HER SKIN WAS VERY WHITE. She was a porcelain doll, and just as delicate. I never resented what Masai felt for her. It was under-standable. Jean Seberg was truly beautiful.
We had met Jean in the early part of that terrible year of 1969. David had “assigned” Masai and me to see her. She was another white movie star who wanted to help.
A small group of Hollywood helpers had already begun to astound us with their support for our chapter by the time we met Jean. If we had thought about it, it was a natural alliance.
Historically, artists were the traditional allies of movements for social change. In the twentieth century, the art of filmmaking had produced men like Charlie Chaplin, so progressive he became a personal target of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-Communist campaign. There had been the Hollywood Ten, and tens more, who were blacklisted from the film industry for refusing to cower before U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist raid on America.
Recent history gave further testimony to that affiliation. The civil-rights movement, the most potent surge for social change in the history of America, had been vigorously supported by artists, black and white. When the latter-day Black Power people seized leadership of the black struggle, they shunned all white involvement, raising fists in white faces. White artists found their support of that movement rejected. Whatever the hazards of association, the Black Panther Party seemed to make a place in the sun for sympathetic whites. White artists were the first to come in out of the cold.
As Los Angeles and New York were the main homes of the artistic communities America fostered, the party chapters there began developing relationships with liberal and progressive white artists. In New York, there were such notable supporters as Leonard Bernstein. Our chapter in Southern California, however, was becoming the beneficiary of the support of the most powerful collection of artists in America: the Hollywood film industry’s actors, actresses, producers, writers, and directors.
People like Don and Shirley Sutherland, and the writer Don Freed, and actors like Jon Voigt and Susan St. James and Jane Fonda, and, most consistent of all, producer Bert Schneider had begun lending us their homes for fund-raising soirees that produced thousands of dollars in hard cash. They subscribed to and helped obtain other subscriptions for our newspaper. They sent monthly checks for our breakfast program, and paid our incessant bails. As most black artists, along with other black professionals, steered around and away from us, we clutched Hollywood, and did not analyze it. We thanked our stars.
That was what made me so resentful of author Tom Wolfe’s wholesale appraisal of such white supporters with the epithet “radical chic.” The influential and popular Wolfe coined that phrase to characterize the rich and famous suddenly latching on to the Panther cause—with the added counterimage of the black Mau Mau, who operated a flimflam to privately exploit the radical chic.
The bevy of white “star” supporters were, the cosmopolitan Wolfe suggested, only casting themselves in a more interesting role, to enliven the boring comfort of life between their real roles. I thought his well-touted term was, at best, a superficial stereotype. At worst, that label, as it seeped into the lingo of the times, ridiculed our supporters with a judgment that could make them recoil.
It was true that some of those cinematic souls were motivated by something less than concern over the plight of poor and oppressed black people. It was equally true that there were ordinary black opportunists in our revolution, as in our ranks. Among those at the various parties and brunches our steady supporters sponsored, there were surely those who wanted to satisfy their curiosity about mythical black men. There were surely those titillated by the danger and daring seemingly involved in being near real black “militants.” There were surely those who imagined themselves vicariously linked to some dramatic revolutionary act. There were surely those who simply found it the thing to do in 1969.
None of that was the point. We were dying, and all of them, the strongest and the most frivolous, were helping us survive another day.
There was nothing at all radically chic about Jean Seberg. From the moment Masai and I entered her rented house in Beverly Hills, I felt her genuineness and decency. She was expressive, like a little girl, excitedly interested in our programs. Transplanted from an all-white, all-American youth in Iowa, she really wanted to know about black people, about the nature of our oppression and the price of our freedom.
She had supported other efforts of blacks in the past: the NAACP—surprisingly, when she was a teenager in Iowa; and, more recently, the school and other social programs of a flashy, independent Muslim named Hakim Jamal (whom Masai knew). She had come to the realization, she told us, that black people could never be treated fairly or justly unless entire systems in America were revolutionized. She wanted to support such an effort.
Her friend, fellow actress Vanessa Redgrave, through whom she had made initial contact with us, considered Jean foolish to become involved with the Black Panther Party. While it was never clear to me precisely why Redgrave felt that way, Jean had her own ideals. She simply believed what she had been taught back in Marshalltown, embodied in the words about freedom and equality found in the Declaration of Independence. To me, Jean seemed a free spirit and a true believer.
After several hours of listening to Masai and I discuss the ideals and goals of the party, and the specifics of our programs, she offered her financial support—and something more, I sensed, as she and Masai lapsed into a long, personal conversation about Hakim Jamal.
Masai and I visited her about once a week after that. Soon I saw no point in going with him.
That was months before the raid on our office and Fred’s assassination. Jean had given us quite a bit of money by then. She gave it in incremental amounts, several thousand dollars at a time. Our arrangement was that she would telephone Masai or me when she had a contribution to make. She would simply leave a message that she had called. An envelope of cash would then be delivered to my mother’s house for one of us to pick up. She used a pseudonym when she called, “Aretha,” after the Queen of Soul. The three of us had laughed in deciding on that name. Jean felt if she was known as a major contributor to the party, she would not get work in Hollywood, and would not, in turn, have the resources to continue. It was logical.
That first meeting with Jean was also some time before I became pregnant with Masai’s child, before he began spending most of his time in Oakland, before his sudden marriage. It was also before Masai’s wife, too, became pregnant—which gave rise to Jean’s dubbing him “Johnny Appleseed.”
When I returned to Los Angeles after Fred’s funeral in Chicago, I called Jean. She was out of the country, but she made arrangements to get some money to our chapter as soon as possible.
The main office on Central Avenue could not be occupied. Thousands of rounds of Los Angeles Police Department ammunition had punctured and destroyed the walls of our two-story building. There were so many bulletholes that light from the front of the building shone through to the back. So many tear-gas canisters had been tossed into the building’s windows and doors that people passing by the building on the street still became nauseous and teary-eyed.
The damage had been done by an army: the LAPD’s new, and previously unknown, Special Weapons and Tactics team, known as SWAT. SWAT, a funny acronym, its sound descriptive of its intentions for us, was billed as an “urban guerrilla counterinsurgency team”—superior to and superseding the Metro Squad.
Before the raid on our office, no one had heard of SWAT. People had seemed incredulous when we told them about those dark blue trucks containing heavy artillery and military materials and specially trained men that had sat outside the Central Avenue office in November, a month before. Now it was clear that the LAPD had spent several hundred thousand dollars to actually create a military force to do one thing: eliminate the Black Panther Party in their domain.
In one fell swoop, they had tried to destroy our Southern California office and our Southern California chapter. They had come at three in the morning with a search warrant and a battering ram and a helicopter and a tank and those dark blue trucks. They had assaulted the headquarters building, as well as two other facilities.
SWAT team members assaulting our headquarters had sustained substantial wounds, while Panthers had not—at least not any serious bullet wounds. Albert Armour, at another facility, had even survived, after fighting SWAT team units alone for half an hour, firing from the rooftop when the building was overtaken and the few others there were forced to surrender. Tommye Williams had been the most serious casualty of the assault, taking a ricocheted bullet in her leg.
Later, however, they had all been beaten mercilessly. Kidneys had been collapsed by gun butts. Teeth had been kicked out by combat boots. Eyes had been stomped closed.
Later, after the five-hour battle on Central Avenue, our type-writers and mimeograph machines and telephones had been smashed. Our posters had been ripped from the walls. Our pots and pans and food and books had been strewn wildly, angrily, over the second-story floors. Our files had been demolished. Our furniture had been broken; our roof caved in.
