CHAPTER 12

BECOMING HUEY’S QUEEN

“DO YOU KNOW who that was?!” I shouted at my interrogators, locked with them in a small room somewhere in the New York airport.

“That was Huey P. Newton! The minister of defense of the Black Panther Party!”

They were unimpressed. They took off their ill-fitting jackets to show their holstered guns. I was unimpressed.

They wanted to know if I realized that U.S. passports prohibited travel to Russia and North Korea. Cuba too, I added, noting that I could read. They wanted to know if I realized that the United States was at war with North Vietnam, and thus if I had gone there, I could be charged with treason. I wanted to know if that applied to the several hundred thousand U.S. troops on the border. They wanted to know if I had been to Algiers with the escaped criminal Eldridge Cleaver. I laughed in response, thinking that having been there was not the question; having survived was.

During the rest of the two hours, I laughed a lot, mostly thinking about Huey Newton and a funny thing my old girl friend Desiree Fountaine used to say whenever she met a fellow she thought was exceptionally “fine.” “Girl,” Desiree would say, “take me away now, ’cause I’ve seen all I came for.”

When I left the airport interrogation room, a few party members were waiting for me. I walked with them in a daze. A car appeared and took me to a hotel suite where Huey was waiting.

Lots of people were inside, clinking cocktail glasses and chattering. Jane Fonda was the most prominent face I saw when I entered. She had paid for all of it, I recalled having been told in the car. They were there to celebrate Huey’s signing of a publishing contract for his first book.

As I stood in the doorway, I concentrated on the people in the room, blacks and whites, Panthers and progressives, lawyers and writers. They looked gaudy and somewhat decadent to me. I was suffering from culture shock, having become accustomed to the ways of people in the socialist Asian countries I had just visited, people who wore plain clothes and lived simple lives.

Huey emerged from the crowd and rushed over to me.

“Would you stay here with me tonight?” he whispered in a strong embrace.

I nodded.

In a short time, Huey dismissed everyone from the suite. Only the Panther bodyguards remained, on guard in the sitting room.

At first I felt ashamed to be naked in front of him. It was something deeper than the skin disease I had contracted in Korea, which had left my body marred with discolored splotches. I felt unworthy somehow—not an unfamiliar feeling, I realized, as I showered behind a closed door. I walked out of the bathroom like a virgin, wrapped in a towel.

He did not remove the towel. Grabbing another one, he dried my back and neck and face. He was nude, thin legs and narrow waist, muscular torso and tight buttocks.

He took my hand as though he thought I might break, and led me to the bed. He whisked back the covers and bowed chivalrously, assisting me into the crispness of hotel sheets. We lay in the dark next to each other, neither speaking nor touching.

“I know you’re exhausted,” he whispered eventually. “I just wanted to be near you, after dreaming about you for so long. May I hold you?”

As I snuggled into the strength of his arms, I asked him how he had heard my songs. David’s cassettes, I laughed, when he told me. He began to rock me back and forth, so gently that tears fell from my eyes. He brushed them away with the tenderest of kisses. When he spoke again, his Louisiana accent sweet and soft, it was very studied. He talked to me about loneliness.

“When I was more alone than I thought a human being ever could be, my insides screamed out begging to know why. Why was I alive? Why couldn’t I die…It was back in sixty-four, before the party. I was in the Alameda County jail, in the part they called the ‘Soul Breaker’—which you’ve probably heard about.”

It was an understatement. The Soul Breaker was as known in and around Oakland as his having been there was. It consisted of a series of special jail cells constructed to do exactly what its name implied. No inmate had lasted in there more than forty-eight hours. The most angry and rebellious, the most sturdy resisters, for whom the cells had been designed, were usually released in a day, having been reduced to screaming morons.

“I’d been in isolation in jail before, but this was harder than anything,” he said. “Not a ray of light filtered into the cell. There wasn’t a window. No knob on the door. No bed or toilet. Just four black walls, a rubber floor, and me, nearly naked.

“The minute I stepped inside, I wanted to beg them to let me out. I was ready to do anything they wanted me to do. I didn’t care about appearing tough. I just wanted out.

“I was shaking with fear when it occurred to me that it was important to hold on. Not for them. But for me. If I could withstand the total deprivation of my senses, I might see something I needed to see. You know, learn something that could set me free forever. Free from all my fears, free enough to look at myself, into the dark corners, come to terms with myself and the universe I occupy.”

I was sobbing and he was holding me hard in the dark.

“You don’t have to shed any tears for me, ’cause I survived fifteen days of the pigs’ so-called Soul Breaker, and came out more powerful than any of them…all of them,” he said with a cocky laugh.

“It’s not your pain,” I told him. “It’s—it’s that I know that pain. I know who you are. I’ve known you in my soul. But I never thought you existed.”

Here was a man who had stepped out boldly and begun an attack on the forces that dominated us. Yet here was a man who was opening all the wounds, boring through the rhetoric of rage to the point of pain. It was a place I knew. He was no hero. He was a man. It was ridiculous to feel sorry for him. I loved him.

At one point he said, “I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m just a plain-born child.”

He went on to tell me that after a while they slipped food through a slot in the bottom of the door of the Soul Breaker. He soon vomited up that food. Later, he became sick from the smells of his vomit and his defecation and urine. He tried to calm himself by imagining beautiful things and keeping close to a wall to place himself. All his imaginary images began to rush together, turning into gargoyles and monsters.

He fell on his back and tried to find a position that would ward off madness. He began to hear the sound of his own breathing. He clung to it. He heard his heartbeat start to regulate. That was when he “let go,” reached out with his mind to the expanse of infinity. He began to feel at peace, he said. He stopped throwing up, and he stopped trying to mark time.

After what seemed hours of talking, he asked me to sing for him. Lying there in the dark of the hotel room, I hoarsely sang a few songs until I fell asleep.

Huey would heal everything, my heart said as I opened my eyes to him the next morning. He seemed a giant hand that would slap the grinning faces that shamed and shunned and severed lives like mine.

He bought me yellow roses and a new pantsuit later that morning. We were off to meet David Hilliard at a lawyer’s office.

Seeing David, I remembered Moscow and Algiers. I tried to focus instead on love, or at least on the business at hand.

“What do you think of the name Stronghold, Elaine?” Huey was asking me.

He was very animated, his cologne filtering lightly through the air as he walked, like a tiger, back and forth in front of the lawyer’s desk.

“That’s a fine name, man,” David offered, to fill the beat of time in which I had not responded.

