From the moment Amiri Baraka landed he was curious about himself, a Black baby boy in the burn and smell of the US seeking refuge and possibilities, like all Black people. As he grew, he witnessed their skin brush against the emptiness of promises and blood from the scars they all seemed to have. He heard their heartbeats and learned the meaning of rhythm and breath, which he would later recognize as what they called the blues. Throughout his life he pushed forward to find the sounds, beats, patterns, and sweet tones thrown into the street or on a stage or flying from a room or field with such ferocity that there would be a regular possession of Black bodies. He studied those sounds, beats, patterns, and tones and watched the dancers sweat, waiting for the music to never stop.
He smelled their cooking and the scents and sounds of the family who held him close but could not restrain him. Those early impressions of the planet, country, and community he danced into were to be studied and interpreted. As he grew, the intensity of his curiosity grew hotter, bigger, faster. He wanted knowledge, but what would he do with that? From the day he arrived to the day he left, he was consumed with an insatiable need to know who he was and who these others with the same skin were. Who he was, who he was to these people he claimed and who claimed him, who he was to those who were not these people, who he was to those who were not these people but seemed to be allies to the extent he understood them. He dug into yesterday and the day before that, mining for context—of the planet, country, and family who guided him from the moment his landing brought him forth. And that family had grown to uncountable numbers all over the globe. But not only did he have to know who he was and who we were, he had to discover what he came to do.
It was clear, from his early development on this wayward planet, that he was smart—more than smart. He was recognized as an intellectual even at a very young age, exhibiting an insatiable need for knowledge, a relentless curiosity, and the surprise that emerged when he began to open the gifts he brought with him. All of that was helpful for the work he was sent to do. He had to leave home. Howard University was his first stop for the type of intellectual that he was rapidly beginning to see in himself. Confirmation came soon, but he needed guidance.
He found community at Howard. It was the world, the Black world in the capital city of the country. Cool Black students, some from wealthy families, preachers’ kids, lower middle class kids (like him) and working-class students, many who held down jobs and some who had even been in the military. He climbed into that Black intellectual space, talking about ideas, culture, literature, and music—especially the music. There were handsome and hip Black boys and gorgeous hipper Black girls. There were friends who lived in silence until they were safe with the person they loved or wanted to have sex with. He wondered why he had landed in this particular place on this particular planet. He would be able to learn who he was from understanding who and where he came from. But he did not know who he was going to be. His peers were searching for the same answer.
Professor Sterling Brown was the first of several seers who had an idea who Baraka was becoming. Throughout his life such figures came uninvited, sometime unannounced, mentors to teach and prepare him. He would also seek them out, perhaps looking for refuge in a house like Sterling Brown’s where he could sit with his friend A.B. Spellman, listen to Black music and learn the history of Black people. He left Howard to join the Air Force and regretted submitting himself to the tight boundaries of military life. He needed to fly, but not here. He tried to conjure favor from the ancestors who could teach him how to fly. It turns out they had already given him the lessons, but he had not mastered the technique.
Back home to Newark. He was a poet. He knew it. People said it. He published poems. He met other poets. They talked about stuff. Stuff that others might talk about, but the poets were more philosophical. They also talked about stuff others did not. He sought the music and found it in small clubs and apartments, and in the record collections of poets and other thinkers. He was welcomed into village life with creatives, poets and painters, playwrights and philosophers, musicians, and mystics.
For a time, he felt at home but was still finding out who he thought he was. This home smelled like something he wanted to eat and so he took a bite so big he wound up choking. Didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver. Tried to smoke it but could write with or without it. It wasn’t essential. Wrote furiously about Black music, especially jazz, culture, love, sex, and esoteric musings. He observed the raging battles for Civil Rights and heard the call but was not that into it. He paid attention, though, got married, had children, published other poets, edited hip journals, eventually publishing his first book of poems, Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note in 1961. It was perhaps a warning. What would volumes 1–20 look like in the darkening skies and thundering storms of the 1960s? What would this Black poet, intellectual, jazz-loving young man even say in the threatened first book? More importantly, could he accept the clarity coiling at his feet sending him to places and experiences and people who would not tell him what to write, but would ask what he stood for?
But then Cuba. A trip there in 1960 with a group of writers and activists awoke him to a world he had heard about but had not really visited or thought about. It was a place where ordinary people—peasants and workers—had taken control of their country from a US-supported despotic ruler and his sycophants. Baraka was there with cool people who seemed to have some purpose beyond being known as cool creative people. He met and maintained a relationship with radical Civil Rights leader Robert F. Williams, who had become a global political figure for organizing the Black community in Monroe, North Carolina, and fighting the terrorist Ku Klux Klan with guns and other weapons. It was in Cuba where he was confronted with the question he thought he had already answered: Who are you? The answer he gave was simple and ill-conceived, in contrast to his well-known ability with clever quips. I am just a poet. It is not hard to imagine that some of the cool, creative people on the trip saw him in that moment as a petulant poet-child. Some were angered, bristling with violence. Others challenged him with the questions he’d been wrestling with his entire time on the planet. Who am I, and what am I here to do? He’d thought himself satisfied but realized now he’d become complacent.
