Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

Before I even realized what was happening, I smashed Lefty in the face with my tray. Lefty fell back, his legs still hooked around the seating bench. “Oh shit,” he cried as he tried to swing up at me. I clubbed him three more times, then began to stomp and kick him as he writhed on the ground.

  “I ain’t nobody’s baby. You hear me, motherfucker? I’m a man!”

  Lefty was stunned. Blood from his nose and mouth mixed with the mashed potatoes and ground meat I had smashed into his face. I tried to turn the table over on him as Merciful struggled to hold me back. “That’s enough, man, you got him,” he said, trying to calm me down. “You gonna catch another case.”

  I punched and shoved Merciful and tried to get back at Lefty who had pulled himself to one knee. Guards were now on the scene. Several grabbed me and handcuffed me and carried me out of the mess hall. Captain Woods and the disciplinary committee gave me thirty days in the bing for fighting. “You broke that boy’s nose. You know that?” Captain Woods informed me. I just stared straight ahead. “I don’t know who started it,” Captain Woods said, “but I’m sure that guy had it coming.”

  I worked out three times a day in the bing. Jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, and punching my rolled-up mattress like a heavy bag. I knew I would have to fight Lefty again and probably some of the house gang. I wondered if Manny would still lend me one of his figas. This situation had surely become life and death. Twenty-nine days later the guards took me back to Three Block.

  Everyone was locked in their cell for the afternoon count when I walked down the tier. Every afternoon and evening inmates were locked in their cell and had to stand when the guards came by to count everyone. This was to make sure you were really in your cell and were still alive. As I passed the cells, various prisoners nodded and spoke: “Hey man, what’s happening, Brother Jamal?” The guards locked me in the cell with Manny who told me that Lefty had been transferred upstate to serve his time. I still expected beef with the rest of the house gang, but they treated me with total respect. Merciful, whom I had punched, approached me in the day room. “We cool?” he asked.

  “I’m cool if you’re cool,” I replied.

  Merciful nodded and let me know that I now had a “rep” throughout the cell block and that I could have a spot on the house gang if I wanted.

  “No thanks,” I replied. “You know how I feel about that neocolonialist, slave overseer, Uncle Tom bullshit.”

  Merciful smiled. “You a heavy dude, you know that? A real black-power soldier.” With that we banged fists and made peace.

  MORE INMATES JOINED the PE classes and martial arts workout. We formed a prison cadre, complete with a code of conduct:.

  No juggling

  No booty bandits

  No hard drugs

  No collaborating with the guards

  We formed a cooperative with our own stash of commissary items and toiletries. If a brother needed cigarettes or cookies, he borrowed it from the cooperative and paid it back on commissary day. If a new inmate came into the cell block, the cooperative would give him a little welcome pack with toiletries and a few basics to get him by until his first commissary day. The house gang and the jugglers didn’t like what we were doing, but our cadre was about forty prisoners strong and we knew how to rumble.

  The guards would often break up our meetings and workouts, calling it unlawful assembly, but we would simply reconfigure into smaller groups and continue our sessions. Captain Woods and other officials would stop by my cell to ask if everything was all right. I would smile and say, “Considering that I am a political prisoner of war in a concentration camp, everything is just swell.”

  The smuggled Panther literature and regular newspapers that reached me gave me a harsh sense of the battle being waged on the Black Panther Party by the government. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover testified before Congress in June 1969, saying, “The Black Panther Party without question is the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Hoover used this moment to get Congress’s blessing to wage a public as well as secret war against the Black Panther Party.

  Every week I would read or hear about a Panther office being raided, Panthers being arrested, or Panthers being killed. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered when the Chicago police raided a Panther apartment there. Fred was a gifted speaker who was organizing the gangs in Chicago. The police shot him multiple times as he lay asleep and unarmed in his bed inches away from his pregnant wife. Fred was twenty-one. Panther offices were bombed and destroyed in Newark, Denver, and Des Moines. Three days after Fred’s murder, the Los Angeles police attacked the local headquarters in that city. The Panthers resisted, led by Deputy Minister of Defense Geronimo Pratt, and a sixteen-hour shootout ensued. I would sit in my cell at night thinking about fellow Panthers, some just a year or two older than me, wounded and dying on the street. I felt angry and at the same time frustrated and ashamed that I wasn’t on the battlefield with them.

