Tales of the Out & the Gone Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2007 Amiri Baraka

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-12-5

  eISBN: 9781617750076

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006923115

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  To my wife Amina

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Introduction

  WAR STORIES

  New & Old (1974)

  Neo-American (1975)

  Norman’s Date (1981–82)

  From War Stories (1982)

  Mondongo (1983)

  Blank (1985)

  TALES OF THE OUT & THE GONE

  Northern Iowa: Short Story & Poetry

  The New Recreation Program (1988)

  Mchawi (1990–91)

  The Rejected Buppie (1992)

  A Little Inf (1995)

  Dig This! Out? (1995)

  Heathen Technology at the End of the Twentieth Century (1995)

  Rhythm Travel (1995)

  Science & Liberalism (1996)

  What Is Undug Will Be (1996)

  Dream Comics (1997)

  A Letter (1998)

  Conrad Loomis & the Clothes Ray (1998)

  The Used Saver (1998)

  My Man Came by the Crib the Other Day (1999)

  A Monk Story (2000)

  Retrospection (2000)

  The Pig Detector (2000)

  Post- and Pre-Mortem Dialogue (2003)

  INTRODUCTION

  What should be obvious in these tales are the years, the time passing and eclipsed, the run of faces, events, unities and struggles, epochs, places, conditions, all gunning through and fueling them. Tales are stories—I like the old sound to it, tale. A story (where we have stored something) can be from anywhere and talk of anything. Like Williams said, sometimes memory explains itself as a newness, a future revelation.

  But tales, as my mother called my frequent absences from the literal, are not only straight out of my own orally recorded perpetrations, but have a literary stature from Pushkin, de Maupassant, Poe, Dumas, Kafka, Sembène, Bradbury, &c., a parade of awesome presences, themselves tails, of eras and assemblages of great thoughts and feelings. What is left of what has left. What my grandfather used to call “the last part of the chicken to go over the fence.”

  Does this have anything to do with Pin the Tail on the Donkey? It depends on who that ass be! We aims to be democratic, even in our registrations of where we been, is, and going. So there is dim ol’ rats and real public coons featured throughout.

  Mao sd that “works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are products of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society.” These tales confirm that. Ideological but also material, to whatever extent the time, place, and condition of our own lives are rendered by our understanding, our perception, rationale, and use of everything we are or that surrounds the inside and the outside of us.

  So many of these tales would be juiced-up journalism if I did not think they needed to be something else to be fully grasped. The earliest tales in this book fit that, with their takes on (& almost at the time of) the interior of a social movement.

  The slightly gnarled pinpoints of great human struggles raging everywhere across the planet! The trials and errors, attempts, failures, and successes of that period. Told, or halftold, or enhanced, by each succeeding level of knowledge that I was able to fully navigate. So there are sounds and colors and surfaces, as well as images and hard edges and impressionistic recallings. Some emerging philosophical constructs. There is also, at the optimal curtain calls, some real information, some actual use provided.

  In specific contexts, anything can be Out! Out of the ordinary. So that even the most advanced of us who struggled against racism and imperialism could be called, and sometimes were called, Out! Just as we might call some artist, like Thelonius Monk or Vincent Smith or John Coltrane, Out! Because they were just not where most other people were. So that is aesthetic and social, often both at the same time.

  There are “real” events and events taken from reality and enhanced with the spirit of the thing itself. That’s why in the “south” of the world, the bird sits on top of the wise man’s head—the soul, the spirit—whether Bantu or Cherokee. When we were told that Osiris, the Djali, raises the sun each day with song and verse, we learned that this is the function of art—to give us light, to let us fly, to let us imagine and dream, but also to create, in the real world.

  The stories become tales when they can give us a sense of a less fully experienced dimension to what is.

  The “War Stories” in this book’s first section are, for the most part, taken from a life lived and experienced, from one kind of war or another. It could be the USAF in Puerto Rico, it could be the later Greenwich Village skirmishes, the Black Liberation Movement, or the Anti-Revisionist Communist Movement (we used to call it). Or what became post- all that. Or it could even be a transmogrification of what happens when people cannot stand reality, perhaps because it is too accusing, and so try to duck out on it, but wherever they try to hide, it is right there waiting for them.

  What happens to us literally is never obvious altogether. The smashing of the Black Nationalist paradigm of the ’60s happened in a number of ways, obvious and un. There are parables here, just like they told us in church. War stories can be tales of what happened “back in the day!” But there are concrete results of real life that have or have not happened, or might have happened or might yet happen, or even metaphorical descriptions of different kinds of life conflicts that move us, whether we can speak of them or not.

  The “Out” is out, even if in plain sight. Though it would not have to be. The “Gone” could be seen or unseen or obscene. But even farther “Out,” crazier, wilder, deeper, a “heavier” metaphor, a deeper parable. We’d say that’s “way out.”

  (At Howard we were so hip we wd say, “That’s way,” meaning, “That’s way too much,” exceedingly hip, super wise. Like a cat we called “Smitty from the City” who when he entered the room addressed us all as “CATS, CATS, CATS,” and we sd among us that Smitty from the City was, indeed, way too much.)

