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Overview
Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones, was known not only as a poet, playwright, and founder of the Black Arts movement, but also as one of the most provocative voices of the civil rights era and beyond.
These pieces, which span the years from 1960 to 1965, cover subjects ranging from Cuba to Malcolm X to street protests and soul food, and are accompanied by the author’s new introduction from 2009.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617750502 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Series: | AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 250 |
| File size: | 644 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
1960
cuba libre
Preface
If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies. If it is, for example, true or, say, honest. The idea that things of this nature continue to exist is not ever brought forward in our minds. If they do, they seem, at their most sympathetic excursion, monstrous untruths. Bigger lies than our own. I am sorry. There are things, elements in the world, that continue to exist, for whatever time, completely liberated from our delusion. They press us also, and we, of course, if we are to preserve the sullen but comfortable vacuum we inhabit, must deny that anyone else could possibly tolerate what we all agree is a hellish world. And for me to point out, assuming I am intrepid enough, or, all right, naïve enough to do so, i.e., that perhaps it is just this miserable subjection to the fantastic (in whatever fashion, sphere, or presence it persists) that makes your/our worlds so hellish, is, I admit, presumption bordering on insanity. But it is certainly true ... whether I persist or no ... or whether you believe (at least the words) or continue to stare off into space. It's a bad scene either way.
(What I Brought to the Revolution)
A man called me on a Saturday afternoon some months ago and asked if I wanted to go to Cuba with some other Negroes, some of whom were also writers. I had a house full of people that afternoon and since we had all been drinking, it seemed pretty silly for me to suddenly drop the receiver and say, "I'm going to Cuba," so I hesitated for a minute, asking the man just why would we (what seemed to me to be just "a bunch of Negroes") be going. For what purpose? He said, "Oh, I thought that since you were a poet you might like to know what's really going on down there." I had never really thought of anything in that particular light. Being an American poet, I suppose, I thought my function was simply to talk about everything as if I knew ... it had never entered my mind that I might really like to find out for once what was actually happening someplace else in the world.
There were twelve of us scheduled to go to Habana, July 20. Twelve did go, but most were last-minute replacements for those originally named. James Baldwin, John Killens, Alice Childress, Langston Hughes, were four who were replaced. The only other "professional" writer on this trip was Julian Mayfield, the novelist, who went down before the main body with his wife.
At Idlewild airport, the 20th, we straggled in from our various lives, assembling at last at 3 P.M. We met each other, and I suppose, took stock of each other. I know I took stock of them, and was disappointed. First, because there were no other, what I considered, "important" Negro writers. The other reasons were accreted as the trip went on. But what I could get at that initial meeting was: One embarrassingly dull (white) communist, his professional Negro (i.e., unstraightened hair, 1930's bohemian peasant blouses, etc., militant integrationist, etc.) wife who wrote embarrassingly inept social comment-type poems, usually about one or sometimes a group of Negroes being mistreated or suffering in general (usually in Alabama, etc.). Two middle-class young Negro ladies from Philadephia who wrote poems, the nature of which I left largely undetermined. One 1920's "New Negro" type African scholar (one of those terrible examples of what the "Harlem Renaissance" was at its worst). One 1930's type Negro "essayist" who turned out to be marvelously un-lied to. One strange tall man in a straw hat and feathery beard (whom I later got to know as Robert Williams and who later figured very largely in the trip, certainly in my impressions of it). The first Negro to work for the Philadelphia Inquirer — I think probably this job has deranged him permanently, because it has made him begin to believe that this (the job) means that white America (i.e., at large) loves him ... and it is only those "other" kinds of Negroes that they despise and sometimes even lynch. Two (white) secretaries for an organization called The Fair Play For Cuba Committee, who I suppose are as dedicated (to whatever it is they are dedicated to) as they are unattractive. One tall skinny black charming fashion model, who wore some kind of Dior slacks up into the Sierra Maestra mountains (she so reminded me of my sister, with her various younger-generation liberated-type Negro comments, that it made any kind of adulterous behavior on my part impossible). One young Negro abstract expressionist painter, Edward Clarke, whom I had known vaguely before, and grew to know and like very much during this, as he called it, "wild scene." Also at the terminal, but not traveling with us, a tall light-skinned young, as white liberals like to say, "Negro intellectual." It was he, Richard Gibson, who had called me initially and who had pretty much arranged the whole trip. (I understand now that he has just recently been fired from his job at CBS because of his "Cuban activities.")
We didn't get to leave the 20th. Something very strange happened. First, the airline people at the desk (Cubana Airlines) said they had no knowledge of any group excursion of the kind Gibson thought he had arranged. Of course, it was found out that he, Gibson, had letters from various officials, not only verifying the trip, but assuring him that passage, etc., had been arranged and that we only need appear, at 3 P.M., the 20th, and board the plane. After this problem was more or less resolved, these same airline people (ticket sellers, etc.) said that none of our tickets had been paid for, or at least, that the man who must sign for the free tickets had not done so. This man who was supposed to sign the free passes to make them valid was the manager of Cubana Airlines, New York, who, it turned out, was nowhere to be found. Gibson raged and fumed, but nothing happened.
