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A Contract. (For the Destruction and Rebuilding of Paterson

By Amiri Baraka b. 1934 Amiri Baraka

Flesh, and cars, tar, dug holes beneath stone

a rude hierarchy of money, band saws cross out

music, feeling. Even speech, corrodes.

I came here

from where I sat boiling in my veins, cold fear

at the death of men, the death of learning, in

cold fear, at my own. Romantic vests of same death

blank at the corner, blank when they raise their fingers

Criss the hearts, in dark flesh staggered so marvelous

are their lies. So complete, their mastery, of these

stupid niggers. Loud spics kill each other, and will not

make the simple trip to Tiffany's. Will not smash their stainless

heads, against the simpler effrontery of so callous a code as gain.

You are no brothers, dirty woogies, dying under dried rinds, in massa's

droopy tuxedos. Cab Calloways of the soul, at the soul's juncture, a

music, they think will save them from our eyes. (In back of the terminal

where the circus will not go. At the backs of crowds, stooped and vulgar

breathing hate syllables, unintelligible rapes of all that linger in

our new world. Killed in white fedora hats, they stand so mute at what

whiter slaves did to my father. They muster silence. They pray at the

steps of abstract prisons, to be kings, when all is silence, when all

is stone. When even the stupid fruit of their loins is gold, or something

else they cannot eat.

Amiri Baraka, “A Contract (For the Destruction and Rebuilding of Paterson)” from Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995 (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Amiri Baraka. Reprinted with the permission of Sll/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Source: Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones 1961-1995 (Marsilio Publishers, 1995)

Biography

Amiri Baraka was born LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka has become most known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that has made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond . . .

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