|
Books by Amiri
Baraka
Tales of the Out &
the Gone
/
The Essence of Reparations /
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
/
Blues People
Autobiography
of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka /
Selected Poetry of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
/
Black Music
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LeRoi
Jones: Black Man as Victim
By Donald
P. Costello
LeRoi Jones, in a 1962 address to the
American Society for African Culture, insisted that the job of
the Negro writer was to portray “the emotional history of the
black man in this country: as its victim and its chronicler.”
Jones the dramatist has taken his own advice.
The black man is the victim in Jones’ plays, and Jones
himself, with an increasingly strident voice, is the black
man’s chronicler, and, perhaps, America’s chronicler.
The plays have been few.
In 1961, 16 performances of Jones’ Dante were
presented at the Off-Bowery Theatre.
This was a short dramatization, a modern parallel of the
False Comforters theme, from The Systems of Dante’s Hell,
Jones’ book of fiction. But
1964 was the big year for LeRoi Jones drama, with productions in
New York of The Baptism, The Toilet, Dutchman, and The
Slave.
The Baptism, presented at Writers’
Stage Theatre off-Broadway in 1964, is not a racial play.
It tries hard to be a comedy-of-cruelty, but it tries
harder to be blasphemous. Most
of the action takes place on the altar of a Baptist church, with
characters including a homosexual in red leotards who does
ballet steps, who sprinkles the assembly with confetti, and
jokingly asserts that he is “the Son of Man.”
A 15-year-old girlishly handsome boy comes to be
baptized, to be forgiven for 1,095 masturbations, one of which
is described in detail, and for which Jones delights in finding
synonyms.
The minister claims at the altar that his
usherettes are “bride of the Lord’s son, our own Jesus
Christ”; and they claim that the masturbating boy is actually
the Lord’s son because “it was he who popped us.”
After the boy admits that he is
the Son of God, he kills the usherettes, for “they had no
charity.” A
motorcycle messenger from “The Man” comes to recall this Son
of God who, although he was sent to save the earth, has been an
absolute failure. God is tired of the world’s mess, we are told, and plans to
grenade the whole works.
But
the boy-Christ won’t leave, for his job is unfinished; so the
messenger hits him with a tire iron and carries him off, home to
God, on the back of the motorcycle.
In a few hours before the grenade will destroy the world,
the homosexual decides to cruise the bars, wondering what
happened “to that cute little religious fanatic.”
Jones strains to be shocking; and the play ends up
incoherent and adolescent, with scatter-shot fury.
In his racial plays, his fury finds his target.
The Toilet is an ugly but affecting
racial play. It was
presented at St. Mark’s Playhouse in a double bill with The
Slave. Jones
tells us, in an “Introduction by the Playwright,” that “The
Toilet is about the lives of black people.
White people tell me it is not.
They have no way of knowing, but they insist they do.”
In The Toilet, the victim—Jones
again uses that word in his “Introduction”—is a black boy
named Ray Foots who cannot express his love for a white boy
named Karolis because of what Jones calls the “brutality” of
the “social order.” And
one of the major achievements of the play is the stunning force
with which that social order is shown to be brutal. The
specific social order created by the play is that of high school
boys, most of them black. And
the setting is a stinking “latrine of some institution.”
Throughout the play, comment is made on the social order
for boys who turn their backs to the audience to urinate into
one of the urinals which make up the visual line of the set, and
by a boy who goes behind a toilet partition and is found
“pulling his watchamacallit,” and by verbal obscenities,
some trite and some imaginative.
When Karolis is dragged into the latrine by a
group of black boys, he has been beat up, is “crying softly,
with blood on his shirt and face.” Karolis has been dragged to the toilet to fight Foots, the
leader of the Negro gang, because of a homosexual love letter
which Karolis has sent Foots, a letter in which Karolis said
that Ray Foots was beautiful.
Foots feels pity—and a kind of returned love—for
Karolis, but because of social pressure from the gang, and
because of Karolis’ own insistence, Foots does fight the
already-beaten Karolis.
Eventually Karolis is jumped by all the gang
and is left bleeding on the toilet floor, draped with wet toilet
paper. Karolis, the
white boy, is more obviously—but to Jones less profoundly—a
victim than is Foots, the black boy.
It is the white boy who is beaten.
