The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (63 page)

It was during the rehearsals of these two plays that I came to know Sylvia Wilson better. She played the role of Tiila in A
Black Mass
, the young woman whom the beast (Bob Davis) touches and changes into a raving creature. Sylvia always drew applause the way she acted out the transformation.

Bumi and I were living together, but that was a thing of circumstance and inconvenience. I felt like her father more than her lover. She wore her Yoruba gele up and down those Newark streets and made friends with the young kids in the neighborhood. But we were in two different worlds. I could, however, and did feel responsibility for her quickly rising stomach and no matter what I felt, I was determined at least to serve that responsibility as best I could.

I found myself staring at Sylvia Wilson, who was married and had two children. One night at the Cellar she asked me was I really staring at her. Yes, I mumbled, maybe I shook my head, uh-huh, I had been. You know, some people get off just by staring. Sylvia was in the midst of separating from her husband. It was over already, the moving out was all that was left. In a few nights we found ourselves hugged together up in the loft, thinking it was just a brief coming together caused by our propinquity at the rehearsals.

But that was not the case. We saw each other again. We held hands and walked around Lincoln Center. Sylvia was tall and very slender, a brown woman with long, straightish-looking hair. I had seen her in the loft world a few times, before the tryouts that got her the part in A
Black Mass
. One night she was dancing in a company doing African dances and her halter slipped down, but she was so intense about the dance she didn't even bother to pull it up. I wondered about that, was that just for effect or was she intense enough to let the damn halter stay down. Bumi had snickered when we saw that, saying she thought Sylvia was “phony,” but by the time the production at the Proctors was over, we had gotten tight indeed.

Sylvia also performed with Yusef Rahman, dancing while he read his swooping jazzical lines. It was my idea that Yusef liked Sylvia as well, even though he had a wife, Aishah, who had moved away from him for a time. Sylvia was one of the initiators of the Jazz Arts Society, which tried to bring some new art into the city, but the split meant she and the folks upstairs at the Jazz Art Society went one way and Art Williams another. But nobody could deny that what Art was doing downstairs was successful.

So her own cultural work was in and around Newark, against much heavier odds. But it was hooked up objectively to the same kind of thing we were doing at the Black Arts. In those cities like Newark, grim industrial towns in the real world, these kinds of projects are necessarily smaller but at the same time tougher and blacker because they are rooted in the absolute necessities of people's desired sensibility. People must fight to bring art to a place like Newark; it is not the tourist stop or great advertised mecca of commercial intellectualism as New York has been styled.

And so she had a whole life as cultural worker in Newark that paralleled what we were trying to do at the Black Arts in many ways. Therefore, a sensibility that was like mine in some ways, but without the tiresome “spaciness” of the middle-class intellectual, subjective and selfish as I and much of the New York crowd tended to be. There was much less room or tolerance for the “fake art” syndrome that is so ubiquitous in Manhattan, therefore much less fertile soil for the maddening and finally vapid “artsycraftsy” personality type. Art was literally lifeblood in a place like Newark and its tenders and developers were, given the limitations of resources etc., dedicated valuable people, with usually a great deal more of a sense of responsibility than their average New York counterparts.

The unwavering focus of responsibility, especially as it relates to the African American people, was what the whole of the Black Arts movement was about. People like Sylvia, in the Newarks all over North America, had had that sense of focus and responsibility because, finally, there was much more of a black working-class underpinning for what they were doing. Such an intellectual and philosophical basis for their efforts was a given. For me, on the other hand, it was something I was still trying to
win
, even when I met her.

Our new relationship moved swiftly toward some resolution. Sylvia fascinated me. Before I'd gotten to know her I was still trying to hook up again with Vashti, but now that was surely over forever. We'd met once more in a bar, after an African wedding Bumi and I had gone to. Vashti stood there holding my arm, telling me it was all over. That we had had some fun but it was over. “We had some fun, didn't we?” She was crying, at first softly and then racked by more tears. “Didn't we?” Bumi had walked out so that we could talk. “Why can't I be the one in the beautiful African clothes?” she said, weeping, referring to Bumi's Yoruba dress. “Why can't I be the one that is beautiful in the African clothes?” And then we parted.

I heard that after our final split Vashti took up with a cameraman. A year or so later, I heard that she and the photographer had gone to Mexico for
a vacation. It was in Mexico that Vashti went swimming one day and drowned.

What to do now? Bumi was a girl, yet she was about to become a mother. Sylvia was from Newark, too, though she'd been born in North Carolina, but she'd lived mainly in Newark, mostly the Central Ward, what used to be called the Third Ward. And she'd lived for a long time as a child, with her grandmother and father, on the Ward's most famous street, Howard Street. What seemed so strange to me now was that I had made something of a full circle. To have gone away so far, so many places, yet to be back with a black woman from the Central Ward. The irony was somehow mocking. I told her how many steps we'd wasted only to come back to our source, love in black life.

So I told Bumi about Sylvia. I told her I had been seeing her. Our relationship had just started. There was a fine intensity to it, a dazzling sensitivity to it, of us together, sensuous and alive. Sylvia was very slender, one could say skinny, but she carried with her (as so many dudes would remark to me while they were still in the running) an outright black sensuousness that was thrilling.

I felt my life had been blown around. I had been thrown by my own appetites across a whole cosmos of feelings and relationships. But the idea of Home was heavy on me, that I could come back. That I could somehow reclaim whatever I'd given up in going away. But there was Bumi and a baby coming. I thought she was too young and naive to handle it alone, which I guess was naivete of another sort, perhaps male chauvinism of one variety or another. So I proposed to Bumi that we practice polygamy, that we go to Sylvia and explain it and get her response.

