Fugitive fictions.

"You're too erudite." ... What that mean? (Amiri Baraka, Fiction 287)

Ask Baraka. (Bob Perelman, Marginalization 150)

There is no reason any intelligent man should have it easy in America--especially not any intelligent black man. (Amiri Baraka, Home 165)

In the aftermath of the artistic and popular success of his play Dutchman, Amiri Baraka felt the full force of white America's still regnant "one-at-a-time" reputation-manufacturing apparatus trained upon him. The "Great White Way," as he puts it, began to flow, albeit briefly, in his direction; some other black artists resented his new opportunity to play the part of "that noble savage in the buttermilk"; and, as he was to recall decades later in his Autobiography, "it was as if the door to the American dream had just swung open, and despite accounts that I was wild and crazy, I could look directly inside and--there--money bags stacked up high as the eye could fly!" (Autobiography 276). While most readers are aware today of the fact that Baraka's response had been to close that door tightly, not entirely politely, few are fully aware of the particular inducements that Baraka refused in the wake of all that buttermilk and whiteness. The gathering of metaphors in Baraka's reminiscences of those days is an indication of just how far the American language has had to reach for adequate representations of a racialized predicament that no white writer has ever really felt, but Baraka's unpublished papers indicate just how much he denied himself materially as a result of his decision to guard the integrity of his artistic explorations. What was at stake was no less than Baraka's commitment to an aesthetics of innovation. Writing in Cricket in 1969, Baraka argued that "what is necessary is constant effort at achieving a total. At achieving something new" ("Notes" 46). What he was offered by America's commercial publishing establishment following the success of Dutchman (a work in which he had indeed achieved something new), and his subsequent media notoriety, was an opportunity to abandon that achievement, to achieve something not so new, in return for more money than he had ever before seen.

Just how much it was worth to corporate publishing to divert Baraka into their stable is apparent from correspondence with his agent. It was worth $75,000 to at least one editor, a significant sum even in seventies-era currency. Among Baraka's unpublished papers that he has deposited at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn collection are letters from William Targ, then Editor-in-Chief at Putnam's, to Ronald Hobbs, Baraka's literary agent at the time. The subject of the correspondence is a fiction manuscript in progress that Targ hoped to publish. At one point Targ suggests a possible advance against royalties in the area of $75,000, a clear indication that Targ expected to sell a substantial number of copies of a second novel by Baraka. On April 9, 1974, Targ wrote to Hobbs to ask how Baraka's work on the book was progressing. By September of that year the staff at Putnam's had read a draft of the novel; they did not like what they read. After reviewing Targ's earlier description of what he expected from this second novel, one has to wonder seriously if anyone at Putnam's had read The System of Dante's Hell, Baraka's first novel, published by Grove Press.

What Putnam's hoped to get from the author of Dutchman, Black Magic, and Raise Race Rays Raze was a sort of black version of The Godfather, a book that Targ had a hand in publishing. Mario Puzo's wildly successful commercial novel comes up more than once in Targ's letters to Baraka's agent; perhaps visions of movie tie-ins danced in Targ's head in those post-Shaft years. Targ reminds Hobbs in one letter of a manuscript conference that must have been a study in mutual misapprehension. On April 3 he writes to Hobbs:

   You'll recall that I referred to The
   Godfather in our talks, and that we all
   agreed that the assigned novel should
   try for the same kind of strong plotting,
   and that we were in fact, striving
   for a popular novel that would be a
   successor to The Godfather. Such a book
   must be structured in the traditional or
   classic form, and written in what is
   currently referred to as romantic realism,
   although social realism might be a
   more appropriate characterization....
   At all costs scenario-notebook, surreal
   and symbolic techniques should be
   avoided. (Howard Papers, Box 3)

It is difficult to imagine what sort of "romantic realism" an editor might have expected to get from Baraka's pen, and Targ's confusion of romantic and social realism must have been confusing to any author. In the end, at the cost of at least $75,000, Baraka submitted a novel that was often non-linear in form, sometimes included imagery as surreal as that on the pages of The System of Dante's Hell, was constructed around a series of autobiographical scenarios, and was highly symbolic. That manuscript, titled Six Persons, never was published by Putnam's. Its first chapter was resurrected a few years later for Baraka's Selected Plays and Prose, but the complete novel sat, unpublished, in a cardboard box in the basement of Howard University's Founders Library until the year 2000, when it finally appeared in Baraka's volume of collected fictions.

