Sonny related his confrontation with Mingus, allegedly about Mingus calling Sonny “jive” for his free style of drumming, I meet Mingus outside of The Five Spot. I say something to Mingus, like “What's happening?” or whatever, just a typical greeting. Mingus starts talking some off-the-wall stuff, most of which I didn't even get with. But then he pushes me, and I'm laughing like it was a joke, which I figured it ought to be. But then he advances, as rapidly as he can with all that weight — Charlie was about a hundred pounds overweight — and he slapped me! It was light, partially because he was off balance and partially because as I saw it coming I tried to pull my head back.

I said, “Hey, man, what's going on? What's happening?”

And Mingus starts this spew of profanity, saying something like “You goddam punk,” and I could hear that it had something to do with something I'd written, that I was sympathetic with the avant-garde musicians, or something like that. But this time when he came forward, I went into my Newark Sugar Ray stick and run, jab and duck, and started popping him side his fat head. After a round-and-round of a few minutes Mingus stops and people all around us are telling us we oughta stop and stop acting
crazy. I didn't think I was acting crazy, I was defending myself as best I could against some two- or three-hundred-pound nut.

Mingus stops, then he puts out his hand to shake. He says, “I'm sorry. I made a mistake. I was wrong.” I guess he meant because he thought he could just slap me and walk away, having chastised some jive intellectual. But I'd ducked and dodged around some much-meaner-with-they-hands mf's than Charlie Mingus. Like I said, in many ways, the downtown scene was completely cardboard.