The whole Yoruba cultural nationalism was influencing me. Bumi was still tight with Serj and the Temple folks. Olatuni even came to visit us with incense from time to time. We had a small altar in the house, as part of the religion. I did have a sincere belief in the need to go back to my roots. As Amilcar Cabral said of the black petty bourgeois intellectuals who have been so thoroughly wiped out by white society, they then all too many times freak out by diving headlong into a super-Africanism. (This was still to come!)

What we must have seemed like, the two of us, coming into Sylvia's house with such a proposition, I cannot guess. Sylvia lived in one of the middle-income town-house complexes that the administration put up to try to make a gesture toward the black middle class. The only thing was, these town houses were only a few steps away from the lower-income
straight-out projects, though they did look different. It was a well-kept apartment, with the dramatic gesture of art readily apparent. (Though we were critical because there were white people's images in some of the paintings. I who just a couple years before not only had lived in a house full of paintings with white images, but had lain beside another white image, a flesh-and-blood one, as my wife. The pretension of these stances was fantastic, yet they came as a reflection of some legitimate desire to change.)

Sylvia did not like the proposition at all, except she did have some real feelings for me and that made her hesitate. She was also in the act of leaving this home, separating from her husband. The two daughters by that marriage she had already taken to her mother's to stay until she got herself situated. That marriage had already shattered. Her being with me had made it absolutely impossible for her to try to repair what was smashed and finished.

What our proposition did do was give Sylvia a place to move until she could see what she had to do. So she moved into Stirling Street with us. I had named the building the Spirit House, trying to raise up to another level the idea of what soul was to black people. The Spirit House was a place to raise the soul, to raise the consciousness. It was to be another edition of the Black Arts.

But no such thing as polygamy could work for us. Bumi was pushed because, even though she had been exposed to this madness, as an honorable black social form, she had her own instinctive feelings bred of being raised as a lower-middle-class girl in America. Sylvia did not want it either; her experience was completely the opposite. She was a light and a live wire in black Newark even with male chauvinism and a backward society. She had hung with musicians and artists, whom she made view her as equal and not as a piece of sexual baggage. But she would not say all this because of me. And I, so long whited out, now frantically claiming a “blackness” that in many ways was bogus, a kind of
black bohemianism
that put the middle class again in the position of carping at the black masses to follow the
black
middle class because this black middle class knew how to be black when the black workers did not. Hey, all that shit was yellow, very very yellow. Another kind of clique and elite. How to move from, say, Francis King to Baba Oserjeman and not miss a stroke.

Sylvia was in the house a few days when she decided she was moving out. The polygamous setup could not be consummated. The many head-to-head conversations we were having led Bumi to protest that she had been left out of this new family. But it had never been a family, only a bad
idea sponsored by a middle-class black intellectual deeply confused and legitimizing male chauvinism. There was a party up on Clinton Avenue at someone's house. I knew Sylvia was going to be there. I had been in New York dealing with my agent and trying to cash some checks. I got back and went up to the party. Sylvia and I talked. She could not go on with this sad charade that I had tried to put together. Maybe, sometime later, things would be different. I stared out into inner space, wondering what was going to happen now. Someone was calling me. There was a phone call. It was one of the older women on Stirling Street. Bumi had gotten sick, it was late in her pregnancy, but she had gotten suddenly sick. An ambulance had been called and they had taken her to the hospital. When I got there she was in a coma. She never regained consciousness.

For Sylvia and me, Bumi's death was a torturous calamity. Not that we did not understand that now the way had been cleared for our relationship, which only a few minutes before had been doomed. But it was the very
guilt
that came with Bumi's death that was so unbearable. The guilt we carried was enormous. She was a young girl, almost a little baby, and we didn't need her in our lives. Now this frightening stroke of coincidence had removed her from our lives. We knew we should be relieved and that was the terrible guilt that plagued us for years afterwards.

What was even wilder was that one of the poets whom I most admired intimated to some people that he wanted to
investigate
Bumi's death because he suspected foul play! On top of that, Bumi's parents acted pretty wild as well. They asked for the baby clothes back, as if somehow I was going to steal them and do what with them!? They too seemed to hold me responsible for her death. This on top of everything else. (The book
Tales
, which was published the next year, has stories in it relating to this period.)

But despite the enormous guilt Bumi's death caused for us, it did not split Sylvia and me. Both of us felt that the cycle of completion represented by our coming together could not be thwarted. We tried to go on with our lives. Sylvia did move now completely into the Spirit House and we began to live together on the third floor. We began now to try to love each other as best we could in a crazy primitive world.

What combustions and reorganization our new lives together caused, I won't speculate upon, only to say that it was obvious they did, maybe they still do. Sylvia was from a black working-class family, one sister and four brothers, of which she is the oldest. She is eight years younger than I, and though we were raised not too far from each other, the difference in our
generations and the difference in our class backgrounds meant that chances of our meeting before this last part of the '60s were not good.

Not because she lacked any sophistication; if anything, what I was coming to emotionally and intellectually, the sophistication to understand who you are and to be ultimately responsible for your development, she had never really gone away from. But I doubt that she would have threaded through the deathly white cells of downtown New York not-yourself-ville searching for death, as I and so many other blacks had and are. She is too completely connected to life as vitality and development, too certain of herself as herself (black, female, intellectual).

The '60s represented a great coming together of the brothers and sisters. The parts of the whole assembling to see further and do more. This is what national consciousness proposes. It is, in the deepest sense, a reunion with our selves, even the farthest-flung.

And so the journey that I made, which can be characterized as “the Prodigal's trip,” only to be summoned (not only by myself but by all the others of us who were conscious that we were not together). Summoned where? Why, home, emotionally, intellectually, and in some cases physically and geographically. And who do you meet? Your brothers and sisters, the other parts of yourself. The people who be home!