More came back as the artist continued to come to.
The driver’s-side door handle was still in his outstretched left hand, though the car was now some twenty feet away. The door was behind him, serving as both a back rest and an explanation as to why he had not become a smear along the local office wall. The car was smashed beyond further mobility. The artist was not.
By the eyewitness accounts of Berry and Sheffi—and sobriety was never an issue with those two—he had used the door as a shield when the old Rambler smashed and crashed against the corner of the insurance company wall. The hinge of the door snapped like a number-two pencil and the artist went airborne. First the door and then his back slamming flat against the smooth plaster.
He was conscious quickly enough to direct the removal of the rifles and shells from the car and trunk and have them hidden across the highway behind a barrier on the shoulder that resisted, though did not restrain entirely, vehicles intent on plunging down a steep embankment on the east side of that two-lane entrance into Avondale, Pennsylvania.
He had not been bothered by the trickle of blood that was tip-toeing its way down an uncharted path from the long scratch two inches left of center on his forehead, which miraculously was the only visible injury among the three of them. There was the truth that he had been knocked unconscious, but he overlooked that when he told the state trooper he was all right.
He was.
The three of them got a ride back to campus and the artist got a butterfly bandage for his head that made him look like a warrior wounded in the turmoil of college unrest when he appeared two days later on the Washington, D.C., evening news, being interviewed by Max Robinson. They were all laughing about the expression on the state trooper’s face as his eyes flitted back and forth between the door and the artist, who was denying the need for medical attention as blood soaked through the napkin he had pressed against the scratch.
“He was bug-eyed,” Berry exclaimed, folding his long frame nearly in half. “When he said, like, ‘You’re all right?’ It was supposed to be a statement, but it came out like a question—with a little squeak on the end of it!”
“I was just glad he didn’t say, ‘Could I see your license and registration, sir?’” said the artist, chuckling.
Maybe the laughter was 75 percent nervous tension. The aftermath of an incident that could have had a lot more tragic consequences: the run they were making, the guns, the shells, the speed, the beginning of a soft rain greasing the roads beneath the well-worn tires of the Rambler, the explosion of the left rear tire when it blew out, and their uncontrolled slide sideways across Route 1, the calm discussion as they sliced the chain-link fence in front of the insurance building, the tension, bracing themselves with the artist’s death-lock grip on the door handle, and then . . .
He had to admit that the thing had almost gotten out of hand. And almost is a valid operative because the great “March on Oxford” never became a real road show. It would have been a real walking nightmare. And the artist had still been debating whether or not he could have, would have, gone along with the marchers if he hadn’t been able to turn it around, if somebody hadn’t.
He understood that agreeing not to do anything was not the answer that satisfied searchers at the close of the symbolic sixties. During a peace rally at Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard had been called to campus to maintain order. When the marchers turned in their direction, they panicked and fired into the crowd, killing four. Then two students were murdered at Jackson State University, a Black school in Mississippi, shot through dorm windows by members of the Mississippi State Highway Patrol.
The problem the artist had was the muted reaction from Attorney General John Mitchell. Well, muted was generous. Zero is not mute. It is as silent as a stone. A statue with limitations.
Okay, the feds were responsible for the National Guard in Ohio and had no direct jurisdiction over the Mississippi State Highway Patrol. The problem was that nobody in Mississippi had control over them either, and as the nation’s top cop, Mitchell had authority over whoever was not exercising authority in Mississippi. Zero.
So the artist made a move at Lincoln, asking the students to shut down all campus activities in protest of the shooting of Black students and the resulting national silence. It worked, but only by the hardest. He found out how difficult it was to contain all elements resulting from a mass response.
The students at Lincoln understood the implications of what was happening on the other campuses; they could not ignore shit like that and say nothing because every nothing you say and do makes it just that much easier for the next incident of that nature. A campus-wide agreement at Lincoln would show solidarity with Jackson State and Kent State.
But just as the artist was about to say to himself that it had gone down a lot more smoothly than he had anticipated, somebody shouted, “Let’s march on Oxford!”
Suddenly the idea of a march bounced around the chapel like a badminton birdie, helplessly rocketing off the rackets and raising a ruckus that rolled out of the old meeting hall to recongregate beneath the arch that welcomed you to the university.
The artist hadn’t known what to do first: send a group ahead to Oxford to try to alert the citizens of that sleepy, primarily agricultural hamlet that this was not a realization of the fear that many of them had always held in their most secret places, like a town with a penitentiary on its outskirts.
And what about the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol? There had never been any publicized friction between the “state boys” and the hundreds of Blacks tucked away in this corner of the Quaker state. But then again, there had never been three or four hundred students turning Route 1 into a bumper-to-bumper parking lot, crawling along the three miles into town, a line of frustrated, confused farmers and good old boys trying to ease back into northern Maryland in four-by-fours with shotguns in the shotgun racks.
