SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING from Cuba, Jones became active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. During one Fair Play demonstration in July 1961, he was arrested.1 Then in late 1961, Jones was elected president of the Fair Play for Cuba’s New York chapter. Spurred on by his pro-Cuban activities, Jones tried to organize a political consciousness-raising group in the Village. Known as the Organization of Young Men (OYM), Jones’s group contained black males only, a fact that he deemed significant because it testified to the growing uneasiness of many black Village-based intellectuals and artists who found themselves isolated from the Civil Rights movement. “We issued at least one statement but the sense of it was that we knew it was time to go on the offensive in the Civil Rights movement. We did not feel part of that movement.”2 It seems rather presumptuous that this group of relatively unknown figures would issue a political statement, as if their opinions, individually or collectively, had public significance. But perhaps recognizing the feebleness of public statements, the group decided that its political duty was to “work” in Harlem. Evidently this group work in Harlem never progressed beyond the planning stage. That in becoming politicized, Jones and his companions thought it necessary to go to Harlem indicated the peculiarity of the emerging racial consciousness of black Village-based intellectuals during the early 1960s. This need to be physically located in Harlem became apparent only a few years after Jones told Podhoretz that Harlem was a haven for the black bourgeoisie.
Shortly after its founding, OYM was merged into On Guard, a larger, more experienced, predominantly black group of Village intellectuals. Like the Organization of Young Men, On Guard also decided to be active in Harlem. An office was opened on 125th Street which, Jones notes, allowed them to participate in a “few struggles.” Most of the members of both OYM and On Guard were black male intellectuals who had white wives or lovers. These black men decided that their white female companions could not accompany them to Harlem.3 Their implicit admission of the possibility that they had done something ethnically illegitimate in crossing over the racial barrier in their choice of companions suggests that the journey to Harlem would be, in part, a petition for ethnic reconciliation. Despite being restricted to males, On Guard was an interracial organization. The peculiar taboos associated with interracial heterosexual/intimate relationships meant that white male members could accompany them to Harlem but white women had to stay away. Harold Cruse found it fascinating that in 1961, the LeRoi Jones of On Guard defended interracial political formations even when such defenses alienated black nationalists in Harlem. Cruse, a member of On Guard, claimed that at one of their meetings in Harlem, Jones not only stated that he did not understand why it was necessary to restrict whites from membership but expressed bewilderment as to why black Harlemites hated whites.4 But Cruse never bothered to question the absence of black women (or white women) in On Guard, an omission that probably speaks to his complicity in the organization’s gender dynamics.
Even though the members of On Guard had fewer ties to Harlem than to the Village, they believed that the only effective politicization on behalf of the black struggle was one that directly worked with black people.5 In many instances, and certainly in the case of Jones, this belief implied that politics was being used to regain an ethnic legitimacy that had been threatened as a result of living in bohemia. Many of those who felt ethnically illegitimate because of their distance from the political struggles of black America as well as their romantic involvements with white partners soon become exceedingly ethnically identified. Extremism is the religion of recent converts.
Jones felt increasingly ambivalent about his bohemian life. The Village had provided him with a setting in which he could create, but he had never felt completely at home there. Even though the literary subculture of the Village was racially liberal, Jones was one of very few blacks to have gained access to its serious artistic circles.6 This sense of racial isolation was accentuated by the increasing political activity taking place in black America during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jones has consistently written of his distaste for Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent politicization of blacks, but his lack of involvement in the Civil Rights movement or in any alternative movement concerned with bettering the plight of black Americans led him to question both the character of his ethnic identity and the utility of his artistic journey. This inability to resolve questions about the political utility of the black artist/writer troubled Jones throughout his career.
It is not surprising that Jones became alienated from the Beat bohemia subculture that valorized alienation. Self-conscious about their alienation, most Beat bohemians tended to trivialize substantive political distinctions and conflicts in the mainstream social order. In his discussion of Western avant-garde movements, Poggioli stated that avant-garde artists cannot sustain a relationship with political movements, be they revolutionary or reactionary. The avant-garde has as its raison d’être a quest to be contrary—to oppose any status quo. To the extent that a political movement, even a counterhegemonic one, becomes organizationally rationalized and embedded in the realpolitik concessions and strategies necessary to increase its viability, it becomes tainted by the parent society. Poggioli further noted that Western avant-garde artistic communities tended to maintain only fleeting allegiances with political movements. He concluded that “the only omnipresent or recurring political ideology in the avant-garde is the least political or the most antipolitical of all: libertarianism and anarchism.” Instead of political engagement, the avant-garde is committed to aesthetic protest.
The artist is in a continual state of social protest, but it does not signify that he becomes, politically, a revolutionary. Analogously, the modern artist, even when driven to embrace a reactionary ideal (sometimes for purely aesthetic reasons), does not thereby necessarily become a conservative . . . his social protest shows itself principally on the level of form, and thus alienation from society becomes alienation from tradition. . . . Avant-garde art seems destined to oscillate perpetually among the various forms of alienation—psychological and social, economic and historical, aesthetic and stylistic. There is no doubt that all these forms are summed up in one other, namely in ethical alienation.7 [italics in original]
As a black writer in a predominantly white artistic subculture, Jones was far more vulnerable than the typical white Beat writer to political pressures originating outside the subculture. After all, he was in bohemia not simply because he was alienated from the mainstream society but also because he was seeking a less racist art world in which to grow. Ethically and racially alienated from the parent society, Jones was continually made to recognize that an individual resolution to his problematic existence was in itself a mimicry of the mainstream.
Jones embraced his betwixt-between status in bohemia. The psychological demands of trying to navigate an outsider position among outsiders was quite demanding and often debilitating. Jones tried to negotiate this space through his art. Perhaps the clearest testimony to his artistic attempt to embrace his insider/outsider status in bohemia was his novel The System of Dante’s Hell. The novel was a tortured effort, as Jones seemed to have even been ambivalent about using the novel as an artistic genre. Nonetheless, writing this novel helped nurture his emergence as a significant and distinct voice in American letters.
In 1965 Grove Press published The System of Dante’s Hell, various sections of which had been written and/or published as early as 1959. Literary critic Theodore Hudson was perhaps correct to consider the novel a “thematically and stylistically controlled anthology.”8 Jones claimed that The System of Dante’s Hell was an attempt to devise a writing style more in tune with his own being.
I guess the pivotal work for me was a novel called The System of Dante’s Hell. That’s when I consciously stopped trying to write like people whose work I was around, people like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg. In Dante, even though I worked in a ready-made frame modeled upon Dante’s Inferno, still I used that frame to develop, I think a different writing style, a more personal one anyway.9
Jones also described how he used Western forms to undermine the hegemony of Western forms in his own psyche:
What I was doing was trying to break away from European influences and the strong influences of many white poets who had affected my work . . . .I did it consciously, but I didn’t know that I was specifically breaking away from white forms at the time. I did know that the forms weren’t mine. I was trying to find a voice, my own, and I needed to oppose myself to the European influence. Dante was an attempt to illuminate all the elements of myself to myself against the backdrop of European form.10
Although I do not know whether the novel actually played the crucial role in Jones’s development that he claims, it is clear that it cannot be read as a major political statement. Rather, its aesthetic significance is far greater than its political significance.
The System is only loosely structured on Dante’s Inferno, whose structure is an antagonistic-cooperative backdrop to a highly individualized exploration of the various states of mind of the protagonist, Roi. Roi is also known as Dante. Clearly, the novel is autobiographical, but it is not a factual rendition of events in Jones’s own life. Instead, it could be read it as an excursion through the psychological torment that Jones experienced from the upward mobility–premised journey of his youth in Newark to his decision to embrace the downward mobility of a bohemian writer. The central agon of the text is representative of the struggle between the allure of a society intent on generating assimilationist tendencies among those blacks who sought mobility and the internal desire of the poet to remain true to his black cultural authenticity. In this sense, The System embodies the struggles of Clay in Dutchman and Walker Vessels in The Slave. The effort to remain authentic in the face of societal enticements either to culturally assimilate or pursue “racial exceptionality,” as in the Negro who is “unlike the others,” is so central to Jones’s novel that he grants the lowest realms of hell to “heretics.” “I put the Heretics in the deepest part of hell, though Dante had them spared on higher ground. . . . It is heresy, against one’s own sources, running in terror from one’s deepest responses and insights . . . the denial of feeling . . . that I see as basest evil.”11 As if to reinforce the condemnation of heretics, Jones explicitly rejects Dante’s Christian notion of hell and instead defines it as the state of mind in which a black person endures a fractured and unresolved racial identity.
Hell in the head. . . . The torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject. . . . The flame of social dichotomy. Split open down the center, which is the early legacy of the black man unfocused on blackness. The dichotomy of what is seen and taught and desired opposed to what is felt.12
The first half of the novel is a collection of streams of consciousness that Jones termed “association complexes.” These include vivid descriptions of scenes and incidents during Roi’s youth. In particular, Roi is haunted by his growing alienation from his black “home boys.” A thoroughly narcissistic novel, its central subject is the development of Jones as a person and writer as told through the eyes of the young Roi, who is a creation of the reminisces of the older LeRoi.
A few examples of the intense self-gazing found in the “association complexes” should suffice to convey the reader’s difficulty in creating meaning out of the text. In the first chapter, entitled “Neutrals: The Vestibule,” Jones describes the proper “Europeanized” black church that he attended as a child:
Stone on stone. Hard cobblestones, oil lamps, green house of the native. Natives down the street. All dead. All walking slowly toward their lives. Already, each Sunday forever. The man was a minister. His wife was lightskinned with freckles. Their church was tall brown brick and sophisticated. Bach was colored and lived in the church with Handel. Beckett was funeral director with brown folding chairs.13
Without racial agency, the neutrals exist in a deadened world of mediocre respectability. Their lives reflect the “proper” social mores to a fault. Their houses are orderly; their marriages are stable, their grass is cut; and, worse, they own books that they will never read. Insular and anti-intellectual, the neutrals merely exist and then die, justly forgotten.
Even inside the house linoleums were cold. Divided in their vagueness. Each man his woman. Their histories die in the world. My own . . . I point out forever their green grass. Brown unopened books. The smell of the world. . . . Each man his own place. Each flower in its place.14
In another chapter, an adult Roi reflects on the orthodox choices that he has made despite having aspired to live differently. For Roi, dishonesty is a sign of the inauthenticity of his life, an inauthenticity rooted in his adherence to convention.
You’ve done everything you said you wdn’t. Everything you said you despised. A fat mind, lying to itself. Unmoving like some lump in front of a window. Wife, child, house, city, clawing at your gentlest parts. Romance become just sad tiny lies. And your head full of them. What do you want anymore? Nothing. Not poetry or that purity of feeling you had.15
Despairing over his decision to become a writer, Roi ponders his downward mobility as a bohemian. Whereas his rejection of the materialistic life was supposed to fuel his artistic commitment, he now wonders whether his poverty has become an end in itself, divorced from any creative impulses.
A dirty floor full of food particles and roaches. Lower middleclass poverty. In ten years merely to lose one’s footing on a social scale. Everything else, that seriousness, past, passed. Almost forgotten.
Another man walked through me like hours. Not even closeness of flesh. Not against this blue ugly air. Not against you or myself. Not against the others, their unclosing eyes. The fat breasted fashionable slut of letters. Her blonde companion in the sulking dugouts of stupidity. She clasped my face in her bones & kissed silence into my mouth.16
While these vignettes are imaginatively written and perhaps reveal insights into Roi’s and thus Jones’s character, they do not sustain the reader, as they are too brief and scattered to justify the intensity demanded of the reader by the form. In addition, Jones’s references to scenes and individuals can be so thoroughly insular that they may not make sense to anyone but him or his alter egos. For example,
Did John Holmes really jump off the Warren St. bridge? But his legs healed and he watched us hump the big italian bitch in Sweeney’s cloakroom. . . . This is Orlando Davis, who with his curly hair & large ass, steps thru mists everywhere. They caught him stealing on his scooter. They, the cops(?), moralists dropped on him from the skies. The music: Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano glinting. Remarkable thick weather he moved thru. Not as a woman this time, a sultry male. He looked tired, or bewildered. And they mobbed him at the river’s edge, yelling their faces at heaven.17
These snippets read as if Jones sporadically jotted down fleeting memories and then later tried to organize them into some type of thematic unity that he subsequently called chapters. Not only does he attempt to recall those interpretations of these events (and people) that he had at the time of their occurrence, but he also offers his current reflections on those historical events and peoples. In addition, he comments on his earlier interpretations. These “association complexes” read like contemporary journal entries written in response to a rereading of other journal entries that were written at the time of the occurrences. He appears to be using this process to give some type of meaning and thus closure to the various ruptures, fears, and joys that he experienced in his younger days, a sort of self-analysis. But given the narcissistic concerns and insular references of many of these “association complexes,” why did Jones share them with a reading audience?18
Once past the vignettes comprising the first half of the book, the text becomes much more accessible. The major transition in the book occurs at its midpoint with the inclusion of the play The Eighth Ditch.
