The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (7 page)

I went through school because I had to. Going where? I didn't know. I don't know if my parents did either. At one point later I pretended they wanted me to be a doctor. But my mother claims this wasn't true. My father says, “Hey, we didn't care what you did. You could do what you wanted.” Graduating from grammar school, I was the third or fourth from the shortest of the boys. And it was a two-way track, I guess, the actuality of being a black kid in Newark in a public school in the West Ward in the 1940s United States. Son of a postal worker and an office worker. (My mother had got away from the piecework in the dress factories and her smart turned-down fedora and neat-cut suit let you know she wasn't thinking about going back. Though we were always back in the sense of the flatness, the horizontal character of our community and nationality — we were not laid back, we were held back. Black. I think we were colored and Negroes then.) But also remember the flashy zoom projection of the inside black bourgeois mind, the lockstep black middle class frantic not to be totally connected with the flat-out black majority. Brain sweat and soul shivers would come, my mother's waking nightmare, perhaps, that you
would be only invisible, only connected to the mass pain, an atom of suffering, that you would not
amount
to anything. Whew! (How much??)

We were we surrounded by the world. A world I thought I knew better than I did. The playground taught me. The black running masses there. Even the poetic line of speech comes from my heart is theirs, so purely, the cutting edge of life description, was once simple dozens. The cynicism, the echoing blues, hollow laughter, bright and distance-filled, kids around my way would hear everyday, from a little big-eyed dude in short pants and a blue shirt, cutting across the playground.

I had the sense of a Jones-Russ life/universe that was an extension of everybody's. All the bloods mostly. The others I didn't understand, except as I could describe them and make some differentiation or make some similarity. As for instance when I went to my mother and asked, because Anthony Ar and I got picked out of Miss Hill (a terrible old bitch)'s art class to go down to Bamberger's and build the boat we'd put together out of clay and painted. I asked if Catholics was the same as Baptists. Anthony had said they were. My mother disagreed. I kept this to myself. Shit, it didn't really matter to me.

It didn't really matter that the whites lived in the white part of Baxter Terrace. Where else would whites live? It didn't matter at the top that the Davises lived like they lived or Eddie or Norman or the Hills or the colored people on Newark Street, which was our metaphor then for very poor. It didn't matter to me on the top, they was just people, phenomena to my wheeling big space-eating image-making eyes.

But the Jones-Russ orangish brown house was one
secure
reality and the scrambling moving changing colors and smells and sounds and emotions world at my eye and fingertips was something connected but something else. I knew that many of the kids I ran with did not have the same bulk of bodies and history and words and
articulation
to deal with what kept coming up every morning when I'd rise. There was a security to my home life. That's the only way I can describe it. A security that let me know that all, finally, was well. That I'd be all right, if I could just survive the crazy shit I thought up to do. And the wild shit some wildass people thought up to drop on you.

It never occurred to me that my mother and father would be anything or anywhere but where they were and who they were. For that matter, it never occurred to me that my grandmother (my mother's mother,
Nana
) could be anywhere or do anything but what I depended on for my understanding of life and reality. My uncle and grandfather were the most
questionable parts of my household. My uncle because he was always on the road. A big tall brawny Pullman porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. And my grandfather because I never knew much about him except what came from my mother or grandmother's mouth. He was big and distinguished looking. A black businessman in a boater hat and three-piece suit and cane. He was a Republican, the legacy of Lincoln, and known as a “race man,” i.e., something of a Nationalist. I found
One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof
by J. A. Rogers in his drawer, while “plundering,” as my grandmother would say. I also found Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis
, a book on the Masonic mysteries, and a revolver. All of them were beyond me, at the time. Though the Rogers made some impact, I couldn't figure out the point Rogers was making hooking up black people with so many wild things. Plus I didn't think I could really use an idea like “Beethoven was black.” I wasn't sure he was, but then even if he was, so what? I was very young.

