Umbra: a personal recounting - a Lower East Side cultural group of the 1960's - Lower East Side Retrospective

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Calvin Hernton

Physically, as a cohesive, functioning group, Umbra existed for only couple of years. But in terms of its impact on my work and my life, the two years of Umbra's physical existence constituted a lifetime; its influence on my writing and its meaning for my life through the years are immeasurable and timeless.

I love everything about Umbra. I love the outlandish parties we gave to raise funds to publish the Umbra magazine and to keep ourselves going. But the three things I love and now cherish most are the writing workshop sessions, the poetry readings, and the friendships and camaraderie.

I first went to New York the summer after my second year at Talladega College in Alabama. From then on I returned during summers throughout my undergraduate and graduate years in school. After getting my master's degree from Fisk University in Nashville, I returned to New York and lived on St. Nicholas Avenue near West 119th Street in Harlem for about two years. Then I left New York, returned to the South, and spent four years as an instructor of social science in four different Negro colleges.

Unable to survive in those environments, I came back to New York, not quite knowing what I was going to do, except to find a job quickly. I had gotten married down south, and my wife Mildred returned with me. We left our baby son Antone with his maternal grandmother in South Carolina. I was unable this time to find a suitable place for us in Harlem, but a friend, Raymond Patterson, directed us to the landlord of his former apartment on East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues. This was how I came to be on the Lower East Side of New York around the begginning of the 1960s.

From 14th Street to Houston and from 3rd Avenue to Avenue D, the neighborhood was occupied with first, second, and even third generations of European immigrants, including Italians Poles, Hungarians, Germans, and Jews from the Soviet Union and the East European Diaspora. Recently however the neighborhood had witnessed an influx of young new-generation artists and artist types, beatniks and later on hippies, including a great many poets and writers--Allen Ginsberg Gregory Corso, Joel Oppenheimer, Jack Kerouac, Ed Sanders, and others--who quickly established themselves, creating their own spaces in certain bars and coffeehouses where they gathered to read their works, exchange ideas, and socialize. One such coffeehouse was Les Deux Megots. I found it quite accidentally around the comer from my house, which was on East 7th Street. I started hanging out there and participating in the poetry readings. It was the only such place where one of the owners was a black man. But very few blacks were there; often I was the only one. On one occasion, though, another black poet, David Henderson, appeared and read his poems.

I had been writing since I entered college, and one of my poems had been published in a professional journal during my junior year. Some of my professors, particularly my writing professor, had been instrumental in bringing me as a promising writer to the attention of Langston Hughes, at whose house on East 127th Street in Harlem I was not a stranger.

When Mildred and I moved to New York that fateful summer of 1961, neither of us realized the extent to which writing was a part of my blood. However, once on the Lower East Side, which became known as the "East Village," and having met David Henderson, my wife and I soon discovered just how hopelessly I was possessed by the desire to be a writer.

Recklessly and excitedly I gave myself to writing and the life it entailed. I hurt some people I loved. I hurt Mildred. I knew she suffered. But I pressed forward, relentlessly.

I do not recall it being so much a matter of determination. It was rather that I was caught up in something so powerful in me that it overwhelmed and challenged me, and I loved it and could not let go. It was living on the Lower East Side and getting involved with Umbra that brought this to a head.

Although Raymond Patterson no longer lived on the Lower East Side, it was he who gave my name to Tom Dent who, in turn, left a message for me at Les Deux Megots. Tom's idea was that the blacks on the Lower East Side were very few in number--particularly the writers and artists--and we should do something about the isolation and anonymity we felt. We could at least come together and get to know each other. Tom said he knew several more blacks in the neighborhood--he mentioned Calvin Hicks, a political ideologue--and I mentioned David Henderson, the teenaged poet from the Bronx who was virtually living on the Lower East Side, spending many nights with Mildred and L and soon with our son Antone and Mildred's oldest sister Pearl, both of whom had recently come from South Carolina to share our tiny Lower East Side apartment.

The first meeting was at Tom Dent's apartment. At the time Tom was Publicity Director for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. I do not recall how many people were cramped into the small rooms, although one (the "living room") was larger than the other (the "kitchenette"). I do recall, however, that at subsequent meetings dozens of us packed ourselves into those two rooms at 214 East 2nd Street. In the second issue of Umbra, our magazine, the membership of the Umbra Workshop numbered some thirty-odd people, including the founding members of the Society of Umbra, the first three being co-editors of the magazine as well--Tom Dent, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, Ishmael Reed, Rolland Snellings (Askia Muhammad Toure), Oliver Pitcher, Lorenzo Thomas, Maryanne and Lennox Raphael along with Alvin Simon, Nora Hicks (secretary), Norman Pritchard, Jr. (treasurer), Charles Patterson (circulation manager), William E. Day (production editor), and other members, such as Art Berger, Jane Logan, Mildred Hernton, Brenda Walcott, and the rest.