{ PART III }
{ 18 }
In late 1969, LeRoi Jones, now preferring to be called Amiri Baraka, was on a popular television show hosted by David Frost. Under the hot studio lights and glare of a mostly white audience, Baraka announced that present-day America resembled the nation long ago when the “Ku Klux Klan rode.” A clearly agitated Frost responded, “There is nothing like that! Come on, nothing like that at all.” Baraka was actually in a moderate mood that evening, for instead of calling white people evil, he acknowledged that “not all white people are necessarily magnetized toward evil.” Nevertheless, in a “white nation,” “evil things” seemed to come naturally. “But do you ever feel, LeRoi,” asked Frost, “it makes matters more difficult when you go to extremes?”1
Going to extremes was Baraka’s modus operandi. “If I write as an angry black man, that’s the way it is.”2 Looking back at this period, he admitted that his reputation as “a snarling, white-hating madman” had been valid. “I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell” in a “dash for freedom.”3 This frenzied dash brought much attention to Baraka. In the New York Times in November 1969, he mocked the paper’s readers for ignorance of “the difference between John Coltrane and Lawrence Welk.” Welk smelled of a rotten cultural carcass, while Coltrane blew freedom with every saxophone note. Jones rejected the hippie counter cultural revolution: “The great deluge of nakedness and homosexuality … within the Euro-Am meaning world” was simply a continuation of a “beast value system.” He also blasted the “Pimp Art” of the Black Panthers for kowtowing to white revolutionary ideologies. Against such degeneration and stupidity, Jones upheld the “raised consciousness” of the true black artist, representing himself and his community. Such artists were creating a new sensibility, a black sensibility. It brooked no compromise with established racism; its rhetoric seethed with violence and ideals of liberation. In the talented, fevered hands of Baraka, it was a weapon, but it was also in its stylistic and rhetorical excesses part of the New Sensibility.4
The piece appeared in the Times days before his play Slave Ship opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Although the play had been composed in the mid-1960s, this was its first full-throttled production. With darkness dominating the stage, interrupted by strobe lights, the play presented aspects of the black experience—the pain of middle passage, the humiliations of slavery, and the uncashed check for freedom. In the view of Times theater critic Clive Barnes, Slave Ship was “a propaganda play … a black militant play … a ‘get whitey’ play.” It caused him to feel “shame, compassion,” and a kind of “pointless guilt.” He presumed that blacks in attendance experienced “shame” but also “a certain self-righteousness in the discomfiture of whitey.”5
Whatever feelings the play provoked, Jones’s article created controversy. In letters to the editor, some condemned Baraka roundly. One reader, A. S. Doc Young, castigated the newspaper for printing such blatant babble. Taylor Mead, who had been part of Warhol’s circle and had appeared in Jones’s early play Baptism, was disgusted by his “new maniacally egotistic catechism and the usual learning by rote how to hate.”6
Readers of the New York Times should have been familiar with Baraka’s militancy. An article earlier in 1969 had offered a detailed and cutting account of his separatist views. It discussed Baraka’s demands that whites not meet his plane nor share the stage with him at a public reading at the University of Pennsylvania. Black students staked out the entrance to the theater and told fellow blacks that they should self-segregate themselves in the balcony for the speech. Baraka read poems excoriating white racism, making whites in the audience squirm. His speech was a “black speech” aimed at raising black consciousness—nation-forming, as Baraka would have it. According to the reporter, by mid-speech, Baraka focused only on those in the balcony. The upshot of the speech was simple: “be black, be black, be black.”7
The Penn program included a performance of Jello, a brief play that spoofed the Jack Benny television program. Benny’s complaining but complacent black servant Rochester is transformed in the drama. Now Rochester is gruff and tough, telling Benny that he wants all of his money; at one point he also sexually molests Benny’s wife. Baraka remarked that the play was intended to “commit us collectively to revolution, i.e. NATIONALIST LIBERATION. Theater that does not do this,” he said, “is bullshit.”8
Baraka courted controversy while managing to be productive. In 1969 alone, a collection of earlier poems appeared as Black Magic. A lengthy anthology that he edited with Larry Neal, Black Fire, was ushered into a paperback edition in January. Along with Jello, Baraka wrote a new play, The Death of Malcolm X, and he was working on a short nationalist manifesto, It’s Nation Time. In this year, too, he collaborated with a black photographer on the book In Our Terribleness, which appeared in 1970. All these projects were designed as bullets aimed at the white beast and to open space for a black sensibility to emerge. His poetry and prose were dipped in violence, paranoia, and invective. Yet Baraka was a complicated, talented, and confused artist. “Why are the beautiful sick and divided like myself?” he asked in a poem.9
Baraka has often been viewed as a changeling, jumping from one position to another. For critic Darryl Pinckney, “Baraka’s writing is defined by vehement repudiations, littered with discarded identities. Much is swept under the carpet, and the frayed edges are then nailed down with a sledge hammer.”10 This is true, to a degree, but Baraka was always consistent in his contempt for bourgeois normalcy and racism, and in favoring experimental literary and theatrical techniques.11 After a brief sojourn at Howard University and being dishonorably discharged from the United States Air Force for possessing left-wing literature, Jones moved to Greenwich Village. He married a white, Jewish woman and fathered two children with her. He also had a long-term affair with white poet Diane di Prima, having one child with her (he had pushed her to have their first pregnancy aborted).12 During these years, up until 1965, he was influenced by projectivist poetry, especially as practiced by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, and shared many poetic associations with Allen Ginsberg and the beats.