As the advocate of a "populist modernism," Baraka had no real objections to his work's becoming popular. Nor did he have any principled objection to being paid well for his work, which is why he had a literary agent in the first place. But when, in his introduction to The Moderns, Baraka proclaimed his dedication to writing that becomes "an event in itself" (xv), he did not have in mind the public event of a novel/movie such as The Godfather, but rather a literature in which the writing itself is regarded as eventful--not simply because it narrates events, but because something of true interest is happening on the page. All writing is about something, even such writing as takes nothing for its subject, but what Putnam's wanted from Baraka was a novel that would be of interest primarily because of what it was about and who wrote it. William Targ wanted a book that would be for its readers a window onto a foreign (to them) world, a world of a certain racial authenticity or flavor. Baraka's words get in the way of such tourism, and he increasingly addressed himself to potential audiences for whom his world was not foreign turf. In the end, it was not the novel's content, its perceived level of racial testament, or even its politics that disturbed Putnam's. It was the writing itself that was rejected.

In the absence of a published volume of fiction in the years after Tales, many have erroneously concluded that Baraka had turned his back on the writing of fiction in the seventies. In fact, he has continued to compose stories in varied forms throughout his career, and recent contributions to the short-story anthology Street Lights and to the journal Fertile Ground indicate that Baraka's prose work has continued in the experimental directions visible in the earlier Tales and The System of Dante's Hell. Though he showed the manuscript of his second autobiographical novel to other publishers after it had been rejected by Putnam's (Conversations 101), that book remained unpublished for a quarter of a century, and Baraka never undertook the publication of his works of fiction himself, as he has often done with poetry projects that commercial presses did not care to bring out for both aesthetic and political reasons. If the only things at stake in this aspect of Baraka's public reception history were amusing anecdotes about the ways of white editors, or even a lack of knowledge of the full extent of Baraka's prolific body of works, there might be less cause for critical concern. But too often critics have built elaborate suppositions upon the basis of this absence, this lack of published narrative prose after Tales. At the close of his examination of Baraka's fiction in Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism", for one example, Werner Sollors argues that already in Tales can be discerned a movement "from fiction to reality" (171). Projecting from his interpretation of Baraka's late-sixties collection of short stories, Sollors proceeds to an astonishing performance, the interpretation of a non-appearance:

   Baraka has not published prose fiction
   in the years since Tales; and Tales may
   be considered the logbook of a fiction
   writer who, under the social pressures
   of the 1960s, catapulted himself out of
   writing fictions while writing a swan-song
   to telling tales. Baraka's concern
   for "theories of government or prose"
   yielded to a predominant interest in
   government at the expense of prose
   fiction. As the voice of Baraka the
   story-teller retreated, the scream of the
   agitating poet-playwright-essayist of
   Black cultural nationalism reached its
   peak. (171)

This portrait is entirely too pat, however, playing as it does all too easily into media descriptions of Baraka as an artist who abandoned art for agit-prop. More important still though, is the fact that, even as Sollors was conducting the impressive research that went into his important study of Baraka, Baraka himself was singing another sort of swan-song entirely to the representatives of Putnam's and other publishers; he had written another work like The System of Dante's Hell, a poetic narrative rooted in the realities of his own life that refused to represent itself as the mendacious social-romantic realism of the commercial publishing establishment. Baraka the storyteller had not sounded a final retreat, and did not retreat even upon the rejection of that second novel. Baraka the taleteller has been among us all along. Like the character in his recently published tale "Rhythm Travel," he has been able to "disappear & reappear wherever and whenever that music played" (244); it is as if he had "turned into some Sun Ra and hung out inside gravity" while awaiting the proper opportunity to play his piece before a more willing audience.

