OUR TEARS FOR FRANCO had to be deferred. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced to America that 1969 would be the last year of the Panther.
In the latter days of 1968, Hoover had proclaimed: “The Black Panther Party is the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” Hoover’s insidious lifelong crusade to crush the “Comm-uh-nis” threat to the “American way of life” had exploded into a declaration of war. Hoover would show Americans the ultimate price to be paid for dissidence by bringing down on the Black Panthers the full force of the FBI and its subservient institutions. The potency of the Panther “Comm-uh-nis” threat lay not so much in the puny Panther guns, Hoover had warned America, as in the “butter” the Panthers were spreading over the minds of the ignorant black masses, Panther propaganda promoted as social programs for the poor.
Hoover had, in a manner of speaking, hit the nail on the head. The more the party sharpened the contradictions between haves and the have-nots, between the powerful and the powerless, the oppressor and the oppressed, the more the people would seek to resolve them. That, and the desire to temporarily alleviate the pain of poverty, was precisely the purpose of the party’s Free Breakfast for Children program.
The Free Breakfast for Children programs had begun thriving in the San Francisco Bay Area not long before Hoover made his declaration. Breakfasts had initially been served in Sacred Heart Church. An Irish Catholic priest, Father Eugene Boyle, had been the first to open his doors to the party’s new breakfast program, providing a place big enough to feed the children of San Francisco’s Fillmore district. Soon after, Father Earl Neil, a black Episcopalian, had opened the doors of his church in Oakland. Thereafter, breakfast programs began springing up everywhere in Northern California. There was no such program in L.A., however, at the start of the new year.
Although we had served free dinners from time to time in the L.A. black community, we had found it virtually impossible to feed hungry black people with any regularity, much less to institute a breakfast program. We had no access to a proper facility, and nearly all the money and energy we could have mustered for a breakfast program were being depleted by our daily efforts to simply keep our people on the street.
Ever-increasing police arrests of our members kept us running from jail to jail, getting medical treatment for Panthers beaten when arrested, paying excessive fees to retrieve our few cars from police impoundment, financing high bails. Indeed, police assaults on Panthers in L.A. were becoming more intense than in any other chapter of the party—from the national headquarters to all the others springing up in city after city. We expected the onslaught; we were not prepared for the intensity.
There was so much food at UCLA’s Weyburn Hall that the steam tables were never depleted. John and I had decided there ought to be a way to obtain the excess food that was being dumped into UCLA’s garbage bins every night. We had decided, during the holiday break, that when we returned to UCLA in January, we would approach the dormitory officials. It would be a small act of charity, we would say, for UCLA to dump the leftover food on the party, to feed some children who needed it.
January 17 was the first day I could arrange to meet with the head of Weyburn Hall’s food services. We had been very busy since classes had resumed a few weeks before. Much had occurred in those weeks.
The campus had become radically different, at least in terms of the black students. They had grown up overnight, it seemed. They had been forced to come together as black people, after having languished in a middle-class myopia the semester before.
We too, it seemed, had grown up overnight. Franco had been buried. Ericka and John’s baby girl had been born. Shermont Banks had been expelled, and John was now chairman of the chapter. The chapter had opened another new section office, on the west side of L.A., where middle-class, white-collar blacks had rooted themselves. We had also opened several new branches, in San Diego, Santa Ana, and Pasadena.
Marsha’s golden Afro curls were bouncing in the early sunlight of January 17 as we started out for UCLA. She, too, was bouncing, in her continuing effort to define herself as “blacker than black.” At one time many had even believed that Marsha was white. She defied the effect of her very fair complexion by always speaking in loud street parlance and carrying herself with a kind of “ghetto attitude.”
We were standing on Century Boulevard trying to hitch a ride. First, we had to make recorded announcements about the opening of our west side office at a radio station in Hollywood. After that, we would meet with the Weyburn Hall people. Later, I was to see a lawyer about setting up a stable legal defense program for the chapter, in light of the frequency of our arrests. Before seeing the lawyer, Marsha and I were to attend an important black students’ meeting at UCLA’s Campbell Hall, an unusual building that had been set aside for the High Potential program. There we would meet John, Bunchy, and Geronimo.
Maybe Marsha was bouncing to make herself alert, I thought. We had all been up most of the night at Camelot. I had been in the basement working late at our new typewriter when Bunchy came down the stairs, followed by Cotton, one of his wolves.
“With these, with these, Elaine, we will deal with the pig,” he announced.
I responded with a puzzled silence.
He flung open his jacket and lifted a sawed-off M-1 carbine from a shoulder holster.
“Hah! You didn’t see a thing…This is beautiful work, Cotton. Beautiful,” Bunchy said, patting the weapon.
Cotton had filed down a series of carbines for him. He was standing straight and looking at Bunchy with unadulterated pride.
“We can carry these under our coats, on the streets. On the outside we’ll look very, shall we say, ‘ordinary.’ ” He laughed. “But we’ll be armed righteously.”
John joined us. Geronimo soon came down with Blue. I could hear Ericka upstairs, walking with the baby. Marsha was upstairs, too, cleaning the kitchen.
Bunchy kissed the weapon, and everybody laughed. The men toasted with small bottles of Champale. Bunchy had banned the traditional Gallo wine concoction in support of the Cesar Chavez–led United Farm Workers’ grape boycott.
I left the men and the guns to see Ericka and the baby. We joked about funny names for her baby, my favorite being “Huggie Girl.” I teased her about taking control and giving the child a name immediately. Otherwise, I would spread the word that my first suspicions about John being a hippie had been confirmed, and that, like him, she was a closet hippie. She and John had refused to name the baby, insisting that she had the right to name herself when she was old enough.
Ericka parried with a threat to tell Bunchy about the poem I had written for him. He would love it, she assured me, giggling. I had written it almost a month before but had not found the courage to let him see it. If I did not give it to him that night, Ericka threatened, she would. She and I had reduced ourselves to giggling fools by the time we heard Bunchy’s footsteps on the basement stairs. When Bunchy opened the door to the kitchen, Ericka forced me into it. I simply handed the poem to him, with a smirk to her.
He sipped his drink. “ ‘The Deputy,’ ” he said, reading the title.
“Please don’t read it out loud, Bunchy.”
He said nothing. Everything was very quiet. He read the poem. Then he read it again.
“Let’s hear it, Bunchy,” Geronimo said.
“Naw, niggers. This is too deep for you,” he said, throwing his head back with a laugh.
He thanked me with a sweet kiss on my cheek. Folding the piece of paper with my poem on it into his pant pocket, he talked on for a long time.
He was still wearing those pants, I noticed, when Marsha and I finally arrived at the Black Student Union meeting at Campbell Hall. He had not taken time to change. He had had no sleep at all.
Marsha and I had made the public service announcements at the radio station. More important, we had also extracted a commitment from the director of Weyburn Hall to give us the dormitory’s leftover food, along with all the dented canned goods we could handle. I was happy to be able to report to Bunchy that some kind of free-food program could now be instituted by our chapter.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” I whispered as Marsha and I approached the room where the Black Student Union was meeting.
“It’s cool,” Bunchy said matter-of-factly, leaning against a doorjamb at the entrance of the meeting room. Over two hundred black students were inside. The meeting had been under way for some time.
“John will fill you in,” Bunchy said.
As usual, John was wearing a ridiculous costume. This time, a secondhand gray suit was draped over his 125-pound body, complemented by heavy black combat boots.
“What’s happening?” I whispered to John as Marsha and I sat down.
“Nothing much,” he whispered back, leaning toward me so that I could see his .44 magnum pistol, which was bigger than his hands. “They’re trying to create a man on paper,” he said somewhat cryptically.
“Is there anything you want me to do?” I asked.
“Not yet. Just listen.”
Although there were only a few members of the US Organization at the meeting, Marsha and I had noted as we entered the building how Karenga’s look-alike members were in force that day. Milling about Campbell Hall, they had seemed a thundercloud of clones, bald heads, dark glasses, pressed dashikis. Karenga was nowhere in sight. He rarely appeared anywhere personally, outside of the Black Congress and his own building.
The midday sun penetrated the cavernous room through its floor-to-ceiling windows. It brought warmth and character to the otherwise institutional dullness of the room. The meeting was, at best, boring and anticlimactic. I drifted into thinking about the meeting I had in the next hour with the lawyer George Slaff, from Beverly Hills. I was wondering how I was going to get to Slaff’s office on time.
As I looked around the room, I also thought about how strange the meeting was, UCLA’s Black Student Union having come into being only months before.
It was a time when every college student, black and white, across America seemed to be part of a campus organization. Everywhere, students were making demands on college administrations, expressing political concerns, addressing social issues, marching for causes. The black students at UCLA, however, had been reluctant to form any kind of association. If they had any desire for organized protest, it was less about the CIA recruiting office that sat conspicuously on UCLA’s campus than about forcing the various dormitory cafeterias to serve “soul” food. They had not concerned themselves at all with the raging war in Vietnam, worrying more, it seemed, about whether Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” would be piped into the dormitories.
John had faith, however, that the small population of black students on UCLA’s sprawling campus could be educated to at least join with the SDS and other campus organizations in denouncing the war in Vietnam, and maybe in getting rid of the CIA recruiting office. He also believed they could be politicized to build a network between the campus and the community, a network to filter the intellectual resources of the students to the black community, a network that would bridge the disparities between “bourgeois” blacks and “street” blacks, a network that would forge a necessary link in the chain toward ultimately making the revolution.
The work John had proposed, which the chapter had tried to implement from the day the four of us enrolled in September, had moved very slowly. Even the poorer black students, the others in the High Potential Program, wanted to break their bonds with the ghetto. All of them wanted to avoid the issues and relax in the sunshine of Westwood. Nevertheless, John pushed us to push them. Every day, every evening, he would intone over and over: “Educate to liberate.”
In those months since September, most of the black students had remained reluctant to become even peripherally involved with any of John’s causes. A few students did initiate a Black Student Union, however, and somewhere in the process, a handful even joined the Black Panther Party, including Nathaniel Clark, Joe Brown, and Albert Armour.
That was the irony of that meeting, I was thinking. Only one month before, even the small Black Student Union that had been formed on UCLA’s campus had become moribund. Indeed, the Black Studies Program we were now discussing had originally existed in a vacuum.
It was not the black students who had proposed the program, but rather the university in an attempt to forestall the kind of black student agitation that was on the rise on most college campuses. The program was suggested by the few blacks who peppered the ranks of UCLA’s administration.
During the off-session holiday period, Ron Karenga, on information provided by one of the black architects of the proposed Black Studies Program, seized the opportunity to take advantage of the inactivity of the black students. Karenga recruited a Dr. Charles Thomas to serve as titular head of the proposed Black Studies Program, which involved hundreds of thousands of university dollars—a High Potential Program with higher stakes. Then, just before Christmas Day, Karenga sent about fifty of his US members to the university administration offices to assert that they represented the Black Student Union, which represented the majority of black students at UCLA. They demanded that Charles Thomas be hired to direct the proposed Black Studies Program and that the program be instituted by the beginning of the next semester.
That show, coupled with the support of Karenga by Vice Chancellor Charles Young, turned the proverbial trick. As of the commencement of the Spring 1969 semester, UCLA had authorized funding for “Karenga’s” Black Studies Program.
When classes resumed, though, and the black students learned about the program and Karenga’s holiday machinations, they became fired up. Sure, they seemed to say in one voice, they had been passive about most issues. They were grumbling, however, that they would not stand for some self-proclaimed messiah to come to “their” campus and take over “their” program. Black student leaders suddenly evolved, reconstituting the Black Student Union. They demanded that the vice chancellor rescind his contractual pledge to the Karenga program. They demanded that Karenga come to the campus and explain himself.
But they became confused about their next step; as confused as most of the university administration became, responding with waves of rumblings that they did not want the campus to experience any disruption and would review the decision. Moreover, the students were terrified of dealing with Karenga.
That was when a few student leaders asked John and the rest of us if the Black Panther Party would support them—specifically by acting as “security” for their meeting with Karenga. Our answer was that we would not be their bodyguards, much less openly oppose another black organization—despite our attitude about Karenga. We would, however, we assured them, back up whatever decision the majority of black students made about the proposed program.
There had been a showdown of sorts on January 15—just two days before. Nearly a hundred US members had shown up, flashing their teeth and, as usual, their .45s. Unusually, Karenga himself had actually appeared, and addressed the students.
“Maulana means great teacher,” he had begun. “I am the teacher. You are the students,” he proclaimed, standing at a podium before the black students who had crammed into the Campbell Hall classroom. “The teacher must teach. The student must learn.”
“Speak, Maulana!” one of the US members standing intimidatingly in the rear of the meeting room chanted on cue.
“Therefore, Brothers and Sisters,” Karenga continued behind dark glasses, which emphasized his nearly white complexion, “you cannot advise me of what you want. I advise you of what you need!”
“A la la! A la la!” numerous followers chanted in simulated Swahili approval.
“US has taken the lead because you have shown yourselves too weak!”
The room froze. No one spoke for what seemed an interminable time. Finally, a freshman Brother, sitting in the back of the room, which was by then packed with about three hundred students, stood up.
“Brother Karenga,” he said, pointedly not addressing Karenga as Maulana. “We are the students here, and we alone will determine our destinies!”
The Black Panthers in the room found each other’s eyes. We smiled. His words had been lifted directly from our rhetoric, reflecting the main point of the party’s platform and program.
There was sparse applause for his bold assertion. Then more students began to applaud, and more. They stomped their feet. They rose to their feet. Karenga could say no more as the students demanded that Karenga “get out!”
Having ushered Karenga and his troops out of the meeting, the students intensified their bravado. First, they voted to have a representative group immediately contact Vice Chancellor Young. They elected that small committee on the spot; it included Joan Kelley, a student sympathetic to the party, John, and me.
The ad hoc committee was to advise Young that the real Black Student Union had reformed and was electing a formal committee from the membership that would be the only group with which the university was to deal on the issue of a Black Studies Program. Their message warned the university that there would be massive problems on campus if anyone else tried to usurp the program or if the program was canceled. Only the black students of UCLA would determine how the already-allocated program dollars would be expended.
Their message to Young concluded with the specific command that neither Ron Karenga nor his lackey Charles Thomas, nor any other such lackey, was to be involved in any way with the Black Studies Program of UCLA.
Another meeting was scheduled for the seventeenth, so that the general body of the now-active Black Student Union could begin the process of developing a student-controlled Black Studies Program.
John was leaning over and whispering to me. His deep voice created a funny little tingle in my ear. “Move to adjourn. This is going nowhere. There’re too many loose ends. I don’t know how they think they can create a thing in the abstract.”
I agreed it was time to adjourn, realizing that I was definitely late for my meeting with Slaff.
Then he added, whispering nearly inaudibly, “I hope they go for this, I’m starving.”
“What?” I whispered back.
“I said,” he enunciated each word carefully and very seriously, “I hope they go for this. I’m starving.”
I tossed him the kind of strained look I knew he loved to evoke with such silliness.
I moved that the meeting be adjourned and that the committee elected on the fifteenth meet and confer. It would simplify the task, I suggested, if that smaller group developed some guidelines and came back to the general body of the Black Student Union in a couple of weeks with specific recommendations. Everyone was so tired of discussing curricula and credentials, they readily agreed to my suggestion by an overwhelming vote.
“You need to watch what you say, Sister,” one of Karenga’s robots said to me afterward. He caught me as I was moving through the mass of students toward the hallway.
The only thing that differentiated that Karenga robot from the others, I noted, was the mustache outline he had drawn over his protruding lips with eyeliner. I could hardly feel frightened of anybody wearing a painted-on manhood. Indeed, I had an impulse to smear the thing. I was certainly not terrorized as I tried to move past him, when he grabbed me so hard the button snapped off my black leather coat.
I moved on, in a rush to get Joe Brown, who had gone to an upstairs office. John had arranged for Joe to drive me to the meeting with Slaff. Bunchy stopped me.
“What did that nigger say to you?” he asked.
“Nothing, really, Bunchy. The fool was babbling the usual US threats.”
“Elaine!”
“Yes, Bunchy,” I said, almost snapping to attention. When Bunchy spoke, one listened, because Bunchy was, at twenty-six, an uncanny composite of artist, “street nigger,” poet, and revolutionary.
“Elaine,” he repeated, head thrown back majestically, “as long as you live, don’t let another nigger talk crazy to you or put his hand on you. You slap the nigger! The nigger is punk and a sissy. So you slap him. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Bunchy, I do. Right on.”
I turned away then and quickly climbed the three flights of stairs of Campbell Hall, to find Joe Brown. I climbed the stairs and never heard the first shot that ripped into John’s back—only ten feet away from the assassin.
I climbed the stairs and never heard the second shot that blasted into Bunchy’s powerful chest.
“Joe! Come on. I’m late!” I said, hurrying Joe Brown.
Dashing down the stairs from the third floor with Joe, I heard gunshots for the first time.
What the fuck is going on? I thought.
The number-one marksman in UCLA’s ROTC program, Joe started back up the stairs to retrieve his Browning 9mm, left locked in the third-floor office. He shouted to me to come with him. We quickly scurried back up the stairs.
Returning to the first-floor landing with Joe, I heard the sound of feet moving fast down the marble corridor. Fearful whisperings rose above the sound of running feet. Then gunfire again, and more gunfire. One, two shots at a time. Short bursts of fire, very loud, horrible echoes. I felt cold.
This is it.
I heard more feet running. The taste of salt came into my mouth. More shots rang out. I heard glass break, then the crash of more breakage. Students were leaping through the huge windows to escape. There were many screams now, following the report of each round of fire.
What should I do? Not the rough streets of North Philadelphia, nothing in my life, not even in the party, had prepared me to respond to so much gunfire. I felt ridiculous. Joe forced me back up to the second-floor landing, pushing me against the wall like a dress into an overstuffed suitcase, and ran off. Others were taking refuge on that landing. I could not see their faces. Joe ran back to me.
“Elaine, take this and get it out of here,” he said in panic, shoving his Browning into my hand.
“John’s dead!” he shouted, running down the stairs again.
“Not John!” I screamed.
Somebody tried to hold me. I knew what to do. I ran down the stairwell.
Get to John! Get an ambulance! John does not die! Get the gun out!
I saw Albert Armour and Nathaniel Clark moving quickly down the hallway on the first floor.
Where’s John?
“Get out! Get out!” they were shouting.
I heard sirens. Then the old, long-ago feeling crept over my soul, that sense of lifelessness. I shook it off. I looked around and spotted Joan Kelley hovering in a corner. She had a purse. I grabbed her, put the Browning into her purse, and led her out a side door. We had to go to UCLA’s Medical Center to get help for John, an ambulance. We had to get the gun out. Find Geronimo. Call for backup—Bunchy’s underground.
“We don’t have ambulance service,” the hospital’s emergency registration clerk said casually. I drew the Browning from Joan’s purse. I aimed it at the clerk’s face and cocked it. There was a round in the chamber.
“Well, you’re going to need one, bitch!”
People in the emergency room panicked. Joan remained calm. Some of the hospital staff started getting a medical team together as I spilled out what had happened at Campbell Hall. I ran around the hospital until I found Geronimo, in the outpatient clinic. I remembered where he was: Bunchy had instructed him to stay with that hypochondriacal Janice. A lone soldier, Geronimo moved into action toward Campbell Hall. I dialed each underground number I knew. I talked to those I could reach. They were so far away from UCLA in distance and in life that I had to give them directions on how to get there. It was hopeless, absurd. Nothing would be done. But John was not dead, and somebody would pay.
Two hours passed. The police had arrived at Campbell Hall before Geronimo and had sealed off the building. He could not get in. No ambulance or medical team returned. No urgency filled the hospital rooms. A doctor finally emerged. I was so dazed I barely heard him.
“They’re both dead,” he said to me.
“Who’s dead, motherfucker?” I demanded, consciousness shocked into comprehension, hoping he meant the stupid Karenga robot with the phony mustache was dead, hoping Joe had been wrong.
“Calm down, miss. Are you a member of either family?”
“How do I know. Who’s dead?!”
He said their names formally. Bunchy and John were dead.
My mind reeled…What made me join this Black Panther Party? Why had Jay Kennedy let me leave the comfort and safety of his very rich and very white world? Had Joe used the Browning? Why had it been so urgent to take it out of Campbell Hall? What had happened?
The bodies of Bunchy and John were still lying in the meeting hall. They had fallen in such a way that their fingers touched. To escape, students had trampled them. When he was hit, John had emptied his gun at the assassin fruitlessly. After the first shot, Bunchy had whirled around, empty-handed, to face the assassin down, fruitlessly. The assassin, a high-ranking US member, who was positively identified as the killer by numerous black student witnesses, had escaped unscathed.
Those of us who had been able to find each other were gathered at the hospital: Geronimo, Nathaniel, Janice, Joan, and I.
“We’ve got to get the shit out of that house. We have to get back there to Ericka,” Geronimo said, taking charge.
We returned to Camelot.
“What happened at UCLA today?” Ericka said, looking at me. Earlier, while feeding her three-week-old daughter, Ericka had seen the televised news bulletins about a shooting at UCLA.
I spat it out point-blank. “Two people were killed, Ericka.”
“Was John one of them?”
I nodded. “And Bunchy,” I finished.
We began organizing the guns, the ammunition, the grenades that were kept there, to haul them, along with Ericka and the baby, away. There would be war among the natives.
Ericka Huggins left the world then, it seemed. I watched her stand at the kitchen sink, her long, thin body surrendered, her eyes glazed, her artistic fingers pulling twenty-odd cups from the cupboard. Then she started to boil pots of water.
“I suppose everyone is upset. I’ll make some coffee,” she said insanely.
The six of us—with others now on the way—busied ourselves with cleaning out the house. We would all be underground soon.
“Cotton, take the first load away. Now!” Geronimo commanded when Cotton arrived. Cotton dragged several metal boxes and weapons wrapped in blankets down the outside stairs to the driveway. He loaded his station wagon and sped off.
“Mama, I want to bring Ericka’s baby to you to take care of John and Bunchy are dead,” I said into the telephone to my mother in a run-on sentence.
“Oh my God! You get out of there now!” my mother pleaded. “Oh God! All right. Maybe I can find somebody to take care of the baby, but you get out! Please, Elaine! Whatever you’re after, it’s not worth this. Nothing’s worth this!”
She was saying nothing I wanted to hear. I slammed down the receiver.
“All you motherfuckers come out or we’ll blow their heads off!”
“It’s the pigs!” Janice screamed.
At least 150 uniformed and plainclothes pigs were moving around outside, getting into position. They were led by Detective Captain Lucey of the LAPD’s 77th Division. I peeked out of the front window and saw the pigs crawling out of a fumigation tarpaulin that had been placed over the house across the street. It occurred to me that that tarpaulin had not been there when I left with Marsha in the morning.
The pigs had punched shotguns into Geronimo’s and Nathaniel Clark’s ears, and pressed their bodies flat onto the driveway cement outside. They had been caught loading up another car. Now there were footsteps in the garage-library area below. Now there was the sound of boots on the roof. The pigs repeated their demand.
“Come out now, or we’ll blow their heads off!”
Ericka snatched the baby out of her crib; she had on only a diaper and an undershirt. I took off my coat to roll the baby into the warmth and safety of it. The four of us, Ericka, Joan, Janice, and I, swiftly and stealthily moved into the main bedroom, away from the front of the house. We rolled the coat with the baby in it under the bed and lay face down on the floor surrounding the bed. The four of us stayed there quietly, hoping our bodies would protect the baby, hoping the coat would muffle her little cries, hoping we would not die or, if we did, that we would be dignified.
We lay there listening. We heard Geronimo shouting: “There ain’t nothing but women in there, man!” We lay there listening to 12-gauge shotgun rounds being “jacked” into police shotgun chambers. We lay there listening to our last breaths and wondering about the “other side.” I heard an old hymn: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river…” We held each other’s hands and remembered our mothers. We listened to footsteps approaching the closed bedroom door. We looked at each other with sad, not fearful, eyes. We squeezed each other’s hands to say goodbye.
“You motherfuckin’ bitches, get up!” a pig with no face said, kicking in the door combat-style, joined by his faceless brothers and their shotguns.
We were four stones. We buried our faces in the floor so as not to hear the sound of our deaths. There was silence. Then four stones simply rose, gathering the coat from under the bed, gathering life from death. Lethargically, four stones rose and moved like one stone outside, into the chilly January setting sun.
Outside, we saw some of the underground, who had come too late. They were shouting at the pigs not to kill us.
“You’re the oldest whore of the pink pussies,” they said to me on the ride to the 77th Precinct, “so you must be the one with the biggest hole.”
I sang: “How many roads must a man walk down…”
At the precinct, Joan and I were shackled together, even when they finally allowed us to use the toilet. Marsha was there, too, handcuffed and crying. Ericka had been placed in a corner alone and was breast-feeding the baby. The men were in some other part of the precinct.
The police eventually allowed one of the many Panther supporters that had gathered there to take the baby out of the precinct. Ericka had named her in the police car: Mai.
By four in the morning, after hours of so-called interrogation, we were all finally charged: conspiracy with the intent to commit murder. We were being held, we were told, to “prevent a bloody retaliation” against the US Organization for the assassinations of John and Bunchy.
More than seventy-five Panthers in the area were known to have been rounded up and arrested. Not one US member had been arrested.
Ericka, Joan, Marsha, Janice, and the rest of us women were taken to the Sybil Brand Institute, the county’s jail for women. We were booked and fingerprinted. We were put into bathtubs, sprayed for bugs, separated, and locked into seven-by-eight-foot maximum-security cells. The morning sun was almost rising.