Maybe their grains of common sense surfaced there beneath the arch. Maybe something flashed on them at the threshold of Route 1 and nothing but three miles of open and exposed Pennsylvania fields. Maybe it was the cameras and the earrings and the platform shoes and halter tops and sunglasses that showed them that what they were thinking about—this proposed demonstration—would signify no more than their agreement to close the school had. That they were not prepared, hadn’t planned, and that Oxford was not the problem. The only things that could have happened were bad.
Their decision not to go had the artist smiling that lopsided grin of his again in the back of the cluster. They didn’t go.
The artist did. Two days later he was on television in D.C., speaking on the evening news about a meeting held earlier that day with Attorney General John Mitchell, where, along with Howard University student government president Michael Harris, he took Nixon’s right-hand man through everything from the infamous “No Knock” law, used in Chicago in the attack against the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to the illustrations on the walls of his office showing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century punishment scenes, including Blacks in chains and overseers with whips in hand.
They explained why they had closed their respective schools, which ignited a wave of closings on the East Coast, and watched as John Mitchell boarded a late-afternoon flight to Mississippi.
20
At the end of that tumultuous school year, two or three people from Black & Blues graduated, so Brian and I had a chance to write things not strictly for that group. And when I went home for the summer, I went to see a man named Bob Thiele, who had started his own record label called Flying Dutchman. Bob had produced Coltrane and knew Archie Shepp; he had made major contributions in the jazz world. And even though I was never really into the Beat poets, I knew he had also produced some Jack Kerouac recordings.
When I opened the door to the Flying Dutchman office, Bob was standing there at a desk that faced the door, talking to his secretary and leafing through some papers. That was really cool—the first moment in my life whe
n a photograph came to life. I’d seen his picture a hundred times, and there he was. The surprise grabbed my throat and lungs, and fright held me for a second and a half. I hadn’t expected the president of the company to be standing in front of the door, but I quickly gave Bob the spiel I had prepared for the secretary or secondary.
I told Bob I was a songwriter. I told him that I had a partner, Brian Jackson, and that we thought that he was recording the kind of people we thought might be interested in what we were doing. Bob said that he didn’t have any money to do an album of music at the time. But he had read my book of poetry and said, “If you do that and make any money, maybe we can get some money together and do an album of music.”
The thought of doing an entire spoken-word album had never even crossed my mind. But aside from continuing to record the types of jazz musicians that had been the foundation of his recognition and reputation in the 1960s, Bob Thiele wanted to create a recorded chronicle of the era. Many changes in our society that took place in the 1970s were credited to the 1960s and Bob wanted those sounds on wax. These were often albums that had no commercial potential, but that were enormously insightful as slices of an age and invaluable as snapshots of a period that reshaped America first and everywhere else later.
Often these albums were not music. There was an album of a speech by the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, that was followed by questions from the press; there were several speeches by H. Rap Brown and Ms. Angela Davis; there were readings by the DJ Rosko of articles and columns by Pete Hamill and Robert Scheer, among others, including a chilling rendition of “A Night at Santa Rita” with music by Ron Carter and James Spaulding; there was the thoroughly hair-raising “Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight” by Stanley Crouch. And as the summer of 1970 was drawing to a close, I went into the studio with a small group of folks on folding chairs and did poems from Small Talk and a few songs I had done on pianos in coffee houses.
Up until shortly before I made that first album, I was just one of nine in a group and arguably not the most important voice of the group. From the standpoint of how much original music I contributed, I was important to the group’s fabric and character, but I wasn’t the lead singer very often, and I wasn’t ever responsible for carrying a show.
When the LP came out, I didn’t think we’d get any airplay. I never thought about how much reach the record would have. As it turned out, FM radio was starting to be kind of necessary right around this same time because of a few popular stations, especially in Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. And those stations began to play a lot of the stuff from Small Talk: “Whitey on the Moon,” “Brother,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” got picked up. The success of Small Talk was only regional, but they were good regions and it was labeled a “breakout LP” because of those sales.
At some point during the next school year, Bob Thiele called me up and said, “Who do you want to perform with?” By that time Black & Blues had completely broken up, so Brian and I decided to work with Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, and Bernard Purdie. We knew Purdie because he played with King Curtis, and King Curtis played with Aretha. Ron Carter wasn’t known as much for bass at the time, but he played great bass.
We entered RCA studio in New York City in February 1971. When everybody came in and didn’t know us and didn’t know the songs, Ron Carter spoke up.
“We can work this out,” he said. “Let’s try a song about some of my favorite people.”
So we worked out “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” and it went from there. All I’d had for that song at first was a bass line and a chord thing with it. I never would have been able to really hook up that progression properly if Brian wasn’t there when I got into it; he opened it up, picked it up, and took it to where I sang it. I didn’t know anything about suspended fourths and all that, which is what the song is based on, so Brian was integral.
