by Ed Bullins
ED BULLINS, one of the most prolific African American writers of his generation, has authored such works as In the Wine Time, Goin’ a Buffalo, Clara’s Ole Man, and The Taking of Miss Janie, which received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of the 1974–75 season. He has also won multiple Obie Awards, Guggenheim fellowships, and playwriting grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. Along with Amiri Baraka, Bullins is considered to be one of the key figures of the Black Arts movement. The Hungered One was originally published in 1971.
THE
HUNGERED
ONE
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
Originally published in 1971 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.
©1971, 2009 by Ed Bullins
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-66-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008925943
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not be possible if it had not been for those little magazines, many now defunct, that allowed me to be published and to grow. Many thanks to Black Dialogue, Citadel, Dust, Illuminations, Liberator, Manhattan Review, Nexus, and Wild Dog. The contents of this book first appeared in their pages. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Black World for permission to reprint “Support Your Local Police,” copyright 1967 by Negro Digest.
E.B.
To all my children
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface by Amiri Baraka
Introduction 2009 by Ed Bullins
Part One: The Absurd One
The Absurd One
Moonwriter
The Enemy
The Excursion
An Ancient One
The Reason of Why
The Real Me
The Drive
He Couldn’t Say Sex
THE RALLY or Dialect Determinism
The Messenger
Part Two: The Hungered One
The Hungered One
The Saviour
In the Wine Time
The Helper
In New England Winter
The Reluctant Voyage
Travel from Home
Mister Newcomer
Support Your Local Police
DANDY, or Astride the Funky Finger of Lust
PREFACE
by Amiri Baraka
Actually, Bullins’s work is more subtle than he writes it. These are coarse stories, tales of rough-edged youth and frustrated adults. The main theme, or wire, running through these short muffled cries is frustration, seeing but not copping, copping but not digging, awash in the lost-and-found of this life shit and not knowing which one you is.
They seem like they have been hacked out of something—sprays of sand from dirt, showers of flakes from a block of ice, dust from the inevitable saw shaping us around our life, or maybe memory in its ghoulish detail, what we saw.
In that sense, they are as dry as Bullins most famously is, except he has brutalized that silence that surrounds him to say something about what he has dug in and of the world. This is a cold, hard, seedy world Bullins gives us. But we recognize it as part of our own. There are master works here, “Support Your Local Police,” “The Hungered One,” for instance, and others. But there is also an edgy silent harshness, a world held together by yearning and regret, where desire is met with smothered instinct, hope with mocking laughter.
Quietly touching, stealthily brain-rattling. Feeling and thought, is what Bullins offers. However bitter, it’s good for us.
The distance between what we want and what exists.
Amiri Baraka
Newark, NJ
October 2008
INTRODUCTION
Premonitions of a Monstrous Time
On a recent near-lovely autumn evening, I read my story “The Hungered One” at a literary gathering. During the Q&A segment of the program, naturally, I was asked where I came by this piece of writing. I answered that perhaps it was a premonition of some monstrous time that has now appeared. The moderator announced that its genre was allegory. I remained silent. And the audience seemed comfortable, having figured out this thing with the aid of the arbitrator. But was it all that? An allegory?
… having hidden spiritual meaning that transcends the literal sense of a sacred text.
—Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary,
G. & C. Merriam Co., 1957
Prior explanations of the origin of my four-leggedcreature story did not seem as important to skeptics—I would say that the beast came from a dream of mine, and premonitions are not necessarily dreams. So is “The Hungered One” about some kind of Western Freudian probing? Or is it all about allegory, that type of world literature which stands for something that is about other things that are not fully realized or expressed?
I do not entirely know what this story possesses in terms of symbols and significance, but it came into being fully formed, like its namesake, and was first published in 1971.
When I began writing seriously—which to me meant following in the footsteps of fiction writers like Richard Wright, Henry Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Sonia Sanchez, John Guare, Marvin X, Edward Albee, Idries Shah, Ishmael Reed, and so forth—I fought with myself to make each new work, initially, as different from my previous writing as possible. I lost that early battle, though I know the attempt was sincere and worth the struggle.
I imagine now that I was trying to answer the voices of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, et al. And also through my early work I discovered “The Absurd One,” which opens these writings, acknowledging the generation of Genet, the Theatre of the Absurd, Ralph Ellison, and the literary existential faddists of the late 1940s and ’50s. The story “Moonwriter” comes straight out of the Haight-Ashbury coffeehouse culture of the late ’60s, though L.A.’s Pogo’s Swamp a decade before helped incubate these literary Happenings. My longtime friend Amiri Baraka showed me how to write “The Enemy” through his example. Change! Change! Change! we hear today, but how did hardened personalities like Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka become wise philosophers and prophets so quickly?
