Plus, Albert, we found out quickly, could play his ass off. He had a sound, alone, unlike anyone else's. It tore through you, broad, jagged like something out of nature. Some critics said his sound was “primitive.” Shit, it was before that! It was a big massive sound and wail. The crying, shouting moan of black spirituals and God music. Pharaoh was so beautiful and he had a wildness to him too, a heavy force like the world could be reopened, but Albert was
mad
. His playing was like some primordial frenzy that the world secretly used for energy. Yeh, the music. Feeling all that, it touching us and us touching it, gave us that strength, that kind of irrevocability we felt. Like the thunder or the lightning or the ocean storming and mounting, crushing whatever was in its path.
At Lincoln Center one night, Trane's group with Eric Dolphy and Pharaoh too, plus Cecil Taylor, was on the same bill and Art Blakey and the Messengers. It was a beautiful night of music, but the high point was when Albert, whom I had come up to the hall with, came out on the stage, at Trane's invitation. He came out in the middle of one tune, horn held high up in the air, blowing like the world was on fire. His monster sound cut through all the music, he was blowing so loud, the timbre was so big. People in the audience and the musicians on the stage were electrified. After the performance, backstage, Trane asked Albert, “Hey, man, what kind of reed you using?” I could dig that!
Marion and some other people were playing in D.C. Marion and I were very close in those days, he'd come by and tell me all his plans and projections and co-sign some of mine. Marion sometimes seemed very bohemian and disconnected. He was heavily introspective, I guess like many of us. But he also had a practical, opportunity-seeking side of him. He wanted to meet people and when he finally did decide he wanted to go back to the Music, being in and around Cooper Square got him quickly connected up with Archie Shepp. And just as Shepp's first major side was “4 for Trane,” so Marion's first side was “3 for Shepp.” So Marion was quietly but efficiently building his own career while watching close up on mine.
So I wanted to go down to D.C. to hear him play in what amounted to his first big gig with his own group. A group of us were going down, but as we were getting ready a feeling of dread descended on me. Like nothing that I had ever felt before. I found myself dreading taking Nellie down to D.C. with me. I was perspiring and agitated as the time approached. I was pacing around in the house, trying to get high and drunk at the same time, but doing neither. I was cold sober. It was the feeling that Nellie was
outside
of my concerns, that we did not connect up. I think now I resented her. It was the black-white thing, the agitation, the frenzy, always so deeply felt and outer directed. It had settled in me directed at my wife. I had begun to see her as
white
! Before, even when I thought she was white, I had never felt anything negative. Even to the point of our beginning debates in the Village and the rising political consciousness I was developing. I had never felt anything abstractly negative about Nellie.
There had even been a magazine satire about me as the great white-hating militant finishing one of my diatribes and then going back to the dutiful white wife. But that had not bothered me, it had not affected my sense of myself or my regard, in whatever way that was carried, for Nellie. But now it was different. There was within that shadow I described before
not only a deep vacuum where words could disappear, there was now a coldness, a sharp disaffection that existed.
“Nellie, we can't go down to D.C. together. I don't want to go with you.”
She looked puzzled and tensed, somehow expectant. “What do you mean?”
“I'm black, Nellie. I'm black and you're” I trailed off. “White. I can't do this, Nellie. I'm black.”
That look in her eye then was of such deep hurt and confused amazement that I almost covered my face so I did not have to look at her face. “Oh, Roi,” she said. “That's silly. You're Roi and I'm Nellie. What are you talking about?”
What was the correlative or parallel scene being played all over the world which meant the same thing in all the different sectors and levels of human experience? That open call for that splitting up. As if the tragic world around our “free zone” had finally swept in and frozen us to the spot.
The play
The Slave
, which shows a black would-be revolutionary who splits from his white wife on the eve of a race war, was what Nellie called “Roi's nightmare.” It was so close to our real lives, so full of that living image.
