ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1958, Jones and Hettie Cohen were married in a Buddhist temple in New York City.1 Jones’s decision to marry a white woman was his clearest articulation of ethnic “outsiderness” and perhaps even social marginality. The marriage produced two daughters.
Raised in New York City, Hettie Cohen had come to Greenwich Village after attending Mary Washington College in Virginia. According to Theodore Hudson, she had gone south to get away from the ethnically parochial expectations of her family and milieu (i.e., to marry “a nice Jewish boy”).2 Like LeRoi, Hettie wanted to be ethnically cosmopolitan and had come to the Village in search of such a lifestyle. In her autobiography, the former Hettie Cohen, now Hettie Jones, provides a revealing excursion into the Greenwich Village bohemian life of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She discusses the manner in which her life as a woman and particularly as a bohemian wife and mother restricted her opportunities to edit, write, and otherwise engage her mind in ways available to her husband, LeRoi. Her autobiography is an important corrective to the prevailing view of Baraka’s life in the Village in which she becomes the invisible backdrop to a “genius-at-work.”3
Several months before their marriage, Hettie and LeRoi began editing and publishing Yugen, a literary journal.4 The title was a Japanese word meaning “profound mystery.”5 Jones launched the journal as an outlet for the avant-garde writings that he found so interesting.6 In producing the journal, an implicit division of labor developed between LeRoi and Hettie. Jones acted as the journal’s primary literary editor while Cohen was in charge of production. Hettie’s previous experiences as the subscription manager of the Record Changer and the business manager of the Partisan Review prepared her for this endeavor. Perpetually short of funding for the journal, Hettie functioned as a one-woman production unit. She typed the first issue on a rented IBM typewriter and laid it out on the kitchen table in the apartment she shared with Jones. The initial issue included contributions from Philip Whalen, Ed James, Judson Crews, Diane Di Prima, Jack Micheline, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and others. Hettie described the range of authors whose articles were published in Yugen:
From a quick first look at Yugen 4 you’d say Beat, as the three Beat gurus—Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg—were represented. Except the “New consciousness in arts and letters” was more inclusive. Like Basil King, Joel Oppenheimer, and Fielding Dawson, the poets Robert Creeley, John Wieners, and Charles Olson were out of Black Mountain College, where Olson was the last rector. Frank O’Hara, like the painters he knew, was a poet of the “New York School.” Gilbert Sorrentino lived in Brooklyn, Gary Snyder in Japan, Ray Bremser in a Trenton, New Jersey, prison.7
In hindsight, it is rather amazing that such youthful and relatively unpublished writers such as Hettie Cohen and LeRoi Jones would presume to edit a poetry magazine. Their presumption was facilitated by their membership in an art world outside the interests of established literary journals. The very novelty of the “new writing” gave Cohen and Jones an editorial entrée. Fortunately for them, Allen Ginsberg passed on the name of the journal to Beat writers and other potential contributors. In certifying their journal by attaching his imprimatur to it, Ginsberg aided the young editors in their quest to publish what they deemed to be the best of the new. Yugen published eight issues from 1958 to 1962. Concerning the journal, Beat poet Diane Di Prima wrote:
The early issues were very rough, both in content and format: great things and real junk, side by side. I used to go over to his house on 20th Street and paste them up with his wife Hettie. The later issues became more professional looking, and also the writing was more professional. It had become a regular little magazine instead of something done out of somebody’s living room.8
As publishers of an important “little magazine,” LeRoi and Hettie gained access to the Village’s inner circles and Beat literary communities and became friends and acquaintances with major Greenwich Village intellectual figures. Their apartment on West Twentieth Street became an unofficial artist salon. According to one student of the period,
the Joneses’ party guest included the habitués of the Cedar Bar, the painters who showed in the new storefront galleries that appeared on East Tenth Street, jazz musicians, and writers. Hettie cooked up spaghetti for a hundred and got kegs from A&M Beer Distributors, and the bashes became regular events. Ginsberg described them as “an Acme of good feelings. A lot of mixing, black white hip classic.”9
Jones does not highlight these parties in his autobiography but does mention that he and Hettie regularly hosted groups of people in their apartment, particularly on weekends. Occasionally, they housed visitors who stayed for weeks at a time.
In addition to coediting Yugen, LeRoi Jones coedited with Diane Di Prima the first twenty-five issues of the thirty-seven-issue publication life of an underground literary magazine, The Floating Bear.10 The impetus behind the creation of The Floating Bear lay in the need for a quick-turnover, up-to-date organ that would publish not only “Beat poetry” and the new writing but also reviews of books, plays, and dance performances; announcements of events; and correspondence.11 Jones wrote a variety of short essays and poems for The Floating Bear as well as reviews of dance performances and opinion pieces. His writings appeared under his own name and several pen names: John King, Johannes Koenig, Miles Campion, and Duke Mantee.
Early in the morning of October 18, 1961, Jones was aroused from sleep and arrested by the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI on charges of mailing obscenity.12 The practice of the editors of The Floating Bear was to mail the journal to anyone who seemed genuinely interested in the “new writing.” One subscriber to the newsletter was incarcerated, and on one occasion, his mail was read by prison authorities. They found two contributions in The Floating Bear that they deemed obscene: Jones’s play From the System of Dante’s Hell (The Eighth Ditch), and William Burroughs’s “Routine.” Although the case never went to trial, Jones requested a grand jury hearing, at which he stayed on the stand for much of two days discussing the difficulties in distinguishing pornography from literature. At some point during the proceedings, the prosecuting attorney asked Jones to tell him the percentage of homosexuals on the Bear’s mailing list. Jones replied by asking the federal attorney to divulge the percentage of homosexuals in the district attorney’s office.13 After two days, the grand jury refused to issue an indictment. The cover of the twentieth issue of The Floating Bear, which reported on the outcome of its case, borrowed its victory slogan from former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis: “HELLO, MA! I GLAD I WIN! BEAR K.O.’S P.O IN TWO.”
Jones also worked for Totem Press and Corinth Books, editing works by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.14 In 1961, Jones and Di Prima founded an experimental theatrical group. During the same year, Jones’s first collection of poetry was released by Totem Press/Corinth Books, entitled Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Blues People, his seminal study of the African and American character of black music, was published in 1963. Jones also edited and published a collection of the “new writing” in 1963, The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which included prose compositions by Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Diane Di Prima, John Rechy, Edward Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and others. For our purposes, what is significant about this edited volume is that except for himself, it included no Afro-American writers. In 1964, another collection of poems, The Dead Lecturer, was published, and in March of that year, Jones’s play Dutchman began a yearlong run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the Village; The Eighth Ditch premiered at the New Bowery Theater; and The Baptism opened at the Writer’s Stage. Dutchman later won the Obie Award as the best Off-Broadway play of the year.
During this same period, Jones published numerous essays, some of which were later collected in Home: Social Essays (1966) and Black Music (1967); poems that were later collected and published in Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961–1967, (1969); short stories that were later published in the collection Tales (1967); and a novel, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965).
Jones first and foremost aspired to be a poet. Although he later was acclaimed as a playwright, he was initially recognized as a poet. In 1961, his first collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published, its dedication reading This Book Is Hettie’s. Jones acquired from William Carlos Williams the authority to write poems in the manner of his speech and not according to formalistic rules. T. S. Eliot also had a major influence on Jones, first as a model and later as an antagonist to his poetic style and ambitions. Eliot represented the sterility of Anglophone poetry. Anglo-Eliotic poetry was the poetry of the American academy, an institution against which Jones railed because of its insular aesthetic values. Sollors, however, perceived in Jones’s earliest poetry an attempt to navigate the tensions between the twin influences of Eliot and Williams.15
Charles Olson may have been the greatest single influence on the young poet. William Harris states that “from Olson in particular, Baraka absorbed his sense of the poem as open form, his sense of line, his sense of the poem as recorder of process and his conception of the poem as definition and exploration.”16 After talking with other Beat writers, Jones decided that autobiographical events were appropriate subjects for poetry. Even so, Jones had not developed an approach to his poetry that emphasized his racial identity. He did not hide his racial identity, but his poetry was not self-consciously black in the way that it became later. When asked during a 1960 interview if and how his identity as a Negro influenced his poetry, Jones replied:
There are certain influences on me, as a Negro person, that certainly wouldn’t apply to a poet like Allen Ginsberg. I couldn’t have written that poem “Kaddish” for instance. And I am sure that he couldn’t write certain things that have to deal with, say, Southern Baptist church rhythms . . . .I am fairly conscious all the time that I am an American Negro because it’s part of my life. But I know also that if I want to say, “I see a bus full of people,” I don’t have to say, “I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.”17
Jones’s early artistic influences show that he was located not only outside a black artistic/poetic community but also outside of a black poetic tradition. For the most part, Jones was not part of a black literary tradition. Rather, his early poetry reflected his bohemian sentiments. Less concerned with explicit social and political concerns, Jones’s poetry instead highlighted the comical, absurd, and mundane aspects of everyday life. In the poem “For Hettie,” Jones humorously describes the awkwardness of his wife’s left-handedness:
. . . TAKE THAT DAMN
PENCIL OUTTA THAT HAND. YOU’RE
RITING BACKWARDS. $ SUCH. But
to no avail. & it shows
in her work. Left-handed coffee,
Left-handed eggs; when she come
in at night . . . it’s her left hand
offered for me to kiss. Damn
& now her belly droops over the seat
They say it’s a child. But
I ain’t quite sure18
Bohemian tendencies proliferate in Preface, particularly those endless introspections and explorations of the arbitrariness of personal histories, the inconsequentiality of life, and the meaninglessness of death. Comparing the intensity of Jones’s introspection with that of other Beat poets, Kimberly Benston stated that “none of these poets . . . felt more poignantly or recorded as vigorously the pains and desires of his alienated soul than did Imamu Baraka.”19 Perhaps no single poem in the collection better captures this than “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today”:
It’s so diffuse
being alive. Suddenly one is aware
that nobody really gives a damn . . . .