As I walked through the headquarters building with a gas mask, I was overcome by the wreckage committed by rage. I stared at the hundreds of cigarette filters sprinkled on the floors. My comrades had stuffed them into their nostrils when gas masks had failed them, to keep from being forced outside. They had hunkered down behind the sandbags and reinforced walls and fought like madmen and survived. Now they were all in jail under exorbitant bails for extravagant charges.
Reviewing the devastation, I wondered how long our spirit could last. After visiting my eighteen comrades in jail and the hospital wards of the jail, I knew the police had damaged us severely. Still, they had destroyed neither our chapter nor our will. We would start again.
It was hard to be pregnant under the circumstances. As March 1970 drew near, however, and I began to feel the regular movements of a living being inside me, the anger and rage of 1969 were assuaged. In the hours of quiet in my bed in the chapter’s house in Compton, where I now lived, I would touch the outline of my swelled belly. There would come what seemed a response. I could see it! It was delightful, the sight and feeling of a little being turning, reaching, moving inside my body. I took to talking to the baby and telling it what was happening.
Now we were being stopped in our car by a pig named Zeigler. He was forcing us out of the car at gunpoint and delightedly announcing that if he shot me in the stomach, he could “kill two birds with one stone.”
Now we were speaking at a huge mass rally for the eighteen L.A. Panthers in jail from the December raids; and cheering with the thousands over the testimonial of “Bebe,” the lady who lived around the corner from the Central Avenue headquarters. She was addressing the crowd, her wig cocked “ace-deuce”: “Yeah, the police come early in the mornin’, rootin’ us up out of our houses, tellin’ us not to say a thing. And I say to my friend, ‘Why they doin’ this to the Panters? When I’m sick, I can’t call no doctor. I calls the Panters, and they come see ’bout me.’ And she say, ‘That’s right, honey.’ And then I say, ‘And when I ain’t got no food for my chil’ren, I calls the Panters, and they come see ’bout me…’ ”
Now we were making a speech at an Emma Lazarus Jewish Women’s Club meeting, where old Polish ladies who had fought the Nazis with guns and refused to go to the gas chambers were telling me to stop smoking while I was pregnant.
Now we were singing to a hundred thousand people gathered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for an antiwar rally, where David’s speech, which suggested the war be ended by killing Nixon, triggered his arrest for “conspiracy to kill the President.”
Now we were meeting “Aunt Jean” at the airport, where she announced that she, too, was pregnant.
“Can you believe it?” Jean Seberg declared excitedly above the din as I greeted her at the L.A. airport.
She touched my stomach and spoke to the baby: “Aunt Jean is having a baby, too!”
This, I thought, was the “wonderful secret” she had told me about over the telephone, girlishly enticing me to meet her at the airport if I wanted to hear more.
“No, Jean, I can’t believe it,” I said, feeling afraid for her.
I felt no one would understand about the boy in Mexico she was telling me had fathered the child. For all intents and purposes, she was still married to French author Romain Gary. She still lived with him officially in France. It was a marriage headed for divorce, but a divorce that would be complicated given the Catholic-grounded French divorce laws.
I told her all that.
“Romain is my friend more than my husband. He’ll understand when he sees how happy I am,” she said, beaming.
She had met the father in Mexico, where she had just completed a film about Mexican revolutionaries. The boy had a part in the film. He was more than an actor, she swore. He was a revolutionary himself, she said, as I recalled another love affair she had had during a different film. Maybe she had confused everything. Maybe Tom Wolfe was right. But I had come to love Jean. She was happy, and she needed to be loved.
“So you had a love affair,” I finally declared, “but this is really foolish, Jean.” I tried suggesting she return to Mexico to have an abortion.
“You should be happy for me,” she exclaimed brightly, sidestepping everything I had said. “You, of all people, should be really happy for me. I want this baby, don’t you see?”
She was going back to France, anyway, to wind up her life with Gary.
“I am happy for you,” I said, resigned to the notion that she did not live by the rules.
Her blond hair was still close-cropped, a remnant of her debut film Saint Joan. She looked the part even then. She was the part, an absurd girl who could never accept brutality or oppression or injustice, and who really believed in love.
She handed me a present she had bought for her “niece or nephew” and kissed me goodbye.
I was sure Jean would have held my hand. I longed for someone to do so, though I tried to be stalwart. I realized I had done nothing to prepare for the moment of the birth of my baby. The Vietnamese women had their babies one day and got back into battle the next, I had told myself. I was, after all, a revolutionary. There were bullets or prisons waiting to take me. There was the grave, ultimately. Surely I could have a baby.
The pain was more than I could bear. I felt alone, and sad for being so. I felt powerless. I did not want to go through with it. I could not believe I would have to give birth to that baby who had been with me for those past months, whose face I did not know. A living being would actually have to emerge from my body. I was frightened.
Masai, who in the last month had decided to behave like the father of my child, arrived at the hospital. He brought my mother with him. Dorothy Phillips, a Sister in the party who lived with me and the others in the Compton house, was there. She had driven me to the hospital at four in the morning, Masai being elsewhere with his pregnant wife. Neither my mother nor Dorothy, nor even Masai, however, was allowed to see me. Because he was not married to me, Masai’s paternity was irrelevant to the Catholics who operated Queen of Angels Hospital—none of whom, I thought, had to have this baby.
Giving birth was endurable until the moment there was no break between the labor pains. I had thought it would be a 5-4-3-2-1-0 operation. There was one sustaining pain now, hard and unbearable. I begged the nurse coming to check on me for something to ease the pain. She responded by telling me to breathe properly. I had forgotten to go to those stupid classes for breathing, I now remembered. I was changing my mind about natural childbirth, I told her arrogantly. She went off in a huff.
On each of her more-frequent returns to my room, I implored her to give me something to help ease the pain, simultaneously trying to retain some pittance of dignity—lost in my physical appearance; reduced to absurdity by the enema I had been forced by some unknown person to take; stripped away by the shaving of my pubic hair. She remained firm.
After about five hours of such exchanges, beside myself with pain and frustration, I changed tactics. “Fuck you, then,” I finally shouted at her back, banging my elbows on the bed’s sidebars, which she had furiously raised.
Marie Branch, the only black medical professional who helped us at our free clinics in L.A. arrived and took command. She forced them to accept her as my private nurse.
She made them unstrap me. Before she arrived, I had been given a shot of something known commonly as “twilight sleep,” to temper my hostile attitude. I had tried to get out of bed, where, according to medical text, I was to remain prone. The drug had only made me hysterical. To keep me in place, leather straps had been harnessed across my feet and chest. Marie ordered the staff to free me and let me have my baby sitting up, which, by then, was all I wanted.
The hysteria and pain subsided. My mind grew silent, contemplating the magnitude of the process. A being was coming out of my body; a being who had been breathing inside my dark womb would soon open its eyes to me, a separate person, its mother. Would he be happy? I wondered. Would she be whole, not damaged by my life and the way I was living it? Would he grow up in a welcome world or a still-hostile one? I suddenly loved that little being whose face I did not know. She was more than revolutions or oppression or freedom or time or death. To give that being life, I would die. I did die, for my ego vanished at the moment of her birth. Ericka.
It was June of 1970, three months after Ericka was born, right after the fantastic and dirty little story had been printed in the Los Angeles Times about Jean Seberg. We were still reeling from the repercussions of columnist Joyce Haber’s FBI-sponsored story.
Let us call her Miss A…She is beautiful and she’s blond…
…According to those really “in” international sources, Topic A is the baby Miss A is expecting, and its father. Papa’s said to be a rather prominent Black Panther.
Jean had called me and cried over the story. It had been published around the world, landing on the front covers of French journals. She had pledged she would never return to the United States.
Romain Gary had slapped her around because of it. He had accepted the pregnancy at first, but the publicity hurt him, and he hurt her.
