Two
These are some basic colors of my life, in my life. A kind of personal, yet fairly objective class analysis that corresponds (check it) to some real shit out in the streets in these houses and in some people’s heads.
Belmont and Spruce was a corner in (of) black life. The people moving back and forth on Belmont, Livingston, 18th Avenue, and down the street on Broome and Prince and Morton and Charlton, or up the street on Waverly or round the corner on Hillside Place or over on West Kinney. That was black life full and open, bent under its history, yet that bend sometimes would seem like blue streamlining — hey, especially on the weekend with everything in front of you but absolute reality.
I had come back from the West, which was black life too, but on The Hill a different kind of thing went down. Like on Newark Street, yeh, but The Hill was more open and spread out, blacker in its spread and magnitude. The blues was our black footsteps, our basic reality, the ideological material of our lives. The mashed down flat social geography of the African American community put all kinds of dents and strokes and twists and turns in that black and blue base. There was the fundamental horizontal quality of an oppressed nationality — yet we were not all completely at the same level of being bent. Some of us did have more money, and in those days before the suburbs opened up for blacks to a certain extent, almost all of us were piled along in one place or another within the same general community though sections of it were better than others.
There were people who lived in East Orange, even Orange and Montclair. And we did look at them different — though they were part of a basic yellow reality, that had some presence in official white world as black, but that was meaningless to us in our day-to-day lives.
The black was fundamental black life, the life of blues people, the real and the solid and the strong and the beautiful. But I developed these understandings as I went. And The Hill was the laboratory in which they developed.
The brown was my family and me, half real and half lodged in dream and shadow. The connected to reality by emotion (and logic). The walking through the streets and ambushes of that harshest reality unscathed except psychologically. The house with hidden insides and unknown wild projections. Not us exclusively, but personally, from my inside looking out, in those days.
The yellow, the artificial, the well-to-do, the middle class really. Described by a term like petty bourgeoisie with steel precision, but something else of caste was what my definition came to mean even without me understanding or saying that. The high-up over the streets avoiding disaster by several hundred thousand feet and some straight hair.
The browns had to weave in betwixt and between the harshest disasters, getting cut in the street, locked up by police, living in places with smelly halls, having hair “standing all over your head,” being “Blue” (a nickname) or “Liverlips” or having a drunk father or mother or a falling-down house, or a tiny apartment decorated with rotogravure covers. Or failing in school, being left back, put back for being from the South, dropping out to go to work, having parents that couldn’t speak “good English.” Browns barely escaped all this and actually had to be tested by yellows and whites or yellow and white “reality” to see if they passed.
Because the black was also the damned, the left behind, the left out, the disregarded, the abandoned, the drunk and disorderly, the babbling and the staggering, the put down and the laughed at, the heir of the harshest of lives I could see.
But the brown, while caught between the black and the yellow, did not, in spite of themselves, like the yellow. They hated it, them, even worse than white, even worse than white folks (normally) because white folks didn’t exist with the same day-to-day common reality. The yellow would be around bugging you, having a haircut neatly parted with well-greased legs and knees. The yellow would be sitting with new moccasins and striped tee shirts and newly creased shorts. They would be laughing and having always good exclusive times, usually at your expense, even if it didn’t have nothing to do with you.
Brown sensitive to this even unable to speak of it, sensitive to it watching it. Touched by both streams of life and consciousness yet being its own being shaped by both and the white other. I mean I could come out of my brown house (no matter its color) into the streets and be facing a black reality. A blue shimmer pushing off the streets and twisting round the corner catching me, caressing me, and being a background for everything, the motion behind the motion which is itself’s full dimension.
Or you could come out of your house (be brought out by your brown (and yellow) mama) and find yourself at the Y being laughed at by the yellow for having your hair cut close or being brown or not having a mother who was a “fashion model.”
Or you could come running out of your brown (and orange) crib and head for the Court and dash smack into the lovely brown E., whose long curly hair like a blood version of Shirley Temple and old man who sang on television (with Your Show of Shows) made them remote and yellow despite your secret protests of love and fantasies and stopped phone calls (“She’s not here. Don’t call here anymore!”), despite the fact they lived in Baxter Terrace, where, hey, some straight-out black was obviously lodged and a corresponding brown you would have sworn prepared them to love you.
(That was a long “alas” of my young life, one of the pitiful unrequiteds youth seems filled with.)
You’d sit looking at a yearbook of your mom’s Tuskegee Normal High School days or of those slim tiny Woco Pep Fisk days (stopped by your appearance) and wander outside dead into a drunk man with wine-red lips threatening you with his existence.
