Panther Baby (17 page)

“What do you want to be, Angel?”—our conversations haunted me for months after his death.

“What do you want to be?” he answered, eyes sparkling, full
of hope. “Whatever you want to be, that’s what I want to be.”

Angel’s murder rocked me to the core.
Th
e demon of death that I thought I had purged was once again riding my back. I drifted away from teaching karate and from the counseling jobs I had at a drug center and a youth program. Who was I to teach or counsel anybody?

Th
e gypsy cab still paid the bills. In fact, I saved enough money to buy another gypsy cab, which I leased out. I started numbing out using weed, alcohol, and sometimes coke to ease the pain. I went into a kind of self-imposed exile. I didn’t want to think or talk about the Panther movement. Didn’t want to remember or deal with the battles and the open wounds that were still searing my memories and ravaging my dreams. I hung out with an eclectic group that included street people, artists, and folks from the night life. I hustled just enough to support my habit. My “deals and introductions” were among my small circle of friends. We fancied ourselves outlaws, sharing contempt for the system and the “square life.” Even so, I would have bouts of depression and guilt, feeling that I had fallen victim to some of the habits and behavior that I fought against as a young Panther.

Politics wasn’t completely gone from the mix. I had some of my best discussions about human rights, social issues, and progressive politics in the backs of bars and in after-hours joints with hustlers, hookers, and thieves.

I was still wild and reckless, ready to roll with any friend who had a problem or beef on the street. My demon continued to whisper through my subconscious. I didn’t die in a blaze of glory during the revolution; maybe I could still have a samurai-like warrior’s death on the street.

Th
at chance would come on a summer night in 1980. I was cooling out listening to jazz in my Greenwich Village apartment. It was a neat little hideaway—a small one-bedroom garden apartment with a fireplace. It had two exits, one through the courtyard and another through the main building, perfect for a posttraumatic-stress suffering former Panther who was ready to spring into any kind of action. My phone rang with the proper code. Two rings. Hang up. Call back. (
Th
is is how it worked before the days of caller ID and cell phones.) “Yeah,” I answered, as flat and cold as possible. I didn’t like phones. I did time with too many people who, like me, listened to hours of wiretaps and dumb conversations during their trials.

“It’s Jake,” came the frantic teenage voice through the receiver. “I just got into some shit with some crazy dude in the bar.”

“Okay. Be cool,” I said, not wanting to hear any details over the phone. “I’ll meet you on the corner.” I threw on a shirt and headed out to meet Jake on the corner of Hudson and Perry close to my apartment.

Jake was an eighteen-year-old white kid from the Midwest whose mom was part of our night-life circle of friends. He and I bonded over Bruce Lee movies, and I had been giving him karate lessons in the park for about six months. When I saw Jake, his shirt was covered with blood.

“What happened, man?” I asked as I inspected his face and arms for cuts.

“It’s not my blood. It’s this bouncer named Nelson. We had some words about me getting off the pool table and he shoved me. I pushed him back and he rushed me. I popped him with a backhand you showed me and cracked his nose.”

I told Jake to come back to my pad so he could clean up. He had lost his wallet in the scuffle and wanted to go back to the bar and look for it.

Even though this was the West Village, generally a safe place, this was a shady bar, and I had warned Jake about hanging out there, but he liked the pool table—plus they let him drink without checking ID. We checked around the bar for his wallet with no luck. As we were walking up Greenwich Street, Nelson, the muscular thirty-year-old bouncer, rode up on a bike. “
Th
at’s the guy,” Jake whispered.

Nelson got off his bike, leaned it against a telephone post, and said calmly, “Oh, there you go. I been looking for you.” He was about twenty feet away. Jake walked over to talk to him. I lay back, not wanting the bouncer to feel that I was there to pose a threat, especially since they were about to talk it out.

Th
e bouncer reached into his crotch and withdrew a small pistol. I recognized it as a .25, maybe .32, caliber.
Th
e action seemed disconnected from his mellow demeanor. I couldn’t believe he was pulling out a gun. So I froze, watching. Unbelieving. He raised the gun and pointed it at Jake. “Don’t shoot me, man,” Jake pleaded. His frightened voice startled me out of my daze.

“Jake, run,” I yelled in a commanding tone.
Th
e bouncer pulled the trigger twice as Jake rushed past him. I looked around for a weapon.
Th
ank God for dirty New York City streets.
Th
ere was a half-empty beer bottle in the gutter. I swooped it up and hurtled it at the bouncer, cracking him in the back of the head. He spun around and fired at me. I ducked and rolled into the street.

