The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (62 page)

Rehearsals started for
Dutchman
. It starred Iris Spielberg and Marvin Camillo (who later moved to New York and formed the theater group The Family, which produced Miguel Pinero's
Shorteyes
). I thought the production was pretty good, even though Iris and I had a fight, in which I told her I didn't like white people — she had complained that I hadn't related to her enough as a director. She said I didn't like white people because I was immature. There was probably some truth in that, though there are probably some other reasons white people could be disliked by any colored person.

The night of the opening, Bumi came up to see the production and Vashti spotted her. Vashti had gotten friendly with Sylvia and some other folks in Newark, and she had been complaining to them bitterly about my male chauvinism, my hanging out all night, and about Bumi, whom she had got word about. After the performance that night all of us went to the Owl Club down on Clinton Avenue. The place was founded by a friend of my grandfather's, another black Republican and a prominent Elk. My grandfather was a Mason. So there was a mix most times of young middle-class types and the older bloods who'd been going down there for decades.

Vashti and I had a fight about Bumi, not only verbal, but she slapped me and I pushed her, right in the Owl Club. My mother was there and she was so embarrassed she came up to me with tears in her eyes, her voice
and person shaking violently. “I have to live here. This is where I live!” So much for the brown promise of yellow spotlight. Tussling in a bar in front of the colored citizens. Wow.

For Vashti and me that was it. That was the finish. She went back to my parents' house, got her stuff, and blew. She went back to New York to stay with a friend. I could not reach her. It was a very low point in my life. The Smokey Robinson hit “The Tracks of My Tears” was popular at the time, and for me that summed up what was going on in my own life. “Take a good look at my face/if the smile seems out of place/look a little closer it's easy to trace/the tracks of my tears!” Fuckin' Smokey, the poet of the age.

I got out of my parents' house as well and went down to the flophouse to stay. As depressed as I was, that raunchy joint took me even further down and out. Bumi was a kid, almost completely unshaped. She was no Vashti, who was also youthful but sophisticated to within an inch of her life. Me and Vashti were like partners, like Nick and Nora Charles, brown style. Bumi knew next to nothing about music, art, poetry, politics — none of the stuff that animated my life. Yet for some absolutely stupid pathological reasons I found myself with her in some flophouse on Broad Street in Newark! The irony, the psychological cruelty of that punished me unmercifully. The same grey streets. The hopelessness and despair that walks through that city like its real owners. I was back here with it, without, even, the promise of youth.

First of all I had to get out of that hotel. I pored over the newspapers looking for some way out. The depression was unbearable. The wine drinking increased. Days filled with a listless frustration, a self-condemning tone to my thoughts mocked me without end. I spotted a house for rent on Stirling Street. Just as you left the downtown area of Newark you'd pass through the Stirling Street area, just above the courthouse and Hall of Records on High Street. It was a short street, bounded on one side by High, on the other by Howard. It was only a couple blocks away from my old church and right around the corner from the church my father told my mother he was a member of so he wouldn't have to go to Bethany regular.

Also, there was a building just a couple blocks away from Stirling Street on Shipman Street where they had music and poetry readings down in the basement and an arts group upstairs. That building contained just about all of arty Newark. Plus, you could shoot right down the street and be at Penn Station or the bus station if you were removing. It was close to downtown, convenient, yet it was edged up into the community. It was about
$200 a month to rent the whole wooden house, three floors. I went up and looked at it. I could get the $200 plus another $200 security, if I strained. And I had to strain, I had to get out of that hotel.

Something happened to flush me out even more quickly than I'd intended. The owner of the hotel sent a man down to check on why he wasn't getting his rent money on time or no time. The reason was that Ben wouldn't bug anybody for the man's money. If you had it, cool; if you didn't, that was cool too. Ben would say, “Hey, man,” to the nonpayers, “the white man gonna throw your ass out in the street,” and everybody would laugh. But the white man did come down, or at least sent someone down to harass the tenants.

