The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones Read Online Free PDF Page A

middles, endings in my life. These stages are also places whereupon acts occur and also those acts themselves, as part of one overall act, really
process
my life. And so these stages are like essays trying to help us understand and illuminate a portion of the American experience.
    Within that American experience is the history and life of the African American Nation; a piece of the whole, yet
unintegrated
into that whole, black noncitizens whose only forward direction must be toward Self-Determination!
    For me, being here has always been a condition of struggle and, hopefully, growth. These could be called
Essays on the Stages of My Life
. To essay is also to attempt! So these are attempts to sum up that life, before having lived it all. Attempts to “make sense” where it has been difficult to see any sense.
    Step
of a life
turns
under the sun
& the sun
turns &
burns &
finally one last day
goes
out
Its history
is a tail
Tales for
remembering
words for
understanding
A long way (opens)
Back then &
there
we see now
again
To know
Seeing
& understand
Our
Being
.
    Why these “Memoirs”? Because it seems my life plagues a few people. They want to “know” how I got wherever they perceive I am. Why I would leave where they “thought” I was in the first place. But was I ever there, where they thunk? And where was they?
    But it is, has been, a path. From the beginning. And these “findings” are meant as darkness-altering mechanisms, small lights for seeing what a person will do and maybe why.
    But even so (just to put a little doo doo in the contest), who knows if this is the real stuff, the
lowdown
. Perhaps I’m distorting for my own reasons, hiding various things. Who can say? The lies officials will put out about me (even the unofficial officials) will be bad enough to make these memoirs of mine at least a relief. At least that’s what I say.
    â€”AB 1981

One
Young
    Growing up was a maze of light and darkness to me. I never fully understood the purpose of childhood. Baby pictures nonplussed me. It looks like me a little, I thought. But what the hell, I didn’t know nuthin’. It ain’t that cute. Falling back like that, toothless grimace, mouth bare, legs bent, fat with diapers. And them probably wet.
    Growing has obsessed me, maybe because I reached a certain point and stopped. My feeling is that I was always short. Maybe that’s why people like those baby pictures, because you couldn’t tell I was short then. Later, it became obvious and people started to rub it in.
    I was not only short, little, a runt. But skinny too. Short and skinny. But as a laughing contrast I got these big bulbous eyes. Big eyes. And it was no secret where they came from: my old man. Actually, you could say I got my whole “built” from him (Coyette Leroy Jones). But I don’t want to slander him, because he is my father and I love him.
    But people always would be sliding up to me saying, “You look just like your father,” or to him, “Roy, he look just like you,” or to my mother or some other hopeless “responsible” in whose charge I was placed, “Hey, he look just like Roy” — “He look just like his father.” It made you wonder (even then) why they put so much insistence on this. Was this a miracle?Wasn’t I spose’ to look like him? What was this wonder at creation? (Later, I would make up other implications of this charge.)
    And today people take my second son, Ras, through the same bizness. And to a lesser extent his three brothers and sister. But this was a stamp or some stamps of Young: that I was short and skinny with big eyes and looked just like my father. These were the most indelible. My earliest identity.
    I knew, too, rather early, that I was brown. Brown with a round face and sometimes wavy hair. These were later dissociations. Brown, round, and wavy. OK.
    I thought I looked OK. Sometimes better than