I looked over my shoulder as I was sprinting away and saw Jake limping badly.
Th
e bouncer was running behind him, firing. My legs wanted to keep running to safety. My gut knew that Jake was a dead man if I didn’t do something. I leaped over the hood of a parked car and got myself between Jake and the bouncer.

“You gotta run, man,” I urged.

“I can’t,” Jake answered in pain. “My leg.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “We’re running tonight.”

I grabbed the back of his belt with one hand and his shirt collar with the other and dragged him along with me. We ran around and ducked between parked cars as the bouncer kept firing. How many damn bullets does that thing have? I thought as the bullets whizzed by. Time does slow in the midst of high intensity stress. I had experienced it before on different occasions when bullets from drug dealers and cops flew by my head, and the seconds that night felt like long, drawn-out minutes. Finally the gun clicked empty and the bouncer hopped on his bike and raced off.

I threw Jake’s arm around my shoulder and headed toward the nearest precinct, which was two blocks away. Cops were running up the street toward the sound of the gunfire.
Th
e police captain reached us first. He saw that Jake was wounded. “What happened?” he asked.

“A guy tried to rob us. He shot my friend.”
Th
e captain instructed a cop to take us into the precinct. Good move, I thought.

Ambulances were notoriously slow in answering sidewalk calls in New York, but a gunshot call from a precinct should make them materialize instantly. I was wrong. Jake sat on the bench bleeding, with the color draining from his face. He threw up and went into shock. Several white cops stood around, just looking. I asked for paper towels so I could clean Jake up and put pressure on his wounds.

When I lifted his shirt, I saw two bullet wounds going into his back.
Th
is made me nervous. I had seen people shot in the torso who seemed fine but then died a few hours later from the internal damage. I rushed over to the desk sergeant. “Can you call the ambulance again, please? He’s going into shock.”
Th
at’s when I felt a sharp pain in my arm and noticed a bullet wound near my elbow.

Th
e ambulance finally came and took us to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Th
e doctors found that Jake had been shot three times but had sustained no major damage. My bullet chipped a bone and hurt like hell, but my arm would be okay. Jake and I were moved to a small ward.

Th
e hospital staff didn’t know what to make of the parade of visitors who came by while I was there.
Th
ey included black, white, Latino, Middle Eastern, hardened ex-cons, radical lawyers, young Wall Street guys, overly dramatic actors, and a black and white six-foot-four drag queen duo named Eileen and Bianca. I had walked into an acting class on a whim a few months earlier, and I loved it. I became immersed in the improv, classical, and technique training.
Th
e teachers invited me to become part of the Actors Playhouse Ensemble, and I acted in several of its off-Broadway productions.

Several months after the shooting, I was subpoenaed to testify at the bouncer’s trial. I had given the police little information about the shooting, with the intention of solving the problem in my own way. Jake identified the bouncer, which resulted in his arrest for attempted murder. I testified honestly that I didn’t remember much about the person who shot me.
Th
e bouncer was acquitted of the charges and Jake moved back to the Midwest.

A few weeks later I saw the bouncer on the street. He called me over and apologized for shooting me. Our respective street networks had given the bouncer and me a lot of information about each other. I knew that he was connected to the Columbian and Italian mobs. He knew I was a former Panther. We had both served time and knew the rules of prison and the street. He also knew that I had honored the “no snitch” code. “Whatever you want to make things right—ten grand, cocaine, whatever—you got,” the bouncer said with a sneer, a mixture of apology and arrogance. “But that kid was disrespectful in the bar and a snitch in the courtroom. He’s still going to get his.”

I looked at the bouncer, who was calm yet deadly intent, the way he was when he shot us on Greenwich Street. “Here’s what I want to make things right. I want you to forget about your beef with this kid the way I’m gonna forget about my beef with you.” My posture told him that this would be the deal or this would be war. Finally the bouncer shook my hand, and the beef was squashed.
Th
e code of the street, the honor and word of the street soldier.

Several years passed and I continued teaching karate, acting, and hanging out with friends ranging from artists to outlaws. I also stayed in touch with a number of my Panther comrades, some of whom were fugitives on local and federal charges. My wide range of friends gave me connections to vacant apartments, fake documents, and contacts in different countries. I began helping “movement people” on the run with places to stay, fake IDs, and safe routes out the country. I believed that the government had jailed Panthers on trumped-up charges and was happy to help other former Panthers and young radicals avoid prison. I was willing to help Panthers who had escaped from prison too.

Disco fever had swept the country, and it was now the late 1980s. But Harlem, like other poor communities, was literally crumbling.
Th
ere were endless blocks that looked like London after a bombing raid. Slumlords had walked away rather than pay taxes.
Th
e city took over the properties but did nothing to repair the decay. Poor families still lived in some of these buildings, without heat and with electricity stolen via long extension cords connected to streetlamps.
Th
ere were community organizers trying to help, but much of the black revolutionary movement had been destroyed or driven “underground” by police raids and the FBI
cointelpro
attacks.
Th
ose of us who were still in contact felt like we were part of a “resistance” that needed to survive by any means necessary until the movement could regroup.

One night, in July 1981, a lawyer friend named Harold Briscoe stopped by my apartment in the Village with his dinner date, a stunning woman named Joyce Walker. Joyce was an actress, dancer, and model who had been part of the original Broadway cast of
Hair.
She had also been the first black woman on the cover of
Seventeen
magazine. She graduated from Long Island University with a philosophy degree and had decided to put her artistic career on hold to attend law school. Joyce let me know that Harold was not a real date but a law school mentor. She and I went on a date and fell in love. Within six months we were married and Joyce was pregnant with our first child.

Th
ree months after that the FBI kicked our door in at four in the morning. Agents dragged me from the bedroom while a two-hundred-pound agent sat on Joyce’s back and pointed an M16 at her head. “Get off me, I’m pregnant!” I heard her angrily yell. I fought to get to her but was cuffed and dragged from the apartment. I was tried in federal court and convicted of being an accessory after the fact for hiding fugitives who were wanted by the FBI. I was sentenced to twelve and a half years. Joyce sat in the courtroom holding our now one-year-old son Jamal Jr.

16

Leavenworth University

T
h
e prison bus pulled up in front of the large structure that resembled the domed Capitol Building in Washington DC. Cell blocks jutted out from the dome, making it look like a giant concrete octopus. A sixty-foot wall with a barbed-wire crown surrounded the complex. Gun towers were placed strategically both inside and outside of the wall.
Th
is was Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility that convicts unaffectionately called “the big top.”

Th
ere were forty of us chained and shackled, hand, waist, and foot. Guards led us off the prison bus and up the long row of steps to the main entrance. On either side was a gauntlet of guards holding M16 military assault rifles, each man with a give-me-an-excuse glint in his eye. Inside the main gates we were greeted by a captain, a redneck ex-Marine in his fifties who appeared to be still fit and combat ready.
Th
e captain spoke to us in his southern drawl: “Welcome to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. If you convicts are here, then you have worked hard to get here, so let me quickly introduce you to your home for the next few years. Down this corridor to your right is the guard house, commonly known as ‘the hole.’ You fuck up once, that’s your first stop. Down this corridor to your left is the infirmary. You fuck up twice, that’s your second stop. Beyond the sixty-foot wall and the gun towers is a patch of land that holds the cow pasture and the prison cemetery. Need I say more?”

With that, we were processed in and led to the cell block that served as the reception center.
Th
e average prisoner in Leavenworth was serving fifty years, with many doing life: bank robbery, kidnapping, murder, organized crime, major drug dealers.
Th
is is where the elite of the hard core was sent to serve hard time. White-collar criminals got to serve time in one of the minimum-security prison camps that people hear about on the news.

I had been sentenced to twelve and a half years for hiding out people wanted on federal robbery and conspiracy charges. I was now twenty-nine years old, back in prison after eight years of posttraumatic stress blues. My wild post-Panther ride had led from the streets, night life, and theater back to revolutionary comrades living underground.

Th
e big yard in Leavenworth had a patchy sports field that included basketball rims, a handball court, and a weight area.
Th
ere was a sweat lodge that had been built when Native American prisoners won a court battle to allow them to practice their religion. Around the yard, prisoners grouped according to racial backgrounds and gang affiliations.
Th
e areas that they stood in had distinct boundaries and were known as courtyards or courts.
Th
e Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican mafia, the Italian mob, and the Black Revolutionary Collective were among the groups controlling territory. No prisoner stepped into another prisoner’s court uninvited.
Th
ere were neutral areas of the yard where prisoners mingled for workouts, sports, or business, which was mainly gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs. Violation of the court rules or of the convict code could easily lead to death.
Th
e sentence for killing another convict was about ten years. What’s that on top of fifty or a hundred years, or even a life sentence?
Th
e rules were reinforced by a prison culture that exploits weakness.

Th
e convict code:

1. Don’t snitch on another convict or anyone.

2. Don’t steal from another convict.

3. Do your own time.

Th
e same way there are tens of thousands of U.S. laws meant to enforce the Ten Commandments, there are dozens of ways one could violate the convict code and get killed. Stealing from another convict could be interpreted as grabbing the last piece of meat in the chow line or taking another convict’s seat in the auditorium on movie night. Leavenworth had Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Marxists, nationalists, anarchists, Neo-Nazis, Yogis, and occultists, but the convict code superseded all beliefs and ideologies. A Christian snitch would catch a knife just as quickly as an atheist.

During orientation, the guards instructed us to look for a movement sheet that was posted each day at the front of the cell block.
Th
e sheet was a printout with prisoners’ names, numbers, and any special moves that were happening for them on that day. Regular routines such as work assignments, meal times, and so forth were not posted on a daily basis. But parole board hearings, infirmary visits, cell block changes, and release dates were posted. If I were going to the infirmary the listing would be “Joseph, 0337, Infirmary 0900 hours.” A prisoner going to the parole board would be listed as “Jones, 3421, Parole Board 1100 hours.”

A young prisoner, whom I’ll call Johnny Smith, was raped and stabbed to death on the top tier of my cell block the first week I arrived at Leavenworth. He was due to be released in a few weeks, and a group of his homeboys got drunk with him on homemade liquor and held him down. Maybe they thought he wouldn’t tell. Maybe they were jealous that he had gotten parole. His body was placed in one of the eight-foot laundry bags used to collect sheets and left in a shower stall.
Th
e entire prison was locked down. Our cells were searched and we were made to step outside naked so the guards could check our bodies for scratches or wounds. I thought we would be locked in our cells for days or a week, but the next morning the cell doors opened at 6 a.m. so we could march to breakfast and go to our work assignments. Word was that the guys who killed Johnny had been arrested and thrown in the hole. I stopped at the front of the cell block and looked at the movement sheet as instructed. I saw my name listed for an infirmary visit at 0800 hours. Below me was an entry for the young prisoner who had been killed. “Smith, Johnny, 78127, Parole by Death.”

I stared at the movement sheet frozen, shaken, hardened, baptized in the realization that I was in a place where I might also be “paroled by death.”

Don’t snitch on another convict. Don’t steal from another convict. Do your own time.
I set my focus on rule number three—I would do my own time. No organizing. No joining a prison clique. No getting involved with other people’s beefs, and especially no gambling, no drugs, no sex, these being three of the main activities that created prison beefs.

One day I sat in the prison yard reading a book, as alone and as minding-my-business as I could be. An older black prisoner named Mr. Cody walked over to me. Suave, savvy, confident, he was a man who on the streets ran a bank robbery ring and gambling joints and in prison continued to “run a few things.”

“Say, youngblood, I hear you was down with the Black Panthers and things,” said Mr. Cody, asking a question that was really a statement.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, looking up from my book.

“I hear you down with a little karate and things,” he continued.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, not too surprised that my Black Panther and karate rep had followed me to Leavenworth.

“And I hear you was down with some plays and things out there.”

“Yeah?” I answered, surprised that anyone in the joint knew about my foray into theater back in the Village.

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Cody said stroking his chin.
Th
en he walked away.

I headed back to my cell a little anxious and concerned. Did the fact that I performed in a few plays violate the convict code? Would the other prisoners perceive me as soft and come at me in the shower or when the lights went down on movie night in the auditorium?
Th
e next day I finished my work assignment sweeping and mopping the library and gym. I returned to my reading spot in the big yard. Suddenly there was an eclipse. I looked up expecting to see the moon blocking the sun and instead saw Mr. Cody standing with two massive black prisoners.
Th
ey looked like NFL linebackers but were marked with knife scars and bullet wounds, like death had struck them. In fact, those were their names: Death and Struck. “Hey, youngblood, about them plays,” Mr. Cody said with a half smile.

Th
is is it, I thought, the convict code is about to punish me for my theater days. “Yeah,” I said as I got to my feet.

“I want you to pull together a little show for Black History Month. I done worked it out with the warden.”

With that Mr. Cody, Death, and Struck were gone, and like it or not, I had my assignment.

I went to the prison library and found copies of only two plays—
Romeo and Juliet,
which was definitely out of the question, and
A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry. I showed the play to Mr. Cody in the mess hall that night. “I only found one black play and it has women in it,” I explained.

“
Th
at’s okay, youngblood,” he said, smiling. “Just look around the mess hall and pick out two or three you want in the play, and we’ll put dresses on them.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking about the dresses, but he wouldn’t be deterred from me putting on some kind of Black History Month show.