Saturday afternoons the whole of The Hill was music. Up top the blues, all kinds, country and city, guitars and saxophones, screamers and moaners. I dug the Ravens, the Orioles, Amos Milburn, Dinah Washington, Little Esther, Ruth Brown was our heartbeat, Larry Darnell, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, Earl Bostic, Tab Smith. It was everywhere everywhere in that space, in the air, on the walls, in the halls, in the laundromats, whistled and sung and stomped to. It colored the vacant lots where barbecue was being perfected, it zoomed out of the bars and lit up our mouths, it bluesed us along through those grey streets and carried the message and feeling of black life.
’Cause Newark was iron grey for me then and it is still but now ripped apart by piled-up despair. But in those days grey and steel were its thrusts into me, its dominant unwavering tone. And the strongest, the deepest, the basic construction element of its design was the black of its bottom of the lives whose majority it held and spoke for. Such an ugly place, so hard so unyielding it seemed — grey industrial city. But black life made it blue. Its beating heart was blue therefore rooted in black life and its streets strummed my head like a guitar.
Inside our house my sister and I were readied for brown stars that flickered in the yellow logic of my mother’s prose like white twinkling distance we’d cover as easily as an amendment is written in the constitution. “Guaranteeing” you something you could only be guaranteed with power. Readied you in brown for white to be yellow. Is that the exact psychology of such beings as what was meing? Yet outside under the invisible white tarpaulin of held-down obstructed life called oppression there was black life and it was strongest everyday where we lived. And no matter the brown inside game plan your mama hammered out with piano lessons, drum lessons, art lessons, singing and dancing in summer school and at the Y in choruses of yellow and brown folks. Or ballet and tap lessons for my sister and pink toe shoes and boubous or our trips down South where we lived out in the suburbs of Columbia, S.C., between two rich yellow doctors (one housed my maximum passion of that time) — when you came out that house it was black people whose lives spelled out the direction and tenor of our day-to-day being.
The brown was like a reserve, an exit or quick passage to somewhere else. You look up you could be getting a scholarship somewhere or shaking Joe Louis’s and Sandy Saddler’s hand or being introduced by Willie Bryant as a bright Negro child, or reciting the Gettysburg Address in a boy scout suit down at the Old First Church, where George Washington was and most black people wasn’t.
But I ran the streets and walked the streets everyday hooked up to black life. And it builded, however, despite the cold white shot of my daily Barringer trip that taught me to lust after abstract white life abstractly. Really, to be concerned with it in some abstract yet intimate way. While even as I moved, Larry Darnell would light up my insides and I could walk down the halls of that cold-ass place and be reciting with cool solemnity his blue tragic ballad:
You’re right Up on top now
You want To be free
Why you’re Afraid to be seen
With somebody like me
You’re afraid to present me
To the friends of your set
Oh well, I guess
We’ll forgive and forget.
But you come back from white Barringer, bam, it was blues and black people everywhere I see. And that church my mother and grandmother took us to was classic in that regard. It was a yellow church, a yellow folks’ church. In fact someone told me that they used to sing, “Only the yellow, only the yellow, will see God.” Some blunt agitprop.
Yet within it there was the brown and the black. The black folks would scream and fall out. The brown would fan themselves and fall out from time to time, but not regular like the black, who would “get happy” at the drop of a note or a word.
The preacher in that church (I mean the minister, only the black got preachers, the yellow got ministers and the browns be strung out as usual somewhere twixt the two, over here with it, over there without). The minister, Rev. H., was white as snow. His hair was white as snow. Rev. H. was whiter (in complexion) than white folks ever thought about being. And, to me, if he wasn’t exactly what God would look like, from my training, then I couldn’t picture what God would look like. God had to look exactly like Rev. H. Tall, slender, solemn, cold blue eyes (or green?), and white as air. Or snow.
But dig, the struggle in that church was classic too. Class and Classic and Class-sick struggle. The browns vs. the yellows and the blacks with the browns vs. the yellows. Under the huge tarpaulin of the white. (Amen!) Like it would be very clear most times around the music. The yellow wanted Handel and Schumann and Lieder with some switching flit with a dull crokinole to conduct while trying to point his hiney at some protein projectile.
Easter and Xmas, Jim, you was took down and off. HALLELUIA it was spelled in gold leaf on the hymnal with white cherubim straight from heaven. The stark raving corny nongrandeur of those stiff shows would make great films for our archive of torture and cultural aggression. You thought you was being moved (those chills through you) but that was rigor mortis on your ass with hobnailed boots.