For the answer he needed to travel in time. To the past but now to look at possible futures. He gathered stacks of books with information on the history and the historical lies about Black people, the descendants of Africa and the people they became in and beyond captivity, on this world and on others. His first excavation of knowledge—hidden behind massive archives of white supremacist fantasies—gave him a glimpse of who he should and would become. As he studied, researched, read, and wrote, it became clear. He was here to create a portal to the future, traveling through rhythm. He had to write a book for himself, his family, his people, and those who want to learn from the knowledge that had been hidden, buried, unwritten yet still poisoned generations. The story had yet to be put together in one cogent narrative.
Focused and committed, empowered by the energy of youth, he found the beat. His research and thinking unlocked hidden secrets. Black people in the US and the western hemisphere, as descendants of Africa, created a unique identity that with various seasonings remained in the twenty-first century. He learned that the roux of that identity is what came with the Africans, especially the creative spirituality and culture. The music, language, storytelling, food, dance, and community remained despite being violently repressed. He learned and understood they were aliens too, a Blues People, having created a form of music that did not exist in the world before. This blues was a form of storytelling with voice, and instruments (often handmade), and rhythms that came across the Atlantic Ocean. It was created by Black people in the fields and oppression of the US South, with the complicity of their allegedly more enlightened relatives in the North.
Blues People—where the sages passed us along with songs that told the stories with words and sounds and movement. Rhythm Travel, he called it in one brilliant work of sonic science fictional history. The blues was the foundation of the Black music that would emerge from the South, during the most terrible times, from enslavement to Jim Crow. It would be the grounding for the new forms that Black people created, often without attribution, very often being robbed by white folks who saw and still see and steal the economic potential of Black music. This complete story had never been written, the story of Blues People, what was taken from them and what they gave. It had never been connected so clearly to their emergent, unique identity. There had never been a book like this—published in 1963 and never out of print for over 60 years. It is still the cornerstone book on the development of African descendants into an African American people, which is why we celebrate its relentlessly strong resonances from the past and into the future. From the poetry of jessica Care moore and the personal reckonings of Guthrie Ramsey and Tony Bolden to the scholarly reflections of Ingrid Monson, Keith Gilyard, Clarissa Myrick-Harris, Dara Walker, and Naomi Extra, Blues People is honored, remembered, credited, and lovingly critiqued. We are even gifted here with a remarkable, previously unpublished 2010 interview between Baraka and innovative wordsmith Tony Medina.
Blues People arrived in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington where Dr. King made clear reparations were needed and justified before he got to the dream part of his speech. It was the same year that Malcolm X gave one of his most influential speeches, “Message to the Grassroots.” It was the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Malcolm’s eventual break with the Nation of Islam was in its first stages. It was the year Amiri Baraka knew he needed a new life. A life surrounded by Blues People. A life gathering strength and clarity about the tasks ahead.
As the civil rights movement continued to confront, expose, and challenge racism and segregation in the American South, a shift was occurring in the North. In urban areas, Black people may have loved Dr. King and revered the young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC) and other organizations, but they began to listen to and lean toward nationalist thinking. In the two years between leaving the Nation of Islam and being assassinated, Malcolm was the most influential proponent of Black nationalism and a principal force in the emergent cry for Black Power, locally, nationally, and internationally. One of Baraka’s mentors introduced him to Malcolm not too long before he was murdered.
Amiri Baraka, though not yet known by that name, had reached a new consciousness that required him to change. This change would exacerbate the pain he already felt by blending with the pain he would cause for his family and friends in the life he had to change from. He left that old life and went to live with the Blues People. He joined other writers and poets, playwrights and actors, dancers and musicians, historians and teachers, artists and filmmakers, painters and sculptors and he made declarations. He had arrived where he was supposed to be. He became who he was supposed to be, and he did what he was supposed to do. The year after the publication of Blues People (1963), LeRoi Jones left Greenwich Village and moved to Harlem. With other Blues People he brought life to the Black Arts Movement, rising all over the US and influencing the world.
Baraka stayed on this planet for a good while. He returned to Newark, married, and built a family with his partner, the artist and activist Amina Baraka. He became a major leader, theorist, and organizer in Black Power and other movements. He found a key to unlock stolen secrets and never rested. He kept digging, seeking knowledge, speaking, and writing. As all our contributors argue in this very special issue, Blues People was his ultimate testament. It took Baraka inside himself, inside his people and their collective consciousness in a way no one—including himself—had ever experienced. The past, the present, the future, to all the possibilities of time, history, race, and memory, that book was and remains a portal.
The author thanks Louis Chude-Sokei for his editorial and collaborative work on this piece.
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Notes on contributors
Michael Simanga
Michael Simanga came of age in the Black Power and Black Arts movement. He is an activist, writer, artist, and teaches Africana studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta.