TOMMY JACQUETTE WAS the first black man I met. I realized I had known only “niggers” and a few colored fellows. I had heard of black men—men who were loving fathers and caring husbands and strong protectors. I had not really known any.
Tommy was so tall, he almost had to bend down to see me when Beverlee Bruce introduced us.
“This is Brother Jacquette,” Beverlee said, adding that he was a Watts uprising warrior. She spoke with a black militant voice inflection, the cadence of which had been set by men like Stokely Carmichael.
“How’re you doin’, Sister,” Jacquette said, reaching out a generous hand to me.
“Fine,” I mumbled through lips that could not seem to open. We were standing in the middle of Jordan Downs. Beverlee and I had just left the Saturday tutorial.
Tommy Jacquette was a willow tree adorned by a shirt in a multicolored, geometric African pattern referred to as a dashiki. He had on khaki pants and black combat boots. His voice was deep, resembling the voice of Paul Robeson, whose records had been played on York Street a long time ago. He called me “Sister” so genuinely, so purposefully, it was not an appellation but an affirmation.
“I understand you write songs and poetry, Sister,” he continued, turning a second later to give a Black Power handshake to another black fellow.
A number of them gravitated to him, deep in the middle of Jordan Downs, while we spoke. “Right on, Brother,” they said among themselves, to each other, hands touching in a cuplike fashion, thumbs upward, palm-to-palm.
“Yes, I do write songs,” I responded, convinced I would write something about him. I would write songs about all of them, this new breed of black men who were exchanging bits of conversation about plans for the future of black people, about how to help their Brothers and Sisters.
“You ought to come down to the Black Congress sometime, Sister. Maybe you could do something for black people. You know, get involved.”
“Yes, maybe,” I said as I looked to Beverlee to rescue me.
The Black Congress building might have housed an insurance company before Watts 1965, as time was marked in black Los Angeles in 1967. It was deep in the ghetto, at Florence and Broadway, a dismal corner which was not strictly in Watts. It was, however, a corner in the very heart of where the 1965 uprising had raged, when Watts had really been the entire Los Angeles black community.
The Congress, as it was called, was an umbrella group, made up of virtually every black organization in the area. It was administered by an executive committee composed of a representative of each member organization. The Black Congress was the expression of a collective desire to emphasize the common will and serve the common interests of black people.
Tommy Jacquette was on the Congress’s executive committee. He represented the Watts Summer Festival Commission, which had been formed to keep people’s consciousness of Watts alive. There was one woman member, Margaret Wright, who headed the local branch of the powerful National Welfare Rights Organization. There was the progressive Black Panther Political Party, headed by John Floyd. There was the militant Community Alert Patrol, headed by Ron Wilkins, known as “Brother Crook.” There was the more militant US Organization headed by Ron Karenga, who was called “Maulana.” The executive director of the Congress was a rather mild-mannered, middle-class man named Walter Bremond.
Only seconds after our introduction, Walter Bremond urged me to volunteer to work on the Black Congress’s newspaper. Experience was not as important as willingness and commitment to black people, Bremond responded to my hesitation. It would be a long ride on the bus from Westwood, I thought.
I wondered what would have happened to the Black Congress’s newspaper had Bremond not employed me. The staff numbered two, including me. John Floyd, the more experienced of us, became, by default, the head of the staff. John had a certain charm, despite the fact that his look was a bit too reminiscent of my father. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and carried a briefcase everyday, which contained his pistol. He taught me the language and the ideas of the Movement, that is, the left or militant wing of the black struggle for civil and human rights. He delivered me into the peripheral ranks of that movement.
John Floyd and I wrote copy together, pasted up storyboards, and typed and turned out, in six weeks, the first issue of the Black Congress newspaper. It was called Harambee—Swahili for “Let’s Pull Together.” We also slept together, once. After that, however, John ignored me on a personal level, which I took personally, even though the times had changed and making love had become a thing akin to drinking water.
Over those weeks, I developed a routine. I worked during the day in an office at UCLA and, most evenings and weekends, found my way to Florence and Broadway to work on the newspaper or do whatever else was necessary: type, clean offices, answer telephones. I began writing poems and songs about black men, black people, in between fashioning with John the next issue of Harambee, and attending any rally or meeting remotely connected to the struggle.
I did not resist at all when Crook strapped the two bandoliers of shotgun shells around my waist before taking me to the San Diego rally. He also placed two shotguns on the rear floor of his “hoopty,” his automobile, in which we would ride to the rally. Guns were the natural accessory of the new black militants, who were determined to claim their manhood “by any means necessary.” Crook, who came out of the Slauson gang, was currently head of the Community Alert Patrol, which organized blacks to resist police violence. Sandra Scott, his lady, was to have gone with us to the rally but had become ill. Now just the two of us were riding south on the San Diego Freeway at the maximum speed Crook’s 1938 Plymouth, replete with running boards, could muster.
We joined several hundred others who had come to San Diego to support a black U.S. Navy man who was facing a court-martial for having referred to President Johnson as a “warmonger.” The reaction of Navy officials to his remark seemed particularly outrageous since thousands of Americans who opposed the Vietnam War had been defiling the name of the commander in chief of their armed forces.
Crook and I stood together listening to the speeches denouncing “the Man,” the white man, who spoke with a forked tongue about freedom.
I thought she was Germanic-looking when she approached us. She had big bones that were a hanger for what seemed her incongruous, Africanesque garb. Angela Davis introduced herself to Crook and me, as people did at such rallies. I had been watching her do the same to others as she moved through the crowd. She smiled a scared smile, a smile with too many teeth, most of which were tobacco-stained. She was with her statuesque sister, a stunning beauty named Fania, who walked so regally one might step aside and bow for her. As Angela was telling us how she had just returned to the United States from studying abroad, in Germany, I was struck by her humble honesty about herself. She did not try to shade her freshman relationship to America’s radical movement, which made me feel less intimidated by all the others there, who projected themselves as veterans. We did not talk much, but I watched her, later, conversing in French, of all things, to Karenga, the Maulana from the Black Congress. It was at a house party, a North Philly–like thing, where people could drink cheap wine and dance and talk about who was talking to whom.
