Panther Baby (11 page)

Both sides were hyped and paranoid because of the disinformation. We all wondered who in our midst could be a “pig,” and we knew that the bullet that killed you could come from the front or the back. Veteran Panthers looked at newer Panthers with suspicion and at each other with doubt. Was Sister So-and-So leaving for a week because her mother was really sick? Did Brother So-and-So get his assault charges dropped because of lack of evidence or because he made a deal?

I took the floor at one of our monthly central staff meetings to talk about the sense of paranoia in the party. “When I joined the Panthers two years ago, Panthers were on the offensive with community patrols, programs, and rallies. When you turned on the news you would see Panthers storming the state capital at Sacramento, or Bobby, Eldridge, or David verbally kicking ass doing an interview. Now, whenever you turn on the TV, there’s a story about a Panther who’s been busted or been killed. I wouldn’t join today if I saw all this shit coming down on the party. And anyone who joins knowing all this shit is coming down has got to be a fool or a pig and we don’t need either one. So I propose that we do a moratorium on new members and tighten the ranks.”

My remarks got a healthy dose of applause and “right ons.” Nonetheless, the officers decided to keep the membership ranks open. I disagreed, but I was a loyal Panther and followed orders.
Th
at night I again took my turn at the window of the Harlem Panther apartment, watching the street with fatigued, bloodshot eyes, waiting for the enemy to come.

10

Revolution in Our Lifetime

I
t was spring in Harlem, and people were in bloom on the streets. Children playing and beautiful women doing African ballets just by walking down the block. Hustlers and gangsters, challenging the eyes with green and yellow silk suits and red and gold Cadillacs.

I walked down the street with Raymond Masai Hewitt, who was the Panther minister of education in California. He liked walking through the community whenever he visited a local chapter. I had become part of the Panthers’ National Speakers Bureau.
Th
e senior leadership had seen me rap at various local fund-raisers for the Panther 21 and decided to make me part of the national speaking team. Masai taught me to walk through the poorest part of town anywhere I was appearing so I could talk about the local problems and issues in my speech. Many colleges and universities border poor communities, and we would try to fire up university students about conditions of poverty and police brutality that existed near their classrooms and dormitories. So in the shadow of Columbia University and the sunrise of the Apollo, Masai and I hung out with Harlem community folk; “the grassroots,” as Malcolm called them; “the lumpen proletariat,” as the Panthers called them.

Th
ere were two men—“lumpen brothers”—fighting on 120th Street. A small crowd was watching. I ran through the crowd and jumped in the middle of the action. Gently, but firmly, I pushed a short dude and a muscle-bound cat apart, without thinking, doing it like I did it all the time. “Don’t fight, brothers,” I shouted. “
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at’s what the oppressor wants us to do—kill each other.”
Th
ose words and my Black Panther buttons were usually enough to cool the situation. If there were no fellow Panthers present to help me, someone from the crowd usually stepped forward to help me keep the combatants apart.
Th
is time no one moved.

Masai yelled, “Jamal, he’s got a knife.”

I turned to see that “Shorty” had pulled a hunting knife and was starting to swing at “Muscles,” the guy I was holding. Swoosh.
Th
e blade swept by my ear as Shorty tried to leap over me to get his thrust in.

Common sense should have made me jump out of the way and run. But what young Panther has common sense? Instead I walked toward Shorty and his ten-inch blade.

“You want to kill somebody, brother? Kill me.
Th
at’s all the pigs want to see is another dead nigga. Any dead nigga will do.”

“But I ain’t got no beef with you,” Shorty snarled. He sidestepped me so he could lunge at Muscles.

I pushed his knife aside and yelled at Muscles over my shoulder, “Split, man. Run!” Muscles blended into the crowd and made his retreat. “It’s over, brother,” I yelled at Shorty. “He’s gone.”

By this time Masai was at my side. Shorty had lowered his knife, but I was still worried that he would run Muscles down and stab him.

“Why don’t you let me hold the knife?”

“What?” Shorty barked, like I had just asked for a kidney.

“You could get it from the Panther office later. Right on 122nd and Seventh Avenue.”

“I know where the office is,” Shorty replied. “My aunt got clothes and food there before.” Shorty handed me the hunting knife and walked off.

Masai looked at me and shook his head. “Are you crazy, Jamal? You don’t jump in front of a knife like that.” It was a warning and a compliment at the same time.