His political radicalization picked up pace after a trip to Cuba in 1960. During the early 1960s, when African Americans struggled and died for voting rights and desegregation, Jones increasingly turned his attention to racial issues, producing some of his finest but also most controversial work. In Black Dada Nihilismus, he wrote of the
ugly silent death of jews under
the surgeon’s knife. (To awake on
69th street with money and a hip
nose. Black dada nihilismus, for
the umbrella’d jesus.
Soon the poem’s invective grew:
Come up, black dada
nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape
their fathers. Cut their mother’s throats.
Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends
in their bedrooms
and so on. It poetically “murdered his old friends,” wrote ex-wife Hettie Jones.13
Jones’s play Dutchman, first staged in 1964, was explosively powerful. Set on a subway car, the play begins with Clay, a young African American male, minding his own business. Soon, he is successively hectored, seduced, and murdered by a white vamp named Lula. At one point Clay sheds his bourgeois serenity and rants at length, splaying “hip white boys” and calling for “crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity.” States Clay, “And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all of your throats.” After Lula dispatches Clay with her sharp tongue and knife, other passengers help her throw the body out of the train. Another sort of Clay negro gets on board, no doubt to be subjected to the same treatment. A Stepin Fetchit–like conductor suddenly appears, doing a soft shoe, greeting the new victim and then tipping his hat at Lula. In one deft, deadly stroke, Jones has condemned black complacency and integrationism, as well as whites’ murderous intentions. It was, he wrote, “about the difficulty of becoming a man in America,” and Lula captured “the insanity of this hideous place.”14 One imagines that he would have been pleased by a review that stated Dutchman was “designed to shock… . Its basic idea, its language and its murderous rage” signified an “extended metaphor of bitterness and fury.”15
In another shocking play from this period, The Slave, Jones confronted a nightmare scenario. A rebel army of blacks is laying siege to a city. The leader of the rebels, Walker Vessels, crosses into the white section and breaks into the home of his white ex-wife, Grace, and her husband, Easley (his former professor of literature). Armed and threatening, tongue loosened by drink, Vessels confronts and kills (literally and figuratively) the weak-kneed liberalism of Easley and claims that his wife had betrayed him. She is incredulous about how he can fault her for not loving him when his hatred for whites is so vehement and extreme. It soon becomes apparent that he is in the house not only to rehash old complaints but also to regain custody of their children: “Those two lovely little girls upstairs are niggers. You know, circa 1800, one drop makes you whole.” Suddenly, bombs hit the house and Grace is killed. Before she expires, Vessels tells her the girls are dead. “They’re dead,” are the final words of the play. The suggestion here is that Vessels has murdered them, although in some interpretations he may mean that they are dead as interracial children, now reborn as black.16
All of this work was obviously linked to Jones’s own personal life and political shifts. Blacks, in his worldview, needed to break from the white world, in order to find their own identities—and to link with a black community and sensibility. Clay was an appropriate name for his dramatic character—a black man, to be sure, but also capable of being molded into various possible sculptures. Jones may have felt like clay in his early years, being shaped by his associations with white people in the Village. And he experienced the guilt associated with a break from the white world, from family and friends. As he had phrased it in the poem “An Agony. As Now”: “I am inside someone / who hates me.”17
By 1965 Jones was a force in theater and poetry. This brought the contradictions of his private life into public view. In a cutting piece, “LeRoi Jones and the Tradition of the Fake,” critic Stanley Kauffmann called out Jones for preaching racial separatism and revolution while living a secure, middle-class life, supported in large part by white audiences. He was either a living contradiction or a hypocrite.18
Jones was increasingly sensitive about this without Kauffmann’s scolding. If whites were, as he increasingly put it, a “cancer,” how could he cohabit with one? He later claimed his split with Hettie Jones (who was a poet herself) occurred because she was having an affair. If so, then the hardly monogamous Jones was, at best, a chauvinist. In reality, his position as a firebrand railing against black moderation and white liberal racists was untenable so long as he remained with Hettie. He first moved to another apartment a few blocks away before making his break with the white world in 1965 and moving to Harlem, where he dedicated himself to building a cultural apparatus to stage plays, perform music, and develop a new black sensibility. As he had indicated in an early work, Blues People (1963), the black experience in America was singular, itself a “real” culture. “Real” black culture was “always radical” compared to the formalities of traditional American culture.19