My wife is pregnant with her child.20
Lines conveying non-sequitur meanings and images are juxtaposed with the verse’s flowing rhythms. This discordance creates a perception of boredom and monotony, both of which intensify the bleakness of his reflections on death.
. . . My life
seems over & done with.
Each morning I rise
like a sleep walker
& rot a little more.
All the lovely things I’ve known have disappeared
I have my pubic hair and am lonely
There is probably no such place as Battle Creek, Michigan!21
Later in the poem, Jones engages in a moment of candor:
but this also
is part of my charm
A maudlin nostalgia
that comes on
like terrible thoughts about death
How dumb to be sentimental about anything
To call it love
& cry pathetically
into the long black handkerchief
of the years22
In “The Death of Nick Charles,” Jones conveys his disgust at the inauthenticity of his life. Worse, he is angered at his peers for viewing his inauthentic identity as authentic.
Sad
long
motion of air
pushing in my face. Lies
weakness, hatred
of myself. Of you
for not understanding
this. Or not
despising me
for the right causes. I am
sick as, OH,
the night is. As
cold days are, when we must watch them
grow old
& dark.23
Jones’s poetry also conveys his bohemian disdain for the plasticity of bourgeois life. In “Hymn for Lanie Poo,” Jones caricatures a black woman (his sister) to reveal his distaste for the racial self-hatred of bourgeois blacks.24 He ridicules the rabid fear of many lighter-skinned Negroes that overexposure to the sun might darken their skin. Likewise, he mocks the black female’s dread of the heat of the sun, which, in causing her to perspire, could turn her hot-combed, white-like, straightened hair into a woolly kink.
Beware the evil sun . . .
turn you black
turn your hair
crawl your eyeballs
rot your teeth.25
He comments on his sister’s bourgeois, aspirant-white, consumerist tastes:
my sister drives a green jaguar
my sister has her hair done twice a month
my sister is a school teacher
my sister took ballet lessons
my sister has a fine figure: never diets
my sister doesn’t like to teach in Newark
because there are too many colored
in her classes
my sister hates loud shades
my sister’s boy friend is a faggot music teacher
who digs Tchaikovsky
my sister digs Tchaikovsky also26
The green Jaguar, ballet lessons, hair straightening, fondness for Tchaikovsky, and dislike of teaching in Newark all are supposed to indicate his sister’s assimilationist desires as well as her embrace of American consumerist values.
Although at this stage, Jones’s racial identity is not a featured part of his poetry, he sporadically interrogates the intersection of his blackness and his bohemianism. In “Notes for a Speech,” he writes,
African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am
. . . My color
is not theirs. Lighter, white man
talk. They shy away. My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.27
Jones describes his shattered relationship to Africa: Africans are only his “so called people,” and African blues do not capture him. Even though he is lonely, Jones is neither a pariah nor homeless. Instead, he is “as any other sad man here american.” This poem is a meditation on his dislocated racial identity, but it does not exhibit the political angst and anger that later characterize Jones’s meditations on Africa and blackness. A bohemian, Jones was much more interested in the deviance of his personal identity and the psychic costs of that identity (i.e., loneliness).
Besides the “nudging” from the growing Civil Rights movement, Jones was also intensely affected by the political success of the Cuban revolution. In celebration of the revolution’s victory over the Batista forces, Jones edited Fidel Castro, January 1, 1959, a small pamphlet of collected poetry by Kerouac, Ron Loewinsohn, Joel Oppenheimer, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Jones, among others. Less political than it might seem, the origins of the pamphlet lay in the Errol Flynn–like images through which Jones imagined Castro: “The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.”28
In July 1960, Jones, a delegation of black artists and scholars, and members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee traveled to Cuba as guests of the Cuban government. Along with Jones, the black delegation included Julian Mayfield, Sarah Wright, Richard Gibson, Robert F. Williams, and John Henrik Clarke.29 Harold Cruse also went along and recorded his memories of the trip in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. After the revolution, the new Cuban government wanted to increase its visibility among those sectors of the international community that might be sympathetic to the revolution’s aims and spirit. Founded in April 1960, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a national organization designed to generate the American public’s support for postrevolutionary Cuba.30
Jones had been asked to be a part of the delegation by Richard Gibson, a black American who was one of the committee’s founders.31 Apparently Jones was unaware that Gibson was a highly suspect and controversial figure.32 While living in the black American expatriate community in Paris during the 1950s, Gibson had been accused by some of the Afro-American expatriates of having had a connection to U.S. intelligence agencies. He had falsely signed the names of black American expatriates Richard Wright and cartoonist Ollie Harrington to essays that he had secretly written condemning France for its colonial policies in Algeria.33 These essays were then sent to newspapers and journals in the United States and published, intensifying the spread of paranoia in the black expatriate community, for they were, in effect, attempts to compromise the expatriate status of Wright and Harrington. The French government allowed black Americans to live as expatriates in Paris as long as they did not become active in internal French political affairs. In exchange for the freedom to criticize the racist practices of the United States during McCarthyism and the cold war, black American expatriates were to remain silent on French politics, particularly the Algerian question. Upon being caught, Gibson confessed to forgery and was deported. Only a few years later, Gibson was in the United States leading delegations to Cuba.
“Cuba Libre,” Jones’s chronicle of the trip, was first published in the Evergreen Review in 1960. It was his first sustained prose essay to be published. “Cuba Libre” reveals an artist who, although artistically supportive of emancipatory ideals, had yet to learn the difference between politically influenced artistic expression and political acts. According to Sollors, “the Cuban experience . . . was one cause of Jones’s transformation from aesthetic to political protest, from a belief in the end of ideology to a new political awareness.”34 Jones later called the Cuban trip a turning point in his life.35“Cuba Libre” is written in the form of a travel journal. Jones comments on the conditions and people that he met in Cuba and uses them and the foreign setting as backdrops to probe the behavior and thoughts of his fellow travelers. Jones portrays his own political naïveté through the depiction of a discussion held on a crowded train on which he, his entourage of visiting Americans, and thousands of Cubans were heading to the July 26 celebration in honor of the revolution. The other discussant, Senora Betancourt, a Mexican graduate student and delegate to the youth congress, repeatedly attacked Jones’s political beliefs and passivity, and Jones reportedly replied, “Look why jump on me? I understand what you are saying, I’m in complete agreement with you. I’m a poet . . . what can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics.”36 Though not given to modesty, Jones’s overstated depiction of his apoliticization stemmed from the realization that his interest in politics would have appeared as bourgeois intellectualism, if not outright frivolity, had he tried to describe his meager political activities amid the euphoric ambience of the Cuban revolutionary spirit.
After having been with intellectuals who had actively helped change material living conditions, Jones returned from Cuba feeling empowered and politically challenged. He would no longer be satisfied with merely writing about the cultural mundaneness and moral dishonesty of mainstream America:
The rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country, a few current ways out. But name an alternative here. Something not inextricably bound up in a lie. Something not part of liberal stupidity or the actual filth of vested interest. There is none. It’s much too late. We are an old people already. Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass. . . . But the Cubans, and other new peoples (in Asia, Africa, South America) don’t need us and we had better stay out of their way.37
One major consequence of Jones’s trip to Cuba was a moment of intense ambivalence about his conspicuous cultivation of the social marginality that bohemia fostered. The isolation from mainstream America that bohemia afforded him had cut him off from the political tensions and movements of the black masses. Jones now saw bohemia’s success at protecting the space for his artistic growth and expression as the source of his failure to act politically in a significant manner.
Whereas bohemian LeRoi had long written about the cultural and artistic destructiveness of mainstream white liberal society, “Cuba Libre” can be regarded as Jones’s opening salvo on the racial implications of white liberal politics. In the 1961 essay “Letter to Jules Feiffer,” Jones continued his assault on white liberal racial arrogance.38 Feiffer, a popular and politically liberal cartoonist for the Village Voice, had written a letter to the editor defending himself against Richard Gibson’s attacks on Feiffer’s “white liberalism.” (Gibson was the fellow from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee who had invited Jones to visit Cuba.) Feiffer not only defended himself as a white liberal but also criticized the political program and writings of Robert Williams, even calling Williams’s newsletter “a hate sheet.” In addition, Feiffer ridiculed the growing black usage of the term “Afro-American” as ethnic nomenclature.
Jones defended the actions of Robert Williams, the North Carolina NAACP official turned self-defense advocate. But Jones did not dispute Feiffer’s claim that Williams’s newsletter was hateful. Instead, he stated that “Afro-Americans (Negroes, spades, shades, boots, woogies, etc.) in this country can afford, I believe, the luxury of hate. They certainly have enough to hate.”39 Most of Jones’s letter to Feiffer is a condemnation of white liberalism, using Feiffer as a case study. Jones exposes the arrogance of Feiffer’s views, attributing it to his whiteness. He argues that white liberals are little better than outright white racists: “You liberals are people with extremely heavy consciences and almost nonexistent courage. Too little is always enough. And it is always the symbol, the token that appeals to you most.”40 Jones’s overkill of Feiffer prefigured much of his political writing during his Village days. He often reserved his harshest criticism for suspected white liberal “allies” of blacks, as if he had more at stake than merely unmasking their complicity as whites in the racial status quo. That is, the vociferousness of Jones’s attacks on white liberals indicates that he is not merely stating a matter of fact. Instead, Jones wants both to expose and abuse white liberals, thereby exacting revenge against all whites. White racists were never imagined as mere individuals but, rather, as representatives of all white Americans.
In 1962, Jones extended his critique of white liberalism in an essay, “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents.” More systematic than his assault on Feiffer, “Tokenism” exposes the crude hypocrisy in American life of viewing every minuscule improvement in the living standard of a black individual as a major indication of progress for all blacks. Jones was angered by the willingness of the New York Times, the NAACP, and other prominent liberal organizations to highlight token black advancements, as opposed to the stagnant plight of the overwhelming majority of blacks. Moreover, Jones warned white liberals not to confuse increased black consumption with improvements in black citizenship status. While white liberals may have celebrated the fact that more southern blacks were able to buy cars in 1960 than they were in 1940, Jones reminds whites that with or without cars, blacks in 1960, like blacks in 1940, were not allowed to vote in the South.