Crook left me alone there within minutes of our arrival, going off to take care of some secret, “black male militant” business. I latched on to another L.A. woman, who had a “street” quality with which I felt at home. Everyone else was too “black,” dressed up in African costumes and African names. Bobbi Hodges was a uniformly caramel color, rather like Angela, whom she was not like in any other way. I hung on to Bobbi for safety’s sake.
The house was filled with members of Karenga’s US—as opposed to “them”—Organization, which had a branch in San Diego. Most of them were men, all of whom, like Karenga, were wearing dashikis, dark glasses, and shaved heads. They were a flash of some part of my past. Perhaps they were like Omega Psi Phi fraternity pledges I had seen during my stint with one of them, the one who took my virginity. That sense of déjà vu became stronger as I looked at them, taking me back to Germantown and the colored fellows who looked down on girls from North Philly. I stayed close to Bobbi, on a couch in the living room, and observed the house party, chain-smoking.
“You Sisters want to contribute something toward some food?” a young woman said to Bobbi and me, reaching out a hand that bore rings on all its fingers, like the one in her nose and the ones on many of her sandaled toes. She wore a very short “natural” and a long attitude that shouted how “black” she was, “blacker than black,” like the youths in Mao’s Cultural Revolution who were “redder than red.”
Bobbi gave her three dollars, and I contributed five dollars to the collective pot. Bobbi and I talked about what all young blacks talked about in 1967: the struggle. We discussed freedom and revolution. We seriously pretended that our commitment to that struggle was an old thing, not born the day before yesterday, when some of us were “white,” or not really “black.”
When the food came, Bobbi and I got up to get into the line that was forming near the kitchen of the house, the owner of which was unknown to us. Another young woman, who might have been twenty-two and who wore a floor-length African to-galike dress, a “gran buba,” tapped our shoulders.
“Sisters,” she said, “you will have to wait until our Brothers are served. Yeah,” she added, validating herself in a clipped meter, “our Brothers are our warriors. Our warriors must be fed first, Sisters.”
Her newly styled words only reminded me of words I had heard from “tough” girls in North Philly who had attempted to challenge me with their hostile attitudes.
“Excuse me,” I said sarcastically, reaching back in time. “Excuse me, Sister. Nobody said anything about ‘our warriors’ when money was changing hands. I want my food now.”
“Yeah,” Bobbi chimed in. “I want my three dollars worth of this Kentucky Fried Chicken—now, ain’t that ‘black.’ ”
Bobbi and I smirked and stood our ground—until a bald-headed dashiki came over to us, folded his arms across his chest, and explained the “rules” to us in a way we could understand. Sisters, he explained, did not challenge Brothers. Sisters, he said, stood behind their black men, supported their men, and respected them. In essence, he advised us that it was not only “unsisterly” of us to want to eat with our Brothers, it was a sacrilege for which blood could be shed.
Bobbi and I poked out our mouths and returned to the couch with our cigarettes and no Kentucky Fried Chicken. The great Karenga, no longer talking with Angela, sashayed over to us and looked down into our faces.
“How’re you beautiful Sisters doing?” he said in a high pitch. “Is there a problem I can assist you with?” He seemed to have left a rhyme hanging in the air.
“Not really,” I said, crossing my legs and blowing a circle of smoke, from practice in my teen years, around his bald head.
He looked like a vanilla-fudge Buddha, waving the smoke away with his pudgy hand and a snicker.
There was just enough chicken for the fifty or so “warriors” to get their fill. There were not enough cigarettes for Bobbi and me. Bobbi left before Crook finally returned in his “hoopty.” It was after midnight.
I violated all the “sisterly” rules and launched into Crook about leaving me there for so long. I demanded he grab one of those otherwise useless shotguns and deal with the entire household of Karenga followers. Instead, he laughed his head off, and made me laugh with him, reluctantly. We laughed about it all the way back from San Diego, stopping at his place to make love and avoiding mention of Sandra Scott.
I could barely look Sandra in the eye over those next weeks when we saw each other at the Black Congress. I followed her around, though, because Sandra had a genuinely brilliant mind. She had seemingly read everything, at least everything about political and social movements and revolutions. She was a student at California State University, Los Angeles, and a devotee and protégée of her sociology professor, Harry Truly.
When Sandra introduced me to Harry, it was done with reverence; she referred to him as the brilliant Dr. Truly, or words that conveyed such a feeling. Harry was a small man, a bit like a black leprechaun. He was forming something called the Black Student Alliance.
Harry, I concluded, was something other than brilliant. He was a professor of sociology by day and the architect of a complex scenario for power by night, a scenario that was designed, among other things, to deliver him to the front and center of history. He would ride into history on the waves of the revolution that would rise in the not-too-distant future.
Harry’s vision was that the Black Student Alliance, or the Alliance, as he came to call it, would be a revolutionary union of all black student unions in America. Black student unions were beginning to be formed on several college campuses in Southern California, making a spiritual connection to the growing national black student movement. Numerous loosely organized black campus groups had emerged on the East Coast, taking their lead from the activist civil-rights organization SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in the South. As Black Power sentiments were beginning to overpower the popular, once-integrated SNCC of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown, however, they were also bearing down on the new black students now organizing, particularly those in California, the catchall outpost of new ideas. Indeed, the black student movement was taking a left turn away from concentrating on campus curricula and civil rights. Harry was not alone in seeing that shift, but he was certainly singular in his determination to harness it.
Assuming the development of a black student union on all the local campuses, Harry explained to Sandra and me, and assuming a minimum of several hundred members per campus, within no time a vehicle such as the Alliance could call thousands of black students together to effectively carry out a single action. Thousands of black students—under Harry’s tutelage and direction, evidently—could be mobilized into a mighty force on a moment’s notice. Moreover, that number could increase exponentially, according to Harry’s vision, as the field of the Alliance expanded. Imagine the magnitude of the thing, Harry excitedly suggested, if the Alliance incorporated black student unions in Southern California with those in Northern California, then the entire West Coast, then the East Coast, the whole country.
It was Harry’s theory that the student was the natural ally of revolution. He explained his vision to Sandra and me night after night in his hillside house, as we sat around drinking lots of wine and watching Los Angeles sparkle beneath us.
“Proletarian, socialist revolution is waged by the masses of working people, irrespective of race,” Harry taught us. “Although the student is not a worker, he is also not a member of the bourgeoisie, at least not as a student. He has no relation to the means of production and thus has no real class status. The student’s youthful fervor, however, combined with his biological moment of rebellion against all authority, make him a prime candidate for a revolutionary.
