The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (64 page)

Sylvia was raised by her grandmother and grandfather. He a construction worker and she, when she worked, a laundry worker in a Chinese laundry and a hairdresser. Sylvia had gone to Arts High School and wanted since her childhood to become an actress, then a painter, and then a dancer, or all three at the same time. It was this vector that had put her in motion in a direction that caused our paths to cross. An early bohemian, thought of by her mother and teachers as “weird,” she was once sent home from high school because the teacher accused her of looking like “she belonged on a reservation.” But hers, for the most part, was a black bohemianism. A white guy had come to her parents' house to try to see her when she was younger and her grandmother had driven him away, saying, “None of that!”

She had known my name first, she said, from a set of liner notes I had done for a record called
Billie Holiday in Germany
and then she had read the splintered “association complexes” of
The System of Dante's Hell
. She had been active in the Newark arts scene and even knew some of the New York people through the Jazz Arts Society. She'd heard of the madness of the Black Arts through some folks who'd come over to see us in the throes of youthful bombast and struggle. “They said you dudes were
out
— crazy as hell,” was the way she described it.

But different people made different evaluations, naturally, of what our coming together meant. They still do. Some folks were disturbed (some still are); some were elated. I think the latter is the norm, but there were significant deviations from this reaction. For one thing, there was a group of people in Newark who'd either been after Sylvia or at least thought she was not to be gotten. She was not only married but principled. There were some other folks who thought that Vashti was a momentary phenomenon and Bumi was even more transient. (Many people who thought this way were not white, either.) They thought I was going eventually to get in motion in their ocean, not go home to a warm southern sea.

I am not even sure that Sylvia and I understood what our coming together meant, except we were in love, we had just come through fire, so we thought we deserved each other and none of the bullshit we were getting. We plunged into life as we felt it, determined to do things our way, no matter who thought what. We were strong on feeling but light on analysis. And sooner or later this one-sidedness must return to haunt you.

We began building a block association on Stirling Street. I had gotten a mimeo machine down in the basement and an electric stencil maker. When I taught all the kids who came around how to work these, we started a little community newsletter,
Stirling St. Newspaper
. We conducted interviews with the residents, editorialized about the city to the extent that we could, and drew people in the area together with this project.

The youth that worked with us in those days — Bobbie, Herbie, Larry, Junior, Stanley, Moosie, J.B., and the others — we grew very close to. Some of them are still our close friends, though they have grown up and are struggling right now to raise their own families. But in those days they were early teenagers full of all that energy and promise. They found they could come into the Spirit House and learn something. We gave them a newspaper to run, to write and print and distribute. We taught them to use business machines. We put them in plays. We got them politically in motion.

When we discovered that the children around Stirling Street had trouble reading the scripts I was writing, some of them especially written for youth, we went into the local school, Robert Treat, later changed to Marcus Garvey, and began to raise hell. The deeper we got into the community, the more openly political were our actions.

The concept of Black Power had reached me and I would walk around stenciling a black fist with the words “Black Power” over it. We had not completely focused on the meaning of the term, but we knew it was correct and ours! That year there were rebellions in Atlanta and Chicago, but
the most shaking blast came out of the Hough section of Cleveland, where they called in two thousand National Guardsmen. Roy Wilkins denounced Black Power, and I wrote a poem saying, “I'monna stick half my sandal up his ass.”

I was also finding out what was going on in the community at large and began easing into certain meetings. Hugh Addonizio was mayor of Newark, he and the Mafia, and he had a crew of niggers and Negroes crawling around on all fours working for him that would make any honest person's hair stand on end. My old college-years buddy Calvin West was jam up in that as a legacy from his sister, who'd always been “the man” of that family. Even her name, Larrie Stalks, suggested that. There were others, petty gunmen and pimps, muscle boys and dirty white-collar workers, who all slithered around using up our fresh air and replacing it with farts.

I was investigating, looking and listening, thinking about Black Power. I discovered, for one thing, that Newark was over 50 percent, maybe close to 60 percent, black. The idea of this set wheels turning inside my noggin. I didn't even peep myself. It was truly
Home
, like a replica of down home. Once in an antipoverty meeting supposedly open to the public, at the point where the community was supposed to vote on an issue, one of Addonizio's thugs, Jack Nicks, stood over some people and openly threatened them if they voted “incorrectly.” It seemed like some straight-out fascism. A guy named Ken Gibson, a black guy, was running for mayor. I didn't follow it down to the detail, but I could check it from the corner of my eye. Somebody put caricatures of Gibson as a rat all over the city. Once, I saw black dudes pasting them up. I was still stenciling “Black Power” on abandoned buildings and sidewalks.

We were starting to have regular productions at the Spirit House and trying to raise an audience. Our theater could seat maybe fifty people if we squeezed. Stokely Carmichael had gotten arrested in Atlanta. The book
Home
was published. Also, I started Jihad Publications.
Jihad
means Holy War. Our first publication was a slim pamphlet of poetry,
Black Art
, with a cover photo showing young Larry Johnson (later Tarik) being trained in karate in the Spirit House by Clarence Reed's son, Clarence. People were coming to the plays and music and poetry, not only from the Stirling Street area but from all over Newark, and even from out of town. We had a small intense audience, an audience that influences others.

We were getting to be known not only by our community but by other forces. One night when we were rehearsing up in the loft, the Newark police crashed through the door and barked at us. They snatched the script
out of my hands and took it, I guess, as evidence. But most likely they took it just to bust our balls.

One Sunday we had scheduled a poetry reading down at the loft and the police sent word that if we tried to hold the reading we would be arrested. I walked down the street to the loft and there were plainclothesmen all over the joint. They were going to stop any Black Power poetry before it started.