  The prison cadre movement spread to other cell blocks. Young prisoners would pass in the hallway and salute each other with “Power to the people.” The number of fights and incidents of rape dropped dramatically. We were allowed to go to the yard once or twice a week. Inmates would usually make a beeline for the basketball court, shoving each other for the balls and team positions. One fall day we entered the yard and no one ran for a ball. The basketballs, footballs, and softballs just lay on the ground. Instead we lined up across the yard and started performing a karate kata that I had taught the inmates. Captain Woods and the other officials watched.

  Around 2 a.m. the next morning Captain Woods and a team of guards came to my cell. “You’re being transferred, Mr. Joseph,” Captain Woods informed me.

  “What are you putting me in the bing for?” I protested.

  “It’s not the bing. You’re going to another prison.”

  The cell door rolled opened, and Manny jumped into a fighting stance. There were about twenty guards outside. We had “no wins” in this situation.

  “It’s cool, brother,” I said, patting Manny on the shoulder. “I’ll be all right.” I gathered a few things, leaving most of my books and commissary with Manny.

  “Watch your back, bro,” Manny said with clenched fists. “Walk slow and drink plenty of cold water.”

  A police escort drove me to the Queens House of Detention, commonly known as Branch Queens. I was processed and taken to the segregation floor. All my Panther comrades were there. Our lawyers had finally secured a court order directing the Department of Corrections to house us together so we could prepare for trial. Corrections had previously resisted these requests, saying that we were high security risks. We had all been organizing in our various prisons. The authorities now realized it was a greater risk to their security to have Panthers on the loose in the general prison population. So with the exception of Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur, who were still in the Women’s House of Detention, we were now all in one unit.

  Our cells filled with documents and law books as we prepared for trial. Eight months had gone by and our lawyers were still fighting to see all of the evidence that would be presented at our trial. We would fill the tiny conference room and talk about how to fight the case. William Kunstler had left the defense team to begin the Chicago Eight trial. Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and other radical leaders were accused of conspiracy charges growing out of demonstrations that happened at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Bobby, the cofounder and chairman of the Black Panther Party, had been bound, shackled, and gagged in the courtroom when he demanded to defend himself. Like Dred Scott, a man who was remanded by the courts back to slavery a hundred years earlier, Bobby’s treatment reflected the legal opinion written by the Supreme Court in Scott’s case, which said, “A black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” We knew we were being railroaded and that we had to make our trial a symbol of resistance.

  Gerry Lefcourt had become our lead attorney. He was twenty-six years old and had only tried one major ca
se before this. I knew he was nervous about being lead counsel when so many lives were at stake.

  “You can do it, brother,” Lumumba said to Gerry. “Besides they’re giving us three hundred years no matter what goes down, so just give ’em hell.”

  There were other young attorneys who had come to join the fight too: Carol Lefcourt (Gerry’s sister-in-law); Bob Bloom; Sandy Katz; Marty Stolar; Bill Crain (who was my attorney); and Charles McKinney, a distinguished older African American attorney who had enormous trial experience.

  Afeni announced that she had decided to defend herself. She had read Fidel Castro’s book History Will Absolve Me. Fidel, himself a young attorney, had been facing life in prison for acts of insurrection against Batista’s Cuban government. He told the court that no matter what sentence it imposed, history would prove that the idea of revolution was just and timely. Afeni wanted to address the court and the jury to let them know that she was a “freedom fighter.” Lumumba and other Panthers protested, saying that Afeni would get too emotional. Afeni stood firm, declaring that since nobody else was going to do her three hundred years, nobody else could tell her how to defend herself. I agreed with Afeni, although it was clear that her decision was not up for vote. Cetewayo “Cet” Tabor announced that he would defend himself as well. There was less resistance to his decision. Cet was an eloquent speaker with a booming, Paul Robeson basso profundo voice. Charles McKinney and the other attorneys agreed that it would be good to have Panthers address the jury directly.

  At night I lay in my cell thinking about a three-hundred-year sentence. I would escape, I thought, or the revolution would succeed and the walls of Jericho would come tumbling down. But if I had to do life and die in prison, I could handle it. I had done a week when I didn’t think I could last a day. I did a month when a week seemed impossible. Now it was almost a year and I could do the time “standing on my head,” like the older prisoners said. My only regret was that I had never done more than French kiss a girl as we slow danced at a party. I was sixteen years old, facing 368 years in prison, and still a virgin.

  There were a few more trips to court as we fought to have our bail lowered and to win pretrial motions to have the charges dismissed. Judge Murtagh would always rule against us. We would invariably turn the proceedings upside down with statements and outbursts that let the judge know how we felt about the “racist, fascist legal lying” he was trying to put down.

  Back in our special prison unit the older Panthers tutored me in political and military theory. I studied Suntzu’s The Art of War, Hannibal’s military campaigns, and the battle strategies that had been used by freedom fighters in Africa and Latin America. We had in-depth discussions about Marx, Mao, and Che and went deep into the writings and speeches of African revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba, Sekou Torre, and Amílcar Cabral. Dhoruba, Cetewayo, and Lumumba were professor-like in their teaching and demands. I had to write essays and critically defend my positions. If prison was a university, as Malcolm said, then our Panther wing was grad school.

  I had stopped counting the days that I was in prison. Like most men and women who are locked up for a long period, a prisoner learns to start counting months. Counting days makes you crazy. You think about the home-cooked meal you’re missing or who your lover is messing with on the outside. You trip about the hundreds of days left in your bid and wonder if you can keep it together. Your mind slips into thoughts and ways to beat the bed and eventually into thoughts of suicide. Better to count the months. Ask any prisoner how long they’ve been in, and he will tell you the time in months. Prisoners doing really long sentences will start counting the years. “Been down eighteen years, youngblood,” one lifer told me, “and I’m never gonna see daylight.”

  I had been down eleven months when the guards came to take me to court. They didn’t want my codefendants, just me, saying I had a special hearing. The older Panthers stood around me and demanded that the guard show us the court appearance order. The appearance was listed as a hearing to review a motion about my youthful offender status. I forgot that my lawyer filed this motion months ago and was surprised it hadn’t been dismissed along with all the other motions. The Panther wall parted, and Lumumba told me to go to court.

  The hearing was in a small courtroom. No supporters. No army of court guards. I stood next to my attorney, Bill Crain, who argued to Judge Murtagh that this was my first offense and that I was an honor student who was involved in church and community organizations. The hefty, perpetually annoyed assistant district attorney Joseph Phillips agreed that I was intelligent but argued that I had allowed myself to be influenced by violent revolutionaries and had turned my intelligence to illegal subversive activities. I took a deep breath to gather enough oxygen for a long stream of insults at Phillips. Bill Crain nudged me and whispered, “Just be cool.” Judge Murtagh then asked Mr. Phillips if he objected to the youthful offender motion. “The People have no objection, Your Honor.” It always pissed us off when the prosecution referred to themselves and their case as “the People,” as in The People of the State of New York vs. Lumumba Shakur and the Black Panther Party.

  I was so involved in my negative reflexive gut reaction to Phillips’s use of the word “people” that it didn’t register that he wasn’t objecting. “The motion is granted and the defendant Eddie Joseph, also known as Jamal Joseph, is hereby adjudicated a youthful offender. Since he can no longer be tried as an adult, he is severed from the case.”

  What? I thought, now trying to process the hearing.

  “In view of Mr. Joseph’s YO status we request that he be released on his own recognizance,” Bill Crain said.

  “Some bail should be imposed, Judge,” Phillips countered. “Even with YO status there is still a possibility of a four-year prison sentence.”

  “Bail is set at ten thousand dollars,” Murtagh declared. He adjourned the hearing. Phillips and Judge Murtagh left the courtroom. Bill Crain smiled, congratulated me, and told me that I would probably be out on bail in a day or two.

  I was totally troubled when I returned to the Panther wing. I didn’t want to leave my comrades behind and I definitely didn’t want to be thought of as a “youthful offender.” I had done eleven months in jail like a man. Now a judge had gone and made me a boy? The older Panthers told me to stop trippin’. Panthers were needed on the street fighting, not rotting in jail.

  “If the gods forgot to lock your cell and you had a chance to escape, would you split and come back for us? Or would you stay behind like a knucklehead?” Dhoruba asked.

  “The answer is obvious to a duck,” I replied sarcastically, “but this is different.”

  “No different,” I was told in a collective voice. “We need you out there raising awareness and bail money with Sister Afeni.”

  Afeni had been released two weeks earlier when the Panther 21 Defense Committee had raised enough money to post her hundred-thousand-dollar bail. We took a vote among ourselves and chose Afeni as the best person to represent the 21 on the outside. We felt a broader section of people could relate to her as a black woman who was being framed. Now that my bail had been lowered, it was my turn to spread our message. People would also respond to me as a young student who had been kidnapped by the pigs from his grandmother’s home.

  The next night the deputy warden and two guards told me I was being released on bail. I had been in prison for eleven months, from April 1969 to February 1970. So much had happened inside that it felt more like three years. I was embraced by my comrades and then led from the unit. I signed a discharge paper and stepped through the barred gate into a cold February night. Afeni was waiting for me along with two Panther officers from California who had been sent to work in New York after our arrest. Afeni gave me a crushing hug. The brothers gave me a Panther handshake and welcomed me home. A car was waiting. Before I got in I looked up at the barred windows on the ninth floor. That was the location of the Panther wing. Dhoruba had made me promise to yell something back at the jail when I got out. As p
romised, I cupped my hands and shouted, “You pigs kiss my motherfuckin’ ass!” Dhoruba and the other Panthers yelled back at me, “Power to the people!” The California Panthers shook their heads and laughed. “You New York niggas sure is crazy.” We climbed into a black sedan and sped off toward Harlem.

  9

  Blood and Wine

  The streets of Harlem looked good as we cruised through the night. Even the run-down tenements and junkies wandering the street were welcome sights. I was out of the concentration camp and back in the black colony. It was a weeknight, but the bars along Seventh Avenue, the Gold Lounge and the Shalimar, were jumping like it was a Saturday night—street folks and hustlers hanging out front, flashy cars pulling up.

  We drove across the bridge to the South Bronx where a new Panther office had opened. It was called the East Coast Ministry of Information and had been designated as the official headquarters for East Coast Panther operations. It was a large storefront office, three times as big as the Harlem office. The office was packed with new faces. Many had joined the party in the last year; others were Panthers from other cities who had been transferred to New York to help keep the chapter there running after the arrest of the Panther 21. I was engulfed with a chorus of “Power to the people,” “Welcome home, brother,” and Panther handshakes and hugs as I moved through the room. I felt awkward and dizzy. The scene was overwhelming. Everyone knew my name and was giving me a hero’s welcome. But I knew I was just a nervous man-child getting out of jail.

  Anyone fresh out the joint will tell you that readjustment is a bitch. You feel like everyone can see your prison number tattooed on your forehead. Handling money, ordering food, buying knickknacks in a store, and getting on subways where people are pushing and shoving is a cold shock. You’ve just been released from a world where there is imposed structure, lines, order, solitude, and no menu choices. It may be steel and concrete, but it’s familiar and home bitter home. I’d only been in prison for eleven months, but it was enough to be contaminated with the virus of institutionalization. And on my first night out even the friendly crush of adoring Panthers was an overload.