And the black and the brown who they rescued from yellow death as plastic persons would be agitating for some heat, some feeling and description of themselves, not going to white heaven so much as crossing that Jordan and escaping finally from the horrible pain. They wanted the old warm hymns, the sorrow songs, and gospel, some modern stuff. Me grandma and Sarah Vaughan’s mother was part of that cadre — they sang in the group called the William P. Sims Gospel Chorus, whose obvious aim was to bring some life and some warmth, some word of black Jesus and black God and black heaven translated to mean some good that included them, some life after death in which they would be much more than silent servants on the fringe of reality.
So struggle would be going down in there. (Known to me only recently as class struggle.) But I did perceive it as struggle. I knew, for instance, that my sweet grandmother for whom I would have done anything and the actually yellow-colored Mrs. B. did not like each other. My grandmother as head of the Ladies Aid with her faint smile and glasses going to sleep in the “front room” of our house making believe she was watching television.
Mrs. B. was head of the Flower Committee. The symbolism was clear — some flowers or some aid. They had different ways (and different things) they wanted to worship. And it was manifest all over if you would pick up the words and looks. Ultimately, I guess, that struggle was really between those who wanted to eliminate a “black church” and those who wanted Xtian worship to be a form of African American culture. Simple now? (I remember throwing out, even before writing Blues People, how you could tell much about black people by what church they went to. And under investigation the concreteness and correctness of that staggered me.) The “purest” African Xtian church in the U.S. is the sanctified — with drums, horns, tambourines, dance, and song. The poorest too — in storefronts, little halls off alleyways, over delicatessens. I’d like to list all the black churches in Newark one day — their names are so weird — take pictures of some — living mythology, dreams housed in despair. The big ol’ churches, stone and steel and huge stained glass, are more European. White. More bourgeois. Less emotional. A church based on money and spurious rationalism. Like Pascal’s cold pensées — “Hey, we better believe in god, along with Money. First: Suppose there is a god after all, we’ll really be up shit’s creek!” But the passion of the black church, which even some white peasants go to in the black belt South, is very different!
My mother dropped it several times how Nana and Mrs. B. didn’t get on. I figured it was because Mrs. B. was out of her mind. Nana liked most people. I could not penetrate to the actuality of their dispute, but my perception confirmed that the little Minnie Mouse-looking Mrs. B., who put layers of pink and white powder on her pale pink face and “put on airs” as even my mother pointed out, was frantic with corniness.
The S’s were hooked up with Mrs. B. The S. clan’s mama B.S. wore pince nez, yeh yeh yeh whew! Really. I didn’t know what the fuck they were. A couple dizzy bitches in Bethany wore them. Yes. White bourgeois apes in yellow. It was a weird church.
And just as in any class struggle, much undermining and jockeying for positions and rear actions and frontal assaults went on. For one thing, Mrs. B. was always trying to get note. She was the senior yellow lady rep, Mrs. S. her junior minister. Invariably, they’d appear, after the services when announcements were made, to rah rah for the Flower Committee and get people to wave their fans back and forth (applause wasn’t dignified).
My grandmother made announcements most times to mention the next regular meeting of the Ladies Aid. She was an usherette too, on special church occasions and she wore those white church uniforms with white shoes.
One reason the Flower Committee could get over is that one member of the family, F., worked for a florist. Later he became an apprentice undertaker for Beckett’s. F. was the loudest (the most human, actually) of the clan — a brown Mickey Rooney tied by everything to yellow life.
But flowers, flowers. Look — hey — we’ve arranged you see, for flowers flowers.
Snide remarks, grimaced conversations. My mother would drop it about “Mrs. Banks and them.” My grandmother never said anything. She just met with the Ladies Aid and kept aiding, doing her work.
B., the junior partner in the yellow flower line, had other illustrious posts in the church. Plus her husband was a supervisor with the P.O. while my father still drove a truck. The son, W., was a prototype, neat haircut and clothes and Vaselined yellow kid. He was as famous at church picnics as Andrew Young. Actually, if there was any stereotype of yellow, as kid, it was W. Bland, glasses, grinning, goofy, “sissified.” The kind of thing your mother would beat you in the head with. A yellow brownjack to pop you with. “W. got W. did” and on and on, a razz for your disconnection from her program of upward and forward to where? The yellowest part of brown? (A question?)
But the real life of where we lived what I perceived as strongest was not any of that but black. That was the life I was tied to — even “shot from guns,” like famous (brown) toasted cereal, the connection I made was with black life.
