by Amiri Baraka
William Love: eyes are closed. (Was that Hudson St.? Warren?) He cd, after a fashion appear in Adams’ class. He had short stubbed fingers he bit for his nerves. A butt. They called him (not our lovely names . . . these bastards like Ora, “Big Shot,” called him “Bullet Head” or “Zakong.”) I had fashioned something easier for his weakness but killers like Murray ground his face in the tar, & William wd chase him. Goof train. Rebound man, wheeld & for a time, as to the properties of his life, dealed. I’m told (and so fell into disrepute. In hell the sky is black, all see what the other sees. Outside the dark is motionless & dead leaves beat the air.
CIRCLE 8 (Ditch 5) Grafters (Barrators)
I am hidden from sight and guarded by demons. And
what?
You find me here, as a street. A tree, under blue heaven.
The time, elapsed, as fingers cross the cold glass. Your
world
has sunk in space, immersed in romance, like whatever in
my head
fastens dreams upon my speech. Nothing makes a silence,
hands
slow or picking dutch thin blooms, wind shatters lips.
It was fashion. In and out of those yellow slate homes. Beds there. Italians. “The monk,” outside the movies. You had forgotten about her streets. And frenchman’s creek. Critters, are foreigners. You had forgotten all their blackness. That tottering room you had only to open your mouth he would have been in it, tottering. Like huge black figures circling the house. Lips, glasses & flags. Also like mad doctors, skinny with acne. I slept several places, also with whores. But now now, this had done it. Years before things moved slowly. You had poets to get to. And then, some motions in the midwest. I traveled. From the Cavaliers, it was only then to schools. Downtown, I went on a bus, or uptown with a horn. Not the “gig” bag, but formal black peeling leather from the musky janitor’s room. He was a southerner and called some guy “Sam.” Jr. Collins had one, I thought, then. And someone looking like Dick Tracy (only, of course, the nose wasn’t as pointed.).
But that was where the rodeos got in & Slick Andrew from the West. Dead Lillian called him Ungie, & he had a faggot brother who is probably sucking a cock right this moment. On Hillside Place or Waverly Ave. probably. Look him up, the next time you’re in that city (or state).
This leaves out Becky, who rode buses and carried a buzzard’s cup. This thing she waved, as my wife will, but then on that bus it drove me into my room, where later my uncle moved and my mother argued at his weight. I learned to jerk off, because probably there were no windows there. I think now there were, because I heard the Orioles sing “It’s Too Soon To Know” through them, the window(s)), also, some outside girl, Woman, Willa Fleming. She was 26 then, and I 13(?) no, probably 14 and 15.
There was a dance up those flights over the polish man (now I’d say “polack”). Lenora was there and we got tight. Stuck up later, tho. It didn’t matter then. Beverly met me near the playground. A neighborhood house for underprivileged days. And we walked her home together. A whole crowd, including Frank the Liar. (A pitiful person. He too here, now, hid.
The Classical symphony. Second Ave., crossing the winter. Then, I walked, as if I grew old. Overcoats later, I still move that way. hands shoved deep in coat, in mind, what moves, as seldom the yard is green. Snow mounts invisible in the hours’ air. Windows of slums chime with the cold.
This had past. This had come later. This moved, as sugar thru my fingers. As time, will. I prayed then, too. You can see it all from that street, like a grove of trees. Because it was quieter, even for them: we thot they were rich. And later, still her father had 2(3) jobs and all the clan moved in. Jews fled.
Ray moved in there later (that street) when it had run down, and the word had gotten out that Negroes were up the slopes. But Lennie was sweet too, and dark, and had a ruder humor. And Sess’s brother Arnold too ugly and loud. Possessed of streets the moon missed.
You think you see? Famine there too. Driveways where the huge shadow of the King, his glass raised, rumbles under cars. All those houses went. Broome St. too. New myths? or fools die under the weight and cannot recognize their hands. New myth?
For Calvin, who has grown up thru the pavement. A homburg and huge cigar. Method Negro. Knives in our wealth, rape, that too thrown over. They scrambled toward the top. Summers mostly, to perform. I stayed at school and loved a girl named Peaches. (Not really, all ploy, and a Ford, and true love the Queen herself employs. If I were Raleigh, A negress would walk up my back.
In Chicago I kept making the queer scene. Under the “El” with a preacher. And later, in the rotogravure, his slick (this other, larger, man, like my father) hair, murrays grease probably. He had a gray suit with gold and blue threads and he held my head under the quilt. The first guy (he spoke to me grinning and I said my name was Stephen Dedalus. And I read Proust and mathematics and loved Eliot for his tears. Towers, like Yeats (I didn’t know him then, or only a little because of the Second Coming & Leda). But Africans lived there and czechs. One more guy and it was over. On the train, I wrote all this down. A journal now sitting in a tray on top the closet, where I placed it today. The journal says “Am I like that?” “Those trysts with R?” And move slow thru red leaves.
You could be distant then because of the weather. Space, now those thin jews live there and my brusque cuckold friend. Another bond. You miss everything. Even pain.
Thin trees. There, it’s so cold. Even downtown with pretty Negroes. Swimmers. Easter is past. So, I. The plan, to make it, On the Lam. You know. Me. These people never got thru. Once, in some rich spook’s house, they played Rachmaninoff and I put it down. Not even recognizing what it was. The Isle of the Dead. Now, it can play and I can read, or pee, or think about my wife. It’s gone, whatever smell rides in that air. Whatever time that was. However strong I was, who I thought I was.
A sideways time.
They fail tho. A woman now splits my face. Not what I am, who says that. Not what I am. My trips tho. Across town, or a few blocks away. Where I fell in final shame. At all of you. I don’t recognize myself 10 seconds later. Who writes this will never read it.
IT IS FAILURE.
To love, if that were so. Look out the glass, at the yard changing. Trash blown across the fence. Disfigured voices.
You could be proper and know what to wear. You could look at shoes. You could find things beautiful on a radio. You could eat rice and be calm on a bus going to New York. You could write those white women and know the world had opened and birds died in your fingers. Or later, an italian almost saw me weep.
YOU LOVE THESE DEMONS AND WILL NOT LEAVE THEM.
Tho they are evil, food smells up the house, outside is cold, drugs addle the brain, hands cut and bleeding. Flesh to flesh, the cold halls echo death. And it will not come.
I am myself after all. The dead are what move me. The various dead.
Hypocrite(s)
Is/fear.
At noise (beneath
the floor. Streets.
The very air.
You shout, or steal. The motion sure, the air, like sea pulled up. They’d cry in church so easy, so wooden & smelled up. Lemon oil, just behind the piano another room.
A door, just behind the last pew. The trustees filed in smiling. After they’d brought in the huge baskets of money. They’d smile & be important. Their grandsons would watch from the balcony (if you were middleclass baptists & had some women with pince-nez). Mrs. Peyton was one, but she stank & died skinny in a slum. They’d smile tho. Mr. Blanks. Mr. Russ. A dark man with a beautiful gray mustache. Also a weasely man (not the same one who’d announce things. Deacon Jones. The same as the song. The one who “threw the whisky in the well.”
Bernice was a big usherette. Graves. They came in together and were beneath us. She smiled at me and wd have fucked at 13. Her mother watched me. Her mother was sly. Her mother was fat. Her mother liked that green statue of lincoln. Her mother gave me cookies and sd, “I marrie
d my first boyfriend.” I wanted to know where the fuck he was. With lincoln, or working in the Adams’ hat store. Easters they’d drag you in and make you buy pegs.
And black Betty. Stuck up, because she had “spanish” boyfriends (the golden boys, i.e., Teddy, Sonnyboy, Calvin, “and them”) but the real reason I cdn’t figure out. Her mother was burned and her sister stayed in the service. Shadows on those pavements. Boston Street, oil lamps, Orson Welles. A huge tailor.
They were all friends. Rufus the bootblack, low man on the totem pole. He had phone booths. Next to the florist. (The smart ones? I guess they thot that. Collier was the name. She was pretty at first but turned pale as wet wind. She disappeared one afternoon.
The old pimply-faced one went to some college and came back with bucks. His brother, younger, in the same high school as me and Jimmy. But he got out when it was plastic and Allen wore cardigans. He loved me because he knew I’d sucked his cousin off. (They were in league with the undertaker with the bad ear. Hayes. So, the hayeses, the colliers, Aubry, a woman with a child in the insurance projects. They were all connected. By blood, I guess. By ideas. By Jackie Robinson.
(There was also a spookier branch . . . included a pretty girl you’d see on shade calendars. The same ones they had in their florist shop. Roses and mixed daisies. Cheap flowers. Middleclass flowers.
Also, a mystery man who lived near the flower box. The refrigerator. I loitered there but he didn’t respond. He knew about picnics and girls with rubber soles and good hair. He didn’t tell me. He was Warren Slaten’s style. Exposing me to softball in the suburbs and then showing up corny like that years later (in a nigger show) with a japanese pool cue and out of style clothes. A Square. And his mother worked in Klein’s. Still, if you could say “South Munn Ave.,” instead of Dey St. or Hillside Place or Belmont Ave., you had some note. You could watch ofays play tennis. You could come late to scout meetings and be made patrol leader of the flying eagles.
LeRoy was in it. Also Rudy. (Damn that he got in sideways, the Baxter Terrace mob. They had it going different. Not softball, not with the beautiful molded southern grass shiny money dear friend of sun walking smooth so far to talk quiet and knowing what it was to be something to live away and not know them. To not be me. To not know, finally, what it is that ran me. To come to this. To what you see here dying. To be that, and to be that, as I am, for you, for you all, for all space.
But he was slum (Rudy) that was the difference. That I knew that . . . & we had erected by whatever guise . . . forget Morris . . . how he did escape is worth knowing tho: Barry got out, but that’s understandable. His temperament was like mine when I go abstract and people talk nonsense to me.
BUT NOT EVER FOR ANY OF US AGAIN THE LOVELY WORLD OF WARREN SLATEN OR THE REALLY BEAUTIFUL PETTIGREWS.
And Rudy’s mother was ugly and looked up to my grandmother, so that made him lower. Place. Place each thing, each dot of life. Each person, will be PLACED. DISPOSED OF.
Rudy and LeRoy were a team. Also “Red.” That must have dragged them. To live in Baxter Terrace yet be made to join the “fags” troop because they went to the same church.
So they tried to take over as far as athletics, &c. Only Rudy was any good tho . . . and still not much compared to Baxter or my friends. So we controlled that easy. And I outside, still, without touching any of them. A long walk home, & they used my name as if I was old and my wife had gone out “walking.”
It took place in a sunday school. The declensions. The age. Tomson, his whole top head caved in like Martin’s publisher. And his stepson big mouth teddy (the bastard was shorter than I and weak as a bitch. Mark, his real son, was mongoloid.) liked my sister. He and later his friend (the music teacher) Freddy. A “closet queen.” They both hunted easter eggs in the churchyard, and even planned to fuck fred’s sister so I cdn’t.
Get in close with me. If you’re in mountains. Or weird smells pack your head. Cereals. Cold water. “Gloom,” Harvey called me. “Hi, Gloom.” (If I knew what that meant. Or what became of him. His socks and shoes. His relatives. It wd be easy enough to predict the future. The past. The fireplaces and whores of the cemeteries of your linoleum.) This is tether. Push toward (SOME END.
It is static. It is constant. It is water. It is her lips. It is Aristotle’s coughs in the tent all night in the snow. Why the old man lived to freeze us. His “reserve.” Sandy, his name was. The same as the young wavy head jew I jabbed silly at camp. Also good body punches in the 2nd round brought down his guard. When he went down my first instinct was to run. But his brother congratulated me and thot he could kick my ass because he got a letter for band.
We did a lot of things, those years. Now, we do a lot of things. We drink water from streams. We walk down hoping to fuck mulattos when they bathe. We tell lies to keep from getting belted, and watch a faggot take a beating in the snow from our lie. Our fear.