During the same year, Jones also promoted a rationality for black nationalist sensibilities. In his essay “‘Black’ Is a Country,” Jones defined nationalism as “acting in one’s own best interest,”41 and for Jones, black nationalism was a metaphor for black ethnic consciousness.42 As early as this 1962 essay, Jones had begun to equate freedom for blacks with black nationalist self-determination. He invokes self-determination as a wedge against the prevailing liberal assumption that black freedom necessarily mirrored white American freedom (which, according to Jones, was the freedom to consume goods and dominate others). This invocation of self-determination then led Jones to defend nationalism but not, yet, aspire to racial separatism.
The struggle is for independence, no separation—or assimilation for that matter. Do what you want to with your life . . . when you can. I want to be independent of black men just as much as I want independence from the white. It is just that achieving the latter involves all black men, or at least those who have not already taken those available roads into the mainstream I mentioned earlier—subservience, cowardice and loss of manhood.43 [my emphasis]
Although in a few years Jones became an ardent black nationalist, in 1962 he comprehended nationalism as a collective means toward an individual end. It was a necessary but strategic evil. Blacks should unify, but only to attain the benefits of liberal freedom or what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty,” the freedom of the individual from unjustified external constraint.44 Any racial unity that extended beyond the role of liberalism’s midwife was a denial of freedom. Predictably, in 1962 LeRoi Jones was an individualist, for individual authenticity was the driving ambition of the bohemian life. At this point in time, Jones was somewhat Ellisonian in his understanding of America as a racially hybrid society. “America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white America are bound up inextricably with those of the black Americans.”45 Thoroughly American, blacks had a vested interest in expanding their freedom within the confines of this nation and its purportedly democratic ethos.
Despite the centrality of blacks to American life and the rich cultural interdependencies of racial groups, Jones did not conclude that the United States was therefore democratic. In the 1962 essay “City of Harlem,” Jones used Harlem as the focal point for an eclectic commentary on the economic and political marginalization of black America. Whereas he had once considered Harlem a black bourgeois enclave, he now proclaimed it the “capital of Black America.” For Jones, Harlem was simultaneously a myth and a material reality intersecting to produce an image of black Americans and black life full of contradictions. On the one hand, Harlem represented pleasure—a raucous, expressive black joie de vivre and a sensualistic release from inhibitions. On the other hand, Harlem also represented immorality and childlike blacks too lazy to take advantage of their opportunities.
Jones offers a very short history of the evolution of Harlem into a predominantly black neighborhood. He traces the momentary allure that Harlem held for hip white voyeurs during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. With the arrival of the Depression, however, the jazzy glitter of Harlem could no longer mask its actuality as a site of black subjugation.
For many Negroes Harlem is a place one escapes from, and lives in shame about for the rest of his life. But this is one of the weirdest things about the American experience, that it can oppress a man, almost suck his life away, and then make him so shamed that he was among the oppressed, rather than the oppressors, that he will never offer any protest.46
Although Jones clearly meant to be sympathetic to the people inhabiting Harlem, his ignorance of their political history is somewhat demeaning. After all, black Harlemites had engaged in numerous protests throughout the twentieth century, including the two major race riots of 193547 and 1943. Harlem had given a platform to Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., arguably the most significant black protest figure in American politics between the death of Ida Wells Barnett and the rise of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. An even greater testimony to the richness of Harlem’s protest tradition was its receptivity to communism. Harlem had been the only major black community during the Depression to sustain an active presence by the Communist Party, even to the point of electing Benjamin Davis Jr., a black Communist Party official, to the New York City Council in 1943.48
In attempting to dissect myths about Harlem, Jones created his own. In his case, the new myth was that of a Harlem too subjugated to protest politically but too alive not to sustain eclectic articulations of Negro creative energy and nonconformity. Reminiscent of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro,” Jones wrote that “any black American, simply by virtue of his blackness, is weird, a nonconformist in this society.”49 Such a view indicates Jones’s continued concern about the image of blacks in white eyes. Certainly, black Harlemites did not view one another as weird nonconformists. More important, in romanticizing the outsider identity of blacks, Jones placed a well-worn bohemian veneer over Harlemites. Jones was somewhat ambivalent about Harlem, an ambivalence that mirrored his attitudes toward black America. In the short essay “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),” Jones speaks of Harlemites as depressed and defeated, beaten down by years of neglect, humiliation, racist subjugation. This Harlem is a living mortuary. Yet in “Street Protest,” another essay written in 1962, Jones describes the proliferation of political speakers on the sidewalks of Harlem. It is an essay that celebrates Harlem as a democratic public space, one in which black thinkers and charlatans are given the right to speak. This Harlem is quite different from that Harlem described in “City of Harlem.” Jones was fixated on Harlem. The bohemian Race Man was trying to fashion a worldview that allowed him to grasp the wretchedness of black subjugation without denying black agency. He did not successfully merge these contradictory impulses until he adopted black cultural nationalism. For now, Harlem was a thorn in the side of his existence in the Village, a constant reminder that increased freedom for individual blacks, including black bohemians, had no impact on the unfreedom that governed the lives of most blacks.
One attempt by Jones to wade through the artistic labyrinth of the Afro-American victim status was his 1962 address “The Myth of a Negro Literature.” Delivered before a gathering of black artists and intellectuals of the American Society for African Culture, Jones castigated black writers for creating fiction mainly to obtain white recognition. He claimed that black writers, particularly novelists, were guilty of copying white artistic mediocrity in their quest for whites’ acceptance. Instead of being preoccupied with aesthetic issues, black writers were preoccupied with social/literary status. Jones cited Phyllis Wheatley and Charles Chesnutt as examples of early black writers who sought to obtain the status of the “exceptional Negro” (a Negro who wants to be seen by whites as being “unlike” the other Negroes). The “exceptional Negro” is a parasitic status because it is formed by appearing to be distant and different from other blacks, blacks who may be justly penalized for being the way that they are. The status of the “exceptional” black is a status rooted in the most explicit desire for white acceptance and hatred of one’s own affinities with other blacks.
Jones could not persuasively claim, without substantiation, that Wheatley or Chesnutt were aspiring to an exceptional Negro status. The mere fact that they were Negroes who lived in a more affluent manner than most blacks of their time did not make them guilty of seeking exceptionalism. Jones implied that middle-class status alone indicated the presence of a quest for exceptionality, but he offered no proof. Wheatley was not middle class. She was a slave, a slave to a somewhat benevolent master, but a slave nonetheless. Jones writes about her as if she were vacationing in Oak Bluffs.
Jones viewed jazz and the blues as black Americans’ greatest artistic statements, a result largely of the unwillingness of black musicians to defer to the assessments of jazz by white American music critics and the white American populace in general. Had Afro-American jazz, blues, and gospel musicians sought the bourgeois respectability that accompanied the recognition of whites, they would have killed the uniqueness of black music. Although it is a bit ludicrous to compare black music and black literature on some linear scale of creativity, Jones’s point about the creative futility inherent in respectability-minded art was a sound critique of a well-used black victim-status aesthetic dating back to Du Bois and others.50 Such an approach to literature did not allow black writers to investigate the “soul” of black people, a necessary step in creating serious black literature. Protest literature also was inadequate precisely because it, too, was primarily “other regarding.”
Written four years before David Littlejohn’s venerated commentary Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Jones’s “Myth of a Negro Literature” was similar in its harsh and sweeping denunciation of black literature:
Only Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin have managed to bring off examples of writing . . . that could succeed in passing themselves off as “serious” writing, in the sense that say, the work of Somerset Maugham is “serious” writing. That is, serious, if one has never read Herman Melville or James Joyce. And it is part of the tragic naivete of the middle class (brow) writer that he has not.51
Divorced from the black community and a black literary tradition, the Village-based Jones tells black writers how to write good black fiction—this from the author of one small collection of poems. “The Myth of Negro Literature” is an apologia for his personal decision to distance himself from the historical and contemporaneous black literary worlds. In a world that produced William Yeats and James Joyce, how could a writer with the ambitions of Jones be inspired by Countee Cullen or John Oliver Killens? Jones’s statements concerning Ellison and Toomer led the critic David Lionel Smith to question whether Jones had read these authors before commenting on them:
In this gospel according to Jones, black writers have failed. . . . Negro writing, he argues, is inferior writing. Negro writers are not honest, and furthermore, they are ignorant. American racial discourse makes assertions of Negro ignorance inherently credible. Still, how could anyone read the first 10 pages of Invisible Man and claim that Ellison has not read Melville and Joyce?52
Smith perceives Jones as a participant in a long-standing racist discourse about blacks, a racist discourse that leads Jones to patronize black writers, some of whom may have been his artistic superiors. Smith continues:
Jones’s comments suggest that he probably had not read the work of these authors. In accusing them of ignorance, he reveals his own, but to be ignorant of Negroes is no sin in our culture. After all, we assume Negroes to be unworthy of serious attention. Being black does not necessarily exempt us from the condescending modes of race thinking.53
Ironically, Jones’s “Myth of Negro Literature” is actually a bid by a young black writer for the status of exceptional Negro. He is a Negro writer but does not want to be associated with a black literary tradition.
Another brazen but less conceptually developed critique of the black victim status appeared in the 1963 “Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots,” in which Jones condemns two black writers, American James Baldwin and South African Peter Abrahams. He implies that both men are less concerned about writing about the struggles of their people than in proclaiming themselves men of refinement who have suffered dearly as a result of their plight. In conveying their personal anguish, these men appear to write as if they want their white oppressors to see them as individuals independent of their people, who also were suffering. Jones states that if a writer has nothing to say but “‘I can feel’ or ‘I am intelligent’ there is really no need saying it.” That is, in their quest for white recognition of their suffering, they do not take a stand. “A writer must have a point of view . . . he must be standing somewhere in the world, or else he is not one of us, and his commentary is of little value.”54
Being unfamiliar with Peter Abrahams’s writing, I cannot verify the validity of Jones’s criticisms of him. At any rate, the Jones critique of Baldwin is misleading. At the very moment that this critique of Baldwin appeared in Kulcher, few in the American intellectual community would have claimed that James Baldwin’s writings lacked a point of view. Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) were neither noncommittal nor lacking a point of view. In 1963, the same year that Jones attacked Baldwin, Baldwin published The Fire Next Time. As a politicized essay writer, Baldwin, at his best, grasped a complexity in the Afro-American psyche and the American racial conundrum that forever eluded Jones (except perhaps in his play Dutchman).