Panthers were outraged by the possibility of its truth, grumbling about which Central Committee member had “fucked that white bitch.” Hollywood supporters were worried about their own association with the party.
No one was interested in the truth. The FBI had done well. Its telephone wiretaps had picked up information about “Aretha” in conversations between her and me, or her and Masai. They had placed FBI “interpretation” on the funny little appellation “Johnny Appleseed,” which Jean had given Masai after she learned he was fathering two children, his wife’s and mine. They had followed him on his visits to her. They had made their move.
The secret, internal memorandum the FBI’s Los Angeles office forwarded to Hoover in April 1970 read:
Bureau permission is requested to publicize pregnancy of Jean Seberg, well-known movie actress, by Raymond Hewitt (“Masai”) of the Black Panther Party by advising Hollywood gossip columnists in the Los Angeles area of the situation.
It is felt that the possible publication of Seberg’s pregnancy could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public.
Hoover’s immediate response had been:
Jean Seberg has been a financial supporter of the Black Panther Party and should be neutralized. Her current pregnancy by Raymond Hewitt while still married affords an opportunity for such effort.
I talked to Jean a few times afterward. I would never see her again. She would return to Marshalltown to have a bizarre funeral for her stillborn baby, madly displaying the little corpus in a glass casket to refute the FBI. Years later, she would commit suicide in France.
Now, in June, Eldridge was calling me away from the never-ending madness. That was how I felt as I listened to David Hilliard. Eldridge was forming a delegation of radical American journalists to join him in North Korea. He had left Cuba and was now in exile in Algeria, where he had met the North Koreans.
I was to join this delegation to North Korea, David was saying, as a representative of the Black Panther newspaper. David was slightly perturbed about that. Eldridge had specifically ordered that I be sent, as deputy minister of information for Southern California. While David said he was comfortable with the idea of my going, he seemed distraught that Eldridge had not requested that a member of the Central Committee be part of the delegation. After all, Emory Douglas, minister of culture, and Masai, minister of education, had accompanied David to see Eldridge in Algiers in 1969.
In any event, David himself could not leave the country. He was facing trial. The federal “kill Nixon” charge had been dismissed. David was, however, preparing for the trial on charges stemming from the April 6 events that had sent Eldridge into exile.
We would be in North Korea three weeks, David was explaining. Eldridge would outline everything about the nature of the trip when we met him in Moscow. My heart sang.
I returned to Oakland weeks later, in early July. David wanted to see me before I left the country. I was planning to leave that evening and had with me my packed bags and passport. It was rather ludicrous to have a passport, I thought with a smile, since travel to North Korea was specifically forbidden to U.S. citizens. But we were not U.S. citizens. We were outsiders, runaway slaves. At any rate, I was ready. I had made arrangements for my little Ericka to be cared for by my comrades; Gwen Goodloe would personally supervise it all. I was ready to see Papa again.
“Find out when Eldridge plans on opening the International Section office,” David said in our secret meeting.
I made mental notes.
“Find out if Kathleen is returning,” he said, referring to Eldridge’s wife, who had joined him when he moved to Algiers. “Ask him what really happened to Byron Booth. Did D.C. make it to Algiers?” he continued, speaking about San Francisco captain Don Cox, who had disappeared after a shoot-out in the Hunters Point section of San Francisco. “Tell Papa my case looks bad. I’ll probably do some time…”
David went on for almost an hour, thrusting me into a whole new world. I had not known that D.C. had been sent to Algiers. I had never heard of Byron Booth. Apparently he had disappeared after arriving in Algiers. I did not know there was to be an International Section of the Black Panther Party. In listening to David, I realized that the party seemed to be growing into a legitimate member of the international family of Communists.
Before taking me to the airport, David had to make a stop at the party’s national headquarters. The aroma of spicy barbecue was wafting through the rooms of the building. The Bay Area branches were about to hold an anti-Fourth-of-July picnic and rally in West Oakland. Tons of ribs and chicken were being roasted over charcoal in the facility’s back yard. The kitchen was filled with Sisters and Brothers making potato salad and lemonade.
David ushered me into a small office to wait for him. There were several Panthers inside awaiting work assignments. I sat down next to the only one I knew, Jonathan Jackson. He was reading a book by Che Guevara.
“Have you spoken to your brother, lately?” I asked, interrupting.
He had, he said, without looking up. It was typical behavior for Jonathan. I thought he was too serious most of the time, though he was only seventeen years old.
The year before, he had seriously asked Angela Davis to permit him to be her bodyguard. Angela had become caught in a morass of media and police attention over her battle with UCLA, based on the university’s refusal to reinstate her faculty position because she was—by then—a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Jonathan had also learned most of the songs on my album, Seize the Time, after I brought it to his family’s home in Pasadena on one of my visits there; in particular, the song written for Franco, “The Panther,” dubbed “Get Guns and Be Men.” He was most serious about his beloved brother, George Jackson, his imprisoned hero, whose book, Soledad Brother, was about to be published.
Jonathan and his mother, Georgia, had recently moved their things from Pasadena to Berkeley, into one of the party’s houses there, so that they could visit George regularly at nearby San Quentin prison. He had been transferred from Soledad prison after he was charged with the murder of a prison guard.
Even when Georgia joined us in the little office, Jonathan did not look up from his reading.
“Jonathan! At least stop long enough to give Georgia a chair,” I said, giving him an admonishing smile.
Georgia greeted me with a hug and a wink.
“Oh yeah. Right on,” he said, getting up without putting down his book. He leaned against a wall near his mother and continued reading.
I chatted with Georgia a few minutes, until I saw David waiting in the doorway for me.
I kissed Jonathan goodbye on the cheek. It was the sweetest face, one had to kiss it. His fair complexion took on the blush of a boy. He finally looked up with his big, questioning, sad eyes.
“Okay. See you later, Sister Elaine,” he eked out with unbelievable shyness.
I boarded an Oakland-to-Los Angeles shuttle flight and waited in the L.A. airport to meet Robert Scheer. By arrangement, he was to be my traveling companion. Scheer and I took a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Paris a few hours later.
Scheer was a writer, and one of the editors of Ramparts magazine. He was also some sort of radical hippie, it seemed, from Berkeley. With a group of his white radical friends in the area, he had formed something called the Red Brigade, whose purpose was unclear to me, even as he talked about it. Scheer also, according to David, had been instrumental in getting Eldridge into Cuba.
He and I would be joining some of the others in Paris. We would meet Eldridge and the rest in Moscow. The United States had diplomatic relations with the French; the French had diplomatic relations with the Russians; the Russians had diplomatic relations with the North Koreans, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Those who met Scheer and me in Paris were also white, Jan Austin and Andy Truskier and Anne Froines and other radical journalists. There would be eleven of us in all, including Eldridge.
When the Aeroflot jet landed in Moscow, it was dark. Eldridge loomed forward out of the crush of heavyweight Russians. He was elegant and not in the least worn. He had on an all-white suit and was still wearing the earring in his pierced ear. He greeted me first, expansively taking me into his arms. It had been a long way back to him.
Surely the Russian tsars and nobility were frustrated even in their death. Ordinary peasants had not only seized power from them, their peasant hands had laid claim to the vestiges of their royal reign. The beautiful Baroque hotel we entered had once belonged to them. Its wide marble stairwells had been theirs. Its crystal chandeliers and Byzantine rugs and tapestried walls had been theirs. The elegant balcony doors of the room where Eldridge and I slept had been theirs. The turrets of the basilican edifices rising in the distance sparkled in the morning light. The Russian summer sun filled the room when we flung open our balcony doors.
