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than filling their ears with words. Emmett watched the change and was glad that it happened the way it did, heightening the contradictions to the point of no return.

The money theme kept beating its rhythm into Emmett's mind, forming a pattern that became a medley of riotous melodies from the ghetto insurrections to the student uprisings to the prison rebellions which for him became the most important--the Attica massacre spelling it out for those who, until then, just didn't understand.

He thought about the word Attica, which was the name for that part of Greece which encircled the ancient city of Athens. He saw the analogy between the city and state of New York. Most inmates in that Attica state penitentiary were city slickers being guarded by hokey, upstate appleknockers in the same way the lawabiding citizens of the city of New York are legislated against by country-boy "representatives" who have no real idea about the problems of running an urban environment.

Emmett decided to concern himself with what was once known as urban blight, now as urban abandonment. He knew that in New York City thirty thousand to forty thousand dwellings were abandoned each year, in Philadelphia twenty thousand, and much the same, in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland and San Francisco. There was a section of Brooklyn called Brownsville which he chose as a plausible spot to maybe do it. To send out a general alarm to all those wandering, heavy hipsters who learned the trade of how to live their lives, and invite them all to converge on Brownsville, occupy it, reconstruct it as a community and try to do what most of them had sought to do in other places without making all the same mistakes. This time as a really postcompetitive, comparative collective community.

Emmett knew who they were by now, and he thought of them as eagles: "Individuals, families, communes, gangs, who are bound together by the blues life. The ones that throw it all away. They're everything anyone wants to be. They're the cream of the streets and their frame of reference is a style of life and death that has been censored from history and condemned to hearsay since man learned to read and write. They are the ones to survive the plagues, the ones in this country who are not in an illusory bag and the ones who get more than the oakey-doke without askin'.

"The best music--the best of everything that is expressive of all this country's got to give is by and about them. [end page 495]