In Harlem, Jones set up the Black Arts Theater and School. He continued to write revolutionary poetry, prose, and plays intended to harness and create a black consciousness.20 In his essay collection Home (1965), he proclaimed that “the Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”21 In 1967 he emphasized again, “What’s needed now for the ‘arts’ is to get them away from white people.” In 1969 the choice was either with the revolution or against it: “The Negro artist who is not a nationalist … is a white artist… . He is creating death snacks, for and out of dead stuff. ”22 In the poem “Black Art,” he craved revolutionary poetry: “Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees or lemon piled / on a step.” Poetry must deal with reality.
By 1967 Jones was largely living in a black world, although he continued working with mainstream, white-owned publishing houses. After his brief stint in Harlem, he headed for Newark, his hometown, to build a cultural center and to agitate for black nationalism. In 1966 he married a black woman, Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), with whom he would father five children. The Newark riot/rebellion hurtled him into the national news. It was an exciting moment, Jones recalled, when “time [was] speeded up” and “all that was pent up and tied [was] wild and loose, seen in sudden flames and red smoke.”23 Another black radical, Hoyt W. Fuller, remarked after the riots: “The Black Revolt is as palpable in letters as in the streets.”24
Along with some pals, Jones was soaking up the street action, delighting in the revolutionary hubbub. Suddenly, he was surrounded by “a riot of red lights blinking. Like Devils or pieces of hell.” Accounts of what happened next differ. Jones claimed that he had been singled out by local cops as one of “the bastards who have been shooting at us.” According to Jones, the cops began beating him with guns and nightsticks until he was “removed from conscious life.” He said, “I was being murdered and I knew it.”25 The intervention of a crowd, angered by the police brutality, saved his life. Police reported that Jones had been injured by a bottle thrown by a rioter. They also stated that he had in his possession two .32-caliber handguns. He was arrested and tried.
Released on steep twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail, Jones was able to participate in a Black Power conference in Newark. The beating and its aftermath contributed, Jones wrote, to major changes in his life. He shook off the last vestiges of bohemianism—“My individualism and randomness, my Western white addictions [a pack a day of Gauloises], my Negro intellectualism.” Jones was reborn as Amiri Baraka, and he began wearing “a bright-colored dashiki and fila (hat).”26
The trial of Jones/Baraka was a circus. While the jury was being chosen, Jones objected to the prospect of an all-white jury of his “oppressors.” Judge Kapp took offense and ordered Jones held in contempt of court. He screamed out in protest, “Take me into custody for what? Because I won’t be judged by this kangaroo court?”27
On November 7, 1967, a jury of ten white men and two white women found him guilty on the weapons charge, punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of one thousand dollars. Judge Kapp sentenced Jones immediately to thirty days in jail for his earlier contempt of court. During the month in jail, Jones wrote a searing play, Great Goodness of Life, taking out his frustrations against “Uncle Tom” blacks.
Following conviction, Jones appeared before Judge Kapp for sentencing. In discussing Jones’s fate, the judge read from a recently published poem of Jones’s, “Black People!” Some of the words offended the judge so deeply that he replaced them with the word “blank.” The poem was incendiary. “Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!” If this were insufficient to raise Kapp’s ire, the poem imagined a new world, where “the white man is dead.”28
There then occurred a remarkable contretemps between the judge and Jones. Jones asked if the judge was offering the poem as “evidence” against him. In any case, Jones demanded that he be allowed to read it aloud in full. The judge dismissed the poem as a “diabolical prescription to commit murder and to steal and plunder.” Jones countered: “I’m being sentenced for the poem. Is that what you are saying?” The judge then claimed that such a poem (and a talk that Jones had delivered at Muhlenberg College) “causes one to suspect that you were a participant in formulating a plot to ignite the spark on the night of July 13, 1967 to burn the city of Newark.” Jones sarcastically interrupted the judge: “You mean you don’t like the poem, in other words.”