I was musing about the history it all represented as I listened to the voice of Eldridge. He was addressing the entire delegation, now gathered in our room. Of the eleven members, only he and I were black. Besides the whites, there were two Asians: a young, diminutive Japanese woman and a fellow from San Francisco’s Chinatown, whose face was overwhelmed by acne.
“Babylon must be burned,” Eldridge was saying. “But the Black Panther Party is abandoning its duty to take Babylon down…”
I grew attentive.
“The fact is, there’s a split in the party. The right wing has seized the reins of leadership and put a muzzle on the Panther. The vanguard party has become a breakfast-for children club.”
Was he serious? Was he constructing another of his well-known grand metaphors, a bizarre one? Like me, the others were stilled by incredulity, their pens frozen over the notepads they held.
“But I represent the left wing of the party,” he proclaimed, “the International Section, headquartered in Algiers. We’re saying it’s time to clip the right wing operating out of national headquarters, dominated by the reformist David Hilliard and his nepotistic hierarchy, which includes his reactionary brother, June, and his silly wife, Pat.”
I could hardly think, much less respond. It was impossible to believe what I was hearing.
“Babylon is quiet. Pigs are comfortable. Why? Because the vanguard is cooking fucking breakfasts instead of drawing guns!” he boomed.
Had exile driven him so mad he did not see? Had he been given some new mind-altering drug that had erased the police raids and assassinations from his brain? He had obviously forgotten the detail of the party mandate, based on the teachings of Malcolm X, that no member speak against another outside the ranks.
“The entire movement will follow suit,” Eldridge went on to open mouths. “I’m not going to stand for it. You can’t stand for it…
“The left wing of the vanguard party is calling upon you, our white, radical Mother Country brothers and sisters—and you others—to stand with us. Support the International Section, the hijackers and the ex-cons and revolutionary warriors in exile, who mean to set fire to Babylon. With your assistance, the real party can rise again, and we can return to finish what we started,” he finished in a dramatic whisper.
“I’m sorry,” Jan Austin boldly interrupted, putting down her pen and notepad. “What exactly do you want us to do? We’re not in the party. We’re journalists and writers. Why are you telling us this?”
“So that,” Eldridge said with a sigh, “with the might of your pens you will spread the word throughout Babylon. Recognize the left wing. Tell everybody who the true revolutionaries are. Take the correct line. Call for the bombing of pig strongholds. Urge the kidnapping of the children of the bourgeoisie. Demand that the bastions of Wall Street be burned to the ground. Stir some shit in Babylon. Show some fucking spirit!”
“Is that why you asked us to travel all the way here?” Andy Truskier asked, unmoved.
“Basically. I had to talk to all of you in person. I had to personally let you know what was happening to the party. With the help of Scheer, I handpicked each of you for this mission.”
I noted Bob Scheer’s silence.
“I’m trying to get this train rolling again. But I can no longer communicate with any of the members of the Central Committee in Oakland. They’re all Hilliard lackeys. I brought Sister Elaine here to be my personal emissary. She’s loyal to me. She and I go a long way back. She’s going to take the message back to the true believers in the party, so they’ll know it came from my lips. I’ve had word a lot of them are sick and tired of the bullshit. So you don’t have to worry about the party’s business. Do your thing, and we’ll deal with the party…”
Looking out of a window, all I could wonder was when and how he had come to the conclusion that I would be his emissary to advance a rift inside the party. Was he so arrogant as to imagine that my expressions of love for him had meant I would help him destroy the Black Panther Party?
“Of course, we’ll go to Korea and talk to them about promoting the thoughts and writings of good ole Comrade Kim Il Sung,” he continued. I promised them we’d get Kim’s entire works published in the U.S. I’m sure we can do that, can’t we, Scheer? That’s why they arranged this whole thing. But yes, I needed to see all of you on this more serious matter. I need your understanding. Can you dig it?”
“Right on,” those who opened their mouths mumbled, new acolytes of the massive man who sat before us, one whom I did not know and, it occurred to me, never really had known.
It lasted another hour—Eldridge’s attacks on the party, on David, on everything sacred. Later, when we were away from the others, I challenged the minister of information of the Black Panther Party.
I told him flat out that the saddest thing about how absolutely wrong he was about David was that David respected him. I asked him why he could not see that it was David who had held the party together through all of the hell we had faced since he left. Furthermore, David had always been in constant communication with the minister of defense, the leader of the party, Huey P. Newton, in prison at San Luis Obispo, whom Eldridge had not attacked.
He told me I did not understand. He knew David. David was ignoring the directives of Huey, whose hands were tied, because David was “pussy.” That was why the party was stuck in reform. He knew what was happening. I did not, for which he might forgive me. David was destroying the vanguard, buying more eggs than guns.
The rank and file wanted to move. Loyalty to the party was the only thing holding them back. He had solid information about that from Brothers out of New York who had joined him in Algiers. Who were these “Brothers,” I asked him. All I needed to know was that they were the bad motherfuckers. Anyway, anybody with eyes could see how weak the party had become. This had been echoed, Eldridge said, by a Trinidadian Sister named Connie Matthews. She worked with a Panther support group in Europe and had come to Algiers to talk to him about how the party’s reputation in the international community was stained, how nobody was taking the party seriously anymore.
“And after sitting in Algiers,” I said, “listening to these so-called Brothers and this Connie Matthews, you want to…”
“Listen! Shut up and listen!” he commanded. “They just confirmed what I already know. There’s unrest in the rank and file, and even on the streets—remember the Weathermen thing?—over the fact that the Hilliard dynasty has damn near forced everybody to put down their guns. I hear this shit everywhere. Even in Algiers! I’m not going to stand for it!”
We argued for hours. Rather, I more and more patiently tried to explain that David was seriously committed to the revolution and that the party was on the correct road.
“The party can’t do battle with the pigs alone,” I said earnestly. “Take a look at our losses, if nothing else, Eldridge. Our own people are becoming afraid of us. Every time the pigs attack us, the whole community suffers. The people just aren’t ready for that. The only thing holding the party and the people together is the programs…”
“Bullshit!” he shot back. “Revolution has to be won, not coddled like eggs. The Hilliards are so punked-out and gun-shy, they’re making the vanguard look like a reformist bitch.”
“Nobody’s put down the gun, Eldridge, but if we don’t have the programs, we won’t organize the people to pick up the gun. And it’s the people,” I reminded him as forcefully as I dared, “who will, after all, ultimately make the revolution…Face it, Eldridge,” I pleaded, “the only thing we’ve done so far to advance the struggle, besides losing a lot of Brothers, is the programs.”
“I don’t give a fuck about some serve-the-people programs. Anybody who doesn’t want to deal with the struggle has to have his ass dragged down the revolutionary road, kicking and screaming if necessary. I’m talking about the same thing I’ve always talked about, ‘revolution in our lifetime’ and I mean it…”
“You mean the revolution that will die with its secret because all the revolutionaries will have died trying…”
“You’re too emotional. Can’t you see I’m drafting Whitey to take the first heat—Weathermen and all that, and these motherfuckers. Look. I just want to get rid of those weak-assed Hilliards right now. That’s all. There’s only one way to get that done and hold the party together…Now, I brought you here to help me accomplish that.
“All you have to do is sound the alarm. Do it because you love me. What the fuck. Take a .45 or something, walk into national headquarters,” he went on seriously, “and put it to David’s head. Tell the motherfucker you’ve come with a message from me: I’m taking back the Black Panther Party in the name of the true revolutionaries. And don’t worry, I’ve got backup for you, Brothers waiting for the word from me.”
“You must be kidding, Eldridge.”
By dinnertime, after we had drunk a second round of vodka and the beef Stroganoff had been served to the “delegation” at long tables in the opulent, mirrored dining hall, Eldridge and I had stopped speaking. The last thing he said to me before I left his room and tried to find another for myself was that he would bury me in Algiers.
