Panther Baby

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by Jamal Joseph


  Our top young student was an eleven-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Angel. He was cute and curly-haired, with soft brown eyes, destined to be impossibly handsome as he grew into manhood. Angel was the first to show up every day and the last to leave at night. I would sit with him in our little office/lounge in the back of the dojo to make sure he did his homework. In the mode of life in the Chinese Buddhist temples, Angel would help me sweep, mop, wash windows, and maintain the dojo. This way he earned his lessons and would feel good about the two or three dollars I would slip in his pocket. Angel had brilliant martial arts technique and high flashy kicks. He would imitate the way I sparred and did forms. When we did karate demonstrations at community centers and tournaments, the crowd would get a kick out of seeing Angel and me performing as large and small versions of each other.

  We would share a pizza, a hot dog, or a chicken patty, and I would ask Angel what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer was to ask me, “What do you want to be?” to which I would say, “I don’t know. I think I’ll finish college and be a teacher or a social worker.”

  Angel would smile and say, “Then I want to be a teacher or a social worker.”

  I would say, “Angel, what kind of car do you want to drive?” and he would say, “I don’t know. What kind of car do you want?”

  I would answer, “I don’t know, maybe a Camaro or a Jaguar.” His eyes would sparkle and he would say, “Then I want a Camaro or a Jaguar.” We’d finish our lunch and then talk about Bruce Lee, baseball, and traveling to Japan and China to meet the great martial arts masters.

  Angel earned his black belt right after he turned thirteen. It was summer, just before the Fourth of July. The temperature was hot and the streets were filled with people hanging out and dancing to the music coming from the open tenement windows and record players blasting Latin and soul music. Kids were starting to set off firecrackers as a lead-up to the holiday. The sidewalk firework salesmen were just letting go of a few packs of firecrackers as a tease, timing their big business for a day or two before the Fourth.

  Angel was buying soda in a bodega with some friends when he heard a series of pops right outside the grocery store door. “Firecrackers!” he shouted happily as he pulled out a dollar and ran outside to see if he could buy a pack or two. The firecracker pops were actually rival drug dealers shooting it out on the street in front of the bodega, and when Angel stepped out on the street he was shot between the eyes.

  “What do you want to be, Angel?”—our conversations haunted me for months after his death.

  “What do you want to be?” he answered, eyes sparkling, full of hope. “Whatever you want to be, that’s what I want to be.”

  Angel’s murder rocked me to the core. The demon of death that I thought I had purged was once again riding my back. I drifted away from teaching karate and from the counseling jobs I had at a drug center and a youth program. Who was I to teach or counsel anybody?

  The gypsy cab still paid the bills. In fact, I saved enough money to buy another gypsy cab, which I leased out. I started numbing out using weed, alcohol, and sometimes coke to ease the pain. I went into a kind of self-imposed exile. I didn’t want to think or talk about the Panther movement. Didn’t want to remember or deal with the battles and the open wounds that were still searing my memories and ravaging my dreams. I hung out with an eclectic group that included street people, artists, and folks from the night life. I hustled just enough to support my habit. My “deals and introductions” were among my small circle of friends. We fancied ourselves outlaws, sharing contempt for the system and the “square life.” Even so, I would have bouts of depression and guilt, feeling that I had fallen victim to some of the habits and behavior that I fought against as a young Panther.

  Politics wasn’t completely gone from the mix. I had some of my best discussions about human rights, social issues, and progressive politics in the backs of bars and in after-hours joints with hustlers, hookers, and thieves.

  I was still wild and reckless, ready to roll with any friend who had a problem or beef on the street. My demon continued to whisper through my subconscious. I didn’t die in a blaze of glory during the revolution; maybe I could still have a samurai-like warrior’s death on the street.

