LIONEL WILSON ANNOUNCED he was running for mayor of Oakland. The first stage of Phyllis’s organizing operation for Lionel’s campaign was ready. It was based on a concept developed by the SNCC organization when they were furiously registering black voters in the South. We referred to it in the party as the “10-10-10 program.” It involved one person organizing ten people around a political goal. Each of the ten would then be educated to organize another ten, and so on.
Despite vigorous voting campaigns, blacks still believed that the act of voting in America was futile. The voting record of Oakland blacks reflected this belief; even the registration percentage was still very low. Registering Oakland blacks to vote had made the difference in terms of whatever success we had enjoyed in our last two Panther campaigns. Massive black registration was critical to Lionel’s campaign.
Phyllis had decided that if only ten Panthers were dispersed daily to each register 100 prospective supporters of Lionel, within one month we would have registered 30,000 people. In three months, we could have 90,000 qualified registrations: black Oakland residents who were Democrats. In a city whose total population was approximately 400,000, that number would overwhelm the white Republican vote. In the next phase of the campaign, Panthers would organize one in ten of those registered who could each bring ten others to the polls.
Phyllis had identified around twenty Panthers in Oakland who had the potential to work hard enough to register the number we required. She would whittle down those twenty talented ones to ten. Those selected would be those who proved they could deliver. We offered incentives to all of them.
Panthers worked for long hours, most finishing the day after midnight, a seven-day-per-week obligation. Those selected to be our ten registrants, however, would be relieved of that regimen for the next few months. Whenever anyone turned in the required hundred registrations, his or her workday was ended. To this incentive was added the promise that a car would be available to each one selected. Other incentives included money and personal items. Within a few weeks, Phyllis had her ten.
During those first registration weeks, I received a call from Michael Berman, the brother of Assemblyman Howard Berman. Michael was known as a political whiz kid. He said he had heard the party was supporting Lionel for mayor and had a proposition that might be helpful. He urged me to use my influence to solicit the governor to fund the controversial Grove-Shafter Freeway extension.
It was a strange request given his brother’s close relation to Jerry Brown. Moreover, I saw no apparent connection between that freeway and the election. I responded that the party had for years endorsed the court-ordered injunction that had halted construction of the Grove-Shafter. Our newspaper had lambasted the city for uprooting and displacing black people to make way for the freeway. I wondered if he was mad.
I reminded him that when Fred Hiestand uncovered an old law requiring the city to build replacement housing, we had forced the city to do that. The Oakland Community Housing Corporation had been developed to handle the city’s $12 million capitulation allocation for three hundred new replacement houses. I was chairman of that board. The injunction was then lifted, and I no longer concerned myself with the freeway.
Berman explained that the problem was Jerry Brown. Jerry was refusing to release the funds for the freeway. The freeway would lay the groundwork for the long-delayed Oakland City Center project.
From my point of view, Jerry’s action was to be applauded. It was the City Center project that had been the root cause of the homelessness of so many West Oakland blacks. As Oakland was being abandoned by middle-class whites, the Grove-Shafter Freeway was designed as a conduit for returning their consumer dollars to Oakland businessmen, a design of Oakland mayor Reading and then-governor Ronald Reagan. The City Center project was to be the receptacle. The party was doing everything possible to destroy that capitalist dream, I told Berman.
He plowed on. The construction of the Grove-Shafter extension was in fact the condition on which the Hyatt Corporation, Wells Fargo Bank, and the Bullocks and Sears department stores had made commitments to locate in Oakland’s deteriorated downtown area. Their millions of investment dollars would build the City Center and also trigger the revitalization of Oakland’s economy. Without the freeway, there was nothing.
I listened as Berman explained that the City Center project would generate at least ten thousand new jobs. In a city the size of Oakland, where so many residents, especially the blacks, were presently unemployed, that was a serious number. It was certainly an incentive to urge the governor to approve the freeway.
The benefits of the City Center project would not reach black people, I commented. The jobs and the City Center could be ours, Berman replied calmly, if our man for mayor could be credited with untangling the girders of the freeway. I began to hear Berman.
If Lionel could be associated with bringing ten thousand new jobs into Oakland, blacks would run to the polls to vote for him. The middle-class and liberal vote, too, would surely be his. More important, white Republican businessmen would have to acknowledge that Lionel, not their Mayor Reading, had opened the flood-gates to millions of new dollars.
There were tactical questions to consider, however. First, blacks had to be convinced that the freeway would deliver the City Center jobs to them. If Lionel was elected mayor, we could point out, that question would be settled. He would be able to control the outcome and do the right thing. The city government was already situated to manage the freeway and City Center construction, having long ago allocated millions of its federal urban-renewal dollars to the downtown development. Secondly, Lionel would have to show that he overcame the state obstacle to the freeway that would build the City Center. I felt certain I could manage this for him.
When I called Lionel, he was at once excited and wary. He feared he would be denounced by blacks for supporting the freeway. It was still a thorn in the community side, despite the new housing. I told him the black voters could be shown that the ten thousand City Center jobs were part of the freeway project. I would take care of the few blacks who might protest. I could not imagine any of them challenging him if the Black Panther Party was behind him. The point was, I insisted, that we could not reject a plan that could propel him into office.
The blacks I contacted needed little convincing. By the end of the week, community leaders Elijah Turner, Paul Cobb, and John George (a former party lawyer who had just been elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors), and I were united.
Tony thought it was a splendid idea. At present, the governor was burdened by his failure to comply with his tacit preelection agreement to release the funds for the unfinished Grove-Shafter Freeway. Funds for local freeways came from a combined pot of money, 90 percent of which was federal and 10 percent state. It was the state, however, which determined the specific allocation. If Jerry was publicly pressed by the black community of Oakland to keep his promise, he would feel justified in doing so.
The problem Jerry faced, Tony explained, was his new transportation secretary, Adriana Gianturco. It was her department that authorized freeway expenditures. She was vehemently opposed to the Oakland project and had refused to release the funds. Jerry had brought her into his Cabinet because she was an environmentalist whose priority was to reduce California’s massive air pollution problems by limiting the number of freeways. That idea was based on her model in Boston, from which Brown had stolen her. On the other hand, Oakland’s businessmen had been bombarding Jerry with complaints about his reneging on his election promise.
Jerry was thus in a quandary over his obligation to support his own Cabinet member and his obligation to keep a political promise. In his heart, Jerry agreed with Gianturco, but he was distraught over the businessmen’s pressure.
I suddenly deciphered the Michael Berman call. The Republicans had gone mad! Unable to move the governor, they had appealed to the moderate state Democratic Party leadership to prevail upon him. Jerry was so disassociated from the formal workings of his party, however, he might as well have been the Zen governor some snidely suggested he was. Berman had apparently offered to handle the matter for the downstate Democrats—for a political price. In effect, the Republican businessmen in Oakland had been reduced to consorting with the Black Panther Party.
Cobb and the others agreed that I would make the formal appeal to the governor for the freeway. Tony arranged the meeting. I told the governor that I represented a coalition of black community groups that was spearheaded by Lionel Wilson. We had concluded that it was in our community’s interest for the state to release the $33 million for the Grove-Shafter Freeway extension. Sufficiently primed, Brown agreed. The governor also agreed to endorse Lionel Wilson for mayor.
In a matter of days, the newspapers shouted that black community groups led by mayoral candidate Lionel Wilson had saved the day. Oakland would finally get its freeway. Wilson and the community had prevailed upon the governor, because the freeway would open the way for the new City Center and ten thousand new jobs for Oaklanders. The incumbent mayor—Lionel’s opponent—was overcome with gratitude, the stories went.
Within a week of Jerry’s announcement, several Oakland businessmen announced the formation of a business consortium: the Oakland Council for Economic Development, or the OCED. The purpose of the OCED, they declared through the press, was to develop the city’s long-stalled City Center project. The mayor was thrilled that Oakland’s businessmen had moved so swiftly. He gave the OCED his public blessing.
Cobb and the rest were tying up my telephone lines grumbling that the OCED was a conspiracy to steal the fruits of our labor. Not one black person had been so much as contacted about the formation of the OCED. Whitey, Cobb and the others lamented, had snatched our victory.
I reminded them that Lionel could soon be mayor. Our team would be in position to manipulate the City Center, as we had discussed. Our primary interest in the freeway was to build a bridge to Lionel’s election. We had to keep focused.
Privately, I conceded that they were right. White conservative Oakland could do business as usual, and with our help. They would forget Lionel at the polls. The black community would feel that he and the rest of us had traded off our principles for an illusion. It stuck in my throat as I called Lionel.
We figured that if he publicly denounced the OCED, the blacks would feel better about him. On the other hand, he would lose his moderate appeal. The answer was somewhere in between. It was obvious, I mused aloud. Lionel would simply have to become a member of the OCED or, better yet, its chairman. As OCED chairman he could assure the black community he was safeguarding its interests while the conservatives would end up having to deal with a “nigger in the woodpile.” Before he stopped laughing, I told him I would make all the arrangements.