The judge was not amused. “It is my considered opinion,” he lectured Jones, “that you are sick and require medical attention.” To which Jones replied, “Not as sick as you.” This verbal battle proved counterproductive. Judge Kapp sentenced him severely “to serve a term of not less than 2 years and 6 months … [and to] pay a fine of $1,000.” Jones appealed the verdict while out on bail; eventually victory came when a court ruled that there had been insufficient evidence to convict Jones.29
By 1969, rage, violence, and paranoia had come to dominate the social and cultural scene. Baraka was hardly alone in thinking that “revolution would be immediate.”30 About eighty members of the Cornell University Afro-American Association in April occupied the Willard Straight Student Union on campus. They were protesting the burning of a cross on the lawn of an African American sorority. Black students also demanded immediate institution of an Afro-American studies program. What made the scene more outsized than the bloody occupation at Columbia in 1968 was that the African American students were heavily armed. One young warrior was captured famously in a photograph with rifle in hand, his torso girded by a bandolier. All ended peacefully, but Professor Allan Bloom condemned what he considered professorial surrender to extremism. Humanities professors, he claimed, “ran like lemmings into the sea, thinking they would refresh and revitalize themselves in it. They drowned.”31
Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam dragged on despite Richard M. Nixon having been elected on a platform of “peace with honor.” In the wake of the trial of the Chicago Seven (radicals who had been indicted for conspiracy and other acts committed during the days of the Democratic National Convention in 1968), members of the Weatherman faction of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) staged a “days of rage” protest in October 1969, designed to “bring the war home.” Only a couple of hundred participated, but they gained maximum publicity with war whoops and combat regalia. They streamed onto the Gold Coast area of Chicago where they overturned cars, broke windows, and grappled with police. It was futile and silly—nothing more than outbursts of a failed revolution.32
A more meaningful revolt also occurred that summer in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn, a seedy, mob-owned place where gays gathered. But on one night in late June, after a typical episode of police harassment, bar patrons fought back. As one person recalled, “I had got to the point where I did not want to be bothered anymore.” Others agreed, pushing back against the cops, who were shoving gays into paddy wagons. A group of queens, according to one account, started rocking the wagons; the cops were assaulted with words; and someone yelled out, “Gay power!” No longer, gays announced after the riot, would they have their rights denied.33 Gay and straight women, too, were expressing their anger in more extreme fashion. Women in the Redstockings Manifesto, released in July 1969, declared, “In fighting for our liberation we will always take the side of women against their oppressors… . The time for individual skirmishes has passed. This time we are going all the way.”34
Utopian ideals reigned briefly after the August Woodstock concert. Around four hundred thousand young people there grooved to music, anarchistic living, abundant nudity and drug intake, and lived to rave about it. But by December such sweet memories were shattered by the dark throb of a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in California. Hells Angels, hired to provide security and insure peace, bludgeoned one person to death and terrified others. Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” imagined war planes “turning into butterflies across our nation” while the theme for Altamont was summed up best by a line from “Gimme Shelter,” “War, children, it’s just a shot away.”
Extreme violence proliferated on movie screens across the country, nowhere more so than in Sam Peckinpah’s film The Wild Bunch. Viewers gasped at the extended gun battle that concluded the film. In bloody detail bodies were pierced and blasted to and fro in an operatic orgy of killing. What Peckinpah caught on screen became a national sensation of horror in August when Charles Manson, a drifter and charlatan, and his gang slaughtered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others at her posh home in the Hollywood Hills.