“I picked you!” he had shouted furiously. “I picked you to take care of this. You’re the perfect candidate. A woman that everybody in the party knows and that everybody knows loves me. Just like I know it. The fucking anthem is my song…Stop acting up, and ‘let your love come down,’ ” he said with a chuckle.
“Eldridge, you’re crazy…I can’t deny I loved you. I have truly loved the idea of you. But you can’t be serious about any of this…Please…Look, I’ll go back and I’ll leave the party, and I won’t tell anyone anything. I know you can find yourself another emissary. ’Cause it’s over for me. It’s all over, Eldridge.”
“You won’t get back, bitch, unless you do what I say! Do you actually think I’d let you walk away from here and mess up the cha-cha?!” he shouted, standing over me now, seated in the room with blue taffeta drapes and bedspread. “Besides, there ain’t nobody else. I couldn’t exactly tell David to send one of the rank and file. I certainly couldn’t call on any of those studs on the Central Committee. All their sorry asses belong to the Hilliards. You’re it, bitch!”
I tried not to cry or shake.
“If you don’t want to work with me, it’s simple. I’ll bury your ass. In Algiers. I’ve got a burial ground there, you know.” He laughed, throwing his head back. “I’ve put two niggers in the ground already. Boumédienne doesn’t give a fuck,” he said referring to the Algerian president. “I do as I please. It ain’t Cuba. I got AK-47’s and twenty niggers, and I will put your ass in the fucking ground!”
“I’m not going anywhere but back to the States,” I cried out, getting up from the bed. “I’m leaving now. I’ll take a plane from here, alone—tonight, if necessary.”
“And I’ll beat your ass right here and now if you move…Anyway, it’ll be a hard way back.” He laughed again. “I’ve got your passport. Remember? Got all the passports. If you want it, deal with the Russians or the Koreans. But I don’t think you have the heart to put yourself in the middle of an international scandal over it. Do you?”
“You’re right, Eldridge. It’s more than I can handle,” I said in a resigned whisper.
I stepped away from him, trembling.
In that second, I suddenly saw him, knew him. Eldridge was a man so afraid of facing prison again, he had left David behind to take the weight of the charges of April 6. Eldridge was a man who had stood naked before the police, walking away with a surface wound to his heel, while Bobby Hutton, half his size and age, had been mowed down before his very eyes. Eldridge was a man who was a rapist, a man who lashed out at women—in fear.
He was undoubtedly capable of inspiring others to act. There was no question that if I were pushed to Algiers, he could inflame his nebulous “niggers” to do what he willed with me. But his own claims to manhood hovered beneath the skin of a man who was, more than anything, a rapist.
“You’re right,” I repeated. “Right about the passport. Wrong about me. I’m not Kathleen. I do not take ass-kicking. You can kill me here and now, but that’s what it’s going to take. ’Cause if you touch me, I guarantee you, one of us will die tonight! And I don’t think you’ve got the heart to risk an international scandal. You wouldn’t have any more countries to run to.”
His eyes smiled as he walked past me. He quietly opened the door of the room to leave.
“Later, baby. Later.”
Our arrival in Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, postponed the terror. The Koreans seemed genuinely happy to see us, hoping we would enjoy what they announced was our one-month stay in North Korea.
We had already spent one week in Paris and one week in Moscow. The three-week trip Eldridge had originally proposed was now going to be six weeks. It was a reality that I had to accept, while trying to invent a plan of escape, while trying to appreciate the people and places in Pyongyang under the circumstances. The circumstances were only exacerbated by the fact that not only were Eldridge and I not speaking, he had influenced most of the others to isolate themselves from me.
Our hotel was actually a charming place, I thought, as I put away my things. I had a room to myself. The other ten were grouped two to a bedroom, Eldridge sharing one with Scheer, now ordained the cochief of the delegation.
Despite the chill, I smiled along with everyone else as we toured museums, war memorials, factories, clinics, schools, farms. I even found the mental strength to appreciate what I saw was the genuine development of socialism in action. There were no homeless beggars on the streets of Pyongyang, no prostitutes, no hustlers. There were no gambling houses or cheap bars, no rundown houses or apartment buildings. Connected to every workplace were a free clinic and a free child-care facility or school.
Most dominant in Pyongyang and the surrounding countryside were tributes to Kim Il Sung. On every corner on every street there were large colorful paintings or framed photographs of Comrade Kim Il Sung, often adorned with flowers or lighted sunbursts emanating from his head. Kim Il Sung was more than their hero or leader who had led the Koreans to victory in the fifteen-year guerrilla war against the Japanese imperialists in the 1940s. He was their virtual god, their “Illustrious Leader,” around whom they had created a cult of the individual.
We saw a passionate, dramatic, four-hour film, Sea of Blood, which depicted the bloody later years of the Koreans’ long struggle for liberation from Japanese colonialism. It made most of us cry and walk away with an appreciation for the Koreans’ unabashed elevation of the man who led them, finally, to liberation. We also saw the film the Koreans had made of the famous capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo. There was actual film footage of the nighttime capture of the Pueblo, caught in North Korean waters years after the end of the so-called Korean War—referred to by the Koreans as the “U.S. Imperialist War of Aggression.”
During that month, we learned a great deal about the Korean War. We heard personal testimonies about the famous battles known to Americans as Porkchop Hill and Heartbreak Ridge. We saw film footage of the Chinese volunteer soldiers as they greeted their Korean comrades; the Chinese “hordes” that had walked to Korea to fight and had turned the tide of war back to the bargaining tables—despite General MacArthur’s bold promise of American victory. We eventually went to the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom and, from the North Korean side, looked into the faces of U.N. and U.S. soldiers “guarding” the border for the U.S.–backed government in the South.
Early one morning, our Korean guides excitedly knocked on our respective hotel room doors. They had important news from the United States: Huey Newton had been released from prison.
Eldridge was genuinely elated. Huey would understand his position, he told me, entering my room without a knock. It was the first time we had spoken since Moscow.
“You don’t know Huey, Sister. But you will. He’ll be with me. If you want to be part of the vanguard, go back and tell him what I’m talking about. Explain everything to him. Tell him how the Hilliards are making the party lose face in the international revolutionary community with their bullshit breakfasts for children…
“Yeah, Huey’ll understand. Huey had a red-light trial! He wanted a red-light trial! Huey knows revolution is guns and bloodshed, not bullshit…”
He rambled on like that for a while as I listened with a serious façade, hoping that, given his sudden burst of enthusiasm for the unknown hero, Huey Newton, he would see I was no longer a problem to be dealt with in Algeria.
That hope was quickly diminished when Eldridge, in his moment of reconciliation with me and the party, dragged me to see Kathleen. I had not wondered about her at all, I realized. She was in a North Korean hospital preparing to have their second child.
Seeing Kathleen was not what bothered me. A part of me admired her. There was something sadly heroic about Kathleen. There was the audacity with which she played her role as one of the first and most significant women in the party. There was her defiant acceptance of Eldridge’s well-known brutality toward her. There was her willingness to stick with everything under a variety of adverse conditions, including being uprooted from San Francisco, and now from Algiers to Pyongyang to have her baby.
What threw me back into a shell of fear was Eldridge’s behavior on the visit to Kathleen. She was weak and less than one month from delivering. Nevertheless, Eldridge immediately launched into an attack on her about nothing in particular, something personal to them. Her listless response only increased his hostility to her. He did not feel shit about her condition, he told her, since the baby she was carrying was probably not his.