The Eighth Ditch takes place in 1947 in a black youth camp and centers on the rape/seduction of a middle-class Negro fellow, “46,” by an older, more experienced and underprivileged black male, “64.” The two young men are talking while sitting on their bunks. First, 46 speaks in the tone of a young alienated poet: “Brittle youth, they say, I am dead america. . . . Young, from sidewalks of wind.”19
Commenting on the stilted and protected world of 46, 64 states: “Call me Herman. . . . Your earth is round & sits outside the world. You have millions of words to read. And you will read them.” When 46 asks who he is, 64 replies: “The Street! Things around you. Even noises at night, or smells you are afraid of. I am a maelstrom of definitions. . . . But as you know, whatever, poorer than yrself.”20 The two men, 46 and 64, are from different sides of the tracks, and 46 makes disparaging remarks about people like 64. As they talk, 64 steadily moves closer to 46, who is reading while lying down. Soon 64 undresses both himself and 46. Even though 46 is initially somewhat hesitant, 64 enters him from behind. As 64 penetrates 46, he tells him about the experiences that he will empty into his body. Referring to these experiences as blues, 64 promises to teach 46 about many of them (e.g., Bigot Blues, adultery blues, Modern Jazz blues, Kafka blues). Soon Otis, another camper, appears and also expresses a desire to have sex with 46, but 64 chases him away. Later, two other campers stumble on the two young men once again having sex. When 64, atop 46, sees these two, he begins to make loud sexual sounds for their enjoyment. These two new onlookers ask 64 if they can “have some.” He indicates that he will let them get some, too, as soon as he is finished. Otis, the first onlooker who had been chased away, returns and hears that 64 will allow the two new onlookers to have sex with 46. He becomes angry and begins a fight with the new onlookers. The play ends as 64 continues having anal intercourse with 46. And 46 asks, “What other blues do you have Herman?” At first, 64 tells him that he has many more blues. But with his mind completely focused on intercourse, 64 responds, “Oooh baby, just keep throwing it up like that.” The chapter ends.
For our purposes, this chapter (play) has little political significance except as an indication of the depth of Jones’s bohemian commitments at this time. The play is decidedly bohemian in its avoidance of a distinct social or political message. It uses social outcasts—black homosexuals—as key characters. Although the play is not well developed, it is clear that the tender sexual moments experienced by 46 and 64 become distorted once their actions become publicly known. Although 64 is willing to act like 46’s lover in private, when others appear, he assumes the mask of “the man fucking 46.” One could perhaps tease out of this a bohemian theme that societal life is fatal to authenticity. Jones’s treatment of the proposed gang rape of 46 is disturbing. How did 64 obtain the authority to grant other men permission to have sex with 46? In the sexist and homophobic caverns of Jones’s mind, 46 is considered female-like because he is being penetrated. As a metaphorical woman, he relies on the protection of his male lover against the advances of other males. His lover, like the others wanting to have sex with 46, consider themselves hyper-heterosexual. In popular urban sensibility, the only one who is “stigmatized” as effeminate or even gay is the man who is being penetrated.
Werner Sollors and Kimberly Benston interpreted The Eighth Ditch as a metaphorical excursion into Jones’s split identities, seeing 46 and 64 are different sides of the same person.21 If read in this manner, the play portrays 46 as the naive and bourgeois young intellectual, juxtaposed against the blacker, more experienced, less intellectual, but streetwise 64. In fucking 46, 64 impregnates him with knowledge and experience. But 64 betrays 46 in the presence of the others, thereby introducing 46 to the wretchedness and exploitation that also accompany experience.
In the chapter entitled “The Rape,” Roi and five bourgeois friends are home for the summer from college. Local celebrities of sorts (as Negroes on the move upward), they enjoy attending various parties given by bourgeois Negro college students. As a member of this college set, Roi appears to enjoy the partying but somehow does not quite feel at ease in this setting. Nonetheless, he continues to frequent these social gatherings. The scene is one of these college parties in the integrated Newark suburb of East Orange.
This one was the hippest for our time. East Orange, lightskinned girls, cars pulling in, smart clothers our fathers’ masters wore. But this was the way. The movement. Our heads turned open for it. And light, pure warm light, flowed in.
. . . I sat on a stoop. One of the white stoops of the rich (the Negro rich were lovely in their non-importance in the world). Still, I sat and thot why they moved past me, the ladies, or why questions seemed to ride me down. The world itself, so easy to solve . . . and get rid of. Why did they want it? What pulled them in, that passed me by. I cd have wept each night of my life.22
While the college Negroes are enjoying these rites of class affirmation, Jones feels excluded from their class pretensions and ambitions. He does not yet understand himself sufficiently to understand why he doesn’t feel driven to join in their pursuit of the “American dream,” but he knows that there is something about him that is rebelling at the thought of disappearing into mainstream America, even if it is mainstream black America. What should be his crowd, isn’t. Nevertheless, he endures his alienation silently while acting in public as if all is right with his world. In private he is tortured.
Leaving the party, Jones and his friends pile into a car. They spot a drunken and disheveled black woman stumbling down the street. After she asks them to give her a ride into Newark, they seat her in the back seat of the car between Jones and one of the other fellows. With rape on their mind, Jones and the other fellows begin to explore her body with their hands without her consent. Jones even tries to place his hand inside her dirty underwear. Instead of generating aversion, the dirtiness of the woman allows these bourgeois black college students to think about sexually assaulting her. Her dirtiness signifies her lack of virtue. Though intoxicated, she recognizes their intent and cleverly foils their plans by casually mentioning that she has a venereal disease. Disgusted with her, they throw her out of the moving car, and she lands on the street near the curb. They scream with excitement as they drive away.
In the final chapter, “The Heretics,” Jones describes an incident in his life during his days as a member of the U.S. Air Force. With a weekend pass, Roi and a friend leave the military base in pursuit of fun in the local town’s black section, known as “the bottom.” There Roi meets Peaches, a young semiliterate but thoroughly carnal seventeen-year-old black female prostitute. Peaches is captivated by Roi’s foreignness, particularly his “white” way of talking. She leads him to several juke joints and bars where Jones, the transplanted northerner, immediately confronts an alien side of black life—the sensuality of gut-bucket country Negroes. He is perceived as “an imitation white boy.” Jones writes: “And when I spoke someone wd turn and stare, or laugh, and point me out. The quick new jersey speech, full of italian idiom, and the invention of the jews. Quick to describe. Quicker to condemn.” Roi later goes home with Peaches. Drunk, he is not sexually aroused. His hesitation and inability to sustain an erection are interpreted by Peaches as a lack of heterosexual desire. In response, she decides to teach him how “to fuck,” as she regards him as a “bigeye faggot.”23 Unknowingly, Peaches has stumbled on an accurate perception of Roi’s sexuality, for in the text are intermittent flashbacks to various homosexual encounters earlier in Roi’s life. After forcing coffee down Roi’s throat and telling him that she will have sex with him for free, Peaches does manage to stimulate two minor erections from Roi, each time telling him that she will teach him how to do it better.
Despite momentarily thinking of going AWOL and staying a while with Peaches, Roi knows that he is in alien territory. Yet her simplicity coupled with the immediacies that govern her life create in Roi’s mind a comforting black pastoral vision of a noble savage. Though highly sexually experienced, Peaches is completely naive and innocent of the complexities of the world that Roi holds dear. Jones eventually escapes from Peaches and the “bottom,” but on his return to the air force base, he is jumped by three black men who had seen him earlier at the clubs. They interpreted the weirdness of his foreign ways and northern accent as an attempt to declare himself superior to them. They viciously beat him.
In both chapters, Roi is confronted with alien black worlds. In “The Rape,” the destitute and vulnerable status of the “street woman” makes her ripe for gang raping—a privilege bestowed on Roi and his boys not only because they were male but also because they were bourgeois college students. They want to do it because they can get away with it. Despite her being their “home girl” from Newark, they feel no affinity with her. If anything, her debased economic condition has turned her into a desired, exploitable object. But the women they really want are the light-skinned, bourgeois suburban ones like those in the party they just left. Even though the drunken woman’s “street smarts” outmaneuver the better-educated college students, she is still forced to endure physical pain and psychological humiliation when they kick her out of their car.
Roi hides his complex sexuality in the group camaraderie of his male “crew,” but then, he is hiding a great deal about himself from them. Even the camaraderie is not sufficient to conceal Roi’s difference completely, for he, unlike the others, tries to lift the fallen woman back into the car, presumably for the ride to Newark. Unsuccessful in this effort, he submerges his unease in collective hell-raising screams as they pull away from her sprawled body.
In the encounter with Peaches, Roi, now alone, is less sexually empowered. In fact, he is frightened of her sexuality and can barely perform. Peaches smacks him in the face, pulls on his penis, and tells him repeatedly, “Goddam punk, you gonna fuck me tonight or I’m gonna pull your fuckin dick aloose.” Roi wants to tell Peaches that the failure of his penis to harden does not diminish his stature as a man. For Peaches, Roi’s manhood lies in his erect penis. If he cannot get an erection, he must not be a man (i.e., heterosexual). Roi, however, tells her, “Please, you don’t know me. Not what’s in my head. I’m beautiful. Stephen Dedalus.”24 As soon as the words slip out of his mouth, Roi knows that Peaches cannot possibly understand what he is trying to say. The gulf between their worlds cannot be bridged with words. It is the world outside words that Peaches symbolizes.
The System of Dante’s Hell is very difficult to read. Whatever one may think of Jones’s claims that the work represents his coming to terms with his own voice, the novel appears to be Jones’s most self-consciously “arty” text. Its difficulty makes it inaccessible to many readers, including many, if not most, blacks.
The novel speaks to Jones’s bicultural identity. Roi is too “white” to be accepted by nonbourgeois blacks (the only authentic blacks) and yet not “white” enough to be attracted to black bourgeois life. Jones devises a self-oriented writing style and appropriates the form of a canonical Western text to facilitate this self-quest. In this regard, the novel should not be read as the artist’s attempt to discard Western literary tradition but as an attempt to assert more racial agency in his appropriation of Western cultural forms. Jones announces that he will no longer be a passive receptacle. In his earliest Village writings, he had been guilty of racially disappearing. Thus The System of Dante’s Hell has significance for his developing art insofar as it is a radical break with his earliest, most parasitically bohemian approach to writing. We even could conclude that the same forces that led Jones to reevaluate his passive acceptance of Western literary canons and forms is the same spirit that ultimately led to the more definitive racial self-definition in his art and politics during the late 1960s.
Various poems that Jones had written and/or published between 1961 and 1963 were later included as Sabotage in his 1969 poetry collection Black Magic. In trying to situate Jones’s changing political sensibilities in their various historical moments, it seemed appropriate to place my discussion of these poems alongside the poems of The Dead Lecturer, which were written during the same period.
Concerning the continuity between Sabotage and his first two poetry collections, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer, Jones writes:
You notice the preoccupation with death, suicide, in the early works. Always my own, caught up in the deathurge of this twisted society. The work a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness. European influence, etc., just as the concept of hopelessness and despair, from the dead minds the dying morality of Europe.
There is a spirituality always trying to get through, to triumph, to walk across these dead bodies like stuntin for disciples, walking the water of dead bodies europeans call their minds.25
One of the poems included in Sabotage (and thus written between 1961 and 1963) was entitled “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand” and addresses the tortured existence of a poet who is forced to faced his social irrelevancy.
What
industry do I practice: A slick
colored boy, 12 miles from his
I am no longer a credit
to my race . . . .26
A poem of intense reflection, Jones once again questions his decision to become a writer. The existential leap required to violate his upward mobility–premised upbringing necessitates the creation of an entirely different value system on which he can try to legitimate his self-worth. Because he is not earning a large salary or employed in a high-status position, he knows that many blacks will view him as a failure. A poet without a real job (“I practice no industry”), Jones is no longer a credit to black people. The idea of being a credit to one’s race is based on a bourgeois black notion of achievement, supposedly to elevate the status of blacks in the eyes of whites.
The conclusion of the poem is a testimony to the poet’s loss of faith in social progress and the future. Instead of naively believing that “things are getting better” for the Negro, Jones argues that the time has now come for militant action in behalf of change.
We have awaited the coming of a natural
phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable
workers
of the land.
But none has come,
(Repeat)
but none has come.
Will the machinegunners please step forward?27
A jarring and frightful statement, the poem’s advocacy of violence violates bohemian ethics.28
The poem “The Burning General” is also an expression of the dilemma confronting Jones as a black artist. As a member of an oppressed group, he believes that subjugation is a ripe subject for artistic engagement, but creating from a state of subjugation may be akin to “savoring one’s oppression.” Jones may have also been addressing the implicit romanticism of black subjugation that was rampant in Beat bohemia. Speaking to himself, Jones asks whether his sophistication and commitment to the world of ideas have mistakenly led him to believe that he could have a social impact.
Can we ask a man to savor the food of oppression? Even if it’s rich and full of mysterious meaning. Can you establish (and that word must give my whole game away) any kind of equality?
Can there be such thing forced on the world? That is, that the poor and their owners appreciate light wherever they are, simply as light. Why are you so sophisticated? You used to piss and shit in your pants. Now you walk around thinking all the time, as if that sacred act would rewrite the world in bop talk, giving medals to every limping coon in creation.29
Some of Jones’s poems consider the psychic costs to those blacks who seek to “get ahead in life.” In “Letter to E. Franklin Frazier,” Jones wrote:
Those days when it was all right
to be a criminal, or die, a postman’s son,
Those days I rose through the smoke of chilling Saturdays
hiding my eyes from the shine boys, my mouth and my flesh
from their sisters. I walked quickly and always alone
watching the cheap city like I thought it would swell
and explode, and only my crooked breath could put it together
again
By the projects and small banks of my time. Counting my steps
on tar or new pavement, following the sun like a park. I imagined
a life, that was realer than speech
. . . Shuddering at dust, with a mile or so up the hill
to get home.
. . . The quick step, the watchful march march,
All were leading here, to this room.30
This poem reflects on his days walking around Newark as a boy. It is significant that even at this age he has begun to view himself as destined for something that most other Negroes could never attain. He cannot make eye contact with the “shine boys,” nor would he stoop so low as to physically interact with their sisters. He walks past housing projects in fear. His fear of urban life and what could happen to him after dusk is indicative of his fear of these poor blacks and their ability to perceive his fear of them. As darkness approaches, he walks faster, wary of the enclosing blackness.
Many of the poems in Sabotage have bohemian themes. In “The People Burning: May-Day! May-Day!” Jones employs the typical Beat bohemian despair of mass consumption and uniformity to rage against cultural assimilation. The subtitle, “May-Day! May-Day!” is included to invoke images of an impending disaster. May-Day is the universal distress call, and Jones uses it to announce America’s impending fall:
The Dusty Hearts of Texas, whose most honest world
is the long look into darkness, sensing the glittering
affront of reason or faith or learning. Preferring
fake tiger smells rubbed on the balls, and clothes
the peasants of no country on earth would ever be
vulgar enough to wear. The legacy of diseased mediocrity31
In behaving in such a manner, Americans have lost their creative agency by living vicariously through consumerism. This emphasis on false identities has also given rise to the blandness of an assimilated America.
Become an Italian or a Jew. Forget the hatred of natural
insolence. The teetering sense of right, as balance, each
natural man must have. Become a Jew, and join the union,
forget about Russia or any radicalism past a hooked grin.
Become an Italian quietist in some thin veneer of reasonable
gain. Lodi, Metuchen, Valley Stream, welcomes you into its
leather ridiculousness.
Now they ask me to be a jew or italian, and turn from the moment
disappearing into the shaking clock of treasonable safety.32
A theme in much of Jones’s pre–black nationalist writing is that white ethnic Americans have entered a Faustian pact with American cultural blandness. In order to attain upward mobility and acceptance, white ethnics have relinquished the richness of their cultural heritages for the homogenous mediocrity of American cultural respectability. Nothing better illustrates their escape from life than their willingness to forgo the dynamic life of New York City in order to live in pedestrian, homogenized, “brain-dead” suburban Jersey townships like Metuchen and Valley Stream.
In “After the Ball,” Jones continues his commentary on the plasticity of contemporary life in the United States:
The magic dance
of the second ave ladies
in the artificial glare
of the world, silver-green curls sparkle
and the ladies’ arms jingle
with new Fall pesos, sewn on grim bracelets
the poet’s mother-in-law thinks are swell.
So much for America, let it sweep in grand
style up the avenues of its failure. Let it promenade smartly
beneath the marquees of its despair.33
In the short essay included in Sabotage, “Gatsby’s Theory of Aesthetics,” Jones describes his aesthetic approach.
I write poetry only to enlist the poetic consistently as apt description of my life. I write poetry only in order to feel, and that, finally, sensually, all the terms of my life. I write poetry to investigate my self, and my meaning and meanings.
. . . But it is possible to feel with any part of our consciousness. Whatever part of us does register; whatever. The head feels. The heart feels. The penis feels. . . . The point of life is that it is arbitrary, except in its bases forms. Arbitrariness, or self imposed meaning, is the only thing worth living for. It is the only thing that permits us to live.34
“Square Business” is a meditation of the values undergirding the social order. In particular, Jones views the profit motive and greed as the governing values of American society, in which everything is turned into a commodity.
The faces of Americans
sit open hating each
other. The black ones
hating, though they laugh
and are controlled by
laughter. The white ones
blown up hot inside, their projects
are so profitable . . . sixteen stories
in a sultry town . . . wind bends them
back
These are boxes
of money. With lids
these winds wont lift.
Winds from foodless mouths.
Steel boxes floating in tears.
. . . They own each
other. They own
my mother. They own
and own, go on, what else
is theirs?
Time. Time is.
The pop of the clock, your head
on the block.
. . . They own
language. Churches. But not the strong ones
Four Five Six, they own. But not Beaulah
Bapt. or Drifting Image Church of Christ In
Dreams. Where the old ladies fan themselves
with God.35
In this society, ownership is an obsession. Everything has been commodified and thus distorted. Squares even “own each other.” Time is another phenomenon governed by the logic of the profit motive. The time clock represents the commodification of labor: “the pops of the clock, your head on the bloc.” Even Benny Goodman has made a profit by ripping off jazz and blues and then turning the art form into a money-making “whitenized” commodity. This argument is elaborated in Blues People.
Jones’s sense of multiple alienation saturated the poetry he composed following his initial volume, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Much like the poems in Sabotage, Jones’s 1964 collection, The Dead Lecturer, continues his obsession with alienation and death. The poems in this collection reflect his bohemian disdain for the mechanistic, profit-before-people ethos of the modern industrial social order. Yet unlike Preface, this new collection described far more explicitly the costs to black humanity of trying to integrate/assimilate into the cold, antihuman, rational world of the parent society.
Jones’s intensifying political consciousness is evident in the poem “A contract (for the destruction and rebuilding of Paterson”).36 Paterson, an industrial city in New Jersey, was the home of poet William Carlos Williams, the greatest influence on Jones’s desire to write poetry in his own voice. First he describes the wretched physicality and inhumane ambience of a city governed by the profit motive.
Flesh and cars, tar, dug holes beneath stone
a rude hierarchy of money, band saws cross out
music, feeling. Even speech, corrodes.
I came here
from where I sat boiling in my veins, cold fear
at the death of men, the death of learning, in
cold fear, at my own. Romantic vests of same death
blank at the corner, blank when they raise their fingers.37
But amid the inhumanity of this society, blacks and Puerto Ricans seem far too compliant in their willingness to defer to the sick, racist social order.
Criss the hearts, in dark flesh staggered so marvelous
are their lies. So complete, their mastery, of these
stupid niggers. Loud spics kill each other, and will not
make the simple trip to Tiffany’s. Will not smash their stainless
heads, against the simpler effrontery of so callous a code as gain.38
Jones is angered by the futile antics of blacks and Puerto Ricans, wondering why they have not chosen to direct their energy toward struggling against the unjust urban social order, as opposed to killing each other. Why not steal from those with superfluous wealth (i.e., Tiffany’s) instead of each other?
“Contract” is one of Jones’s earliest poetic advocacies of the black robbery of white wealth. In this call for unlawful but justifiable agency against white-owned property, Jones prefigures themes in his Black Arts poetry. Now, the ease with which whites manipulate blacks into compliance creates a disdain in Jones that is nothing less than disgust.
You are no brothers, dirty woogies, dying under dried rinds, in
massa’s
droopy tuxedos. Cab Calloways of the soul, at the soul’s juncture.39
Given the popular usage of the term brother in black urban, public greeting rituals, Jones’s claim that “you are no brothers” expresses his aversion to them while appropriating their language.
. . . Killed in white fedora hats, they stand so mute
at what
whiter slaves did to my fathers. They muster silence. They pray
at the
steps of abstract prisons, to be kings, when all is silence, when all is stone.40
Jones is using “whiteness” in this poem as a metaphor for evil and black self-hatred. Those blacks who can only “muster silence” are implicitly referred to as “white,” albeit less “white” than those blacks who sold Afro-Americans (“my fathers”) into slavery. Where, he wonders, is their rage?
In “An Agony. As Now,” Jones continues his autobiographical reflections.
I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women.41
Some critics of Jones’s poetry do not view the sentiments contained in the preceding verse as racially linked. But this stanza could be read as a statement of racial self-hatred as manifested in a pathological attraction to white women: “love his wretched women.”42 Buried in anguish, Jones conveys his tormented soul:
Cold air blown through narrow blind eyes. Flesh
white hot metal. Glows as the day with its sun
It is a human love, I live inside. A bony skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.
But it has no feeling. As the metal, is hot, it is not,
given to love.
It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.43
In “A Poem for Willie Best,” Jones offers a meditation on Willie Best, the actor who played the role of Sleep ’n Eat. Much like his Hollywood counterpart, Step ’n Fetchit, Sleep ’n Eat was a stereotypical black buffoon. Such figures were characterized by their dim-witted, word-slurring speech; shuffling; head scratching; and eye-ball rolling facial expressions of bafflement. Jones describes him as
Lazy
Frightened
Thieving
Very potent sexually]
Scars
Generally inferior
(but natural
rhythms.44
But Jones sees the birth of an oppositional subjectivity in Willie Best. Even though Best plays the role of Sleep ’n Eat, his inner consciousness increasingly views this role as a phony public posture, a public marketing device that hides his anger and rage at America. Jones considers the possibility that Willie Best is
A renegade
behind the mask. And even
the mask, a renegade
disguise. Black skin
and hanging lip.45
No longer willing to play the role of the obsequious black buffoon, Best is ready to act.
. . . He said, I’m tired
of losing.
“I got to cut ’cha.”46
In a 1980 interview with literary scholar William Harris, Jones commented on “A Poem for Willie Best”:
The Willie Best poem is again the whole question of how does one relate realistically to one’s environment if one feels estranged from one’s environment and especially a black person in a white situation. And especially a person who is growing more and more political, and that politics is showing up his closest friends in a negative light but yet having to relate to those friends. Willie Best presents the black as the minstrel—the black as the bizarre funny person, yet the black as victim, and this black minstrel victim having to come to grips with that, with his victimhood, with his minstrelsy in order to change that.47
In SHORT SPEECH TO MY FRIENDS, Jones further explores his outsider identity as a black and a writer in a predominantly white, culturally philistine society. Why, he wonders, should he enter a “burning house”? After all these years of trying to be like them, write like them, and, in fact, be them, Jones now sees through the charade of their false creativity.
The perversity
of separation, isolation
after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms.
now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly ignorant.48
“The Politics of Rich Painters” offers Jones’s impressions of the commercialization of a “bohemian hustle.”
is something like the rest
of our doubt, whatever slow thought
comes to rest, beneath the silence
of starving talk.
. . . You know the pity of
democracy, that we must sit here
and listen to how he makes his money.
Tho the catalogue of his possible ignorance
roars and extends through the room
like fire . . .
They are more ignorant than the poor
tho they pride themselves with that accent. And
move easily in fake robes of egalitarianism. Meaning,
I will fuck you even if you don’t like art. And are wounded
that you call their italian memories petit bourgeois.49
This poem expresses Jones’s disdain for the monetary motivations of so-called radical artists who are actually quite bourgeois. Jones was friends with some commercially successful bohemian artists (e.g., William de Kooning), and perhaps this poem was written about them. Diane Di Prima believes, however, that it was more specifically targeted, that it “was one of many episodes in an endless quarrel between LeRoi and Larry Rivers.”50 By the late 1950s, Rivers had become an artist celebrity of sorts. He appeared on televised “game shows and in Life magazine. Even his marital problems and drug taking were well publicized.”51 In a 1955 edition of Fortune magazine, the editors noted that Rivers was one of the avant-garde painters whose work constituted a good speculative investment.52 It thus would not have been out of character for Jones to offer an intrabohemian critique of the nonbohemian commercial practices of his confreres who claimed to be antibourgeois.
In “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer,” Jones invokes a common theme in his writing: anguish over his will to live a dissimilar life and torment over the possible uselessness/decadence of his unique intentions (including his decision to become a writer).53 As a strategy to illuminate the solitary nature of his artistic journey, Jones accentuates other people’s disapproval of his life. Often he describes his sense of estrangement as if it were all but invisible to others. But in “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer,” the others recognize Jones’s deviance and reject him because of it.
They have turned, and say that I am dying. That
I have thrown
my life away. They
have left me alone, where
there is no one, nothing
save who I am. Not a note
nor a word.54
In pursuing his aesthetic vision, Jones follows various paths that lead ultimately to an interrogation of his inner being. So intense is his self-examination that he wonders whether he will be consumed by it and thus fail as a writer.
For all these wan roads
I am pushed to follow, are
my own conceit. A simple muttering
elegance, slipped in my head
pressed on my soul, is my heart’s
worth. And I am frightened
that the flame of my sickness
will burn off my face. An leave
the bones, my stewed black skull,
an empty cage of failure.55
Jones long associated honesty with craziness and lying with normality. In Home, he stated that he aspired to the craziness of all honest men. The poem “The Liar” is an unmerciful act of self-introspection in which he declares himself guilty of distorting the truth.
What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear.56
It is the fear of being known that causes Jones to lie. Is this fear that has been mistaken for love somehow directly linked to Jones’s intimacies with whites? Although he publicly announces changes in his ideas and actions as if he knew all along what he was doing and where he was heading, this is not the case.
Though I am a man
who is loud
on the birth
of his ways. Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even tho
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.57
Jones’s dishonesty is so fundamental to his being that he wonders whether his true self, which was unknown in life, would ever be missed in death.
A question I think,
an answer; whatever sits
counting the minutes
till you die
When they say, “It is Roi
who is dead?” I wonder
who will they mean?58
This quest for personal authenticity was a central theme of Baraka’s poetry and speaks to the pervasive influence of bohemia on even his postbohemian self.
The poems included in Target Study were composed between 1963 and 1965. Concerning his mind-set at that time, Jones later wrote: “Target Study is trying to really study, like bomber crews do the soon to be destroyed cities. Less passive now, less uselessly ‘literary.’ Trying to see, trying to understand . . . trying as Margaret Walker says, ‘to fashion a way,’ to clean up and move.”59 In “Ration,” Jones provides one of the earliest examples of the militant didactic poetry that later became his trademark:
Banks must be robbed,
the guards bound and gagged.
The money must be taken
and used to buy weapons
Communications systems
must be seized, or subverted.
The machines must be turned
off.
Smoke plenty of bush
before and after work,
or during the holdup
when the guards are iced.60
Unlike his later invocations to militant action, Jones now registers a certain hesitance to engage in violent actions. The recommendation to “smoke plenty of bush” could be understood as a therapeutic necessity for those who are about to rob and kill. An entirely different reading of the mention of bush is that it is invoked as an act of comic relief, a juxtaposition with the seriousness of the acts about to be undertaken. In this instance, though, the drugs would still dilute the militancy of the message.
Justifiable killing in behalf of black emancipation should not be confused with murder. Murder is an immoral and unjustifiable killing. The United States murders people, as it did in Vietnam. In “Word from the Right Wing,” Jones writes,
President Johnson
is a mass murderer,
and his mother,
was a mass murderer
and his wife
is weird looking, a special breed
of hawkbill cracker
Johnson’s mother, walked all night holding hands
with a nigger, and stroked that nigger’s
hard. Blew him downtown Newark 1928 . . . .I got proof.61
Ending the poem through the use of the “dozens” is a rather hilarious counterposition to the image of the almighty president of the United States. In “talking bad” about Johnson’s mother, Jones was partaking of a black ritual of vicarious empowerment. In ridiculing the president’s mother, the grandeur of the president is reduced to manageable proportions. Nothing could have been more scandalous than to accuse the president’s mother of having performed fellatio on a “nigger.”
Jones includes in the collection Here He Comes Again a poem that describes his highly cathartic verbal “shoot-outs” in the Village in which he often viciously attacked whites. Jones was angered at the attempts of whites, particularly Jews, to claim an equal or superior victim status to that of blacks.
. . . the black sealed in me flies to
the surface, and beneath it, more
of the same. Like a hard deep rock
I had to tell a hooknosed lady panting
at my fly, I didn’t care whether she died
I had my own history of death and submission62
His disrespect for a Jewish woman who challenged his vicious message is reflected in his use of a pejorative term “hooknosed lady” to describe her. Worse, in claiming that she was “panting at his fly,” Jones tries to reduce her disagreement with him to a repressed sexual desire for him. If anything, the poem speaks to Jones’s embrace of traditional stereotypes of white women and black men.
Jones’s dislocation from the Village scene and white people is more explicitly addressed in his poem “I don’t love you.”
Whatever you’ve given me, whiteface glass
to look through, to find another there, another . . .
I don’t love you. Who is to say what that will mean. I don’t
love you, expressed the train, moves, and uptown days later
we look up and breathe much easier
I don’t love you.63
This is a poem of extreme vulnerability, even though Jones appears to imagine it as an act of assertive defiance. Yes, he is telling whites, including perhaps Hettie, that he does not love them. But the poem makes sense only if he believes that whites would care about the loss of his love. Otherwise there would be no reason to tell them. Announcing that you do not love someone that you never loved is rather mindless.
In “Return of the Native,” Jones describes his return to Harlem and the mutual embrace between himself and the black people of the neighborhood.
Harlem is vicious
modernism. BangClash
Vicious the way its made.
Can you stand such beauty?
So violent and transforming.
The place, and place
meant of
black people . . . .
We slide along in pain or too
happy. So much love
for us. All over, so much of
what we need.64
The poem captures Jones’s sense of himself as a prodigal son who, in leaving the Village for Harlem, had spiritually and physically returned home.
Another poem specifically condemns the life choices of the black middle class. Entitled “Black Bourgeoisie,” probably in deference to E. Franklin Frazier’s “The Black Bourgeoisie,” the poem mocks the racial obsequiousness of the black middle class’s obsessive concern with proper etiquette.
has a gold tooth, sits long hours
on a stool thinking about money
. . . works very had
grins politely in restaurants
has a good word to say
never says it
does not hate ofays
hates, instead, him self
him black self65
In “A Poem for Black Hearts,” Jones offers a moving testimonial to the centrality of Malcolm X to emancipatory-minded black Americans. Malcolm’s example was an inspiration but burdened Jones with the responsibility to carry on the fight for black freedom.
For Malcolm’s eyes, when they broke
the face of some dumb white man, For
Malcolm’s hands raised to bless us
all black and strong in his image
of ourselves, For Malcolm’s words
fire darts, the victor’s tireless
thrusts, words hung above the world
change as it may, he said it, and
for this he was killed, for saying,
and feeling, and being change, all
collected hot in his hear, For Malcolm’s
heart, raising us above our filthy cities
for his stride, and his beat, and his address
to the grey monsters of the world, For Malcolm’s
pleas for your dignity, black men, for your life,
black man, for the filling of your minds
with righteousness, For all of him dead and
gone and vanished from us, and all of him which
clings to our speech black god of our time.
for All of him, and all of yourself, look up,
black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up,
black man, quit whining and stooping, for all of him,
For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth. let nothing in us rest
until we avenge ourselves for his death, stupid animals
that killed him, let us never breathe a pure breath if
we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end
of the earth.66
“A Poem for Black Hearts” became one of Jones’s more widely read poems in the Black Power era. A compelling lamentation of Malcolm’s life, it was republished in Jones’s later volume, Eulogies. In tune with the prevailing logic of Black Power, the poem celebrates black men as the source and defenders of the race’s pride. Malcolm’s assassination demands retribution from black men against white men. If black men fail to avenge Malcolm’s murder, then white men are justified in calling black men faggots, which, by homophobic implication, is an unbearable fate.
Collectively, the poems of Target Study display an artistic sensibility less ambiguous and tortured than that of his earlier poetry. Jones is freer to be racially and politically offensive. It sometimes appears that he believes he is saying something far more strident than his actual verse conveys. But he is moving closer to the highly politicized, didactic poetry of the Black Arts movement. His poetic identity now has crossed the divide from Beat poet to black poet.
The Village scene facilitated Jones’s growing attachment to black music, particularly jazz. The prevalence of jazz clubs and lofts in the Village ultimately helped ground Jones’s identity. Jazz became his ethnic/racial lifeline in his predominantly white environment. Although many of the Beats recognized jazz as a sophisticated art form, mainstream white America relegated jazz to a status beneath that of the middlebrow schmaltz of Mitch Miller, Lawrence Welk, or Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz.”67
Some white bohemians were attracted to jazz for reasons having less to do with its integrity as an art form and more to do with their desires to acquire an outsider identity.68 Blackness and jazz were mutually reinforcing metaphors for opposition to the prevailing mass culture. Nevertheless, those white bohemians who viewed jazz as a means of escaping blandness, when coupled with those who respected jazz as art, nurtured the Village’s supportive environment for the music and the musicians. Although he was inspired and energized by the new music, Jones never made peace with those whites who viewed jazz as a vicarious lifeline to a dynamic existence.
Jones entered the Village as a lover of jazz, but he was not yet a serious student of it. Luck would have it that his first stable job after arriving in the Village was as a clerk for a jazz magazine. The magazine, The Record Changer, was directed to an audience interested in pre–Louis Armstrong jazz. Jones spent numerous hours poring over the old jazz albums in the magazine’s archives, an exploration that culminated in his writing his now-classic study, Blues People. His job at The Record Changer not only fed his growing curiosity about jazz but also introduced him to coworker and future wife, Hettie Cohen.
Jones became personal friends with some of the well-known black jazz musicians who lived in the Village and became acquainted with some of the leading lights of the jazz avant-garde scene. While Jones, the aspiring writer, may not have been raised in a black literary tradition, his fondness for Afro-American music grounded him in a black artistic tradition. A self-professed “schwartze bohemien,” Jones dwelled in cultural ambivalence. As a Beat writer, he was immersed in a literary tradition and art world without significant Afro-American influences except jazz. In hindsight, Jones’s attraction to avant-garde jazz seems all too predictable. Like Jones, black avant-garde jazz musicians were creative hybrids: blacks attempting to capture a creative space in a musical community adverse to dominant commercial influences yet forced to confront the money-making desires of the established, white-controlled music industry.
The history of black music in the United States exemplifies the white exploitation of black creativity. However skillful and innovative, black jazz artists often were barely able to make a decent living, whereas less talented white artists became popular and commercially successful by marketing a middlebrow, watered-down version of black music.
Jones had been exposed to a rich black musical heritage while growing up in Newark. Musically, Newark benefited from its close proximity to New York City. In addition, Jones mentioned that he deepened his exposure to black music through an informal seminar at Howard University taught by Professor Sterling Brown. Jones also used his time in the air force to broaden his exposure to jazz.
The Village was an excellent place to study jazz as an artistic tradition. Jazz was valorized in the Beat scene, although sometimes for reasons that had as much to do with the exotic nature of black music as with the hypermarginalized, destructive lives of black musicians who, owing to poverty and frequent drug dependence, were often romanticized by the Beats as black bohemians. More precisely, despite the Beat recognition of jazz as a valuable art form, little in the subculture could predict the depth of Jones’s appreciation of it.
Jones’s first writings on jazz were short reviews of jazz and blues albums as well as occasional reviews of jazz performances. From early 1959 through the mid-1960s, Jones published in Jazz Review six short reviews of albums by Sonny Rollins, the Cannibal Adderly Quintet, and blues singers Brownie McGhee and Snooks Eaglin. In 1961, Jones became a regular reviewer for Metronome. Beginning in March, his reviews appeared monthly, including those of albums by Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Muddy Waters, and Dizzy Gillespie. From 1962 through 1966, Jones wrote reviews for Down Beat, Jazz, and Kulchur.
One of Jones’s earliest critical essays on jazz, “The Jazz Avant-Garde” (1961), describes the artistic legacies and cultural contexts of the avant-garde musicians. First, he wanted to show that the jazz avant-garde was a distinct creative impulse in modern music that could not be simply attributed to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, and the like. According to Jones, the most energizing influences on the new jazz was the bebop movement of the late 1940s. Although some prominent jazz critics claimed that the vanguard of creative jazz could be found in the merging of the classical musical influences with jazz, Jones looked instead to those musicians who “have come to the beautiful and logical conclusion that BeBop was perhaps the most legitimately complex, emotionally rich music to come out of this country.”69
The issue for Jones was not that black avant-garde musicians like Ornette Coleman could ignore contemporary European “art” music. Rather, he believed that black musicians would inevitably be influenced by European music because they were subject to many of the same social forces and ideas that gave rise to that music.
Ornette Coleman has had to live with the attitudes responsible for Anton Webern’s music whether he knows that music or not. They were handed to him along with the whole history of formal Western music, and the musics that have come to characterize the Negro in the United States came to exist as they do today only through the acculturation of this entire history.70
Such sensibilities had become ingrained into the psyches of Afro-American jazz musicians as Westernized Americans, albeit not fully equal. Jones was therefore not claiming that jazz needed to be viewed as distinctly uninformed by Western classical music (or other Western music, for that matter) but that it existed as a subcultural creative sphere in Western culture. As such, jazz should be defined by members of that subcultural group who created it. This is where he racially privileged his own voice as a jazz critic.