But the meaning of the play comes from Karolis’
revelation that the black boy he really loves is a hidden
beautiful boy named Ray, not the Foots of this stinking toilet
who is visible to his gang members.
“Did I call you Ray in that letter—or Foots? . . .
That’s who I want to kill.
Foots . . . His name is Ray, not Foots.
You stupid bastards.
I love somebody you don’t even know.”
After Karolis is left bleeding on the toilet
floor, Foots sneaks back in, kneels by Karolis’ form and,
weeping, cradles his head in his arms as he wipes the blood from
Karolis’ face. For
all of its ugliness, The Toilet is, as Jones has written,
“a play about love.” It
is a play about a love between a white boy and a black boy, a
love which, because of the social order in which the black
people live, cannot be expressed on any level. Brutality results, says Jones, in any social order, “if it
is not an order which can admit of any man’s beauty.”
The beauty of Foots remains hidden.
Both the black and the white are therefore victims; and
the chronicler, Jones, in this play talks—for the last
time—about love.
The victim in Dutchman is Clay, and
this is a play about hatred.
Dutchman was produced off-Broadway at the Cherry
Lane Theatre, and it won the Village Voice’s Obie Award
for the Best American Play of the 1963-64 season.
Subsequently it was presented at the Festival of Two
Worlds, at Spoleto. It is the most widely known of Jones’ works, primarily
through the 1967 movie version, directed by Anthony Harvey.
In Dutchman, Jones again, as he had in The Toilet,
speaks through controlled dramatic art.
He controls his form.
He embodies his hatred in two characters; he is still a
dramatist. In an
interview, Jones said, “Dutchman is about the
difficulty of becoming a man in America.”
The boy who is “desperately trying to become a man”
is Clay, twenty-year-old Negro.
Lula, beautiful young white woman on the make, sits next
to Clay on the subway. In
brilliant dialogue (by far the best art Jones has shown in any
of his plays) Clay’s
lack of place is revealed to the audience.
He doesn’t belong, for he doesn’t acknowledge his
blackness.
Lula has him pegged:
“You’re a well-known type,” and “I know you like
the palm of my hand.” He’s
a suburbanite, living in New Jersey with his parents; in college
he thought of himself as Baudelaire.
Never did he think of himself as a black nigger.
He’s a poser, not a man; he doesn’t acknowledge what
he is. Lula
takes hold of his jacket and shouts: “Boy, those
narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel
oppressed by. A
three-button suit and striped tie?
Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to
Harvard.”
Scene I ends with Lula’s insistence that
she knows the truth about Clay.
Ivy League clothes won’t hide his blackness.
And his submission is only a pretense.
He cannot be free from his history, the heritage of
slavery; and she cannot be free from her history, the heritage
of oppression. And
simmering under the pretense of Clay’s submission to the white
order is the necessity of the slave to murder his oppressor:
“You’re a murderer, Clay, and you know it.”
By the end of Scene I the mood of the play is
taut. The victim will not stay victimized peacefully.
And by this time the observer hears obviously the voice
of the chronicler, the tortured autobiographical gropings of
LeRoi Jones himself faced with “the difficulty of becoming a
man in America.”
In a preface to a 1966 collection of essays,
ironically called Home, Jones tells us something about
that constant struggle of his own which, in Dutchman, is
mirrored in the character of Clay: “One truth anyone reading
these pieces ought to get is the sense of movement—the
struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to
move with that understanding.”
All these movements, Jones writes, “seem to me to have
been always toward the thing that I had coming into the world,
with no sweat: my blackness.” And, he concludes, “by the time this book appears, I will
be even blacker.”
In Scene II, Clay becomes blacker.
Lula goads him to it.
She mocks him, wildly, dancing in the aisle: “You
middle-class bastard.” “You liver-lipped white man.”
“You ain’t no nigger, you’re just a dirty white
man.” She
commands Clay to do what Jones himself, in his dramatic career,
has been doing: “Get
up and scream at these people.
Like scream meaningless shit in these hopeless faces.”
Clay finally answers back.
He slaps her across the mouth as hard as he can, and
announces: “Now shut
up and let me talk.” And
then Clay launches into a long and obscene rage against Lula and
against all whites who profess to understand the Negro.
Lula cannot understand: “You great liberated whore!
You fuck some black man, and right away you’re an
expert on black people.”