Not only was fiction after Tales, he was writing fiction while Sollors was publishing his conclusions about Baraka's supposed renunciation of fiction. Among the several unpublished pieces that are found among Baraka's manuscripts there is much of interest. There are three notebooks that contain preliminary work toward Baraka's published autobiography. One of these notebooks, titled A Burning Mirror = Memoirs, begins as a surreal jailhouse interrogation, a futuristic scenario in which "B/403" has been detained for violating the fictive "Publishing Act of 1990" (68). As the imprisoned B/403 looks back over his life, he recalls elements from Six Persons (49), demonstrating both the continued importance of that manuscript to Baraka's work and his continued mingling of the fictional with the autobiographical, despite Sollors's assumptions that would have driven a critical and authorial wedge between the realms of fact and fiction around 1970. At one point in Burning Mirror, Baraka imagines the thought processes of B/403's captors, and it may be that we can read here a fictionalized version of Baraka's assessment of the thinking at Putnam's a few years earlier: "Wouldn't it be great if they cd get one of the fat mouths of extremism to come clean ... & give a big ol' public confession and media soaked announcement that he'd--wdnt it?--seen the light ... Seen it, embraced it & was going to be part of it" (68-69). What Baraka rejected was the part designed for him by American commerce, a chance to be part of the traffic in ethnic confessionals, a part in the drama of a show trial of the sixties; he did not reject the forms of fiction themselves.

There is much that is confessional about Six Persons. The narrator is particularly hard on the earlier versions of himself. Of his first name change (from "Leroy" to "LeRoi") the narrator says, "thas when he changed his name that first year in colored school, from english to french., why? it seemed cooler" (281). At one point in the version of the first chapter that appears in Baraka's Selected Plays and Prose Baraka underscores the book's connectedness to his own life: "This is my story. The story of I who was born in north east america. An African youth, hid under cotton futures. Hid under slavery, oppression." But the lines preceding this statement remind us that this is a life reshaped in memory and reformed in the telling of the tale: "This is my story I. I tell it like I want to. Follow the eye, and you'll see" (203). Baraka's play upon the "eye"/"I" homophony also restates a part of his developing aesthetics. More than a decade previously he had said of Robert Creeley that the poet strikes "with his fiercest weapons first: SYNTAX. Creeley is always forcing you to rearrange your own eye, to disregard, or abandon any 'gestalt' you bring to merely reading a poem" ("A Form" 82). Baraka's prose is designed to effect a similar rearrangement of the eye, and thus of the consciousness, using the features of the rearranged language of his writing.