In disclosing the richness of jazz, Jones refuted those nonsensical arguments that have historically consigned jazz musicians to the status of “talented but technically limited.” The elevation of technical virtuosity over musical content is a misunderstanding of the character of the music and undoubtedly a misplaced borrowing from the Western classical tradition: “To my mind, technique is inseparable from what is finally played as content. A bad solo, no matter how ‘well’ it is played is still bad.”71 The essay ends on one of Jones’s signature arguments. He contends that black jazz musicians continually explore new avenues for playing the music in response to the encroachments of white cultural appropriation and mass culture influences.
In 1963, Jones published “Jazz and the White Critic,” which became one of his best-known essays on jazz. In much the same way that Noam Chomsky addressed the “responsibility of intellectuals,”72 Jones could be said to have addressed “the responsibilities of jazz critics.” In so doing, the essay became his personal announcement of his own commitment to the craft of jazz criticism.
Jones confronted the paradox that most jazz critics have been white, even though jazz is an Afro-American art form, most of whose greatest innovators were black Americans. He believes that one of the reasons for the paucity of black jazz critics lies in the bourgeois orientation of most educated blacks who could have become critics. That is, this sector of black America was the least respectful of an art form too closely associated with lower-class blacks and too devalued by whites. Like the blues, jazz was considered a music of “bad taste.” While Jones offered no proof to support this assertion, it follows from his general views about the assimilationist desires of black middle-class Americans.
Jones was not critical of white jazz critics because they were white and the music “black.” As of 1963, he had not yet adopted his racial essentialist beliefs. Instead, he argued that white critics often did not approach the music seriously as an art form but treated it as if it could be understood far more easily than Western classical music. No serious critic of classical music would attempt to interpret Mozart without studying the social and cultural milieu that produced him. Yet white critics of jazz routinely skipped this stage when judging jazz. Jazz, Jones contended, could not be understood without also understanding the sociology and philosophy of Negro culture that gave rise to the music. “Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made.”73 The least informative jazz criticism was based on a discussion of the musical score and notation.74
A printed musical example of an Armstrong solo, or of a Thelonius Monk solo tells us almost nothing except the futility of formal musicology when dealing with jazz. Not only are the various jazz effects almost impossible to notate, but each note means something quite in adjunct to musical notation.75
Jones asserted that historically, the scarcity of intellectuals among the ranks of white jazz critics had led to major shortcomings in their jazz criticism. Not interested in the ideational aspects of jazz, most of them approached the music as if it was a hobby. Worse, their cultural orientation was middle class. According to Jones, jazz “in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards, in fact, quite often is in direct reaction to them.”76 He cited a few examples of misguided criticism written by white critics but did not and perhaps could not document the assertion that white jazz critics tended to be nonintellectuals. Although he does not explicitly say so, a reader might think that those jazz critics who disliked bebop did so because they were white. Yet I suspect that many blacks did not immediately gravitate to Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce.” Do blacks who dislike Parker’s music want to be white-like?
While Jones was undoubtedly correct in claiming that the differences in the musical approaches of Paul Desmond and John Coltrane represented two very different attitudes toward life, he mistakenly generalized this claim to racial groups. Desmond and Coltrane cease to be individuals rooted in different life histories and contexts and instead become proxies for racial difference. By implication, all Negroes share a similar temperament and approach to life that is distinctly different from the temperament and approach to life of all whites. Jones’s various claims about the intrinsic differences between jazz played by whites and jazz played by blacks dredges up memories of racialist arguments.
The belief in racially demarcated cultural essences conflicts with Jones’s argument about the impact of class differences on black American psyches and attitudes toward black music. Jones confuses his readers because he repeatedly employs race language to describe class issues. According to his argument, the black middle class rejected the blues because they wanted to be white, not because they sought middle-class respectability as blacks. In fact, Jones is almost saying that being middle class is being white.
Racial and class differences probably did influence attitudes toward jazz, but in much more fluid ways than Jones would have us believe. After all, the poorest of the poor blacks never gravitated to Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker. And despite his affected “lower-class” vernacular, Miles Davis was the very bourgeois son of a dentist. Did Miles respect the blues tradition? Conversely, the novelist Richard Wright was raised in a poor black southern family. Yet according to his friend and fellow novelist, Ralph Ellison, Wright knew little about the blues and, in fact, was quite divorced from the world of jazz as well. To claim that the blues and jazz are Afro-American art forms does not mean that all Afro-Americans appreciate or even understand this music. Moreover, a black American who does not like the blues or jazz is not necessarily aspiring to assimilate. Simply put, some blacks may not like jazz. I, for one, am not a fan of the blues.
The contradictions in the argument of “Jazz and the White Critic” reappeared in Blues People. What remains striking about this essay is how similar the 1963 version of LeRoi Jones was to Ralph Ellison in his approach to Negro culture. Ellison could easily have written Jones’s closing lines:
Negro music, like the Negro himself, is strictly an American phenomenon, and we have to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it.77
Jones’s classic study Blues People: Negro Music in White America was published in 1963.78 Combining the scholarly and the polemical, Blues People charts the historical development of black music and then uses that historical development as a metaphor for exploring the Americanization of the Negro. Beginning with a discussion of the cultures and musical sensibilities of the enslaved Africans, Jones chronicles the ways in which changes in black music reflected changes in the social status of blacks. Writing as a sociologist of music, Jones states:
It seems possible to me that some kind of graph could be set up using samplings of Negro music proper to whatever moment of the Negro’s social history was selected, and that in each groupings of songs a certain frequency of reference could pretty well determine his social, economic, and psychological states at that particular period.79
Using this “graph,” Blues People focuses on certain moments of rupture/dislocation in the historical lives of black Americans: from Africans to Afro-Americans, from slaves to freedmen, from southerners to northerners, from rural to urban, and from working class to middle class.
Blues People begins as a meditation on the immensity of the cultural dislocation experienced by the Africans brought as slaves to America. African slaves were not only thrown into an alien culture, but they also were perceived, because of their foreignness, as less than full human beings. The unintelligibility of their various languages to their white masters only reinforced the perception of their “difference.” Borrowing from the work of anthropologist Melville Herskovits, Jones argued for the existence of certain cultural continuities between Africans and Afro-Americans despite the gulf separating the first slaves who were Africans from those slaves who had been born and raised in the United States. Despite the stories and musical tales that informed the lives of the first Afro-American slaves, they were at a decided disadvantage in retaining their cultural continuity with Africa because they could not reflect on or remember a life lived in Africa.
Of all the slaves brought to the New World, the enslaved descendants of those Africans first brought to the United States were the most culturally assimilated. Behind the quick dissolution of African traits and cultures in the American colonies was the greater interaction experienced here between the slaves and their white masters. In the American colonies and later in the United States, small-scale farmers were able to buy slaves. Unlike the huge plantation systems in Brazil and Haiti, where individual slaves had little interaction with their masters, in the United States, the small-scale farmer in the United States had extensive contact with his slaves. The intensity of this interaction accelerated the cultural dislocation of the enslaved from their African past.
In proclaiming a uniqueness to Afro-American culture vis-à-vis African cultures, Jones is not participating in those narratives that view this cultural shift as a progressive movement toward civilization. Instead, his intent is to valorize African cultural roots while simultaneously granting cultural agency to the enslaved and their descendants.
Blues is the parent of all legitimate jazz, and it is impossible to say exactly how old blues is—certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the United States. It is a native American music, the product of the black man in this country or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives. . . . The immediate predecessors of blues were the Afro-American / American Negro work songs, which had their musical origins in West Africa.80
Blues People should not be read as scholarly historiography, although the book is historically informed. Instead, it is a historically astute, impressionistic, cultural studies polemic. Jones is not interested in merely telling the tale of black cultural development but of rhetorically righting historical wrongs. In particular, he wants to undermine the credibility of those scholars and the general populace who participated in the negative stigmatization of black people. By focusing on the creative products of these devalued peoples, Jones questions the criteria used to determine just who in America is and isn’t “cultured.”
When writing Blues People, Jones availed himself of the scholarship available at that time.81 Several decades after its publication, he reflected on the work that went into that book:
That took a lot of research. You know, I once read someone felt I just tossed it off the cuff—that it was something that flashed through my mind, in other words. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I had a fundamental knowledge about the subject and, to one degree or another, I have studied music, devoured music all my life. But Blues People was an education for me. Writing a book about the history of black music is a self-teaching job in terms of your own history, and that was tremendously beneficial to me.82
What was and remains pathbreaking about the text is Jones’s neo-Marxist, cultural studies approach to the study of black music. Jones’s novelty lay in his ability to describe and analyze black music as a site of black opposition and a historical repository of black struggle. Whereas Ellison viewed the blues primarily through the lens of the psychocultural humane intentions and meanings universally expressed through art, Jones saw black music as an ever changing response to the economic, social, and material alterations in black life. Both Ellison and Jones recognized the cultural affirmation present in the blues, although Ellison made this aspect central. Jones, on the other hand, wanted to highlight the concerted oppositional elements in black music. For Ellison, the blues and jazz were conspicuously American art forms. In Jones’s mind, the blues and jazz were primarily African, albeit continually filtered through American culture. Ellison viewed the music as an indication of the Negro’s fundamental American identity. Jones saw the music as an indication of the Negro’s status as a cultural outsider in America.
One strength of Blues People is its historical reconstruction of various genres of the blues and jazz. At each stage in their development, Jones situates its black cultural creators in the context of their economic function in the American social order. For instance, the early “shouts” and “hollers” arose as accompaniment to the heavy physical labor of plantation slavery. As blacks in the postslavery era gravitated to tenant farming, their group-oriented work songs changed into more solitary music. In much the same way, Jones describes the urban influences on the music that arose after the “great migration” to northern industrial centers and how they differed from its rural, southern origins.
In chronicling the journey from Africa to Detroit via slavery, Jones’s discussion continually invokes the idea of a changing but nevertheless resilient, black cultural particularity. Negro Americans, that is, authentic Negro Americans, are culturally different from white Americans. In Jones’s mind, many Negroes have forsaken their authentic cultural identities in order to gain white people’s acceptance and recognition. Such Negroes can be found disproportionately in the middle classes. It is not surprising, then, that the most polemical and tendentious chapter of the book is Jones’s commentary on the black middle class and its relationship to black culture. Jones asserts that the black middle class rejected “gut-bucket” blues because they were trying to escape all links with Africa and their black “Africanized” lower-class ethnic peers. He claims that the black middle-class rejection of “primitive” black music was premised on a desire to be white.
The black middle class, from its inception (possibly ten seconds after the first Africans were herded off the boat) has formed almost exclusively around the proposition that it is better not to be black in a country where being black is a liability . . . it was the stench of Africa these aspirant Americans wanted to erase.
. . . It was the growing black middle class who believed that the best way to survive in America would be to disappear completely, leaving no trace at all that there had ever been an Africa, or a slavery, or even, finally a black man.83
Jones is only partially correct. While there were middle-class blacks who rejected the “primitive” black music out of a desire to “whitenize” themselves, there was a larger tradition in the black middle class that rejected such music because its sociocultural status was deemed to be beneath them. It is true that the reason for the black middle class’s sense of the music as low status stemmed from their devaluation of the poorer blacks who created it. But the act of distancing themselves from the poor was not the same as trying to racially “disappear.” It could be considered an act of racial disappearance only if poor black folks and their music had a complete monopoly on authentic black existences. Jones writes mistakenly as if the black middle class were engaged in a collective effort to racially “pass.”84
In his formulaic denouncements of the black middle class, there is no room for the middle-class Negroes who were proud to be Negroes. Jones is forced to ignore the existence of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, both of which were made up of nonpoor blacks and yet were explicitly identified as black. Likewise, some Congregational and Episcopalian churches were openly identified as black, albeit black middle class. Jones did not and would never understand those elements in the black middle class who took pride in being black and middle class. Yes, they may have had some disdain for poor blacks, but they were not trying to rid themselves of their racial identity. Such privileged blacks established social networks, recreation facilities, and schools, not with the hope of racially disappearing, but with the hope of reinforcing whatever privileged status they enjoyed.
Middle-class Negroes often did reject black folk culture music in favor of European music or even white popular culture. Jones, however, confused acculturation with assimilation. Privileged blacks were often trying to identify with “white culture” while maintaining their allegiances to racial uplift and the broader ethnic group. Aren’t Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois examples of this? Ironically, it is possible in America for a highly Europeanized black man like Du Bois to maintain strong ethnic/racial affinities for his non-Europeanized ethnic peers. Jones mistakenly posited cultural similarity as the core unifying element in ethnic consciousness when in fact, similar economic, political, and social conditions were far more determinative. If cultural similarity actually was the primary basis of group unity, then on what grounds did Jones, a Beat writer, escape accusations of racial apostasy?85
Jones has a peculiarly simplistic understanding of black cultural assimilation. As described earlier, Jones believed that assimilation and acculturation were identical and attributed moral weakness to those blacks who acculturate. He deemed this a moral failure because he saw it as the result of a decision to break away from the masses of black folks and a denial of black cultural authenticity. We need only remember that in The System of Dante’s Hell, Jones placed heretics in the deepest part of hell. Contrary to Jones’s assumptions, no moral quality is linked to assimilation or its rejection. Assimilationism is not a moral issue, even though it is common for ethnic groups to try to make their members believe it is in order to keep them in the ethnic fold.86
To create this false ontological aspect of assimilation, Jones was forced to make assimilation/acculturation a deliberate action. Historically, the process by which blacks became increasingly assimilated and acculturated was far more complex and nonlinear than he seems to understand. For instance, assume that the black slaves in the United States experienced what literary scholar Robert Stepto described as a will to literacy.87 Slaves or even freedmen and women who were taught to read were far more assimilated than their illiterate brethren. They learned to read not in order to be “white” or unlike the other Negroes but because they viewed literacy as the embodiment of freedom and personal empowerment.