My grandfather was big in black Republican politics and after his grocery store folded in the Depression he got a patronage job as night watchman in the election machine warehouse for Essex County, on Wilsey Street in Newark. It was within walking distance of our house, right down the street from the Newark Street Jail. There was a big vacant lot across from the jail and I played baseball when I got up into high school as part of the Newark Cubs, complete with uniforms. A hundred years later I was locked up in that same jail during the Newark Rebellions and saw the National Guard shoot up a black couple's car from that same vacant lot.

My sister and I would accompany my grandmother with her slow rocking stride over to the warehouse where she would go with my grandfather's dinner packed in a picnic hamper with big folding handles. The food was hot, complete with a thermos of coffee and cornbread or biscuits. And while “Old Miss” and “E'rett” talked back and forth as he ate, my sister and I would range up and down the long rows of election machines in a virtual frenzy of ecstasy. We could run down down the rows, in and out. We could flash as hard and fast as we could. We could hide, we could catch each other. And the best treat of all, we could climb up on top of the machines and run from one end of the warehouse, which ran an entire city block, to the other, streaking on top of the padded machines, leaping from one machine to the other, without stopping, playing war games and hero games and simply using up some of our boundless energy.

As I said, my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School at
the yellow and brown folks' Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee. The trustees, after those collections, would rise up and file into the back. It was a kind of dignified swagger. It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job. And I could go through there and see them counting that money, the respected elder gents of the church. And a preacher white as God himself!

But Tom Russ was a name to conjure with in those times. Important in the church, politically connected, but the failed business could not help but have lowered him in those folks' eyes. Those yellow and browns he was ranked among. But he was the
head
of that house, in those early days. No doubt about it. And I think its stabilizing center.

One night there was terror in our house, there was pain on everyone's face, weeping and shouted unknown words — negative passion flaring. And then it was said my grandfather had been hurt, he had got struck down on a street corner — where Springfield meets South Orange just down from the Essex theater. They told me a streetlight dropped out of the fixture onto his head! They did. That's what they said. I repeated it but somehow never (to this day) believed it. A streetlight? From way up at the top of the pole with perfect random accidental accuracy smashing him right in the center of the head? Yeh, that's what they said.

And it all but destroyed Tom Russ. From the tall striding dignified family patriarch who swept my lil' plump grandma up when she was fifteen (his second bride) and left a trail of funeral parlors, general stores, and colored productive force, he finally came home paralyzed and silent. In fact I never heard him utter another sentence. He merely sat in a chair, smoking his cigars and spitting, spitting, into a tin can. There was some money in a pension, but I never understood why the city wasn't sued if that's what had happened, an accident. They even took him up to Overbrook for a minute, a hospital for the insane and mentally incompetent. But they brought him back in a little while. Perhaps my grandmother just wouldn't go for that. And she tended him the rest of his life. Frustration now shot out all the way into tragedy! And the pain in those stopped eyes, stopped from vision and transformation, was horrible, like death alive and sitting in a chair completely dominated by reality.

My grandfather's last years were all like that. Stopped motion, frustration turned all the way to tragedy. And the old image of Tom Russ slowly evaporated from our young minds and we cruel kids, my sister and I, would whisper to each other like savages about “Spitto” sitting there. We mocked him. But why could we create such ugliness in ourselves? How did it come
to replace the awe and respect? Was it just the grossness and crudity of children or was there some impulse we picked up from the adults around us?

But it didn't come from my grandmother. His “Old Miss.” She was with him, close by him, waiting on him, even to her own detriment, until he died. Until they cut down one of his black coats so I could wear it to his funeral.