I went back to my cell, grabbed a pad and pencil, and began writing a play. I called it
Parole by Death.
Th
e setting: Death Row—five men struggling with the criminal misjustice system and their conscience, days before there is to be a lottery to decide which one of them will die.

In addition to being an actress, my wife, Joyce, was a playwright whose work had been produced by Joseph Papp and Woodie King Jr. She sent me copies of her plays and other scripts so I could understand more about dramatic structure and format. Joyce would send me the plays to study, as would my good friend and attorney Bill Mogulescu.
Th
ey would make sure the plays came via bookstores or theater companies. Had they come through regular mail, the guards would have simply trashed them.

Mr. Cody secured a rehearsal space in a storage room near the gym. He also provided the cast: Death and Struck, neither of whom had an interest in acting. But Mr. Cody had aspirations of being a producer, and what Mr. Cody wanted, Mr. Cody got. As part of our rehearsals, I developed a technique of teaching acting through improv. I would create a situation that people were familiar with, throw them in the mix, and then deconstruct the scene to show them what acting techniques they had been using without realizing.

“Freeze,” I shouted at a heightened moment in a scene between Death and Struck.
Th
ey were panting and staring each other down like boxers in the ring. “Death, Struck. Wow, that was amazing! I really felt your commitment to your characters and to the scene. Death, you looked at Struck with such intensity when you told him you would stab him fifteen times and eat his liver for a snack. Struck, you were so present when you told Death you were gonna bash in his skull with the mop wringer until his brains oozed out of his ears. Great damn work!”

Th
ey continued to stare at each other as I moved from praise to deconstruction. “Now, when an actor gives a long talk or a speech, like I’m doing, that’s called a monologue. When two actors are talking back and forth, the way you guys were, that’s called dialogue. Say that with me: dialogue.”

Death kept staring at Struck and barely moved his lips as he growled. “I wasn’t dialogin’! I’m gonna kill this fool for real.”

Struck seemed to swell twice his size with anger. “You’ll be dead before you can blink, punk-ass son of a bitch.”

I jumped between them and grunted as I struggled to push them apart. “Okay, fellas. Let’s go back to our centering exercise.
Th
is is how we get rid of that negative emotion. Feet together, hands up, and breathe. You’re a tree.” I raised my arms and spread them as I demonstrated the yogalike posture. “Once again; breathe. You’re a tree.” Death and Struck looked at me like I was crazy.

At that moment Tito and Raphael, two of the leaders of the Latino crew LaRasa, strolled into the rehearsal space. Tito and Raphael had six or seven murders between them since they’d been in the joint.
Th
ey had killed people in prison hallways, corridors, and mess halls in plain view of the guards, almost chuckling as the guards handcuffed them afterwards. “Give me the ten years,” they would taunt. “You want to take away my driver’s license while you’re at it?”

Of all the prison crews, LaRasa was the worst to have a beef with.
Th
ey would pursue a vendetta to the bitter end. A LaRasa member who worked in the plumbing shop would toss a piece of metal out of the window into the big yard. Another member would file the metal against concrete every day for a month, shaping it into an ice pick. He would get a piece of plastic wrap from a LaRasa member who worked in the kitchen, get Vaseline or antibacterial ointment from another member who worked in the infirmary, wrap the ice pick in plastic, lubricate it, then insert it in his anus so he could bring it through the metal detector into the main prison. He would mount it on a piece of wood and use it to take out the vendetta victim in front of everybody in the cell block.

Tito and Raphael sat on a broken workout bench and watched the rehearsal. Death, Struck, and I were in telepathic communication with the same thought: LaRasa has left their court and come to our rehearsal. Who are they here to kill? One of the unwritten statutes of the convict code goes “
Th
e main thing is just don’t panic.” So everyone acted cool. Death and Struck put their arms up and started swaying with me. “Look, Jamal, I’m a tree,” Death grunted. “I’m a palm tree.” Still looking at Tito and Raphael out of the corner of our eyes, we began rehearsing and improvising one of the scenes from the play.

Tito kept shifting his muscular tattooed frame like something was disturbing him. He silently grew angrier and angrier. A few minutes later he stood up, pointed at me, and grimaced. “Yo,
ese,
let me talk to you a minute.” He pulled me into a corner and bored into me with a cobralike stare. I shifted my feet into a neutral karate stance, arms at my side but ready for an attack. Just be cool, Jamal, I coached myself. Talk to him man to man, don’t be too timid or aggressive, but if you see him reach around to his asshole for a knife, try to take the whole damn arm and run out the gym for help.