The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (83 page)

So no matter what washed-out-blond catatonics will tell you in unreasonable recalls about rumors they heard of human beings. Don't ever believe all the Negroes Fanon, Frazier, Cabral described cannot gradually come to consciousness, cannot one day stand on instinctive (i.e., perceptive) parenthetical phrases and colors in their own speech and one day look up and feel they need to go where the air is cleaner, where they can walk down the street at peace with themselves acknowledging the blatant contradictions of this world.

There are certain petty bourgeois intellectuals and poseurs and soi-disant artists, most of whom, in the U.S., are white, who cannot understand that most people do not envy, respect, or want to be near them. Who think they are unattractive and weird. Who do not like their washed-out limp hair and slightly open mouth with just a string of saliva, in sunlight, who think they are silly-looking, square, bizarre, irrelevant, not with it, corny, mediocre. But because they are in charge of the world, they think, figure you would quit them or their buddies only under duress.

Some of Jack Kerouac's overweight catatonic graveyard-blond mistresses thought (and think) that there is some reason someone should
love
them! And figure the only reason someone can think they are square, ugly, etc. & etc., is such gone types have been brainwashed. But in truth it's the other way around (and now some of these national chauvinists scream about sexual chauvinism!). Many of these could only hook up with certain chocolate drops under the duress of white supremacy. Released or trying to be released from that and seeing things as they more nearly are, such drops would, under sudden intake of breath, say “Shit” as they stole through the windows into the cold blue night. “Shit.” And, like, split. Happy. Very very happy!

The arguments and show trials, the public shootouts and private disassignations. These helped blow me into another life. Ornette Coleman asked me to write a song around that time. I never had a chance to give the song to him cause I was gone by then. It was called “I Don't Love You.” Check it.

Whatever you've given me, whiteface glass
to look through, to find another there, another
what motherfucker? another bread tree mad at its
sacredness, and the law of some dingaling god, cold
as ice cucumbers, for the shouters and the wigglers,
and what was the world to the words of slick nigger fathers, too
depressed to explain why they could not appear to be men.
The bread fool. The don'ts of this white hell. The crashed eyes
of dead friends, standin at the bar, eyes focused on actual ugliness.
I don't love you. Who is to say what that will mean. I don't
love you, expressed the train, moves, and uptown days later
we look up and breathe much easier
I don't love you

Blew me into another, better life. I felt. I wanted and soon I needed. I wept I was caught downtown with white people. And left. As simple as that. Like one day you got pubic hairs.

The words of black people shape the fret of historic U.S. structure. Drunk nigger. High nigger. No, the calm iron-fingered equipment operators. Who breathe these words into my life—I want to be black and clean and free.

All the frenzied discussions our Negro intellectuals had. Our people and us had been dying slaves but we like our tradition fought—and I was fighting. Learning. Fighting. No matter that the emperor weeps he has lost his trim fleet of horses. I am no kept stallion.

You are ignorant, you are less, and one day, hopefully, you know something. We are all our years in yalla training taught to desire a certain world, whose existence is imperiled always by reality. There are many in this society whose lives are fueled by unreality, who deny and hate reality. But when I left the Village, the shock of waking up to who you are and hating it proved enough to send me into an orbit that was not completely correct. All the white-hating is not necessary to love oneself. Unless you are insecure as I was. And in the blinding flash of self-search that went on in the '60s there were many of us mashed together like that. No clear ideologies, some calling themselves Muslims, some Yorubas, when we got assembled fled from wherever.

The positive aspect of all that was clear, it represented struggle, the desire for liberation. The negative was the bashing together like children. And so those structures could not last, the internal contradictions were so sharp. Like the Black Arts. Like CFUN and CAP. Like RCL. Internal contradictions, lack of science, attacks by the state.

But just like the '20s we set some further footprints on a path yet to be fully trod. Yet to be fully understood. Except it is the getting out of the prison of self-deprecation. The mind bent by oppression, such beautiful people beat into submission by ugliness. Yet there is no submission, except
from the already dead. The living resist and resist. We've held that line in song and story. It'll make you weep.

Fanon laid it out how the pathological intellectuals will rush headlong, unknowing, into love of their oppressors, trying not to kill them but to be them. And discovering the trap, how they have been used, they rush again headlong, or heartlong now, into Africa of their mind. The crippled fought each other and tried to stop any health or victory even in the name of victory and resistance. There is deep sickness among oppressed people. Deep hatred of each other among the pathological. Who even while they mouth liberation are trying to kill each other so they can scramble up the ladder of the oppressor's world. Or they think they can bash the world and mash it into pieces forever and with the resulting explosion reappear as cowboys of a new world made holy by their warped desires.

So many way stations to reality. And among the middle class, black as well as white, their narrow view too often they take as the necessity of the world. All that was positive from the Black Arts will be pieced up and a lot of the stupidity, too, will go on other places, replayed because the actors have no institutions of their own from which to learn. But how to duplicate that flash of heat that we mistook for absolute reality. How to explain that breaking out of the jail of white possession, even while reinventing the same shit in blackface, had to be done. We can look back at it now and laugh. At the mistakes, the viciousness, the errors, of our struggle. But only fools, the sick, the misinformed, the white supremacy freaks, would not understand the correctness of our vault toward the real.

And the errors were not that we left that world and its sickness but that we were ever there in the first place!

When the Arts had folded for me, I could look back there too, but it was not a place one never needed to be. There are folks still there worshiping the disappeared. Some hoping what is dead will come one day—not knowing it'd come and split. We met very sinister presences and sickness, but we began to understand our own world better. Not from across the chasm reading the newspapers listening to music memorizing our childhood or fantasizing, but touching and feeling. The men the women, the sights and sounds. There was no time for drawn-out reflection, bullets smashing into the walls. A pistol in my briefcase. Confrontations every day. Yet trying to build something. And that something being held up for the bright colors to be seen in the distance and signaled further on.

That failed because we did not know enough. We were young people just out of adolescence flexing our muscles, hero-worshiping. Trying to
actually fly. We loved each other and fought for each other. We learned to love black people from close up again, and we laughed a lot as well as cried and cursed. We needed each other then, in the worst way, at that time of transition. Our flag was a gold mask on a black field, divided between tragedy and comedy, the drama of our time. Or was that symbol yellow on that flag? But those times were golden not yellow. There were the terrorists of our own movement, not just the state, but the sick. But something was raised. And at the same time, the seeds of even worse mistakes were made. There's no doubt in my mind that the Black Arts Theater will be remembered even in its brief throw against the dead. Its tiny light in shadows. The victory was in the struggle the unity the raising of ourselves, our history and tradition. That is simple national consciousness, where the victims focus on the requirements of their liberation. Where a people come to see themselves in contrast to their oppressors, and their lives and laws. Where they climb back into the stream of history.

But we made the same errors Fanon and Cabral laid out, if we had but read them, understood them. Because the cultural nationalism, atavism, male chauvinism, bourgeois lies painted black, feudal dead things, blown-up nigger balloons to toy around with. I would say the Nation of Islam and the Yoruba Temple were the heaviest carriers of this, the petty bourgeois confusing fantasy again with reality. The old sickness of religion—all the traps we did not understand. Crying blackness and for all the strength and goodness of that, not understanding the normal contradictions and the specific foolishness of white-hating black nationalism. The solution is not to become the enemy in blackface, that's what one of the black intellectuals' problems was in the first place. And even hating whites, being the white-baiting black nationalist is, might seem, justifiable but it is still a supremacy game.
The solution is revolution
. We thought that then, but didn't understand what it meant, really. We thought it meant killing white folks. But it is a system that's got to be killed and it's even twisted some blacks. It's hurt all of us.

Sometimes, though, you feel you move through tragedy and shame. That you step forward in the midst of ruins and explosions. Your eyes shining. Your survival ensured somehow by the fact of the I running on that computer track between your ears, behind your eyes. You could see the Black Arts in flames months before. Even while we did our heroic work of bringing the art, the newest strongest boldest hippest most avant of the swift dark shit to the streets, you could look up at that building some nights and swear it was in flames. That it shuddered and shook wreathed in hideous
screams of fire. When you looked into the eyes of some very sick nigger, who might wind up in an ice cream suit selling dope or staggering down Seventh Avenue mumbling his divinity, my brothers, or with little women never had to face a real real world playing half house in the half dark, naked and burning, you knew it was that brief youthful footstep erased by fire and a cooling unremembering rain. But what was real survived the flame.

And let the sons of the sons and the daughters of the daughters retell and evaluate it. Let us retell and evaluate it, also more quickly that we might set up more strong, more real, and go on to the actual winning of the world.

When I was driven out of New York, at this point, I did feel the world was over. It was all ruins. From the wondrous hope, the promise of first coming to Harlem. And every day it had been like seeing again, being reshown the world. Just walking that first new spring uptown was revelation, from corner to corner taking in the panorama of that community was like being refueled with long-sought
blackness
. And that itself, the mythical blackness that we pumped up full of the hopes and desires of a people, but also the delusions and illusions of a rather narrow sector among that people. What blackness was, how it could be defined. With no science. It was easy enough for dudes with robes or red weird hats, who had some words, some rituals to say, you see, this is what it was. White people ain't like this.

When the final big explosion, the separation of myself from this cauldron of confusion and desire, came about, even though I knew the stupidity, frustration, ugliness I had encountered, and was still in awe of the actual tasks, the would-be solutions had come out of my mouth so easily (way way off in another world, another life) that Newark at first was like some Elba. I remembered the first echoes of what was coming, and the moving, that rush of blood into Blood, and the array of sensuous learning, black and gold, and then that gold turned yellow, crumbled right behind my eyes. So I felt in some kind of wounded exile.

Yet as I came to retune, to take up new energy, the place of my birth stood me up in it anew. And no matter the bleak occasion I began to see yet new again, and take new spirit from that newness, new energy and courage. Because this was literally, and certainly now, Home. And if there was a blackness that was not mythical, it would be found there. And I did move toward something real and tangible. Real life, real love, practical work.

The whole sweep of the Newark return was, like anything else, educational. Busted, somehow, is how I felt. Thrown down from the clouds hard upon the ground, even though it was my own decision.

As I tried to recover from that beating, huddled close to myself like a wet dog, shivering, out my weakness. Gradually there returned a fuller sense of self. I did know some things—I had some
actual
information. It was my real home. I had roots.

From there, as I learned more and more about the place and myself there and what could be done, I started to grow again. To do the things I wanted to do again. And the myth that that political work detracted from the art is mostly just another class's view of what it all is in the first place. Certainly I became concerned with a political truth in its practical operation. Its concrete realization, and that is work. It is difficult grey stone work. But to me it was exhilarating, opening, clearing work. Like the gunfighter wounded sits somewhere practicing pulling his heat to get faster and faster.

Still I was moving through levels and levels of webs and stages and stages of steps made of different materials. I was having to find out the simplest things. To the more difficult. Learning, building. Making connections. And that whole trip was not bereft of fantasy either. That whole gunfighter fantasy. The real isolation—from an art-derived world. Although I kept working, Newark is no art colony, no panting aesthetic group. It is a grey steel and stone factory workers' town, the grim highway's end for those lovely southern men and women who came this way and mistook an “Ark” for a “York.”