The rearrangement of the eye is always also a rearrangement of the "I," as the title of Six Persons' first chapter indicates. This is not the kind of ghetto confessional Putnam's required. The six persons of the book's title are the shifting grammatical and historic points of view from which Baraka constructs the ever-shifting narrative of his book and of himself. The chapter that was first published, "I," certainly would appear a less problematic form, more familiar to readers of popular autobiography and The Godfather alike than the later chapters narrated from the point of view of "Yall" or of "We & All," but even the very singular first person of Baraka's first chapter is a teeming congress. Just here we can see what Baraka might share with other authors of the postmodern, and where he differs from them. Six Persons is as good a critique of Western Humanism's idealized individual subject as any to be found. Witness the novel's comic critique of the Cartesian subject: "Decartes there on his back chortling like a baby, i i i i i i think i i i i i i think i i i i i i think, therefo i is ..." (271). This passage echoes the ending of Baraka's 1965 essay on "New Black Music," an ending that sounds perhaps a little more Eliotic than we might expect (but isn't that part of what it means to be postmodern?), where the poet remarks that "New Black Music is this: Find the sell then kill it" (Black Music 176). The relationship between the late-sixties Black Arts assault upon Western individualism and the simultaneous questioning of subjectivity among the more radical Western philosophers is a phenomenon that is too often ignored. Baraka had clearly not been perusing Derrida or Foucault just before penning these lines, nor had these French philosophers read Baraka's unpublished novel. Baraka's book, though, also demonstrates his ongoing search for totality, something that would set him apart from most postmodern philosophy. The "total" that Baraka spoke of achieving in his early essays and notes appears in Six Persons as "all the reality, its multiple addresses, and parallel appearances. Awash in a see of others" (200). Baraka has not put fiction behind him in order to govern the real. Rather he has recognized that a writing of the real must make multiple addresses and parallel appearances. If one is to present the real it must be shown as a simultaneous apparition of these faces in a crowd, multiple viewpoints, not the linear plodding of the traditional first-person plot so desired by Putnam's editors. In Burning Mirror, B/403 says to his interrogators: "Baraka thats my name. You want LeRoi Jones? You want Everett Jones?" His tormentors, unlike some of Baraka's publishers, want it all: "We want you to tell us all your names. We see them as realities __" (16). For Baraka, to interrogate even oneself is to look for a subject "awash in a see of others."

Theodore R. Hudson, in From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, remarks that "one may read Tales to see what it is possible to do with language" (123), a comment so commonsensical that its importance might be overlooked. Hudson's critique of Baraka's prose, published five years prior to that of Sollors, does not anticipate a future disappearance from published fiction by Baraka, and thus does not offer assumptions about political and aesthetic motivations for any turn away from tale-telling. It is doubtful that Hudson would have made such an assumption in any event, not only because he recognized, as did Sollors, that Baraka was a prolific artist drawn to multiple genres, but also because he understood that Baraka would not likely close the door on such a productive laboratory as prose narrative had proved for him. In 1991 Baraka told Charlie Reilly that the manuscript of Six Persons was "a very ambitious book stylistically" (Conversations 241). He remembers that the proposed publisher "absolutely hated it" and that he had been asked by his editor, "Why don't you do it over in a simple style, something like The System of Dante's Hell?" (241), advice that crystallizes Putnam's conception of the book while once again raising the question of whether or not anyone at the publisher's office had actually read that earlier novel. Baraka was interested in writing that makes a direct address to the real, but he knew the difference between the simple and the simplistic. In the fourth chapter of Six Persons, titled "They (Them Theeirs Theyres & C)," Baraka writes of a time, parallel to his own Village days, when "they ran into some straight out aesthetes from [Black] Mountain College, who said, shave all that extraneous sensuality outta the shit and get down to the flat bizness of creating a new academia" (Fiction 320). The key here is that in writing, as in bringing into being a new academia, it was the extraneous that was to be stripped away. To strip further would be to tear away the necessary, and that truly would be simple, and that Baraka refused to do.

At the opening of her essay titled "Anonymous in America," an essay that closed the 1978 special supplement on Baraka in the journal BOUNDARY 2, Sherley Anne Williams worried that in the future Baraka's literary accomplishment might be reduced to a black footnote to white bohemia, that he would be presented only as someone who "was at the cutting edge of mid-twentieth century American literature. Black Arts and Black Consciousness and Black Liberation will be explained away in a footnote like Harlem (a Negro area in New York) in the Norton Anthology of Literature" (435). She ends her essay with the admonition that "we won't have Baraka remembered as just another of the old (white) boys" (441). To judge from some of the published evaluations of Baraka there may be some justification for Williams's worries. Many college anthologies continue to present Baraka's post-Village poetry, particularly his post-cultural-nationalist, Marxist works, as bizarre footnotes to his earlier work, and most such anthologies studiously avoid the reprinting of Baraka's prose. But a return to Baraka's long uncollected and fugitive fictions might make such reductive treatments more difficult to sustain (they should already be an embarrassment to any who present themselves as careful readers), for in these works, as indeed in his better-known publications, we can see just how strongly Baraka has resisted such reduction all along. Reading Baraka's fiction alongside the mass of his collected works should make even more evident the fact that Baraka, from the outset, was placing himself as a black artist in the position simultaneously of precedent to the white avant-garde and as a significant post- to their post-modernity.