And neither can any whitey understand or help
a black man come to an image of himself.
So, Clay insists, through his teeth: “Let me be who I
feel like being. Uncle
Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It’s
none of your business.” It’s
as simple as that. Whitey
can tell the black man nothing because whitey can understand
nothing. As early
as 1961, Jones had written: “Liberals think that they are
peculiarly qualified to tell American Negroes and the other
oppressed peoples of the world how to wage their struggles.”
In Dutchman, the Jones reply to whitey is
“It’s none of your business.”
Clay knows that it is insane to conceal his
blackness, but Jones gives him two alternatives.
He can continue the insanity of living half-hidden in
whitey’s world; or he can relieve his insanity by asserting
his blackness through murder: “Murder.
Just murder! Would make us all sane.”
He warns Lula not to teach the black man the way of the
white man, not to talk too much about the advantages of Western
rationalism or the great intellectual legacy of the white man,
because if the black man does learn the lesson of the white man,
he will adopt his weapon: “All of those ex-coons will be
stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives,
sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you.”
Clay chooses to avoid the easy, luxurious way
of murder (“It takes no great effort.
To kill you soft idiots.”)
He chooses, instead, to stay in his insanity, to deny his
blackness, to deny the murder that would liberate him: “Ahh,
shit, who needs it? I’d
rather be a fool. Insane.
Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard
thoughts.”
But in the Jones world murder is inevitable
once white and black confront each other.
So, although Clay decides to remain insane by not
murdering, Lula turns him into the complete victim by plunging a
knife into his chest. In
a ritual act, with the collaboration of the rest of the
congregation in the subway, whitey kills the black man as indeed
whitey has been doing all along.
The black man who refuses to murder is himself murdered.
If Clay is the black man, if Clay is Jones
(Jones has written often that everything he writes is
necessarily written specifically as a black man), who is
Lula? She is of
course America, especially white liberal America who interferes
with the black man, who professes friendship as it murders.
Jones insists that Clay and Lula are not symbols; but
then he goes on to talk of them as if they are.
Lula, he insists, “does not represent anything—she is
one. And perhaps that thing is America, or at least its spirit.”
When the critics complained that Lula is too crazy,
extreme, neurotic, Jones replied, “You remember America,
don’t you, where they have unsolved murders happening before
your eyes on television. How
crazy, extreme, neurotic, does that sound?
Lula, for all her alleged insanity, just barely reflects
the insanity of this hideous place.”
Harold Clurman has pointed out that if Dutchman
is angry, The Slave is rabid.
Anger, he says, has a definite form; rage only smolders
and explodes. The
form of The Slave is supposedly a fable in which a debate
takes place. But
rather it is a tirade delivered by Walker, a Negro who is
leading a violent murderous black rebellion which is in the
midst of blowing up “this city . . . this country . . . or
world.” Walker
talks at Easley, the white liberal intellectual who is now
married to Walker’s white ex-wife.
But it is not a debate.
It is merely pages of invective in which Walker speaks
Jones’ doctrine of race violence. “This hideous place” is no longer encompassed into a
dramatic space small enough for Jones to control.
Here he does not reflect America through a few boys in a
toilet or through a white-black couple on a subway; he tries to
reflect America in huge, amorphous, prophetic rhetoric.
He ignores his own artistic principle that art must
reflect man within a “defined world.”
The chronicler takes up the role of self-conscious
Prophet and shouts hatred.
The Slave holds dramatic interest only
in the fact that Jones, as in his other plays, makes the black
man a victim, this time—and Jones fully know this—a victim
of his own philosophy. Walker
delivers a prologue during which he is dressed as an old field
slave; and at the end of the play, as the city explodes, he is
again a slave—enslaved by mutual hatred, hatred received and
returned. All has
been made rotten, we are told again, as we were in Dutchman,
by the hatred in the heritage of slavery.
The Negro writer is, Jones has written, “a chronicler
of the Negro’s movement from African slave to American
slave.” The central doctrine of the prologue is “We are liars, and
we are murderers.”
The slave, who is Walker, who is the black man, who is Jones, is
destroyed as well as destroying.
The wife knows that the black man has been robbed (like
Clay in Dutchman) of his image of himself: “I don’t
even think you know who you are any more.
No, I don’t think you ever knew. . . .