More important, Baldwin did not merely whine about his treatment at the hands of whites. It is true that he wrote as a Christian-influenced moralist who believed in the redemptive nature of suffering. Nevertheless, Baldwin labeled as dehumanization his racist oppressors’ urgency to subjugate black “others.” In sum, he was not simply trying to invoke his specialness as a sufferer but to use suffering as cultural capital in his efforts to morally critique the world around him. Jones’s misinterpretation of Baldwin may have been deliberate, as Baldwin’s thought contained an element of the victim status that may have struck Jones as ethnically self-demeaning. Yet instead of concentrating on that one facet of Baldwin’s writing, Jones attempted to sweep all of it under a rug of irrelevance. It was a clever polemical ploy but somewhat dishonest, and in overstating Baldwin’s dependence on whites, Jones overstated his own posture:
If Abrahams and Baldwin were turned white, for example, there would be no more noise from them. Not because they consciously desire that, but because then they could be sensitive in peace. Their color is the only obstruction I can see to this state they seek, and I see no reason they should be denied it for so paltry a thing as heavy pigmentation. Somebody turn them! And then perhaps the rest of us can get down to the work at hand. Cutting throats!55
A dramatic but childish ending, Jones needed to explain why Baldwin’s existence prevented him (and “the rest of us”) from getting down to the work of cutting throats. As a foretaste of the pronouncements encouraging violence that emerged from Jones’s pen during the Black Arts era, he invokes a disingenuous obstacle to explain why he cannot, just yet, actualize his threats.56
In the short 1963 essay “Black Writing,” Jones extends his discussion of the plight of the Negro writer. He begins the essay focusing on the various debilitations faced by black writers as a result of the distorted and dishonest racist images that they must confront in their daily lives and work. Yet the racist devaluation of blacks offers black writers a unique vantage point for understanding America. Jones advises them to embrace their pariah identity and make use of their racial outsider status.
I think though that there are now a great many young black writers in America who do realize that their customary isolation from the mainstream is a valuable way into any description they might make of an America. In fact, it is just this alienation that could serve to make a very powerful American literature.57
Jones was asserting that blacks had a dual social location and that this location might inspire enormous creativity.
The vantage point is classically perfect—outside and inside—at the same time. Think of the great Irish writers—Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, O’Casey and Beckett—and their clear and powerful understanding (social as well as aesthetic) of where they were and how best they could function inside and outside the imaginary English society, even going so far as teaching the mainstreamers their own language, and revitalizing it in the doing.58
At face value, this comparison of Irish writers and black American writers is enticing. This enticement no doubt stems from the enormous presence of these Irish writers in twentieth-century literature and the fact that they were members of a subjugated group that had been victimized by economic exploitation, colonization, and a vicious racism.59 Nonetheless, the case of Irish writers is immensely different and probably incomparable to that of black American writers. The main shortcoming of the comparison lies in the colonial history of the Irish and the absence of such a history for blacks in the United States. Irish writers participated in numerous stages of anticolonial and postcolonial writing. Initially, anticolonial Irish writing of the twentieth century attempted to create a romantic historical memory of an Irish past before the arrival of the British. Some, like Yeats, yearned for an Irish romantic past before the time when “men gave their lives to Greece and Rome and Judea.”60 Irish anticolonialist writers were able to call on two distinct romantic pasts, one Celtic and the other Gaelic. But black Americans had no similarly indigenous black American, pre-American historical past. Since the antebellum period, black Americans’ cultural outsider status in the United States has become more and more like a subcultural distinction. Afro-American cultural inventiveness has been part of American life for centuries. Conversely, once Ireland became independent, writers like Joyce and, later, Beckett confronted Ireland’s cultural dependence on England.
The significance of Jones’s invocation of the Irish writers that he so admired is that even though these writers were members of a subjugated group, they won the acclaim of the broader European literary community. He now wanted blacks to take their place among the seminal literary artists of the Western world and to influence white minds. Ironically, blacks were already exerting such influence on the white world through their music.
In “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” an essay that was published in 1963 in the Jewish American journal Midstream, Jones offered his views on nonviolence as a strategy of black social change. Jones clearly perceived the victim-status syndrome inherent in Martin Luther King Jr.’s political project. Whereas black writers had mistakenly sought white acceptance, black nonviolent protesters were seeking to elicit white guilt. Jones mistakenly argued that nonviolence, as in nonviolent civil disobedience, was the strategy of the black bourgeoisie. In addition, he erred in claiming that nonviolent civil disobedience was acceptable in the eyes of the white powers that be. Ironically, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had a larger base of support in the black working class than Baraka and other black nationalist militants would ever have. At the time, King’s popularity among the black poor probably exceeded that of Malcolm X. Furthermore, it was not apparent that the black bourgeoisie viewed imprisonment in southern jails as a status-validating exercise. King, SCLC ministers, SNCC field organizers, and local NAACP activists were jailed repeatedly, and some were killed. Many were members of the black middle class. One such bourgeois fellow was the courageous, soft-spoken, college-educated Medgar Evers, head of the NAACP branch in Jackson, Mississippi. In universalizing his narrow exposure to the black bourgeois frivolity that he found at Howard University, Jones could not understand bourgeois blacks like Evers, King, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Andrew Young, or Bob Moses.
Jones attributed too much significance to the celebration of King by northern white liberals like those who lived with him in the Village. Jones failed to view King and other black nonviolent activists through the eyes of the black community. Paradoxically, the “blacker” that Jones became, the more significance he attributed to white American perceptions of the Civil Rights movement. Jones’s obsessive concern for the image of blacks in white minds endured throughout most of his political life.
Coincidentally, Martin Luther King Jr. shared Jones’s concern with the image of blacks in white minds but did so from a diametrically different vantage point. King devised a leadership style that embodied bourgeois respectability, whereas Jones tried to tear it down. But King did not seek bourgeois respectability as an end in itself. Instead, his quest became a crucial ingredient of his strategy for social change. If blacks could project to whites an image of themselves as devout, well groomed, good mannered, property respecting, and sexually repressed, King believed that they might have a better chance of convincing whites that racist infringements on their rights were unjust. Jones’s desire to flaunt bourgeois respectability was not linked to a strategy for social change, however, but was an end in itself, part of his deeply embedded bohemian tendencies.
Jones misunderstood the radical implications of King’s bid for victim status. Hadn’t it been the white South’s claim that “our Negroes” were not unhappy with their plight? Jones was both angered and perplexed by black political leaders like King, who instructed black people to become objects of southern white brutality in order to obtain a victim status that could then give them the moral capital necessary to prick nonsouthern, white American popular concern. King believed that widespread white support would lead the federal government to act on behalf of subjugated southern blacks. In other words, King thought that he could use the victim status to undermine black political subjugation. Jones recognized that the problem with King’s victim-status strategy (of reliving the Christ event) was that it does not and cannot lead to self-determination. King’s strategy was so dependent on white moral gratuity that one may have wondered whether he was the tail that was wagged by the dog or the dog that wagged the tail.
In hindsight, it is clear that King miscalculated the nonsouthern black response to the white brutalization of southern black nonviolent civil disobedience. King’s strategy relied on instigating white southern brutality against nonviolent, predominantly black demonstrators to generate nonsouthern white guilt toward southern blacks. This blueprint for inducing white guilt apparently overlooked those nonsouthern blacks who would not feel guilt but humiliation and rage as a result of this strategy. Consequently, many nonsouthern blacks became bent on revenge. However morally superior King and his followers may have appeared to whites in not fighting back, in the eyes of many nonsouthern blacks, black southern demonstrators seemed disgustingly weak. Like many northern blacks, Jones was outraged by the ways in which southern blacks were being brutalized by local law enforcement agencies.
After writing about racial tokenism, nonviolence, and other “black issues” in such a scathing manner, Jones edited and published an anthology in which all of the contributors, except for himself, were white Americans. The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, was published by Corinth Books in 1963. As an additional rationale for his selections, Jones wrote:
One characteristic that binds most of the writers in this volume together, at least as far as a common distinction which separates them immediately from the serious middlebrow establishment fiction of our era, is that for the most part they are interested in those personalities (and people) who exist outside the mainstream of the American social organism.61
I do not mean to imply that these writers were insufficiently innovative or dynamic but that Jones’s criteria for selecting the creators of “the most interesting and exciting writing that has taken place in this country since the war”62 evidently led him to dismiss all black writers but himself. Despite his protest against tokenism, Jones helped construct himself as a racial token. Once again, Jones was flirting with the status of “the exceptional Negro,” the one who is not like the others.
Jones never assumed the identity of a bohemian “who happened to be black,” but he was able to construct a creative life in Beat bohemia despite the overwhelming whiteness of the Village scene. Jones’s desire to become more explicitly politicized in his writings and actions initially gave rise to efforts to expand the boundaries of his bohemian art world. In contrast to the broader apoliticization of many of his closest bohemian confreres, Jones attempted to become increasingly politicized without abandoning his artistic community. He remained attracted to the idea that the artist’s political sensibilities were best expressed aesthetically, but he now wanted to articulate his politics in more direct ways than could be sustained by the manipulation of poetic meter, metaphor, symbol, and rhythm. Although bohemian poetics were antagonistic to the broader society, their driving force was aesthetic innovation and protest (or implicit cultural critique). Jones’s political desires led him to question the viability of avant-garde poetics. But these contradictory desires soon gave rise to unresolvable tensions that ultimately led Jones to reject bohemia. For now, however, these tensions fueled a momentous period of creativity.
