Read Online The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka - Free Book Online
Authors: Amiri Baraka
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction
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what? I was very young.
My grandfather was big in black Republican politics and after his grocery store folded in the Depression he got a patronage job as night watchman in the election machine warehouse for Essex County, on Wilsey Street in Newark. It was within walking distance of our house, right down the street from the Newark Street Jail. There was a big vacant lot across from the jail and I played baseball when I got up into high school as part of the Newark Cubs, complete with uniforms. A hundred years later I was locked up in that same jail during the Newark Rebellions and saw the National Guard shoot up a black coupleâs car from that same vacant lot.
My sister and I would accompany my grandmother with her slow rocking stride over to the warehouse where she would go with my grandfatherâs dinner packed in a picnic hamper with big folding handles. The food was hot, complete with a thermos of coffee and cornbread or biscuits. And while âOld Missâ and âEârettâ talked back and forth as he ate, my sister and I would range up and down the long rows of election machines in a virtual frenzy of ecstasy. We could run down down the rows, in and out. We could flash as hard and fast as we could. We could hide, we could catch each other. And the best treat of all, we could climb up on top of the machines and run from one end of the warehouse, which ran an entire city block, to the other, streaking on top of the padded machines, leaping from one machine to the other, without stopping, playing war games and hero games and simply using up some of our boundless energy.
As I said, my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School atthe yellow and brown folksâ Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee. The trustees, after those collections, would rise up and file into the back. It was a kind of dignified swagger. It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job. And I could go through there and see them counting that money, the respected elder gents of the church. And a preacher white as God himself!
But Tom Russ was a name to conjure with in those times. Important in the church, politically connected, but the failed business could not help but have lowered him in those folksâ eyes. Those yellow and browns he was ranked among. But he was the
head
of that house, in those early days. No doubt about it. And I think its stabilizing center.
One night there was terror in our house, there was pain on everyoneâs face, weeping and shouted unknown words â negative passion flaring. And then it was said my grandfather had been hurt, he had got struck down on a street corner â where Springfield meets South Orange just down from the Essex theater. They told me a streetlight dropped out of the fixture onto his head! They did. Thatâs what they said. I repeated it but somehow never (to this day) believed it. A streetlight? From way up at the top of the pole with perfect random accidental accuracy smashing him right in the center of the head? Yeh, thatâs what they said.
And it all but destroyed Tom Russ. From the tall striding dignified family patriarch who swept my lilâ plump grandma up when she was fifteen (his second bride) and left a trail of funeral parlors, general stores, and colored productive force, he finally came home paralyzed and silent. In fact I never heard him utter another sentence. He merely sat in a chair, smoking his cigars and spitting, spitting, into a tin can. There was some money in a pension, but I never understood why the city wasnât sued if thatâs what had happened, an accident. They even took him up to Overbrook for a minute, a hospital for the insane and mentally incompetent. But they brought him back in a little while. Perhaps my grandmother just wouldnât go for that. And she tended him the rest of his life.
My grandfather was big in black Republican politics and after his grocery store folded in the Depression he got a patronage job as night watchman in the election machine warehouse for Essex County, on Wilsey Street in Newark. It was within walking distance of our house, right down the street from the Newark Street Jail. There was a big vacant lot across from the jail and I played baseball when I got up into high school as part of the Newark Cubs, complete with uniforms. A hundred years later I was locked up in that same jail during the Newark Rebellions and saw the National Guard shoot up a black coupleâs car from that same vacant lot.
My sister and I would accompany my grandmother with her slow rocking stride over to the warehouse where she would go with my grandfatherâs dinner packed in a picnic hamper with big folding handles. The food was hot, complete with a thermos of coffee and cornbread or biscuits. And while âOld Missâ and âEârettâ talked back and forth as he ate, my sister and I would range up and down the long rows of election machines in a virtual frenzy of ecstasy. We could run down down the rows, in and out. We could flash as hard and fast as we could. We could hide, we could catch each other. And the best treat of all, we could climb up on top of the machines and run from one end of the warehouse, which ran an entire city block, to the other, streaking on top of the padded machines, leaping from one machine to the other, without stopping, playing war games and hero games and simply using up some of our boundless energy.
As I said, my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School atthe yellow and brown folksâ Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee. The trustees, after those collections, would rise up and file into the back. It was a kind of dignified swagger. It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job. And I could go through there and see them counting that money, the respected elder gents of the church. And a preacher white as God himself!
But Tom Russ was a name to conjure with in those times. Important in the church, politically connected, but the failed business could not help but have lowered him in those folksâ eyes. Those yellow and browns he was ranked among. But he was the
head
of that house, in those early days. No doubt about it. And I think its stabilizing center.
One night there was terror in our house, there was pain on everyoneâs face, weeping and shouted unknown words â negative passion flaring. And then it was said my grandfather had been hurt, he had got struck down on a street corner â where Springfield meets South Orange just down from the Essex theater. They told me a streetlight dropped out of the fixture onto his head! They did. Thatâs what they said. I repeated it but somehow never (to this day) believed it. A streetlight? From way up at the top of the pole with perfect random accidental accuracy smashing him right in the center of the head? Yeh, thatâs what they said.
And it all but destroyed Tom Russ. From the tall striding dignified family patriarch who swept my lilâ plump grandma up when she was fifteen (his second bride) and left a trail of funeral parlors, general stores, and colored productive force, he finally came home paralyzed and silent. In fact I never heard him utter another sentence. He merely sat in a chair, smoking his cigars and spitting, spitting, into a tin can. There was some money in a pension, but I never understood why the city wasnât sued if thatâs what had happened, an accident. They even took him up to Overbrook for a minute, a hospital for the insane and mentally incompetent. But they brought him back in a little while. Perhaps my grandmother just wouldnât go for that. And she tended him the rest of his life.
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