The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, by Amiri Baraka

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones) was a towering figure in American letters who died in 2014 after 50 years of prolific commentary. He started as a poet (many collections), but also wrote plays (Dutchman being his most well-known, still produced with regularity today in repertory companies and college programs – probably still 20 or 30 times a year across the country), music criticism, essays (political and personal), plus fiction, as well as his classic 1984 memoir The Autobiography of Leroi Jones. Leroi Jones went to Howard University and as well as Rutgers, served time in the U.S. Army and then attended the New School for Social Research. He has been accused of anti-Semitism, misogyny (probably rightly, although … well, if we discounted every writer who showed “incorrect” attitudes, then we’d all be left ONLY allowed to read Tumblr posts for the rest of our days), of abandoning his unique voice to political causes. The debate on all of that continues. He took his role as Spokesman seriously, but many were like, “Hey. Don’t you speak for me.” He was one of those artists who was open to change (many aren’t: they burst onto the scene, and then just keep repeating themselves until their work becomes “schtick.”) In the 1950s, Leroi Jones was pure Beat Generation. He lived in Greenwich Village. He hung out with Frank O’Hara. He wrote with intensity, he was personal. A contemporary of Kerouac and Ginsberg and their explosive psychological stream-of-consciousness style. Poems were meant to be expressions of personality, of states of mind. The subjective turned universal. Apolitical, practically, although there was a political side to the Beats, or their focusing on individualism helped create an atmosphere that launched into 60s politics. The 60s radicalized him into a Black Nationalist, and the 70s brought on the Marxism in his philosophy – although all of that was, of course, part of him from the beginning. When he changed, he often left the audience he had cultivated behind. Come with, or don’t, it didn’t matter to him. He was accused of focusing on his own personal experience, seen as completely inappropriate in a world going to hell, when people lived in poverty, when Third World countries were erupting into revolution. He listened to those accusations, they got under his skin. His work changed.

In 1964, he wrote The Dutchman, a thrilling and confrontational play about a white woman and a black man on a subway train. It won the Obie in 1964 and then was turned into a film.

Jones’ style was different, very much his own, although he had the avant-garde in his soul (the 1960s were such a thrilling time in American theatre, with voices both surrealist and realist rising, Leroi Jones, Lanford Wilson, John Guare – giants, in other words – and off-Broadway – and small theatres like The Cherry Lane – where The Dutchman premiered started to dominate in a way that just hadn’t existed before.) Many people who weren’t poetry readers were introduced to his work through The Dutchman. The play still works for a modern-day audience.

He wrote a classic book about jazz and the blues: Blues People: Negro Music in White America, two styles completely indigenous to America: it’s a history book, tracing the genesis, through its developments, creating the continuum necessary for further analysis. (It’s a hell of a book. I read it in college.)

Malcolm X’s assassination was part of his break with his own past. He moved to Harlem and opened up an acting school for the community. He wanted to foster black pride, and create an alternative to white training programs. Many who were a fan of his poetry considered what was happening to him one of the greatest losses to literature they had ever known. He changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1966.

Eventually, Baraka saw Black Nationalism as destructive, and moved on to his third world Marxist stage, again alienating many who had seen him as their mouthpiece. (On the flip-side, there were always champions in the literary world who cautioned against “dismissing” this giant, just because he changed his mind, or his style changed.) Many thought that he “lost” his unique-ness when he aligned himself with specific causes. Disappointment in him – and his abandonment of his earliest concerns – followed him wherever he went. He withstood that criticism, something I found admirable, even when he drove me crazy. He made inroads into the white establishment with his writing, busting down doors. Mohawk poet Maurice Kenney said of Baraka, “We’d all still be waiting for the invitation from The New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and take it.”

I took an African-American literature course in college, and we read the people I had already encountered in my great Humanities class in 10th grade, but the college course went into more depth: the great Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Phyllis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes. It was an amazing class. We devoted about 3 weeks to the work of Amiri Baraka, although I was already familiar with him since I was a theatre major and The Dutchman was one of the regular plays assigned in acting classes for scene work (along with the plays of Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets). It’s one of THOSE pieces of writing: great for young actors, first of all, and also easily used for scene work purposes and actor development. Good for a young African-American male actor too, a part to sink his teeth into, and utilize all parts of himself. (There are only two people in the play, and it’s great for young actors to work on “conflict” and how to play/tap into the different stages of conflict. If you can’t play conflict, you can’t be an actor.)

The Autobiography of Leroi Jones is required reading if you want to understand the upheaval, social/political/cultural, of the second half of the 20th century.