When I was a kid there was a neighborhood wino who we called Mr. Charlie. Now this was a funny name for a black man, since Charlie and Mr. Charlie were nicknames commonly reserved for white people. But our parents would not let us call any adult by their first name, so Charlie the wino became known to us kids as Mr. Charlie.

Th
ere were two cool things about Charlie. One, after he downed about a pint of wine and got his head where he needed it to be, he would forget we were kids and share the second pint with us. Two, he would tell us crazy stories about the Korean War. Mr. Charlie was in a black unit that saw two-thirds of its men killed in combat, and he told us he was “shell-shocked” and on full disability from the Veterans Administration. It wasn’t recognized as posttraumatic stress disorder in those days, but Mr. Charlie had clearly been damaged by the war.

One story he told was about driving in a convoy at high speeds late at night with the headlights off, so Korean artillery could not get a fix on their positions. Every so often a Korean local would run in front of the truck as though he wanted to be killed. Drivers were ordered not to stop for fear of the enemy opening fire, and sometimes these people would get hit and the convoy would roll on. Mr. Charlie explained that Korean men weren’t actually trying to kill themselves, but instead wanted to kill a demon that was riding on their back.
Th
ey believed the only way to do this was to have a truck barely miss them, and that would kill the demon.

As I grew into my teenage years, I began to secretly believe that a demon was on my back and that it would take a near brush with death to remove it. Not only did my demon ride me, but I believed he killed many people close to me, like Pa Baltimore; my mother, Gladys; and Panther leaders like Bunchy Carter and John Huggins who were assassinated on my birthday. A part of me believed these deaths were all my fault, as was the arrest of the Panther 21 because of the actions of Yedwa, my mentor. So I kept pushing myself into dangerous situations, hoping that those near-miss razor slashes and gunshots would kill the demon, once and for all.

Th
e Panther office was essentially a crisis and relief center with socialist politics. People would come in at all hours to have us break up disputes, intervene when the cops were making arrests, or for emergency medical care and disputes with slumlords. A few people even kicked the heroin habit in the Panther office. We once took turns sitting with a twenty-year-old brother named Stan as for three days he sweated, shivered, cramped, and vomited. He had tried to kick the drug a couple of times before but felt that having the Panthers standing guard over him was the charm he needed to break the habit.

Drugs were an epidemic in Harlem.
Th
ere were intersections and blocks where junkies would line up to buy drugs in full view of the cops and the community. In fact, many of the cops were on the drug dealers’ payrolls, and the community felt powerless to do anything. We would claim certain areas as “liberated territory” and make it plain to the drug dealers that we would deal with them if they came there. Blocks where we organized buildings, breakfast programs, liberation schools, and so on were off limits.

But we knew the Panthers alone could not run all of the drug dealers from the community. It would be the community itself, strong and organized into a “people’s party” and a “people’s army,” that would make it impossible for drugs and crime to exist. Our goal was not to have every black person in the community join the Black Panther Party but rather to make the Black Panther Party obsolete because the whole community had become politicized and organized. In our youth, fueled by enthusiasm, we truly believed this would happen.
Th
e only question was how long it would take.

One night a group of us community activists were hanging out in the dorms of Columbia University—Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Young Lords, Asian activists, and members of the women’s movement. We got into a heavy debate about how long the revolution would take. “One year,” an optimist shouted. Felipe Luciano, Denise Oliver, and Yoruba Guzman from the Lords predicted Puerto Rican independence and socialism within two years. “Five years,” a pragmatist countered. Finally we agreed that the military- industrial complex of America was too difficult an enemy to overcome quickly and that the revolution would take at least ten years.
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is led us to the horrifying realization that those of us who lived might be near or over thirty when the people’s victory arrived.

Not only was this the night that I helped to set the date for our goal of completing the revolution, it was the first time I dropped acid. An SDS kid passed out tabs of “sunshine,” and I swallowed one with some wine. For a while I felt nothing. I was used to a swig of wine or a hit of a joint going to my head in a few seconds.
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is is some bullshit, I thought as I watched people roll around and dance in the dorm rooms. Acid must be a white-people thing, cuz I don’t feel nothin’.
Th
at’s when the first burst of electric butterflies exploded in my stomach and shot up my spine. “Damn,” I said out loud. A few seconds later another burst.
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en I started laughing uncontrollably.