The chairman of the OCED, Robert Shetterly, was also the president of the Clorox Company. He was glad I had called, he said, because he had heard so many nice things about me, particularly about the work I was doing with the community school.
I said that I was sure he had also heard that I was the head of the Black Panther Party, which had helped save the Grove-Shafter Freeway. I told him that I had supported the freeway only because it would open the door to the City Center project, which would mean jobs for black people. The very formation of the OCED in the aftermath was an insult to that effort. But I was most upset that not even one black was on the OCED.
He assured me his interests were the same as mine. He conceded that the freeway approval had assisted him in making the decision to organize the OCED. He felt, however, that the OCED would serve the best interests of all Oakland residents.
I told him I was pleased to hear that. I was looking to him to demonstrate it. My friends and I expected, therefore, his enthusiastic endorsement for the placement of a black on the OCED. I was recommending Lionel Wilson, whom I was certain I could convince to share the OCED chair with him, Robert Shetterly. With Lionel as cochair, I offered, not only would the community feel assured of the OCED’s concerns, but he, Shetterly, would be assured of assistance in steering the goals of the OCED.
Stuttering, he said that he was part of a team and that, while he might welcome Lionel’s input, he could not dictate to the others.
I was sorry he felt so impotent, I said. It rendered me impotent, too. I felt powerless to stop the Black Panther Party and other black community organizations from unleashing the same energy which supported the Grove-Shafter to now discourage its construction.
There was a long pause. Shetterly finally responded that he would like to consider the matter, to mull it over with the OCED. “Think long. Think wrong,” I said, quoting my mother. He chuckled.
Gianturco was furious, Tony told me. She remained adamantly opposed to the Oakland project; she thought it benefited no one but a few rich businessmen. She felt the governor had overridden her because he was a male chauvinist, and she was threatening to resign. Tony said the governor would probably be relieved to have an excuse to rescind his pledge. Tony agreed then that if Shetterly did not place a member of the black community—Lionel—on the OCED forthwith, the governor would with-draw from the freeway fray.
I called the Clorox offices. Shetterly explained he was having difficulty discussing the matter with his peers; most of them were out of town on business. He asked for another week to try to confirm Lionel as a member of the OCED. He hoped I could understand, however, how untenable it would be to make Lionel cochair.
I interrupted. Since he was unwilling to take the correct course, I said the state pledge to fund the freeway would be rescinded. Arguing that that would serve no good purpose, he held his ground on the implausibility of that possibility.
A week later, the governor’s office informed the Oakland mayor’s office that the state’s commitment to Oakland’s freeway extension was canceled. The governor’s press release stated that the city of Oakland had violated the good faith on which the freeway funds had been released.
The stated purpose of the new OCED, the governor’s press release continued, was to develop the City Center project. However, although the development interests of the OCED could only be realized because of the work of the black community, blacks themselves were starkly absent from its membership. This had opened Brown’s eyes. The OCED was using the state’s gift to the community of Oakland to serve narrow business interests. As that was contrary to the spirit of Governor Brown’s commitment, that commitment was revoked.
I waited in my office at the school for the telephone calls. I refused Shetterly’s. I talked with Cobb and George and the others about the morning newspapers’ front-page stories. Mayor Reading was in a state of considerable rage. J. Anthony Kline had called him from the governor’s office, he stated, to inform him that the governor was “deserting” the city of Oakland. Reading was “shocked.” The mayor denounced the governor’s decision as a political ploy.
I told the press ringing me that I endorsed the governor’s decision, that in fact I had appealed to him for justice.
Lionel’s elation was tempered. If he was now placed on the OCED, it might appear that the wrong kind of political bargain had been made. Moreover, he reasoned, if he was elected, he would be unable to justify having his feet in two camps. He had thought about how to salvage the situation. He concluded that I should be on the OCED. As he saw it, Oakland was in economic shambles and would remain so even if he became mayor. We needed the power of the OCED to pull it up as much as they needed the freeway. If I were on the council, it would underwrite everything. We had to “seize the time,” Lionel laughed, quoting the title of my first record album.
I needed the support, as well as the consensus, of the others. I called them. They thought it was a perfect plan. I accepted Shetterly’s call late in the day.
Shetterly wondered if I realized that the Hyatt executives and others, waiting in the wings with their millions of City Center investment dollars, had become thoroughly discouraged. They were ready to close off all discussion. He could calm the troubled waters, I told him, and without haggling over Lionel’s membership. The black community would be satisfied with my membership on the council, I offered, and added, in his silence, that I felt certain the governor could be convinced to recommit the freeway funds upon my appointment to the council.
Shetterly laughed. It was the laugh of the losing poker player who had had the best hand. We agreed to meet for lunch in the next few days.
We met at an elegant restaurant atop the Kaiser Center, over-looking Lake Merritt. Having arrived early, Robert Shetterly greeted me at the entrance to the restaurant. I had never seen his face, but he knew mine—moreover, I was the only black woman there.
Shetterly looked me over with the subtlety of well-bred white men. I did not need to consider him so carefully. He was everything I opposed. We were meeting in his world, but we were at that moment standing on common ground, face to face with what we each detested most about America. We reviewed our menus, chatting pleasantly about the flowers planted in the rooftop garden outside the window adjacent to our table.
“It’s a very interesting bunch in Sacramento now,” Shetterly ventured. “Are you planning to run for the City Council again?”
“Not at all. I think I serve my interests best in other capacities.”
“As to your interests, Elaine—if I may—I’ve spoken, as I promised, with everyone on the council. We’re all in complete agreement that you’d be a fine addition to our membership.”
“I think that’s best for all concerned. And I’ve spoken with Tony Kline. He’s sure that under the circumstances the governor can be persuaded to reinstate the freeway funds.”
“It’s such a small amount of money,” he said in a dry tone.
We ordered crab salads and wine.
I looked directly into his eyes. “I’ll be going back to Sacramento this week and will let you know the outcome of things. So you can notify the council and the investors—and, naturally, the mayor.”
He did not appreciate my sarcasm.
“John Reading is really a fine man, once you get to know him.”
“Though that’s highly unlikely, of course.”
“Well, the mayor is a nonvoting member of the council, you know.”
I tried not to rush from my chair to the telephone to call Lionel. “Actually, I’m not specifically aware of who sits on the OCED.”
As he listed the fifteen or so members of the OCED, an understanding came to me. Kaiser Industries (which included Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, and Kaiser Health Plan) was on the council, as were the chief executives of Safeway Stores (the largest food outlet in the world), Pacific Bell (the California affiliate of AT&T), the Oakland Tribune, and others of the same ilk. It was a cartel. The form was local, but its substance was global.
What became clear to me was not so much what Shetterly and his men had built as why they had built it. It was not a simple matter of developing the City Center. Unlike other capitalists of the day, who had spirited away their operations to lily-white hinterlands when their industrial centers became crowded with black and poor people, Shetterly had organized the OCED to wrest Oakland from the encroaching, hostile natives. For he intended to seize the future, as it sparkled on the waters of the second-largest port in the world.
That port’s business was confined by the city of Oakland, even though the billions of dollars it was currently pumping had never belonged to the city. They had always belonged to the progeny of the founding fathers, distributed at the discretion of the private, independent port board. Now the port’s billions had the potential to be exponentially increased through trade agreements with the rising economies in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong—in all of the Pacific Rim and Asian countries.
The three-quarter-mile piece of concrete called the Grove-Shafter freeway extension was the tie to the harbor for those international billions. As the foundation for the City Center, that freeway would do more than reintroduce into Oakland the lost middle-class millions ferreted away in the surrounding white townships. It would be the keystone of a new, global economic community. And such communities would surely supplant nations by the onset of the twenty-first century.
It was a very big game. Shetterly had recently lost a bid to merge Clorox with Colgate-Palmolive. All that was left now was his twenty-two-story edifice built to sanitize the still-black heart of downtown Oakland and be a foundation for the economic community of Oakland that he and Reagan and Reading and their club had envisioned. Shetterly and his men had the same agenda as the Black Panther Party: to claim Oakland.
“We meet monthly, early in the morning,” he was saying. I noted his insinuation that black people were known to be too sluggardly to rise at the start of the day. “Right here, at the Kaiser Center, in a breakfast meeting. My secretary will call you to inform you of the next meeting and tell you exactly how to get to the meeting room.”
I said, “I think it’s premature to resume your meetings until I’ve gotten confirmation of the governor’s change of heart.”
I lit a cigarette. There seemed to be nothing else to say.
But Shetterly began again. “I’m curious, Elaine—what is it you really want?”
“Do you mean what do I want as the head of the Black Panther Party, Shetterly? What do I want as a black person, or what do I want as a black woman?
He smiled. “I mean whatever you’d like.”
“It was your question.”
“Well, you see, I believe that in America we have to allow for all kinds of philosophies.”
“That’s very generous of America, assuming you’re speaking for America.”
“What I’m trying to say is that while my own life has not permitted me a great deal of contact with black people, I believe America must open its doors to blacks…”
“Or you get Black Panthers?”
“Perhaps. At Clorox, though, we’ve been very serious about enforcing the federal guidelines for affirmative action in employment.”
“It certainly makes good business sense,” I said.
“Yes, but also, I’ve been sensitized, you might say, to the problems of those outside of the mainstream. My son is doing volunteer work at a free clinic in San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury district. The stories he’s told me about the poor health and the lives of so many of the clinic’s clients are, well, quite appalling. I’ve come to truly believe that something must be done to assist blacks and poor people. But I’m not sure what that is.”
I refrained from responding.
Finally, I said, “I’m glad you told me about your son. It broadens my understanding of you, and of your question, as to what I want…When I was a little girl, I wanted to be white. My mother sent me to schools dominated by rich white children where I learned that I was a ‘nigger.’ Oh, it wasn’t because anybody called me that, but because I saw that I was poor and black.
“So I came to believe that if I could be white, or as white as my color permitted, I could be elevated from the degradation of being a ‘nigger.’ I trained myself to talk like white people, to act like white people, to walk and dress and eat like white people. I made every effort possible to belong to white people.”
“You’ve had a very difficult life,” he said, now attempting to end the meeting.
“The point is not about my life, Shetterly. It’s about what I want. And I think you should know exactly what that is and how much I want it…By the time I realized there was no place in America for a black girl, I discovered another trick. Even if I had been able to be white, there were no paths out of the powerlessness. The keys to the kingdom were gripped in the hands of a few white men—and only men. I could work for those men, if I ‘behaved,’ but I could never be them, have what they had, be master of my own ship…What I saw was that my oppression and my freedom were umbilically tied to the oppression and freedom of all my people. So I became a Black Panther.”
“I think you should’ve tried harder. You’re very bright and you could have done more. There are opportunities.”
“Before you give me the standard statement about how I could have personally persevered and entered the mainstream, I want to finish the point. I also knew that I could never walk over the bodies of black girls like me. For that’s one of the entrance fees. I mean, even if I had found a loophole—some way to get out of poverty and ease past racism—I could not do to anyone what had been done to me. So it’s not a personal matter anymore.”
“It’s a sacrifice, though, don’t you think?”
“For whom? Me? There’s no sacrifice at all, because in the end I get everything I really want.”
“And what is that?” he asked, with raised eyebrows.
“I want a new arrangement between you and me. I want to change the situation—equalize it.
“What I want, as the mother of Ericka Brown, is to keep her from having to dream about a job at Clorox, any Clorox. I want to make a place for her to have her own dreams. And to live out those dreams.
“As a black person, I want to see my people free from all oppression, to be able to develop into a proud and independent people.
“As a leading member of the Black Panther Party, I want to initiate that new arrangement. What the Black Panther Party wants is a new America. We want to diminish the power of you and yours over so many of us through the institution of a humane and egalitarian society—we could call it socialism. I hope the word’s not too scary.”
“I’m not sure of its precise definition, but I think you’re talking about communism, and that system is not just scary, it can destroy the world.”
“Well, whatever may come of my revolution, Shetterly, there’s nothing for you to fear. None of it will come to pass in either of our lifetimes. Right now, all Elaine Brown actually wants is very little: every one of the ten thousand jobs at the City Center. And I want your guarantee to deliver them.”
“Of course, I’d be delighted to help unemployed people get jobs,” he said, sidestepping everything.
“I’m not talking about an affirmative-action program or anything like that, Shetterly. I intend to create an entity that the Black Panther Party will operate and control, through which I want each and every one of those City Center jobs funneled. I want you, under whatever title, to sign an exclusive agreement with this nonprofit corporation to act as the sole contractor of City Center personnel.”
“May I ask why you want to do that?”
“Certainly. I’d think you’d find it interesting. And I don’t mind sharing this with you because it won’t affect what either of us has to do. As it’s turned out, you need me to get what you want—perhaps more than I need you.
“Before I explain, you should know that I’m not overly concerned about the temporary freeway construction jobs. The so-called minorities will get a fair share of them, because my friends in the state will handle that. And if Lionel Wilson is elected mayor, he’ll make sure the city’s urban-renewal antidiscrimination guidelines are enforced as to construction of the City Center. By the way, I know you’re a Republican, but I’m banking on your tacit underwriting of Lionel.”
“But you must realize, Elaine, that while Lionel Wilson may be a fine candidate, I could not support him.”
“I’m not trying to push this thing that far, Shetterly. I really want to work with you. I’m just suggesting you use your influence to influence others not to attack him. You know, assail his image for having Black Panther support.”
“I think you give me too much credit.”
“I don’t think so. But I’m sure you appreciate that such a thing would undermine what each of us wants to accomplish.”
We were now the only diners in the restaurant.
“As to my new City Center Employment Corporation, I intend to make it a political undertaking, to organize and educate the ten thousand mostly black persons that will be hired. Each of them can be organized around individual employment interests and group interests. Soon, those ten thousand, and the many thousands more among their families and friends, will have developed the consciousness and the will to act as one. They will be a force to bring about more fundamental changes in their collective interest. You see the point? The development of a socialistic model right here in Oakland.
“In any case, the bottom line is the ten thousand City Center jobs that you’ll have control of. If I don’t get a signed agreement by ground-breaking time, I don’t see the freeway rolling.”
“I think we understand each other, though I might have said it differently.”
“I’m sure you would have.” I laughed.
He laughed, too.
“But there’s one other thing I’ve got, Shetterly. Besides the freeway. I’ve got the ability to take down this entire city if you and I fail to see this thing to completion. I mean the City Center, the port, and all twenty-two stories of the Clorox building.”
“Despite your passion, Elaine, I think you’re far too intelligent and sophisticated to mean everything you say.”
He smiled the admonishing smile of a father. I smiled back, though I considered reaching across the table and slapping him.
I called Lionel. Whatever would come of the Shetterly business, I told him, I had certain expectations about his role in the future of Oakland.
I was guaranteeing him our party’s support in becoming mayor of Oakland. I had only three requests.
I wanted to replace the police chief of Oakland with a black who would assume that position with the clear understanding that I—in the Panther sense—had put him in office. Secondly, I wanted to be a silent partner in his selection of a new city manager. Finally, I wanted him over the years to support my recommendations for vacancies on the port board.
He said it was the least he could do.
Adriana Gianturco operated in a man’s world and seemed to know exactly how to do that. Under other circumstances, I might have held her iron will in high esteem. At the moment, it was infuriating.
As long as she was transportation secretary of the state of California, she was saying, her refusal to release the Grove-Shafter Freeway funds would remain firm. She was not interested in my arguments, though she said she was glad to meet me.
She did not care about construction contracts and jobs for blacks in the building of the freeway. Her main concern was the environmental impact of building another freeway. She was aware that black people had been displaced by the freeway land allocation. She reminded me that the Reagan people had done that and suggested that I might spend my energy on developing the new housing. She was absolutely unconcerned about the political aspirations of Lionel Wilson, or the blacks who wanted a black mayor.
I told her that her environmentalism was a charade for her racism.
“Don’t give me that shit, Elaine,” she said in her non-Boston, Southern-rooted accent.
I informed her that the Black Panther Party would publicly denounce her, spurring the entire black community to assail her with ugly epithets. She had been called names before, she said, by profit-seeking “pigs” demanding highways from Massachusetts to California. I pounded my fist on her desk. “Who in the fuck do you think you are?” She was not intimidated.
I had gone to Sacramento to see her the day after Tony called to tell me that even though the governor knew the businessmen had placed me on the OCED, Gianturco was so furious about the freeway that neither the governor nor anybody else felt a fight with her over it was worth the havoc it would wreak. Tony told me he was making every effort to resolve the issue, but that it could take months. I knew how to change Gianturco’s mind, I had told him.
Now I was ready to hurl her out of the window of her office. Shetterly’s millions was not the point, I reiterated. It was that a socially committed black man could become mayor. It was that the “people’s” Oakland, not “their” Oakland, could be rejuvenated—the Oakland that was also the headquarters of the Black Panther Party. Ten thousand permanent jobs would be made available to poor and black people. She remained unaffected. In desperation, I changed strategy and pleaded with her.
I asked her to weigh the value of an only slightly improved environment against the lives of poor people who had little hope of employment without the fruits of the freeway. I urged her to think about what clean air meant to people who were too oppressed to lift their heads and breathe it. I implored her to imagine life as a black person, what it felt like to be denied one more time, by one more white person.
I knew I had the freeway when she suggested that there was no way to enforce the promises of the businessmen. She had heard their promises before. Her laughter filled the room when I told her that none of those promises had been made to the Black Panther Party. She actually howled as I summarized my conversation with Shetterly, in which I had promised to destroy “his” City Center if he reneged. I told her about the new employment corporation, and that Fred Hiestand was registering it to do business.
She finally said, “I’ll do it, Elaine, but not because I believe the businessmen will do the right thing. If the Panthers think you can control the thing and benefit somebody, it’s worth a try. I have to tell you the truth, though. I don’t fucking think you can do it.”
“I’m not sure either, Adriana, but the thing is, we may never have such a moment again. In addition to the jobs, this freeway can get our man elected. That’ll put us in position to transfer power and money into the hands of the people. Not only from the City Center, but from Coliseum revenues and the like, and, most important, from the port of Oakland. The environment won’t be saved or damaged by this. And black people won’t be freed by it. I just think we can make some change in the arrangement that’s damaged both my people and this planet.”
“All right. I told you I’m convinced you believe in what you say. Take the freeway. Try to use it for something good. You’ve got my commitment. But I’m still warning you, they’ll stab you in the back. And I won’t open my mouth, except to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
I had a strange feeling when I shook Adriana’s hand. For the first time in my life, I felt a white woman was my Sister.
Shetterly was in command as usual. He suggested I sit next to him in the back of the chauffeured car. He arranged the others, the head of Kaiser Health Plan to sit on my right, with Pacific Bell facing us. We had made our adjustments with each other after the first few OCED meetings I attended. I nestled comfortably into the soft dark velour of the limousine seat. Everything was clear now: our “partnership” and our present business, which was to meet with the governor.
I knew Shetterly was trying to eliminate the middle man—me. He remarked to the others how impressed he was that I had so quickly arranged the meeting with the governor. The other club members parroted his appreciation.
Shetterly ostensibly wanted to meet the governor to shore up the City Center project. Based on Adriana’s change of position, Bullocks Department Store, the Hyatt Regency, Sears, and the others had reactivated their pledges to locate in downtown Oakland. But Shetterly also wanted to shore up his relationship with the popular Democratic governor for the broader OCED agenda. This was a move in his constant manipulation of the pecking order of his club that could guarantee his leadership in the future. Of equal importance, he was trying to free himself from the Black Panther connection.
I enjoyed watching his anxiety about the meeting. I enjoyed watching him attempt to use me. Mostly, I relished looking at his face once he realized the Sacramento connection would remain in my hands.
As we rode to Sacramento, I thanked Shetterly for applauding me for so little, though it was true, I added, that the governor was not prone to holding personal meetings with special-interest groups. Everyone chuckled on cue. And as I listened to Shetterly once again decry how terribly small that three-quarter-mile freeway extension was in relation to everything that hinged on it, I silently agreed.
The governor told Shetterly that Oakland could rely on him to keep his word on the freeway. As for the other concerns, he would welcome opening a channel to his office for the OCED, as long as the community’s interests remained a priority. He concluded that he hoped Shetterly would relay his sentiments to the City Center investors.
It was a very quiet ride back to Oakland.
Despite the excitement of the party’s progress, I felt a sense of doom—my doom.
It was connected to death. I was feeling not so much a fear of death as an awareness of the loneliness of dying. These thoughts had consumed me since the abortion.
A week after another of the numerous ruptures in our personal relationship, Larry and I had resumed our part-time love affair. When we argued the week before, I had decided never to have another affair with any man, and to underscore my determination, I had put away my birth-control pills. Seven days later, I anxiously prepared for a night of celebration with Larry by swallowing one week’s supply of pills. I actually believed the accumulated dosage would be effective. I was shocked by my stupidity the next month.
There was no doubt that I would have an abortion. My life in the party had no space for another child, a child I did not desire. There was nothing to discuss with Larry. My body was mine.
It would be a very simple operation, the doctor explained to me. The fetus would be aborted in minutes; I would be able to return home in half an hour.
Legs apart, I listened to the soft whirring sound of the instrument that quickly emptied my uterus. I felt nothing—except sorrow.
I did not know what was being removed from my womb. But I felt it was something, somebody, who had tried to live—as I had tried for so long. And it was I who had broken the connection. I had destroyed the potential.
The immorality of it stung something deep in me. It was not in thinking that I had killed someone. I had done something worse. I had prevented someone from coming into being. I wanted to grab that being and say that I was sorry. I wanted to push it into some other womb, some other time, some other life. There was no god or man or woman, though, who could alter what I had done.
It was fitting that I live alone. When I moved into the new apartment, the doom filled all the empty spaces. It eclipsed the pride I felt in how well Lionel’s campaign was progressing. It muted the pleasure of the press conference in which the governor, Shetterly, and I announced that ground would soon be broken for the new City Center bringing ten thousand new jobs to Oakland. Representatives of the Hyatt Corporation and Bullocks et al. had stood with us before the television cameras. Everything had been confirmed in writing. Nevertheless, I was sullen.
Ericka Huggins had been my close friend and comrade for nearly ten years. It had been painful to leave her. But I had to. I had become angry with her. Hardly a day passed when I did not chastise her over the decisions she made, accusing her of abandoning her post at the school to Regina Davis, her assistant. Recently, I had attacked her for absentmindedly leaving her key in our apartment door, for preparing “organic” meals, for burning candles and incense. The truth was her unburdened sorrow had begun to heighten my sense of doom. The truth was I brought every rage of the day to our door, and she never responded, her sorrowful eyes accusing and accepting. I had to live alone. It was best I live alone. She agreed, in her languid voice.
It was best, I repeated to Larry, though I knew there would be the same kind of resentment in the ranks as there had been when Huey moved into his penthouse.
The grumbling was mild and short-lived, however. Panthers were enjoying a highly upgraded standard of living at that point, and most credited my leadership with having produced it. Moreover, Larry had pointed out to the members that the expense of my new housing arrangement was also justified by the need for absolute security for the party’s leader.
It was an all-white refuge, built before the Crash, when crystal doorknobs and handmade tiles and polished-brass fixtures were in vogue. I began to wonder if moving into that isolated security palace, with its cold parquet floors and lakeside luxury, had caused my sense of doom. Perhaps it arose from the second bedroom, reserved for my Ericka, my daughter, who, at seven years old, had never lived with her mother. There was a disturbing unfamiliarity in having her close. I had been a Black Panther all the years of her life—not her mother, in any meaningful way. Perhaps it was that in the apartment there was space to finally look at myself after thirty-four years of living with others. All of it seemed strange and uncomfortable.
I had no patience to deal with the distribution of damaging leaflets in the hills of Oakland three days before the election. A photo-reproduction of the front page of a Panther newspaper announcing the party’s endorsement of Lionel was being circulated in Republican strongholds. Under the headline was a large photograph of Lionel, Cesar Chavez, and me.
I called Shetterly. It was after ten o’clock at night. He was asleep. We were at the brink, I shouted. I could not manage the party, the election, the freeway business, the Oakland Community Housing, the OCED, and also have to contend with his backstabbing. Of course, he knew nothing about it. Of course, he could not control what everybody did. I silenced him with a variety of reminders about the freeway, the City Center project, the existence of the Clorox building. I told him I knew he had tried to orchestrate a takeover of Colgate-Palmolive, but if he felt that had been a defeat, he could not imagine how defeated he would be if another piece of paper or word was issued connecting Lionel to the Black Panther Party. He told me he would look into the problem. I slammed down the telephone.
We rode out those next two days on the hope of the pollsters’ accuracy. Lionel was projected to win.
Phyllis had registered over 90,000 black Democrats. She had had their registration cards copied before they were sent to the office of the county voter registrar. Now administering all of Lionel’s campaign workers, she had commanded them to contact every one of those 90,000, to determine when they would vote, whether they needed transportation to the polls, baby-sitters, or anything else to assist them in voting.
On Election Day, Phyllis fielded every Panther and every other campaign worker, on foot, in cars, and on buses, to drag those black registrants to the polls. The streets of Oakland were being harvested.
At the Alameda County Central Labor Council offices, Panthers were working with labor leaders to squeeze out the maximum labor vote. I saw the excitement on the faces of the mostly black workers at the voter registrar’s office: black precincts were, atypically, voting early in the day. I passed Panther cars going in and out of the most dilapidated areas, including the government housing projects in West and East Oakland, taking mothers and their children to the polls. Panthers were virtually tearing people away from card and dice games and all-day drug parties to vote. The excitement of the day was so intoxicating, it immunized me against the still-clinging dread, temporarily.
Finally, the television reports proclaimed that Lionel Wilson had become the first black mayor of Oakland, the first Democrat elected to office since World War II. I stood at Lionel’s side while the cameras recorded his victory and thousands cheered.
I did not tell Huey how all the pieces had fallen into place. I told him Lionel had won. I told him to come home. I said nothing at all about my sense of doom.