I love that the editors of this anthology excerpted the part of the memoir that deals with Jones’ memory of attending Negro League baseball games in Newark, where he grew up, and what those games were like, and what they meant to his community. “His” team was the Newark Eagles. The way he described the fan reaction was: “pure love.” In the white world, everyone had to “Yes, sir” “No, sir” and tolerate rubbing-shoulders with racists. Little-boy Jones watched his father blossom at those games, the easy banter with fellow spectators, getting to know some of the players, who were heroes. Everyone dressed to the nines for those games. The sadness he felt when the Negro Leagues disintegrated (not all at once) post-Jackie Robinson. With all the fervor and adulation and controversy about Jackie Robinson moving into the all-white major leagues), the feelings of a lot of people were more complex. One essay in this anthology deals with that explicitly: the wonderful profile of Cool Papa Bell,, believed to be the fastest man who ever played the game. Barak’s feelings about Robinson (as you can see below) were ambivalent, and many African-American writers from the time (and especially Negro League players) expressed the same thing. It was bittersweet.

Here’s the excerpt.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. From The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, by Amiri Baraka

It was black life that was celebrated by being itself at its most unencumbered. Mrs. Effa Manley, who owned the team, would even come through and Baba or somebody would buy her a drink. Or my father would push me forward for an introduction and Monte Irvin would bend down and take my little hand in his and, jim, I’d be all the way out.

In the laughter and noise and colors and easy hot dogs there was something of us celebrating ourselves. In the flying around the bases and sliding and home runs and arguments and triumphs there was more of ourselves in celebration than we were normally ever permitted. It was ours. (Not just the ownership of the teams, the Negro National League, though that had to be in it too.) But our expression unleashed for our and its own sake. It made us know that the Mantans and Stepin Fetchits and Birminghams were clowns – funny, but obviously used against us for some reason. Was it a big creep in a white hood somewhere in charge of trying to make black people feel bad? I thought so. But the clowns we knew were scarecrows, cardboard figures somebody was putting out trying to make us feel bad. Cause we knew, and we knew, that they wasn’t us. Just clowns. Somebody got hooked up. We was out on the field at Ruppert Stadium, jim. And we was even up in the stands diggin it. Laid back in a yellow shirt with the collar open and white pencil-stripe pants. We was in the sun with a hot dog and a root beer having our hands shook by one of our father’s friends. We was cheering for Mule Suttle or seeing Larry Doby make a double play. We was not clowns and the Newark Wagles laid that out clear for anyone to see!

But you know, they can slip in on you another way, Bro. Sell you some hand magic, or not sell you, but sell somebody somewhere some. And you be standin’ there and all of a sudden you hear about – Jeckie Rawbeanson. I could tell right away, really, that the dude in the hood had been at work. No, really, it was like I heard the wheels and metal wires in his voice, the imperfected humanoid, his first words “Moy nayhme is Jeckie Rawbeanson.” Some Ray Bradbury shit they had mashed on us. I knew it. A skin-covered humanoid to bust up our shit.

I don’t want to get political and talk bad about “integration.” Like what a straight-out trick it was. To rip off what you had in the name of what you ain’t never gonna get. So the destruction of the Negro National League. The destruction of the Eagles, Greys, Black Yankees, Elite Giants, Cuban Stars, Clowns, Monarchs, Black Barons, to what must we attribute that? We’re going to the big leagues. Is that what the cry was on those Afric’ shores when the European capitalists and African feudal lords got together and palmed our future. “WE’RE GOING TO THE BIG LEAGUES!”

So out of the California laboratories of USC, a synthetic colored guy was imperfected and soon we would be trooping back into the holy see of racist approbation. So that we could sit next to drunken racists by and by. And watch our heroes put down by slimy cock-suckers who are so stupid they would uphold Henry and his Ford and be put in chains by both while helping to tighten ours.

Can you dig that red-faced backwardness that would question whether Satchel Paige could pitch in the same league with … who?

For many, the Dodgers could take out some of the sting and for those who thought it really meant we was getting in America. (But that cooled out. A definition of pathology in blackface would be exactly that, someone, some Nigra, who thunk they was in this! Owow!) But the scarecrow J.R. for all his ersatz “blackness” could represent the shadow world of the Negro integrating into America. A farce. But many of us fell for that and felt for him, really. Even though a lot of us knew the wholly artificial disconnected thing that Jackie Robinson was. Still when the backward Crackers would drop black cats on the field or idiots like Dixie Walker (who wouldn’t even a made the team if Josh Gibson or Buck Leonard was on the scene) would mumble some of his unpainted Ku Klux dumbness, we got uptight, for us, not just for J.R.

I remained a Giant “fan,” cause me fadder was, even when J.R. came on the scene. I resisted that First shit (though in secret, you know, I had to uphold my own face, alone among a sea of hostile jerks!)

(So what? So Jeckie came on down to DC town and they got his ass to put Paul Robeson down! I remember that, out of the side of my head I checked that. What did it mean? What was he saying? And was it supposed to represent me? And who was that other guy – Paul Robeson? I heard that name … somewhere.)

The Negro League’s like a light somewhere. Back over your shoulder. As you go away. A warmth still, connected to laughter and self-love. The collective black aura that can only be duplicated with black conversation or music.