  That chance would come on a summer night in 1980. I was cooling out listening to jazz in my Greenwich Village apartment. It was a neat little hideaway—a small one-bedroom garden apartment with a fireplace. It had two exits, one through the courtyard and another through the main building, perfect for a posttraumatic-stress suffering former Panther who was ready to spring into any kind of action. My phone rang with the proper code. Two rings. Hang up. Call back. (This is how it worked before the days of caller ID and cell phones.) “Yeah,” I answered, as flat and cold as possible. I didn’t like phones. I did time with too many people who, like me, listened to hours of wiretaps and dumb conversations during their trials.

  “It’s Jake,” came the frantic teenage voice through the receiver. “I just got into some shit with some crazy dude in the bar.”

  “Okay. Be cool,” I said, not wanting to hear any details over the phone. “I’ll meet you on the corner.” I threw on a shirt and headed out to meet Jake on the corner of Hudson and Perry close to my apartment.

  Jake was an eighteen-year-old white kid from the Midwest whose mom was part of our night-life circle of friends. He and I bonded over Bruce Lee movies, and I had been giving him karate lessons in the park for about six months. When I saw Jake, his shirt was covered with blood.

  “What happened, man?” I asked as I inspected his face and arms for cuts.

  “It’s not my blood. It’s this bouncer named Nelson. We had some words about me getting off the pool table and he shoved me. I pushed him back and he rushed me. I popped him with a backhand you showed me and cracked his nose.”

  I told Jake to come back to my pad so he could clean up. He had lost his wallet in the scuffle and wanted to go back to the bar and look for it.

  Even though this was the West Village, generally a safe place, this was a shady bar, and I had warned Jake about hanging out there, but he liked the pool table—plus they let him drink without checking ID. We checked around the bar for his wallet with no luck. As we were walking up Greenwich Street, Nelson, the muscular thirty-year-old bouncer, rode up on a bike. “That’s the guy,” Jake whispered.

  Nelson got off his bike, leaned it against a telephone post, and said calmly, “Oh, there you go. I been looking for you.” He was about twenty feet away. Jake walked over to talk to him. I lay back, not wanting the bouncer to feel that I was there to pose a threat, especially since they were about to talk it out.

  The bouncer reached into his crotch and withdrew a small pistol. I recognized it as a .25, maybe .32, caliber. The action seemed disconnected from his mellow demeanor. I couldn’t believe he was pulling out a gun. So I froze, watching. Unbelieving. He raised the gun and pointed it at Jake. “Don’t shoot me, man,” Jake pleaded. His frightened voice startled me out of my daze.

  “Jake, run,” I yelled in a commanding tone. The bouncer pulled the trigger twice as Jake rushed past him. I looked around for a weapon. Thank God for dirty New York City streets. There was a half-empty beer bottle in the gutter. I swooped it up and hurtled it at the bouncer, cracking him in the back of the head. He spun around and fired at me. I ducked and rolled into the street.

  I looked over my shoulder as I was sprinting away and saw Jake limping badly. The bouncer was running behind him, firing. My legs wanted to keep running to safety. My gut knew that Jake was a dead man if I didn’t do something. I leaped over the hood of a parked car and got myself between Jake and the bouncer.

  “You gotta run, man,” I urged.

  “I can’t,” Jake answered in pain. “My leg.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “We’re running tonight.”

  I grabbed the back of his belt with one hand and his shirt collar with the other and dragged him along with me. We ran around and ducked between
parked cars as the bouncer kept firing. How many damn bullets does that thing have? I thought as the bullets whizzed by. Time does slow in the midst of high intensity stress. I had experienced it before on different occasions when bullets from drug dealers and cops flew by my head, and the seconds that night felt like long, drawn-out minutes. Finally the gun clicked empty and the bouncer hopped on his bike and raced off.

  I threw Jake’s arm around my shoulder and headed toward the nearest precinct, which was two blocks away. Cops were running up the street toward the sound of the gunfire. The police captain reached us first. He saw that Jake was wounded. “What happened?” he asked.

  “A guy tried to rob us. He shot my friend.” The captain instructed a cop to take us into the precinct. Good move, I thought.

  Ambulances were notoriously slow in answering sidewalk calls in New York, but a gunshot call from a precinct should make them materialize instantly. I was wrong. Jake sat on the bench bleeding, with the color draining from his face. He threw up and went into shock. Several white cops stood around, just looking. I asked for paper towels so I could clean Jake up and put pressure on his wounds.

  When I lifted his shirt, I saw two bullet wounds going into his back. This made me nervous. I had seen people shot in the torso who seemed fine but then died a few hours later from the internal damage. I rushed over to the desk sergeant. “Can you call the ambulance again, please? He’s going into shock.” That’s when I felt a sharp pain in my arm and noticed a bullet wound near my elbow.

  The ambulance finally came and took us to St. Vincent’s Hospital. The doctors found that Jake had been shot three times but had sustained no major damage. My bullet chipped a bone and hurt like hell, but my arm would be okay. Jake and I were moved to a small ward.

  The hospital staff didn’t know what to make of the parade of visitors who came by while I was there. They included black, white, Latino, Middle Eastern, hardened ex-cons, radical lawyers, young Wall Street guys, overly dramatic actors, and a black and white six-foot-four drag queen duo named Eileen and Bianca. I had walked into an acting class on a whim a few months earlier, and I loved it. I became immersed in the improv, classical, and technique training. The teachers invited me to become part of the Actors Playhouse Ensemble, and I acted in several of its off-Broadway productions.

  Several months after the shooting, I was subpoenaed to testify at the bouncer’s trial. I had given the police little information about the shooting, with the intention of solving the problem in my own way. Jake identified the bouncer, which resulted in his arrest for attempted murder. I testified honestly that I didn’t remember much about the person who shot me. The bouncer was acquitted of the charges and Jake moved back to the Midwest.

  A few weeks later I saw the bouncer on the street. He called me over and apologized for shooting me. Our respective street networks had given the bouncer and me a lot of information about each other. I knew that he was connected to the Columbian and Italian mobs. He knew I was a former Panther. We had both served time and knew the rules of prison and the street. He also knew that I had honored the “no snitch” code. “Whatever you want to make things right—ten grand, cocaine, whatever—you got,” the bouncer said with a sneer, a mixture of apology and arrogance. “But that kid was disrespectful in the bar and a snitch in the courtroom. He’s still going to get his.”

  I looked at the bouncer, who was calm yet deadly intent, the way he was when he shot us on Greenwich Street. “Here’s what I want to make things right. I want you to forget about your beef with this kid the way I’m gonna forget about my beef with you.” My posture told him that this would be the deal or this would be war. Finally the bouncer shook my hand, and the beef was squashed. The code of the street, the honor and word of the street soldier.

  Several years passed and I continued teaching karate, acting, and hanging out with friends ranging from artists to outlaws. I also stayed in touch with a number of my Panther comrades, some of whom were fugitives on local and federal charges. My wide range of friends gave me connections to vacant apartments, fake documents, and contacts in different countries. I began helping “movement people” on the run with places to stay, fake IDs, and safe routes out the country. I believed that the government had jailed Panthers on trumped-up charges and was happy to help other former Panthers and young radicals avoid prison. I was willing to help Panthers who had escaped from prison too.

  Disco fever had swept the country, and it was now the late 1980s. But Harlem, like other poor communities, was literally crumbling. There were endless blocks that looked like London after a bombing raid. Slumlords had walked away rather than pay taxes. The city took over the properties but did nothing to repair the decay. Poor families still lived in some of these buildings, without heat and with electricity stolen via long extension cords connected to streetlamps. There were community organizers trying to help, but much of the black revolutionary movement had been destroyed or driven “underground” by police raids and the FBI cointelpro attacks. Those of us who were still in contact felt like we were part of a “resistance” that needed to survive by any means necessary until the movement could regroup.

  One night, in July 1981, a lawyer friend named Harold Briscoe stopped by my apartment in the Village with his dinner date, a stunning woman named Joyce Walker. Joyce was an actress, dancer, and model who had been part of the original Broadway cast of Hair. She had also been the first black woman on the cover of Seventeen magazine. She graduated from Long Island University with a philosophy degree and had decided to put her artistic career on hold to attend law school. Joyce let me know that Harold was not a real date but a law school mentor. She and I went on a date and fell in love. Within six months we were married and Joyce was pregnant with our first child.