Baraka glowed red hot with this new identity and revolutionary zeal at his point. “Will the machinegunners please step forward?” he wrote in “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand.”35 Black Power was being turned into reality, in the view of Baraka and others. A new “attitude, an inward affirmation of the essential worth of blackness,” was arising, according to theologian James H. Cone.36 The armed and romantically menacing Black Panthers were becoming cultural heroes for many whites and blacks, but their days were numbered due to internal squabbling and a concerted effort on the part of the FBI to eradicate them. A Harvard sociologist found that between 5 and 20 percent of the black population felt “estrangement” and “bitterness” about their lives and situation in the United States. Black radicals, sociologist Gary T. Marx concluded, were a small minority, but they pushed more moderate blacks to take harder stands.37 A review of the cultural situation found that “politics and passion” in black drama pointed toward separatism and hatred for whites. While Baraka’s plays displayed “passionate irony hidden almost to the last in a white velvet glove,” the playwright was increasingly discarding such gloves in favor of brass knuckles.38
Baraka’s paranoia soared in his play The Death of Malcolm X. Along with most black militants, Baraka had greatly respected Malcolm’s black nationalism and well-channeled anger. By 1965, Malcolm was challenging the supremacy of Elijah Muhammad within the Nation of Islam and moving slowly toward a more open vision of interracial cooperation. According to most accounts, Malcolm was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1965 at the behest of Elijah Muhammad and his cronies, who feared his popularity and moderating tone.39
Baraka considered the assassination of Malcolm X to be a conspiracy launched at the upper echelons of the United States government, in cooperation with the Ku Klux Klan and carried out by African Americans. Like so much of his work from this period, as critic Werner Sollors notes, the play was agitprop designed to highlight white evil.40 The play opens with blacks having their brains taken out and white brains put in; other blacks are being brainwashed to serve their white masters. An instructor tells them, “Now repeat after me … White is right.” It is an absurdist play, although it is hard to tell if Baraka intended it as such. Men prance about in Uncle Sam suits, wearing “long hats.” In New York City, a “Negro integrationist” is awarded “a life sized watermelon made of precious stones and gold.” In another part of the city, Malcolm X has begun a lecture, warning the audience about the evil of whites and calling for revolution and land for blacks. In a “prearranged manner,” the assassins act. With Malcolm dead, a Klansman laughs while he fingers a “girl’s snatch,” and “ofays together at a party in USam suits” are dancing and chanting: “White! White! White!”41
In addition to penning racially provocative plays, Baraka worked hard to develop a black aesthetic or a new black sensibility. The ideal was defined variously, but it boiled down to the view that blacks had a different cultural consciousness than whites, one that was purer and better. But, as Baraka later acknowledged, the notion was somewhat inchoate and confused, relying more on an attitude or style than a fully articulated aesthetic. And it was based on the premise that there was a singular, correct black perspective. The style, Baraka demanded, was to be “as Black as Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington or John Coltrane… . We wanted it to express our lives and history, our needs and desires. Our will and our passion. Our self determination, self respect and self defense.”42
Consciousness arose from interplay between African heritage and American oppression. The imperative for black artists such as Baraka, playwright Ed Bullins, poet Sonia Sanchez, and many others was to develop this consciousness. Stephen Henderson, a theorist for the black aesthetic movement, maintained that black poetry was written by an identifiably black person and was “somehow structurally black,” an admittedly vague definition. Its rhythms were to be found in jazz, blues, black speech, and the soul shouts of James Brown.43 According to Larry Neal, black poetry—when it was true to black consciousness—was more than an aesthetic taste; it served the goal of “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.”44 Like the New Sensibility, it aspired to liberation.
To foment a black aesthetic, Baraka and Neal brought out a bulky anthology of essays and poems, along with short fiction in a volume appropriately titled Black Fire. His introduction read like an incantation or pep talk. He introduced the writers as follows: “These are the founding Fathers and Mothers, of our nation. We rise, as we rise (agin). By the power of our beliefs, by the purity and strength of our actions.”45 In his own collection of poetry, Black Magic, also published in 1969, Baraka spoke autobiographically. His early poetry and plays had been saturated with “death, suicide … caught up in the deathurge of this twisted society. The work a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness” or the “European influence” marked by “hopelessness and despair.” Now he had been freed from such shackles. Thanks to black art, “a beginning, a rebeginning, a coming in contact with the most beautiful part of myself, with ourselves,” his work took on a prophetic flavor, “self-consciously spiritual, and stronger.”46