So that the yellow church was dry and boring at one side — yellow and artificial at another. And even if I’d wanted to (which I never did) there was no way you could bring no yellow shit in the streets or walk with that in no playground without gettin’ laughed at minimally, chased if you pushed it and beat the hell out of if you blew altogether.
No matter the browns and the yellows could collect minusculely — in the streets of our lives, black life shaped us. We were judged by it and defined (to ourselves by ourselves) by it.
W. was a “sissy-punk” where I was most comfortable. That East Orange shit was another world. You saw its products on Sundays. One dude, H., a yellow comedian with glasses, called me “Gloom” every Sunday in honor of my seriousness (?) and the black life he peeped had grown me a blue soul.
At some point I envied yellow its neat haircuts (wavy) and new moccasins. Its cars and exotic addresses. The pretty little girls that grinned at you accidentally or never. I might fantasize about these in some way (depending upon the chronological maturity of my genitals) but that never seemed real.
Except down South there was a girl who lived next door to my folks with a high hill-like lawn at the top of which was her red and white house and a lawn chair you could swing in. The group of us, my two cousins, my sister and I, and her, S.J., would swing there and scramble across and up that high hill lawn. That was a terrible knife in my young heart that she should be forever and always out of my reach. It was so pitiful because I never told her how I felt. It was too ridiculous. She was too distant, haughty, light-skinned gorgeous. With a doctor father. I could not even pretend to mention my passion. But sometimes if strange waves pushed through me, a physical dazzle to my head turned awry staring past a blurred bird at his wind, I’d think, “These are my S.J. moments,” and sigh.
Another girl, in Newark, I went to see down on Waverly Avenue. Another light-skinned — off to the side — kind of pretty girl. Was so proper and quiet and grinned little quiet jokes. I’d go to see her in my late high school days. She had a very old light father who I never talked to, only saw a few times before he passed. Her mother was young, in her thirties, and tall dark brown and lovely. She always seemed, I guess in contrast to her husband, athletic and vigorous, like she was on her way to a dance or tennis match. Her stepdaughter had much of her father in her, quiet and old even as a teenager. And I made her house a pilgrimage of sorts, consciously to sit, clean and smiling and pressing my suit, which was no suit at all. It was just that I felt good sitting there nice and all like a good boy but I never took it seriously though I might have thought I did. But I never even thought that. She was too quiet and yellow. I could not have told anybody she was my girlfriend. Even when I was fairly sure that I was the only one seeing her. And certain people did think our thing together was somewhat serious. Still I never thought she thought it was other than a mild surface pastime. I was too brown. Too gross. Too bounded by malevolent experience. Too grimy. My hands were dirty (another little brown chubby girl said). I could never talk to her about some things, that wiggled and screamed and bluesed my head up. I could never tell her my feelings, even about her. Which were dry enough for a “big-time” marriage with pictures in the Afro. “Dr. Jones, I presume,” neither bone nor contention. But it was all like something I saw walk past. Pretty girl. Quiet little yellow girl. Sitting there across from me in her quiet father’s home. Her mother and she, she told me always, were like sisters. And her mother was sleek and brown and it was she — sad confession — who really turned me on, on the real side. (Is this Oedipal and shit?) So did I think — my other sister? No, not flat-out like that. But something like that, cool and quiet and on your best behavior — a quiet almost like in a photograph or five-and-ten repro. I was gone from that no matter what postures I made, I was gone from that, just walking.
But none of this can be totally separated from Music. Because that was the great definer and link, the extension chord of blackness in me. And so everything (else) had a music to it. A shimmer of sound you heard as you saw it, or you saw as you heard it. The blues hugged me close to the streets and the people. That was what we breathed and Saturdays was when we breathed (full out).
But the brown yellow white tip was a constant too, by contrast, so you knew the real did exist more totally and in you more completely as the informant, creator, and disperser of mystery. Barringer and McKinley were certainly white — and the newspaper — and voices on the radio. Though I transformed the radio in my transmutating mind so it told brown tales somehow. (Yet you understand the term brainwash and must acknowledge certain brain damage. Yet I claim the transduction of certain impulses, so that the output was not just white noise, but a heroic grimace when I smile that contains absolute desire for the destruction of evil.)