As a neophyte participant, a rank novice, I developed much like a boxer, an artist, or a sprinter who takes on an extreme challenge, or even a marathon player who might put his/her life on the line. A boxer can spar at the gym or in the back alley, and develop into a contender if he has the heart and will. The artist of music, studio painting, and sculpture (as well as installation art) can also develop in various ways. My own creative writing grew in a hopscotch kind of experimental way. By the time I got to “The Hungered One,” I was taking full steps.
Being young and black in the ’60s and ’70s was a rem
arkable experience. As a writing student and soon-to-be editor of Citadel, the Los Angeles City College literary magazine, I met Malcolm X before he captured the headlines and minds of much of urban America. Along with other student leaders, I had been fortunate enough to have lunch with Martin Luther King, Jr. at LACC in the late ’50s or early ’60s. I remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and my Contemporary Literature Club (of which I was president) huddled together and swore we would find a way to make this country a better place. (Can you believe how young we were?) I have met, befriended, shared living quarters and organized with numerous political, artistic, cultural, and progressive activists of the past fifty years through my writing and theater endeavors. And if I had to, I would do lots of it all over again (hopefully having learned more). And by the way, please understand that all of this relates to the universal paraphrase—for instance: The past is the past, although what goes around comes around.
I did not write a play until nearly a decade after I began working on stories in my early twenties. In this book, the vignettes “In the Wine Time” and “In New England Winter” became the prologues of the plays of the same names.
She passed the corner in small ballerina slippers, every evening during my last wine time, wearing a light summer dress with big pockets, swinging her head back and to the side all special-like, hearing a private melody singing in her head …
We picked Chuck up at noon and drove with brood hanging close to our bodies blended with the sweat. The ’53 burped reliably in its infirmity; its windows gulped the grit which peppered my face, and Indian summer rode with us across the city, a spent brave, a savage to the last, causing me visions of winter in New England …
After I read dozens of plays, worked for a while as trashman and stagehand at little theaters, and then began trying to write my own plays, I found that incorporating some of my fictional work was of great help. In the Wine Time was my second full-length play, following Goin’a Buffalo. In New England Winter came in third place.
Soon I concentrated on dramatic writing, though I did have a novel published during the following years.
And this is part of my story as a writer. Surprising. It’s the beginning of the tale with much more to follow. I would be happy if it never ended, but that’s impossible, right?
Ed Bullins
Roxbury, MA
October 2008
PART ONE
THE
ABSURD
ONE
To Joe Wooly …
from Mississippi …
to Hate (Haight) Ashbury & death …
filling his belly
with life
The Absurd One
I have no understanding of how that absurd being whose lair is centered behind our eyes takes us over, stealing from his cave in our brains to take us over for a sliced second; but, in dream, when dog weary, in the d.t.’s or cold turkey we sometimes glimpse him, or better, his claw flexing, hinting of the Absurd One’s eternal presence, his ironic whim for destruction or creation.
Some of us know him and are in an intimate compromise to his capture in that unsuspected interval, for we know he may call once a year in the dawn as we practice our art—that he viciously splashes a shadow of his perfection onto the canvas, upon the page or within the wood, stone or clay, and as soon, swipes back and withdraws and awaits his whim another year or more, and we are left madmen who scream futilely within, screams which reverberate in the Absurd One’s hole, screams he gloats upon, screams he draws sustenance, for they are his solemn reverences, given by the devout and reverent believers. We scream inside for that impossible perfection he teased of.
Or the Absurd One may come in the bed and bite with our teeth through our love’s nipple or into our manhood and he intimidates us both to lie of it as our love, or the Absurd One may prance with the punch of the needle, popped as he pursues the heart, until he is the heart, pumping, pounding to every portion, and you are he, awesome in absurdity. Or with the lung-scorched joint effect the Absurd One may lift out your mind from its case and insert an endless running bump-and-grind piano roll of creation until he becomes absurdly bored and sprinkles a pinch of depression into his bed, your head, before slamming back the brain, snapping the musical paper toilet roll of the universe, or the Absurd One may one day like the other days but for that day, slide down the out-of-uniform Royal Crowned and processed cowlick of the seventeen-year green sailor, into the fortyyear breathing wide nostrils belonging to the scrawny whore who “moved like she had a propeller in her tail”; the same woman who shed a tear from dehydrated glands forgotten since twelve, the same woman absurdly taken in the crotch so as to have a twitch disbelieved since fifteen, the same who sliced forty-year veins after the boy was gone with his money still to be used for another skinny one, the same who blubbered the entire distance to the psycho ward that she had somehow felt absurdly impure when Joey, or was it Johnnie, or Moe, when it was unknowingly Sam, was with her with the exact mixed amounts of Mississippi sweat, lye, lard and sweet water that someone once had who had had her at ten in some absurd hayloft … of all places. But there was reality in his bumpkin bounding and pounding.