In response to the growing Civil Rights movement, the Village theater scene became far more receptive to serious drama about black life. During the early 1960s, Langston Hughes’s Jericho Jim Crow, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, and Martin Duberman’s In White America opened in the Village. Despite this new interest in black theater, few theatergoers and critics were ready for the militancy introduced into the American theater by the relatively unknown playwright LeRoi Jones. Jones’s entrance onto the American stage scared, angered, and inspired both blacks and whites. In addition to the content of his plays, Jones’s emergence was magnified by the simultaneous opening of three of his plays in the Village during one week in March 1964. In his “Across the Footlights” column, New York Post drama critic Jerry Tallmer wrote: “This is LeRoi Jones week in the theater. A few days ago we had his The Eighth Ditch at the New Bowery, now shuttered by officialdom. Tonight we have his Dutchman at the Cherry Lane. And last night we had the premiere of his The Baptism at the Writers’ Stage.”63
The Baptism was first performed at the Writer’s Stage Theater in New York City on March 23, 1964. It was part of a double bill with Frank O’Hara’s The General Returns from One Place to Another.
The setting is the altar area of an affluent Baptist church. Minister is talking with Homosexual (the characters in the play are nameless). Although their dialogue is somewhat absurd, we learn that the homosexual is hip and celebrates sexuality while the finely tailored minister affects an air of piety. Homosexual knows that Minister is a fraud, and they informally but vulgarly needle each other. Interrupting their discussion, a young boy enters the church looking for the minister and expecting to be baptized. Boy is weeping as he begs the minister, whom he calls father, to pray for him. He admits to the minister that he needs absolution before he can be baptized.
Minister reassures crying Boy that there is nothing to fear from God, for God will not abandon him. As Minister talks to Boy, Old Woman rushes into the church shouting that the little boy is a wretched sinner, “an agent of the devil.” Old Woman’s accusations lead the minister to ask Boy just what he had done to make her angry. The boy denies knowing her or having seen her before now. The woman says that she saw him through her kitchen window as he was pretending to pray. The boy insists, “I was praying.” But Old Woman cannot be sidetracked. Feeling divinely empowered to expose wrongdoings, the woman describes in detail how the boy appeared to pray but was really masturbating. Obviously aroused by the young boy’s sexuality, Old Woman’s gaze had been fixated on his penis. The passionate condemnations of the boy’s soul are indications of the sexual excitement the woman felt. Old Woman describes his crime and then collapses as she tries to grab the young boy by the legs. Minister is also sexually attracted to Boy. As Old Woman elaborates her accusation, Minister is seen softly stroking Boy’s head. Minister still believes that Boy can be saved, but he views Old Woman as having done a true Christian deed in reporting his masturbation. Boy admits that woman’s charges were correct. He admits that “thinking of God always gives me a hard-on.” Homosexual provides a running commentary. He tells Boy that he is not in need of saving. Instead, sex—like the devil—is a part of life and ultimately God’s creation. For uttering such statements, Minister considers Homosexual to be blasphemous. Homosexual inquires and discovers that Boy has masturbated three times a day every day of that year. Homosexual comments, “That’s one thousand ninety-five beatings. Not bad. Not bad.”64
Six young women enter the church. They are the minister’s “usherettes . . . holy young virgins.” These women refer to the boy as the Christ child returned, the Son of God. While simultaneously moaning and kneeling in prayer, the women admit to the preacher that they have had sex with the Son of God, “our holy husband.” The minister and the woman who accused the boy of masturbation throw themselves on their knees begging his forgiveness. They now believe that Boy is the returned Jesus. Instead, Boy beckons them to their feet while claiming, “I am not the Son of Man. I lied, I am not the Son of God.”
At this point the minister and everyone present except Homosexual feels betrayed and angry at Boy. The women who had sex with Boy now proclaim that they have “fucked for nothing.” In anger, Minister, Old Woman, and Women approach Boy, demanding that he be put to death as a sacrifice. Their motives are to cleanse themselves. Homosexual tries to protect the boy but is knocked out. Boy begs for forgiveness but sees that none is forthcoming. At that point the boy reveals his true identity as the Son of God and slashes all of them to death with a sword. Only Homosexual is spared.
After the Son of God kills the eight people, a messenger from God arrives on a motorcycle. He has been told by God to bring his son home, for he has “fucked up royally.” The son asks God for another chance and begs him not to destroy the world. The son also refuses to return to Heaven. While resisting the order to return, he is clubbed unconscious by the messenger, who rides off with the son of man drooped over his motorcycle. The play ends when Homosexual awakens, extricates himself from beneath the pile of dead bodies, and decides to go to the bar before it closes. He knows nothing of the earth’s impending doom.
The Baptism is a hilarious play criticizing the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Church, particularly the black church. The play reveals the dishonesty, phony love, and repressed sexuality that motivates the minister as well as the other believers. Sollors believes that The Baptism, Baraka’s first attempt to explore the social implications of drama, does not quite succeed. The characters are underdeveloped, particularly the boy. The minister never earns a status worthy of murder; the women are too shallow and stereotypical; and Homosexual, who is depicted as a humorous if not ludicrous figure, remains the only character with any common sense. But Kimberly Benston considered The Baptism a “theatrical tour de force, a whirling succession of self-consciously struck poses, nonsense patter, surreal images and exposed perversions.”According to Benston, Jones was influenced by the European theater of spectacle, particularly the works of Genet and Cocteau:
Baraka unites images of the Sunday-morning commercialization of religious services, the garish bourgeois expression of wealth in religious edifices, and the sexual perversion latent in religious “ecstasy” and “worship” in one sweeping critique of the American Christian church and its cultural, moral and spiritual failures.65
In the estimation of most critics, Dutchman is Jones’s best play. As his best-known single work, Dutchman launched Jones into prominence as an indignant and contentious voice of Afro-American literary protest. Reviewing the play in The Nation magazine, theater critic Harold Clurman wrote:
Dutchman indicates the emergence of an outstanding dramatist—LeRoi Jones. His is a turbulent talent. While turbulence is not always a sign of power or of valuable meaning, I have a hunch that LeRoi Jones’ fire will burn even higher and clearer if our theatre can furnish an adequate vessel to harbor his flame. We need it.66
The play begins with Clay, a black man, sitting alone in a speeding subway car. The train stops at a station where Clay’s idle glance catches the gaze of an attractive red-headed white woman who is standing on the landing. They smile at each other. Lula enters the subway car from the rear door, carrying a bag and eating an apple. She walks to where Clay is sitting and flops down next to him. This act is conspicuous because empty seats are plentiful. Soon, staring directly at him, she accuses him of having stared at her “ass and legs” when she was standing at the station. Clay protests, whereupon the white woman informs him that she came close to the window so that he could get a better look at her body. Moreover, she boarded this train in order to see him, even though it is not going in her direction. Lula taunts Clay with sexual innuendoes. He perceives her as wanting to “pick him up.” She succeeds in enticing Clay but speaks to him as if his response is utterly ludicrous. She says, “You think I want to pick you up, take me somewhere and screw me, huh?” He feigns ignorance. She begins to make educated guesses about him that are generally correct. She surmises that he is trying to grow a beard and that he lives in New Jersey with his parents. While not all this may be true, he is amazed that Lula knows about the beard and that he lives in Jersey. Baffled, he asks her if they have met before and quizzes her about potential mutual friends who must have told her about him. She attempts to further entice him, going as far as putting her hand on his knee and rubbing his thighs. She asks about his desire for her.
LULA: Would you like to get involved with me, Mister Man?
CLAY: Sure. Why not? A beautiful woman like you. Huh, I’d be a fool not to.67
Still intrigued by her knowledge about him, he once again asks about her source. Lula responds, “I told you that I don’t know anything about you . . . you’re a well-known type.” She guesses correctly that he is on his way to a party and suggests to him that he ask her to come along. He agrees to do so but first asks her name. After a few games, she tells him her name is Lula. He tells her to guess his name. She mocks “colored” New Jersey names but is unsuccessful. When Clay gives her a choice of three last names from which to guess his, she does so correctly, “Williams.” Clay then asks her to go to the party with him, but she replies that she doesn’t know him. They exchange small talk, but Lula is annoyed.
LULA: . . . What’ve you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat for? And why’re you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. . . . What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.
CLAY: My grandfather was a night watchman.68
Not recognizing the theme of her taunts, Clay continues to converse with her. She snidely asks him just who it is that he thinks he was in college and is today. He informs her that in college he imagined himself as Baudelaire. Lula mockingly responds, “I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger.” Their dialogue continues, and Lula informs him that her mother was a communist. Clay’s mother, he claims, was a Republican. This first scene ends with Lula telling Clay that he is a murderer. Clay doesn’t understand.
The second scene begins with Lula hugging Clay’s arm. A few other people are now seated in the car. Clay’s tie has been loosened, and he seems more relaxed. Lula fantasizes about what they will do at the party and later when they arrive at her apartment. Of course, the evening she describes culminates in sex. As she predicts these events, Clay is kissing her neck and fingers and appears excited about his forthcoming sexual escapade with Lula. Once again Lula “shifts gears” and begins a critique of Clay. The train begins to fill with people, all of whom are white. Clay expresses mild but meaningless surprise that they are no longer alone. He is more aware of the numerical presence of the people than their particular racial identities. Lula tells him that she knows those people even better than she knows him. She wonders whether he is now frightened. Astonished by the question, Clay indicates that he does not know why he would be scared.
CLAY: . . . Why should they frighten me?
LULA: ’Cause you are an escaped nigger.
CLAY: Yeah?
LULA: ’Cause you crawled through the wire and made tracks to my side.
CLAY: Wire?
LULA: Don’t they have wire around plantations?