We talked awhile, saying really little else. Actually, we repeated the things we had already said, in other ways. But finally, I was gone, down to D.C., where Marion was playing. But when I got down there I had a kind of relapse. I thought I had done wrong to leave Nellie that way, though I was coming back. The serious business of what was to happen to us and with our marriage was still to be done. The set was in a hotel and I paced back and forth and called home, but no one answered. Nellie was wherever she had to go to deal with such conflict. I called again and again, pacing, now feeling somehow I was trapped in this high building, unable to get back and cut off from this woman I had lived with for almost seven years. I was nervous and confused and though there was a party after Marion's set, I went to my room and laid up brooding about what the fuck I'd said and done. I called again; no answer.
Finally the drink I was nursing ran out, so I went down the hall to where the party was. When I stuck my head in looking around for the alcohol, there was a very slender red-brown black girl with the kind of “Mariney” red-brown haircut, very short and worn natural. She looked at me and smiled and not only did she not avert her eyes in some false modesty, she winked at me mischievously. I stood my ground, still looking for the big
drink. But smiling, trying to be cheerful. So she comes over, drink in hand. She says, “You look hip, what's your name?” Her name was Vashti.
We breezed out of that joint in a few, and wound up in my room, talking eight thousand miles an hour about everything we could think of. She was a young woman, still college age, but she had dropped out, she said, cause she wanted to be a painter. Vashti was skinny and had a tendency to be knock-kneed, but I thought she was one of the most gorgeous women I'd ever seen. It was like her quirky red looks turned me on, and the little knock-kneed walk and slightly protruding teeth. Plus, Vashti was dressed up, she was styled like she thought she was in some play where the woman painter goes to a cocktail party and meets the famous writer. Slouch hat pulled down over one eye, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Full of wisecracks and laughing at her own ironic humor or mine. We wound up in bed much much later in the morning with Vashti saying, “You better not give me a baby. I'm not playing.”
I told her she reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. She said, “Yeh, and you're the Mad Hatter.” And so I referred to her as Alice for a while. I was going back to New York and she was staying in D.C. But I knew even then that I would see her again. I knew that she would come to New York.
The crowd of dudes I was hanging with had swollen, it seemed that that place on Cooper Square became a meeting place for a certain kind of black intellectual during this period. But it was not just a casual circle anymore, there was clearly something forming, something about to come into being. We sat around trying to talk it and coax it into being. I met Max Stanford, from Philly, who'd recently moved to New York. I didn't know it at first, but Max was with the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which had just formed. Larry Neal became a part of that group. Larry, clean as blue wind, would sit in and contribute to those discussions of what was going on in the world, who were we in it, what was the role of the black artist? What should our art be? Larry was a poet, and he too had come up out of Philly and was also, unbeknownst to me, with RAM.
One night, after talking to Max, who had communications with the exiled Rob Williams, and who was actually distributing his newsletter,
The Crusader
, I felt particularly whipped and beaten. Why? Because, to me, the young tireless revolutionary I saw in Max was what I felt I could never be. I had said outright that the black and white thing was over, but I did not think I could act. For one thing, the little girls, now, were walking around and there was certainly both a deep love and a sense of pressing responsibility there. It seemed to me I was caught, frozen between two
worlds. I told this to Nellie, almost weeping, but dragged off to get high and tried to push it out of my mind.
One evening when a large group of us were together in my study talking earnestly about black revolution and what should be done, I got the idea that we should form an organization. On Guard had been long gone, because of its obvious contradictions. We needed a group of black revolutionaries who were artists to raise up the level of struggle from the arts sector. There was Dave Knight, White, Marion, C.D., Leroy McLucas, the Hackensack brothers (Shammy and Tong), Jimmy Lesser, Larry, Max, plus Corny and Clarence. We would form a secret organization. Tong asked me what would it be called, it came into my head in a flash, the Black Arts.
