Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  One day I was with Afeni and other Panthers in a broken-down building whose tenants we were helping to organize. I saw a little boy with a bandage covering an ugly rat bite. We noticed a baby sleeping in a crib with panties tied around his head. “Why do you have panties around the baby’s head?” Afeni asked the young mother.

  “So the roaches won’t crawl into her nose or her ears while she sleeps,” the young mother replied tearfully. “I scrub my house every day. I use the insect spray every night, and they still come back.”

  By the end of the week we helped the tenants seize control of the building and had community lawyers teach them how to set up an escrow account so they could use their rent money to bring in an exterminator and make repairs to the building.

  It felt like there was never a dull moment with the Black Panther Party. I was always in the midst of excitement, potential danger, and the coolest black men and women on the planet. What fifteen-year-old wouldn’t want to feel as fully engaged and as turned on about life, black culture, and the “people’s revolution” as I was?

  The New York chapter was divided into sections according to where you lived. The Bronx section did not have an office. We went to our main meetings at the Harlem office but had section meetings at Yedwa’s house. There were about fifteen of us in a section. I would find reasons to hang around and be one of the last ones to leave the meeting. I was fascinated by Yedwa’s swagger and style. He spent time in Vietnam before joining the movement. He worked along with Lumumba Shakur as an organizer for a group called the Elsmere Tenants Council. They would help tenants get repairs, heat, fight evictions, and so forth.

  Yedwa was always shoving cops, arguing with officials, and talking about battling the pigs. Most of the young Panthers wanted to be like him. I felt really cool and important when Yedwa would let me hang around with him selling Panther papers; standing security at a rally; or cooling out in his apartment listening to jazz, eating fried chicken and apple pie, and talking about life from a “revolutionary black man’s point of view.”

  His pad had a couch with no legs and a couple of pillows that Yedwa called the “low-to-the-ground feel.” He would push back his couch to teach me fighting moves or take me to the park and show me hand-to-hand combat techniques. He took me to the woods and taught me how to shoot a pistol and a rifle so I could be “ready when the time comes.” Most important, for a fifteen-year-old man-child with raging hormones, he instructed me on the right way to rap to a Panther woman, something he had touched on earlier when he overheard me trying to talk to a pretty young sister. Yedwa completed the lesson with a smile and a wink. “If you say all the right things, then a sister might tell you, ‘Well, come by my house and rest while I make a little dinner, brother.’ See Panther women like brothers who work hard for the struggle. That’s how you get their attention.”

  I first got Yedwa’s attention when the Panthers got into a scuffle with cops at a courthouse in Brooklyn. We came out to support a Panther who was arrested on gun charges. Thirty cops started pushing and shoving us in the hallway near the elevator. We started swinging and pushing back. I was right next to Yedwa doing my best to land a few haymakers and kicks. There were no arrests and the cops didn’t follow us when we jogged out of the building. “You’re a crazy little nigger. You like to get down, don’t you?” Yedwa said as he dabbed blood from my nose with his bandanna.

  “Yeah,” I answered, trying to sound tough even though I was still shaken from the fight. From that moment on, he seemed to take a special interest in me.

  One night we were sitting in a Harlem greasy spoon known as a Jap joint. Greasy spoons are small restaurants where patrons can get large portions of greasy but delicious soul food for cheap prices. Jap joints got their nickname because they were staffed by Chinese cooks that Harlem residents incorrectly identified as Japanese. The trippy and fun part would be the black waiter or waitress at the counter who took your order in English and yelled it to the cooks in Chinese.

  Yedwa and I were well into a few jokes and big plates of ribs when two young thugs eased into the restaurant. They took off their fedora hats, which they used to shield the pistols they pulled from their waistbands. One gun man jumped behind the counter and cleaned out the register. The other stood near me watching the patrons, his gun inches from my head. I jerked nervously and turned to run out the door. Yedwa grabbed my arm with a grip that was firm and calming. “Just keep eating your food, brother,” he ordered in a whisper. I mechanically shoved food in my mouth while the gunmen stuffed money into a paper bag and scooted out the door.

  After a minute, one of the Chinese cooks ran into the street yelling, “Police, police. He rob us.”

  Yedwa kept calmly eating like we were at a beachfront resort. “That was real smooth,” he commented between bites. “Now those brothers need to go downtown to a bank where the money is.” Yedwa dabbed his goatee with a napkin and put five dollars on the counter to pay for our meals. “Let’s split before the pigs get here.” I followed Yedwa out, my body still electrified from the robbery, my mind blown at how cool Yedwa was. He was the father I never met, the big brother I never had.

  There was a Che Guevara poster that hung in the front of the Panther office, with a quote from a speech that Che gave at the United Nations. “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love.” Wow, I thought as I read that. The “love” thing. Pastor Lloyd talked about it in Sunday school and at NAACP Youth Council meetings. Noonie talked about it at home. Dr. King talked about it in his speeches, but love in the Black Panther office? What was that about? “It’s about understanding that being a Panther is about serving the people, mind, body, and soul,” Afeni would teach in political education class. “If you’re here because you hate the oppressor and you don’t have a deep love for the people, then you are a flawed revolutionary.” Hearing these words made me feel less like I was doing Noonie wrong or letting down Pastor Lloyd or my favorite teachers at school.

  Being a Panther meant that I was being a real aggressive lover of freedom, and I took this part of the training to heart. “It’s love that makes a Panther get up at five a.m. on a freezing winter morning to travel across town to serve breakfast to kids that are not their own,” I would say in speeches at school and park rallies. “And it’s love that will make a Panther get off the bus on the way home and stand between a cop who has his gun drawn and the black person being arrested, someone he’s never met before.” So I learned to smile while I was being taught to cook pancakes, change diapers, and fix broken windows. I learned to be enthusiastic about asking for donations and giving away the food and clothing that we collected. I learned how to find the energy, even when I was dead tired, to help a senior citizen across the street and up the stairs with her groceries.

  Guns were around, but in a drawer or a closet, and not as constant companions to Panthers on duty. Once a week or so there would be weapons safety training and military drill with the purpose of giving young Panthers the skills needed to protect the Panther office or home in the event of an attack or police raid. There was a lot of talk in Panther literature and speeches about armed revolution, but it was made clear that the duty of a Panther was to organize and teach so that the political consciousness of the broad masses of people could be raised to the point that they were ready to engage in revolution. We were taught that the revolution could not be fought or won without the people and that if the masses were organized and unified enough that armed struggle might not even be necessary.

  That being said and at least partially understood, I couldn’t wait for my chance to fight and if need be to die in the people’s revolution. It’s what young Panthers talked about. Next to the poster of Che was a poster of Panther man-child hero Bobby Hutton, who was the first Panther to join at age fifteen and the first Panther to be killed at age seventeen.

  I spent most of my time in the Panther office or engaged in Panther activities. I was a pretty good public speaker
, with an ability to adapt the best lines from Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, and Harlem Panther leaders and to make them sound like my own. I would be in lunchrooms and hallways of high schools around the city organizing students into Black Student Union chapters, a sister group of the Black Panther Party. Older Panther leaders like Lumumba and Afeni took notice of me, and I got promoted to section leader in charge of the youth cadre.

  The more I rolled with the Panthers, the more my grades fell off. I went from As to Cs in most of my subjects. “School is irrelevant,” I would shout at high school rallies. “The struggle is about making progressive change on the university of the streets.”

  Not only was my school work falling off, I was also slacking on my home chores. Noonie would have to remind me to take out the garbage, clean the cat litter box, and help her get the groceries home on Saturday morning. She was constantly on me about making up my bed and straightening my room. One day Noonie got tired of getting after me and decided to clean my room herself. As she was changing my sheets she noticed newspapers and magazines hidden between my mattress and box spring. This is where most normal fifteen-year-old boys hide their Playboy magazines, but when Noonie looked at my stash she got much more of an eyeful than pictures of nude girls. It was Black Panther literature. The artwork of cops depicted as pigs and little black schoolchildren blowing cops’ brains out with guns while shouting, “Power to the people! Death to all fascist pigs!”

  When I came in that night, Noonie had my Panther papers, her Bible, and a belt all spread out on the kitchen table, looking like it was an altar prepared for some secret society initiation. “Hi, Noonie,” I said as I headed for the refrigerator. I stopped in my tracks when I saw the “altar.”

  “Boy, what is this?” Noonie demanded.

  “What is what?” I replied, trying to play dumb.

  “All of this. These books about killing cops and hating everybody I found in your room.”

  “You were going through my stuff?” I said indignantly.

  “Don’t even try that,” she said firmly. “I don’t know whether to bless you with this belt or kill you with this Bible, but you better tell me where this nonsense came from.”

  I admitted that I had been going to “a few” Panther meetings. The truth was I had been sneaking off to Panther meetings and activities for about four months now, making up lies about extra activities at school and the Minisink community center to cover my “missions.”

  I showed her the Ten-Point Program and tried to explain that their intention wasn’t much different from what she and Pa Baltimore had espoused as part of Marcus Garvey’s movement when they were young. “Oh, it’s much different,” Noonie said. “Mr. Garvey did not preach about hate and guns. And you are not going back to the Panthers ever again. I’ll kill you myself before I let white folks kill you over this foolishness.” With that, the Panther literature was thrown in the garbage and I was sent to my room.

  Being the obedient grandson that I was, I went to the Panther office the next day anyway. My intention was to announce my forced retirement from the Black Panther Party and to let my Panther comrades know that I was still part of the movement in spirit and, whenever possible, in deed. “My grandmother is tripping,” I said to Afeni, Lumumba, and Yedwa in front of the Panther office. “She’s an Uncle Tom.”

  Afeni practically leaped in my chest. “Don’t you dare talk about your grandmother that way,” Afeni snapped. “She’s just trying to love you and protect you best way she knows how.”

  I apologized, realizing that there was a line about elders in the community that not even the Panthers would cross.

  “Yedwa, you’re his section leader,” Lumumba said. “Why don’t you talk to his grandmother?”

  “Yeah, that’s cool. That’ll work,” Yedwa said with a smile. “I’m gonna come by your house and rap to your grandma.”

  It took a lot of pleading and a few days of doing extra chores around the house to convince Noonie to let Yedwa come by. “You can bring whoever you want to bring,” Noonie finally said, “but I’ve already spoken to the Lord about this and my mind is made up.”

  That evening Yedwa showed up to our apartment wearing a leather jacket but without his usual array of Panther buttons. He even had on a shirt and tie. A shirt and tie? I thought. I didn’t even think we were allowed to wear a shirt and tie in the Panthers.

  Noonie sat in her favorite chair. Yedwa and I sat on the couch across from her. I was nervous, knees shaking like a man about to go on trial for his life. For the last four months I had walked, talked, and acted like a young badass revolutionary man. Now Noonie was about to sentence me to being a boy again. It was all up to my section leader, mentor, and hero Yedwa. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mother Baltimore. If I didn’t know better I would think you were Jamal’s—excuse me, Eddie’s—older sister.”

  “Yes, his much older sister,” Noonie said, smiling slightly.

  Yedwa got some points off the bat, not because of the attempted beauty compliment but because he referred to Noonie as Mother Baltimore, a term of respect that Noonie had earned in our church for being a senior congregant and the head of the missionary board.

  “Mother Baltimore,” Yedwa continued, “if you say Jamal—excuse me, I mean Eddie—can’t come back to the Black Panther office I have to respect that cuz you’re his grandmother and you’re my elder.”

  I winced at the fact that Yedwa was using my slave name Eddie, instead of Jamal. “But ma’am,” he continued, “I know that Eddie is giving you a hard time and if it’s all right with you I still would like to keep an eye on him.” Noonie looked intrigued. I was confused. Why was Yedwa giving up the fight so easily, and what was this stuff about keeping an eye on me? “Ma’am, if you set his curfew for nine o’clock and he is not in the house by eight forty-five I will take off this garrison belt buckle and I’ll whip his butt.”

  By then I was really unsure. What the hell was Yedwa talking about? He was supposed to tell Noonie that I’m a revolutionary and that I need to come and go as I please. “Ma’am, I know Eddie can be doing a lot better in school. If you want him to bring you an eighty on his next math test and he doesn’t bring you a ninety, I will take these size fifteen combat boots and I’ll give him a swift kick in the rear.” At this point I was trying desperately to catch Yedwa’s attention. He was making things worse. Yedwa never looked my way. He kept a humble gaze on Noonie.

  Noonie nodded her head slowly, leaning back in her chair for a moment. She glanced up at the heavens as she checked in with the Lord. “You know my mind is pretty made up about this,” Noonie said. “Eddie doesn’t have a father and it’s really hard raising a teenage boy alone. But if you’re going to look after him like you said, and make sure that he does better in school, that when he comes in the house he obeys my rules, then he can come by the Panthers a couple of times a week.”

  I could barely believe what I was hearing. Yedwa had just moved a mountain and parted the Red Sea. This was unprecedented. From the time she started taking care of me when I was four to this very moment, Noonie never changed her mind about a punishment decision.

  Yedwa stayed for dinner. After home-baked apple pie and hot chocolate, he hugged Noonie like she was his grandmother. Noonie let me go outside to take out the trash and to chat with Yedwa. “That was cool, brother,” I said admiringly, “the way you laid it down with Noonie was really something.”

  “Well, in case you didn’t realize it, I was dead serious. You need to do better in school and you need to stop worrying this woman or I’m gonna be getting in your ass. In the Panther Party we say that we are motivated by our undying love for the people. Isn’t your grandmother part of the people?” Yedwa turned and walked away. I watched him for a few minutes and headed back to our apartment. When I got inside I hugged Noonie and told her that I loved her. For the first time in many tumultuous adolescent months I really meant it.

  5

  Busted with the Big Cats

  April 1, 196
9. It was a Thursday night and there was a big rally for the Harlem Five at a public school there. The Harlem Five was a group of five young black men who were community organizers in the Lincoln projects in the heart of Harlem. Hannibal, Sayid, Wallace, David, and Mustafa were college students and community counselors who preached black nationalism in the spirit of Malcolm X.

  They worked with tenants organizing rent strikes, and they set up after-school programs where kids did homework and learned black history and the martial arts. Because of their efforts, gang violence and drug dealing was reduced to almost zero in the projects. But in 1968 they were arrested and jailed for conspiracy to declare war on the cops. Many people in the community felt they had been framed, and on that April Fool’s night the school auditorium was packed with their supporters. The Panthers had worked side by side with the Harlem Five on tenants’ rights issues, community safety patrols designed to protect the elderly, and efforts to get to get rid of drugs in the neighborhood. Members of the Harlem Tenants Council, the Republic of New Africa, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Black Student Union, along with parents, grandmothers, and neighbors from the projects, were all part of the standing-room-only crowd.

  That night’s gathering was more than a political rally—it was a cultural event. There were African dancers, a jazz quartet, and a concert by the Last Poets, a group said by many to have invented rap. Their lyrics and poems performed over jazz riffs, bass licks, and African drum beats were both incendiary and highly entertaining. The men in the group, Felipe, Abiodun, Kain, and Yusef, were stars of the black movement.