It must be a sick task keeping so many lying separate
uglinesses together . . . and pretending they’re something
you’ve made and understand.”
However certain this black man is of his
hatred, he is also certain what it has cost him.
Hatred has cost the black man everything else that has
desired from life, and it has cost him all his art.
The black man has chosen to promote “a bloody situation
where white and black people are killing each other . . .
despite the fact that I would rather argue politics, or
literature, or boxing, or anything, with you, dear Easley, with
you.” And the
black artist has chosen bloody rebellion knowing “I have
killed for all times any creative impulses I will ever have by
the depravity of my murderous philosophies.”
The leader of the black rebellion knows that
another tyranny will result after the rebellion; he is not the
Marxist visionary preparing for the happy day after the
revolution. The
harvest of slavery, with so much hatred, must be bitter; the
revolution is only a case of “you had your chance, darling,
now these other folks have theirs.”
He knows it’s ugly; but in “this hideous place”
there is no alternative to murder and violence.
Jones no longer admits Clay’s alternative, no longer
sees a possible alternative in choosing to remain insane by
denying violence. The
black man instead seeks the sanity that comes from murder.
“God, what an ugly idea,” says the white liberal;
head in hands, the black man replies, “I know.
I know.”
Throughout the text of The Slave,
Jones has the characters talk about “ritual drama.”
But the play never ascends to the level of ritual drama,
to any cleansing emotion. It rants. It
establishes no bond between author and audience.
It speaks with only one human dimension, racial hatred;
its people are partial. The
play doesn’t even have verisimilitude: Why do the white man
and his wife leave their children in the midst of a bombardment?
Why does Walker sit around and talk while he should be
leading his troops? Why
does Walker tell his wife that their children are dead although
we hear them scream at the end of the play?
Real ritual drama affects one as a transcendent filling
up, it exists throughout or even outside of time; this play
freezes.
I don’t think that The Slave, or the
bigger question of LeRoi Jones the dramatist, can be understood
without examination of Jones’ dramatic credo, called “The
Revolutionary Theatre,” published in Liberator, the
journal of the Afro-American Research Institute.
In 1965, the year after his four off-Broadway
productions, Jones reasserts that “Clay in Dutchman,
Ray in The Toilet, Walker in The Slave are all
victims.”
And because the black man is victimized by
society, the role of black theater is clear: “The
Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can
be accused and attacked. It
must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims.”
And that is the difference between The Slave on
the one hand and Dutchman and The Toilet on the
other. In The
Slave, Jones is writing “Revolutionary
Theatre.” Tension is gone because he has made up his mind to Attack and
Accuse. Dutchman
and The Toilet are controlled by containing form; Jones
is still probing, and the result is the tension that allows art.
But in the Attacking and Accusing of The Slave,
tension is relaxed, form is gone; and propaganda, the
Revolutionary Theatre, takes over.
Jones’ Liberator essay is itself
incoherent, frantic, filled with sentences in upper case, with
quintuple question marks and double exclamation points.
Much of it is inexplicable: “ The
Revolutionary Theatre must function like an incendiary
pencil planted in Curtis Lemay’s cap.
So that when the final curtain goes down brains are
splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must
wire SOS’s to Belgians with gold teeth.”
But its central doctrine of hatred is clear
enough: “White men will cower before this theatre because it
hates them. . . . The
Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for hating. . . .
The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their
deaths.”
And clear, too, is its call for destruction:
“It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter
of those dim-witted fatbellied white guys who somehow believe
that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on. . . .
It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the
poor. . . . Americans
will hate the Revolutionary
Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever
they believe is real. . . . The play that will split the heavens for us will be called
THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA.”
If we are to believe our courts, Jones’
life has followed both his art and his theatrical credo.
For all of the certitude in The Slave that armed
rebellion would ruin the artist, the hero-victim of that play
took to the streets with guns.
And the courts tell us, so did Jones take to the streets
with guns in Newark during last summer’s black rebellion.
In The Slave, the black man has made up his mind
to pay the price; in the streets of Newark, Jones apparently
made up his mind to pay a similar price.
The Slave is fearful in its foretelling: in it
Jones announces—before Watts and Newark—what will happen and
what he will do.
Before the riots, Newsweek concluded
that LeRoi Jones “writes and harangues himself out of the
company of civilized men.”