Blacks who adhered to certain social norms in hopes of gaining upward mobility may have acculturated in ways denied to those blacks who did not have similar opportunities. Those blacks who did not assimilate as readily as other blacks may not have done so intentionally. Rather, they may not have had many options. What does it mean to say that black sharecroppers in Mississippi were less assimilated and acculturated than Robert Abbott, owner of the Pittsburgh Courier? Such comparisons are not relevant, for the sharecropper and Abbott had different opportunities and pressures in the social structure. Isn’t it possible that Abbott and/or the hyperacculturated W. E. B. Du Bois could have had a stronger ethnic consciousness than the impoverished black sharecropper? Once again, Jones’s conceptual problems stem from his obsessive concern with a fictional “black authenticity.”
Black cultural particularity attenuated in accordance with blacks’ increased access to the socioeconomic mainstream of American society. Black cultural particularity was at its height during the antebellum period. If acculturation, the decline of Afro-American cultural particularity, is a function of increased black socioeconomic inclusion, then Jones has set up an analysis in which slaves were the most authentically black of all Afro-Americans. To the extent that he valorizes a black cultural purity, Jones places blacks in a no-win situation. If they become upwardly mobile, they will lose some of their cultural distinctivenesses. If they are able to maintain their cultural distinctivenesses, then they may not be able to advance economically. In order to protect black cultural authenticity, would Jones have opposed the emancipation of slaves, the abolition of Jim Crow, or the integration of Julliard? Here we see that Jones’s neo-Marxism is compromised by an unwillingness to situate the culture of blacks in a dynamic Marxist framework. It is as if the nation’s economic forces were constantly changing everything in society but the cultural core of black America. In Jones’s mind, this core could be retained and shared by blacks, whether they were located in Biloxi, Mississippi, during the 1920s or South Philadelphia during the late 1950s.
If acculturation is both a cause and effect of economic inclusion, why did Jones write as if the black middle class took an immoral or unprincipled stance in divorcing itself from legacies of black cultural distinctiveness like the blues? He offers them a phony choice, for his analysis rests on the assumption that macrosociological processes fueled their acculturation. Jones’s analysis implies that the only authentic blacks are poor blacks. He mistakenly reifies the impoverishment of blacks by treating poverty as if it were an ethnic black trait. In so doing, he creates an ethnic black identity that is far less adaptable than the ethnic identities of most whites. His analysis would have been richer if he had realized that the forces promoting the disappearance of black cultural peculiarities were also at work in the lives of white Americans. The amorphous cultural mainstream that Jones labels white helped coerce the peculiarity of white ethnic subcultures, whether Jewish American, Italian American, or Irish. Why, then, does Jones persistently refer to mass culture as “white culture”? Given the extent that blacks culturally inform American popular culture, can the cultural mainstream be accurately designated as “white culture”?
As simplistic as it sounds, Jones overlooks the fact that folk music is truly organic only to the folk. As some blacks gained a foothold in the mainstream American economy, their links to traditional black folk cultures became thoroughly attenuated. When Jones, the blues aficionado, listens to recordings of early blues musicians, he does so outside the folk culture that produced these musicians. He, too, is an interloper or, worse, a consumer of a cultural commodity. Yet Jones writes as if something in the core of black identity is not only timeless but makes these early blues musicians and their music his in a way that no white person could honestly claim. Today, the blues as an art form no longer generates the support it once did from black audiences. Part of the disappearance of a black audience is the broadening gulf between Afro-Americans and the folk culture that produced the music. Certainly blacks can enjoy the blues today, but they would have to be exposed to it in much the same way that whites are. Like whites, black audiences must be educated to enjoy the blues. Is this a sign of something wrong with black America? Are the white audiences that now fill blues clubs incapable of truly understanding or appreciating the music?
Jones seeks to isolate early periods of black cultural agency as the standard bearer of black cultural authenticity, and by doing so, he succumbs to a reification of black culture. Black culture (i.e., an affinity for black music) becomes a constantly changing but timeless object in the possession of different generations of black people. In commodifying black culture by freezing it into an ahistorical kernel of authenticity that can be either accepted or rejected, Jones is guilty of the very charge that he has leveled against Benny Goodman—changing a verb to a noun.88 Had he taken his argument to its logical conclusion, black “culturing” would not have needed to be constrained by the existing black culture.89
While Blues People justifiably expresses outrage at the commercial exploitation of black music by white-owned record companies, white musicians of lesser talent, and generic white powers that be, it pays too little attention to those serious white jazz musicians who respected the tradition and fought against the encroachment of consumerism. Is jazz not also theirs?90 Can’t less-talented black jazz musicians and black record companies also exploit jazz?
One of the major problems in Jones’s analysis is its overt emphasis on politics as a conscious, driving element in black music.91 Jones is quite adept at extracting the cultural memory, hope, and opposition embedded in black music. He is far less persuasive when he argues that bebop was intentionally created as an act of political opposition.92 The relationship of the music to politics was far more elusive. The creators of bebop were trying to develop a style of playing that deviated from the homogenizing tendencies of the market. They were seeking a new space for artistic freedom. But does this make them political revolutionaries who viewed their music as a weapon? I think not. After all, we should acknowledge that Dizzy Gillespie, one of the central figures in bebop, was also prominently featured on international tours sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Worse, Gillespie and others consciously acted as tools of the American government’s desire to show the world that black Americans were not subject to vicious oppression. In the face of international Soviet propaganda that highlighted America’s racist treatment of blacks during the 1950s, Gillespie’s willingness to champion the United States may have been a form of international “uncle toming.”93
Bebop was quite radical, but mainly because of the way that it broke with and built on traditions of jazz. Even if bebop was stimulated by a desire to play something that “whites couldn’t play,” this fact alone cannot explain why bebop was created as bebop.94 It just identifies the underlying angst that gave rise to an attempt to create something innovative and different.
In appropriating a macrosociological vantage point, Jones is unpersuasive when he tries to link a particular style of playing jazz with a sociohistorical environment and condition, because he biases his findings by focusing on the innovators. Although most of them were black, most black jazz musicians were not innovators. Certainly, many black jazz musicians who were contemporaries of Monk, Dizzy, and Bird chose not to embrace bebop (e.g., Louis Armstrong). Why, then, was bebop deemed more representative of the mood of the times than the “traditional” approach of the more numerous, less innovative black jazz musicians? The macrosociological vantage point of Blues People generates too broad a sweep to provide insightful commentary on all but the most generalized tendencies.
Herein lies the origins of another analytical shortcoming of the proto–cultural studies framework found in Blues People. For example, Charlie Parker was undoubtedly a virtuoso musician, a man with the talent to realize his unique vision of music. He attained the status of an “artist as revolutionary-genius.” In the Beat bohemian community, he became a revered icon, for he seemed to embody the combination of artistic creativity and disaffiliation from the parent social order. Much of his romanticized image stemmed from his heroin addiction, which was posited as the embodiment of an outsider sensibility. Heroin solidified the image of Parker and other jazz musicians as outlaws.95 Concerning the “outsider” identity of Parker and other bebop musicians, Jones wrote:
The goatee, beret, and window-pane glasses were no accidents; they were, in the oblique significance that social history demands, as usefully symbolic as had been the Hebrew nomenclature of the spirituals. . . . Narcotics users, especially those addicted to heroin, isolate themselves and are an isolated group in society. They are also the most securely self-assured in-group extant in the society, with the possible exception of homosexuals. Heroin is the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because, it seems to me, the drug itself transforms the Negro’s normal separation from the mainstream of the society into an advantage. It is one-upmanship of the highest order.96
Contrary to Jones’s clever but irresponsible claim that the use of heroin gives black addicts an “advantage,” heroin addiction could more accurately be described as the physical embodiment of despair and defeat. As Sidran notes, heroin “suppressed aggressive feelings and allayed anxieties.”97 The use of heroin became a means by which Parker and others therapeutically acclimated to the broader racist society. Ultimately, the addiction undermined their ability to live a functional life. To valorize Charlie Parker as an oppositional figure is far too simplistic. In celebrating heroin addiction, Jones essentially admitted that he had abandoned all critical pretense when assessing the lives of bebop musicians.98
Finally, in Ralph Ellison’s often quoted review of Blues People, he mentions that Jones did not pay enough attention to the degree to which white America was culturally changed by the music of black Americans.99 Consequently, Ellison rejects Jones’s Manichaean typology between a changing-same black culture and a static white culture.100 Instead, he argues that both cultures were continually changing and being changed by each other.101 Andrew Ross also perceived the nondialectical aspects of Jones’s analyses of the interplay between black music and the mainstream society.
In Blues People, Baraka focuses on the conflict between what he sees as autonomous “Afro-American” developments in jazz and their assimilated forms. But his account of the perpetual cut-and-thrust between pure and impure, black and white, good and evil, always depends on his demonizing the cut-and-paste mainstream culture of musical meanings as a Gehenna of white appropriation and black Tomming. So while Baraka’s polemical purism ensures his sensitivity to the changes wrought in black music, it leaves him little room to consider the actual changes wrought upon mainstream popular culture by black musical influences. As a result, black meanings, in whatever form, which reach “acceptance by the general public” can only be seen as evidence of “dilution,” and testimony to a “loss of contact with the most honestly contemporary expression of the Negro soul.”102
Despite its many limitations, Jones’s Blues People provides a new road map for the emergence of cultural studies types of nonfiction works and attempts to generate a holistic thick description of the cultural plight of Afro-Americans. Given the scope of its ambitions, Blues People was bound to fail in many respects. But to the extent that its “failures” are the result of unanswered questions or ill-conceived formulations used to explain an as-yet-unexplainable phenomenon, the book succeeds even when it fails. Most important, it continues to inspire others to interrogate the rich theoretical and intellectual undercurrents of black American cultural projection, particularly black music. And in so doing, it brings the splendor of jazz and the blues to new generations of readers.
During 1964, Jones’s aesthetic and political views became increasingly unsettled. The openings of The Baptism and Dutchman in March of that year, followed by The Slave and The Toilet in December, gave Jones a heretofore unknown celebrity status. As a successful black writer, he was forced to devise strategies to maintain his artistic and ethnic integrity. He wanted his works to be well known and acclaimed, but he had no intention of allowing himself to become a poster boy for Negro opportunity in America. Jones was decidedly ambivalent. In April 1964, Newsweek published a profile of him in which he distanced himself not only from political engagement but racial militancy as well. He described himself as “a literary person first of all, before anything. . . . I think of myself as a poet.” When prodded to compare himself with the politicized Jimmy Baldwin, Jones refused to be made a spokesman for anything except art. He was quoted as saying:
Jimmy Baldwin. He’s a friend of mine. I love much of his work. But we’re different persons, we each do what we have to do. I don’t think that any artist can divorce himself from ideas. His work has to have something to do with the world. But a lot of my plays have nothing to do with the Negro Problem. I try to make people out of my Negro characters, people on a stage, not causes or social documents. Any man, black or white, has something to say, but a black man these days will seem to have something to say. Othello is profound, but not because he is a Negro.103
Not yet the Imamu, Jones is so adamant about declaring himself depoliticized on matters of race that he ends up distorting his work. For the playwright to deny that most of his plays were concerned with the Negro problem is ludicrous. Only a year earlier, Jones published the essay “Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots” in which he claimed that Baldwin’s writings were spavined whines and pleas for the white recognition of his humanity. But in Newsweek in April 1964, Jones juxtaposes himself against Baldwin, the Negro-writer-as-race-spokesman, in order to proclaim an artistic space for himself that was free of explicit political engagement. This posture was short lived, however.
By mid-1964 Jones began to cultivate the image of the “angry young black man.” He regularly engaged in public rhetorical attacks on whites, often ad hominem in character. Jones displayed his characteristic “black anger” at a town hall meeting held in New York City on June 15, 1964. This symposium was entitled “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” The black panelists included novelists John Oliver Killens and Paule Marshall, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Jones. The white participants included the talk show host David Suskind; James Wechsler, editor of the liberal New York Post; and Charles Silberman, a journalist on the staff of Fortune magazine. Predictably, Jones attacked the white liberals for their weak commitment to racial justice. After attacking Fortune and the New York Post for their editorial slant, Jones even declared that he “objected to sitting next to people I despise.” Addressing his comments to the white panelists as well as the whites in the audience, Jones stated:
When you say violence you usually mean violence to the white man and to the economic and political power structures . . . the everyday violence against black people is taken for granted like the weather . . . we want control over who we’re going to fight, over where the tax money goes . . . you can call it a stick-up.