Baraka was at this time under the charismatic influence of Maulana Karenga, a UCLA graduate student and community activist. According to Karenga, blacks must sharpen their “cultural expression” and sense of community. A black nationalist, Karenga claimed, “should be a man who saves his brother from a sinking boat. But he should also teach them how to save themselves by being a good swimmer.”47 In 1966, as part of his program to raise black consciousness and build community, Karenga began popularizing his notion of Kwanzaa, which he based on African rituals and which he hoped would serve to replace Christmas for African Americans. He also wanted blacks to celebrate holidays such as the birthday of Malcolm X. Although he generally eschewed violence and believed that building a black nationalism would be a long-term struggle, members of his organization (US, short for US Black People) were often in conflict with the Black Panther Party. In jockeying for dominance on the UCLA campus in 1969, two Black Panthers were murdered, presumably by followers of Karenga’s organization. In its more peaceful moments, the organization sponsored a dance troupe and produced albums devoted to African rhythms. Baraka bought into nationalist principles and Karenga in a big way, although he rejected Karenga’s view that the blues were “reactionary.”48
Writing in The Black Scholar in November 1969, Baraka outlined Karenga’s principles under the title “A Black Value System.” The seven principles were, sans their Swahili appellations: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Although a bit like the Ten Commandments, Baraka admitted, they had a “more profound” meaning for black people. They were the antidote to the “mind control” of blacks that he had outlined in his play about Malcolm X. The principles were valuable, Baraka wrote, because “Black creativity, Kuumba … is what will save us—not just ‘artists’ but all of us—after all is said and done—nothing else.”49
Baraka was slowly moving away from the venomous antiwhite, anti-negro rhetoric that had dominated his work. Why bother hitting the same tired note? “Draw away from the diseased body,” he decided. He tried focusing on a positive message: “Embrace the blackness.” In 1969 Baraka wanted to celebrate black life, its everyday hum, rhythm, and spontaneity. He did this most creatively—and erratically—with the book In Our Terribleness. Its subtitle read Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style.50
In the massive corpus of writings about Baraka, critics generally ignore In Our Terribleness, finding it disjointed and a bit precious in design. Baraka acknowledged as much, referring to it as “spontaneous, an utterance of desire and need.” But it was also, as intended, “definitely from black to black and was meant to express, define and clarify us to ourselves” by paying attention to “how the black man looks and sounds and why he does what he does.” In sum, an example of “functional black art.”51 Terribleness was a collaboration between Baraka and a photographer, Fundi (Billy Abernathy). Fundi lived in Chicago and was a street photographer, seeking to document the pride of the black community. He was much less given to irony than Robert Frank. Baraka got to know Fundi during frequent trips in the late 1960s to Chicago for Black Power meetings. The volume bears a dedication encouraging the adherents to spread the message of Kawaida, a synthesis of sorts of the philosophy and customs of African culture advocated by Karenga. Upon turning the dedication page, readers encountered a reflective silver sheet, with the title of the book embossed upon it. It allowed readers to view their faces, as if in a mirror. This was intended, presumably, to force them to acknowledge their blackness, to examine themselves for signs of blackness. If few were found (in visage and consciousness), then a self-transformation might be effected by reading the volume.
In Our Terribleness was a celebration of black life. As such, it follows in the tradition of The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a collaboration between black photographer Roy DeCarava and black poet Langston Hughes. That book, however, tells a fictional story through Hughes’s captions to DeCarava’s photographs of people living in Harlem. It was largely upbeat despite its honesty in showing poverty and displacement.52
Baraka was attempting in Terribleness an “inversion” of language and values.53 Street jive and barbershop chatter were the rhythms of the book. Baraka was particularly taken with how blacks changed the meaning of words, especially those weighted with ethical judgments. For instance, in black argot, bad had been transformed from a negative word into a word that, when verbally drawn out, implied something cool or hip. Baraka exulted in “bad, bad, bad ass niggers.” Hence, too, with the title for his book, “terribleness” was transformed into a favorable attribute, connected with “living force.”
As in some of his earliest poetry, Baraka had his ear not only to the ground of popular culture but also to spontaneity and orthographic experimentation.54 He was seeking to do what Coltrane did in music—to achieve “freedom from restraint,” to touch “ecstasy.”55 He played with type, line breaks, and more. And the content was harsh: “Roy Wilkins is a dumb slave. The future rulers are black.” Here Baraka took a swipe at a moderate black activist while upholding his ideal of a new black sensibility becoming revolutionary consciousness.
Much of the book was cheerleading for the ideals of Black Pride and Black Is Beautiful. He called black people “THE MAGIC PEOPLE … Prophets of the Planet.”
However uncritical of black life and the problems of urban ghettoes, In Our Terribleness was a welcome relief from the hurricane of hate that had been raging for years in Jones/Baraka’s prose and poetry. He believed that he had caught the rhyme and reason of the black sensibility—and he embraced it with gusto. “Our hipness is anything we touch.” The book—after all of the paranoia, violence, and hatred of his earlier work—was alive with laughter. And, Baraka wrote, “The laughter powered me.”