But all those people who'd hung around were not the serious core I felt would cohere with such an idea. I also thought it should be a paramilitary organization. At the next meeting I announced this, and if there were any doubts that some folks would stay and others breeze, that put an end to it. Max and Larry hung back because they were in another organization. Askia, too, who was around there, was not in that core because he too was with RAM and apparently they had been “assigned” to work with us.
White, though he worked with us contributing his art, could never make that core, which was probably a little too fanatical anyway, because of his scag habit. There were other people who came in once we got uptown and who worked with us as strongly and as closely as possible. But while we were downtown the core became McLucas, the Hackensacks, Jimmy Lesser, Dave, Corny, and Clarence. We gave ourselves military ranks, at which Larry smiled, it seemed knowledgeably, saying only, “You'all think you're ready for that?”
Marion spaced on that, being a little too sophisticated for such playacting, I guess. Bob Thompson was off battling the white powder. Overstreet came up to work at the arts but avoided some of the nuts in that core. So it got down to McLucas, Dave, the Hackensacks, Lesser, Corny, Clarence, and I, with C.D. straddling the fence.
We talked black black, being downtown, amidst the white world, even more frustrated and bitter in contrast to our surroundings, and less realistic than we needed to be. We formed a cadre, but looking at it now, my oldest black friends downtown did not go for the science fiction blackness our downtown core presented. All those people, with the exception of C.D. and McLucas, I had met only relatively recently.
What we did, concretely, was polarize the people downtown. We talked a black militance and took the stance that most of the shit happening
downtown was white bullshit and most of the people were too. The fact that we, ourselves, were down there was a contradiction we were not quite ready to act upon, though we discussed it endlessly. With all militant black groups that form downtown, the point of demarcation is always: they are downtown and the masses of black people are elsewhere. For us it was Harlem, that was the proper capital of our world and we were not there.
So we settled for jumping on people, mostly verbally, and preaching the need to be black and ultimately to get out of this downtown white hell.
Because of this “blacker than thou” stance, several relationships were disrupted. We were sincere, most of us. But we carried the fanaticism of the petty bourgeoisie. White through, yesterday; Black as heaven, today!
For one thing, we kept talking and talking about “going uptown.” The On Guards and OYMs came up, partially dissected.
Umbra
's struggles were partially discussed. I learned that Ishmael Reed, Hernton, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia, Tom Dent, David Henderson, Steve Cannon, the Hackensacks were grouped among its ranks. Theirs was a positive self-conscious black effort that had existed for some time down on the Lower East Side. But with the twists and turns of U.S. reality and new contradictions, one was splitting into two, they were about to come apart.
Rival sectors of different arts groups, particularly poets and writers, were polarized. The Black Arts group still moved downtown, still my house the unofficial HQ. Some of us had guns and we talked endlessly about black liberation. So that we might go to a poetry reading of Ish's and Calvin's and be there both to dig them and also to measure how black they were.
Our deepest feelings were correct, but we had no knowledge of the realities of revolution, not even the realities of the Black Liberation Movement. But still, helter-skelter, twisting and turning, we were putting out the seeds for a Black Arts Movement and the bit of that which we perceived astonished us.
Vashti came up to New York to live. She had a girlfriend she stayed with up on the West Side (who became part of a group of middle-class black women who came to the aid of Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow). But soon we had arranged something. I'd meet her different places, occasionally she even stayed at the Old Albert Hotel on University Place. She began to meet the various people in the Black Arts and go in and out of the watering holes of our downtown world. Sometimes we would go to a friend's loft and she would talk bad about me getting high, but mostly we talked and laughed and made love. Vashti became part of our crowd, speeding with me through those nights of uncertainty. I came to feel more and
more for her. It was like we were at the outset of a great adventure, the deepest part of which we picked up just by watching each other laugh. There was so much love in our eyes. Plus, we felt we were snatching that love from out of some dying white shit. Vashti never talked bad about Nellie, but she would look at me, sometimes, with her hands on her hips, not quite smirking, when the subject came up. There was nothing left for me at Cooper Square now but memories and the little girls. But I felt backed up against the wall.