“Oh yes, it’s wonderful,” I said.

Stronghold was Huey’s name for an entity under which the party would legally receive revenues from various artistic and business enterprises, beginning with his first book to be published, a collection of essays, To Die for the People. He was laughing about the pun in it: a one-word idea that captured what the party intended to erect inside the walls of the citadel of capitalism.

Once the three of us returned to the hotel, Huey launched right into the issue I had been dreading.

“Now, what the fuck is wrong with Eldridge? Is he crazy?” he asked, easing the tension in my jaws and neck and back. “I told you about all that bullshit he told me on the phone, didn’t I, David?”

“Yeah, man, but I think we need to hear Elaine run it down.”

I told David everything Eldridge had said about him, how Eldridge had openly denounced him, how Eldridge had even proposed that I be part of a move to push him out of the leadership. Then, looking into Huey’s almond eyes, I explained to him how Eldridge had insisted he would agree with him about the party, since he had had a “red-light trial.”

“Is this what you’re upset about?—Eldridge told me enough of that bullshit already. But worrying about what Eldridge says is like worrying about the paper he wipes his ass with…This is actually some funny shit, man, when you think about it,” Huey said to David. “I mean the idea of Eldridge wanting to ‘get down.’ I guess that’s how Bobby Hutton ended up dead,” he added.

“I’ll tell you what’s happening with Eldridge, David,” Huey continued, bolstering David’s spirit. “This doesn’t have a thing to do with you, man…Eldridge got his ass over there with all those African guerrillas and wants to have some dramatic shit to add to the conversation when he has cocktails with them. Just like he stuck us with his anti-Zionist rhetoric when he first moved to Algiers and found himself surrounded by all those Palestinians. Matter of fact, just like he did in the joint. Snapped his fingers and turned himself into a so-called Muslim minister when he saw all the Brothers around him picking up on Malcolm.”

David was as speechless as I was.

“I only asked the motherfucker to help put together the newspaper. He’s got words down pat. So I gave him a title and a pencil…”

David smiled.

“I didn’t ask Eldridge to do shit but write about revolution, man. This is my party, and we’ll have breakfast, lunch, and dinner programs if I say so. And I do…Eldridge can be happy he didn’t lay his hand on you,” he said, looking at me with a grin, “much as I wanted your pussy.”

David’s gratitude for Huey’s support bowled him off his chair with laughter. He slapped Huey’s palm. I nearly collapsed with relief.

“I need to see Eldridge in person, so I can smack him.” Huey laughed finally. “When we get back, man, have somebody get me a passport. I’m going to Algiers.”

We stayed about a week in New York, days that seemed to me a love montage in a movie. Huey bought me flowers almost every day and made love to me every night. He talked to me about everything and anything. He took me everywhere with him and made it known that I was his.

When author Mark Lane came to interview Huey for Playboy magazine, we were propped up in bed next to each other, both of us buck-naked. Huey said he felt clothing was too confining. I went with him to meetings with his publisher and lunches with well-to-do whites who wanted to support the party—and had to meet Huey Newton. When he made several visits to New York Panthers, we saw them together. He dismissed their irritation about that, and I dismissed the jealousy I saw. I was in a small, private world in the arms of Huey Newton; and also in a bigger world in the arms of Huey Newton.

“Man, this Eldridge shit could get serious,” Huey was saying to David between swallows of orange juice.

David was having breakfast with us in the hotel room on one of our last mornings in New York.

“Did you check out the bad attitude of these New York comrades? Telling me the direction they felt the party ought to be moving in.”

“Some disrespectful motherfuckers, Huey.”

“David, man, we have to make these comrades understand what’s really happening.” He gulped down a raw egg. “Nothing in the universe remains the same. It’s a law of nature. The party doesn’t stand outside of that…

“The only constant we have is the goal of freedom for black people. And that’s actually a subjective goal. It’s certainly not in the interest of these capitalists. It’s in our interest to be free. And we’ve come to see that our freedom can only be realized through revolution, the complete overthrow of the system of capitalism…

“But in order to attain our subjective goal, we have to become as objective as possible. We can’t be free using strategies based on emotion or rhetoric. If a man has the subjective desire to drive a car, for instance, and jumps into one without knowing how to drive, he’s bound to destroy himself, and whatever else. To get what we want, we have to look at the objective conditions and develop strategies and tactics related to them. And those conditions are in a constant state of flux—like everything else in nature. So our tactics must be adapted accordingly—you could say we have to know when to hold and when to fold.

“Now, when we jumped out on the streets with our guns, we had favorable conditions—the element of surprise. The pigs weren’t ready for some niggers parading around town with guns pointed at them…Of course, they’re ready now…”

“Ready like a motherfucker,” David echoed.

“But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Superiority of guns is theirs—to put it mildly.”

He got out of bed and started pacing.

“But originally, when we carried our guns openly, it was a tactic to introduce our people to an idea…The only government most black people had ever seen was the police—an armed force which we called an ‘occupying army.’ For black people, the police were all three prongs of the U.S. government, right out on the streets—legislative, judicial, and mostly executive. Black people understand a red-light trial—which I certainly did not want, whatever Eldridge has concocted in his mind about that.

“Before the party, you had Brothers operating the community-alert patrols. The joke was, after the patrols took their pictures and made notes about rampant police brutality on the streets, they reported that shit to the police. The party came along to heighten the contradiction, take it to a manageable level. Since the people viewed their primary relationship to the system’s oppression on the street, we had to introduce dealing with the ‘system’ on the street. And that’s one idea our people have gotten, I think. To an extent, so have the pigs, at least in Oakland.

“Sacramento was the same thing. It had less to do with guns than with organizing; even though a lot of people, even the so-called militants, had the mistaken idea we went there over a gun law.”

“Manifest reform,” David injected. “I remember that, man. As though we gave a fuck about pig laws.”

“We have to go back over that, David, and explain that the fundamental reason we went to the legislature in Sacramento was to organize. To put forth a call. Not to arms in the narrow sense, but to people ready to take a vanguard step toward revolution…You know, Elaine, we just showed up with guns and used the gun legislation issue to startle the pig press into putting our message out.”

“Matter of fact,” David said, laughing, “there were only about seven real party members at the time. After Sacramento, thousands of Brothers signed up to be Panthers.”

“Yes, well, that was about organizing the party. Now we’ve got to move to organize millions of black people to sign up for revolution. So I think the first thing we have to make these comrades understand about all of this, David, is that, intrinsically, the gun is not necessarily revolutionary. The fascists have guns. It’s the motivation behind the gun that determines the validity of its use. Vietnamese guns against imperialist guns. And it’s the strategy that determines the value of the gun. Of course, Mao said, ‘In order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.’ And we believe that. But we have to emphasize that the idea is to get rid of the gun.

“As for the party, we need guns to keep ourselves from being obliterated, so we can push the momentum of revolution. And we need guns in the picture to politicize black people with the concept of the ultimate necessity of armed revolutionary struggle—which seems inevitable, unless the pigs change and throw down the guns that support the system. But the ultimate armed struggle is not the business of the vanguard. Our business is to develop and organize our people to carry out the revolution to achieve the subjective goal of freedom.

“As I see it, the next step in that process is to deemphasize the gun and emphasize the social programs, to widen the people’s horizon. If we stayed on the pigs and the gun, per se, not only would the party go down, the people’s spirit would be crushed as they watched, and they might remain blind to the forest for the trees. Not only that, they’d come dead on arrival at the door of revolution. It’s the people who have to survive to the point of revolution.

“Elaine, would you make some notes on this. From now on, we’re going to call the breakfast program and the clinics and so forth Survival Programs…

“We have to educate the comrades, David, that these programs are neither revolutionary nor reformist—no different than the gun. They have to understand that what the programs—Survival Programs—do is expose the contradictions beyond pigs with guns. The Survival Programs are a vehicle to move the people to a higher level.

“Now, Martin Luther King was dealing with—or had started to deal with—this primary contradiction, going beyond civil rights to the economic question. But his poor people’s campaign had some major flaws. Not to mention that Martin had no chance to correct them, which I think he might have if he’d lived. And the pigs must’ve thought so, too, because it was at the start of that campaign that they cut him down. But first, the poor people’s thing lacked dignity, had the tone of begging from the white man, maintaining the slave-master relationship. Second, it was doomed from the jump, as a moral appeal to an immoral bunch of thieves. Mostly, the idea went no further than getting jobs and housing and so forth. It was reformist, something like asking the slave master to make better slave shacks, avoiding the fundamental question of slavery.

“If that was our strategy with the Survival Programs, it would be reformist. And Eldridge would be right—in that sense. Not about you, David…But I hope he tells me that shit about you to my face, so I can put my revolutionary foot in his ass.

“Black people already know they’re poor and powerless. They just don’t understand the nature of their oppression. They haven’t drawn the line from their condition to the system of capitalism. The Survival Programs begin to do that. The people will undoubtedly start asking themselves why the party can do so much with so little, and the capitalists so little with so much. That’ll motivate them to start making some demands—not begging—for shit. And the Man will be forced to make little concessions. The more concessions, the more demands…In other words, the programs are another tactic for revolution.”

It was more than love I was feeling for Huey. I was beginning to see a man who seemed the other part of my soul. Connected to him, I was a new force. Disconnected, I felt I might never exist again.

Huey, David, and I returned to Oakland, to sort out the pieces, or what might be the pieces, of the party, given Eldridge’s machinations. In the meantime, Huey prepared to deal with Eldridge in person.

Everybody I saw on my arrival in L.A. was complaining about the heat, with the exception of one little being, who was concentrating all her energy on a lime Popsicle.

There was no interest in my hello-my-darling-baby, how-you-have-grown sentiments. Ericka Brown did not even look up from her crib. She never noticed the grand entrance of her mother. She did not concern herself with my tears, as I looked at her; or Gwen, her mother for half her life, standing over her, smiling.

It is very hard to eat a Popsicle with no teeth, especially when it is so hard to sit up. Thus, Gwen had propped a wardrobe of support pillows behind my baby’s back and, wrapping a piece of wood with layers of cool white sheet, had invented a mouth-high plank across the small crib. It was a no-hands-necessary arrangement for licking a lime Popsicle at about forty miles an hour. The largest fan in the house was sending a breeze onto Ericka’s topless torso, causing her eyelashes to flutter and the cloth napkin tied under her chin to billow. It did not interrupt her concentration.

After a few minutes of holding back, I jumped in front of her with a tap step.

It was that smile that shook me. She really remembered her mother, who had left her three months ago, off to save the world. A chubby beauty, she cracked the world with her smile and sent me to my knees with arms outstretched.

How could I explain myself? There were no words. I picked up that baby that was mine, and squeezed and squeezed her, staining the sticky remnants of lime Popsicle on her face with stupid tears. How forgiving her little body was to hug me back, to tell me she had been well. How forgiving to accept my embrace without question, to accept me back as her mother, a woman who claimed to care about millions of black children, yet had shown so little caring for the one that was hers. In kiss after kiss, I tried to ask her to hold on through the rest of my comings and goings.

I wanted some group of mothers to show up with a ribbon and tell her I really was one of them. I wanted somebody to tell her it was all right if I never baked a cake, all right if I knew nothing about teething, or what she was supposed to be eating at this stage. I wanted somebody to make amends for what I would not do for her, because I was doing this intangible thing, with this grand idea about my role in it. I wanted to explain myself.

If anything, I had the instincts of a father—to provide for and protect. I wondered if that was enough when you had a cold and needed your nose wiped; when you could not sleep and needed a hug; when you needed a ribbon in your hair, or your shoe tied.

My mother did not hesitate to inform me that no committee would be coming to give me the motherhood stamp of approval. She told me that if I were too busy to take care of my own child, the least I could have done was to leave her in a decent home: hers. I had, in point of fact, abandoned my child. That was something, for good or ill, she had never done.

She was right, right about everything I was not. I just listened. I did not want to be her. She did not want to be her.

Huey was ablaze. I had to come to Oakland right away. He had a proposal for rescuing the comrades from their ideological stagnation, from the undertow that Eldridge might create. Instead of directing the party leadership to study the guerrilla warfare treatises of Castro or Che, he wanted them to study the great ideas of the world, he told me when I arrived. He wanted to know what I thought about the creation of an Ideological Institute.

Such a forum, he was saying excitedly, would bring together the party’s leading members to study ideas, expand their minds, come to conclusions, or find there were no conclusions. We could go beyond his own early treatise, The Correct Handling of a Revolution. We could set it aside with the rest. There was no correct way, no blueprint for socialist revolution in America. Through the leadership’s collective investigation of the history of ideas and philosophies, however, we might develop some kind of road map.