I had an affinity for jazz and syncopation, and the poetry came from the music. We made the poems into songs, and we wanted the music to sound like the words, and Brian’s arrangements very often shaped and molded them. Later on when we wrote songs together, I’d ask Brian what he had on his mind, which sometimes I could more or less intuit from the music, because it carried an atmosphere with it. Different progressions and different chord structures brought a certain tone to mind. Sometimes I’d ask him and he’d convey in words what sort of feeling he was trying to bring about with that particular chord and that helped me get into it.
The new version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” that emerged from those sessions tended to be the focus of talk about the album, Pieces of a Man. But it was followed on the LP by a song called “Save the Children,” and that was followed by “Lady Day and John Coltrane.” Then came “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” and “I Think I’ll Call It Morning.”
When people picked “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to decide what kind of artists we were, they overlooked what the hell the whole album said. We didn’t just do one tune and let it stand, we did albums and ideas, and all of those ideas were significant to us at the time we were working on them.
But none of that would matter too much, for two reasons. First, because one of the main ideas behind recording our songs was to get them out there for other people to hear and cover. That plan started to work immediately, when Esther Phillips covered “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” She got the song via Pee Wee Ellis, who was then working at our label, Flying Dutchman, but who had been brought in to work on Esther’s first album for another label called Kudu.
“Home Is Where the Hatred Is” seemed to run parallel to Esther’s own life, since she had openly overcome a serious drug problem. So the heroin thing was something she could communicate with in terms of a song and, to this day, I’m desperately proud of the way she performed the song. It brought it to life and that’s a helluva thing for a writer to be able to hear in one of his songs.
The other reason it didn’t matter was that despite having a second album on the way, as far as I was concerned I was still a student. And if I tried to picture myself doing something professionally, it was as a novelist, not a musician. I was working on another novel, The Nigger Factory, and I had come up with a plan to get the credentials that might allow me start a career as a writing teacher.
21
If you don’t believe in the Spirits—and I didn’t understand what they were at the time—then let’s just say I was “lucky” that I didn’t mail my application to Johns Hopkins University, where I had decided I wanted to go for a master’s degree in writing; lucky that I didn’t go down to the school on a day when the head of the writing seminars was not there; lucky I didn’t go down without taking my accomplishments with me; and lucky I didn’t take no for an answer. That last one almost played me, however.
It was not a day I’ll ever forget, but I had long since started a habit of writing about days when things I thought might be important happened. Believe me, the day I was to apply to Hopkins was one of them. Aside from the fact that I was delivering the application personally and would need some kind of receipt noting their having gotten it, I felt like taking the trouble to go down there might make a better impression. And yeah, I didn’t have a lot of faith in tossing books or LPs in the mail and just hoping it would get all the way through. There was no reason for me to supply a mailroom or mailman or secretary or whoever-the-fuck with The Vulture or Small Talk or Pieces of a Man.
I had actually heard about the Hopkins fellowship program during my first year at Lincoln. My roommate during the second semester that year was Stevie Wilson, and he had a friend, a drinking buddy, who had been his counselor at a summer program Lincoln ran to prepare high schoolers for college. This counselor, a Baltimore guy, had graduated from Lincoln and gone on to the Hopkins writing program. His reputation on campus said that he was a great writer with a tremendous catalog of things he had written. I was impressed because Stevie was impressed—
and Stevie wasn’t easy to impress.
Stevie and I had gone down to Hopkins once that second term of freshman year to see “B. More” Franklin. Stevie wanted to go because he would rather go anywhere than go to class, and because I had stolen a bottle of Jack Daniels Black on our most recent trip to the Conowingo Liquor Warehouse. Actually, I had stolen a fifth of Bell’s scotch, a bottle of Ballantine’s scotch, and a fifth of Jack, but that had been Friday and it was Wednesday when Stevie and I decided we should share that last bottle with another writer.
Stevie had already painted a picture for me of B. More, told me a few things about their adventures and what he thought about Hopkins and Baltimore and everything else. I was a little intimidated and a whole lot of curious about this guy that Stevie would drive fifty-odd miles to drink something with that he could otherwise drink alone. I was also curious because this guy must have been good. He was in the Hopkins graduate school and Stevie had endorsed him. But when I thought about that I paused. B. More could be good, but not because of any of the information I was working with. I wanted to read something of his because it was possible that the brother got into Hopkins the way I had gotten into Fieldston. It could have been that Hopkins needed a Black guy, or, better yet, a local-Black-makes-good type. Good community relations. In my case, at Fieldston I had covered a bunch of minorities: I was the Black student, the ghetto student, a single-parent-Southern-Black-ghetto student all rolled into one. A utility scholarship recipient, like a baseball player who can play any position. Not an All Star anywhere, but being an All Star at any of those things wouldn’t have been good because it would have necessitated my specializing in one.
As it was, I had been All Mediocrity at Fieldston, which was All Right for both of us. In retrospect, instead of me beating them out of $2,200 a year for three years by being a mediocre student who only wanted to be left alone while he wrote stories, they owed me three more scholarships for three years each for covering so many categories.
The Last Holiday Page 13
