The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (70 page)

What really was funny about that trial was our attorneys. “Buddy” (I'd called him that since high school) meant well but many times he was just plain terrorized and terrified by the judge, who made it plain from the very
beginning that he thought I should be wiped out and that he was going to see that that happened. Big John Love seemed like he wanted to be as low-profile as possible, not make any waves, for those same reasons, reasons that had Buddy pacing up and down in the courthouse hallway.

But the most hilarious of the trio was Sanders, the Jersey City dude. He had been married to one of Joe Louis's ex-wives, Rose Morgan, of the beauty-salon fame. A stout jowly man with glasses that slipped down on his nose and that he was constantly pushing up on his forehead, Sanders had a stomach that hung pendulously over his belt like a bag of suet. But he had no belt, he wore suspenders, and his characteristic stance during the trial was to lean back against a railing where the spectators sat and pull on his suspenders with his thumbs while he sagged in sleep. If he hadn't made me so mad it would have been truly hilarious. The jurors got a chance to stare up into his open mouth and I was constantly whispering or gesturing to Booker to poke Sanders and wake his sorry ass up.

However, Sanders outdid even his self. At the end of a hearing at which we were trying to suppress the two guns as evidence, Sanders said, “Not only are they not our guns, your honor but we want them back!”

My mouth flew open and must have hit my chest with the impact of a .22. In my paranoid state, I swore the police got him to do that.

The trial ended with me getting convicted of possessing two guns. In fact, Barney, Shorty, and I were all convicted. However, I was sentenced to three years with no parole, while they got a year or so. Kapp amazed me by prefacing my sentencing by reading a poem of mine, “Black People,” with the lines that became ubiquitous: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup!” He read this to show that I was guilty. But whatever he said, I would counter it.

When he read the poem, he left out the profanity, and as he read I supplied it. He said, “You've been convicted of possession of two guns,” and I added, “and a poem!” Kapp got redder and redder as I kept jumping in during his tyrannical little rant.

When we first got to the court all the attorneys weren't there, but Kapp was going to go on with the proceedings without them. I protested and urged Barney and Shorty to protest. “Tell him it's illegal. Tell him you want your attorneys,” I called out to them. But both of them ignored me and stood quiet and docile before the judge like doomed chattel. (Not so strangely, immediately after this gun business was cleared up after our appeal and during the second trial, Barney and Shorty moved back to New York. Even while the rebellion was going on Helen and Beverly had cut
out. Suddenly they both had things to do, and they had cut out until time for the trial.)

Finally, Kapp laid his sentence down on us, me with the three years without parole for possession of guns. And I told him again as they led me out of the court, “Black people will judge me, Brother Kapp don't worry about that. Black people will judge me!” They led me away, placed me in the back of a screened police vehicle, and drove from Newark to Trenton State Penitentiary, about fifty miles, with the sirens blasting all the way down!

I spent maybe a week in Trenton. Before that I had spent a few days at Caldwell, up near Morristown, in another joint, in an open-bay jail with a couple hundred prisoners. Caldwell had been like going back to grammar school, I saw so many old familiar faces. Trenton was like going back in time as well. All the missing dudes I'd wondered what had happened to were down there in that old 19th-century jail that stayed about 50 degrees all the time. I got a cell where I had to step down about half a foot. It was so narrow that only the single bunk really fit into it and it was very dark. I made a prayer rug out of newspaper and made regular Salat while I was there and it gave me great comfort. It is easy to see why someone in prison could cling to Islam. The sense of being supported by a higher power than the one that is downing you. It is the appeal of all religions — one is “protected” by a higher power. But not quite enough.

I met the writer Nathan “Bubbie” Heard in Trenton. He was in there doing a stretch for armed robbery. I guess he was working on his famous novel
Howard Street
. He knew me and befriended me immediately. Between Bubbie and Billy Allen, the black-sheep brother of my old track buddy Arthur Allen (New Jersey All State high jump and high hurdles during my high school days), I got a heavy reception from the prisoners. They brought boxes of cookies, tea, instant coffee, canned meats and sardines, and candy to me in the cell. Another brother came up to me in the mess hall and told me he had read the newspapers about my trial. He praised the statements I'd made. A couple others threw their fists up in the Black Power salute.