Some people had come over from New York to see me, Shorty and some others. The money collector sees us coming through the lobby and he wants to know who we are and whatnot. One thing led to another and I'm saying, “Fuck you, kiss my ass,” which seems normal in these kinds of situations. The guy picks up a stick and charges me. I guess he was some kind of small-time enforcer. But luckily I kicked him with a fake karate kick right in his real testicles, and he keeled over, folded up like a newspaper. You mean you gonna kick some white man in the balls on Broad Street? Some landlord's flunky? You can't make that, my man. Something like that could have gone through my head as if it was Clarence Franklin talking slow and drunkenly inside my knot. For a second I froze. The guy was still laying in the floor like he was knocked cold. I backed off him, scrambled up the stairs to get what I could out of the room. Most of my stuff was still at my parents' house. Then I split, jumped on a bus, and went just where any detective would look, my parents' house. I didn't think anybody at the hotel would say anything. I lay low a couple days, and when I got my money together, I headed for Stirling Street.

So I found myself cleaning and painting yet another group of rooms, yet another place. I was moving to the third floor. Bumi would come, too. Barney wanted to move into one of the rooms with a little girl he'd hooked up with, the daughter of a famous black novelist. Ben figured he wanted to move out of the hotel, after that last incident. So he was going to move in, too. In a minute, Shorty would move over, too.

I wanted the downstairs floor to be a theater, something like the Black Arts. So we tore the walls down again. Joe Overstreet came over to help and at one point the whole ceiling nearly collapsed on our heads. Joe thought it was funny. There was a bunch of young boys in the neighborhood I soon
got to know and they helped us. While we were clearing the theater part I even put together a quirky little film in which the kids starred. Putting that building together gave me more of a sense of purpose than I'd had in a long time. It was possible to do work in Newark. I was not an exile from New York. I could do work in the city of my birth. And that positive idea began to grow.

One of the first things I did was organize the Afro-American Festival of the Arts. The World Festival of Negro Arts was being put together in Dakar under Monsieur Senghor's direction. The idea of a world festival of
Negro
arts was a drag, many of us agreed about that. But the overall idea was a great one. But there was no mistake, Leopold Senghor
was
a prominent Negro!

The Newark festival took place mainly outside in the park of the Douglass-Harrison apartments. Those were the most successful sessions. The speeches and music and dance got over biggest. We were supposed to have a few forums and roundtables inside but they were not well attended. But the outside programs were very successful.

Ben Caldwell designed the brochure, which showed some folks sitting on the steps of 33 Stirling Street. The festival brought Stokely Carmichael, Harold Cruse, Baba Oserjeman, and the Yoruba Temple Dancers and Drummers into Newark. While some of the things didn't work, some worked very well. Carmichael, for instance, had just projected the concept of “Black Power” in the press. When I read it, in the
Times
, quoting Stokely down in Georgia or Alabama calling for Black Power, it lit me up. I had heard some things about Stokely when I was in New York and he still at Howard. I followed the SNCC struggles, of course, and the change that had occurred in SNCC, from a replica of the black preachers' SCLC until now, when under Malcolm X's influence, a nationalist perspective was growing in SNCC. Many of the whites had left. And now Carmichael was talking about Black Power. Next to the article I penned: “God bless you, Stokely Carmichael!”

The festival was my first really organized attempt to bring political ideas and revolutionary culture to the black masses of Newark. Though, in retrospect, a lot of what was said could hardly be looked at now as revolutionary. Though it all
was
resistance to imperialism in one aspect or another. The festival also connected me to many of the young people in Newark who were trying to do something in the arts and alerted some of the political types in that city that something “new” was happening.

We published a magazine called
Afro-American Festival of the Arts
, which featured works by Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Spriggs, Yusef Iman, Ben Caldwell, Clarence Reed, S. E. Anderson, and myself. Later it was called
An Anthology of Our Black Selves
. I met a young writer who worked for Johnson Publications, David Llorens, and he followed us around from place to place taking notes which in a year or so blossomed into a feature article in
Ebony
on our work in Newark.