Barney got arrested in an old car I bought going for a juice one night late after rehearsal. He was arrested as being “suspicious” and we had to go down and bail him out. Everywhere we'd leave our mark. When I asked who was in charge in the precinct, the captain started screaming that I was gonna get arrested for being so presumptuous as to ask a question of these cavemen. Another of our friends was arrested over at a precinct on Runyon Street and we walked in to bail him out and told the desk sergeant that we could kick his ass and in fact would do it very soon. Anger and youth!

Added to this was the bad publicity that the media would hype us with. But some of it was our own doing. I had published a play,
Experimental Death Unit
#1, in the
Eastside Review
, which was edited by a guy named Shep Sherbell, who at the time was tight with Diane Wakoski, the poet. Sherbell promised me $100 for the play but I never got it. One night I saw him at a concert at a theater on Second Avenue. During the intermission I ask him for the money and he says he never promised me any money. The anti-white thing is working very strong. Barney and Donny were with Sylvia and me. Barney, Ben, and I always had a habit of getting into arguments with white folks. Whenever they said something we thought was off the wall, we'd jump on them. So that Sherbell's rap and his attempt to brush the matter off as some nigger lie I'd made up to hustle off him made smoke blow out my nose. In the flash of an eye we were rolling on the floor.
The New York Post
said, “LeRoi Jones Accused of Beating Publisher.” That dragged on for a little while but was finally thrown out when Sherbell didn't show. Why only I had gotten charged when we'd had a fight in which we both participated I leave for you, gentle reader, to figure out. Diane Wakoski tearfully begged Sherbell to drop the charges but he wouldn't.

There was a deep anti-white feeling I carried with me that had grown deeper and deeper since I left the Village. I felt it was a maturing, but in some aspects it was that I was going off the deep end. To the extent that what I felt opposed white supremacy and imperialism, it was certainly correct. But to the extent that I merely turned white supremacy upside
down and created an exclusivist black supremacist doctrine, that was bullshit. Bullshit that could only isolate me from reality.

But who was clear? Sylvia and I were trying to live and find out about each other. I was resolved that I would clean up and straighten up, that I would stop trying to make it with every attractive woman I came in contact with. Before, it was white ones, and then it changed to black ones, but it was much the same business, sad to report.

I also had to straighten out other parts of my life. I had been seeing my two daughters on the weekends when I was able to. They were getting older, growing up in the Village world. Nellie had never ceased to relate to my mother and father, especially my mother. The children had been her links and she was building strong (though, I think, devious) ties. Perhaps my mother thought (as Nellie might have too) that these black women I was with were just passing fancies and that one day I would get my good sense back and return to good-hearted Nellie. The idea that someone could think that makes my teeth grind. At any rate, the longer Sylvia and I lived together, the more complex the relationship between my mother and us and Nellie and the children became.

Sylvia and I had growing pains too. She got suddenly angry because I had not voluntarily thrown out the bed Bumi and I had cohabited in. Sylvia's anger distressed me. I had not known it was so sudden and direct nor as hot. Many people in Newark could have told me this about her had I been close to them. But I had to learn the hard way. We would also struggle about my disappearing late nights into the ghetto to go in and out of the taverns and hangouts, sopping up the atmosphere the way I liked to do. I might go out at midnight and hang in the Howard Bar or some real dive and sit there till the joint closed, sipping and listening and looking. My accountability in a living-together situation was not too strong. Downtown New York it was light at best, and even though it strengthened with Vashti, I was still unpredictable and spoiled and a stomp-down male chauvinist. And these struggles were to come up again and again.

The Newark community was restive, going through surface changes but also changes in psychology, like myself. The Addonizio thing was so low that only the basest mongrels could defend it. Even mediocre civil servants shuffling papers in the dark castle of City Hall, like Gibson, could see something was happening and something further still needed to happen. The undercurrents were no longer completely under; there were bubbles in the water that suggested deep turbulence. Calvin West won a City Council seat, so now there were two Negroes seated on the nine-member
council. One an old-line blood who had had some note — even honor — as the first Negro councilman, Irvine Turner, an old friend of my family's. I had looked up to him as a child. But since then he had turned into his opposite. He was looked at now as an old Tom, mouth puckered from kissing Addonizio's ass for so long. Plus, he had grown senile in office and stared into space like a dead thing. He was now an object of ridicule.

Calvin was raised by his sister to be Addonizio's junior crony. And he had become that, exactly. We used to tease Calvin, when we were all college age, by rubbing the fingers of one hand together to suggest how dearly Cal loved dee dollar. With his little, naturally hoarse, high-pitched voice and comic-opera sense of style, hey, like a black homburg and big cigar — Mr. Big Time Negro heself!

This is what we had, like, to represent us. Even in our kid-operated
Stirling St. Newspaper
we began to raise the fact that Newark was over 60 percent black. We asked, “What do you think of having a black mayor?” And sent the kids up and down the block and around the corner to ask the questions like the inquiring reporter. We began to harass the school administration at Robert Treat to find out why the children couldn't read. “Wouldn't it be better to have a black principal at an all-black school?” we asked, not innocent at all.

I wrote leaflets, and circulated them, about the local situation and the national and international situation. We distributed them at the plays and dropped them off at meetings and put them in people's mailboxes. The FBI even suggested that I had circulated a leaflet on how to put together a Molotov cocktail. I found this out from a nigger I later discovered worked for the sheriff's office. One thing about the FBI, they're always trying to make you famous.

We began to take people down to the Board of Education, particularly to deal with the Robert Treat situation. Sylvia had gotten friendly with many of the women on the street, personally and through the block association. We were building ties and mutual support. We were friendly and intimate and Stirling Street resembled a country street down in the black belt most times. But Newark itself reminds one not a little of the black belt South, northern industrial city though it be.