When she tried to defend herself, he shouted her down. “Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” True to form, Kathleen hung on, chiding him with spitfire responses, pushing further with her high-bred intelligence. Incapable of shutting her up, he finally slapped her hard, right there in the pristine orderliness of a North Korean hospital reserved for Communist Party leaders. He slapped her again, as I stood stoically, stupidly helpless. She just sat there in bed, holding her pregnant belly with one hand and wiping away tears with the other. She bravely screamed at him to leave. As he left her room, me trailing, he tossed her a laugh and a last ugly comment that he would have nothing to do with the bastard she was carrying.
My hope of finding a way to survive the trip was finally extinguished on one of our last days in North Korea. We visited the embassy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It was one of the few diplomatic outposts of North Vietnam, as the war with the United States was still raging in the South. The Marxist government of the North, established by the Vietminh (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh) under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, who had recently died, was the administration the United States was waging war to topple. We had tea there late one afternoon.
We exchanged pleasantries with the Vietnamese through interpreters, drank our tea, and listened to them invite the delegation of radical American journalists to Hanoi for two weeks. With no hesitation at all, Eldridge, on behalf of our delegation, accepted their invitation.
The Vietnamese people seemed small and serious compared to their robust and cheerful Asian comrades in Korea. Of course, there was the debilitation that came from constant war. There had been hardly a breath of peace since Dien Bien Phu, where, in 1954, they had, using the guerrilla warfare tactics of General Giap, finally ousted the French colonialists. From that point forward, a country divided by the 1954 postwar Geneva Conference had suffered internal struggle, due to the refusal of the United States–backed provisional government in the South to hold free elections and its declaration that the South was a separate state.
It was easy to feel at home in Vietnam, although the poverty and underdevelopment were pervasive. Perhaps the influence of years of French domination had so Westernized the people they seemed familiar, the Koreans having seemed more “Asian.” Moreover, the Vietnamese offered us their best, when they had so little. They were passionate, unabashedly weeping as they spoke of the horrors of the war, and able to laugh with equal vigor—even about the war. Every time the United States dropped bombs on them, they told us, a big crater was created. The most efficient thing to do with the deep holes the bombs made was fill them with water. Then they became “lakes.” “We have many lakes in Vietnam,” they laughed.
In contrast to the warmth of the Vietnamese, I was still feeling the chill of Algiers, still coldly isolated from the group. Although we had been eating and touring museums and war memorials, hospitals and farms together, by the time we reached Hanoi, most of the delegation was barely speaking to me at all—thanks, of course, to Eldridge.
I was surprised, then, when Jan Austin burst into my room one afternoon. She was, on the other hand, the only one with whom I did talk beyond the diplomatic doors, and whom I rather liked. She was waving a Vietnamese news bulletin in front of me and speaking about it excitedly, incoherently.
News about the United States was a rare item. We had been isolated from the affairs outside our cloistered world. Other than the brief information we had been given in Korea about Huey Newton’s release, we knew nothing of life back in the United States.
Jan was animatedly pointing to several bizarre sentences in the Vietnamese wire service page she held. They said that Huey Newton had spoken at the funeral of Jonathan Jackson.
Jonathan Jackson?! It could not be the same one. What had happened?!
Jan and I raced down the stone stairs of the hotel. We tried to find an English-language magazine or newspaper. Some of the other members of the group were already in the lobby, trying to do the same thing. Eldridge was nowhere in sight. We were told there was a Swiss chargé d’affaires in Hanoi who had an office in the hotel. He might have a journal. We rushed, en masse, into his offices. Inside was a French-language version of Newsweek magazine. The secretary let us borrow it.
There was Jonathan Jackson on the cover. There was the sweet face of a boy taking charge of life like a man. His blondish Afro was lit by the photographers’ flashes. His beautiful eyes were covered by smoke-colored glasses. His back was to the camera, but he had turned his face and upper body around as the picture had been taken. He held an M-1 carbine at the ready, at waist level.
We sat down on the stairs near the hotel lobby. Jan read the French and did her best to translate. On August 7, Jonathan Jackson had gone to a courtroom in Marin County, California, where certain prison inmates were having a hearing. He was alone. He had taken the parts of a folding-stock M-1 carbine, secreted in a bag he had brought into the courtroom, put them together, and stood up in the back.
“All right, gentlemen, I’m taking over now,” he was quoted as having said.
He had passed out automatic pistols to the inmates at the hearing who had joined him: Arthur Christmas, Ruchell Magee, and James McClain. A shotgun had been tied to the neck of the judge. The prosecutor, selected members of the jury, and the judge had been marched outside at gunpoint, one inmate shouting, “Free the Soledad Brothers by twelve-thirty!” I could smell the lush beauty of the San Rafael countryside that surrounded the courthouse that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. I could see the sun bouncing off the subtle mosaic colors of Wright’s building. They had marched outside to a van, all hostages, and entered the van. Then the bullets had rained down. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds from the weapons of San Quentin guards and sharpshooters had been rapidly sprayed into and around the van. The judge’s head had been blown off. The prosecutor had been critically wounded by San Quentin guard bullets. McClain and Christmas were killed, and Jonathan Jackson, sitting in the driver’s seat, had been riddled with bullets, slain in his seventeenth year.
I had no more breath in my body. I wondered why I was there and Jonathan was dead. I wondered why I was still involved in any of it, if it meant the loss of so much tenderness. Eldridge Cleaver was a stupid detail. Another man-child was gone. Yes, the Vietnamese were suffering, and far more; as were the Angolans and the blacks in South Africa and all the other oppressed peoples struggling to live. It was still too much. Jonathan was only a boy, a boy who had had a crush on Angela Davis, a boy who was a science genius, a boy who loved songs, my songs, and, above all, a boy who loved his only brother more than life.
Lying on my bed in the waning light and crying, I wrote another song, a ballad, a lamentation for the man-child who should not have died so alone…
You weren’t there, you didn’t see
Jonathan
Or do you care, what do you mean
Jonathan
What he would do none of us knew
Jonathan
for a man was he…
Dismissing Eldridge from my mind and focusing on the strength of the Vietnamese for the duration of our two-week stay brought the alleviation of understanding. So many of them had died and would die for their independence.
There were the young guerrilla girls we met on the beach at the Gulf of Tonkin, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, up from Saigon for a rest, girls who should have been giggling about boys or lipstick or hairstyles. There were the children we met whose bodies had been maimed by napalm, and those who had only one arm or one leg, the missing limbs destroyed by U.S. bombs. There were the stalwart old women who had lost everyone in their families in U.S. troop destructions of their villages.
So, there would be many Jonathans. There would be more bloodshed and suffering. Perhaps Eldridge was right, I thought. Perhaps we should force the thing fast to its inevitable, ultimate confrontation. No, I decided, Eldridge was wrong. Ours was truly a vanguard organization, a small unit in a big endeavor, whose purpose was to trigger a step-by-step revolutionary process, to clarify the issues, develop the mass mind, solidify a base of struggle, prepare our people to achieve freedom as nonantagonistically as possible—or to prevail in a conflict decided by bloodshed.
We were still not returning to the United States. We were now, according to Eldridge’s private arrangements, going to Beijing. We would stay only one week, Eldridge promised, a few of his cherished delegates having found the fortitude to suggest they had to return to their lives. I had been gone from my baby for over two months.
I put on my happy, diplomatic face and found that Beijing in early autumn was not too burdensome. Even as I dragged myself around to the factories and hospitals and new housing developments, I was challenged by the enthusiasm of the Chinese people. Old and young would spontaneously give emotional testimonies, like Baptist converts, to the glories of socialism. There was a refrain, it seemed:
If it hadn’t been for Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, I never would have lived in a house of brick…
If it hadn’t been for Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, I never would have eaten meat and vegetables, or educated myself and my children, or had running water, or medical care…
They affirmed that, but for the revolution, they would not have had the possibility of a decent life. Most of them would have lived and died eating the garbage of the feudal landlords for whom they had toiled, simply surviving the brutalities of the landlords and the warlords and the opium wars and the invading armies of eight different colonizing nations, never imagining happiness.
In comparison to the clean crispness of Beijing, Algiers, a crumbling, dirty city, was a disaster. It was also a study in contradictions, eight years after liberation from French colonialism. As we rode along the highway abutting the Mediterranean, all the signs were in French. Along the streets, however, women were babbling in Arabic, still hidden behind the veil. There were open, native marketplaces selling indigenous fruits and grains alongside French bistros advertising ice-cold Coca-Cola.
The building that Eldridge referred to as the embassy of the International Section of the Black Panther Party had previously been the residence of the North Vietnamese ambassador and his staff. Eldridge had secured it with the help of the Koreans, probably with another revolutionary lie. It was a white stucco-and-marble building, with open, airy, arched doorways, very Mediterranean in its feeling. There were three levels, the ground floor and one above and below, connected by whitewashed stairwells. A maid and cook lived on the lower level.
A small black woman was the first person I saw, standing in front of the house. Eldridge introduced her: Connie Mathews. I did not bother to speak to her. There were several Panthers inside from New York, men who had actually hijacked airplanes to get there. There was also the dashing D.C., Don Cox from San Francisco.
They all greeted Eldridge as though he were a nobleman returning from a Crusade, taking his bags, showing him telephone messages and stacks of mail and newspapers. All their hustle and bustle was overshadowed, I felt, by the racks of AK-47 rifles I saw lining an entire wall of one of the rooms. I heard somebody tell Eldridge that Huey Newton had just called.
As Eldridge placed a return call to the United States, some of his Panthers took Scheer and the rest of the journalists to hotels. I would be staying at the embassy.
“Yeah, Brother, I know you’ll dig where I’m coming from. The Sister will run it down to you,” Eldridge said into the receiver.
I read a Black Panther newspaper as I listened. It was the July issue, which headlined the release of Huey Newton. Ten thousand or more had greeted him when he exited the Alameda County courthouse. The front-page photograph showed him standing on top of a car, shirtless, surrounded by a mob that filled the camera lens. Impressive, I thought, ears cocked to Eldridge’s conversation.
“Naw, Huey, you don’t need to talk with her now. She’ll tell you everything in person,” Eldridge was saying.
I was not sure whether that meant I would really be able to escape finally, or whether he was covering up a plan to keep me there indefinitely or, as he had threatened, to “off” me.
I sat up for the next three nights, avoiding sleep as much as possible, and took quick baths whenever Eldridge went out. I ate nearly nothing though I had already been reduced to just over 100 pounds. During the day, as “ordered” by Eldridge, I wrote and typed various press statements that were to be delivered in a few days. Eldridge was preparing to formally announce the opening of the International Section.
Every news organization in the world arrived at the embassy for Eldridge’s press conference, along with various ambassadors and leaders of numerous revolutionary organizations based in Algiers. Eldridge was, as usual, effusively dramatic in his delivery, announcing that the Black Panther Party was establishing an International Section, “to join with our Third World comrades in the assault on U.S. imperialism.” The Brothers stood around in strategic places looking stern and revolutionary. Finally, it was over. The lights were out, the press was gone. It seemed time to leave.
The next morning, Eldridge gathered together his delegation. Once everyone was obediently seated in a sitting room in the embassy, Eldridge handed out our passports with a smirk. His cook served us a meal of couscous. Finally, he told us that he had made reservations for us on a flight to Paris that would be leaving in a few hours.
It took me only minutes to pack, despite having to do so while acknowledging Eldridge’s various admonitions and reiterations about exactly what I was to tell Huey Newton. Tears of relief clouded my vision, which Eldridge actually presumed to have something to do with my leaving him. My façade had been effective, I smiled weakly inside, alive.
I forgot my fear of flying. I had eleven hours between Paris and New York to contemplate what lay before me. I had eleven hours to decide whether to run from everything or to face it. I had eleven hours to determine what any of it meant to me, or whether everything I had become meant anything or nothing at all. There were eleven hours to develop the courage to tell everything to David and the unknown Huey Newton.
Huey was free. His imprisonment had been a symbolic victory for the reactionary forces in America, which had been gathering momentum since World War II. Achieving his freedom seemed a concrete victory for all of us fighting for real change.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had purchased for the United States the position of dominant world power. The sun had set on the British Empire, and on the other European colonialists. There was only one postwar issue for the United States: holding on to the number-one position. There was only one external threat to that: the Soviet Union, its wartime ally.
The most critical issue facing America at home was the maintenance of internal security. Strife or disruption inside the stronghold would waylay the global march, rust the new imperial sword, give free rein to the voracious appetite of former friend Stalin. Ranks had to be closed.
A postwar anti-Communist paranoia was constructed by J. Edgar Hoover, a friend and manipulator of every president since the 1920s. It flared in the machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formerly the Dies Committee. It spread like the proverbial prairie fire, fanned by the shameful Senate hearings conducted by Hoover’s close friend Joseph McCarthy. In 1956, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was created, the aim of which was not merely to investigate dissidents but to “disrupt, disorganize, and neutralize” them. Now there was wholesale suppression of all dissident citizens of the United States. The new public enemies were anybody and everybody designated as Communists.
The majority of people in the United States were unaffected by all of this. The war had introduced them to a new credit system which could confer great comfort on the lives of Depression survivors. Production and consumption boomed. There were new cars and radios and washing machines and toasters and refrigerators for everyone. There was a wonderful new thing called television. Everybody liked Ike and J. Edgar Hoover. Happy days had come again.
It was okay to round up and jail or even kill Communists and Communist sympathizers. Whoever they might be, they were enemies of freedom.
“Freedom” was the watchword. “Free enterprise,” they meant, the men whose monopolies controlled the United States of America, the only interested parties in the business of being number one. It was in the name of freedom that surviving Nazis were employed by the U.S. government, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were burned at the stake of the state.
By the end of the fifties, Hoover and his FBI had expanded their investigations and disruptions to civil-rights activities. The civil-rights movement had begun marching with a momentum that was unsettling.
There was the emerging leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., who could not be labeled a Communist. He could not be assailed as an enemy of freedom, with his nonviolence. But he was charging that there was something wrong with America. Freed slaves had no real freedom, he was saying, had no ability to exercise their life-liberty-pursuit-of-happiness rights. People were listening to him. Blacks sitting in their ghettos and sharecropper shanties were getting ideas and even speaking out.
A lot of white Americans were being shaken from a comfortable sleep. The color of things was being radically changed, blighting the all-white mashed-potatoes American culture of comfort, bringing disharmony to the internal peace.
Ordinary Americans were titillated by the sounds of new music, that had originated in darkest Africa. The new music was spreading into a psychedelic culture, accompanied by long hair and missing brassieres. Young whites were flowering into rebels, and young blacks were rising up in the streets.
In 1968, Hoover forced a massive augmentation of his COINTELPRO budget and forces. The timing seemed strange since the two men who had embodied for Hoover the only real danger to the internal security of the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, were by then dead.
It had been the embrace of reputed opponents Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in 1964 that had most alarmed Hoover. It was not a strong embrace, but it had certainly signaled a red alert.