Bubbie hipped me to a plan the guards had, probably passed on to them by the FBI. They were going to come to me, demand that I shave off my beard, and if I didn't do it, they would drop me into solitary. So when they came, sure enough, about four of them, telling me I had to be shaved and have my hair cut, I said, simply, “OK,” and they looked at each other,
obviously nonplussed, shaved my face, cut down my mop, and split without another word.

The always low temperature and dim cells were that way, I guess, to keep you demoralized. And they succeeded. But those prisons house some real warriors and even a few scholars. The fact that big-city prisons are 75 percent black and Latino makes you know that their real function is as institutions of oppression for the poor and minorities.

I was out after about a week, on appeal. I had reached Ray Brown, the white-looking black criminal lawyer from Jersey City. He filed the appeal and took up the case. Before that I had received an offer from Bill Kunstler, through someone, that he would take the case, but being a nationalist, I refused. A well-known black star had agreed to let my wife and father come to his penthouse hotel suite and tell him about the case. While they talked to the diminutive musical star, an Italian-looking dude sat in the suite listening. Finally, he asked my wife and father, “You want me to call some of the wise guys over there to take care of it?” But they, very wisely, refused. What would I owe for such a favor? I can imagine to whom it would be owed. Apparently, the diminutive black musical star owed them several favors.

The appeal was won on the basis of Judge Kapp's demented reading of my poem in court as part of his justification for the stiff sentence. He had also charged the jury by telling them that “the boys in blue,” the police, who were the state's principal witnesses against us, “would never lie.” So we got a new trial. But this time, the sleeping ugly from Jersey City was not with the team. Ray Brown came on as my attorney; Booker and Love were retained to try the case again, as part of the new team.

If he were really white, Ray Brown would be one of the most famous attorneys in the U.S. He is obviously one of the best. A learned and curious man, Brown had such mastery of the courtroom proceedings that I was relaxed enough to write a play while the trial went on
(The Sidney Poet Heroical)
. He kept the prosecutor, a grim crew-cut carabiniere named Zazzali, so off stride and frustrated that at one point Zazzali was chastised by the judge for flying off the handle. “If you do that again, Mr. Zazzali, I'll report you to your superior.”

Plus, every time Zazzali passed the table where I sat I would boo him under my breath, but loud enough for him to hear. His face stayed hot-poker red throughout the proceedings.

Ray Brown's summation to the jury was incredible. He took Mark Antony's speech to the crowd in
Julius Caesar
(“Friends, Romans, countrymen”)
and using the refrain Antony laid on Brutus to discredit him (“And Brutus is an honorable man “), laid waste to the state's arguments. Brown would say, “And we are supposed to believe the police, because they are honorable men …” taking them all the way out to lunch and back. At the end of the summation you could see some of the jury wanted to applaud.

This was the denouement, and the verdict of acquittal seemed to me a matter of course. But the high point of the case was when Rabbit, the brother we had picked up off the street and taken to the hospital, was found by means of leaflets we circulated through the community. He breezed into the courtroom, talking shit, the same way he had that night, raised up his pant leg and pointed to the bullet hole. We were not shooting at people, we were taking people to the hospital. Brown won it going away!

The group that met on Sundays decided to call itself The United Brothers. It was still expanding and the meetings were regular and we all looked forward to the incisive informal discussions and the growing amount of planning that went on. There were also some brothers and sisters from East Orange and Montclair who knew something of Karenga's organization, US. They had formed a group and styled themselves after the US people and regarded Karenga as their leader. They were called the Black Community Defense and Development (BCD). Two men headed up the group, a dark-skinned, big-eyed brother named Balozi Zayd Muhammad, and a karate expert, Mfundishi Maasi. They also began to attend the meetings of the circle.

Karenga's influence was increasing on me personally. He came East a couple times, planning the 1968 Black Power Conference, which was to be held in Philadelphia. I was coordinator of the Arts Workshop at that conference. I began to move more and more under the sway of cultural nationalism, Karenga's brand. The two influences, orthodox Islam and the African-derived cultural nationalism, had to clash, and they did. The Sunnis were not very advanced politically. They said that blacks were really “Arabs,” that the true Arab was black. “Arab” means black, but they were very derogatory about Africa and things African. Also, they were constantly counseling me against my “militance,” saying that my speeches needed to be toned down. Kamiel's advice to me when I was on trial was that I should stand with my feet placed at a 45-degree angle and then put my hands on top of my head, since that was “a Masonic distress signal.” He said the judge would then recognize that I was a Mason in distress and cut me loose.

What really put distance between us was that I found out that Kamiel was in regular contact with Spina as well as the sheriff's office. He would file regular reports, and parts of his regular reports were on the “fantastic” doings at the Spirit House. And what he had in his reports was fantastic on the real side. But it made good reading. How did I find out? Kamiel cheerfully volunteered this information. It paid good money!

When Dr. King was murdered in '68, rebellions broke out in the major cities. Newark, too. Again, we walked all night, but this time the people did not want to tear up inside their own community; groups of people marched down Clinton Avenue toward the downtown area to light it up. The police massed at the bottom of the hill, shotguns raised. We told people to cool it. Kamiel introduced me to a balding black dude with a walkie-talkie strapped to his belt who was carrying a shoulder holster. We wanted some assurances that the police would not shoot into the crowds. Kamiel implied that the balding man with the walkie-talkie was attached to the sheriff's office but was really a fed. Kamiel and I went with this man to an apartment building directly across from City Hall. There was a white man in a room on one of the floors wearing a shoulder holster. I was told this was some kind of nerve center for the feds to monitor the crowd's actions. At one point, the balding man said to me, “Well, you have to admit one thing about America. It's been a fascinating experiment!” My blood ran cold, this Negro was an actual creation. Someone or something had created him and what I was hearing was obviously tapes running through his brain track.

Later, this same balding man with the shoulder holster was present at the first meeting called by the Black Panthers to start a Newark chapter. But this time he was one of the recruiters. He was supposed to be a Panther!

It was during this period that Kamiel introduced me to Anthony Imperiale, the Newark racist from the Italian North Ward. Imperiale had made headlines talking about the tank and the guns he had. He'd said, “If the Black Panther comes, the white hunter will be waiting!” He'd also called Dr. King “Martin Luther Coon.” Imperiale had risen to infamy as the white counter for black rebellion. If I had gotten some notoriety from the rebellions, so had Imperiale.

It was Kamiel who organized the appearance of the two of us on a television program. The angle of the show was to denounce the left in Newark. I saw it as an opportunity to denounce the young whites who were
playing revolution in Newark. I was a black nationalist and saw nothing wrong with denouncing Tom Hayden and the others. It was rumored in the black community that these dudes were setting the rash of fires that broke out during that period. Old buildings in the black community. These actions were supposed to trigger more rebellions. We wanted Hayden and his classmates out of the community. We thought they were “white boys pimping off black struggle,” so we put them down on the TV program while Imperiale and some police official from D.C. went out on the left in general. I thought white Marxists were just some more white people using black people to do their struggling for them. But in retrospect, to be on such a television program was asinine.

Kamiel, as our security chief, even thought up the gimmick of a “hot line” between Imperiale and me, supposedly to keep community tensions down. The phone was installed. I guess, on reflection, it probably was nothing but a listening device right in the center of the house. I never used it.

It was Karenga who, on one of his visits, suggested that we formally bring together the United Brothers, BCD, and the Spirit House forces. (The acting group was named by me the Spirit House Movers. I got the Movers' name from a bar down on Shipman Street, Daniel's, where we always went when we were down in Arthur's Cellar or after rehearsals. There was a moving company down the street, and the workers drank in Daniel's all the time too.) Karenga suggested the name Committee for a Unified Newark. We shortened it somewhat to Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN). So this larger united-front organization brought together middle-class blacks interested in electoral politics (United Brothers); younger blacks influenced by Ron Karenga's Kawaida doctrine (BCD as well as us in the Spirit House); and mostly young black artists who were part of the Black Arts movement (Spirit House).