The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (9 page)

In ring-a-leerio, I was always with the little guys and I actually liked that. There was always more of us allowed on the team, cause we were little. But our secret was that we were fast and shifty. I had one move where just as the big boy would be about to snatch me after the run, I'd stop short very suddenly and duck down, and this would send this big dude literally flying over my shoulders. Me, Johnny Boy Holmes, Skippy, and a few others patented that move. So they had to be wary and not run so hard after us and instead try to hem us in and get a couple or three of them to run us down. So we were the dangerous ringy players. And sometimes we'd even break loose and slide into the box and free the others already caught. Streaking into the box, which was marked on the ground, and against the fence of one side of the playground, “RINGALEERIO,” we'd scream, whoever got that honor of charging through the ring of big boys to free the others. Sometimes we'd form a kind of flying wedge and come barreling in. But some other times them big dudes would smash us, block us, knock us down. Or if we didn't have our thing together, some of the really fast and shifty dudes wasn't playing for instance, they'd chop us off one by one and
you had a hell of a time if it was the big boys' time to run out to stop those dudes. But we could and did. If there was enough of us we'd roam in twos and threes and tackle them suckers and sit on them. But you also had to get them back to the box, and they'd be struggling and pulling and that could be worse than just catching them.

But ringy was the top game for my money. It involved all the senses and all the skills and might and main of little-boydom. We played everything, baseball, basketball, football, all day every day, according to what season it was (though we'd play basketball all the time, regardless of what the big leagues was doing) but ringy was something else again. I'd like to see a big league ringy game and league. It's just war pursuit and liberation without weapons. Imagine a ringy game in Yankee Stadium, with karate, boxing, wrestling, great speed, evasion tactics, plus the overall military strategy and tactics that would have to be used, that would really be something.

Ringy got you so you could get away from any assault and at the same time fear no one in terms of running directly against big odds trying to free your brothers in the box. And sometimes if you were the only one left, and could keep the bigs darting and running and twisting, and outspeeding them, with the whole playground watching, that was really something, really gratifying.

Another teaching experience I had was the game Morning. It had its variations, Afternoon, and perhaps there was also an Evening, though I don't think so. Morning happened in the mornings. The first time we came in contact with each other the first one to see the other could hit him, saying, Morning. And though the other variations probably could be played, Morning was most happening I guess because at that time it was the first confrontation of the day and folks just getting up could be unawares and thus bashed.

And these suckers who most liked to play Morning were not kidding. When they hit they was trying to tear your shoulder off. The shoulder was the place most often hit. The real killers like this dude Big Shot would sneak up on you and hit you in the small of the back and that would take most people down and rolling on the ground in pain. Sometimes actual tears.

Close friends wouldn't actually play it or they wouldn't actually hit each other and if they did it wouldn't be a crushing blow. They'd just make believe they were playing it to keep you on your toes. But killers like Shot and some other dudes, little ugly Diddy and dudes like that, would actually try to take you off the planet.

If there was a slight tension, an outdoing or competitive thing, between dudes they would use Morning as an excuse to get off. But then the only thing that meant is that the other guy would come creeping around looking for an opening to bash the other one. I got hit a couple times, most times not hard — these were my main men who did it, cause I'd be watching, Jim. I was not going to get Morninged too often. And I caught a couple of them terrible snake-ass niggers a couple times and tried to tear 'em up, though they were taller and huskier, so my mashing punch was more embarrassment and aggravation than physical wipeout. I got Shot one time and jumped off my feet punching this sucker in his back and he got mad (which was supposed to be against the “rules”) and he started chasing me around the playground. But then he really got embarrassed, because his ass was too heavy to catch me. I motored away from him, ducking and twisting, just like in ringy. And finally he got tired and people was laid out on the fence of the playground laughing at his sorry ass.