Then, a Señor Molario, the head of the July 26th movement in New York City, appeared (he was supposed to accompany us to Habana), and the problem took on new dimensions. "Of course," Señor Molario said, "there are tickets. I have a letter here signed by the Minister of Tourism himself authorizing this trip. The passes need only be signed by the manager of the New York office of Cubana."
Gibson and the airline people told Molario about the manager's inconvenient disappearance. Molario fumed. Gibson and Molario telephoned frantically, but the manager did not appear. (His secretary said she had "no idea" where he was.) Finally, when it was ascertained that the manager had no intention of showing up by plane time, Señor Molario offered to pay for all our tickets out of his own pocket. Then the other dimension appeared. The two men behind the desk talked to each other and then they said, "I'm very sorry, but the plane is all filled up." Molario and Gibson were struck dumb. The rest of us milled around uncertainly. At 4:30 P.M., the plane took off without us. Five hours later, I suppose, it landed in Habana. We found out soon after it took off that there were thirteen empty seats.
The communist and his wife were convinced that the incident represented an attempt by the U.S. government to discourage us from going to Cuba at all. It seemed a rational enough idea to me.
There was no trouble at all with our tickets, etc., the next day. We took off, as scheduled, at 4:30 P.M. and landed at Jose Martí airport five hours later (8:30 P.M. because of the one-hour time difference). At the airport we were met in the terminal by a costumed Calypso band and a smiling bartender who began to pass out daiquiris behind a quickly set up "Bacardi bar" at an alarming rate. There were also crowds of people standing outside the customs office, regular citizens they looked to be, waving and calling to us through the glass. Between daiquiris, we managed to meet our official interpreter, a small pretty Cuban girl named Olga Finlay. She spoke, of course, better English than most of my companions. (I found out later that she had lived in New York about ten years and that she was the niece of some high official in the revolutionary government.) We also met some people from Casa De Las Americas, the sponsoring organization, as well as its sub-director, a young architect named Alberto Robaina. I met two young Cuban poets, Pablo Armando Fernandez, who had translated one of my poems for Lunes de Revolución, the literary supplement of the official newspaper of the revolution, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the editor of the supplement.
From the very outset of the trip I was determined not to be "taken." I had cautioned myself against any undue romantic persuasion and had vowed to set myself up as a completely "objective" observer. I wanted nothing to do with the official type tours, etc., I knew would be waiting for us and I had even figured out several ways to get around the country by myself in the event that the official tours got to be too much. Casa De Las Americas, the government, was paying all our bills and I was certain that they would want to make very sure that we saw everything they wanted us to see. I wanted no part of it. I speak Spanish fairly well, can't be mistaken for a "gringo yanqui" under any circumstances, and with the beard and without the seersucker suit I was wearing, I was pretty sure I'd be relatively free to tramp around where I wanted to. So of course with these cloak-and-dagger ideas and amidst all the backslapping, happy crowds (crowds in the U.S. are never "happy".... hysterical, murderous, duped, etc., viz. Nathanael West, yes, but under no circumstances "happy." A happy crowd is suspect), government-supplied daiquiris, Calypsos, and so forth, I got extremely paranoid. I felt immediately sure that the make was on. (See preface.)
In New York we were told that we would probably be staying at the Hotel Riviera, one of the largest luxury hotels in Habana. However, the cars took us to another hotel, the Hotel Presidente. The Presidente is hardly what could be called a luxury hotel, although I'm sure it was one of the great tourista places during the 1930's. Now, in contrast to the thirty-story Hilton and the other newer "jeweled pads" of Habana, the Presidente looked much like the 23rd Street YMCA. It had become, after the advent of the skyscraper hotels, more or less a family residence with about thirty-five permanent guests.
When we got out of the cars and realized that by no stretch of the imagination could we be said to be in a luxury hotel, there was an almost audible souring throughout the little band. The place was fronted, and surrounded, by a wide, raised awning-covered tile terrace. There were rattan chairs and tables scattered all over it. At the top of the stairs, as we entered, a small glass-enclosed sign with movie schedules, menus for the dining room, and pictures of the entertainers who worked (only weekends now) in the hotel bar. There was one working elevator run by a smiling, one-armed, American slang-speaking operator. The sign-in desk was exactly the way they are in movies and I was startled for a moment by the desk clerk, who in his slightly green tinted glasses and thin eyes looked exactly like pictures of Fulgencio Batista.
To further sour our little group, the men were billeted two in a room. Clarke and I managed to get into a room with a connecting door to another room. As soon as we got into our room, the other door opened and the model came through smiling and mildly complaining. She definitely missed the Riviera. However, the three of us established an immediate rapport and I called room service and ordered two bottles before we even took off our jackets.