“If the black college student can get past the bullshit and into the legitimate cause of black liberation, it will produce a campus concoction that will blow the lid off this state and even this country.”
Harry went on to explain that it was our role, the role of the Alliance, to agitate such fervor among black students. Although there were “radical” white campus groups, like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) already in place, Harry emphasized that they were not reliable allies of revolution. The war against the Vietnamese, around which SDS and other white student groups were primarily organized, would inevitably end, and whites could resume their “natural place” in America. Black students, though still sleeping, were a sleeping revolutionary giant, because black students had no stake whatsoever in corporate America—which they would learn sooner or later, especially on graduation into the white world.
I could not resist Harry’s heady language and logic. I agreed to be part of the nucleus of his new Black Student Alliance, though I was not a student anywhere.
I began spending a lot of time with the others who had become the mainstay of the new organization, Brothers with African names like Dedan, Weusi, and Rashidi. They were not typical students, not even as blacks. They were, however, an emerging prototype of a new black student. They had come from the streets with Black Power hearts, and had forced their way onto college campuses through previously closed doors via the post-Watts pacifying programs of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.
SDS and its free-speech precursor, led by people like Mario Savio in Berkeley, were addressing broad national and international issues, from a student perspective—a white student perspective. Dedan and Rashidi and the other campus leaders who were now part of Harry’s Alliance were building a student movement that had as its expressed goal the use of the college campus as a staging area for revolution, black revolution.
Sometime during that period, Harry ordained me as the Alliance’s first representative to the Black Congress, making me the second woman on its executive committee. Now I was working during the day, attending Black Congress meetings once a week, contributing articles to the expanded staff of its newspaper, and reading and studying, mostly with Sandra Scott, black literature and revolutionary treatises—particularly works like Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth—at night. I had also begun to wear my hair in a huge Afro style, no longer setting it on rollers to keep it straight, and arguing with my mother that my hair was really “like that.”
Karenga always chaired the weekly Black Congress meetings, mostly because, I came to see, everyone was too terrified of him to challenge him. They not only deferred to him, they called him Maulana, his self-conferred title, which was a Swahili term loosely translated as “great teacher.” There were usually about a dozen organization representatives at the Congress meetings. We sat around a large oval table, with Karenga at the head, discussing issues we would collectively support. Mrs. Wright’s welfare mothers, for example, might be attacking a cutback in services; or Crook’s organization, the Community Alert Patrol, might be organizing a rally to denounce another police murder of a young black fellow; or Bremond would bring up the necessity of supporting a black running for public office. We would vote not only to support a particular issue but also to decide how we would support it, as a group and as individual organizations.
The force of our organizational unity could be secured with a single vote, but it had to be a unanimous one. Karenga had convinced everyone in the Congress that unanimity was an “African” method of deciding a question. It was in the spirit of African communalism, Karenga had expounded, that the collective act only when the collective will had spoken in this way.
There had not been any discussion at all in the Black Congress of a particularly significant recent event, although news of this event had been spreading like wildfire through the entire country. It was an event that had forced people to consider the real meaning of black pride and black power, setting aside the significance of Afro hairstyles and dashikis. It was a street-corner episode that had challenged the oppressor and the oppressed.
Earl Anthony came to discuss the event at an early November 1967 meeting of the Black Congress Executive Committee. He wore the Black Panther uniform: black leather jacket, black pants, powder-blue shirt. He told us he was on the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party for Self-defense. Like the rest of the black militant organizations, the Black Panthers had come into being only in the last year or so. Unlike the rest, they had drawn their guns. They walked the streets of Oakland openly armed, to challenge any police who were assaulting blacks.
“Brothers, this is an emergency,” Anthony announced. “Last month, Brother Huey P. Newton, minister of defense of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was taken hostage by the pig. He was seized off the streets of Oakland after an armed agent of the Man was shot and killed in a righteous act of self-defense. One of the pigs was killed when they tried to kill Huey. Yeah, Brothers, it was a ‘red-light trial,’ a trial by fire on the streets of Babylon. Brother Huey took care of business. Now he is the political prisoner of our enemy. I’m here to get you Brothers…”
Karenga interrupted. He spoke from his chair at the head of the table. “Brother, we would love to hear more, but we have an agenda to follow. Perhaps we could schedule you for next week.”
“Uh, excuse me, Maulana,” Walter Bremond said weakly, “but I took the liberty of telling Brother Earl here that he could address the Congress because he had come all the way from the Bay Area in this time of crisis to rally support for Huey Newton in Southern California.”
“Walter Bremond,” Karenga said in his singsong manner, “I appreciate your concern, but you do not vote in the Congress, you do not chair the Congress, and therefore you cannot set the agenda for the Congress.”
My voice came through the air like a zephyr, ringing in the huge hall in which we were sitting, causing all heads to turn and mouths to open. “Well, I’d like to hear the rest of what this Brother has to say.” I had begun to think of Karenga as an obnoxious prig. I snatched the opportunity to oppose him. Moreover, I was charmed by the Black Panther stuff; and Earl Anthony had style, I thought.
“Fine, Sister,” Karenga muttered confidently. “Let us put it to a vote, to gain African consensus on the issue.”
Everybody mumbled approval that a vote should be taken.
Crook and I were the only two to vote to hear Earl continue. It was enough to throw things into “African” confusion, however. No one knew what to do, because there was no absolute consensus. This had apparently never happened before. After much debate, Earl Anthony was permitted to continue his pitch for support for the Huey P. Newton Legal Defense Fund.
Karenga’s main lieutenant, Tayari, brushed past me after the meeting, whispering to me in a threatening tone that black women did not wear miniskirts such as I was wearing. I stopped long enough to toss Tayari a street-corner comment to the effect that when black men paid for what black women wore, they could talk about it. I found my way over to Earl Anthony. He was taking the names of those whose organizations might form a support committee for Huey Newton.
Earl Anthony began attending the weekly Black Congress meetings, though he never petitioned the Congress to include the Oakland Panthers in its membership. Perhaps it had to do with the technicality that Earl represented only the Huey Newton Legal Defense Fund, which was organized around a limited agenda, unlike the NAACP and other organizations which had representatives in the Congress. Nevertheless, Earl was coming every week to report on the progress of the Huey Newton Legal Defense Fund and, afterward, inviting me to ride with him.