  Three months after that the FBI kicked our door in at four in the morning. Agents dragged me from the bedroom while a two-hundred-pound agent sat on Joyce’s back and pointed an M16 at her head. “Get off me, I’m pregnant!” I heard her angrily yell. I fought to get to her but was cuffed and dragged from the apartment. I was tried in federal court and convicted of being an accessory after the fact for hiding fugitives who were wanted by the FBI. I was sentenced to twelve and a half years. Joyce sat in the courtroom holding our now one-year-old son Jamal Jr.

  16

  Leavenworth University

  The prison bus pulled up in front of the large structure that resembled the domed Capitol Building in Washington DC. Cell blocks jutted out from the dome, making it look like a giant concrete octopus. A sixty-foot wall with a barbed-wire crown surrounded the complex. Gun towers were placed strategically both inside and outside of the wall. This was Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility that convicts unaffectionately called “the big top.”

  There were forty of us chained and shackled, hand, waist, and foot. Guards led us off the prison bus and up the long row of steps to the main entrance. On either side was a gauntlet of guards holding M16 military assault rifles, each man with a give-me-an-excuse glint in his eye. Inside the main gates we were greeted by a captain, a redneck ex-Marine in his fifties who appeared to be still fit and combat ready. The captain spoke to us in his southern drawl: “Welcome to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. If you convicts are here, then you have worked hard to get here, so let me quickly introduce you to your home for the next few years. Down this corridor to your right is the guard house, commonly known as ‘the hole.’ You fuck up once, that’s your first stop. Down this corridor to your left is the infirmary. You fuck up twice, that’s your second stop. Beyond the sixty-foot wall and the gun towers is a patch of land that holds the cow pasture and the prison cemetery. Need I say more?”

  With that, we were processed in and led to the cell block that served as the reception center. The average prisoner in Leavenworth was serving fifty years, with many doing life: bank robbery, kidnapping, murder, organized crime, major drug dealers. This is where the elite of the hard core was sent to serve hard time. White-collar crimi
nals got to serve time in one of the minimum-security prison camps that people hear about on the news.

  I had been sentenced to twelve and a half years for hiding out people wanted on federal robbery and conspiracy charges. I was now twenty-nine years old, back in prison after eight years of posttraumatic stress blues. My wild post-Panther ride had led from the streets, night life, and theater back to revolutionary comrades living underground.

  The big yard in Leavenworth had a patchy sports field that included basketball rims, a handball court, and a weight area. There was a sweat lodge that had been built when Native American prisoners won a court battle to allow them to practice their religion. Around the yard, prisoners grouped according to racial backgrounds and gang affiliations. The areas that they stood in had distinct boundaries and were known as courtyards or courts. The Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican mafia, the Italian mob, and the Black Revolutionary Collective were among the groups controlling territory. No prisoner stepped into another prisoner’s court uninvited. There were neutral areas of the yard where prisoners mingled for workouts, sports, or business, which was mainly gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs. Violation of the court rules or of the convict code could easily lead to death. The sentence for killing another convict was about ten years. What’s that on top of fifty or a hundred years, or even a life sentence? The rules were reinforced by a prison culture that exploits weakness.

  The convict code:

  1. Don’t snitch on another convict or anyone.

  2. Don’t steal from another convict.

  3. Do your own time.

  The same way there are tens of thousands of U.S. laws meant to enforce the Ten Commandments, there are dozens of ways one could violate the convict code and get killed. Stealing from another convict could be interpreted as grabbing the last piece of meat in the chow line or taking another convict’s seat in the auditorium on movie night. Leavenworth had Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Marxists, nationalists, anarchists, Neo-Nazis, Yogis, and occultists, but the convict code superseded all beliefs and ideologies. A Christian snitch would catch a knife just as quickly as an atheist.

 

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