Silberman responded that Jones had used the wrong metaphor: “It sounded to me like a mugging.”104
While the Jones-Silberman exchange might have been entertaining for the audience, it does not suggest a serious dialogue. One of Jones’s postures at the time was that dialogues between blacks and whites (particularly white liberals) were futile, for there was little to talk about anymore. Thus he refused to accept the fundamental premise of authentic dialogue and intellectual exchange: respect for the “opponent.” Why was Jones on the panel if he was not committed to dialogue? Few discussants are more capable of irresponsible speech than those who claim that they see no reason to participate in a political discussion but do so anyway.
Could Jones be honestly faulted for distrusting the words of Silberman, a writer for Fortune magazine? In conveying his personal disgust for the white liberal panelists, Jones circuitously placed under scrutiny the personal lives of the white participants. Instead of treating them like disembodied bearers of liberal doctrine, Jones’s ad hominem dismissal inadvertently opened their material lives to the audience. If Silberman was so liberal on matters of race, why was he working at Fortune? Did his racial liberalism inform his behavior there (e.g., Fortune’s editorial position)? Did he fight to integrate the magazine’s staff and editorial board? And how integrated was the staff of Weschler’s New York Post? Jones could not assume that self-proclamations of liberalism on the “Negro question” would translate into behavior.
Gatherings like the town hall meeting were really public theater, ritualistic performances that sustained a sense of community. In the presence of an audience, such a dialogue becomes a performance. Did his love of theater lead Jones to participate in a dialogue that he thought was fruitless? It was as if these public rhetorical assaults on whites allowed him to reverse momentarily the power hierarchy between whites and blacks. Throughout his political life, Jones was attracted to the catharsis of momentary symbolic “victories” over his opponents. In such outbursts Jones could also claim to have become a protégé of his fearless idol, Malcolm X.
In a revealing interview that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in August 1964, Jones tried to describe his anger: “People have said about me that I’m hateful and bitter. . . . Sure I’m bitter about a lot of things. I’m trying to work with complications of feelings, love and hate at the same time. . . . What I’m after is clarity; if it sounds like anger maybe that’s good in a sense.”105 Jones explained to the interviewer that writing was the most important thing in his life, that it kept him from becoming violent or even self-destructive.
I have to write poetry . . . .I’d last about maybe a day if I didn’t. I’d go crazy. Any artist has a lot of energy that won’t respond to anything else. The reason I’m not a violent man—that what I’m trying to say in Dutchman—is that art is the most beautiful resolution of energies that in another context might be violent to myself or anyone else. . . . Neither sex, now whiskey, nor drugs would do it. People need something to do. If you really have something to do and really want to do it, you use up all that energy and violence in making sure you do it right.106
Although Jones was passionate about his political involvements and the political direction of his playwriting, he had not yet become the political activist that would rise to national prominence. In this interview, Jones was still capable of warmly invoking friendships with apolitical white artists in the Village who repeatedly advised him to stay out of politics.
In New York, I have a lot of friends—Larry Rivers, William de Kooning—people who say you shouldn’t get involved in politics. People say, “Just stick to your poetry . . . .” “Why are you getting involved?” You have to be involved, whether you say you are or not. I’m black. I have to be involved. When I walk down the street, a man doesn’t say, “There goes a cultured nigger.” He says, “There’s just another nigger.” All the white friends I have, people I genuinely love, probably only one or two understand what I mean.107
Notably, at this pre–black nationalist stage, Jones could publicly admit to feelings of genuine love for his white friends. He even seems quite willing to tolerate the inability of some of them to understand his unique plight as a black writer. Nevertheless, in the same interview, Jones stated that the United States was on the verge of “blowing up” because most whites could not admit that “America is not a white middle-class country in toto.” But despite the warped character of most American whites, Jones remained committed to his white bohemian buddies. Allen Ginsberg was the “only white man in New York I really trust. . . . I trust him and love him completely.” Furthermore, it was the writings of “outlaws” like Ginsberg that he most valued. “I always associate with the people thought of as ‘beats’ . . . [because] they are outside the mainstream of American vulgarity.”108
In December 1964, Jack Newfield published a short profile of Jones in the Village Voice. Written in the afterglow of the dramatic successes of The Toilet, Dutchman, and The Slave, Newfield was somewhat perplexed by the enigmatic playwright.
In the last year Jones has been swept into fashion on a wave of white masochism, curiosity about underground culture, and a gift that is more controlled than Baldwin, hipper than Killens and more direct in its hatred than anyone else. But Jones is a victim of a paradox. The wilder, more obscene, the more jugular his thrusts become, the more he draws acclaim instead of blood.109
Newfield’s attitude toward Jones reflects the ambivalence that even white progressives felt when talking to the physically small, mild-mannered man whose plays appeared like hand grenades tossed into crowds of bourgeois white thrill seekers. Like many white critics, Newfield saw fit to compare one black writer only with another black writer. In this case, he inappropriately compared Jones with Killens, a writer known primarily for his novels. Claiming that Jones’s plays were “obscene” was a rather meaningless comment, albeit one with negative implications. Evidently Newfield never considered the possibility that stunning theater need not be civil. Clay, a central figure in Dutchman, is not a representative of an “underground culture,” whatever that is. Rather, the play rests on the assumption that Clay is an orthodox bourgeois black man seeking to forge an establishmentarian career in white-dominated America. Finally, neither Dutchman nor The Slave is a statement of race hatred. Both plays are, instead, articulations of repressed and not so repressed black rage. It was all too convenient for white Americans, progressives included, to experience black rage against white antiblack racist subjugation as black hatred for whites. In so doing, a lazy moral erasure occurs as the dominated become the moral equivalent of the dominating (i.e., “both people are hateful”). To the extent that Newfield’s misreading of Jones’s plays was probably widely shared, he is justifiably puzzled as to why whites appeared to be enthralled by the playwright.
Ironically, Newfield probably interpreted Jones’s statements as substantiation of his claim that Jones was a creator of hateful dramas. By late 1964, Jones had begun to issue apocalyptic denunciations of the West. Besides believing that the West was morally bankrupt, he issued hopeful predictions of its ultimate destruction. He became increasingly obsessed by dreams of revenge. But even though they were frightening to many whites, Jones’s apocalyptic fantasies were admissions of political impotence. Jones told Newfield,
My ideas revolve around the rotting and destruction of America, so I can’t really expect anyone who is part of that to accept my ideas. But 90 percent of the world knows they are true. They know the West is done. . . . Guerrilla warfare by blacks is inevitable in the North and the South. . . . Even SNCC doesn’t realize this because they are just a bunch of middle-class vigilantes . . . every black is a potential revolutionary.110
The preposterousness of some of these statements testifies to Jones’s inability to divorce wishful thinking from critical analyses. They speak to his ignorance of black America. Not only was guerrilla war not an inevitability, but if it had been, Jones probably would not have known. What was the basis of his claim that SNCC was mainly composed of middle-class students? Students, yes, but what did Jones know about their class backgrounds? On what basis could they be called vigilantes? Despite the distortions and hyperbole, what remains pertinent about Newfield’s profile of Jones is that it indicates that the playwright was no longer seeking to reform the United States. He now wanted to contribute to its destruction.
Jones’s outsider status in the Village intellectual/art scene was further captured in a profile published in the New York Herald Tribune in December 1964. Written by Isabel Eberstadt and entitled “King of the East Village,” the article describes Jones as an integral part of the Village’s avant-garde artistic life. According to the article, Jones could be found at almost every avant-garde Village event—dance performances, jazz concerts, films, plays, or poetry readings in coffee houses. On many occasions he would read his own poetry. Eberstadt noted that even though Jones was an important participant in this circle, “he always polarized this underground world by the force of his personality and by his violation of the few conventions which exist in it.” Unlike most Village intellectuals, Jones was willing to engage in moral and artistic critiques of fellow Village writers and artists. His rejection of total artistic permissiveness was viewed by many as unbohemian-like. But Eberstadt informs us that most incongruous and startling in the Village scene was Jones’s “commitment to action, to violence if necessary, in the furtherance of what he considers right. This is the most foreign of all to the East Villagers, who espouse passivity and usually think of using nothing sharper than satire against the society of manufacturers, merchants, and advertisers from which they are so estranged.”111 The “King of the East Village” was an outsider among outsiders.
In an essay published in the Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine in 1964, Jones once again described his alienation from American society. Although written for a broader and more mainstream audience than Jones usually addressed, “LeRoi Jones Talking” is both a diatribe against the mundane and vulgar governing values of American society and an autobiographical statement in which the author uses his own experiences to comment on the generic plight of black writers. The essay begins:
I write now full of trepidation because I know the death this society intends for me. I see Jimmy Baldwin almost unable to write about himself anymore. I’ve seen Du Bois, Wright, Chester Himes, driven away—Ellison silenced and fidgeting in some college. I think I almost feel the same forces massing against me, almost before I’ve begun. But let them understand that this is a fight without quarter, and I am very fast.112
Like many American writers, Jones believed that the American obsession with money and material gain had produced a society in which artistic creativity was thoroughly devalued. Upon attaining any type of artistic acclaim, a creative artist is deluged with financially lucrative offers to create the most facile and pedestrian art. All that matters is that it sells. Any writer must wrestle with the ways that American success hinders creativity. No sooner does an American writer begin to create serious art than he or she is lured by the artistic death hiding behind profitability.
Jones informs the reader that the designations “Negro writer” and “Negro literature” are used to categorize certain writing as second rate. Such assessments are made by cultural arbiters, often academics. But the judgments of these critics are suspect. As proof, Jones notes the superior status granted to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow over far greater poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Using warped value systems derived from their own culturally impoverished lives, these critics possessed the power to establish the American literary canon. This canonical celebration of artistic mediocrity is indicative of a debased moral character that ignores the realities of the Harlems of America when proclaiming American progress. In such a social context, Negro writers must appeal to their richest inner selves and try to convey that to their readers, knowing all the while that America cannot tolerate honesty. All honest artists, the only great ones, will suffer in such an environment. Such artists will be rightly accused of being crazy and naive. Jones openly admits that he aspires to “the craziness of all honest men.”113 He proudly proclaims himself a “raver” in the tradition of Blake, Rimbaud, and Allen Ginsberg.
Jones hypothesizes that the interests of Negroes would be advanced if they turned to craziness. He asserts that the entire nation would cease to function if Negroes “just stopped behaving, stopped being what Charles desires, and just flip, go raving in the streets, screaming in verse an honest history of America, walk off their jobs.”114 Despite their powerlessness, blacks are implicated in the corruption of this society if only because they appear to be quite at home with their subjugation by compliantly fulfilling their subservient roles.
He argues that the prevailing dishonesty of this society exists to mask the actions of the American economic elite. Only art that celebrates the capitalists, those to whom Jones refers as the “basest elements of the society,” will be considered great.
The Negro writer is in a peculiar position because if he is honest, most of what he has seen and experienced in America will not flatter it nor can that seeing and experiencing be translated honestly into art by euphemism. And while this is true of any good writer in America, black or white, it is a little weirder for the Negro, since if that Negro is writing about his own life and his own experience, that writing must be separated from what the owners and the estimators think of as reality, not only by the intellectual gulf that causes any serious man to be estranged from the mainstream of American life, but by the social and cultural estrangement from the mainstream that has characterized Negro life in America which his work will reflect.115
“LeRoi Jones Talking” ranks among the very best of Jones’s efforts to discuss his plight as a black writer. What remains so fascinating about the essay is Jones’s naïveté and inflated sense of self. If serious art is as thoroughly marginalized as Jones claims that it is in the United States, why would he, a serious writer, be threatening to that social order? In 1964, Jones also wrote the essay “The Last Days of the American Empire (Including Some Instructions for Black People.” Except for “The Revolutionary Theater,” “The Last Days of the American Empire” was probably the most racially assertive and politically militant statement that Jones wrote before he became a separatist black nationalist.
“The Last Days of the American Empire” is an explosion of rage with no consistent theme or argument. Jones harbored so many complaints about racist American society that he could not devise a style of writing that would allow him to do more than vent his frustrations. Early in the essay Jones rhetorically asks, “Is there anyone in the real world America who thinks Slavery Has Been Abolished?”116 This question sets the stage for the sledgehammer effect of the writing. Over the twenty pages, we learn that the morally debased white America is destined for political decline, that the black middle class has closed ranks with whites, that it is silly and weak to let some racist sheriff beat your head, and that black people could change their situation if they only would unite and discard racist images of themselves.