If he wanted my endorsement, he had it, I said. I knew how Eldridge’s jingoistic “revolution-now,” “part-of-the-solution-part-of-the-problem” rhetoric had influenced the style of the party. I knew that if his latest rhetoric reached the ears of the rank and file, it would cut at the heart of the party. Such a college, I told Huey, certainly could be an antidote. To my mind, this was also a way for Huey to begin to re-establish his place in the Black Panther Party.

Huey had gone to prison within the first year of the party’s formation. During his three years in prison, his small essays on revolution, printed and distributed in pamphlet form, had been required reading for party members, as his rattan-chair poster had been our introduction to revolutionary art. Thousands had joined the Black Panther Party while Huey was behind bars. To them he was a mythical figure, a godly photograph of a man, or a man’s image of God.

When he emerged from prison, thousands were waiting for deliverance. He was David with a stone in hand, Perseus with sword raised. Even for those beyond the ranks, black and white, Huey’s being set free raised the prospect of revolution in their lifetimes. For the party membership, he was the returning general who would reveal his plan for the decisive battle of victory over the abstractions of racism and oppression, and lead the charge that would propel us into paradise. For those who had known him on the streets of Oakland, not excluding David or his brother June or even Bobby Seale, Huey’s mythical persona had supplanted the street image of “crazy Huey,” the man they had known in pre-Panther days. He had become a kind of homegrown messiah.

Of course, I had my own Huey Newton fantasies, which did not exclude Prince Charming visions. As we grew closer in those weeks after Eldridge, though, I saw that he was bigger than the visions and fantasies of him. And I saw that that made him a misfit in his own place and time as much as in his own organization.

“A lot of what I am has to do with fear,” he said to me out of nowhere one of those first nights I came to see him in Oakland. “And what I understand about fear. I wasn’t afraid only in the Soul Breaker. Like you, I’ve been afraid much of my life.”

I moved closer to him. We were curled up in a small bed in the apartment of Alex Hoffmann, a white attorney who provided regular refuge to Huey, who had had no residence of his own since his three-year residence in prison.

“You know, niggers on the street don’t like ‘pretty niggers,’ ” he continued, making me wonder whether he was speaking about him or me. “They called me ‘pretty’ and ‘high-yellow nigger’ and other motherfuckers. The problem with niggers on the street, of course, is that they don’t know what to hate for their oppression.”

“Or, as Frantz Fanon wrote, they’re afraid to confront the real issue: ‘draw the oppressor’s blood,’ as he said. My problem in North Philly was ‘good’ hair.”

“Naturally…Anyway, it didn’t take long to figure out that I was in trouble on the street. I reached a point where I was scared to go out of my house. Then Walter, my brother, tutored me on the game.

“Walter schooled me on how to confront my fear, how to see a motherfucker for what he was—in most cases, another scared individual. He taught me how to walk on the street, how to talk, how to carry myself, and how to use my hands…But I was still scared every day. Every blood on the street was a potential threat, unless I knew he was a friend. After my first fights, though, I recognized that they bled like me…By the time I became a teenager, I was challenging the first fool who looked at me wrong, and walking around with an ice pick in a paper bag.”

“No, really?” I laughed.

“Really. And you can believe it kept most of them out of my face.” He laughed with me. “The rest I knew how to beat with my fists, unless they wanted to deal with my ice pick. I earned a reputation as ‘crazy.’ ”

He went on to say that black people would never rise out of life at the bottom of the quagmire of America unless they took the same approach.

“The first question for black people is to get past fear, to see past the monolith to the man. That’s why we started using the word ‘pig,’ a detestable image that takes away the image of omnipotence. A pig, whether running loose in the ghetto with a gun or sitting on Wall Street or in the White House, is a man who can bleed like a man and fall like a man.

“So, in many ways, the party represents a response to our collective fear of the Man—getting past the first barrier to walking free on the streets of life…Revolution will be our ultimate response. But that’s a hell of a thing for black people to begin to comprehend, because their fear of the Man has been driven down so deep, down where they live. It comes out in the form of hatred, or self-hatred. That was another reason I felt we had to start there, where they lived and the armed pig wallowed. Putting guns out there was carrying ice picks in a collective paper bag.”

“And so it’s ‘Free Huey’ all around,” I said with a smile.

“Something like that. But I’m still talking about fear. If we can now expose the whole face of the Man, tear off his mask, the people will see the capitalist system. They’ll see that what keeps them down is a collection of men that can be dealt with by the collective effort of other men—and women.

“The hardest part for me right now, though, is trying to convince this party I invented that we can’t do much more than that. The party can’t take down the Man. And I can’t do it. I can’t save one soul. And I don’t want to be Jesus or any other god. I want to realize ‘God,’ which is not some dominating power sitting above us. God is all humanity in concert with nature. We are God, though we’ve yet to become God. But mostly, I want to be free to live on my terms and die on my terms. But in order for Huey to be free, the party has to develop the collective will in the people to free us all. We say, ‘Power to the people.’ ”

He talked on—then and each time I returned to him. Every word became a building block to the new world, the one where I knew I belonged—with him, who had become my other self, my lover, my confessor, and the only man I could imagine I would ever call my leader. And in that world, I saw that Huey was as much an outsider in life as he was in the party.

On his release from prison, Huey had made a formal public offer to the North Vietnamese of the entire Black Panther Party membership as comrades-in-arms to support them in defending their country in the vicious war against the “U.S. imperialists.” For Huey, marching for peace or calling for an end to the war was futile. In war, he said, the only position was on the battlefield. Though his offer was not accepted, the North Vietnamese sent the party a formal expression of gratitude.

Just as the party membership and thousands of other leftists in America were applauding that act, Huey sent everything into a state of confusion. He renounced the party’s Eldridge Cleaver-inspired position against the State of Israel. He sent a message to all Arab embassies and to that of Israel stating that the Black Panther Party now recognized both the State of Israel and the right of the Palestinian people to have a homeland.

The party’s position, as his message outlined, was that the Arab-Israeli dispute could be settled quickly if Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or some other territory controlled by the Palestinians’ rich brothers—who had been claiming since 1948 to be pressing to help them reclaim Palestine—simply gave a piece of territory inside their vast borders to the Palestinians and made them a new homeland. The wrong that had been done by the Stern Gang in collusion with the British gang and the U.S. gang in uprooting the Palestinians was a fait accompli. The resultant State of Israel had to be reckoned with, therefore. Life, like revolution, he said, looked forward, not backward.

His message contained the most daring conclusion. Ultimately, he exhorted, there was a revolutionary way to settle the conflict. He called upon Arabs and Israelis alike to recognize that the problems between them had to do with something larger than the territory of Israel or Palestine, larger than Judaism or Islam. It had to do with the theft and hoarding of the resources of the region—specifically the oil—by what he lambasted as a conspiracy of certain governments of the region with the United States. He urged them to lay down their arms against each other, rise up united, and overthrow the reactionary Zionist government in Israel and the reactionary Arab sheikdoms and kingdoms and create peace in the land of plenty.

Huey found a certain private delight in taking that position, no matter how befuddled his troops became over it or that it tainted our nominal alliance with the PLO—and notwithstanding the damage it did to Eldridge. Several nights before he proclaimed the party’s new Middle East position, he told me about his father.

Huey’s father, Walter, was half white, or half Jewish actually: the product of a black woman and a Southern Jew named Simon. The question of whether or not Walter Newton’s mother was forcibly raped, working in the house of Simon, was a technicality lost to history as far as Huey was concerned. What disturbed him was the damage that had been done to his father, whose self-hatred and hatred of whites was that of the son of a presumed rapist—despite his mother’s subsequent marriage to a black man named Newton, who gave him his name.

Somewhere in the outer regions of Huey’s thinking, he saw a connection between the bitterness of Walter Newton and the bitterness of Arabs and of Jews, and that of black people in general. It was, to him, a useless response to the sting of the past. They had all looked back so long, he declared, the present was obliterated and the future eclipsed. The relief of change was only for those who could create the future. There was, therefore, something poetically proper, healing, even, he thought, for the black son of the bastard son of a Jew to take that position.

The confusion of Arab-Israeli positions for Black Panthers far from the Sahara was only temporary. It did, however, begin to disturb the poster image of the homecoming hero who was to “off the pig.” As Huey was defining his leadership, his troops were trying to decipher the man they had created, with whom they were now face to face.

Now they were wondering about his Ideological Institute. I saw the questions as the local leadership cadres came trooping to Oakland from as far away as Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago for bimonthly, two-day learning sessions led by Huey. Where was the stuff about the pigs? they seemed to ask, as we studied not only Mao and Marx but Aristotle and Plato. Where was the stuff about urban guerrilla warfare? their expressions conveyed, as Huey led us in discussions of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant, Kirkegaard and Nietzsche, about existentialism and determinism and free will. I saw their faces when we examined and questioned the theories of capitalism and socialism and Communism, Huey asking whether our systematic use of the tests of dialectical materialism meant anything. If, under a dialectical materialist analysis, nothing “stood outside” of the process, did that negate the process itself? he asked.

In that time of reawakening, as I came to think of it, it never dawned on Huey that he ought to have a place to live. Other than Alex Hoffmann’s, or the house of one of his six brothers and sisters, Huey slept at arbitrarily chosen locales nearly every night. On one hand, that arbitrariness had its benefits. A potential assassin could make no plan. It necessitated, however, that David undertake the difficult task of providing security for Huey, which was worsened by Huey’s frequent, unannounced jaunts into the streets by himself, unarmed. Ignoring all admonitions, Huey would simply declare that “the People” would protect him. It was actually quite an amazing thing to behold Huey walking down an Oakland street. He drew large crowds of eager children and teary-eyed women with flowers and men reaching out to shake his hand.

It was definitely time for Huey to have a secure place to live, David kept insisting. I agreed. By the end of 1970, the police had increased the number and sophistication of their watchful eyes on Huey Newton. There was a lot of COINTELPRO money.

Police were, of course, watching all party members. That Huey Newton himself, however, was the target of an FBI-sponsored assassination plan was becoming more and more evident. The “heroic” cop killer who had defanged the Oakland Police Department, who had inspired others to do the same elsewhere, who was preaching revolution, had to be eliminated—though gunning him down openly did not appear, at the moment, politically practical.

I was staying in Oakland more than not and saw the increasing level of police surveillance. Wherever Huey was, it was certain the police would be—an apparent assortment of FBI and local police. When we woke up at Alex Hoffmann’s, a plainclothes policeman would be outside our second-floor bedroom window on a telephone pole. Outside his parents’, there might be police in phony mail trucks. Police drove taxicabs behind the car he was riding in; police walked down whatever street he walked on. They were so invasive, it became necessary—David insisted over Huey’s protests—to post a bodyguard overnight with Huey wherever he stayed. In time, Huey himself began feeling the strain of looking over his shoulder, sleeping very lightly and eventually trying to keep alert with Ritalin pills.

“Huey, man, this arrangement of yours about housing has got to go,” David commanded with finality one afternoon at his house. “I’m going to trial soon, man. And I’m sure to get a conviction. Then what happens? Even if Bobby gets out of his New Haven case, he’s facing the Chicago trial. Anyway, you think Bobby can take care of things…I want you to get a place to live. Now.”

“I have one—wherever I want.” Huey laughed.

“This is not funny, Brother. Even I know that,” Gene McKinney said. McKinney was one of Huey’s myriad “street partners,” who faithfully stayed close to their homegrown hero. McKinney, though, was a special one. He had been with Huey the night Oakland police officer Frey had been shot and killed—the incident that put a bullet into Huey’s abdomen and sent him to prison, triggering the “Free Huey” campaign. It was Gene’s dramatic testimony about that night—or his Fifth Amendment refusal to testify about that night—that had tossed judge and jury into a maelstrom at the end of the trial.

“But, Gene,” Huey said, still laughing, “I’ve got you, Brother…”

“Man, this is not about you, Huey,” David interrupted forcefully. “It’s about this party. It’s about taking care of the party by taking care of the leadership. We’re on thin ice as it is…We need you, Brother.”

“Because I’m the supreme commander?” Huey said, not laughing anymore. His title had been changed by the Central Committee from minister of defense when he was released from prison.

“Because you’re…”

“Who came up with that title, anyway, David…See, that’s the real problem. I don’t want to be the supreme commander anymore. Let Gene be the supreme commander…”

“People love you, Huey,” I said.

“Because they don’t love themselves…”

“You can philosophize about this shit if you want to, Huey,” David said, as if to an obstreperous child, “but I’m going to prison, and…”

“You want to put me in one.”

“Call it what you want, Huey, but we’ve found a place for you to live, and you’re going to live there.”

“Why do you need all this convincing, Huey?” I added. “You can’t even sleep anymore. Pigs everywhere.”