In his 1963 review of E. U. Essien-Udom's Black Nationalism, Baraka denounced those who are "impressed with what it is to be an exotic minstrel in this strange deadly time" ("Udom" 89). Though Baraka learned much from his white colleagues in the artistic underground of the late fifties and early sixties, he was no more willing then than he was ten years later to serve as anyone's exotic minstrel. His early ambitions, as he explained in a 1962 letter to Rosey Pool, were quite different:

   To write beautiful poems full of mystical
   sociology and abstract politics.

   To show America it is ugly and full of
   middleclass toads (black & white).

   To become a great political agitator
   and invade Britain.

And while he was to welcome the sense he got from reading Ginsberg and others that there existed the possibility of a united front for a truly popular aesthetic rebellion, Baraka would always stake a claim for modernity's black origins. In the third-person-plural chapter of Six Persons Baraka is scathing in his descriptions of those who only value black innovation when it is covered and played back to them in the authorizing redactions of white mimicry, those who "only dig they soul watered down" (321). Baraka describes the ludicrous sight of those who "stood and listened to ag [Allen Ginsberg] be them in a yarmulka, and put on the mammy jammin yarmulka and imitated him being them" (322). Anyone listening to the career-spanning collection of recordings of Ginsberg's readings, Holy Soul Jelly Roll (whose very title is a borrowing from African American musical traditions), will note a decided change in Ginsberg's mode of verbal performance very early on, and it is a transformation that appears to have much to do with Ginsberg's own renderings of the styles of blackness as he perceived them in his experience, at least as much as it has to do with his appropriations of the modes of the Jewish cantor and of Hindu and Buddhist chants. This is one reason that Baraka may have felt that he was meeting himself coming and going as he read the work of the Beats.

In Six Persons' second-person chapter, Baraka remembers that "you cd sit copyin ee cummings meticulously out of some absolutely ununderstood text. Tho you must have understood, something. Something of what beyond the instant lesson, it 'meant'" (254). A young Baraka learned, though, that this was simply "the facade of a culture" that he had consumed, and that the danger was always thus: "What you eat, gets a chance to eat you. From the inside!" (254). Baraka consumed reading matter the way a famished Wimpy consumes burgers, and he had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Pound, Williams, Eliot, and the other moderns he shared as a common heritage with the Beats, the New York school, and the Black Mountain group. He also knew that each of these moderns had taken a turn at poetic black face, had spoken the white man's black English. So an encounter with Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," while liberating, was for Baraka like a trip to the hall of mirrors, "awash in a see of others." Still, Baraka had a strong sense of the immense resources of black modernisms. "They were themselves," he writes of himself in the third-person plural, "like black icebergs rising out the underwater American reality" (Fiction 349).

This last is an especially powerful image in Baraka's manuscripts, which are themselves like those metaphorical depths supporting the visible promontories of his published books, and in its doubleness it figures the specific contours of the African American postmodern that Baraka was bringing into being in his writing. In Six Persons he sees the looming heights of black culture afloat in a sea of whiteness, supported by the immense volume of things unseen. This is also a trope for African American history--still, at the time of his writing, largely uncharted but evident in the consciousness of the visible subjects of contemporary America, the historical and political unconscious of the nation itself. The doubleness of the image, the towering peaks and the voluminous depth, again embodies for Baraka the largely unsung black base of historical and cultural modernity and the black contemporaneity rising above the smothering covering of its surroundings. This doubleness is refigured at the end of a 1967 essay in Negro Digest, a text that began as a letter to editor Hoyt Fuller, in which Baraka calls for an art that encompasses "the first learnings of man. While we fly into the next epoch." As Baraka viewed things in 1967, the goal was to achieve "a post-American form. An afterwhiteness color and re-erect the strength of the primitive" (Raise 34). Just as he desired a drama that would at once tear down and build up, Baraka wanted an art that was simultaneously futuristic and primitive. As William Carlos Williams wanted to rescue the rose from its history of use and abuse so that it could once more be used to write of love, Baraka sought to tear away the wrappings of Euro-modernist primitivism to bring a primitive to light, so that the first and last learnings of man could be conjoined in a post-American, postmodern afterwhiteness.