It then must have been the Absurd One who was there that one sliced second of night or day that you or me or we stood with glass in hand and with unshakable conviction in the arrogance of our convictions that the answers possessed were our own answers. It was he then who pulled the blinds behind our eyes, reversing them, slipping the slats out and back again all at once, as your eyes changed from brown to blue, from grey to white or charred good black in the heat of possibility, when Absurd stood behind you that second that you knew you were a girl or a boy though your Brooks Brothers and Chanel spoke with proper authority otherwise, but the Absurd One whispered in that absurd second that men and women and girls and lads are all one and the same as you and all look boss, to you, for you wanted a man or a woman or a girl or a boy or yourself, which was the best possibility, and you knew entirely, backed up by Absurd, that you could then in that sliced second and at once fuck the world, Sealy Posturepedic or not, for it waited; it waited with mouth wide.
Moonwriter
On rainy Saturday … and there I was at one of them thar scary lit-ar-airy beer busts with real writers and he-man things … with sandals and beards and handlebar moostashes and tweeds and pipes … and agents and contracts and credits and the moon and mountains and in Mexico were in the room … with beer belches.
We put down all mutually known writers not there … unless, of course, they came later.
And there I was saying … “Yeah … and after bein’ a bouncer in Naples and a bodyguard in Sicily I got to …”
“Yeah … you and the Mafia in Palermo …” someone said.
“… and I got to Spain,” I continued, “and ran into a hassle with the lightweight champ of that part of the world …”
But then I sighed fuck-it inside and didn’t tell them that I’ve had a lot of odd jobs, my father ain’t Italian, and all the champ and I did was get to like each other finally; he drank me under the table.
People dream of goin’ to the moon … I’d just like to get back down into livin’ …
Should I have dropped my pants and flashed bullet blister, round and pus pushing, sometimes sore on snowy days.
Should I have shined stiletto slash seam of stitches skimming jugular vein, or pursed pulled together punctures in back. Should I have flexed my scars and screamed:
“But … mah pain is in mah brain … yawhl!”
Should I have said: “Check with J. Edgar … sweetie!”
But I shouldn’t be blowin’ ’bout the past; the past is with me each night hobbling on cloven hooves holding hands with dead dream masks that even drugs can’t dim. They dance to goat songs sung until dawn in spirals about my head.
I lived by the gun … and know those who live will die …
I live a lie … and know those who live die …
I have notches on m
y soul … and know those who have … have … have need of death … for sleep has dreams and handholding songs.
I’ve met Death on ageless corners and died in streets without corners in Brooklyn, in Philly, in Hollywood, in Boston, in Nice, in Marseilles … on corners without streets.
I’ve woken up dead in drunk-tanks, on hospital slabs … never ever in bed.
I’ve notches on my soul …
the gun …
Notches …
the knife …
Notches …
You want to go to the moon, writer?
Go via Harlem, Dante.
Muses of mountains, poet, with sprinkles of waiting solitary secrets?
Sip a random sample of meatless everyday soup in solitary stir with visions of tits, arse and better … scorching steel cells.
Romance in Mexico, hombre … with advaanture …
Tell your analyst elephant jokes, men, the punch line being: “Elephants don’t fuck with analysts!”
The gun, the knife, the dream, the lie; notches behind my eyes.
My Id can lick yours anyday, moonwriter.
The Enemy
To Norm Moser
I am an enemy of the State. I do not mine bridges nor take over the national airways or private airlines at gunpoint. I do not preach revolution against the Republic in its overt dialectical forms. I do not even care what political elements make up the State at the moment, unless these factions jeopardize my personal desires, caprices or concerns. Nor do I care who holds the balance of power within the government. I simply do not care for the presence of the State; it is the supreme evil to my existence, for I am against all factions, groups, agencies and alliances which make up the State, and I know, not so secretly, that they are against me. For I am their constant threat, for I am in essence against everything the State purports to be. I stand against the institutions of the whiteman.
