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FREEDOMWAYS            THIRD QUARTER 1969

And in defining this word "freedom" for the Black man, Jones simply refers to having the weight of the white man, off the Black man's back and soul. 

In "Cold, Hurt and Sorrow (streets of despair)," the author gives a brief but moving assessment of the down-trodden Black man - beaten down by the oppression of white supremacy. This essay is written in the same sympathetic yet unsensational vein as a short story, "Rhobert" from Cane by Jean Toomer. Jones states that it's difficult enough trying "to be human under any circumstances, but when there is an entire civilization determined to stop you from being one, things get a little more desperately complicated."14 The Black man often seeks temporary escape. He can either become a "Bigger" (of Richard Wright's Native Son) and attempt to find his manhood and himself by murder, or he can be a "Mrs. Thomas" (Bigger's Mother) and go to church several days and evenings during the week, or he can take up a form of ghetto "voodoo," and buy charms and herbs and roots, or he can shoot himself up with heroin and drink himself down with "sterno" or "Thunderbird" wine. There are innumerable pacifiers the poor Black man can take up; and each one becomes yet another pathetic detour from true manhood, true freedom.

It is in his essay on "The Myth of Negro Literature," that Jones begins to condemn the literature of his predecessors as being evasive of the real problems and real needs of the Black man. He believes that only in the Negro people's music-its jazz and its blues-have the real feelings and life-styles of the Black man been fulfilled. For there has never, to Jones' knowledge, been an equivalent to the music of a Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker in Black writing. In writing on the need for a more truthful, more cohesive (faithfully relating one's culture and one's background to writing) Black literature, he states that it must not be imitative of the white man's writings, that it must have its own values stemming from the average black man's experience. Jones simply states what his young followers have taken up their philosophy: 

If there is ever a Negro literature, it must disengage itself from the weak, heinous elements of the culture that spawned it, and use its very existence as evidence of a more profound America. But as long as the Negro writer contents himself with the imitation of the useless ugly inelegance of the stunted middle-class mind, academic or popular, and refuses to look around him and 

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