The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (81 page)

And so here, too, was part of the African reality continuing to come into me. How great a trek to go from the never-never-land Africa of nationalist
invention to the real thing. Though some folks can go there and still not deal with it realistically. They might go up and hang out with Idi Amin, be flown in by his special plane and feel he's a great leader because of his skin color and the favors they received — no matter the mountain of corpses flung every which way.

They might see the prehistoric backwardness of our brothers and sisters, the low level of productive forces, scenes being played out the same as they were hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, and dig it. Think it quaint and heavy and black. (Except I wish they could be stuck out in the bush when the sun disappears — not much twilight in Africa — and be searching for their way on those electric-lightless roads, or have to go to the bathroom and have to dig a trench, or have to be actually responsible for pushing back the forests and animals and ignorance and colonialism and neocolonialism. Then we would ask them again how quaint and heavy, etc.)

At the same time, it was equally clear to me that I was, we are, we African Americans are, exactly that, African Americans, and to the extent we were separated from an understanding of either the realities of Africa or our own grim present in the U.S., we were doing nothing to transform the situation. Africa itself is atomic and nuclear. Everything about it, from the blackness of its people (African Americans are light-skinned in comparison) to the absolute necessity for forward motion, means that one day there will be an upheaval on that continent that will change the world!

Along with the economic and social backwardness and political turmoil, one can see and feel atomic fires burning in Africa. It's in the people's color and faces, the electric roll of their eyes, their franticness and coolness. You feel that one day such an explosion will take place on the continent as to give the whole world more color. When all that primordial blue/blackness is reorganized on higher ground, when all that power potential and unbelievable beauty, dynamism, deep combustibility is roaring and flowing on the same track,
united
if you will, at some high level, the whole world will have taken off at a speed which can only seem incredible to us.

I could see clearly now how inextricably bound are our fates, the African and the African American, as well as our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean. We are all captured and held in backwardness by chains. Now we are, with great effort, breaking those chains and flinging them away. And though our specific situations, the particularities of our oppression and exploitation, differ to the extent that we are in different places with different conditions, there is an overall unity to our collective plight that we ignore only at our collective peril.

Though I had shed some of my naive cultural nationalist delusion about Africa, I had been rewarded with an even greater hope, which I know to be a revolutionary optimism. Knowing what is real, no matter how painful, is the only prerequisite for making real change!

Our ancient home is more beautiful than our words, but at the same time, if we are absolutely realistic and scientific, it is much more ugly as well. In the lull of the sweet air off the Indian Ocean, as I sat in the sand, contemplating the speech I was to make at 6PAC and at the same time watching my tiny son romp up and down in the warm water, happier than adults can ever be, I felt remorse at having been among the slaves taken from these shores. These motherfuckers need to be killed just because of the cold-ass weather they took us to. But then reality, again, would indict some of those African feudal lords and ladies that sold us (and who are still selling us and our brothers and sisters, the workers and peasants whose land Africa really is). Then I felt more whole, more complete, understanding perhaps the primitive nature of world society and realizing that black life must finally rise, that we cannot be kept backward and in chains, that this interlude of slavery must soon be ended, and I watched the little boy knowing that he must be readied to take up this struggle at a much higher level than his father. Knowing, also, there were African children and West Indian children who must join with the African American children, as conscious men and women, to bring our shame and humiliation to an end.

I realized, also, that the U.S. was my home. As painful and complicated as that was. I realized that the thirty million African Americans would play a major role in the transformation of black people's lives all over this planet. It was no mere truism, we lived where the head of world oppression lived and when the people of the world united to bring this giant oppressor to its knees we would be part of that contingent (of not only blacks) chosen by the accident of history to cut this thing's head off and send it rolling through the streets of North America. As the warm air lulled me, my eyes opened even wider and the child's voice was even sweeter. I loved that idea. Yeh, payback is hard, hmmm, a head rolling in the streets.

When I returned to the U.S. that idea still moved me, but I was raised up myself. I thought perhaps I had finally come of age. I was no longer a nationalist, I knew clearly that just black faces in high places could never bring the change we seek — all of us who are conscious or describe ourselves as advanced or progressive. I could see my own life and those tasks I had declared for myself with new light. I had seen Gibson and domestic
”neocolonialism,” I had been to Africa and seen that same boy at work over there holding the people down. It was clearer to me that only socialism could transform society, that the whole world must be at the disposal of the whole world, that all of us must benefit by each other's existence, a few billion primates of an arguably advanced species in a world dominated by insects.

Amina and I went back to Africa, to Somalia, a few months later and she discovered some of the same truths. But they were something which we had shared anyway in our widening consciousness. It was a period of deep and rapid transition, but for Amina socialism was something she had always been looking for. It was the explanation of her life, as the child of black workers, that made her own travails finally make sense.

It was the beginning leg of another journey, one that we knew would be even more rich and exciting.

Back home, it was clear now where CAP was going, at least to me. We even began to work with white groups. We organized a strike of Newark's taxi drivers, white ones included. We sat in the City Council chambers when the city government started ripping off the young people's checks in one of the federal government's summer-coolout “Youth Programs.” We were working with the local Black Panthers (whose relation to the national we could never ascertain) and a mostly white Marxist group, the Revolutionary Union. The CAP cadres, students, as well as a few Panthers and RU members, were arrested in the chambers and later when they had to go to trial the prosecutor asked one little white girl from RU who had been the leadership of the takeover and the girl pointed at the Panthers and our cadres. We were working with the multinational left now, but we still had a lot to learn.