CLAY: You must be Jewish. All you think about is wire. Plantations didn’t have any wire. Plantations were big open whitewashed places like heaven, and everybody on ’em was grooved to be there. Just strummin’ and hummin’ all day . . . and that’s how the blues was born.69
Repeating Clay’s refrain, “and that’s how the blues was born,” Lula dances up and down the subway aisle, bumping into people. Somewhat amused, Clay tries to mask his embarrassment by engaging her in humorous banter. Lula ups the ante by calling on Clay to dance with her. Lula taunts, “Come on, Clay, Let’s rub bellies on the train. The nasty. The nasty. Do the gritty grind, like your ol’ rag head mammy.” Clay becomes increasingly angered by Lula and her public display of annoyance at his refusal to accede to her demands to dance. She calls him a middle-class black bastard, a liver-lipped white man. “You would-be Christian. You ain’t no nigger, you’re just a dirty white man.” Following more racial invectives from Lula, Clay tries to grab her but fails. Lula continues to taunt him, calling him “Uncle Tom-Thomas Woolly-Head.” Other whites seated on the train laugh at her comments. A drunk white man gets up from his seat and tries to dance with her. Now angered, Clay punches the drunk to the floor, grabs Lula, and slings her into her seat. Undaunted, she tells him that he fears white people. Clay slaps her twice very hard and then states:
I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it flat, and watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks. All these weak-faced ofays squatting around here, staring over their papers at me. Murder them too. . . . It takes no great effort. For what? To kill you soft idiots? You don’t understand anything but luxury.70
In denying her accusation that he feared whites, Clay asserts that he has no need to fear whites, since he could, with ease, murder all the whites seated on the subway. But Clay does not explain that given the ease with which he could kill whites, why it is that he dances to the puppet strings held by whites. In what may be the most revealing lines in the play, Clay states,
If I’m a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. . . . Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It’s none of your business. You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart . . . .I sit here, in this button-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats.71
As if the audience would not find such dialogue sufficiently scandalous, Clay crudely questions Lula’s pretensions of familiarity with blacks.
You great liberated whore. You fuck some black man and right away you’re an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. . . . The belly rub? You don’t even know how. . . . Belly rub is not Queens.72
He tells her that Charlie Parker wouldn’t have played his sax had he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people that he saw.
If Bessie Smith had killed some people she wouldn’t have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. . . . Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane. Ahh Shit. But who needs it? I’d rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests.73
Lula informs Clay that she has heard enough. Clay begins to collect his briefcase and books in order to get off the train. Facetiously, he apologizes to Lula for short-circuiting their sexual plans for that night. When he bends down to retrieve his belongings, she plunges a knife into him. Clay dies. The train stops at a station. As if on cue, the other white passengers on the train pick up his body and, on Lula’s orders, toss it off the train. Following her instructions, the whites get off the train at the next stop. The play ends as another solitary young black man enters the train and sits several seats behind Lula. She turns around and stares at him. A black conductor shuffles down the aisle, says hello to the black man, tips his hat at Lula, and continues through the door of the car.
Dutchman is primarily an absurdist play, with elements of realism. Jones did not create a coherent plot or maintain a realistic stage setting. The play contains themes that appear in Jones’s work throughout the 1960s. First, Clay, the assimilated bourgeois Negro, is not only artificial but is also attracted to death (in the form of Lula’s stupefying whiteness). It is his cultural assimilation that makes him vulnerable to Lula’s evil intentions, for he is preoccupied with the belief that he is just “one of the crowd.” Thus, there was nothing unusual about Lula’s come-on to him. Clay does everything in his power to ignore the realization that this white woman sees him as a black other. She, of course, forces him to confront their racial difference. When he does so, he explodes. Through his repressed rage, we see the “real Clay,” or what Jones has described elsewhere as “a renegade behind the mask. And even the mask, a renegade disguise.”74
Although Clay carries himself as a respectable figure, he seems incapable of rejecting the overtures of a less than respectable white woman. Why is he so enticed by this crazed white woman? Do we see images of “Crow-Janeism” here? On another level, Lula may represent white America and its death-dealing enticements to all blacks who believe that they have entered the ranks of the racially “acceptable.” The repressed rage of blacks is not unknown to whites. Whites merely demand that such anger remain repressed, for all that matters to them is how blacks navigate public space. When such rage is publicly articulated, whites will respond in a repressive manner, perhaps even with murder.
Symbolically, the play invokes images of Eden and the fallen woman. Lula enters the train eating an apple. The play moves from innocence and ignorance through knowledge to death. Yet, as Leslie Sanders notes, Lula is both serpent and an aspiring Eve. She is not quite Eve because she does not really seek or possess any “true” knowledge, even though her stereotypes of Clay are well grounded. She does know a great deal about Clay’s repressed anger and its short fuse. It is obvious that the play concerns the sexual energies between a white woman and a black man, a taboo relationship that in the past led to the murder of many black males. For an audience aware of this historical backdrop, the anxieties and fears generated by the play become all the more intense because of the black male’s naïveté and the white female’s apparent sexual abandon and aggressiveness.
Harold Clurman perceived more in Jones’s anger than a protest against white racism. Instead, he imagined Lula as “the absolute neurosis of American society.”
She is “hip”: she has heard about everything, understands and feels nothing. She twitches, jangles, jitters with a thin but inexhaustible energy, propelled by the vibrations from millions of ads, television quiz programs, newspaper columns, intellectual jargon culled from countless digests, panel discussions. . . . She is the most “informed” person in the world and the most ignorant. . . . She is the bubbling, boiling garbage cauldron newly produced by our progress. She is a calculating machine gone berserk; she is the real killer. What she destroys is not men of a certain race but mankind.75
By removing the play’s racial implications, Clurman certainly softens its message. In his eyes, Dutchman is less of an indictment of white America than an indictment of American civilization—which thankfully, for Clurman, has no racial specificity. Ironically, Clurman probably thinks that he is elevating the play’s status by making its racial message of secondary importance.
Jones also, at times, softened the play’s racial image. In an interview published in 1964, he added to the confusion surrounding the meaning of Dutchman. Jones argued that the play had no broader social message. When asked if Lula represented all of white America, he asked:
But how can one white person be all white persons, unless all white persons are alike? . . . Similarly, it is equally stupid to think of the Negro boy as all Negroes, even though, as I’ve said, most white people do think of black men simply as Negroes and not as individual men. But I showed one white girl and one Negro boy in that play, and the play is about one white girl and one Negro boy, just them, singularly, in what I hope was a revelation of private and shared anguish.
But I will say this, if the girl (or the boy) in that play has to “represent” anything, I mean if she must be symbolic in the way demented academicians use the term, she does not exist at all. She is not meant to be a symbol, but a real person, a real thing, in a real world. She does not represent any thing—she is one. And perhaps that thing is America, or at least its spirit. . . . Dutchman is about the difficulty of becoming a man in America. It is very difficult to be sure, if you are black, but I think it is now much harder to become one if you’re white.76
What is striking about this particular “spin” on Jones’s play is that it did not last long. In a very short time, he could be heard referring to Dutchman as a metaphor of black-white interactions in the United States.
Howard Taubman, theater critic for the New York Times, was overwhelmed by Dutchman:
Everything about LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman is designed to shock—its basic idea, its language and its murderous rage. This half-hour long piece . . . is an explosion of hatred rather than a play. It puts into the mouth of its principal Negro character a scathing denunciation of all the white man’s good works, pretensions and condescensions. . . . If this is the way the Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine. If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm and for a hastening of change.77
The power of Dutchman stemmed from its message and the shocking but intelligent manner in which it was conveyed. Ironically, the play’s dramatic power became for some critics, particularly some perverse white critics, a sign of its dishonesty. After all, a Negro playwright who could write in such a powerful fashion and have his play produced could not really harbor such rage against whites and white racism. If white Americans had been as racist as Jones’s play described them, how could we explain the existence of Jones, the writer? And how do we explain his marriage to a white woman?
Jones’s Dutchman forced whites to confront their own wishful thinking concerning American racial dynamics. His willingness to express black disgust with whites was interpreted by many whites as hateful. Yet hidden beneath such assessments was the nagging reality that however much whites may have believed that blacks wanted to love them, they also knew that blacks had reason to hate them.
The play also comments on certain existential choices confronting black American intellectuals/artists who were using the written and spoken word as the primary means to assert their existence and/or protest their subjugation. In a moment of profound introspection, Clay states that instead of murdering white people, he would “rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths.” Clay’s statements imply that writing, at least for subjugated black Americans, is an act of weakness or cowardice insofar as it constitutes a decision to remain safely away from the repression that the state might unleash on political activists. The British critic C. W. E. Bigsby captured the dilemma confronting Jones (via Clay):
His doubts about language extend to the work itself in which action tells a truth which the words would conceal. His doubts about his position as a writer, warning against the deceptions of language, pose questions which not only address the special circumstances of the committed artist but also acknowledge the unreliability of language itself. In other words the insecurities that he confronts go beyond simple acts of racial prejudice, just as the real betrayal that he addresses is the betrayal of the self rather than the other. Clay is condemned to death and Lula to her everlasting task because, like the Flying Dutchman, they have in a sense blasphemed against the natural order. They have betrayed themselves.78
The Toilet is a one-act play that takes place in a high school lavatory. The lavatory is dirty and reeks of urine. It is at the end of the school day, and several black male students casually enter the lavatory in anticipation of an impending fight. The would-be combatants are not yet present. Instead we are witness to the badgering among several of the black students. Most frightening is the gang bully, the pathologically violent Ora. The others don’t joke with Ora in the same manner as they do with one another. Always one step away from ferocity, the tormented Ora does not know how to “play.”
We learn from several characters that James Karolis, a white male student (“a paddy”) is being chased on the third floor of the school by a group of black male students. Terrified, Karolis has been difficult to corner. But word comes to those waiting in the lavatory that Karolis is now locked in a third-floor closet and will soon be brought to the basement lavatory where he will be forced to fight. The black guy who is supposed to have the “beef” with Karolis is Ray Foots. Foots, the leader of the gang, has not yet entered the lavatory. He is in class, where he is a favorite student of the teacher. His studiousness clearly distinguishes him from the other gang members.