While this essay contains little substantive analysis, it is significant because it was one of the first times that Jones openly endorsed black nationalism as the strategy for black people. Even though his understanding of it at this point is nothing more than black group unity, we can see now that he has shifted the vantage point from which he contemplates society. The vantage point has shifted from the idea of a decadent society run for the benefit of mindless consumerist capitalists to a decadent society that has been deliberately committed to domestic and international racism as a means of maximizing its economic profitability.
The essay is an early articulation of some of the themes that soon became standard Jones arguments. He tells us that the United States is destined to fall because it is immoral and out of touch with the needs and interests of most of the world’s people. This is why he can title the essay “The Last Days of the American Empire.” In issuing prophecies of white American destruction, Jones conceals his inability to conceive of an agent of social change. Instead of considering the possibility that American economic exploitation of the world could continue indefinitely (or, worse, permanently), Jones retreats to moral claims to substantiate assertions about America’s demise. Having no agent of change (like Marx’s working class), Jones retreats to the efficacy of moral condemnations. And for this, he criticizes black advocates of nonviolent social change!
In a raging didactic fashion, Jones instructs black people that whether or not they know it, they have stronger characters than whites do, for oppression breeds strength in the oppressed and weakness in the oppressor.
The stupid arrogance, the ignorance, AND FEAR, in those cracker eyes, those firemen, state patrolmen, the dog holders, all that fear is in the bones of this society. . . . Look at those weak fag faces on those patrolmen arresting that beautiful chick, and finally there is something in her face which is stronger than anything in white eyes’ life.117
A second lesson is to beware of any and all attempts of white America to divide blacks against one another. In particular, whites will try to split blacks into different classes, even though they know that the only division in America that matters is the one that labels someone white or black.
I cannot repeat it too many times, nor can any of you black people repeat it too many times to one another. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE SEPARATED from your brothers and sisters, or your culture. This is what makes us think we are weak.118
A third lesson centers on Jones’s attempt to convince his readers that the racist attacks on blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, are directly linked to the racist behavior of the United States (and other “white” countries) in Africa. He asserts that Patrice Lumumba and Medgar Evers were murdered by the same people. Finally, Jones wants blacks to know that the idea of a nonviolent social change is both demeaning to black people and a political scam.
In the essay’s conclusion, Jones’s argument implodes on the basis of his inability to construct a viable alternative plan of action.
The hope is that young blacks will remember all of their lives what they are seeing, what they are witness to just by being alive and black in America, and that eventually they will use this knowledge scientifically, and erupt like Mt. Vesuvius to crush in hot lava these willful maniacs who call themselves white Americans.119
It is not clear just what Jones intended when he subtitled the essay “Including Some Instructions for Black People.” If he meant to instruct black people, why do so in a book that would be read predominantly by whites? I suspect that these so-called instructions for blacks were actually directed at a white reading audience. Their purpose was to instill in whites the belief that Jones had tapped into an undercurrent of black popular sentiments. If successful, Jones’s hypermilitant essay would have functioned as a fear-inducing plea/warning to white folks. Once again, we see the depth of Jones’s entrapment in a black victim status.
In contrast to his many artistic talents, Jones more frequently than not displayed a penchant for simplistic social views and the resultant dogmatic politics. During his latter days in the Village (1964–65), Jones and his friend jazz musician Archie Shepp engaged in bitter verbal attacks on whites at public forums.120 In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse describes a joint Jones-Shepp tirade at the Village Vanguard. During an exchange with the audience, artist Larry Rivers spoke from the floor. A friend of Jones, Rivers had created the sets for Jones’s plays The Toilet and The Slave.121 In the course of his remarks, Rivers reminded Jones and Shepp of the 6 million Jews who had perished in the Nazi Holocaust.122 According to Cruse, Jones replied to Rivers, “You’re like the others [whites], except for the cover story.”123 As if Jones were not provocative enough, Shepp went further, “I’m sick of you cats talking about the six million Jews. I’m talking about the five to eight million Africans killed in the Congo. King Leopold is his name.”124 Cruse then notes that a white woman in the audience argued that Jones and Shepp should appreciate the assistance that whites and, in particular, Jews had given to the cause of black civil rights. Once again Shepp replied in an inflammatory tone, “I give no civil service charity for going to Mississippi to assuage their consciences.”125
Another public forum that turned into a LeRoi Jones tirade against white people took place at the Village Gate. Three decades after this event, Jones referred to it as “the public shootout that remains most clearly etched in my memory.”126 He recollected that a white woman, “in all earnestness”127 asked him if whites couldn’t be of some help to the black struggle. He remembers emphatically telling her that she and other whites could help by dying, for “you are a cancer.” Another white audience member brought up the names of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the two young Jewish American men who, with James Chaney, had been murdered in Mississippi. Jones answered that blacks had many of their own to mourn. “Those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences.”128
When commenting on this episode in his autobiography, Jones finally admitted that the willingness of Goodman and Schwerner to commit their lives to the black civil rights struggle was not only heroic but constituted a degree of engagement that outstripped his own contribution to that movement.129 Jones mentions that the anger in his responses was intensified because the very people (i.e., white people) who had invoked the memory of Goodman and Schwerner had not mentioned the name of their murdered black companion, James Chaney. Jones claimed that he was enraged by the silence of Chaney’s murder and the corresponding implication that the value of white life superseded that of blacks. This response sounds contrived, however, for the audience may have mentioned the murdered white civil rights activists precisely because Jones and Shepp were attributing racism to all whites. Concerning these public tirades against whites, Jones wrote,
There were questions from the audience; I now regularly put down “whitey.” I had long done this in my writing. The torturous years the African and African American have spent as slaves and chumps for this white supremacist society obviously provided enough factual resources to support a tirade against whites. The Muslim example, particularly and most inspirationally the message of Malcolm X, supported my attack. But still I was married to a white woman, I still had many white friends.130
Even many years later, Jones still did not grasp the underlying vulnerability that may have led him to such fanatical and irresponsible articulations of rage. Jones cites his marriage to Hettie as if it canceled out his antiwhite tirades. On the surface, this certainly was the case. But it seems equally plausible that the necessity for cursing white liberals arose precisely because of his intimate relationships with white friends and a white wife, not in spite of them. One can easily imagine a self-assured black political activist who was situated in a black community speaking to the same Village audience without feeling the need to “act out” in such an immature manner. In denouncing whites, Jones was actually condemning himself for his lack of involvement in the black movement. The whites he vilified as “poseur-liberals who sashayed safely through the streets of Greenwich village, the behind-the-scenes bleeding hearts”131 were essentially transferred and detested images of himself. Ironically, it was Jones and Shepp, not Goodman and Schwerner, who were trying to assuage leaking consciences.
Jones’s depictions of his life, whether in his autobiography or in his numerous interviews, often assume a teleological narrative in which one action necessarily leads to another, which then necessarily leads to yet another action and so forth up to the present. The present incarnation of Jones is therefore posited as the culmination, negation, and moral erasure of all the previous ones. For example, Jones’s autobiographical narrative assumes that the contradiction between having a white wife and publicly vilifying all whites could have been resolved only through his emergence as a militant black chauvinist. In actuality, the supposed contradiction between his private life and his public speech might just as well have been resolved by ceasing to engage in such cathartic diatribes. But since he did not choose this path, Jones writes as if such a course of action was never a viable option.
While he does reflect on his past, his reflections are usually constrained by a priori limits that ultimately reduce his responsibility for any previous actions, however wretched. Dreadfully irresponsible, Jones is unremittingly morally evasive. We, his audience, are supposed to restrict our judgments to his present configuration and thus participate in his moral amnesia. Jones’s contemporary rationalization for his past attacks on Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (i.e., the whites did not mention Chaney) is only one part of a larger project to obfuscate any obscene behavior in his past.
Jones’s attempts to equate his diatribes against whites with Malcolm’s rhetorical style was a gross distortion. Certainly Jones knew that Malcolm did not curse at white audiences on those numerous occasions when he spoke to them. Even though Malcolm was angry at whites, he did not use such occasions to exorcise his internal demons. Malcolm, unlike Jones, did not have to engage in theatrical spectacles of conflict in order to create an image of opposing white racism. Instead, Malcolm’s everyday life embodied that opposition. It was therefore not surprising that Malcolm praised the very Jewish civil rights activists whom Jones condemned in the Village. Concerning the death of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Malcolm stated, “I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who will fight not for us but with us is my brother.”132 During one 1964 speaking engagement at Wayne State University, Malcolm deliberately confronted a black member of the audience who had uttered a string of anti-Semitic denunciations. Malcolm stated, “I suspect that our moderator today is Jewish and I won’t put him in the position of silencing you. So I will. Shut up and sit down.”133 Had Malcolm been in the audience in the Village when Jones launched into his antiwhite, anti-Jewish tirades, he might well have told Jones to sit down and shut up. Had he done so, Afro-American politics and literature might have been spared some of the infantile outbursts that became characteristic of Jones’s political rhetoric during the next seven years. Unfortunately, Malcolm had been murdered by the time that Jones exploded at these Village rap sessions. The legacy left by Malcolm was so open-ended that Jones and others could tease out of it whatever they so chose. In need of dramatic performances to rhetorically create the image of estrangement from whites that his life did not embody, Jones became a walking antiwhite, invective machine. Provided with an audience, preferably white, and a microphone, Jones would hurl a crescendo of curses. In pursuit of hurt white feelings and black applause, Jones would sacrifice complexity and ambivalence. This aversion to ambivalence forever made Jones politically a Manichaean dogmatist.
The Village attacks on white audiences were typical articulations of Jones’s mistaken belief that rhetorical assaults were analogous to radical praxis. It was not therefore surprising when Jones wrote about this period in his life, “I rejected Martin Luther King’s philosophy. I was not nonviolent. I had written a poem about this time that ended:
We have awaited the coming of a natural
phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable
workers
of the land.
But none has come
(Repeat)
But none has come.
Will the machinegunners please step forward?”134
Evidently, Jones thought that writing a poem about violent political activity was a negation of and thus, by extension, on a par with nonviolent political praxis. While Jones viewed himself—and desired to be viewed—as increasingly radicalized because of his willingness to engage in antiwhite verbal tirades and antiwhite, cathartic poetry, he continued to refrain from active political engagement. His actions were not only nonviolent but passive, whereas the nonviolent Martin Luther King Jr. was anything but passive.
It is not surprising that while living a politically passive life in the Village, Jones was willing to play the role of the “big, bad, violent nigger” for an audience of bohemian whites. Jones had clearly sought and acquired a black victim status in the Village scene. Unlike mainstream white society, which wanted its victim-status blacks to be cross-carrying messiahs like Martin Luther King Jr., Village whites evidently expected their victim-status blacks to tell them just how despicable they were as whites. Many of these whites were, as Tom Wolfe later announced, engaged in “radical chic.”135
In an interview published in 1966, the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor might well have been speaking about Jones and Shepp:
When you want to go in for politics you don’t stay in New York. I’ve no great admiration for people—white or black—who take up positions here. The people I respect are the young blacks of Mississippi or Alabama who don’t hesitate to get themselves clubbed by the police in order to win the case.136
At some point between 1964 and 1966, Jones became New York society’s fashionable black-writer-who-hates-whites. In commenting on Jones’s shrewd manipulation of white guilt and fear, Stephen Schneck noted:
The more he attacked white society, the more white society patronized him. Who’d have suspected that there was so much money to be made from flagellation? Whitey seemed insatiable; the masochistic vein was a source of hitherto untapped appeal, big box office stuff, and LeRoi Jones was one of the very first to exploit it.137
Schneck concluded his article by claiming that Jones’s willingness to leave the “white” New York art world was an indication that he was not merely engaged in an ethnic “hustle.” What Schneck did not foresee at the time of his article was that Jones would reemerge “on the other side” as a prominent figure during the Black Power era. Schneck also did not understand that Jones—a man who had evaded the entire Civil Rights movement and who was not necessarily perceived as ethnically legitimate by those circles he hoped to join and ultimately lead—needed an ethnically legitimating admission ticket into black America. The ticket was purchased through his rejection of the “white world,” including, supposedly, his Greenwich Village celebrity status. That is, Jones’s willingness to walk away from white acclaim became a trademark of his commitment to black people. But Jones never abandoned his quest for public recognition. What he supposedly sacrificed in the Village became his mode of entry into Harlem.
Concerning his last days in the Village, Jones wrote:
What we did, concretely, was polarize the people downtown. We talked a black militance and took the stance that most of the shit happening downtown was white bullshit and most of the people were too. The fact that we, ourselves, were down there was a contradiction we were not quite ready to act upon, though we discussed it endlessly. . . . For us it was Harlem, that was the proper capital of our world and we were not there. . . . So we settled for jumping on people, mostly verbally . . . we carried the fanaticism of the petty bourgeoisie.138
Harlem had not only relinquished its status as the haven for the black bourgeoisie but had become the “capital of our world.”