Art Williams was running the Cellar just down the street from where I lived. He brought New York musicians in on the weekends. There were some very good sets. He also had poetry readings and I even read there myself one evening with a poet, Ronald Stone, who later changed his name to Yusef Rahman. Yusef's poetry was a revelation to me. He was like Bird in his approach to the poetry, seeming to scat and spit rapid-fire lines of eighth notes at top speed. It was definitely speech musicked. This was my first exposure to his work and I was mightily impressed. It confirmed some of the things I had learned in the first surge of the Black Arts movement, how different the black poetry was that emerged in that rush of new blackness that came upon us then. Poets like Larry Neal and Askia Tour, were, in my mind, masters of the new black poetry. Larry coming out of straight-out bebop rhythms, but actually a little newer than bop, a faster-moving syncopation. Askia had the songlike cast to his words, as if the poetry actually was meant to be sung. I heard him once up at the Baby Grand when we first got into Harlem and that singing sound influenced what I was to do with poetry from then on. To me, Larry and Askia were the state of the art, where it was at that moment. Yusef was good, in some ways on a par with Larry and Askia, but Larry's syncopation was a little more elegant. Yusef was dead-on a Charlie Parker bebop, straight ahead, blue wings flapping up a hurricane of funk. But Yusef was a definite new measure in the poetry, an innovative style that had to be absorbed by any who wanted to reflect where the word was circa 1966.

The fact of music was the black poet's basis for creation. And those of us in the Black Arts movement were drenched in black music and wanted our poetry to
be
black music. Not only that, we wanted that poetry to be armed with the spirit of black revolution. An art that could not commit itself to black revolution was not relevant to us. And if the poet that created such art was colored we mocked him and his inspiration as brainwashed artifacts to please our beast oppressors!

Another poet I heard during this period had a great influence on me, Amus Mor (once David Moore) from Chicago. I heard him read in Chi
his masterwork, “We Are the Hip Men.” The way Amus put the music directly into the poem, scatting and being a hip dude walking down the street letting the sounds flow out of his mouth — putting all that into the poetry — really turned me on. We wanted to bring black life into the poem directly. Its rhythms, its language, its history and struggle. It was meant to be a poetry we copped from the people and gave them right back, open and direct and moving. Reading in the vacant lots and on the sidewalks and playgrounds of Harlem that summer of '65 had opened many of us all the way up. We had been able to reach deeper into ourselves than ever before. We had been able to touch sometimes that dark brown feeling that is always connected with black and blues.

Reading with Yusef was a good heavy experience, like playing opposite another horn (his an alto, maybe, mine a tenor) and wailing blue/black magic for the soul's use. I began to come down to the Cellar often. It was only a block and a bit from my house. I became a regular, showing for most of the programs, sipping the beer and wine and mingling with the folks, digging the sounds. Maybe Barney and Donny and Ben and I would show. I was writing a column called “Apple Cores,” meant originally for Ed Dorn's magazine
Wild Dog
. I had published a couple of columns in
Downbeat
. I began to fill them with what was going on at the Cellar.

Actually, Art Williams, who ran the Cellar, I knew before I left home. His younger brother and I had been fairly close even though we went to different high schools. Art was a bass player, much maligned by some musicians, who called him “the silent bass player,” because Art's sound was so small. But Art was a good dude at heart, one of those classic free spirits that float through the black community trying to raise up beauty in the midst of ugliness. He'd been part of the Jazz Arts Society, which ran the third floor of the building the Cellar was housed in. But they'd split up because there was a growing Muslim influence on the Jazz Arts, resulting in them not wanting to deal with whites either as performers or as audience. Art had no such restraints on what he wanted to do. He wanted to bring in the music, whoever was playing it and whoever wanted to listen to it, and groove.

I was hooking up a production of A
Black Mass
and
Jello
, two plays written at the Black Arts. Calabar was putting up the bread and we were using the Proctors, an old movie theater that no longer functioned as that. Marvin Camillo, Barry Wynn, and Yusef Iman had the leads. Olabumi was in
Mass
, and Sylvia Wilson. Yusef and Charles Barney, a Newark actor, had leads in
Jello
, and Bobbie Riley, the mother of the major-league
catcher Earl Williams, played Mary Livingstone. I thought it was a good evening, a professional production and aimed at the many.