* * *
Soul on Ice is meant to be a conversion narrative, like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Malcolm X had educated himself in the prison library and in time put his gifts as an orator into the service of the black struggle. Cleaver tried to revive Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity before he joined the Panthers. However, Soul on Ice is not especially autobiographical. We learn little of Cleaver’s life before his imprisonment. Not a word about parents, hometown. His collection of prose pieces opens with six letters that he wrote in 1965 from Folsom Prison. He looks back to 1954, when he was eighteen years old and beginning a long sentence for having gotten caught with “a shopping bag full of marijuana.” The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education had only just been handed down, and the controversy over desegregation led Cleaver to question what it meant to be black in America.
The social indoctrination of black people included being ruled by “the white race’s standard of beauty.” Cleaver said he was disgusted with himself for the lust he felt when he saw a photograph of the white woman that the black teenager Emmett Till was killed for supposedly whistling at. For black men, white women were a sickness, Cleaver concluded. As a black man, he decided that it was important for him to have “an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women.” He was paroled. “I became a rapist.” He practiced on black women, he said. Then he crossed the tracks and targeted white women. “Rape was an insurrectionary act.” However, when Cleaver was convicted of rape and returned to prison, this time to San Quentin, he took a long look at himself. He wasn’t breaking the white man’s laws; he was sacrificing his humanity.
In Sex and Racism in America (1965), a book the prison wouldn’t let Cleaver have, Calvin Hernton steps out of his social scientist’s objectivity to speak in the first-person voice of the danger white women were for black men growing up in the South. He keeps his balance, writing more in sorrow. Soul on Ice, on the other hand, sexualizes race politics, with Cleaver’s emotions all over the place. He, an inmate not allowed to have a pinup of a white girl, suggested a branch of the civil service be formed that would pay women to visit convicts. He declares early on that he is in love with his lawyer, a white woman who wants to help him and is interested in his work. But Soul on Ice ends with a love letter to the black woman. He casts himself as a black man who has returned to her after four hundred years of not having been his own man.
Throughout the book, Cleaver is on a quest for his balls and in the process fights white sexual myths with some perversities of his own. In one monologue piece, “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs,” he supposedly remembers an old fat man’s answer to the taunts of young inmates. The old man claims that the black woman wants a white man, especially when she’s become successful, while the black man wants a white woman. “I worship her. I love a white woman’s dirty drawers.” The war going on between the black man and the black woman makes the black woman the “unconsenting” ally of the white man. It is the reason white men put black women above black men economically. The white man wants to be the brain and for the black man to be the muscle, the body. But then the white man realized he’d cut himself off from “his penis.” The brain must control the body. He imagines the white man telling the black man:
“To prove my omnipotence I must cuckold you and fetter your bull balls.… My prick will excel your rod … I will have access to the white woman and I will have access to the black woman.… The white woman will have access to me, the Omnipotent Administrator, but I deny her access to you, you, the Supermasculine Menial. By subjecting your manhood to the control of my will, I shall control you.” But the plan didn’t work, and the white man can only seize the black man in a rage: “String the Body from the nearest tree and pluck its strange fruit, its big Nigger dick.…”
In another piece, Cleaver’s theory about sex and power in a class society extends his fat inmate’s riff. The “male and female hemispheres of the Primeval Sphere” must prepare for “Apocalyptic Fusion” “by achieving a Unitary Sexual Image, i.e., a heterosexual identity free from … [the] antipodal elements of homosexuality.” But the “Unitary Sexual Image” is only possible in a “Unitary Society,” a classless society. The men of the elite class, the “Omnipotent Administrators,” are “markedly effeminate,” because they have repudiated the body in favor of the mind, making the “Supermasculine Menial” a threat to their “self-concept.” Women of the elite class, “Ultrafeminines,” are driven to seek out the “walking phallus symbol of the Supermasculine Menial” because her “Female Principle” grasps that only he can break through her “Frigidity.” Meanwhile, “the Amazon” has difficulty respecting the “Supermasculine Menial,” because “he has no sovereignty over himself.” This is very sixties stuff.
Shrewdly, Soul on Ice flatters white youth. They were going through the greatest psychic upheaval as the cost of “waking into consciousness,” Cleaver asserts. They had to face “the moral truth concerning the works of their fathers.” Their refusal to participate in the system had first been expressed by the beatniks. Cleaver quotes a passage from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) in which the narrator, while walking through the Denver ghetto, wishes he were a Negro, because the white world did not offer enough ecstasy, life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, “not enough night.” In Cleaver’s view, white youth who joined the civil rights effort and helped shape the antiwar movement were worthy of the black man’s respect. They were free in a way white Americans had never been before.
* * *
“Notes on a Native Son,” Cleaver’s denunciation of James Baldwin, was the first piece he published in Ramparts. In it, he says that he had respected Baldwin’s achievement, the kind of writing that outlasts kingdoms. But when he read Another Country, in which a black wretch lets a “white bisexual homosexual fuck him in his ass” and indulges in the “white pastime” of committing suicide, he knew why he had lost confidence in Baldwin’s vision. He says he then reassessed Baldwin’s skepticism, in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), toward the aims of an important meeting of Negritude writers in Paris in 1956 and decided that he could detect in Baldwin’s work “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.”
Furthermore, he’d changed his mind about Baldwin’s autobiographical reflections in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and found that they only confirmed his belief that many “Negro homosexuals” acquiesce in “the racial death wish” and are “outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man. The cross they have to bear is that, already bending over and touching their toes for the white man, the fruit of their miscegenation is not the little half-white offspring of their dreams but an increase in the unwinding of their nerves—though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man’s sperm.” The white man has deprived the black homosexual of his masculinity, “castrated him in the center of his burning skull,” and turned the razor edge of his hatred against blackness. This racial death wish is “the driving force in James Baldwin.”
Soul on Ice is not far from sentiments expressed in Amiri Baraka’s Home (1966). “Most white American men are trained to be fags,” Baraka says. He equated the conquest of white women with the revolutionary act and sneered at Baldwin for being the darling of the white liberal cocktail party circuit. Cleaver’s assault on Baldwin was, in part, an expression of his literary ambition. Baldwin was the preeminent black writer, the big brother whom young brothers hoped to equal or surpass. Indeed, in his review of Soul on Ice in Commentary, the black cultural historian Jervis Anderson viewed Cleaver’s attack as akin to Ralph Ellison breaking free of Richard Wright, saying that he was not his sole influence, or Baldwin rejecting Wright and the protest tradition. “It is Baldwin to whom Cleaver is closest in sensibility, which perhaps explains why Baldwin bothers him so much.” A
nderson regarded Cleaver’s characterization of black homosexual desire as so absurd, it was beneath serious consideration. However, Anderson then takes Cleaver to task for having no moral imagination, which would seem to put him pretty far from Baldwin, most of whose pages, whether of fiction or essay, speak of the importance of having moral qualities.
Anderson at least referred to Cleaver’s “nastiness” toward Baldwin and homosexuality, even if he quickly dismissed it. But Cleaver interprets Baldwin’s critical memoir of Wright—“Alas, Poor Richard,” from Nobody Knows My Name—as his inability to deal with the innate heterosexuality of Wright’s work. Wright, like Norman Mailer, understood a man’s life as a daily battle, while Baldwin conducted a guerilla campaign against masculinity itself. The Fire Next Time (1963) was the fruit of a tree with a poison root, and homosexuality was “a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become head of General Motors.”
Cleaver’s sexual politics went largely undiscussed in 1968, though in The New York Review of Books, the playwright Jack Richardson identified the central theme of Soul on Ice as “the old Mind-Body difficulty,” which, he says, Cleaver moves from the epistemological to the psychological and social. Cleaver picks apart white consciousness with “angry humor.” Richardson praises what he sees as Cleaver’s “rare honesty.” In the same review, Richardson looks at Baldwin’s new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. He says that Baldwin was bleeding his talent away by writing about blackness with “all the zest of a penance performed for party discipline.” Richardson was writing before Cleaver had fled, when his parole was under threat. Public sympathy for the Black Panthers was at its height. Panther chapters were opening across the country. Cleaver reflected the madness of the times, while Baldwin was having to answer for past statements about the black writer needing to remain above the struggle.
Then, too, the self-education that Cleaver describes resonated with the white left. In prison, he says, he rejected the pacifism of Thomas Merton and moved swiftly from Thomas Paine to Machiavelli, Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Mao, Fanon. The nihilism of Sergey Nechayev most fit his determination to exact revenge on white society. “This is the last act of the show. We are living in a time when the people of the world are making their final bid for full and complete freedom,” Cleaver declares. Nevertheless, Richard Gilman in The New Republic concluded that black people did not think like white people, and therefore Soul on Ice could not be judged by white people. It was not their place to approve or disapprove of it.
Soon published in the United Kingdom in the distinguished Cape Editions alongside Lévi-Strauss, Castro, Barthes, and William Carlos Williams, to name just a few of the figures in the series, Soul on Ice was taken as black nationalist writing. Calls for black-created standards and an independent black criticism were very much in the air at the time. Ironically, the Black Panther Party opposed the separatist wing of Black Power. Former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael broke off his connection with the Panthers, because the Panthers believed in alliances with white revolutionaries, while Carmichael believed that blacks should make their own institutions. Harold Cruse, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1969, strenuously defended black cultural nationalism against what he saw as Cleaver’s outmoded and even superficial Marxism. One sector of the “power structure” jailed him, but another sector of the “power structure” facilitated his literary and political celebrity, the people the Panthers needed in order to get its leadership out of jail, he said.
The revolutionary politics of the Panther platform attracted more attention than anything else they had to say. The revolutionary knows only the science of destruction, Nechayev said. The Panthers were staunchly anti–Vietnam War, linking the struggle of black people in the United States to wars of liberation around the globe. “The blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts,” Cleaver says of his criminal past. This rhetoric was so intimidating, it almost didn’t matter what he said.
* * *
An unpublished review of Soul on Ice that James Baldwin wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1968 rests in Barbara Epstein’s archive at the New York Public Library. Epstein was one of the founders of the magazine in 1963 and its coeditor until her death in 2006. There is no correspondence between Epstein and Baldwin in the file, nothing to explain why the piece was not published. Of the two undated typescripts in the file, one seems to be a photocopy and has a note in the margin in Epstein’s hand, asking Baldwin to be more concrete, and the other has a somewhat different beginning, but other than that the two typescripts are identical.
Baldwin begins by saying that nearly everything in Soul on Ice is corroborated by the current state of affairs in the United States. It hardly seems to be a book at all, but more like standing by the bedside of a dying man and checking off each lethal symptom. He began to write the review before Dr. King was murdered, he says, and was still struggling with it when Bobby Hutton was murdered. He visited the house riddled with bullet holes where the shoot-out took place. Eldridge Cleaver was wounded. Soul on Ice is the testimony of a young man who has spent his life in bondage, by which Baldwin means America, not just prison. Cleaver’s connected pieces are notes from the underground, notes from the house of the dead.
The book is not about the civil rights movement, which Baldwin describes as the doomed effort of beleaguered children aided by noble grown-ups, nor is it about the Negro problem, which is a euphemism for black acceptance of white tears. Baldwin says that Cleaver’s book is about the effort to retrieve the self and that nothing in it is more moving than Cleaver’s evaluation of himself, his drives and motives, as a rapist. He did not surrender his sexual equipment, Baldwin goes on, and attempt to atone through a life of good works. Instead, he accepted responsibility for himself and committed violence against those protected by an arsenal never before seen in the world.
Baldwin says he cannot imagine a white American without a gun, and whereas he would not fight very hard for himself, he would not hesitate to kill anyone out to destroy those he loves. He believes that he survived Selma because he traveled its dark roads in the company of armed black men. Black rage is not paranoia, Baldwin asserts, and what frightened most Americans was that they would no longer be the black man’s frame of reference. Power is the threat of force, and when force is all that is left, that power will go.
Baldwin then revises his opening, by saying that we cannot know a black man or a white man by looking at the color of their skin. Both typescripts end with him revisiting the scene at the house in Oakland where the shoot-out took place. People in the teargassed basement surrendered to the police naked, in order to show that they weren’t armed—except for Bobby Hutton, who was too shy to take off his underwear.
The shoot-out is not dealt with in Cleaver’s book, which had already been published, but Baldwin seems to be relying on Cleaver’s version at the time of what happened. Maybe there are letters somewhere between Epstein and Baldwin about the piece, but what is immediately striking about it is not the combination of weariness and fury in Baldwin’s rhetoric—more was to come at this time in his writing life—and not even how little he can bring himself to say, but the moment when he claims that he’d kill to protect those he loves. It’s a cover. We don’t want to pry into his hurt or anger, if there had been any of either, but as an episode in Baldwin’s life, Soul on Ice makes the case for the publication of Baldwin’s letters. His estate has deposited them with the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, restricting access to what his family considers the most sensitive material. People who have seen any of Baldwin’s letters describe them as some of his best writing.
After Baldwin was caught up in the gunfire that erupted at a Panther rally in Los Angeles in 1968, David Leeming, his biographer, tells us that he stopped going to its rallies but continued to voice his support of the Black Panthers in his speeches. The Panthers were in nothing but trouble once FBI director J. Edgar Hoover branded the group the most serious internal
threat to the security of the United States. Baldwin answered Cleaver’s judgments about him soon enough, in his book-length essay No Name in the Street (1972), his lament for the sixties, the civil rights movement, and America.
In No Name in the Street, Baldwin recalls that he knew about Cleaver’s essay in Ramparts but hadn’t yet read it when they met at a dinner in San Francisco in 1967. When he got around to reading it, he says, “I didn’t like what he had to say about me at all.” But he admired Cleaver’s book otherwise, felt him valuable and rare, and eventually came to see why Cleaver felt “impelled to issue what was, in fact, a warning.” “He seemed to feel that I was a dangerously odd, badly twisted, and fragile reed, of too much use to the Establishment to be trusted by blacks.” He also felt that Cleaver confused him in his mind “with the unutterable debasement of the male—with all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison, must have made him vomit more than once.” Baldwin remarked only that he hoped he knew more about himself and the intention of his work than that.
Baldwin’s restraint and evasiveness suggest that he considered “the storm of fire and blood which the Panthers have been forced to undergo merely for declaring themselves as men” a greater matter than his own reputation. My reputation, Iago. The FBI’s war against the Panthers made them “the native Vietcong,” Baldwin said, and the ghetto like the village in which the Vietcong were hidden. He regretted that he and Cleaver would probably never have the chance to redefine their relationship, an allusion to Cleaver’s exile. “No one knows precisely how identities are forged,” Baldwin muses toward the end of No Name in the Street, “but it is safe to say that identities are not invented: an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” Baldwin excuses Cleaver’s baby-rape analogy as the consequence of his experience of prison, without condescending to notice that he himself was being asked to pay some of that cost in his threatened exclusion from racial hipness, from what used to be called the Church of What’s Happening Now.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 18