Mutt the zipper. Mutt the zipper. Packed lunches, on Norfolk Street, beans, franks. The bus. Also a stone quarry. (That whole side I knew later, midnights, after work in a paint factory. You walk at night, fine. You show up. You sit. You alright. But you never be no doctor. (Hilary talking.)
Ora—Why you sit in the dark & fight me when I tickle?
Skippy—Boy, I’ll beat your ass in Miss Powell’s class, cause Johnnyboy and I are friends and “Jones” did that dopey funny book about guys robbing everybody. I live in a cloakroom. I live where you tried to get rid of those Ledgers.
Knowles—Baroom, Baroom, Baroom-Baroom-Baroom. Sho, I’ll stop or climb. Or smile, or hit, or fuck (maybe, I guess, because the inkspots were popular and he had that correct trill). Miss Golden gave you a “D” in dependability and she hated something in you.
Murray—Nothing to it. Just be around and need a clean nose and hit people on the back of the head. Don’t look for me now. It’s too sociological and’d make you cry. You playground step. “Brains.”
Becky—(Ha, Ha, with colored teeth and tightass girlfriend. That was cross town. The masonic temple she gave me hunter and coke and it tasted like it does now.) Spread my legs on the 9 Clifton. Let you in for somethings. A new building to incest. Hymn to later masturbation. You could have had me, if you’d come down. Gone Down.
Love—Ah bullshit.
Morris—(Later) Boy, this cat is something. Is my dead sister. The car crashed her huge eyes. My father’s big buick. You rich running. Pigeon toes, you got us in to the Troops. (And those buildings, even tho Dolores, and the two crazy ones, football players and midgets) were crumbling. Were red, at the corner where my grandmother made “pageboys.” Miss Still, was the lady she worked for. The other street, where Willie lived, continued to the lot and the women’s detention home you could forget if you only looked at the tile store or the abandoned icehouse full of ammonia. Jr. Bell fell thru the floor. Jr. Bell died in the lake. Jr. Bell fucked Eunice before I did, or you. (In an alley behind the Zarros house, also crumbling gray behind Central . . . You pressed together.
Otis—We athletes. We bowlegged. We got crooked peckers. We see’d you get stuck in the ass in a tent. We wanted some and forgot later because you ran so fast and could twist past the line for 12. I still know Whatley and he still thinks you’re a punk.
Gail—I’m fat, but Sammy likes it. Sammy and Wen Shi (& Tomson). They dig. because their heads are sawed off. I like Diane(a). Not her friends or spooky dead father. She’s old fashioned. You like her, LeRoi? Huh? Marcelline ain’t (whisper) shit.
Marcelline—I don’t even know what the hell you mean. I had boyfriends and one even vomited in my mouth. New Years, you never understood it. Did you jockstrop bluejacket “foots”?
Sammy—I’m drafted and cool and wear an apron and we went to Coney last night.
Jackie Bland—You see me doing one thing (even tho you heard about me humping some chick in a condemned house) and you think you got something on me. Shit. I’m nigger stan kenton. I’m crazy. I got long arms and helped you whistle to juliet in the laundry (before they tore it
down).
Nat P.—Intermission Riff. Is that what you know about Floyd Key and Allen Polite? You mean you never been to North Newark and met Scram and the cocksmen. Boy, we cool even tho we teach school now and disappeared in our powder-blue coats. (Billy can play better than you heard. You know Wayne? He played with us. You mean you never made the Los Ruedos? Wow. I ran track too, man, and waved my arms in sheer pinnacality.
JAN MANVILLE, MINNIE HAWKS, JUDSON, ALEX G.’S WIFE—Sylvia was part of our scene and you know she was hip. What about Holmes? He’s a doctor now, and you know you admired him. He could run and liked to talk about sports. Caesar taught you to hurdle. He had great form. He’s a doctor now too. All of us are somewhere. We own trees.
The Brantley Bros.—I’m a writer. I go to games. I knew you when. I was impressed. I’m weird in Newark. I limp like a tackle. I knew everybody. You wished a lot of times you could have talked with my sister. You know we don’t understand what you mean by all this!