Now my grandmother was my heart and soul. She carried sunshine around with her, almost in her smile. She'd have some little hat cocked to one side and she strutted when she walked. Rocked when she was a little weary. But full of fun, her eyes sparkled. You cross her, you were gonna get at least pinched. Like mess up in church, be talking, or fidgeting, she'd cop your flesh between her fingers and rival the inquisition with their more complicated shit. And she had to do that to me quite often in church because I would go completely out, like some kind of menace. A little big eyed monster, yapping, running up and down stairs, giggling and laughing. One time I turned off the electricity down in the basement for the whole church and the organist (another Miss Ada) was pushing on the keys and people rushed to her thinking she was having another stroke. They caught me just as I came up out of the basement. Even the special policeman, Mr. Butler, wanted to smash me. But I got ate up when I got home.

My grandmother was deeply and completely religious. Her life was defined by Jesus and the holy ghost. Every aspect of her life either had God in it or she hooked him up in some way. And the church was her world. She was head of the Ladies Aid Society, an usherette, and a teacher in the Sunday School. And now and again she'd get “happy” in church and start fanning and weeping, rocking back and forth, but most times she'd just sing and listen and amen, under her little flat-top hat trying to see God from behind her rimless glasses.

It was my grandmother who most times fed us and kept us, and her spirit is always with us as part of our own personality (I hope). I loved my grandmother so much because she was Good. If that had any meaning in the world. She'd tell you, “Do Unto Others as You'd Have Them Do Unto You,” and you knew that's what she believed and that's what she practiced. She'd tell me when I was doing something she approved of, “Practice makes perfect!” Maybe it was being polite, emptying the garbage like I was supposed to, or having shined shoes, or even getting good grades in grammar school. “Practice Makes Perfect.”

And she was funny, really. Like all those various “teams” on radio and later television whose names she'd turn around. I'm not sure why — was it intentional or why she had to twist it up — but it always cracked my sister and me up. Like she'd talk about Abner and Lum or Costello and Abbott. And when she came out with Andy and Amos I thought she was putting us on, but she would pull it with a straight sincere look and it cracked us up.

And she dug
The Road of Life, Life Can Be Beautiful, Ma Perkins, Young Widder Brown, Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones
(and his wife, Belle). She'd be listening when we came in and then the kid adventure stuff would come on and she'd fade to do her dinner, preparing stuff, though sometimes she listened with me. Hop Harrigan, Jack Armstrong, Captainnnnnnn Midnight, Tom Mix (and Wash White). And then later she'd be into Beulah, Andy and Amos, and them. When I was sick and had to stay in bed I heard all those soaps along with her while I sprawled. All had organ music and a voice-over telling you what was up. It was a crazy world of villains in civilian clothes.

Plus when my grandmother was working up at those Fortes' house and the other rich white folks', when she'd come back, Jim, she'd have a bundle of goodies. Clothes, books, I got the collected works of Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and random books of Pooh Bear, Sherlock Holmes, and even an almost whole set of Rudyard Kipling, if you can get to that! They were gifts, is what she told us. The white folks was just giving stuff away. I guess they had better stuff, or they needed room. Some of the stuff she brought my sister would have “Anna Marie Forte” sewn on labels in the collars. I always wondered about those goddam Fortes, how they could have all that stuff up there in Essex Fells, how they looked and what they had to say. But I never found out.

My grandmother also had gone to Poro beauty school and she talked about that. She was a hairdresser. The shop she worked in in Newark still sits there on Norfolk Street. So sometimes Elaine and I would be out in front of the beauty parlor, weekends, running around, but connected to the hot curling irons and pressing combs of Ora's beauty parlor and our grandmother sitting there talking and straightening hair with that hunk of grease on the back of her hand.

If I have ever thought seriously about “Heaven” it was when my grandmother died because I wanted her to have that since she believed so strongly. I wrote a poem saying that. I'd been writing for a while when she died, mostly poems in magazines, and I always regretted that she never got to see a book of mine. I had the dust jacket of
Blues People
in my hand around
the time she died, a few weeks later it came out. And I wanted her to see that all the dreams and words she'd known me by had some reality, but it was too late. She'd already gone.