Wanting to see the fight, other black males soon enter the lavatory. One black student brings with him a white male student, Donald Farrell. Farrell does not know that he has been brought there by his black friend to watch a fight. Several of the black students present, including Ora, demand that Farrell leave. After much protest and banter, he is allowed to stay. Ora then informs Farrell that they all plan to “kick Karolis’s ass,” an assertion more indicative of Ora’s desires than the collective ambitions of the other black fellows present. One black gang member says that he isn’t going to fight Karolis (“Shit Karolis never bothered me”). When Farrell protests the impending gang assault of Karolis, Ora punches him in the stomach. Farrell is doubled over when a bloody-faced Karolis is dragged in by two gang members. Already beaten, Karolis is dropped on the floor. Ora goes over to the beaten lad and taunts him to suck his penis. Ignorant of the preceding events, Foots, the gang leader, enters the room joking, only to be startled when he sees Karolis’s condition. He manages to mask his shock. It is made clear to the audience that Foots does not want to fight Karolis but that the other gang members are not aware of his ambivalence. Because of his rhetorical agility, Foots is almost able to avoid the fight on the pretense that Karolis has already been beaten. “Just poor water on the cat and let’s get outta here.” Upon hearing Foots’s rationale for not going through with the arranged fight, Farrell, the other white guy, states, “I sure am glad somebody got’s some sense here.” In making this statement, Farrell unknowingly stigmatizes Foots as an “exception,” more sensible than the other black fellows present, particularly Ora. Farrell thus has inadvertently undermined Foots’s strategy for avoiding the fight, for he makes Foots look as if in not fighting, he is siding with the “white boy” against his black gang. Foots, recognizing the danger that Farrell presents, demands that he leave. Farrell won’t, perhaps believing that his presence will prevent a gang attack on Karolis. He demands to know why Foots is going to fight Karolis. Foots remains adamant about making Farrell leave, but one of the gang members mentions out loud that the fight is over a letter that Karolis sent to Foots. Now aware of the reasons behind the imminent fight, Farrell responds as if he knows more about the Foots-Karolis relationship than the gang members do. After Farrell is forcibly thrown out of the lavatory, Foots is about to leave when Karolis speaks up, announcing a desire to fight him.79
KAROLIS: No. You have to fight me. I sent you that note, remember. That note saying I loved you. The note saying you were beautiful. You remember that note, Ray?
FOOTS: Goddamn it, if you’re going to fight, fight you cocksucker.
KAROLIS: Yeh. That’s what I’m going to do Ray. I’m going to fight you. We’re here to fight. About that note, right? The one that said I wanted to take you in my mouth.
Did I call you Ray in that letter . . . or Foots? Foots! I’m going to break your fucking neck. That’s right. That’s the one I want to kill. Foots!80
The fight begins. When it becomes clear to the gathered crowd that Karolis is getting the upper hand, the gang jumps in. Foots, who was being strangled by Karolis, crawls on his hands and knees away from the gang attack. Only Ora has the audacity to admit what they all know, that “good ole” Foots was beaten by Karolis. Some gang members help Foots to his feet. They all leave. Karolis’s motionless body remains sprawled on the floor. A short time later, Foots returns to the lavatory, stares at the outstretched Karolis, and kneels before his limp body, weeping and cradling his bloodied head.
As Werner Sollors notes, the meaning of The Toilet is not apparent. Even Jones sometimes offered two contrasting interpretations of the play. In the “Introduction by the Playwright” that accompanied The Toilet when it was included in the collection The Best Plays of 1964–65, Jones described these competing interpretations:
The Toilet is about the lives of black people. White people tell me it is not. They have no way of knowing, but they insist they do. They try to deny my version (and any black man’s version) of American reality, on the stage, just as they do in the street . . . .
The Toilet is also a play about love. And a boy’s inability (because he is a victim) to explain that he is something stranger than the rest, even though the blood and soul of him is as theirs. It is a play about social order, and what it can mean, ie: the brutality its insistence will demand, if it is not an order which can admit of any man’s beauty.81
Gerald Weales also found competing meanings in The Toilet:
Given Jones’s obsessive concern with his own identity in his work, the struggle that he defines as a pull between whiteness and blackness, the play is ironic since its final effect is to suggest that Foots has lost by his choice. It is possible, however, to read the play in other than racial terms, as the story of a boy, lacking the courage to face his own individuality and its implications, who chooses the mindless, cheerful brutality of the group.82
According to Harold Clurman’s review, The Toilet was fundamentally about hypocrisy.
The two youths who beat each other nearly to death are secretly and shamefacedly in love with each other. That the love is between black and white as well as being homosexual is undoubtedly significant, but far less significant than that we are made to realize that its frustration must result in the most shameful and horrifying cruelty.83
In “That Boy LeRoi,”84 a review of The Toilet that appeared in New York Post, Langston Hughes also read the play as being more concerned about unrequited homosexual love than about race. Hughes recommended that the play be racially double-cast “for the sake of sensitive Negroes and battered white liberals.” He also proposed changing the performers’ racial identities on alternating nights.
Every other night, let all the present Negro characters be played by white actors, and vice versa. Four times a week I would like to see white school boys in “The Toilet” beating up a colored boy and sticking his head into a urinal. . . . Black would then be white—and white, black—which alternatively would cancel out each other.85
Hughes’s suggestion would thoroughly revise the meaning of the play, turning it into a love story only, a story of two individuals. But to write as if the characters’ racial identities were incidental would be to ignore the desperateness of black urban life that Jones depicted so well. Jones situated the homophobic violence in the cultural context of a high school, a location in which these black males had no agency. In beating Karolis, the cowardly black gang members were able to witness the triumph of their worldview over that of the school environment. The ending of the play in which Foots cradles Karolis seems contrived, as it is not earned by the preceding dialogue and actions and appears more shocking than tragic. The final scene can be read as a racial resolution of sorts, a re-connectedness between the two interracial lovers (turned racial antagonists) that transcends racial conflict.
Jones has admitted to having compromised the meaning of the play in order to introduce the possibility of interracial harmony. In a 1978 interview, he stated,
The ending is peculiar because I tacked it on. It actually invokes my own social situation at the time. . . . If you ever look at the manuscript you’ll see that the manuscript stops at the end of the fight. But then I sat there for a while thinking, was that really the way it had to end? . . . Well the whole thing needed some kind of rapprochement—there was a question of wanting to offer that kind of friendship that existed across traditional social lines. At the time I was married to a white woman, and most of the friends I had were white, on the Lower East Side. I didn’t go round thinking in my mind this is the case, but I think that is why that kind of ending seemed more appropriate to me at the time.86
Often viewed as Baraka’s most racially militant play, The Slave opened on December 16, 1964, at St. Mark’s Playhouse, on a double bill with The Toilet. A prologue proceeds the main narrative of the play. Walker, the central character, appears as an old, white-haired field slave dressed in ragged clothing and grinning. His physical movements are reminiscent of Willie Best. Walker delivers a soliloquy worthy of an academic philosopher:
Whatever the core of our lives. Whatever the deceit. We live where we are, and seek nothing but ourselves. We are liars, and we are murderers. We invent death for others. Stop their pulses publicly. Stone possible lovers with heavy worlds we think are ideas . . . and we know, even before these shapes are realized, that these worlds, these depths or heights we fly to smoothly, as in a dream, or slighter, when we stare dumbly into space, leaning our eyes just behind a last quick moving bird, then sometimes the place and twist of what we are will push and sting, and what the crust of our stance has become will ring in our ears and shatter that piece of our eyes that is never closed.
The prologue is a call to distrust habitual perceptions and long-held certitudes. The slave tries to unsettle all our preconceived notions:
I am much older than I look . . . or maybe much younger. Whatever I am or seem . . . to you, then let that rest. But figure, still, that you might not be right. Figure, still, that you might be lying . . . to save yourself.87
While some students of Baraka’s drama have offered an intricate analysis of the prologue’s meaning, others have ignored it in favor of dissecting the meaning of the main narrative.
The main narrative of the play concerns a race war in the United States at some unspecified moment in the future. During a raging battle, Walker Vessels, the leader of the blacks, leaves the ranks of his fighting comrades and walks alone, behind enemy lines, to the house now occupied by his former wife, who has custody of their two daughters. Grace, his former wife, is white. She lives on the “white America” side of town with her two biracial daughters and second husband, Bradford Easley, a white man. Easley is Walker’s former literature professor. Grace divorced Walker and took custody of their daughters in response to his intensifying allegiances to black nationalism and his growing hatred of whites. Walker is tortured by ambivalence. He is the revolutionary leader of blacks, and yet he remains sentimental about Grace. Nonetheless, Walker has not come here to pursue his former wife. Instead we are informed that he has come to Grace’s house to take back his two “black” daughters with him to the side of “black America.”
Most of the play takes place in the bourgeois intellectual ambience of the well-appointed house that Grace and Easley call home. Grace is beautiful and blond. Easley is stereotypically depicted as a wimpy white liberal professor. Easley is an expert on literature and friendly toward the Negroes but opposes their revolutionary intentions. He emphatically expresses disdain for the blacks who are shelling the city and destroying the country. Unknown to both Grace and Easley, Walker has broken into their home while they were out.
Upon entering the house with Grace, Easley removes the protective steel helmet that has become a necessity in the face of the race war. He is startled to find Walker Vessels standing in the living room holding a pistol. Annoyed and angered by Vessels’s intrusion into his house, Easley tells Walker, “Look, you arrogant maniac, if you get drunk or fall out here, so help me, I’ll call the soldiers . . . and turn you over to them. . . . If I get the slightest advantage, some cracker soldier will be bayoneting you before the night is finished.” Annoyed with Easley’s arrogance, Walker slaps him several times and pushes the gun barrel into Easley’s stomach. He is knocked to the floor. Grace is angered and hysterically calls Walker a “nigger murderer.” Humorously surprised, Walker asks Grace how long had she been harboring the desire to call him a nigger. Grace begs him to leave before he kills somebody, particularly another white person. Walker tells her that only she and Brad are white, that the two daughters upstairs are black. “You know circa 1800, one drop makes you whole.”88
This argument continues, as does Walker’s drinking. Intermittently, Walker speaks to Grace in a warm and tender manner as if he is still haunted by her departure from his life. Clearly, it is important to Walker that Grace understand him. Occasionally Walker exchanges comments with Easley concerning poetry he had written under Easley’s tutelage. He even recites some of his badly written verse, which Easley wittily condemns. Easley chides Walker for not being with his troops, asking, “How can the black liberation movement spare its illustrious leader for such a long stretch?”