  The act of imagining is the root of creation. I brought that with me as I grew. I cd imagine my ass off. Sometimes my parents wd try to whip it literally off for such imagining. I told my teacher once that I was late for school because I had to feed the snakes my parents kept in the basement. Little knowing the wench wd come and investigate.

  So to tell the whole story of this place, there has to be room to imagine what it means as well as what it seems to be, since all of that is what it is. And this is the shining antique surface that makes the tale. I was a lover of these tales, short stories. Richard Wright (Uncle Tom’s Children), Langston Hughes (The Ways of White Folks), Ousmane Sembène (Tribal Scars), Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry). All of Kafka’s Outness.

  Earlier, I was a teenage science fiction reader. An avid, like they say, reader. The first story I ever published, called “The Cat,” as a senior at Barringer High School in Newark, had merely the humming of metaphor made mystical. But from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and science fiction from writers like Heinlein, van Vogt, Asimov, Clarke, and the annual sci-fi anthology. Plus the mysterious stories that the radio
was hip enough then to offer; remember ESCAPE (with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as its theme song), which did the wilder stories by Cheever, H.G. Wells, and many more? All these sources molded my taste for the Out & the Gone. The merely humdrum quickly bored me, the tale had to have some weirdness.

  The stranger and more science fiction–like that the tales might seem, I hope they still carry a sense of what needs to be addressed and even repaired in the “real world.” Octavia Butler and Henry Dumas, though more my contemporaries, yet gone (really) already, carry this kind of social presence, like a hymn of clear morality, in their works. We see what they love and what they hate, what they think ugly and what they think beautiful, as if addressing themselves directly to Mao’s dicta in the Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art & Literature (1942).

  That is not simply my analogy, but a historic litmus analysis for any art.

  Sartre sd if you say something’s wrong in the world and you don’t know what it is, that’s art. On the other hand, if you say something’s wrong in the world and you do know what it is, that’s social protest. At least that’s what our enemies say. Fuck them!

  Amiri Baraka

  The Last Poet Laureate of New Jersey

  Newark, NJ, 5/11/06

  WAR STORIES

  NEW & OLD

  The debate was short and sour. Acrid. Unsunny. Though a vein of humor eased through it. It began after three years away from the organization. Conrad faced Pander with the proposition that he, Pander, was an opportunist. That he would come up and criticize operations to others, but say nothing to people’s faces.

  Pander huffed and puffed through his opened nostrils. A flush of red thru his brown face, fattened by studentdom come late in life.

  As revolutionaries, black nationalists, he and Conrad had been together as part of a larger being, World Insurrectionists. W.I. But a silent and tightly focused split sent Conrad, as one suborganization head, off with his folks in another direction. There had almost been a shoot-out on a southern campus between W.I. people and the breaking-away Liberation Afrikan Front. L.A.F. people.

  Pander had been where in that? Had he already left W.I., or what? During that period or a little earlier, Simba, the leader- teacher, apparently had Pander cracked across the skull and driven out with his running partner, Big Yellow Jerome, who’s now a City Hall dope dealer. Cleaner. Wabenzi (the tribe that drives in the Mercedes Benzes). The whole story on that. The head whipping. The flight. Accusations that Pander was “an agent who pushes pills” inside the organization. All that remains unclear. Or too clear.

  Except Simba got worse, from the strain of revolutionary struggle. Began to swallow too many stay-awake and stayasleep pills. Became a drowsy ordering vegetable. Amidst the cries for blood, the secret and public capitalist hit men also cried. Amidst internal and external machinations, opportunism— a more exotic withdrawal from the real world. Madness in the smoke of sweet incense. A machine gun set up on a tripod just inside the door of the house. Servants padded in stockinged feet. People pulled in and questioned. Through the fog, conspiracies hatched conspiracies—all fake. Except the real one, that worked.

  Conrad gave money to Simba’s brother to rescue him, take him to a hospital. The brother didn’t even bother to report. Except months later, he explained the obvious: He had failed.

  But all this, simply to set the proper pincer of memory and light. Truth moves the faces back and forth. Pander began talking in a rush. “Phrase mongering,” he said. Being criticized for behind-the-back criticizing to the R.C. The Right Commies, a group of young, mostly white students calling themselves “multinational workers.” About how it shudda been. With thousands of Puerto Ricans ready to rip, boiling outside on the pavement in front of City Hall. Safely indoors, the Nigger Mayor losing weight, oinking like a panicked porker with his little tail curling up under his coat, nailed in place by the way his neck sat, holding up his doofus face. Conrad, the Puerto Rican leaders, and another organization—the Leopards—ran back and forth between City Hall negotiations and the pavement. The crowd had converged from the Puerto Rican ghettoes of the city, El Barrio, to scream at this ugly life. One of their children had been trampled to death by a mounted policeman, trying to stop two Puerto Ricans from shooting crap in the middle of a folklore festival. Two more, both Puerto Rican, died. Shot in the back and the back of the head. The last one pistol-whipped in the face, for good measure.