But then he runs over to my main man Love and catches him. You see, you were supposed to say, “Morning,” then the other dude couldn't hit you. So Shot zooms over and catches Love right between the shoulder blades and damn near kills him. Love and Shot were always on the verge of going around anyway. Love had a close-cut haircut and a funny, bony-looking head, according to us. And we called him Bonehead or Saddlehead or some such. But it was the usual joke time. With Shot it was some kind of bitter rebuke, cause Love could play ball — any kind of ball — Shot couldn't do nothing but terrorize people with his ugly-ass self.

Love was hurt but when he come up a fight almost started, and then goddam Shot wanted to talk about the “rules.” “Like how come Love wanna fight he just don't know how to play the goddam game. If you a sissie you can't play.”

“How come you can play then, Shot?” And people cracked up, knowing he could not catch me. But from then on I had to watch Shot very close.

The “rules.” And he had just broke 'em himself. People like that I knew about early. And also I learned how to terrorize the terrorizers.

The Dozens. You know the African Recrimination Songs!! Yeh yeh, see, I gotta anthropological tip for you as well. But Dozens always floated around every whichaway, around my way, when you was small. Or with close friends, half lit, when you got big. But that was either fun, for fun connected folks, or the sign that soon somebody's blood would be spilt.

The lesson? The importance of language and invention. The place of innovation. The heaviness of “high speech” and rhythm. And their USE.
Not in abstract literary intaglios but on the sidewalk (or tar) in the playground, with everything at stake, even your ass. How to rhyme. How to reach in your head to its outermost reaches. How to invent and create. Your mother's a man — Your father's a woman. Your mother drink her own bathwater — Your mother drink other people's. Your mother wear combat boots — Your mother don't wear no shoes at all with her country ass. She just come up here last week playin' a goddam harmonica. Or the rhymed variations. I fucked your mama under a tree, she told everybody she wanted to marry me. I fucked your mama in the corner saloon, people want to know was I fucking a baboon. Or Your mother got a dick — Your mother got a dick bigger than your father's! Point and Counterpoint. Shot and Countershot. Up and One Up.

(In the late '60s when I was going through some usual state harassment — to wit, I had supposedly cussed out a policeman in a bank. The truth being that this dude had been harassing us every few evenings, riding by the house, making remarks to the women, creep gestures at us, etc. So he comes in this bank with a shotgun out on “bank patrol” and starts talking loudly about George Wallace, who was running for president. Hooking him up with some local creep, Imperiale, and saying he was voting for Wallace. I said, “You should, it's your brother!” Or something like that. There was an ensuing baiting, a scuffle, more cops summoned, and three of us who'd been in this bank talking bad to the cop, then cops, got taken away. But it was later thrown out because the prosecution said I'd baited the cop by talking about his father. My attorney and I pointed out that while that might be the mores of Irish Americans (the prosecutor) African Americans focused on de mama, so it was an obvious frame. The judge blinked, hmmm, case dismissed. Some street anthropology. And if you coulda been there, judge, in them playgrounds, and heard it, you'd see my point. But, miraculously, he did.)

I learned that you could keep people off you if you were mouth-dangerous as well as physically capable. But being Ebony Streak also helped just in case you had to express some physical adroitness. Cause your mouth might get your ass into a situation it could not handle! In which case it was the best thing to rapidly change your landscape.

Fighting, avoiding fights, observing fights, knowing when and when not to fight, were all part of our open-air playground street-side education. And fights were so constant, a kind of staged event of varying seriousness. Sometimes very serious. Sometimes just a diversion, for everyone. Like two dudes or girls woofing. Woof woof woof woof woof. They'd be standing
somewhere, maybe the hands on the hips, the chicks especially, hands on hips. Maybe one hand gesturing. Or each with one hand on the hip and one hand gesturing. Or they'd get closer and closer. In the purely jive fights the audience would get drugged and push the would-be combatants into each other and that could either start a real fight or it would reveal the totally jive nature of the contest.