That summer, Amina organized the historic Afrikan Women's Conference in which almost one thousand women from twenty-eight states came to workshops on education, social organization, politics, health, welfare and employment, communications, and institutional development. Our left line could be seen even clearer. At our CAP general assembly in Newark, on my birthday, October 7, we declared ourselves a Marxist-Leninist organization. (The Revolutionary Communist League [MCM], which merged in 1978 with the U.S. League Revolutionary Struggle [M-L], an organization formed from I Won Kuen, a mainly Asian anti-imperialist organization, and the August 29th Movement [ATM, a largely Chicano Marxist organization].) I was a socialist, at least in name.
At forty years old, then, I was acknowledging another tremendous change in my life. In my life of changes. (And how can you play the tune, if you don't know the changes?)

Suffice it to say, this all was written some time later, as an effort at partial summation, a beginning of the “summing up.” Such a summation does relieve some of the weight of those years, those comings and goings, exits and entrances. All stages in illumination and from their momentary brightness now a glow of whatever relevance, as long as it remains relevant.

At the point of removal (or exhaustion) it all can resemble a Zoom, just a Zoom, perhaps a faint roar whispering in the head and in whatever thing or process or idea that remains somehow connected to what was, even in the act of some new thing's becoming.

In 1970, Amina and I moved from Stirling Street into the fringes of the South Ward, Clinton Hill, where we still live. We paid down on a big square fortress of a stucco house which I painted red and trimmed in black, and when the seasons allow the trees to come full out, the tableau is like a not quite subtle black nationalist flag.

Here we live today, with our healthy brood of five smaller ones and the two older young women coming and going at their own order. A great many things happened after the October 7, 1974, date of our public notice to the world of our socialism. (But that is another story, which might one day be told, with whatever additions.) But we are alive and well, struggling still in the world for us and it to get better.

My wife, Amina, who can tell her own stories, and I are still very much in love, and that story itself, of a brown boy and a black girl from the blue/grey streets of the New Ark, is just in that particular focus reams and reams yet to be told.

But I leave you with this, all these words are only to be learned from. The childhood; music; blues-bottomed class distinctions: black, brown, yellow, white; HU; error farce; Village time; Harlem sojourn; home-returning black nationalist grown blood-red person — all that is like some food for thought, some sounds meant only to say, look at this, dig it, what it means, where I, and some others, been. As Monk would say, “Let's call this …”

Does anyone know actually what is life? Awkwardly said, as the awkwardly held knowledge of it “seems.” I have come to as scientific an understanding of great portions of it as exist. Though that has to be deepened and there'll be even greater information come with that.

But
why
is a good question — fo' what? Naomi, an old friend of my mother would say, or her husband, Wallace — fo' what?

In some ways my own life has been a long upward series of climbing trails. Pleateaus, the amazing view, then casting gaze there's more upward, a sheer rise of dazzling rock — and the blue shining sun lit air all around. There is that begging to to go, up further. Not as ambition but the workings of a self growing into itself's identity.

I look at my son Ras sometimes and maybe think I see me then, round and brownly rosy. Eyes bulging out into the world, alive with life, whirling around like wild computers. I think I must've been like that, little and bigheaded, full of myself, intently digging my own head's noise.

”If we ever split, you better take him with you,” sez Amina. “He's too much like you. I couldn't stand it!” Though they all have traces of my self and hers. But Ras, whom I stayed up all night with, plotting the historical metaphysic of his name, has such a striking physical resemblance it
provides the other comparisons. And when he plays at the trumpet, reminding me of a would-be hip little dude with an imitation-leather “gig bag” hippety-hopping across High Street — it's too much.

And what letters does he carry? Or Oba, Shani, Amiri, Ahi (bad thing), what letters do they carry, on their way, to where, or
wheres
, and at each where, another letter drops in place. How life is defined. Spelled out.

The mail I carried in those big sparkling eyes, I see in theirs. Not mine, but some I guess Amina and I helped drop in place, they carry on though way way past that.

Like a bullet into and surrounded by the music. And Obalaji, a drummer, Ras, my horn, Shani says she wants to play violin because the rest are too noisy. Amiri was a bass player last week, this week he's thinking percussion. Music is my life — it opens me into the deeper sensitivity of the world, what it is really about, past our worlds. That in itself was deep instruction about the world, its shaking beauty and information, too, about myself in it. It was social studies and aesthetic design — style and attitude. How to hear and how to see. All that, is music; class analysis and culture delineation, grace and magic, polyrhythmic world!

And I'm still there in that, the music, always, that's me. My heroes and life path. My story and my song.

The growing up, though, was possible, as it was, only because the music taught me. Even the black, brown, yellow, white of the world, the snarl and precise gibberish of class, the music explained. Its colors, when you saw them on the street, or sitting next to you in school, “igging” you crossing the church lawn, hugged under big hats entering and exiting dark rumbling places, those colors of my social spectrum the music had explained. I was stepping anyway.

The color code of class distinction taught me early what America was. I had that cold training — and had but to recall it, as cold. From the soft and dreaming to the plain out and steely.

From black and blue Belmont and Spruce to white Barringer and yellow HU, headlines in my head say fly fly up and away. To corniness and banana extinctions. So you can end up grinning at HU, dragging a wagonload of contradictions. Childhood, the music, spectrography of class/caste deceit, all toted by strap wagon tied around the haid, Porgy style.

So I could blanch or become endarkened as I would, having had the joys and lies of Amoralca pressed beneath my flesh. Aha? So this is what thee music spake of. This is what the high dive from blues cabaret streets into the grinning yellow of Jesus the Cool. I could march hungry, dance
dance hungry, be in it and out of it, even fantasizing with blue baby while the yellow dogs howled they knew I wasn't ready. And I never was, for death by boredom and sterility.