Walker becomes increasingly intoxicated but manages to announce to Grace’s horror that he has come to take the two girls with him. She panics at the idea but cannot decide whether Walker really wants their daughters or is merely saying something that he thinks will terrify her. Ultimately she believes that he has come for the girls as if to rescue them from her and Brad in the same way that she had earlier rescued them from Walker’s antiwhite hatred. Grace fears losing her daughters more than anything else.
GRACE: . . . You’re lying. You don’t want those children. You just want to think you want them for the moment. . . . Today you want to feel like you want the girls. Just like you wanted to feel hurt and martyred by your misdirected cause, when you first drove us away.
WALKER: Drove you away? You knew what I was in to. You could have stayed. You said you wanted to pay whatever thing it cost to stay.89
Walker continues to state that he wants to take his two daughters. Easley cannot understand how Walker can have so much love for two little girls but still manage to kill large numbers of people. Walker states that in spite of the people that he has killed and in spite of his responsibility for single-handedly starting the war between whites and blacks, he still loves those girls.
Walker then acknowledges the ultimate futility of his revolutionary activities. He admits that “this is at best a war that will only change the complexion of tyranny.” He expresses his contempt for his fellow black officers by referring to them as “ignorant motherfuckers who have never read any book in their lives.” He even goes as far as to admit that he would rather discuss politics and literature with Easley rather than his black officers.90
Grace, fearing that Walker will abduct the children, tries to persuade Easley to physically intervene. Walker is shocked at her naïveté. Evidently she does not really understand that he would, without hesitation, kill Easley if necessary. He then informs Grace that he thought she would have understood his need to condemn all white people. He thought that if any white person could understand his need, it would have been Grace. But even though they had been together a long time, she didn’t understand.
GRACE: Walker you were preaching the murder of all white people. Walker, I was, am, white. What do you think was going through my mind every time you were at some rally or meeting whose sole purpose was to bring about the destruction of white people?
WALKER: Oh Goddam it, Grace, are you so stupid? You were my wife . . . I loved you. You mean because I loved you and was married to you . . . had children by you, I wasn’t supposed to say the things I felt. I was crying out against three hundred years of oppression; not against individuals.91
Grace becomes more emotionally involved, even saddened by this nostalgic journey through their marital demise. Easley intervenes and asks Walker if he really thinks that blacks could run the society in a more just and equitable fashion. “Do you think Negroes are better people than whites . . . that they can govern a society better than whites? Do you think they’ll make fewer mistakes.”92 Walker cannot bring himself to deem blacks morally superior to whites. Instead, he responds that whites have had their chance, now blacks can have theirs. Following this fatalistic message, we hear explosions getting closer to the house. The house lights go off. Using the sudden darkness, Easley gets out of his chair and creeps silently and deliberately toward the sitting Walker, who is drunk with his head drooping toward the floor. Act 1 ends.
Act 2 begins with the sounds of explosions in the background. The lights in the house flicker. The battle outside is raging and coming closer by the minute. Walker, still drunk, sits with his head down as if nodding. Easley continues to tiptoe toward him. As he carefully advances, Grace continues her chatter in hopes of maintaining an air of normality. A nearby explosion rocks the house, and the lights suddenly come on. Walker’s head jerks up, whereupon he sees the advancing Easley. Frozen, the two men stare into each other’s eyes for several seconds. Now confronted with the reality of Walker’s intentions, Grace screams “Walker” as if to plead for Easley’s life. Easley jumps on Walker, but during the ensuing scuffle, Walker shoots him in the chest. Fatally wounded, Easley tries to speak, but Walker taunts him into silence. Walker screams at Easley to shut up and die quietly. Grace runs to her dying husband, who is lying on the floor. Walker tells Easley that he will not allow him to utter anything dignified before he dies. He can either shut up or repeat the lines “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Grace, angered and crying, grabs for Walker, but he throws her to the floor.
While lying on the floor, Grace ponders her future. With Easley now dead and Walker threatening to take the children, she worries about being left alone. Walker, still emotionally attached to Grace, asks her what she thought would happen to him when she took the children and left him alone. “Did you ever think about that?” Grace concedes that after leaving Walker, she began to pity him. Walker confesses that he became enraged for he recognized the smugness of her belief that she and Easley were “good and compassionate.” He was even more enraged by the thought that Easley would pity him. Looking at Grace, he states, “You and that closet queen, respected, weak-as-water intellectual, pitying me. God. God!”
Grace now wonders if Walker will kill her. But he tells her that he has no intention of killing her. Is he still going to take the girls? she asks. Walker now shakes his head no. Grace, thrilled by this answer, wants to make sure and repeats the question while getting to her feet. At the very moment that she stands, an explosion rocks the house, and Grace is knocked down by a falling beam. Her chest is crushed. She is hurt badly but still manages to call to Walker to look in on the children. “Walker, the children . . . the girls . . . see about the girls.” Walker also seriously hurt, crawls to Grace but can’t help her. Walker tries to calm her, but she continues to tell him to check on the girls. Walker now standing, starts to climb the stairs but then stops. He tells Grace: “They’re dead, Grace. Catherine and Elizabeth are dead.” Grace cannot believe Walker’s words. She wonders how he knows that they are dead. Her frantic last words are “How do you know they’re dead, Walker?” Tortured by the possibility that Walker has killed their two daughters, Grace dies. Walker screams, “They’re dead, Grace, dead!” He then stumbles out of the door of the house. At this point Walker’s character reverts back to the old man at the beginning of the play. After more explosions and a silence, a child is heard crying and then loudly screaming. The curtain falls. More explosions are heard.
Jones’s portrayal of a racial Armageddon was performed during a moment in the life of this nation when white people of goodwill were supporting black Americans’ attempts to attain full citizenship status. Perhaps at no other time in the history of this country and the colonies that preceded it did white Americans appear to be more concerned about the plight of blacks. Such popular concern was the result of a massive nonviolent civil rights struggle that used hegemonic rhetoric about American freedom to legitimate black and white civil disobedience. While liberal white Americans probably knew that the status of blacks would not in the near and/or distant future be elevated to anything resembling racial equality, white liberalism was in a mood of self-celebration as historical barriers to black equality were being struck down. Enter The Slave.
Though shocking, the play’s characters are akin to the ideal types employed in sociological theory by Max Weber and Georg Simmel. As ideal types they are exaggerated depictions of real phenomena. Easley is an ideal type of a white liberal male professor. He has every stereotypical quality associated with that image, including a soft body. Because it has no complex characterizations, the dialogue in The Slave is stilted, and the plot is predictable. Who did not know that Walker would somehow murder Easley but not Grace? And the unresolved status of the children is more annoying than provocative. Why would Walker kill them, or why would he want Grace to think that he killed them?—And if he didn’t kill them, why didn’t he check on them after the explosion that killed Grace? It is one thing to view Walker as a morally flawed revolutionary, but Jones’s ending makes him out to be a rather disgusting thug, whereupon the play loses any semblance of meaning. After commenting on the play’s dramatic failure, Gerald Weales teases out its potential meanings:
Jones calls his play a “fable.” Presumably the moral is that whites and blacks must hate each other, and not even love (the marriage of Grace and Walker) or friendship (if that is what Walker and Brad had) or education (Brad as professor) or art (Walker as poet) or reason (“The way things are, being out of your mind is the only thing that qualifies you to stay alive,” says Walker) can alter that “fact.”93
Howard Clurman interpreted The Slave as being concerned with
the futility of the white man’s liberalism and the hysteria its failure causes in the souls of those who suffer most through that failure. . . . What is actually communicated is the sense that our incapacity to make true contact with one another must head our world to a hopeless shapeless shambles—destruction and annihilation with a “lesson.”94
Unlike Weales, Clurman took Jones’s bait and viewed The Slave as a political statement rather than a work of art about politics. He proclaimed the play important, not because it was good art, but because it conveyed a frightening idea. Commenting on the twin bill of The Slave and The Toilet, Clurman wrote, “I do not ‘admire’ these plays or call them ‘good.’ But despite their malformation and immaturity I believe them important. They are to be heeded. They say ‘Beware.’”95
The Slave was undoubtedly intended to traumatize the whites in the audience. The failure of the play—and it was a great failure—lay in Jones’s naive belief in dramatic shock therapy. By the time The Slave was produced, Jones had already published poems and nonfiction essays in which he used his talents to offend and abuse white readers in the name of articulating a just black rage. Even though his rage may have provided a tremendous source of creative energy, Jones was rarely able to harness it beyond a scream. Simply put, he had become more invested in offending and frightening whites than in writing good plays, poems, or essays. Ironically, the intention of this play is so overwhelming that it hides its few dramatic moments. White viewers of The Slave may have left the theater frightened, but they were neither intellectually nor emotionally engaged.
In a 1966 interview, Jones confronted the ambiguity of Walker Vessels and the underlying rationale for titling the play The Slave:
Walker Vessels is still a slave in the sense that he’s supposed to be leading this army, yet he’s spending all his time talking to this white man . . . he has no business being there in the first place; he was supposed to be with his own people. . . . If he were really free, the only sound that professor would have heard is cannon-fire.96
Walker Vessels embodies the ambivalences felt by the play’s author. After all, Jones was caught in a situation in which he felt increasingly pulled toward a more militant assertiveness of blackness and yet was still living in the predominantly white Village scene. He was married to a white woman and had two mixed-race daughters. Prophetically he described Walker’s increasing nationalism as having caused his wife to leave him. In real life, Jones would soon leave Hettie and their two children. The close resemblances between some of the characters in the play and intimates in Jones’s real life may have indicated an internal rage. Not only was it emotionally costly for his wife to be subjected to the personal disjunctures with her husband that were occurring as he became more assertive in projecting an insular blackness, but for Hettie to have seen this very personal crisis exposed on the stage must have been humiliating. By 1978, even Baraka was willing to admit that there was a certain cruelty in the choices he had made at that time.97