My terror was white, and racists (who I knew since the Elephant House, and Augie’s slaps and Birmingham’s rolling eyes, etc., and tales my grandmother told. And when I was thirteen I read Black Boy, the alternate selection of Book-of-the-Month Club, and I feared for R.W.’s life and wondered how he dared say such things and still walk around. Yeh, I knew in my young life about “crackers” as my grandfather called them) yes, they were white, and scrunched up dudes and ugly ladies arguing with my mother in buses and Fanny Farmer candy stores. They were most assuredly white. And the unknown monsters my grandmother told me had cut off a young boy’s “privates” near Dothan, stuck ’em in his mouth, then gathered the young black girls to see, so a lesson would be taught. They were definitely white. And the killers of Emmett Till, whose ruptured swollen horrible body I saw in Jet, swallowing hard and being actually afraid. No, they were very very white. But mostly it was the outside limits of our world. In the distance, and cold, like the end of the world, beyond which you fell off (?). Who knew?
There were teachers, interesting that they were all rec teachers, who were white and who were real enough to talk to. They would even throw me out of the playground for “cursing.” Mr. F., Mr. R. were the main dudes. I had a bad mouth, Jim, a bad mouth. Withering in its obscene intensity. But the white was merely distance or, close up, terror. And even the Italian dudes that I knew when I was young were somewhat removed and that was the definition.
The yellow was always a combatant. Distant (somehow) colored people, whom you did not know well. Made up shit, painted up shit. Stiffness — corniness. Sissified, dull shit. Stuff in church. The Y where they made you sing. Lessons. Picnics your mama carried you off to when there was real baseball games to be played — shit to be explored. The Secret Seven to be hung around with. Or, later, just the blues streets to be walked and the bigassed black girls to be stared at from within the brown recesses.
The yellow was a promise you could never keep. A challenge you did not want. A frustrating distant thing some mama threw up in your face that you did not care about but just did not want to be compared with. The so ’n’ so’s or little So ’n’ So or Master So ’n’ So, against which your mama would rank you and you knew you could never measure up. (I could make the sound of a madman at this point ahhhhhddgggggggggggg to show my frustration!)
Cotillions and Mrs. B. found them and drug a few selected (mostly brown) ghetto kids outta the hopeless muck of their lives and shot them off upward and onward (fake style) into the bull’s-eye of yellow enterprise. Now that was banana yellow. In tuck-see-dose and evening gowns, we lidda brown and yellow chilruns were readied for our entrance into the waiting warren of slaughter. Where our brains would be took out and placed in a safety deposit box for Mister Big Guy, one day, to make use of.
The cotillion, which I approached as a high school youth, was designed so that brown and yellow ladies could be presented to society. (There was also the Debutantes’ Ball, which surfaced at the same time but had less note.) And we practiced our bows and turns and went to practice week nights, walking home in groups afterwards. Chubby brown Betty was my partner and we went together for three or four years on and off.
I was awarded scholarships, and the four of us, mother, father, sister and I, sat downtown at the Terrace Ballroom and watched the proceedings. There was a real effort to include the brown folks in this. But somehow we sat just outside of the connected up “human” thrust of that (was there any?) and the animating stream of yellow life made that run like an escalator to nowhere.
And see there was one group of “friends,” acquaintances, from rehearsal that you took up with on one level. You want to know the complexity of my young life? Well, I still knew the Cavaliers but by late high school we’d drifted in a real sense. I’d see S. and R., they were even in the cotillion and they lived on The Hill and were fairly tight. But the others, the boys I’d known earlier, had mostly faded except at odd times around odd occasions. Games we played in together were getting fewer and fewer and by the time I got out of high school and started going to the Newark branch of Rutgers I did not see them at all nor play any ball with them.
At the same time, for several years I’d taken up with some brothers around the corner on Hillside Place. The Cavaliers were brown compared to the Hillside Place brothers, who were definitely black. And for most of my high school years, after white school, black Hillside Place was who I ran with. (Though I had a brown band I put together, R. on alto, D. on drums, me on trumpet, and we played upstairs in my house on Belmont Avenue, “Tenderly,” “September in the Rain” [the same song], “Perdido,” etc.) Yellow church shit and Y stuff and Jones Street Y stuff, which was much browner, were all shot in there.
But the black was the constant. The people, the life, the rules, the mores, the on-the-street definitions of what was beautiful or hip. The constant background of our breathing, the blues, was always everywhere. And Saturdays raised up like a great space mural (blues as) companionship of thought and feeling; it was feeling. The real good-looking girls and tough dudes, who you wanted to make laugh and impress, the style you had to perfect was black — black and blue.
And though I came striding out of a brown house with plenty of bullshit packed between my eyes. There was nowhere to go but the black streets and the people who ran those streets and set the standards of our being were black. And no matter where we would go and what we would get into, when we were true to ourselves, when we were actually pleasing our deepest selves, being the thing we most admired and loved, we were black (and blue).