And the magazine went on to say, he therefore “forfeit
all claim to serious attention.” It is, rather, because Jones has decided to leave the company
of civilized men that he demands our attention, if not for our
interest in art, then for our interest in humanity.
How can the white liberal critic—interested
in art and humanity—react to the drama of LeRoi Jones?
Jones certainly does not expect acceptance:
“My ideas revolve around the rotting and destruction of
America, so I can’t really expect anyone who is part of that
to accept my ideas.”
Jones intimidates.
He predicts that the white liberal critic will attack him
on aesthetic grounds. And
he’s right. That’s
just what any critic who refuses to abdicate his critical
judgment must do in the face of Revolutionary
Theatre like The Slave.
Jones further intimidates the white liberal
critic by insisting—as do black revolutionists both literary
and non-literary—that whitey can never understand the black
man. Again I
suppose that Jones is right.
When Jones says, “You cannot understand me,” I will
not deny it. I am
afraid to be patronizing by saying, “I understand.” I
don’t expect to come to understand the foul indignities heaped
for centuries on the black man, not to understand their
result—for my skin is white.
So how do we react, all boxed in, cowering
like a Calvinist sinner before a God who has already decided he
is damned? Can the
critic do nothing but stand here and plead, “What do you want
of me? You, LeRoi
Jones, carry your heritage of slavery; I carry my heritage of
guilt. Do you just
stand here and stare at each other until the murder starts?”
The suffering involved in standing mute while Jones proposes
mutual murder seems to be peculiarly the kind of suffering which
many white liberals enjoy.
When Jones singles out the white liberal as the black
man’s particular enemy, little response is heard from the
self-flagellating liberal who thinks such suffering is good for
us. We white
liberals might indeed need the expiation which Jones
offers for our guilt. But if we accept the inevitability of his prophecies, we will
be as destructive as Jones.
I think that the white liberal who refuses to
give up his rationality must see that Jones’ art and
philosophy are suicidal as well as murderous.
His philosophy is ultimately a betrayal of all of
humanity, and particularly of the black man. In fury and despair, Jones says that the black man must
accept the white man’s way of suppression and murder.
This is a betrayal not only because it proceeds on the
incredible assumption of The Slave that the black man
could win an armed rebellion.
(The white ghetto will not stand still, enjoying its
punishment, as do we white liberals.)
But the Jones philosophy is also a betrayal
because it denies the black man the moral superiority over the
white man, the moral superiority of non-violence.
The conclusion of The Slave is that the answer for
the black man is to find himself, and at the same time destroy
himself, through killing the white man.
But there is no finding there.
There is only loss, and a madness.
The victim would remain a victim.
So, in spite of the fact that Jones has the
power to intimidate into paralysis, the only sane response is to
break out, to challenge the rules as Jones has laid them down.
I will attack his art on aesthetic grounds, for when form
is shattered in art, no shared experience results.
And although admitting that full understanding between
white and black may be impossible, movement toward understanding
must be continued, for we all know that it has been started.
We can all still remember the “We Shall
Overcome” days.
I don’t think that Jones, deep down,
believes himself when he insists that no understanding is
possible. For he
writes. He lets
white men produce his plays for white audiences.
If he truly felt that we could never come to know each
other, he might as well talk to a tape recorder.
He wears African robes; he insists on calling himself an
Afro-American: but he has come to us in his writing. We must assume that he has something to say to us.
We hear obviously enough the hatred for which
he has willingly sacrificed his art.
Our human reaction is that his vision is so hate-ridden
that it is insane, and that we must reject it, must not stand
mute before it and watch racial hatred become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. But after
I reject him, I still am left with fear.
That cannot be escaped or rejected.
And maybe fear finally is the one shared experience that
Jones communicates. Perhaps,
at this point, poised for the horror which is promised for the
summer, the shared experience of fear is what he has to say to
us. Perhaps it
can shake us into the doing—which could bring effective change
within the political order.
Is there time for such change?
Jones says the political change is only the liberal game,
“palliatives and symbols to remind him of his own good
faith.” So the
fear remains. Is
there time? And the
prospect of mutual madness.
Donald
P. Costello, a previous contributor to these pages, was
Associate Professor in the Department of English at the
University of Notre Dame.
Source: Commonweal
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28 June 1968 *
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updated 3 October 2007 |