Baraka was far from the first to have posited that the superstructures of Western modernity rested uneasily upon an historic base of slavery and of black cultural invention. Historians, including C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois, had established that argument during the decade of Baraka's birth. Critics such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown (one of Baraka's most memorable professors during his time at Howard University) had outlined the contributions of black artists in the New World and in Africa to modernisms high and low. Poets, among them Melvin B. Tolson, had made the black strata of modernism a theme of major works, and had structured their epic forms around the shapes of that history. Amiri Baraka, however, constructed his modes of contemporaneity around a yet more audacious claim to simultaneous pre- and postmodernity, bringing into being a form of the future anterior more daring than anything previously seen in African American letters. Baraka wrote of a "post-pre-birth enlightenment" (Fiction 3), an enlightened critique of the Enlightenment delivered from the possible-impossible double posture of one who writes both before and after the avant-garde of his own generation.

It is in another of Baraka's fugitive fictions that we can most readily sight his simultaneous appearing and disappearing act, a story titled "Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine" that was printed in the second issue of Baraka's own magazine Yugen, a journal he co-edited with Hettie Jones. Both the title and the Victorian-looking illustration that accompanied the tale on its first appearance repeat the trope of doubleness and the future anterior (it is an old-fashioned futurism that Baraka alludes to here), Baraka's intent mingling of the untold past with the unforeseen (at least by white America) future.

The story joins together Baraka's youthful enthusiasm for science fiction and popular culture with his dedication to reconnecting the black past to its cultural future, a joining Baraka continues to thematize in such recent fictions as "Rhythm Travel." It also previews the techniques of Six Persons, with its use of second-person point of view. The story's second paragraph introduces the reader to the "you" of the narration in mid-supposition, enacting the odd grammatical tense of the title. We read, "Say that you are Tom Russ" (Fiction 1), and are thus asked by way of this second-person mode of address to occupy the imagined historical ground of Baraka's predecessor, his grandfather, who also figures prominently in such more frequently read works as "Black Dada Nihilismus" and The System of Dante's Hell. Talking to himself and to us on paper, Baraka transports us--or "you," to be precise--to the Dothan, Alabama, of 1898:

   You are a Negro who has felt the
   ground vibrate, and you are trying to
   interpret the vibration. You are trying
   to interpret the vibration, and what it
   means in 1898 Dothan. I know you
   Tom. You are my grandfather. I am not
   born yet but I have felt the ground
   vibrate too. (Fiction 1)

By means of the displacement writing affords as time machine, the author becomes the not-yet-born. He opens a passage between himself and his absent grandfather, a passage along which the same vibration travels from one generation to another. It is a passage in which the body of the present is translated into the past to interpret, from its source, the ominous vibrations the unborn child senses through the womb, the maternal passage connecting grandfather and son. "Let your unborn grandchild know what his dead, whistling grandfather thought."