“And will they go away if I get an address?”

“No, Huey,” David said patiently, “but they’ll have to go through some deep shit to get to you…Now be quiet a minute, man. Let me tell you about the place. It’s an apartment on the twenty-fifth floor of the building. The penthouse. The pigs would have to use helicopters to get to you. Or burn down the building along with all those well-to-do white people in it. There’s an internal security system in the building, television cameras and that shit. The point is, it’ll give you some space, Brother, away from the bullshit.”

“Sounds nice. But not for me,” Huey said.

“Why not?” I asked.

We discussed the advantages and disadvantages, the latter being virtually nonexistent.

“It’ll cost too much,” Huey argued weakly in the end.

“Six hundred dollars a month?” I said. “You’re not serious.”

“I know one thing you’ll appreciate about this place, Huey,” David added. “A piece of poetry for you…The building faces the Alameda County courthouse. You can look down on it out of the windows—you know, reflect on the thousands of black people who stood out there all those months chanting ‘Free Huey.’ ”

Huey was strangely quiet.

“You mean I can see the Soul Breaker, where I nearly died,” he said solemnly.

Nobody said a word.

“Where nobody else will, really because of you, Huey,” I said after a bit. After Charles Garry became Huey’s trial attorney, and then legal counsel to the party, he had lobbied for a judicial ruling that such confinement was “cruel and unusual punishment,” based on the atrocious treatment of Huey, effectively outlawing soul breakers in the state of California.

Still nothing.

“Get me a telescope!” Huey laughed at us, patting my rear end.

There was something more about that apartment I did not mention, and certainly could not. It had to do with one of the reasons for my enthusiasm for it, beyond my love for Huey and the obvious security question. It was a shameful, secret, personal reason. It was a woman thing, and not at all a revolutionary woman thing. I really wanted to be Huey’s “woman,” in the old sense, the nonrevolutionary, get-married, down-and-dirty street sense, even including the barefoot-and-pregnant sense.

The party’s position about such relationships was being revolutionized. Indeed, it was Huey who was promoting a line that the primary relationship between men and women in the party was as comrades. That included love and sex. To define another party member as one’s own—“my” man, “my” woman—was not merely taking a step backward, clinging to a bourgeois socialization. It was taking a step in the wrong direction, to support the most fundamental principle of capitalism, the private possession of property; and worse, it was to liken people to property, chattel. That socialization had to be rooted out of us, as did all the other old ways, if we were to follow a revolutionary road.

Thus, I traipsed back and forth between Los Angeles and Oakland like the comrade and lover that I was. Under my revolutionary façade, however, clinging like a cancer, was a woman with fairy-tale, teenage dreams. Moreover, I was doing nothing to improve myself—doing nothing that would distinguish me from all the other women I sadly discovered Huey had in his life.

How naïve I had been to imagine Huey had been looking for me, as I had been for him. I knew at that point that he truly loved me. I knew our relationship was special, outside the others—men and women, party and family. I knew also that the idea of his being “mine” could exist only in a very small place.

When Huey Newton walked into a room, he stunned both women and men with the combination of his image and physical appearance. I had seen even calculating journalists, looking for some Pulitzer Prize-winning angle in an interview with him, be halted in their tracks and thrown completely by his presence. I was not concerned about the part of him that belonged to the party or the struggle, or that was consumed by his numerous admiring friends, or his adoring family, or the public. It was Huey’s absolute irresistibility to a host of women, particularly beautiful brown-skinned women, that was a problem, as I saw how many of them were also irresistible to him.

His arbitrary forays into the night, the many nights I was not in Oakland, were not, I had come to learn, limited to the home of Hoffmann or his mother or his street partners. There were the women, quite a few, exquisite brown-skinned ones. I saw them when we went out to dinner in Oakland, handing him telephone numbers, suggesting they wanted to be in the party, and I saw him saying he would personally call them to talk about it. And he was calling them, I knew.

It had only stung me at first, dismissible as part of the temperament of the times; dismissible at some higher plane of thought that Huey Newton ought to have love, all the love he could get; dismissible because most of the women were not in the party. They would come and they would go, with their beautiful bodies and painted nails and tantalizing perfumes. They would have their night with a “star,” and he would let them go—while I would remain.

But there was Gwen Fountaine—one of them, I assumed, when Huey introduced us—who had actually been recruited into the party after a romp with him. And she was nothing like the other women in the party.

In general, Black Panther women were stripped of the pretty things, the “bourgeois” sweetnesses that could have made them glamorous women, the kind that I saw Huey adored, despite his revolutionized ways. Panther women were hard, in a way—soldiers, comrades, not pretty little things. Gwen was a pretty little thing with beautiful brown skin inherited from her absent black father and beautiful big eyes like her Greek mother’s. She had actually shown up to do graphics work on the newspaper—more or less joining the ranks.

The problem with Gwen was not simply her nominal membership in the party. It was that Huey was leaving clothes at her private apartment in Berkeley, the one that was away from the collective. The problem was that I felt threatened, in that old “what-you-doin’-with-my-man,” that old “bitch” sense.

As Huey was the leader of the party whose life was definitely at risk, as Huey was the man I loved in my ether world, I wanted him to have a secure place to live. I also wanted him to hang his clothes in a place that was not the place of Gwen or any other Gwen who might happen along. I would be queen in his world, I thought, as the bourgeois cancer began to infect my conscious thought.

The only issue remaining regarding the apartment, as far as David and I were concerned, was finding the $12,000 we determined was needed to pay for it. We thought one year’s rent should be paid in advance, lest there be an early eviction notice once it was discovered who occupied the apartment. We also wanted to buy some furniture. Every dime the party had was locked up in publishing our newspaper, maintaining our Survival Programs, paying rent and operational expenses, and securing ammunition and guns.

By the beginning of the next year, we had become urgent about the apartment. David’s trial was about to commence, and a problem more compelling than the police had begun to erupt.

Though Huey had talked to Eldridge every week over those months since my return, Eldridge remained adamant about ousting the Hilliards and instituting his “terrorist” agenda. Huey kept insisting he wanted to talk about it in person. Since Huey had not been able to obtain a passport, and Eldridge would not be coming to the United States, Huey suggested at one point that Eldridge send Kathleen to Oakland as his “emissary,” to try to settle the differences sans police telephone monitors. Eldridge offered Connie Matthews instead.

She lied from the moment she stepped into Oakland. She said she had only agreed with Eldridge because she thought he was crazy. She said she was ready to take orders from Huey. In response, Huey had ordered her to stay in Oakland, perform secretarial duties for him only, and never do anything, not even receive or place a telephone call, without his express permission.

During this time, Huey continued to try to get his passport to go to Algiers. Legally, he was not free. The technicality that Fay Stender, Garry’s associate on Huey’s trial, had brilliantly unearthed had only stayed the serving of a prison term. Huey’s potential fifteen-year prison sentence, for a manslaughter conviction—an irritation, at best, to the state which had charged him with murder—was simply overturned, pending a new trial. A passport for Huey Newton, under these circumstances, which included Eldridge’s notorious escape from prosecution, was out of the question, the court finally ruled. By that time, however, Huey was finished with Eldridge Cleaver.

In the early part of 1971, Connie Matthews disappeared with a member of the party from New York and later surfaced in Algiers. At the same time, the Panthers who formed the highly publicized “New York 21” sent Huey a letter stating they were resigning from the party because it was no longer the vanguard of the revolution. And while the Weather Underground issued a statement that the party was “reformist,” Eldridge openly declared that there was a “split” in the Black Panther Party.

In a nationally televised broadcast from Algiers, Eldridge claimed he and his International Section represented the “true vanguard,” the “left wing” of the party, while the “right wing,” headed by David Hilliard in Oakland, was a reformist faction that had taken over the party. He was issuing a call for other true revolutionaries to join his vanguard soldiers.

Huey responded through the party newspaper, castigating Eldridge as an ordinary renegade. He had me write many articles for the paper supporting the party and lambasting Eldridge. Message after message shot out from Oakland. There was no split in the party. As a result of Eldridge Cleaver’s defection, he and all who supported him were now “expelled” from the Black Panther Party.

People inside and outside the party began to take sides, however. Most Panthers wandered around in confusion. Papa was an unknown dynamo whose rhetoric had fueled their passions. Huey was also unknown, but was the hero and near-deity who had created the Black Panther Party. A domestic battle line was drawn.

That Huey should have a secure place to live was no longer debatable. The only question was money. The emergency quickened my brain. I had not been the party’s chief liaison to the stars in the land of movies and money for nothing. If no one else, there was certainly Bert Schneider.

I had met Bert in early 1969 as a result of one of my various calls to Jay in those desperate months. Jay knew Bert’s father, who was president of Columbia Pictures. Bert had become a film producer in his own right, however, with the success of one of his company’s early films Easy Rider.

The first time I met Bert was at his production company’s offices on the sprawling Columbia film lot. His friend Abbie Hoffman was just leaving. I had become irritated with Bert at the very outset of that meeting. He and Hoffman were exchanging light-hearted word games about what I deemed the heaviness of our struggle. As I considered that either of them could dismiss that struggle whenever the spirit moved them, they seemed to me the prototypes of Bert’s “easy riders.”

Bert was very smooth, though. After showing Hoffman out, he displayed not the slightest sign of being flustered by my hostility. It was not at all what I felt was the typical white liberal attitude: that annoyingly patronizing attitude of ingratiation that was usually presented to surly blacks. He was a unique “white boy,” I thought, trying not to notice how pretty I also thought he was. He was lean, as tall as a basketball player, with chiseled features, longish blond curls, and light blue eyes. Despite his lackadaisical “Hollywood” style, he was evidently very intelligent and well read. By the time I left, he had charmed me.

After that, Bert began to make significant monetary contributions to our Southern California chapter. He also introduced us to many of our other Hollywood supporters, the most noteworthy of whom was Jane Fonda.

“The boy’s got that kind of money to throw around?” David said to me after I reminded him about Bert.

“He’s got it, all right.”

I immediately arranged to have lunch with Bert in L.A. Over those nearly two years since I had met him, we had had our share of lunches. We had had our share of private time. We had had our share of bantering foreplay, for which I had always felt mildly ashamed.

I could, of course, justify those times alone with Bert to my comrades. Along with Jean Seberg, he was the most serious of the Hollywood, or any of the other, supporters of our chapter. It was more than the sumptuous sums of cash he laid out without question, I could explain. He was with us for the ride, and it was not easy. It was one thing to fight against oppression from under the boot of the oppressor. It was another to do so when born with all the comforts of capitalism; when one is among the most popular producers in a million-dollar milieu; when one is the most sought-after prince of every beauty in a world of beauty.

I did not ask myself why I did not ignore Bert’s signals, the sensuous ones that usually attended our lunches. I was pretty certain it had nothing to do with Huey and Gwen. I did not ask myself why I said nothing at lunch about why I had wanted to meet with him right away, about an apartment for the leader of the Black Panther Party. I just laughed with him a lot, and drank a lot of wine, and let the conversation drift to man and woman things, human things, not revolutions.

After lunch, we strolled out of the garden restaurant still laughing, hugging. I had to return to his office to get my car. When we got into his small blue BMW, the natural thing happened. He leaned across the center panel and kissed me, deliriously, deftly.

We drove in silence in the midafternoon to a small motel nearby. We barely breathed once inside, and did not speak.

I did not care about justifications, personal or political. I lost myself in the frenzy of stripping off clothing, tossing back bed-covers, making love, hard and passionate.

“Bert,” I said finally, as we dressed, “we need some cash. Cash that can’t be drawn from the party’s main accounts, which, as you know, the FBI regularly reviews. Besides, as you can guess, what money we have can’t be freed for another project…Well, this isn’t really a project, it’s an apartment. It’s a place for Huey. His life is in real danger right now, more than ever, but he practically lives on the streets and…”

“How much, babe?” Bert interrupted.

“Well,” I hesitated, “we want to pay an entire year’s rent.”

“How much?” He smiled.

“Twelve thousand,” I mumbled.

“Can you pick it up from my office tomorrow? I’ll have a cashier’s check made out to you personally.” It was the largest single contribution he had ever made to us.

I felt relief rush over me, along with shame. It was not about comrades, certainly not about morality, not even about Huey. I worried that Bert would think I had used him. And perhaps I had. Perhaps not.

He looked at me with a knowing smile. “Don’t worry, Queenie,” he said, using his shameless nickname for me, which I had insisted he never speak publicly. “Don’t look so worried. If anybody sees us, you can say I’m a trick.” He laughed.

“Or maybe I am,” I responded, looking away from his blue eyes. “…Or maybe,” I added, brightening, “I’ll tell them it ain’t true what they say ’bout white boys.”

“And what’s that?” He smiled, helping me into his car.

I brashly brushed my hand along the front of his pants. “Let’s just say that you defy the cherished myths about black men.”

The day before Huey moved into the apartment, the FBI leaked the information about it to one of their favored reporters in the Bay Area, Ed Montgomery. The front-page headlines blasted that the “declared revolutionary” Huey P. Newton would be moving into a “luxurious penthouse” apartment in a building on the “exclusive and fashionable” shores of Oakland’s Lake Merritt.

The FBI had been ready. We had not. The “masses” turned on Huey. It was a sin, they whispered on the streets of Oakland and other places. By the time Huey actually settled in, letters to editors and barroom gossip carried their message. God was to live in man’s image of him, a sacrificial lamb, a martyr, not a man living in a penthouse.

Party members were grumbling everywhere that it was enough that they were faithfully adhering to Huey’s party in light of the Eldridge conflict. Now they were being insulted, expected to swallow the hard, self-sacrificing lives they led in the Black Panther Party, housed in bare-bones collectives, working every waking hour, while the supreme commander lived in a glamorous bourgeois penthouse.

One Sister even confronted me over the matter. Like many Panthers, she believed that I influenced the supreme commander, though I was not a member of the Central Committee. Like most Panthers, she understood that the reality of our paramilitary structure was that the Politburo and the Central Committee and the other hierarchy in the party had come to function very much like the rank and file, under the supreme command of Huey Newton. I was the best person to approach about him, and the safest, not the intimidating figure of the men in leadership. She told me forthrightly that she was, at best, very disappointed in Huey Newton.

“Wait a minute, Sister,” I said to her defensively. “Don’t be ridiculous. Think…You know, when I was in China, everywhere I went, the people testified. They didn’t talk about how thrilled they were that the motherland was finally free. They didn’t declare how overjoyed they were over the blood they had shed for the revolution. No. Everywhere I went, this is what I heard: ‘If it hadn’t been for Chairman Mao, I never would have lived in a house of brick or had medical care…’ and so forth. You see the point? In the end, that’s what our fight is about. It’s about people living, not dying…

“Notwithstanding the question of security against pigs and ‘jackanapes,’ ” I continued, referring to the name we had begun using for the Cleaverites, “it’s really a little thing to have the leader of our party live in a decent place. If nothing else, we show the world that we will never sacrifice our leader to our enemies’ guns, much less allow him to live without the dignity and quality of life he’s earned and deserves. Huey didn’t want this. It was necessary.”

She was, however, like the others, unmoved. Like the others, she wanted a leader who would be a suffering savior.

It was not the apartment per se that spawned the general anger. It was that confusion was replacing what had seemed the clarity of that glorious moment when everyone had cried “Free Huey!” Huey was no longer amorphous. He had stepped out of his poster and was breathing and eating and exhibiting ordinary attributes. People were angry with him because he was only a man, a man who might not bring about the instant upheaval of the world that would assuage their rage and pain.

“I can’t save them,” Huey actually sighed in frustration over the grumblings regarding his new apartment. “They want to love me as they created me, because they don’t know how to love themselves.”

Finally, he gave up. He locked himself defiantly inside his penthouse, alone. He decided the party members’ anger with their god was transient. As for the “masses,” they would have to discover their own power. Perhaps this would help put things into perspective. In any event, he was not going to die for the pigs, and certainly not on their terms. He would live for the people and the party, and they would forget their temporary insanity.

David and I, and Huey’s other close associates and comrades, including the members of the Central Committee, had absolutely no regret about the decision regarding Huey’s apartment. Eldridge was actually building an opposition army. That message was delivered with the brutal murder of Sam Napier.

Sam had been the backbone of the party’s newspaper circulation. In spite of the fact that the pigs had forced airlines to “lose” bundles of our papers, or intimidated our printers into overinking the pages, or hired people to regularly turn water hoses or fire on bundles of our papers, Sam had miraculously gotten the newspaper distributed throughout the entire United States and beyond, on time, every week. Now Sam was dead, killed by “jackanapes” from the Eldridge faction in New York. He had been tied to a chair in our main newspaper distribution office in New York, beaten, shot in the head, and left in the building, which was then set on fire. His body was found charred nearly beyond recognition.

It had been a horrible warning. It was the beginning of a frightening, internecine battle as our troops, Huey’s party, responded.

Bobby Seale, the party’s well-known chairman, now acquitted of the murder-conspiracy charges in New Haven, came out of his Connecticut cell publicly praising Huey and denouncing Eldridge. Ericka Huggins, also acquitted in New Haven, returned to Oakland a heroine and condemned Eldridge. The powerfully influential prisoner-author George Jackson, now openly acknowledged as the field marshal of the Black Panther Party, attacked Eldridge scathingly, summarized in an open letter he wrote to author John Gerassi:

My personal message to [Eldridge] was mild, considering that he was in fact leaving his old comrades open to [police] attack again. I sent a letter reminding him that his behavior while in prison was far from exemplary…I finally asked him simply to show proof now that he was not a compulsive disrupter or agent provocateur. A very mild request, I feel. He returned with a very scurrilous and profane set of invectives—in short, a piece of vendetta…Tell him that seven thousand miles, the walls of prison, steel and barbed wire do not make him safe from my special brand of discipline, tell him the dragon is coming…

The party foundation cracked. Nearly the entire New York chapter defected. Panthers in San Francisco, Eldridge’s old base, were drifting away daily. Suspicions among all of us, about each of us, became rampant. Soon no one could be trusted. “Comrades” began carrying arms against one another.

Los Angeles was not spared its share of shooting incidents between former comrades after Sam’s death. Adding insult to injury, Karenga’s people began taking advantage of the war with Cleaver, accosting us openly. The ever-vigilant police certainly stepped up their attacks on our weakened corpus. The combination of police and Karenga’s people and now Eldridge’s forces made it a dangerous proposition to even identify oneself as a Panther in L.A., much less to brave the streets to sell a Panther newspaper.

It was then that Huey decided it was unsound for me to remain in L. A. It was inevitable, he said, that I would be specifically targeted by Eldridge’s people—whoever they were. I was to move permanently to Oakland, immediately.

Everything I had come to be, everything I had come to feel, had been created in L.A. My reeducation as a human being had begun in L.A., with John and Bunchy. My close comrades had died in L.A., been jailed in L.A. Now I was to leave everything in L.A., I thought, packing up my child and our life.