Before 1964, Malcolm X had been dismissible as a racist and hate monger, with his visions of black independence from “the Devil.” His appeal had been limited to a relatively small segment of the black population, even though his freedom-by-any-means-necessary exhortation had quickened the rebellious pulse of black urban youth. Besides, Malcolm’s Muslims had been talking mostly about a separate program, and that did not interfere with the free-enterprise designs of the rich. Then Malcolm had abruptly left the Nation of Islam, disavowed narrow nationalism, and begun espousing an internationalist ideology. Through his new Organization of Afro-American Unity, he began linking blacks “impatient” for “freedom” to the international community. At the same time, the program of Martin Luther King was receiving international acclaim. In 1964 he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Hoover saw that the union of Malcolm and Martin was the worst possible threat to the internal security of America. The synthesis of their philosophies and, even worse, their forces, directed toward an aggressive campaign to gain “freedom” for black people, was a real danger. Both men were assassinated not long after that embrace: Malcolm X in 1965 and King in 1968.
Nevertheless, in 1968 Hoover intensified his COINTELPRO activities. The domestic situation had become a brewing tempest that Hoover knew could not even be stemmed by the millions of dollars assigned to waging the War on Poverty of his close friend Lyndon Johnson.
Young whites, the generation born after the war, the children of the days of civil-defense drills and Hiroshima and James Dean, the kids of good American families who had been bred on Father Knows Best philosophies, were doing more than dancing in the streets like their black counterparts. Grown up, they were sitting in front of their television sets watching the brutal realities of the war their freedom-loving government was waging in Vietnam, outraged.
Young urban blacks, who had idealized Malcolm X, who had always thought nonviolence an absurdity, who had tossed Molotov cocktails at America, were militantly claiming they were “black and proud.”
The domestic threat that caused Hoover to bolster his COINTELPRO forces arose the moment these two groups, black and white, came together—not under a psychedelic umbrella of “flower power” or to sing “We Shall Overcome,” but to shout “Free Huey! Free Huey!”
Before then, Hoover had not even noticed Huey Newton. Huey Newton had been characterized by Oakland police reports as a small-time gangster. Hoover did not even pretend to deal with gangsters, any more than he dealt with American Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, or organized crime syndicates.
Hoover had been busy with his post-Malcolm X campaign against Martin Luther King. He had also been watching the angry new generation of war babies dancing to the music of the legatees of Malcolm X. Even after the King assassination, Hoover had been trying to keep a handle on the residue of dissatisfied, alienated, and disenfranchised Americans, who were complaining about their government.
On the day in October 1967 when Huey Newton was arrested for killing a white cop, a hush had fallen over that cacophony of disgruntled voices. Huey Newton had specifically stated that “for every act of aggression, the oppressor must suffer a ‘political consequence.’ ” Huey Newton was not grumbling about problems, he was addressing problems. It was a Jeffersonian address.
The cop-killing charge against Huey was soon defined as a “revolutionary act,” and Huey became a “political prisoner.” By the time Huey was put on trial in 1968, he was gasoline on a nationwide spark. The question of change in America had become a matter of revolution.
It was the year “Free Huey” erupted as a kind of universal battle cry that J. Edgar Hoover openly pronounced: “The Black Panther Party is the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” By early 1970, Hoover and his new best friend in the White House, Richard Nixon, declared that the destruction of the Black Panther Party was a national security “priority.” Huey Newton had become more than just another leader of a black organization. He was the symbol of change for Americans questioning everything sacred to the American way of life.
Now Huey was free. But what did this mean? During the eleven hours on my way to New York I smoked a lot and drank a lot of Bordeaux, and thought about that. And I thought about John and Bunchy and Fred Hampton—and Jonathan Jackson.
Whatever I would do, I felt I had come to the end of a road, a glorious revolutionary road on which I had been traveling for the past two years. Whether I ran or resisted the temptation, I was convinced the Black Panther Party was facing its final days.
It was more horrible to think of, because after all we had endured, the party’s destruction would come from inside, from Eldridge. Malcolm X had predicted such a thing, and had been the victim of it. “We had a beautiful thing and ‘niggers’ messed it up,” Malcolm had said. History, I felt, would substantiate that the destruction of the Black Panther Party marked a tragic episode in the struggle of black people in America for freedom. No one would record that it marked the end of my life.
Our feet had barely touched the terminal floor when we were snatched up, as such, by unknown officials, men in suits, perhaps customs agents. Their guns were their identification. They cordoned us off into a single corner of the customs entry area. Dragging our bags into the same area with us, they began shouting to us to open everything. Scheer tried to protest; to no avail, of course. I was too stunned to care. What difference did it make to me if they questioned us forever about the “Commie” countries to which they very well knew we had traveled, though our passports bore no indication of the fact. Everything was doomed as far as I was concerned.
In the midst of all the shuffling around that was going on as to our passport stamps and the identification of our luggage, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a number of familiar-looking faces. They were smiling at me. I saw David among them. There appeared to be quite a few, maybe a hundred, other party members. They were crushed against a glass wall, a sound barrier. They were on the side that was United States soil. I was on the other side, in a kind of limbo land that seemed to belong to the unknown agents. They were smiling and waving fisted hands in muted animation. What was there to be excited about, I wondered. I stared at them sadly, especially David. They did not know.
“Exactly where have you been, Miss Brown?” a voice suddenly asked me.
“Paris,” I said matter-of-factly, still staring at my doomed comrades. France was the only country whose stamp was on my passport. Of course, the volumes of Mao’s writings and the works of Kim Il Sung in my suitcases, which were being opened before me now, provided conflicting testimony. Agents were strewing the contents of my bags everywhere, apparently waiting for an explanation. They wanted me to account for the bottles of ginseng liquor from Korea and the cigarettes from Vietnam. They wanted Scheer and Jan and the rest of us to explain how we acquired the complete works of the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, as well as the film canisters from North Korea—one of which contained the documentary of the capture of the Pueblo. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the moment to insist such things had been purchased in Paris.
“Paris, motherfucker!” I snapped to no one in particular, hand on my bony hip. I glanced back at my supportive audience of comrades, who were furiously raising fists, shouting silently.
When the search was over, I was asked to accompany a few of the unknown agents to an investigation room. The rest were free to go, their bags sufficiently stripped of all “Communist” paraphernalia.
It was while two of the agents and I were walking past the glass wall that I saw a sight so stunning it halted me. David was pressing kisses against the glass and pointing to that imposing sight—which was a man.
The agents touched my elbow to move along. I could not move. What could they do? I thought. There were too many witnesses for them to get too rough. I threw kisses back to David, my eyes fixed on the man. I did not hear David’s introduction of him. Then I recognized him. It was Huey Newton.
He was certainly not the poster. He was certainly not the picture Eldridge had painted. His face gleamed with beauty and sensitivity, and his smile was familiar, in a haunting way.
His body was built up, apparently from prison exercise. Behind the rimless glasses he was wearing, I could see eyes that were large dark almonds. His face was angular, chiseled. He wore a fastidiously groomed Afro hairstyle, and had beautiful teeth and flawless skin, the color of honey.
He sort of bowed to me, and I felt a loss of energy, like finishing a foot race or reaching a climax. It was an exquisite exhaustion that buckled my knees.
Somehow, Huey and Charles Garry, the party’s chief legal counsel—who, I realized, had been standing next to Huey against the glass—moved along laterally with me and the armed agents to an open area. It seemed to be a bridge between the territory beyond the glass wall and our limbo land. As we passed that area, Garry called out to me not to worry if I was arrested. He would get me out immediately.
Before I could speak, or my agent escorts could move, Huey Newton stepped across the forbidden bridge into limbo land, stopping time. He reached out his powerful arms and embraced me.
“I have lived to touch you,” he said softly.
My escorts were still immobilized.
“I’ve listened to your voice and your songs over and over in my prison cell and dreamed of you,” he whispered into my ear, still holding me against his body. His breath was a kiss.
“Welcome home, Comrade.”