  The negotiators, of course, read and shouted demands, impossible even under the crumbling illusion of bourgeois democracy. And now it was the nigger—a grim fatso who stuffed himself daily with five or six meals, combined into two for austerity. He rode in a Checker cab instead of a Cadillac to give the illusion that he wasn’t spending money. He changed mistresses so people who knew the old fat one would be confused because they wouldn’t know the new fat one. But they knew both and laughed casually or derisively, depending on whether or not they had a city job.

  Police review boards—Amnesty for all the prisoners—A people’s investigation team—Expose the causes of the police riot—Free medical care! These were the demands. And the Nigger Mayor acted like the Cracker Mayor, co-collaborators with the dying order. Skin freaks still didn’t understand this. “Give him a chance,” they said. Though now they couldn’t say it to the Puerto Ricans. Or maybe the fools could. Like big outtashape loudmouth Ms. Birdie, in charge of the anti-poverty specialeducation fund. “These Podaricans is takin’ everythin’,” she said. A working-class recruit to the petite bourgeoisie, with aspirations from early times. Conrad told how she sang opera. She was Cio-Cio-San in Madame Butterfly, with pink makeup on her dark skin, even on the lips, with white sequined gowns and hair tossed in high piles like frozen custard, Vaseline flavor. She was in training then to play this sorry role, big outtashape loudmouth hard bureaucrat of nigger-shuffle garbage can– eatin’ para(meta)dise. “These Podaricans is takin’ everythin’.” Yeh. Poverty, exploitation, oppression, white feet—now Bignigger feet. They got, truly, everything!

  “Whatta I supposed to do about these?” In the middle of Nigger Mayor scowling at being confronted with reality, a rock through his window made his eyes spin like Laurel & Hardy. When we got to the street, the rocks showered City Hall like Robin Hood’s arrows. The fat middle-class foolish nigger called to his hoodlums—mostly Italian, but with some young niggers fronting. One, the chief, with a huge ’fro and crimson-and-gold dashiki, had gone to Harvard—N.Y. clean, really. But then the lower-echelon state hit men came on horseback and in squad cars. On foot, the crowd had been walking. Now they rolled, and young dudes waiting for this shit whipped out crowbars and bashed store windows down Main Street, punctuating the sirens. Crisscross, the police cars wheeling, knocking people over. A new technique: high speed, then last minute, wheel around in a sharp turn, bashing the rebels into the sidewalk or up against the building. Conrad and the others, in the middle of the people, jumped to the sidewalk just in time. The cop car smashed one of the Leopards, sideswiped him twenty feet across the ground, but undead. The pigs scrambled out and leaped at his chest, wailing with sticks. Conrad said, “Walk, walk. Slow down. Don’t run, just check ’em out.”

  The beatings went on. The whole of Main Street filled up with new storm troopers. Whites scowling. Blacks peeping. But all almost on the line to kill for the twelve thousand, if they had to.

  A roll of poor people running against the shoetops of the mighty, whose blue louses came out from between the toes to beat and maim and murder. Demonstrations would go on, more protests. José Liga, head of the Revolutionary Puerto Rican Communist Organization, Conrad Barker of the L.A.F., Leopard leaders, and community and student groups, held a press conference announcing they would march in the streets—no matter that the nigger weasel downtown had banned it. “Fuck you, weasel!” was their simple rejoinder. And march they did, filling the streets, the downtown, and the park with denunciations of the neocolonial niggers and collaborating Puerto Ricans, the state’s pitiful hit men, and the s
tate itself—the instrument of the du Ponts, Mellons, Rockefellers, Fords, &c. It went well. And Pander and his student people were there too, marching with the rest. Standing in the crowd, trying to grin. This was after the meeting, the criticism, the slender memory. The knowledge that even fleeing, reality remains in reality. Were these their class origins? The petit bourgeois thrust at socialist rap. The years of narrow nationalism and polygamous opportunism? Suburban privilege? Or what?

  The day Pander arrived with his head split open, red pants, saying he was digging Sly and the F.S. The white boy with him rapped about left opportunism and narrow nationalism. He had thick glasses and Lucky strained to like him because he wanted to be a socialist and abandon his black chauvinism. His hatred of whites. So he described it to Conrad, what the sectarian shoot-out had been, in tones that showed he wanted to deal with these socialists. But Conrad, looking from the back of the truck where he stood waiting to speak, was wondering what Pander and the young white revolutionary Gruen had explained to their people. At the point of the police attack, they shouted to nobody and everybody, “Let’s get outta here, we ain’t gonna get killed!” and sped away in their three- and four-year-old cars.

  Who were these people? And what had their criticism outside City Hall consisted of? Would they help smash the capitalist system? How? Conrad swallowed and got ready to speak “people.”

  He began, “People, people. We gonna win anyway!”

  The crowd agreed and hollered.

  February 1974

  NEO-AMERICAN

  Goodson readied himself for his big day. Up a little early, shower, read the Measure (local paper), glance at the Times. Checked specifically the word on the goings-on. Namely, the President of the United States coming to town. And he had the biggest front on it, since he was mayor. The Mayor. (A quick look in the mirror confirmed that it was him thinking about him, and check, any photos handy? Luckily—or as usual—they was right there.)