The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones Read Online Free PDF Page B

Russes. In Alabama the old man owned two grocery stores and a funeral parlor. First grocery stores burned down by “jealous crackers” (my grandmother’s explanation). After the second arson, they had to hat. First, to Pennsylvania (Beaver Falls) and then finally to Newark.
    My father was running from dee white folkz too. He had bopped some dude side the head in a movie he ushered in. The dude was an ofay. (Naturlich!) And so, again, the hat was called for.
    To arrive, out of breath, in a place you thought was The Apple but turned out to be the
prune
(Newark) or the raisin. Jobless, detached from theyellow streak of the Jones’s (nee Johns’s) upward mobility, even there inside the brown. A part-time barber, for mostly white folks, with a high school diploma — though three of his sisters were bound for college. Projected from a teeny brown white-haired widow lady, daughter of another teeny brown white-haired widow lady, who shot the distaffs through on sewing for white folks and a blissful irony that smiled the bittersweet recognition of the place and its inhabitants. Its mores and morons.
    So that’s where we was coming from. The church of specific reality. Inside the general (flight) our Johns-Jones/Russ lives merging. But see, they had sent my mother to Tuskegee (when it was a high school) and then to Fisk. I used to look at both yearbooks full of brown and yellow folks. She had one flick poised at the starting line, butt up, large eyes catching the whole world, about to take off. Her name then was “Woco-Pep,” a Southern gasoline. She was that fast.
    Where she was going to in her parents’ heads, I ain’t exactly hip. Except it’s safe to say it was
up
. Storekeeper father, mother and brother assistants in the joint, and whatnot. But somehow she ran into this big-eyed skinny dude. (MF) My father. A tipsy part-time barber or a barber who occasionally got deep in his cups. The story goes he flipped his little Ford on top of his drunk self on 13th Avenue and come out from under swearing off.
    You see an irony here? No? A split-off from the upwardly mobile somehow molests (with permission) the scioness of the nigger rich. Except by 1929 all them fireworks was put out by Ugly Sissy’s fatal flaw — capitalismus. And so the new day dawned with a pregnant coed who did not get to go to the Olympics and a new member of the family who didn’t come from “bad stock” (!aagh hopeless!) but what the hell was his thoroughly brown ass going to do now?
    Marrying your mama, Jim. What else? And so flow the streams together. (But wasn’t one of the first Negroes to read in South Carolina, complete with plaque and multiple modest legend, your old man’s Uncle Enoch? Yaas — that’s affirmative — over. And them slender and fat sisters of his, wasn’t they all got to be teachers and shit? Affirmative — J.A.M.F. So couldink you say they was all in the same shit — anyway?)
    You see, you doesink understand colored people or color peepas either. My mother’s folks was in business. Them funeral parlor dudes was and is the actual colored rich guys. The bourgeoisie, dig? Them teachers and shit (his old man [MF’s] was a preacher part-time and chef, also bricklayed a taste. Got the flu and it took him off), they just the petty bourgeoisie. Andhell, they even had food smells and brick dust on ’em and some sew-for-white-ladies thread on ’em. Whew!
    Later, it really cracked up. They was drug down! That’s what the scuttlebutt was. Arguments in our weird orange house years later. My uncle called my father a “nincompoop.” What is that? Because these Russes had been drug down, Jim! Outta they funeral parlors, outta they stores, Granddaddy to be a night watchman, his wife on the bus to Essex Fells to curl up some white ladies’ hairs, and wouldn’t ya know it, MF “had” MM in a dusty-ass Jew factory doing