Tom Russ was a shopkeeper whose store was burned down by racists. He rebuilt it, "knelt back down in those ashes and scraped the black off again, and built again" (2). Black ash and the brilliance of flame--these once more doubled images of brilliance and savagery form a dialectic that works its way through all of Baraka's works. He asks rhetorically, "How obscure is enlightenment?" just before retelling his grandmother's explanation of Tom Russ's final years. Baraka's grandmother told him that "They" dropped a street light on Russ's head and scattered his brains. There is an obvious parallel between Baraka's question and his grandmother's narrative. The modernity produced by the Enlightenment made the darkness darker, produced the black ash to which Russ's neighbors reduced his labors. In the iconography of cartoons, enlightenment is signified by a light bulb going on over a character's head. In the ironic iconography of grandmother Russ, the visible sign of the modern, the electric street light, puts out the brilliant light of her husband's mind. (The ironies rebound decades later when Baraka appears in a fiction anthology titled Street Lights, whose editors choose their title to symbolize the illumination that black people bring.)

Baraka imagines that he can advise his grandfather across the boundaries of place, space, and time, that he can convince Tom Russ to carry himself to the North. More than that, he speaks out of the future to his grandfather's tormentors, the leading (as opposed to the leaving) citizens of Dothan, the white representatives of the modernizing South at century's turning:

   Goodbye, crackers, Tom Russ is leaving
   your town. His grandson'll be back
   to correct your grammar and throw
   stones in your well. Fifty years ain't so
   long. (2)

And sure enough, a half-century or so later, here is Baraka's prose narrative published in fulfillment of prophecy.

There is yet another turn in this timeless story, as Baraka once more displaces his own words into his family's past. As he imagines his grandfather transplanted to the Newark of 1925, he translates his own poetry into the past he has himself inherited. He imagines "Tom Russ, standing there trying to remember some of his unborn grandson's poems" (2). What better example of the "always already" could be conjured than this writing of the past as prologue in which the prologue has been transported back in time, after the fact, to precede itself. As Baraka travels along the fold in time, tracking past and promise, he arrives at the birth of black modernism. Whichever definitions of African American modernity we might deploy, Houston Baker's as well as that of David Levering Lewis, the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the urban, industrial North is a defining feature. Baraka writes himself into the past as precedent so that in "Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine" he appears as both a big-eyed boy anxiously awaiting his grandfather's tale and as the author of that tale. "Have you got time, Tom?" Baraka asks the ghost of his grandfather. "Can you remember any of those lines, Tom? Tell the saucereyed boy at your feet. Maybe they'll do him some good" (11).

Hence in this telling Baraka's lines come to him with the authorizing imprimatur of his family's past, in the authenticating form of his African American cultural legacies, but at the same time he is the author of his own inheritance. The poetry that Tom Russ recalls, that verse he will contribute to his grandson's repertoire of cultural knowledge, is the not-yet-written poetry of Amiri Baraka, the poetry that Baraka will build out of the vibrations he has sensed emanating out of that same past, that futuristic, projective, postmodern poetry he will construe with the black consciousness willed to him in his grandfather's narrative. Baraka's "post-prebirth enlightenment" projects from that fold in historical consciousness that Baraka traces in memory and in prose fiction. His writing is a time machine by means of which, like the blues themselves, he memorializes at the same time he transforms sorrow into art. (In his Autobiography Baraka recalls that his grandmother, though she didn't live to see a full book of his, had seen and liked this early tale commemorating her husband [21-22].)

This story, in which the child is grandfather to the man, is not The Godfather, is not the simple social romance of realism that Putnam's dreamed of selling on their auction block. It is an effort to explore fully the possibilities offered to the present by the past that we now imagine. The narrative's fluid point of view points to Baraka's early and sustained efforts to renew experience in the crucible of art. In a 1976 letter, Baraka makes clear just how the metamorphosed perspectives of time mark the distinctions among the personal narratives he is writing. Still trying to interest a commercial publisher in the manuscript of Six Persons (at exactly the time Werner Sollors believed Baraka was making a politically determined choice against prose fiction), Baraka writes on September 21, 1976, responding to queries from Ken Stuart in the midst of attempts to place the book with Macmillan, and distinguishing his new text from his first novel: "What you say about seeing the past from the perspective of the present is true. I don't want to write the book I wd have written when those events were happening. That wd be Dante pt 2."