“Just relax,” a pretty white student named Natalie said to me. She guided me to a bed and helped me stretch out. “Just breathe and feel the music. Everything is cool.”
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e ceiling melted away and the sky was filled with colors as Jimi
Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” played in the background. Natalie gave me fruit, juice, hugs, and cookies and made sure I was okay as the trip got more intense. Eventually we wound up in the dorm shower together and got it on, laughing, coming up with crazy positions, slipping on soap, and falling on our asses.
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ere was no towel so we wrapped our wet bodies under one sheet and stumbled back to her dorm bed.

As I lay next to Natalie, the vision of revolution in our lifetime started playing in my head.
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ere were rainbow people dancing in the streets; Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” was the new national anthem; President Bobby Seale ordered the White House to be painted black and blue, the Panther colors. But I’m not at the celebration. Instead I’m in a grave, dead at seventeen, my troubled spirit watching everything from the other side. My trip suddenly made me feel that I needed to be back in Harlem, back on the street. I climbed out of bed and found my clothes. Natalie opened her eyes and smiled at me. “See you in the colors,” she said. We hugged again and I left.

At three thirty, maybe four, in the morning, I’m standing on Amsterdam Avenue waiting for the light to change, or actually stuck in the same spot, watching the same stoplight explode from green to yellow to red, accompanied by bursts of music. Suddenly I feel a heavy weight on my back. A swirling shadow. My demon. I run into traffic like one of the Korean men in Mr. Charlie’s war stories. A taxi driver blares his horn. A truck bears down on me. I stop, frozen for a second, and then run.
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e truck barely misses me.

Th
e stocky white truck driver pulls the vehicle over, hops out, and walks toward me as if he plans to kick my ass. “Are you fucking crazy? What the hell is the matter with you?”

Th
e threat of a fight suddenly cleared my head. “Nothing’s the matter with me. Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going?” I yelled as I jumped into a combat stance and threw some punches at the air.

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e truck driver shook his head and climbed back in his cab. “Fuckin’ psycho,” he muttered as he pulled off.

I rubbed my eyes and checked the streets to see if my demon was lying dead on the asphalt. Nothing. I took a couple of deep breaths and headed down the hill toward Harlem.

Once a black teacher from a Harlem school came into the office and asked if I could come and speak to her class. I said yes and scribbled down the date on a piece of paper, then put the paper in the desk drawer and forgot about it. A couple of weeks later Afeni approached me and said that the teacher had returned to the office disappointed because I failed to show up at her class assembly. I responded about some Panther assignment that had come up that was more important. I had jumped into a car with a group of Panther officers to head up to New Haven where tension was brewing between the local police and black residents.
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e New Haven chapter asked for reinforcements, and I was one of the first out the door looking for “action.”

“Nothing is more important than keeping your word once you’ve made a commitment,” Afeni said, “especially when you’ve made a commitment to black children.
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eir lives are already filled with disappointments and broken promises.
Th
e least you should have done was to contact the teacher and let her know that you weren’t coming.”

Afeni had put me “in check,” and I accepted her admonition humbly. Panthers, especially Panther men, tended to have a healthy dose of arrogance to go along with the swagger. We were badass dudes who were willing to die for our beliefs, but we could also be cocky-ass dudes who felt we could do no wrong. One of our guiding principles was respecting criticism and constructive self-criticism. Afeni would often be the first to point out our personal and our organizational mistakes, especially when it came to the community. She could give the criticism gently or ferociously, but she never held back. She could theorize with the best of the party’s intellectuals and cuss with the meanest of the party’s street cats. I learned many of the important lessons of manhood from Afeni. Keeping my word, loving and caring for children, respecting women as equals, and honoring and taking time for my elders were all things that she impressed upon me.

I also learned from her what quiet courage was and how it could be more effective than the loud bravado of leaping at flying bullets. One morning Afeni and I were alone in the dining room of a Harlem church where the Panthers conducted its breakfast program.
Th
e kids were gone, and I was mopping the dining room when a dozen cops with guns drawn stormed into the basement. A white lieutenant with a gold shield and a suit walked up to me.

“What’s going on down here?” he asked, snarling.

“It’s a community program,” I snapped back. “We serve free breakfast to children.”

“We got a report that someone is down here with a gun.”

“Ain’t no guns down here,” I replied. “I told you this is a community breakfast program.” I deliberately left out the word Black Panther, because it was clear that this raid was a setup.
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e pigs were about to arrest us or kill us and then conveniently find a gun that they would claim was a Panther weapon. We’d heard that Panther programs were being harassed and shut down in this way all across the country.