The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones Read Online Free PDF

other times. When I had on what I wanted and wasn’t too sparkly from my brown mom’s Vaseline aspirations, I didn’t look bad. Shit, I was just short! That’s all. (Even the “skinny” shit was a secondary harassment.)
    Another thing is that we were always in motion. It seemed that way. But why or how or even the supposed chaos of such a situation never registered. It certainly was never explained to me by anyone. Though I guess you could get some word from these Johnny-come-lately sociologists, if you got the time to be bored with their chauvinism. But it was our way, is what etched itself somewhere.
    From Barclay Street, a “luxury” project we had to move out of, $24 a month was too much even though my ol’ man had just got a good job at the Post Office. But he couldn’t cut those prices, so we had to space. But I have some early memories of that place. Its park, its fire escapes (I nearly fell off and ended the saga right here), its red bricks and some light browns and yellows flittin’ round.
    Earlier than this is a blank, though I have “memories” produced by later conversations. Like being hit by a car — banged in the head (or do I remember the steel grille smacking my face, trying to wake me up!?).
    A dude hit me in the head with a big rock. And I still carry the scar. I think I remember that sharp pain. A cold blue day. A brown corduroy jacket. And the whiz of wind as I broke round the corner to our crib.
    I pulled a big brown radio down, also on my head. (Ah, these multiple head injuries — is something beginning to occur to you? Spit it out!) Another scar, still there. The radio had a knob missing and the metal rod sunk into my skull just left of my eye.
    Tolchinskie’s Pickle Works across the street. A smell and taste so wonderful I been hooked ever since (every sense). Hey, man, in a wooden barrel, with them big green pimples on ’em. And good shit floatin’ around in the barrel with ’em.
    A guy who flashed around and tried to teach us to play tennis. That’s how “horizontal” our community was then. Almost all of us right there, flattened out by the big NO. Later, more would “escape,” rise up a trifle by our collective push. PUSHy niggers. That’s later a verticality rises, so we know. The vicissitudes of NO.
    But I never learned how to play tennis. That yellowness never got in. But it was different in my house than out in the street. Different conventions. Like gatherings — of folks and their histories. Different accumulations of life. So those references and their
enforcement
.
    You see, I come from brown niggers from way back. Yeh. But some yellow niggers — let’s say color notwithstanding — some yellow and even some factual,
a
factual, white motherfucker or fatherfucker in there.
    I was secure in most ways. My father and mother I knew and related to every which way I can remember. They were the definers of my world. My guides. My standards. (So any “nut-outs” y’all claim got to begin there!)
    I was a little brown boy on my mother’s hand. A little brown big-eyed boy with my father. With a blue watch cap with Nordic design. At the World’s Fair (1939) eyes stretched trying to soak up the days and their lessons.
    But the motion was constant. And that is a standard as well. From Barclay to Boston (Street) and the halfdark of my grandmother’s oil lamp across the street. They had me stretched out one night, buddeeee, and this redfreckle-face nigger was pickin’ glass outta my knee. There were shadows everywhere. And mystery.
    My grandfather had had a grocery store on that same street earlier, but that was washed away in the ’30s with a bunch of other stuff. My grandfather didn’t shoot himself, or jump off a building. But after that, we was brown for sure!
    And so for that branch of the family, there was a steep descent. My mother’s folks, the