The liquor was brought upstairs and when I opened the door to let the bellhop in, the essayist and the tall bearded man were standing outside the door also. We invited them in and everyone re-introduced himself. As the evening moved on, and more liquor was consumed, we talked more and more about ourselves. I was most interested in the tall man. His name, Robert Williams, was vaguely familiar. I remembered just where it was, and in what context, I had seen Williams' name. He was the president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP. He was also the man who had stated publicly that he didn't hold too much with "passive resistance," especially as championed by Rev. Martin Luther King, and he had advocated that the Southern Negro meet violence with violence. He had been immediately suspended by the home office, but the people in his branch had told the New York wheels that if Williams was out so were they. He had been reinstated, but very, very reluctantly. Williams had gone on, as he told us in some detail later, to establish a kind of pocket militia among the Negroes of Monroe, and had managed to so terrorize the white population of the town that he could with some finality ban any further meetings of the local Ku Klux Klan. The consensus among the white population was that "Williams was trying to provoke them and they weren't going to be provoked."
Somehow, people in Cuba heard about Williams' one-man war in Monroe and invited him to see for himself what was happening in Cuba. Apparently, when the people who were in charge of trying to attract U.S. Negro tourists to Cuba found out that they drew blanks in their dealings with NAACP people and other "official" Negroes, viz. the tragedy of Joe Louis, they thought Williams would be a good risk. He was. He came down to Habana with Richard Gibson and toured the entire country at government expense, meeting Fidel Castro as well as most of the other important men in the revolutionary government. There were many pictures of Williams in most Cuban newspapers, many interviews given to newspapers and over the various television networks. In most of the interviews Williams put down the present administration of the U.S. very violently for its aberrant foreign policy and its hypocritical attitude on what is called "The Negro Question." He impressed almost all of Cuba with the force of his own personality and the patent hopelessness of official Uncle Sham.
On his return to the States, Williams, of course, was castigated by whatever portion of the American press that would even bother to report that there had been an American Negro "leader" who had actually gone down to Cuba and had, moreover, heartily approved of what he had seen. The NAACP people in New York called Williams in and said he was wasting his talent down in that small town and offered him a good job at the home office in New York. When he was offered a return trip to Cuba, Williams jumped at the chance.
Later in the evening, the two middle-class ladies from Philadelphia turned up, drawn I suppose by all the noise that must have been coming out of our room. The one pretty middle-class lady talked for a while about not being at the Riviera, and what people in Philadelphia had said when she told them she was going to Cuba. I was pretty surprised, in one sense, at her relation of those comments, because the comments themselves, which I suppose must have come from people pretty much like herself, i.e., middle-class, middle-brow young Negroes living in Philadelphia, were almost exactly the same as the comments that had been tossed my way from the various beats, bohemians and intellectuals in Greenwich Village, New York City (of course, given that proper knowing cynicism that is fashionable among my contemporaries). It made me shudder. I mean to find how homogenous most thinking in the U.S. has become, even among the real and/or soi disant intellectual. A New York taxicab driver taking me out to Idlewild says ... "Those rotten commies. You'd better watch yourself, mister, that you don't get shot or something. Those guys are mean." And from a close friend of mine, a young New York poet, "I don't trust guys in uniforms." The latter, of course, being more reprehensible because he is supposed to come up with thought that is alien to the cliché, completely foreign to the well-digested particle of moral engagement. But this is probably the biggest symptom of our moral disintegration (call it, as everyone else is wont, complacency), this so-called rebellion against what is most crass and ugly in our society, but without the slightest thought of, say, any kind of direction or purpose. Certainly, without any knowledge of what could be put up as alternatives. To fight against one kind of dullness with an even more subtle dullness is, I suppose, the highwater mark of social degeneracy. Worse than mere lying.
In 1955, on leave from an airbase in Puerto Rico, I came into Habana for three days. I suppose, then, probably next to Tangiers, Habana was the vice capital of the world. I remember coming out of my hotel and being propositioned by three different people on my way to a bus stop. The first guy, a boy around fifteen, wanted to sell me his sister. The second guy, also around fifteen, had a lot of women he wanted to sell. Probably not all of them were his sisters. The third guy had those wild comic books and promises of blue movies. The town was quieter in the daytime; then it was only an occasional offer to buy narcotics. No one even came out on the streets except billions of beggars and, of course, the Americans, until the sun went down ... then it was business as usual. The best liberty town in the world. I remember also blowing one hundred bucks in the casino and having some beautiful red-haired women give it back to me to play again. She was the wife of a bigtime British film maker who said she was in love with Africans. She was extremely dragged when she found out I was just an American G.I. without even money enough to buy a box of prophylactics.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Home"
by .
Copyright © 2009 LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
2009,
HOME (new introduction),
1965,
HOME (original introduction),
1960,
Cuba Libre,
1961,
Letter to Jules Feiffer,
1962,
Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents,
"Black" Is a Country,
City of Harlem,
Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),
Street Protest,
Soul Food,
The Myth of a "Negro Literature",
1963,
Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots,
A Dark Bag,
What Does Nonviolence Mean?,
The Dempsey-Liston Fight,
Black Writing,
Expressive Language,
1964,
Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,
LeRoi Jones Talking,
The Last Days of the American Empire (Including Some Instructions for Black People),
The Revolutionary Theatre,
1965,
American Sexual Reference: Black Male,
Blackhope,
The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,
STATE/MEANT,