“You got to sing . . . don’t be no ghost”
In the mid-1960s I was living in San Francisco. Divorced and going to college I worked at a hospital as an orderly. My life experiences to that point pretty much consisted of high school in Oklahoma, and three years in the Marine Corps. In San Francisco it was the time of the Haight-Ashbury, anti-Vietnam protests, Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements. I was caught up in it all. And I loved it all.
A friend at the hospital—he was Black and he was a lab technician—invited me to go along with him to see two one-act plays that were getting rave reviews. The plays were The Dutchman and The Toilet by LeRoi Jones, and I was blown away by the power and the relevance of the pieces. Other than my high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, I’d never before seen live theater.
In my junior year in college I moved back to Oklahoma to be closer to my mother, who was having some difficulties. I worked at a hospital there and resumed my college studies. While it will come as no surprise that Oklahoma was/is a hotbed of right-wing conservatism compared to San Francisco and most other places, there were offered in the state school where I was enrolled some surprisingly fine courses in Black Literature, which I took. At the same time, there was an active NAACP group in Oklahoma City, which supported a garbage workers’ protest—a protest that I took up by writing letters to the editor at the Daily Oklahoman wherein I described how I was withholding the portion of my City Utility Bill that was earmarked for garbage service and sending that amount to Miss Clara Luper, who was then president of the OKC NAACP to use as she saw fit.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from what was then called Central State College and relocated to New Mexico to pursue a Master’s Degree. There were very few Black students at New Mexico Highlands University in 1969. Those who were there were mostly athletes. When I told the English Department Chairman that I wanted to write a Master’s Thesis on the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, I believe he took to his bed for several days. The school’s library had very little relating to contemporary Black writers, and there were no courses offered that remotely related to what I wanted to pursue. However, I think that I was a little scary in those days—my hair was long and I had a beard and called the Chairman “sir,” which I learned later he thought was said sarcastically (it really wasn’t). In any event, I was given the go-ahead.
The thesis--Transition into Blackness: The Audience and the Speaker in the Poetry & Plays of LeRoi Jones—caused a stir in that it contained the word “fuck.” (In my defense, the word was in a long quote of Jones’ important poem, Black Art!) The stir came about because I was (and remain to this day) a two-finger typist, and had arranged for the Department secretary to type the manuscript—no word processors or personal computers in 1969. The Chairman called me into his office and closed the door. He stuttered that Mrs. Smith (not her real name) was not an “academic,” and so shouldn’t be subjected to such “dirty” words. He wanted me to type the offending page myself. Long story short: When I was unable to find a typewriter with a perfectly-matched font, I asked Mrs. Smith if I could use her machine for, maybe 20 minutes. She asked why. I told her. She laughed and typed the “dirty” words herself.
The link below will take you to a 6-minute recording of Jones reading “Black Art!” Click on it if you dare:
In the mid-1960s I was living in San Francisco. Divorced and going to college I worked at a hospital as an orderly. My life experiences to that point pretty much consisted of high school in Oklahoma, and three years in the Marine Corps. In San Francisco it was the time of the Haight-Ashbury, anti-Vietnam protests, Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements. I was caught up in it all. And I loved it all.
A friend at the hospital—he was Black and he was a lab technician—invited me to go along with him to see two one-act plays that were getting rave reviews. The plays were The Dutchman and The Toilet by LeRoi Jones, and I was blown away by the power and the relevance of the pieces. Other than my high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, I’d never before seen live theater.
In my junior year in college I moved back to Oklahoma to be closer to my mother, who was having some difficulties. I worked at a hospital there and resumed my college studies. While it will come as no surprise that Oklahoma was/is a hotbed of right-wing conservatism compared to San Francisco and most other places, there were offered in the state school where I was enrolled some surprisingly fine courses in Black Literature, which I took. At the same time, there was an active NAACP group in Oklahoma City, which supported a garbage workers’ protest—a protest that I took up by writing letters to the editor at the Daily Oklahoman wherein I described how I was withholding the portion of my City Utility Bill that was earmarked for garbage service and sending that amount to Miss Clara Luper, who was then president of the OKC NAACP to use as she saw fit.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from what was then called Central State College and relocated to New Mexico to pursue a Master’s Degree. There were very few Black students at New Mexico Highlands University in 1969. Those who were there were mostly athletes. When I told the English Department Chairman that I wanted to write a Master’s Thesis on the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, I believe he took to his bed for several days. The school’s library had very little relating to contemporary Black writers, and there were no courses offered that remotely related to what I wanted to pursue. However, I think that I was a little scary in those days—my hair was long and I had a beard and called the Chairman “sir,” which I learned later he thought was said sarcastically (it really wasn’t). In any event, I was given the go-ahead.
The thesis--Transition into Blackness: The Audience and the Speaker in the Poetry & Plays of LeRoi Jones—caused a stir in that it contained the word “fuck.” (In my defense, the word was in a long quote of Jones’ important poem, Black Art!) The stir came about because I was (and remain to this day) a two-finger typist, and had arranged for the Department secretary to type the manuscript—no word processors or personal computers in 1969. The Chairman called me into his office and closed the door. He stuttered that Mrs. Smith (not her real name) was not an “academic,” and so shouldn’t be subjected to such “dirty” words. He wanted me to type the offending page myself. Long story short: When I was unable to find a typewriter with a perfectly-matched font, I asked Mrs. Smith if I could use her machine for, maybe 20 minutes. She asked why. I told her. She laughed and typed the “dirty” words herself.
The link below will take you to a 6-minute recording of Jones reading “Black Art!” Click on it if you dare:
Epilogue
A Ph.D. and a number of years later I was working at writing and doing non-academic things on a horse ranch in Northern New Mexico. My brother—at the time a doctoral candidate at the University of Oklahoma—telephoned to say that the English Department at OU had come into some oil money and was fixing to hire a dozen-or-so Ph.D.s to teach lower division courses. He suggested that I might want to send a curriculum vitae and a cover letter. I did. I never heard a word back.
A couple of months later, my brother telephoned again to say that he’d seen the new schedule for the Fall term and noticed that an “R. Querry” would be teaching a survey course in Black Literature. Turns out the folks in the English Department had alertly noticed my Master’s Thesis and, not having a person of color available to teach the course, had assigned it to me, along with a couple of writing courses.
Below, one of my favorite images--Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou
A Ph.D. and a number of years later I was working at writing and doing non-academic things on a horse ranch in Northern New Mexico. My brother—at the time a doctoral candidate at the University of Oklahoma—telephoned to say that the English Department at OU had come into some oil money and was fixing to hire a dozen-or-so Ph.D.s to teach lower division courses. He suggested that I might want to send a curriculum vitae and a cover letter. I did. I never heard a word back.
A couple of months later, my brother telephoned again to say that he’d seen the new schedule for the Fall term and noticed that an “R. Querry” would be teaching a survey course in Black Literature. Turns out the folks in the English Department had alertly noticed my Master’s Thesis and, not having a person of color available to teach the course, had assigned it to me, along with a couple of writing courses.
Below, one of my favorite images--Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou
