Dutchman and The Slave

DUTCHMAN AND THE SLAVE HAMPTON INSTITUTE IS ONE OF THE leading predominantly Negro colleges in the U.S. It was founded as long ago as 1868, and has an extended record of fine service; Booker T. Washington was among the early graduates and Martin Luther King's father another. Although the Institute is predominantly Negro its members have a remarkable colour-blindness, and white faculty and students have no problem of acceptance; people are persons. At the same time there is a proper awareness of and involvement in social problems, and Black Power has its representatives on campus. It was an imaginative decision for the Hampton Players to offer a programme of plays of protest for 1968-9, and to open with two short plays by LeRoi Jones, both of which required an integrated cast. LeRoi Jones was born October 7, 1934, of middle-class parents who lived on the fringes of the Newark ghetto. He later described himself as "the only 'middle-class' chump running with the Hillside Place bads. I was 'saved' from them by my parents' determination and the cool scholarship game which turns stone killers pure alabaster by graduation time." After high school in Newark, he took his B.A. at Howard unusually young. Then, at a loose end, he joined the Air Force. It was a frustrating and formative period. He wrote of it, "The air force was where I did all my reading, or a great deal of it. At least it was where I started coming on like a fullup intellectual, and got silent and cagey with most of the troops, and stayed in my room most nights piling through Ulysses or Eliot or something else like that. Sometimes writing shreds of literature myself, most times about things of which I had very little knowledge at all, Death or Eternity or Love or something like that, weeping sometimes at my fate, hitched like a common fool (... an insufferable silent snob, loose-mouthed nigger ... both at the same time) to the air force of the United States." He came out with an insatiable ambition to conquer the world, predominantly white, of the middle-class intellectual. Smiling and glad/ in the huge and loveless white-anglo sun/of benevolent step mother America. He moved to New York, married a white girl, mixed with the avantgarde white artists, founded an important magazine Yugen, and wrote 398 1971 Dutchman AND The Slave 399 poetry of some power. He was on the way to being accepted. "Having read all of Whitey's books, I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was 'what white men did,' I almost became one, to have a go at it." Then something cracked. Somewhere in the early 1960s, sickened by the continued degradation of black people and the polite indifference of whites to it, he began to break with his white past and reassert his blackness. "The black man" he declared "is weakened by any friend-contact with ... the morally weaker white element.... Integration is assimilation and the permission to see the world suddenly through mealy ofay eyes." He began to model himself on Kenyatta. He offered a new dialectic of history. The white man is the thesis, the major obstruction in the path of man's progress. The coloured man is the antithesis. But Jones offers not a new synthesis, but the victory of the antithesis; this is Marx (with a difference), not Hegel; the coloured man is "a species that is evolving to world power and philosophical domination of the world." Meantime Jones had rejected the Christian god as a white man or white idea and became a Moslem. His writing has ceased to be private and personal; it is the expression of a kind of group-consciousness. In the process it has initially taken on a new power; this is why he is feared. For Jones is an unabashed racialist, answering racialism with racialism, and he has written words which are an incitement to violence, answering violence with violence. In doing so he has become something of an oracle. I asked an intelligent middle-of-the-road Hampton student his opinion of Styron's...