I became Earl’s entourage of one. I would accompany him after the Congress meetings to gatherings of black professionals or college students or neighborhood groups, whom he would call upon to “join the struggle,” to support Huey Newton. Earl also invited me to his bed.
I wondered, later, what made me accept Earl’s nagging invitation. Perhaps I thought of it as having to do with the freedom of black people. Earl had suggested such a thing. He had actually told me that a true Sister would be happy to sleep with a revolutionary Brother. Obviously, revolutionariness was not close to cleanliness, I thought as I entered Earl’s unkempt house. One night with him was enough. If I was guilty of having just discovered the Tommy Jacquettes, of having loved a white man named Jay Kennedy, of having done nothing to improve the sad condition of my people, I certainly would not be redeemed in the unclean house of Earl Anthony.
Avoiding Earl was why I missed the Black Congress meeting the week after the members’ early-December retreat in the mountains to resolve a variety of internal conflicts—which retreat Karenga had refused to attend. At the retreat, Crook and I had forced a vote that Karenga no longer be referred to by the grandiose title of Maulana. “Call him Brother or nigger,” Crook had said, which I had seconded. But I missed that next Black Congress meeting, in which it was revealed that the Brother who had come to the retreat known only as Ken, a telephone company employee who had begun working on Harambee, was really Ken Msimaji, a member of Karenga’s hierarchy. I was shamefully grateful that I had missed that meeting, trying to avoid Earl, who had been pressuring me for another romp, the last time by pushing me up against a wall in the Black Congress building.
At least fifty US Organization members surrounded the Black Congress building at the beginning of the meeting, I was later told. Most of them were armed with shotguns. Karenga then paraded inside, but did not take his seat at the head of the table. Instead, accompanied by Tayari and Jomo and Ken Msimaji and several other bald clones, all armed (though Karenga was not), he stood at the head of the table. Some of his followers raised their shotguns at the Black Congress members sitting at the oval table. Franklin Alexander, the head of the Du Bois Clubs, a fledgling front organization of the Communist Party, USA, dove under the table for cover. John Floyd made a weak attempt to reach for his briefcase with his pistol in it. Everybody was terrified.
“I understand some people want to criticize US, Brothers,” Karenga said, referring to his organization. “I understand somebody has something to say to Maulana.”
When the response was only silence, he continued: “I have something to say to you, Brothers. If you cannot deal with me politically, perhaps you might want to deal with me militarily. Can you dig that, Brother Crook?”
Everyone talked about how Crook stood his ground that evening at the Black Congress. Everyone talked about how everybody but Crook started backing down about referring to Karenga as Maulana, leaving Crook with no backup for the collective position. The point was lost at the point of Karenga’s goons’ shotguns. Karenga had solidified his position as head of what would come to be considered the most militant black organization in Southern California—in Los Angeles, the city where only two years before young black men armed with indignation and Molotov cocktails had terrified all of America.
Even after that meeting, Sandra Scott and I continued our practice of laughing about Karenga and his US Organization. Whenever we met, we always got around to finding something demeaning to say about Karenga. We might laugh about his effeminate voice or his squatty body or his tiny hands. Sandra was a kind of feminist, though she would never have agreed to that label; and I had become as much her protégée as she was Harry’s. Karenga was certainly not a promoter of equal opportunity for black women, inside or outside his ranks, Sandra and I agreed. We laughed about Karenga to keep from crying. Encouraged by Harry one night, Sandra and I decided we just had to fuel our sessions with new stories. We decided to attend an US Organization meeting held at the so-called Hakalu, the US Organization’s headquarters.
It was a meeting open to the black community at large. People could come in off the street and listen to the teachings of Karenga, most of which were articulated in a pamphlet that might have been entitled The Wisdom of Maulana Karenga, Sandra and I were given the pamphlets as we entered the rear door of the small building. We secreted ourselves in the back row of folding chairs. On a small platform before the gathering, Tayari gave a pep talk, after which Karenga spoke. Each sentence he uttered rhymed, and was set off by his followers’ choruses of “Speak, Maulana!” and “Tell the truth!”—the women chanting “A-la-la” over and over, in high, piercing tones. Sandra and I snickered one too many times and were spotted in the darkened room by Tayari. We were immediately asked to leave by two of the “Simbas,” so-called young lions, duplicates of Karenga. We reported the details to Harry in between tears of laughter.
Harry had his own enjoyment in all of this. It allowed him to indulge his dream. Harry Truly wanted to replace Karenga. That is, I felt Harry wanted to hold the position of supreme black militant leader. Harry seemed to see that as a real possibility, through the Alliance, though he never articulated this aim. That would have suited me, however, having learned that Karenga had posted a notice in his building to the effect that Crook and I were “enemies” of the US Organization. As more and more black student unions were popping up like wildflowers in the Los Angeles area at the end of 1967, Harry began focusing everything on building the Alliance, which, he said, could become greater than the sum of its parts.
Harry insisted we wear long African bubas for the grand year-end Alliance fund-raising event—something Sandra refused to do. We Sisters had to look our part, Harry remarked in his leprechaun way. We also had to act our part, as hostesses, selling drink tickets and seating everybody at the benefit. The Brothers’ part was handling the nebulous security. Miraculously, it all worked according to Harry’s plan. A “sell-out crowd,” as he referred to it, piled into the supper club to support the Black Student Alliance, Harry having convinced the club’s owner to donate the place to us for the evening. Harry had also gotten the jazz/folk singer-songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr., and his wife to put on a show for our benefit.
For me, those few hours provided a bit of sanity and clarity in an evolving confusion, a tenderness squeezed between the hard edges of the Movement, to which I seemed to be committing body and soul. Listening to the words of Oscar Brown, sung by his strikingly beautiful wife, Jean Pace, I found time to remember why I had come that far by faith, it seemed. Brown sang his famous “Work Song,” the music of which had been written by Nat Adderly. He also performed his well-known piece “Bid ’Em In,” which depicted the auction of a young slave girl. Together, he and Jean sang the lilting bossa nova “Laia Ladaia,” Brown closing with his sweet lullaby “Brown Baby.”
…When all of men’s hate
Is hurled away,
You’re gonna live
In a better day,
Oh, you little Brown Baby…
Afterward, about ten of us went to the apartment of two Alliance members, Razell and Nathalie, to assess our work. Nathalie, Angela Davis, and I, still bedecked in our African apparel, were the only women there. We all patted ourselves on the back for a job well done and began listening, as usual, to Harry pontificate about the future—the future of America, the future of black people in America. Soon Angela, a graduate student and a political theoretician like Harry, was debating the lack of merit of some point Harry had made, a point no one else even understood.
Their academic wrangling was interrupted by a grand entrance. He seemingly came out of nowhere. Perhaps Razell had invited him. He said he had heard about the Alliance and wanted to speak to some of us.
“My name is Bunchy,” he said coolly. “Bunchy,” he reiterated, “like a bunch of greens,” answering a question someone a long time ago had found the courage to ask.
His face was black alabaster; his eyes, black diamonds, set off by carved eyebrows and distinct black eyelashes. His skin was as smooth as melted chocolate, unflawed, with a reddish gloss. He was the vision of Revelations, a head of soft black wool refined to an African crown. He stroked his rich mustache as he spoke, head back, feet apart, an olive-green leather coat tossed over his strong shoulders. Everybody had heard of Bunchy. He was a lion from the streets of L.A., the former head of the Slauson gang, five-thousand strong, originator of its feared hardcore, the Slauson Renegades. He was considered the most dangerous black man in Los Angeles, known as the “Mayor of the Ghetto.” He was with another fellow, called Wilbur Terry, who was taller but less significant at first glance.
Harry did not bother to rise. He remained in his conversational posture, bent over like The Thinker, sitting on a low stool in Razell and Nathalie’s living room, still fixed on Angela. The atmosphere in the room had changed, however. Harry felt it as strongly as we all did. He peered up at Bunchy through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He extended his hand without moving any other part of his body.
“Right on, Brother—ah, what? Bunchy?” Harry said as though he had a death wish.
“Bunchy,” he confirmed for Harry, smiling.
Perhaps Harry did not understand, I felt. Perhaps he had been swathed in intellectualism too long. I knew this man Bunchy. He was the Crump brothers and all the other Brothers from the Avenue and Norris Street and Camac and Diamond, style transformed, rage directed, spirit defined by the ghetto streets and raised to a revolutionary level. He was a conscious and articulate member of the black proletariat, up from the industrial ghetto. He was different from the patient, agrarian Negro of the New South, different even from the new militants and Black Power brokers. He was an angry black man who had survived with a conscious understanding of the ruthless Northern urban centers that had forgotten what to do with “niggers” after the Civil War was over. I knew this man, and I wanted to know him.
He looked at Angela and Nathalie and me. “You Sisters sure look black and beautiful tonight,” he said. “I’d love to take you Sisters down to the De La Soul with me, all dressed up like African queens. Yeah,” he continued relentlessly, “I know you Sisters sure could organize some of those ignorant niggers down at the De La Soul.”
I swore immediately that I would never, ever wear such a costume again. He had challenged us with his imagery. The De La Soul was obviously where “real” black people lived, raw and real, not dressed up—up, as in superior to the “ignorant masses” who “parried” at the De La Soul with wigs and sequined dresses and flashy suits bought the hard way. We had, he said with his picture-words, placed ourselves above the people, not as leaders or role models, but as intellects of a higher order, who did not deign to go down to the De La Soul but who sat around in living rooms in pseudo-African garb discussing the implications of a struggle from which we had safely distanced ourselves.
There was something else in the air that Bunchy had brought in with him. There were the rumors that Bunchy Carter was organizing the streets of which he was “mayor” into a chapter of the Black Panther Party in L.A., presumably a military wing of John Floyd’s Black Panther Political Party. The combination of those thousands of gritty young Brothers from the Slausons, who still saw Bunchy as their leader, with the ideals of the Black Panther Party had sent chills through everybody at the Black Congress that had dared to speak about it.
Bunchy had just finished four years in Soledad prison, it was whispered, for armed robbery. He had become a Muslim minister in prison, a devotee of Malcolm X. Earl Anthony had verified to me the rumor that Bunchy had met Huey Newton right before the cop-killing incident and had, on the spot, pledged devotion to Newton’s organization. It had been after the well-publicized event involving Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X. Huey Newton had led his Black Panthers, outfitted in their now-well-known Panther uniforms and openly armed with shotguns, into the San Francisco airport, right up to the airplane, to meet and escort Betty Shabazz. She was in the Bay Area on her first speaking tour since the assassination of her husband. Newton and his Panthers had dared anybody to attempt to assassinate the widow. The audaciousness of such an act, followed by their face-to-face meeting, had done it for Bunchy, Earl had said. I recalled that as I sat looking at Bunchy.
“I’d love to ask you to stay, Brother,” Harry said fearlessly, “but we’re having a meeting.”
“I didn’t come to interrupt, Brother,” Bunchy replied. “As I said, I came to get involved. I’ve been out of the joint for only a little while now and I’ve been observing the black organizations here in L.A. to get a handle on things. It seems you are all doing a fine job of articulating the problems of our people.” He placed one leg on the bottom rung of a wooden chair near Harry.
“I think the Alliance is doing more than that, Brother,” Harry bristled. “We’re struggling over a solution. Trying to initiate black revolution.”
“Right on. That’s right on. Even though I never heard of revolution without the gun…”
“The gun? The gun, Brother? Nobody’s scared of the gun. We’ve got…”
“I’m just making an observation. I haven’t seen anybody picking up the gun against the Man. Weapons of words won’t deal with the Man. I think history has taught us that. The Man is a beast, and he’s armed against us. The only thing that will deal with the Man is the gun, and men willing to use the gun.”
“Spoken like a true Fidelista,” Harry said, referring to those who adhered to the doctrines of Fidel Castro, and showing himself to be stronger than any of us had imagined.
We watched in silence.
“Spoken like a socialist, Professor,” Bunchy shot back. “Lenin, Mao, Che, as well as Fidel understood the absolute necessity of armed struggle.”
“We’re not in a position to wage armed struggle right now, Brother. We have a ragtag army and a sorry arsenal. We can’t deal with the Man with bullshit. We’d only lose. Is that what you’d have us do, fight to lose?”
“ ‘In revolution, one wins or dies,’ ” Bunchy answered, quoting Che Guevara.
Their conversation went on for an hour, it seemed. No other voices were heard. When it was over, when the wine was gone and nothing was resolved, Bunchy bid us farewell in rather swash-buckling style. Before leaving, he winked at us women with a remark about going down to the De La Soul. He had challenged us and left us dazzled, knowing we could never speak about black power or black nations or black struggle again without feeling the weightlessness of our words. It seemed he had offered us an opportunity to step into the real battle if we dared. Nothing much was said among us after he left.
No one I knew saw Bunchy again for weeks after that. The year ended only with the rumors. Maybe the rumors were untrue, everyone hoped, rumors of Bunchy heading an arm of the Black Panthers, of Bunchy bringing his transformed troops into the Southern California black militant scene.
Sandra Scott called me excitedly one evening during those last days of the year. She had purchased Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice. I had to read it, she said. She could not read another word without calling me. We went through the entire book together the next night, each of us reading alternate chapters aloud, analyzing and praising each sentence and drinking about two bottles of wine. It was an incisive autobiographical excursion into the mind of a black man driven by racism to rape, for which Eldridge had spent nine years in prison. When we finished the book, we vowed we would meet him: the minister of information of the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver. When Sandra dropped me off at home early the next morning, I stayed up to write a poem for him. My mother, with whom I still lived, thought I was insane.
Spending less energy on my work with the Alliance than on discussing Eldridge Cleaver with Sandra, I brought in the new year with Rashidi. While making love was freer than ever at the end of 1967, I really liked Rashidi. He enjoyed ideas, and he liked to talk about them, and he enjoyed talking with women about them. It seemed appropriate to welcome in a new year with him. One of the core members of the Alliance, Rashidi was committed to the cause of black liberation and was excited by the prospect of the coming of Bunchy Carter and his L.A. Panthers. Our discussion was punctuated by a lot of wine and sex on the floor of my Westwood apartment.
A late-morning sun woke us from the deep sleep produced by the wine and the heat of the fireplace. When the closed bedroom door informed us that my mother had come home earlier than expected, and had had virtually to walk over our bodies to get to the bedroom, it shocked us from our lovely stupor. We dressed, cleaned up things hurriedly, and sneaked out into the cold new year. When I found the courage to return home late that night, my mother announced, as though it were a weather report, that we might consider getting separate apartments.
In his never-ending effort to organize the organizers and, ultimately, to control the black revolutionary struggle that was clearly building, Harry decided to create what he classified as a significant event, one that would bring together all the black organizations in Los Angeles under the sponsorship of the Alliance. A black culture was evolving, he explained, one that reflected the militant tone of the time. An art was coming into being that would not only define but inspire black revolution. The Alliance, as a student group, had a duty to encourage such revolutionary art.
Now we were inviting all black organizations in the area to participate in a community poetry reading. We distributed leaflets throughout black L.A., inviting the community to come together in the “spirit of struggle” one Sunday afternoon. Clyde Halisi of the US Organization would read some poems, our Alliance fliers promised. There would also be readings by the intense young poet Stanley Crouch, and by two of the original, well-known Watts Poets, Quincy Troupe and Ojenke. There would be plenty more. We drew an audience of about three hundred to the Black Congress’s auditorium.
Representing the Alliance, I would recite a poem. I seated myself in the front row of chairs next to Stanley Crouch, along with the others who would read. Serious though he was, Stanley was the only humorist around. Whenever I saw him, I would end up a ball of laughter about this or that bit of pretentiousness of the latter-day militants. I had saved a chair next to him so I could share his funny fire, which would be the only relief, I felt, in what was going to be a long afternoon.
Harry played host and took charge of establishing the meaning of the day with lengthy introductions of each reader.
Stanley read his “Howlin’ Wolf.” Halisi read some words he had written about “our” African heritage. John Floyd and Aiuko Babu, of the Black Panther Political Party, read poems they had written. I read my “poem,” which was really a metric denunciation of black men who were exploiting the struggle to cajole their Sisters into their beds with the slick rhetoric that to refuse a warrior was counterrevolutionary. Quincy Troupe read his elegiac tribute to John Coltrane:
Trane, Trane,
Runaway Trane,
Breaking all known dimensions…
Everyone was “black” and satisfied as the sun set after two hours of “blowing,” as such readings were called—a very masculine reference: “Blow, Brother!” Everyone was black and satisfied until the double doors to the large Black Congress hall where we were seated were brusquely flung open. In he walked, “entering” as he had the last time, at Razell’s. Down the aisle, past the many rows of folding chairs to the front, to face us. The waning winter sun burst around him. He was wearing a black leather jacket tossed over shoulders broadened by Soledad workouts. Wilbur Terry was with him again, along with about twenty others, the fiercest-looking Brothers I had ever seen.
He stood where the other poets had stood. His men swaggered into standing positions against the walls, surrounding the gathering. Some of them wore leather gloves, at least those with sawed-off shotguns pressed to the sides of their thighs. Some wore hats cocked over one eye and pistols in shoulder holsters. They postured in streetwise stances, holding up the walls that seemed to be closing in. Once they were in place, all eyes, all heads turned from them to the figure of Bunchy Carter.
“No one invited us, but we thought we’d come anyway,” he said right off, without even a glance at Harry, quietly seated in the front row.
“Right on, Bunchy!” a deep voice exclaimed from the wall.
I could feel everyone straightening up, though no one spoke or made any overt moves.
“I’ve got a few poems, though.”
It was said Bunchy wrote poems that he recited on the street corners of Los Angeles.
“Blow, Bunchy!” a voice cried out from the wall. “Blow ‘Niggertown.’ ”
“Right on…‘Niggertown,’ ” he announced.
“Right on! Right on!” came the chorus from the wall.
Bunchy recited his confrontational “Niggertown” and a few other poems, finishing with the tender “Black Mother.”
After that, he put an end to the rumors.
“Thank you for letting me blow,” Bunchy said, after a beat, “but actually, I didn’t come here for that. I came here to make an announcement: we have just officially formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.”
“Right on” came the chorus, covering the sound of gasps.
Stanley Crouch and I smiled at each other out of the corners of our eyes, for we knew. It was all changing irrevocably now. The Karengas and the John Floyds and even the Harry Trulys were being called to task, to back up rhetoric with action.
“I came here also to make it crystal clear that we are the Black Panther Party, that there is but one Black Panther Party and that is the party headed by Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton—ain’t that right, John Floyd,” Bunchy said in one sentence, walking down the center aisle of chairs toward John, who was a silent stone. “I said, ain’t that right, John Floyd! There’s only one Black Panther Party. And we don’t want to hear about another soul trying to use our name again unless authorized by the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party. Is that clear, John Floyd!”
John Floyd, like everyone else, was immobile. People stole glances at John, however, grateful they had not exploited the name. Stanley Crouch and I nudged each other.
“I also came here to let you know that it is the position of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense that we are the vanguard of revolution in the United States. We are the vanguard party. And the vanguard party is declaring all-out-war on the pig. We are declaring war, and we are declaring that from this point forward, nobody will speak about Black Power or revolution unless he’s willing to follow the example of the vanguard, willing to pick up the gun, ready to die for the people.”
He snapped his fingers, eyes still fixed on all of us. One of the Brothers walked over and handed him a rolled-up banner. He unfurled it with a flourish, revealing a photo, blown up into a large poster: a poster of Huey Newton seated in a high-back rattan chair, wearing a black leather jacket and a black beret.
“This here is Huey P. Newton, Brothers and Sisters,” he said in his streetwise timbre, modified by the tonality of Louisiana roots, one generation removed. “And this poster’s got to hang on every wall in the black community, because Huey P. Newton is the leader of the black liberation movement in this country. He is the leader of the vanguard party. Why, Huey P. Newton has done what you niggers are talking about, thinking about, doing. He has dealt with the pig!”
“Right on!” came the chorus.
“He has set the example and showed us that we, too, must deal with the pig if we are to call ourselves men. We can no longer allow the pig’s armed forces to come into our communities and kill our young men and disrespect our Sisters and rob us of our lives. The pig can no longer attack and suppress our people, or send his occupying army to maraud and maim our communities, without suffering grave consequences…
“From this point forward, Brothers and Sisters, if the pig moves on this community, the Black Panther Party will deal with him…What will we do, Brothers?” he said to his compatriots.
One stepped forward, sawed-off shotgun now raised across his chest, a gloved fist at his side. “We’ll put his dick in the dirt, Bunchy.”
“That’s right. That’s right. Right on.” Bunchy nodded. “We’re here to say that the vanguard party will deal with the pig. We’ll kill the pig! Off the motherfucker! We will destroy him absolutely and completely or, in the process, destroy the gravitational pull between the earth and the moon!”
It was hard to believe Earl Anthony had found the nerve to call me again. I had made it clear to him months ago that he disgusted me, at best. He was still in Southern California, still working for the Huey Newton Legal Defense Fund and now also working with Bunchy Carter. He was writing press statements and pamphlets for the new Southern California chapter, he told me, as though I had an interest in him. He was also telling me something about attending a rally for Huey Newton’s birthday. It was a political rally to raise funds and consciousness in connection with the pending trial of Huey Newton for the killing of the white Oakland cop back in October.
There were about ten thousand people inside the Los Angeles Sports Arena. There were hundreds more outside, involved in circuslike pandemonium. Posters of Huey Newton in the rattan chair were being sold on the streets all around the arena. Young blacks were also hawking Black Panther buttons and powder-blue sweat-shirts, all carrying the same slogan, the same message: FREE HUEY!
Women and men in black leather coats were marching military-style, back and forth outside the huge arena, backed up by the beat of several parade drums, chanting the battle cry, a clarion call that was thundering in the ghettoes of black America and being carried in banner headlines in every news journal in the country:
Free Huey!
Or else!
The sky-y-y’s the limit!
They marched and waved huge powder-blue flags on which the stalking Black Panther symbol was emblazoned; now singing, to the tune of the spiritual “Wade in the Water”:
Free Huey Newton,
Free Huey Newton, fascist dogs,
Free Huey Newton,
We need our leader to guide us.
Inside, petitions and collection plates were being passed around as the auditorium filled to overflowing, each person having been searched for weapons on entry. Men in berets, holding shotguns, stood along the walls.
Seated in a row on the huge stage, waiting for the program to get under way, was the entire leadership of the new black militant movement, a national movement neither supported by, endorsed by, nor involving white people. They were a new generation of black men, divorced completely now from the old, the civil-rights movement of the NAACP and the Urban League and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were young black men no longer concerned with the business of segregation or integration. They were young black men who were calling for an end, not only to discrimination, an end not only to the denial of civil rights, but to all forms of oppression of blacks—social, political, and economic—on all fronts. This new leadership was not begging the question but making a demand, a demand it declared it was backing up with armed force, as symbolized in the hero of that new movement: Huey P. Newton.
A new black leadership had gathered in Los Angeles that day in February 1968, as it had in Oakland the day before, to, as Eldridge Cleaver had defined it, declare war on “Babylon,” the United States of America.
Now Eldridge was standing before the thousands in Los Angeles, spreading out his arms like a godly force. He wore dark glasses and spoke with his head to the side. He told us we were gathered there to celebrate the life of the leader of the vanguard party, Huey P. Newton. There were constant cheers as he spoke, and standing ovations, with fists raised in the air. A giant banner-poster of Huey formed the visual backdrop to Eldridge’s words. When he finished, he introduced the other speakers, who stood up as he called their names.
“The vanguard party has drafted this Brother. He has been drafted into the army,” Eldridge announced. “Brothers and Sisters, Brother Stokely Carmichael, the new prime minister of the Black Panther Party!”
“Power to the people!” the crowd cheered, up on their feet as Stokely stood, raising two fists high above his head. “Power to the people!” the people cried again, fists raised in return.
“Next to Brother Stokely,” Eldridge continued, “is another draftee. He has put down his plow and picked up the gun,” referring to the inductee’s SNCC affiliation, as symbolized by SNCC members’ wearing of overalls as they trudged through the Southern backwoods registering blacks to vote. “Brothers and Sisters, another new member of the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party, Brother H. Rap Brown!”
Rap Brown stood, wearing dark glasses and a black beret, acknowledging his transformation. He, like Stokely, was a leader of SNCC. The meaning of their donning the Panther black beret was not lost on the crowd, which roared its approval.
Eldridge continued the introductions of speakers: James Foreman, Ron Karenga, Bunchy Carter, and other local black community leaders. The crowd continued to cheer and stomp and shout.
When the introductions were finished, Stokely got up again to address the cheering crowd.
“Brothers and Sisters, we are calling for the freedom of Huey P. Newton. Huey Newton must be set free! Must be set free! Set free!”
It was a charismatic delivery that turned the crowd wild. There was a long, standing ovation.
“We’re talking about freedom, the freedom of Huey, the freedom of all black people!”
Every sentence was punctuated by rousing cheers and raised fists from thousands.
“The honky has enslaved us and robbed us and killed us. But now, like Brother Huey, we’re here to say, ‘No more! No more! No more!’ ”
His words bounced off the walls, touching even those high in the balcony, where I was sitting, stunned.
“Malcolm told us. They killed him. Huey Newton told us. They’re trying to put him in the gas chamber.”
“Nooo!” came the cry from the throng.
“Huey Newton must be set free! Black people, black people must be set free! Free from poverty. Free from oppression. We have nothing to lose but our chains! Free Huey Newton! Power to the people!”
The speeches went on for hours. I sat in the balcony convinced, like everyone else, apparently, that the battle had begun. As Eldridge Cleaver said over and again during that evening, now we had to choose: we would be part of the solution or part of the problem. I was terrified.
Sandra Scott and I seemed on our own now. We were reading and holding our own political discussions without the benefit of Harry Truly’s wisdom. After Bunchy’s announcement and the Huey Newton birthday rally, Harry seemed to have withdrawn from everything. Besides, Sandra and I had grown up, in a manner of thinking.
The Alliance was muddling along, nevertheless, and I was muddling along, having just celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday, when Sandra called me several weeks after the Huey Newton rally to tell me Eldridge Cleaver was back in L.A. The local SNCC chapter was holding a fund-raiser for the family of one of their members who had died. A popular national figure with the success of his book, Eldridge had been invited to appear at the benefit to attract wider community support. Sandra’s on-again, off-again lover, Crook—now working with SNCC—had called her and told her about it, assuring her Eldridge would be there, which guaranteed that Sandra and I would be there.
When Sandra came to pick me up in her Volkswagen, we joked and screamed about which one of us would go home with him. In fact, we actually made a friendly bet that one of us would go home with Eldridge Cleaver that very night.
When we pulled up and parked in front of SNCC’s storefront office, where the benefit was being held, I saw. that there were about 150 people inside, including Bunchy Carter and the ever-present Wilbur Terry. From the street, we could hear the Temptations singing from a blasting record player. Sandra and I sauntered in, smiling at each other.
My eyes scanned the dark room for the captivating Eldridge Cleaver. We both spotted him and did all the stuff girls do when they want to impress a fellow or catch his eye. We giggled loudly and whispered obviously and got drinks when he moved anywhere near the bar, and danced with everyone we could—me thrilled to be asked to do the African Twist by Bunchy, as dashing a dancer as he was a man.
When I could stand it no longer, I boldly walked over to where Eldridge was seated, holding conversation in the dark, and introduced myself to him.
“I really loved your book,” I said cavalierly. “I just wanted to thank you for writing it.”
He seemed genuinely grateful for my compliment. He stood up to kiss my hand. He was much bigger than he had appeared from a distance at the Sports Arena. He was about six feet five inches tall, and weighed about 250 pounds. Even in the dark, even with his dark glasses, his face was sensuously appealing, an appeal accentuated by a small earring he wore in one ear. His hands were massive, and his speech was poetic. I could see Sandra nearby, out of the corner of my eye, as I wondered, like the teenager I now was, where Crook was.
Eldridge told me he would ask me to dance but he did not dance. We talked a bit about Bunchy, whom he had known when both of them were in Soledad prison, and about the new Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party. I avoided his silent exhortation that I become part of it. Finally, in desperation, when I saw there was little else to say, I told him I had written a poem for him, about him.
“How flattering,” he said. “Where is it?”
“At my house.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure.”
“How about now?” he said, rising simultaneously and indicating to the Brothers nearby that he was leaving.
“Fine,” I stuttered, and threw a glance at Sandra.
Eldridge grabbed Bunchy as he walked toward the door, with me following. Bunchy shot a look at several of the Panthers in the room, who stumbled together quickly to escort the minister of information.
On his way outside, Eldridge held numerous short conversations with admirers. He got into the driver’s seat of a black sedan that someone brought up to him, after wheeling it out of its parking space in front of Sandra’s Volkswagen. I sat next to him. Bunchy and some other Brother got into the back seat.
When we dropped off Bunchy and the other fellow, Bunchy leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Take good care of ‘Papa,’ Sister,” he said with a smile.
We drove to my house to get the poem. I introduced Eldridge to my mother. When he realized that my mother lived with me, he asked if I would like to go somewhere else with him. He read the poem over almost ten times before we left, and praised it and me profusely.
After a bit of debate, we ended up at a motel. He smoked some marijuana and forcefully made love to me. Looking directly into his gray catlike eyes, I listened to him for hours, talking about revolution, about Huey Newton and his “redlight trial,” about the struggle of black people. We lay awake next to each other till sunrise.
He drove me home in the early light. He had to get back to Oakland by that afternoon, he said. He would call me, he swore, not knowing that within a week that would be impossible.
On April 3, 1968, there was a massive earthquake in Los Angeles.
On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, triggering the most massive uprising of black people in the history of America, in over one hundred cities throughout the country, wherever black people were concentrated, including in Los Angeles. Nonviolence was dead.
National Guardsmen all over the United States were still trying to put down the wrath of black people over King’s assassination when seventeen-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton was killed in a ferocious shoot-out with Oakland police, on April 6.
In the same battle, the police shot and wounded Eldridge. A thousand charges were brought against him, any one of which could and did mean a parole violation. By the next day, Eldridge was back in a California state prison, at Vacaville. The following week, I received a letter he wrote me from there.
Sometime before the end of April 1968, I knocked on the office door in the Black Congress building that had been set aside for its newest member organization. A pretty woman named Ericka Huggins, whom I had noticed at the Huey Newton birthday rally, was inside. She spoke in a gentle manner as she wrote down my name and address and asked me a few questions about my life. Eventually, she told me what time to show up for the next membership meeting of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party.