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Baraka's bohemian blues
African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by John Gennari
From The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones and Hettie Jones's memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, we glean contrasting but mutually illuminating portraits of the Village years, years in which the Jones household served as a key venue of downtown bohemia: a work space for their magazine Yugen: a new consciousness in arts and letters, a play space for such vivid illustrations of the new consciousness as a nude, lotus-positioned, mantra-chanting Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, in a 1988 interview, recalled the heady, multi-arts, intergenerational spirit of that time and place:
I met Langston Hughes at LeRoi Jones's party one night when Ornette Coleman was playing music and everyone was dancing. That's the only time I met Langston Hughes. In '59 or '60. A great touching moment in history. When Black Mountain, Beatniks, the Abstract Expressionists, the freedom jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, all met in one room.
The Village's cheap rents, coffeehouses, bars, and galleries offered a tentative but shaky refuge against dominant American racism and philistinism. "Living in Greenwich Village ..., perhaps the most highly 'integrated community' in the United States," Baraka later recalled, "I felt free to move and think as I wanted to, but I was nevertheless constantly running into the northern liberal bohemian varieties of racism and national oppression and tried to deal with it as I could" (Home 6).
The East Village proved more progressive and emerged as a center of the black avant-garde. A kind of downtown Harlem Renaissance arose on the Lower East Side, with the Umbra writer's collective, Freedomways magazine, La MaMa Experimental Theater, and the Negro Ensemble Company foreshadowing the full flowering of the Black Arts Movement uptown in Harlem later in the decade. (1) Black writers and artists on the Lower East Side in these years included David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, A. B. Spellman, Tom Dent, Calvin Hernton, Lorenzo Thomas, Brenda Walcott, Sarah Wright, Emilio Cruz, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Bob Thompson, ant such "new thing" jazz musicians as Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Sonny Murray. The sound of the new jazz was, literally, in the air of the Jones's Cooper Square neighborhood, as Hettie Jones lyrically observes:
... the trumpeter Don Cherry would announce his arrival by playing a wooden flute, so clear it broke through the traffic noise. The acoustics of Cooper Square augmented every music: if it was warm weather when Archie[ Shepp]'s groups played, they'd open his studio windows and let the sound ricochet off the factories and repeat a millisecond later on the tenement wall on Fifth Street. The Five Spot was only a stone's throw away. Roi was always hanging out the window. The casual proximity to his life of his chosen frame of reference, the source of so many images, made him deeply happy. (172)
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