The Black Male Show

Amiri Baraka

1934–2014

I think about a time when I will be relaxed. When flames and non-specific passions wear themselves away. And my eyes and hands and mind can turn and soften and my songs will be softer and lightly weight the air. — AMIRI BARAKA

Nabokov told us that all a writer has to leave behind is his or her style. Amiri Baraka made the reading populace deal with a rowdy, robust gang of style. Miles Davis (whose powers of concentration, condensation, and cool Baraka emulated in his poetics) once said he only had use for musicians who could play a style — stone-cold-bold originals. Originality, like style, is generally what's left after artists eliminate all excess from their repertoire — all the corny stuff that seems better suited for somebody else.

Born October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, Everett Leroi Jones shed hosts of styles, skins, friends, foes, and belief systems on the way to becoming Amiri Baraka, the iconic legend of literary and political lore. Like Miles, he got beaten bloody upside the head by upsouth redneck cops for being a model of uppity nigra defiance. Like Miles, Baraka walked away with brains, cojones, and swagger intact ... intensified, even.

I'm Everett LeRoi Jones thirty years old. A Black nigger in the universe. A longer breath singer, would-be dancer, strong from years of fantasy and study.

LeRoi Jones is the byline the world first came to know him by (simultaneously) as a poet, jazz critic, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. As Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad notes, Baraka and Hughes are the only writers in the Black American canon to distinguish themselves in four genres of writing: poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay. (Ntozake Shange belongs on that list too in our humble — more fodder for diatribes to come.)

Every writer can tell you about the one book that changed their life, changed their mind, made becoming a writer a fait accompli. For this writer here, that book was Baraka's Black Music. His Blues People is standard reading for anyone wanting to know the history and socio-cultural-political significance of The Music to The Struggle, but Black Music is The One by freedom-swing musicologist Baraka that turned your boyee out. Made him leap overnight from being a fourteen-year-old Marvel Comics / sci-fi nerd to a precocious warrior nerd for the cause of freakishly-rad jazz improv.

Black Music introduced superheroic otherworldly entities calling themselves Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders. And did so deploying a style that was as incandescent, indelible, and whiplash smarting as the music itself. Laid down like grammatical law in Black Music is the mandate that music journalism seem as possessed by furies as The Music. Count this reporter among those writers who owe their adult vocation to being swept up by Baraka's elegant prose juju at a tender, volatile age.

The fledgling career of LeRoi Jones became noteworthy in 1959 with publication of his chapbook, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, which contains the poem of the same name now known as a much-anthologized classic. In a scant eighteen lines, a gothic young Jones parses dissonant melody from his sorrows and hallucinations, confesses alienated harmony with everyday chaos, then achieves spiritual renewal observing the mysteries of infant curiosity.

At that moment, Euro-American poetry and fiction was being resuscitated by the bebop-inspired artistic offspring of the so-called Black Mountain and Beat Generations; Jones, then ensconced in Gotham's East Village, swiftly bonded with the inner circle (Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, et al.) via books or bars. Jumped onboard their drunken boat like 'twas lifesaver, barnacled onto their methods and milieu until they became his own.

Jones arrived in the East Village as a refugee of the U.S. Air Force and of Howard University — where he served time with homecoming queen Toni Morrison, studied the blues with Sterling Brown, sociology with E. Franklin Frazier, and Dante's Inferno with the great Afro-Classicist Nathan Scott. (Bombardier training was his metier in the Air Force, or the "Error Farce" in Jonesology.) Soon after arriving on the Lower East Side he became betrothed to the former Hettie Cohen, also a poet, and within scant years also became the father of two darling daughters, Kellie and Lisa — who rolling stonishly gained stepsister Dominique DiPrima in this period.

By the time Preface was published, Jones had become a promising fixture of the Village's modern art–damaged bohemia. Hardly content simply hobnobbing with the Beats' pale male star chamber, the energetic and ambitious Jones read, wrote, and edited like a fiend, thought very deeply upon all things poetical, personal, and darkly sonorous, and while sipping cocktails, dashed off his own jazz and come-what-may-tales accordingly.

This proto-fly-brother in the ointment also devoted as much time as humanly possible going out to hear music of the great Black modernists who further ignited his literary passions — John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. These giants, among others, would provoke him to conjure his two aforementioned seminal classics of Black musicology, Blues People and Black Music.

By 1965, a barely thirty-years-old Jones had published the five now-canonical works that would forevermore ensure his presence on Africana syllabi across the land and guarantee his dramatic works would become mainstays of off-Broadway and regional theater well into the twenty-first century: Blues People (once again, church sez Amen); The System of Dante's Hell (a broken-beat fictive odyssey through his childhood, adolescence, and young manhood); The Dead Lecturer, his rapturously mordant second volume of death-obsessed née death-defying poems; Home, a book of cultural essays and belles lettres; and that first bevy of earth-scorching plays — Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave.

In 1959, the year twenty-five-year-old Jones published his Suicide Note, a thirty-three-year-old Fidel Castro and a thirty-one-year-old Che Guevara took over Havana with a rebel army that overturned the U.S.-supported and Mafia-friendly Batista regime. In 1961, Jones accepts an invitation to join a delegation of upstart American artists for a visit to postrevolutionary Cuba. In Havana he gets to rap with Castro and Guevara. The Cuba voyage, essayed on in Home, documents Jones's slow turn away from poetic disengagement with tings politique. This gradual 180 will later be propelled into r/evolutionary overdrive by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965.

That catastrophic event will provoke Jones's 1966 exodus from the East Village (and his young family) up to Harlem for race-man/race-manic repurposing and action. Treating the...