Six Persons is neither the second part of The System of Dante's Hell nor the first part of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. It is a work in which "a see of others" defines the multiplying perspectives of the writing as Baraka attempts to achieve the new that emerges from its place within the old. The text is an instrument of that "sensitivity to the world total, to the American Total" that Baraka addresses in his introduction to David Henderson's first book of poetry. It is one of those "local epics with the breadth that the emotional consciousness of a culture can make" (Raise 35-36). Baraka took this local epic to America's mainstream publishers, but they wanted none of it. "You went to the main stream," he writes in the second-person-plural chapter, "& found it sluggish & unmoving--reflecting blackness, repetition, blind follies, mirrors" (174).

The future that Baraka renounced in the early seventies comes into view in his own rejected book, in the brown face of the fictive Harris Sullivan, glimpsed near the book's conclusion, "the noted black poet, ... now poet in residence to this largest insurance company in the world he explains. He rises & reads his latest epic, 'Whitey Better Increase The Stock Options'" (461). The past upon which his own epic rests, the route traveled again in his poem Wise, Why's, Y's, is also visible in Six Persons. But as in "Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine," here the past is confronted coming and going at the crossroads of the narrative present:

   Hawkins stares through night using
   the moon as a crystal outlined against
   the sea. He barely sees these words
   led in a ledger crossing the ocean
   the other way. The Jesus bulks its
   prow toward America--Afrikans turning
   to niggers just below the water
   line. He will not warn them. (Fiction
   396)

When he went down to the crossroads, Baraka relinquished the chance to become the Godfather of the Black Arts, to impersonate a commodity fetish. By choosing "not to take up the ankh instead of the cross, but to pull down all invisibilities" (457), he nearly became the invisible poet, and he did become the invisible man of America's fiction industry. But the achievement of Baraka's fictions remains a massive form joining the visible promontories afloat in, to take the title of one of his Tales, "The Largest Ocean in the World."

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. The Amiri Baraka Papers. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Howard U. Washington, DC. 72 boxes.

--. Amiri Baraka Papers, 1958-1966. Special Collections, University Research Library. U of California, Los Angeles.

--. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. 1984. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997.

--. Black Music. New York: Morrow, 1967.

--. A Burning Mirror = Memoirs. Ms. Baraka Papers, Howard U. Box 37.

--. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Ed. Charlie Reilly. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

--. "A Form of Women and Hymns to St. Geryon: Reviews." Kulchur 3 (1961): 81-85.

-- The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2000.

--. Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966.

--. "Introduction." The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. Ed. Amiri Baraka. New York: Corinth Books, 1963. ix-xvi.

--. Letter to Ken Stuart. 19 Aug. 1976. Ts. Baraka Papers, Howard U. Box 3. "Correspondence 70-79, McMillan File."

--. Letter to Rosey Pool. n.d. Ts. Rosey Pool Papers. "Correspondence 1959-1967." File 84. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Manuscript Division. Howard U. Washington, DC.

--. "Northern Iowa: Short Story and Poetry." Arshile 4 (1995): 39-43.

--. "Notes on Lou Donaldson and Andrew Hill." Cricket 4 (1969): 46.

--. Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays since 1965. New York: Random, 1971.

--. "The Rejected Buppie." Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. Ed. Doris Jean Austin and Martin Simmons. New York: Penguin, 1996. 20-23.

--. "Rhythm Travel." Fertile Ground 1 (1996): 243-44.

--. Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: Morrow, 1979.

--. Six Persons. Ts. Baraka Papers, Howard U. Box 38.

--. "Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine." Yugen 2 (1958): 9-11.

--. "Uncle Udom's Cabin." Kulchur 11 (1963): 88-90.

Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham: Duke UP, 1973.

Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism". New York: Columbia UP, 1978.

Williams, Sherley Anne. "Anonymous in America." BOUNDARY 26 (1978): 435-41.

Aldon Nielsen's book Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press. His most recent book of poetry is Vext.