SOURCE: "Several Lives, Several Voices," in New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1984, pp. 11-12.

In the following review, Gates outlines The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones.

When I first met his father, Coyette Leroy Jones, I was shocked by his striking resemblance to his son. Amiri Baraka locates his first identity through this resemblance to his father: "That I was short and skinny with big eyes and looked just like my father. These were the most indelible. My earliest identity." If that's true then for much of a half-century, it is fair to say, he has been running away from that very identity.

LeRoi Jones predicted as much, even as early as 1964 when he wrote in "The Liar": "When they say, 'It is Roi / who is dead?' I wonder / who they will mean?" Anyone else who had hoped that his autobiography would at last answer this rhetorical question...