Free The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka Page B

Wow. And the dude did pitch and switch when he walked and his hair was done up rococo and curled up, his eyes and mouth were pornography. Danny was dusty and slightly off speed, a little plump. He was kept by his grandmother, a lowdown church lady. She was always dragging Danny off to church and since it was sanctified they went every other day, it seemed to us, and we giggled and teased him to distraction. One great cap on Danny was imitating his speech, as for instance he would tell us he was going to his sister’s “wettin’.” He had a cousin just a little older than us who also was “funny,” who fanned up and down the street like he was on his way to mind the seraglio. So Dan had to hear about that. But there was calmness and loyalty in Danny and a quiet palship you always counted on. But he was a great source of merriment, as for instance when his grandmother had himby the ear pulling him toward Sanctified Heaven. We fell off the stairs and rolled on the sidewalk.
    The radio, I’ve told over and again, was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed. The TV must serve the same purpose now for kids. The daily adventure stories after school and before dinner. And the later night shows like
The Lone Ranger
and
Inner Sanctum
(the creaking door),
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, I Love a Mystery, Mr. District Attorney
. The weekend shows like
Sam Spade
and
Gangbusters
. But two of the most meaningful to me were
The Shadow
and
Escape
. My father even took me to see
The Shadow
over there in Radio City. I got to see the actors, with scripts in their hands, saw them make the sound effects, and saw the guy who played the Shadow go into a booth when he “became invisible” (so his voice sounded weird and spooky). “The Hypnotic Power to Cloud Men’s Minds So They Cannot See Him.” That seemed deep. Or “The Weed of Crime Bears Bitter Fruit!” Wow. Or the laugh. “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eheh-eh The Shadow Knows” was deep.
    Escape
came on later after we had left Dey Street. They did more literary stories. Tales by H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, tales of the fantastic, the strange, science fiction. It came on late at night but I would play the radio soft in my room in the dark and listen, fantasizing the most strange and spooky world that could fit in that room and my head. One night I heard Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Another time “Leiningen and the Ants.” Wells’s “The Valley of the Blind” and “The Man Who Would Be King.” And one strange story about people who lived in department stores after closing who buried their dead by turning them into display dummies. They were changed by people in the store called the Dark Men and the story was found on a note outside a department store left by a guy who had been trapped in there and grabbed by the Dark Men because he wanted to leave and give away their secret. The guy reading the note looked up as he finished reading and a dummy in the window fitting the writer’s description stared out from behind the glass with unseeing horror-fixed eyes! Scared the shit out of me!
    Saturday stories from the little kids’
Land of the Lost
, with Red Lantern, a fish who led kids down below the sea to find their lost toys. (He was not to be confused with Green Lantern, a caped crusader from the comic books I also dug. I put his incantatory dedication to fight against evil in my book
The Dead Lecturer
. To wit: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight!/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware MyPower/Green Lantern’s Light.” A green ring he recharged in front of a green lantern which gave him all kinds of powers. Powers, I guess, to reach the absolute.)
    I heard
Let’s Pretend
, when younger, the Grimms’