In "Tyndall Armory" my autobiography
primarily serves as geography.
We were there in the poem because I was there,
but the most effusive and relevant gestures in the poem
are reserved for my friend Richard and Chuck
D, who was by his very position a performer
and political advocate before becoming
the embodiment of those secret and public domains of our lives
that Ben Okri talked about.
He is a spectacle because his job in art
requires it, which brings me to Jack
Johnson, the primary subject of The Big Smoke.
Johnson is one of the most complex historical figures
that we have in part because of the way he operated
in the world and in part because the way
the world framed those actions.
If my mother could find a way to get past Johnson's
physical attractiveness and his magnetic personality,
and I don't think that there's any universe in which she could
have done that, I imagine she might have told him to not
make a spectacle of himself.
Johnson was outspoken, self-possessed,
self-aggrandizing, and all around aware
that the people want a show.
He was willing to give them that show;
better yet, he was willing to be that show
because it benefited him.
Let me go further with this.
We have many brilliant books and individual poems
about the first generation immigrant experience
in America, but what about the first free generation?
As you're going to hear in these poems,
Jack Johnson's parents were slaves
and he was so self-determined and so talented
that he was able to become the most famous athlete
in the world at his time.
And this is in spite of the brutalities of reconstruction
and Jim Crow, in spite of the fact that very few people were
interested in having a Black heavyweight champion,
in spite of the way he treated the women around him,
and in spite of the fact that everything
he did he learned himself.
Jack Johnson was 30 years old when he finally
got his shot at the heavyweight championship
and he'd been the best prizefighter in the world
for several years before that.
The boxing establishment and in particular
the White heavyweight champions, Jim Jeffries and Tommy
Burns who you're going to see drew
what was called the color line back then
and would not fight Jack Johnson because he was Black.
It took the spectacle--
I mean, and I'm talking about a real spectacle
in the true sense of the word-- of Jack Johnson following
Tommy Burns all over the United States
and challenging him to fight from ringside.
And that didn't work, so he followed him to Australia;
and that didn't work, and he followed him
to France and to the UK.
And every time he would get up there, he would look up
and there's Jack Johnson at ringside saying,
I'll fight you for free.
You're no real champion, you're afraid of me.
As it too.
Is that loud enough?
Not quite.
Right into it.
See?
I'm soft spoken.
So now that everyone can hear me.
So anyway, he followed him around.
And it took Jack Johnson following
Tommy Burns all over the US and to Europe challenging him
from the ringside along with a purse of $50,000, which
was more than anyone had ever been paid
for a heavyweight fight or any fight
up to that point to get Tommy Burns in the ring.
In essence, Johnson had to create this spectacle
around himself that was bigger than the sport, an already
enormous spectacle of blood and brutality to shame Tommy Burns
into fighting him.
And once Johnson became heavyweight champion,
he had to continue to show that and continue
the show because it was expected of him which is especially
complicated when you consider how much disdain
white Americans at Johnson's time
had for Black people as a whole.
I mean, a few white Americans outside
of the gamblers Johnson made money
for were enthusiastic about having
a Black heavyweight champion, but that was about it.
So when you throw in the fact that he had a white wife
and two white mistresses and he was very overt about that,
most people didn't want to have anything
to do with Jack Johnson.
So let me run down the accoutrements
of spectacle for Jack Johnson before I read these poems.
They're all superficial but they will
help you to understand what an event he was.
Johnson had gold fronts, he had gold teeth like rappers do now.
Like I said, he was married to a white woman, Etta,
and he had two white mistresses, Hattie and Belle,
and they pop up in the poems.
All of this was in 1908.
Muhammad Ali, the great Muhammad Ali once said, this is a quote,
"Jack Johnson was the greatest.
He had to be the greatest of them all.
It wasn't no Black Panthers, wasn't no bodyguards.
White people were lynching Negroes
and that Negro was doing all kinds of crazy stuff in them
days.
He was bad when you think about it.
I know I'm bad, but he was crazy."
Jack Johnson had a white valet and chauffeur
and he owned five cars at a time when
there was no such thing as an inexpensive car.
To give you a little perspective,
at the time in 1910, there were 100,000 cars
in the entire United States and Jack Johnson had five cars.
I know that's got to be more than--
I don't know if anybody here is from the Dakotas,
but certainly he had more cars than either of the Dakotas
had at that time, maybe Montana too.
So I keep thinking if there was such thing as Lifestyles
of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs,
he would have been on there with his cars
fanned out in the front of his driveway.
Again, it's all superficial things,
but they speak to what Johnson valued and the things
people recognized him for.
They also speak to his unparalleled ability
to manipulate expectations and perceptions.
There are a lot of almost true stories about Jack Johnson,
and I'm going to finish this up with one of them.
There's one that he punched a shark when he was 12 years old,
there's another one that he was a spy for the US government
during World War I. But the one that's most often told
is about his driving.
Jack Johnson was driving in his usual fast manner
through some small town and a cop
saw him and pulled him over.
The cops had bicycles, so the cop stopped him on his bicycle
and pulled him over and he was like, you're
speeding, that's a $50 fine, because he recognized
Jack Johnson.
Like, there are not a lot of Black people
with cars if you think about just the odds.
This dude's like, hmm, you must be Jack Johnson.
So he pulls him over, he says, it's going to be 50 bucks.
And Jack Johnson pulls out this big wad of money
and hands him a $100 bill and the cop gets all flustered,
he's like, I don't have change for a hundred.
Jack Johnson's like, just keep it; I'll be back this afternoon
and I'm going the same speed.
So the spectacle of action, the spectacle of myth,
the spectacle of racism and necessary resistance,
the spectacle of a publicly lived life, the little
spectacles we call historical poems.
I wish I could have been here to hear Kimiko, Khadijah,
and Terrance talk about this.
I imagine their takes were as brilliant
as their respective poetries are.
It's tough to be the caboose for such
an amazing group of writers.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to spend the rest of the time reading poems.
And so let me get--