And these girls, the black ones, in Central would really get down. There were a couple, Edna, Charlene, plus Laverne and some others, who was so bad that dudes seriously didn't want to get into nothing with them. (Last time I saw Edna years later she was giving some white folks hell in Irvington about them trying to jack her kids up in that school near the Newark city line which was now heavy black so the concocted tensions of the racist system were provoking. I thought, when I saw her, shit, these motherfuckers just do not know what they are about to get into. I saw Edna kick so many little girls' asses when she was a not so little girl — she wasn't never really little when I was knowin' her! She even jumped on some dudes and run 'em up Central Avenue with they eyes rollin'.)

And they would fight. After school every day. The famous ones every other day. The corner of Newark Street and Central Avenue, a rumble. And when it was female, hey man, skirts rolling up, drawers in the wind. Dudes would press close up on that just to peep the flesh. But there were some terrible rumbles — clash and noise and conflict — eyes on fire. And the gathering of kids in motion to see, themselves a wild event. But we never got to the outer edge with the chicks' struggles. We thought they were serious, some even scary — as to the violence — but none we perceived as
deadly
, as when the dudes would get down. And then when a couple of famous knucklers and especially when they were representing some clear faction in the broader community, yeh, then that would seem deadly, deadly, like indeed death was easing close to our faces and our eyes would be propped open like at a horror movie with our favorites sounded loud, only if we were with one of the factions.

Yet, compared to today's constant communications of outright death in the streets every day, especially from the gangs, our clashes of yesterday seem tame. But then, death in those times was mostly unthinkable, though it happened. But when you fought you did not expect anybody to have a knife, let alone a piece. When today the pulling of shanks is normal, and guns, just about.

There were the gang clashes later that I knew about and almost got mashed up in several times. The story “The Screamers” talks about this,
and in
The System of Dante's Hell
. I was caught between a small war inside a party between The Dukes (and I capitalize their names from leftover respect, not just grammar shit) and The North Newark Dudes. Hey, there was meat cleavers flying around in that one (during my teenage hip bluelight party roamings), the thing smacked my green Tyrolean lid off my head and sent me scrambling into the prone bodies. And there was a gang named The Geeks, uh uhm uhmp, the name itself could freeze you in your thirteen-year-old pimples. And those were titanic to us then, but the memory gets blunted by today's horrific reality, the projection of the dying monster trying to kill all life as it books.

But we had more experience day by day with individual confrontations. Gangs rose up in my experience more directly in my later teenage times.

Matthew Holden of the Central Avenues vs. Baxter Terrace's color bearer, Larry Thomas, was one standout of fixed tension and underlying terror. Matthew was known around Central Avenue as about the baddest of the big boys. He'd been kept back in school because he came up out of the South, so he was sixteen and in the eighth grade, just like the dead Haley. Matthew was big lean fast and strong. He excelled at all sports and was a likable kind of guy but took absolutely no shit. We littler ones laughed with him sometimes and he might get upset if we said some off the wall stuff, like made mock of his Southern speech, and what's more, if you did you'd take two or three steps and he'd have your ass by the collar and punch you in your shoulder paralyzing you. But he didn't “take tech” as some of the monsters like Shot or Diddy might. He was a straight-ahead dude, only you couldn't mess with him.

Thomas I knew only vaguely by rep. He was from Baxter Terrace, and about the same age as Matthew, only he had been born, I guess, up North, so he was already in high school. He was shorter than Matthew, stocky, built up, already playing high school football. And the Baxters relied on him as their baddest dude.

Baxter Terrace was actually in our neighborhood and most of the younger kids went to Central Avenue with us. But they had a Baxter Terrace playground in those projects where they played after school. And they had teams in another league, so there was some distance, though they played with us and around us often enough.

The fight was almost like some passion play. It happened in the middle of the playground, a crowd had formed and the two moved around inside that thick crowd armed and slowed with tension. The crowd itself had ranged around like two halves of some giant organic creature, with much
leering and balling of fists and the shouting somehow strained and shallow. Each half connected itself from the inside with its champion. For one thing, I didn't understand how this dude Larry expected he could seriously take on Matthew. That seemed dumb, but the fact that he did do that seemed to breach something important, it seemed a nasty corny affront and I thought he should be made to disappear.