Free The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka Page A

around end and streak for the goal. Or double step, skip, stop, leap, jump back, ram, twist, hop, back up, duck, get away, hustle, and rush into the end zone. I could leap and catch passes one-handed, backwards, on my back, on the run, over someone’s shoulders, and take it in. And mostly I never got hurt. I had a fearlessness in games and sports. A feeling that I could win, that I could outrun or outhustle or outscramble or rassel or whatever to pull it out. I would slide head first into home, even first. On tar and cement. I would turn bunts into homeruns, by just putting my head down and raging around the bases.
    And we learned in our own gatherings, like The Secret Seven, our youngest collective, led, I guess, by me, with Board as the official outlaw. We’d roam those streets getting into things, climbing over roofs, “exploring,” going around the corner two or three blocks — strange places. Confronting mysteries daily and giving childish explanations or shrugging our shoulders and pulling off the leaves of a “poverty tree” to play “sord fighting” like Tyrone Power in
The Black Swan
. Our thing was roaming and registering, laughing and eating candy when we were lucky. Board, the bad one, Algy, his younger skinny brother, fast and usually snotty-nosed, who got my baseball suit cause I went off and stayed in the movies all day till dark and said the devil made me do it.
    Norman, long-head colored Norman was our designation so as to distinguish him from white Norman. Norman was fast, a good ring-a-leerio man, and would go off with you anytime you wanted to do some serious exploring. Eddie, of the tilted old smelly house, was strong and fast and very recent. Like so many of us he had just come up from the black belt a few minutes ago.
    My sister, a tomboy, dogged my tracks. I was always looking over my shoulder as I scaled another fence, when we took it in our minds to try and “duck” her. I would get furious when we couldn’t and she would get furiouswhen we could. I know we had begun to get older when I began to be able to beat her running, I guess from the added weight of hips and breasts. But in them early days it was hell getting loose. Her job, it seemed to me, in The Secret Seven was to see that I didn’t get too far out.
    Board liked to fight and steal. He was a little bit of a bully, a big bit on the real side. And people at one age were afraid of him. But he lived across the street, so we got tight in a standoffish kind of way. (I think he liked my sister.) Running with him finally got me in trouble cause we started lifting stuff out of cars. I watched him get popped in a trap set up by the local company. He’d got the stuff out the car window (simple shit glove compartment stuff). But this time they were waiting for him/us and they caught him as he climbed on his bicycle and tried to pull away. I was standing in S’s yard in back of the playground watching it from behind a billboard. It scared me as much as anything in my life.
    Also we’d gone into the school a couple of times and lifted silly shit. Pitch pipes, school materials, but then played vandal and threw shit every which way. I was deeply paranoid after that and thought any minute we were sure to get busted. But Board must’ve squealed when they got him at the car because in a few weeks I had to go down to police headquarters. My father and mother sat by my side and the white man gave me some vague lecture. Afterwards my father said that he and my mother had “decided to stick by me.” (I’d figured that, it surprised me to hear him say that and it sounded a little artificial to me. So I wondered why had he said that. But sometimes my father could be curiously formal. My mother would usually just bop me in the head.)
    And Danny whose brother was gay in those days when we called them “sissies.” And that carried a weight then, Jim. “He’s a sissy.”