In order to teach, each one of us had to prepare our lesson and know what we were talking about. One of the boys in the class worked so hard on his lessons that he would just lay me out. I don’t know where he is now or what he's doing, but if he isn't a teacher, it's a damn shame, because he would have been a great one. He would cut out pictures and even make up math games for us to play.
My class in the afternoon was usually exhausting. Clay, paint, papier-mache over everything and everyone, especially me. The first days of that class i wanted to do nothing but go somewhere and have a good cry. On the first day of the arts and crafts class i had nothing really prepared, so i asked everyone to draw themselves. When i looked at the drawings i felt faint. All of the students were Black, yet the drawings depicted a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed little white children. I was horrified. I went home and ransacked every magazine i could find with pictures of Black people. I came in early the next day and plastered the walls with pictures of Black people. We talked about what was beautiful. We talked about all the different kinds of beauty in the world and about all the different kinds of flowers in the world. And then we talked about the different kinds of beauty that people have and about the beauty of Black people. We talked about our lips and our noses. We made African masks out of clay and papier-mache, made African sculptures, painted pictures of Black people, of Black neighborhoods. Over the summer i felt the classroom changing. The kids were changing and so was i. We were feeling good about ourselves and feeling good about being with each other.
I was so involved in working at the school that i had time for little else. If one of the students didn't come to school, i was at his or her house that very day wanting to know why. I would go home and spend hours rewriting some story or preparing for the next day. Half the time my mother would find me asleep with a book in my hands and all the lights on. I loved working with the kids, and i loved teaching. My mother helped me quite a lot and we grew closer than we had ever been before. I thought about becoming a teacher but decided against it.
For the first time, i became aware of what my mother had been going through all those years trying to teach in New York schools. Most of these principals are caught up in bureaucracy and they force the teachers to be caught up in it too. They care more about what the teachers have written in their plan books than what they are actually teaching in the class. My mother was working in an environment where white teachers often showed a hostile, condescending attitude toward Black children and where some teachers thought of themselves as zookeepers rather than teachers.
As much as i loved working with kids, i knew that i could never participate in the board-of-education kind of teaching. I wasn't teaching no Black children to say the pledge of allegiance or to think George Washington was great or any other such bullshit.
That fall, the level of activity on campus surpassed anything that we had dreamed of. Large numbers of students became involved in the antiwar movement. It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all of the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then march ing with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with every thing-rent strikes, sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole. I was home. For the first time, my life felt like it had some real meaning. Everywhere I turned, Black people were struggling, Puerto Ricans were struggling. It was beautiful. I love Black people, i don't care what they are doing, but when Black people are struggling, that's when they are most beautiful to me.
As usual, i was speeding. My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of struggle, and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me. I would mention their names, but the way things are today, i'd only be sending the FBI or the CIA to their doors.
There were a lot of communist groups on campus. I had no idea at the time that there were so many different kinds of communists and socialists. I had been so brainwashed i had thought that all communists were the same, that there were Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyites, etc. Most of the so-called communists i met weren't in any party at all, but just related to the philosophy of communism. Most followed very different political lines and policies, and it was difficult for them to sit down and agree on the time of day, much less hatch up some "communist plot."
I was surprised to learn that there were all different types of capitalist countries and different types of communist countries. I had heard "communist bloc" and "behind the iron curtain" so much in the media, that i had naturally formed the impression that these countries were all the same. Although they are all socialist, East Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, and North Korea are as different as night and day. All of them have different histories, different cultures, and different ways of applying the socialist theory, al though they have the same economic and similar political systems. It has never ceased to amaze me how so many people can be tricked into hating people who have never done them any harm. You simply mention the word "communist" and a lot of these red, white, and blue fools are ready to kill.
I wasn't against communism, but i can't say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man's concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn't rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn't work ing people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn't working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.
I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. That's why you've got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan or other conservatives. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It would burn me up every time somebody talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you've got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom, because we're the easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both the democratic party and the republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power, while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i wanted to see them overthrown. They were interested in supporting racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing them win their liberation. A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world.
Manhattan Community College had not one course on Puerto Rican history. The Puerto Rican si
sters and brothers who knew what was happening became our teachers. I had hung out all my life with Puerto Ricans, and i didn't even know Puerto Rico was a colony. They told us of the long and valiant struggle against the first Spanish colonizers and then, later, against the u.s. government and about their revolutionary heroes, the Puerto Rican Five-Lolita Lebron, Rafael Miranda, Andres Cordero, Irving Flores, and Oscar Collazo, each of whom had spent more than a quarter of a century behind bars fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico. Once you understand something about the history of a people, their heroes, their hardships and their sacrifices, it's easier to struggle with them, to support their struggle. For a lot of people in this country, people who live in other places have no faces. And this is the way the u.s. government wants it to be. They figure that as long as the people have no faces and the country has no form, amerikans will not protest when they send in the marines to wipe them out.
I had begun to think of myself as a socialist, but i could not in any way see myself joining any of the socialist groups i came in contact with. I loved to listen to them, learn from them, and argue with them, but there was no way in the world i could see myself becoming a member. For one thing, i could not stand the condescending, paternalistic attitudes of some of the white people in those groups. Some of the older members thought that because they had been in the struggle for socialism for a long time, they knew all the answers to the problems of Black people and all the aspects of the Black Liberation struggle. I couldn't relate to the idea of the great white father on earth any more than i could relate to the great white father up in the sky. I was willing and ready to learn everything i could from them, but i damn sure was not ready to accept them as leaders of the Black Liberation struggle. A few thought that they had a monopoly on Marx and acted like the only experts in the world on socialism came from Europe. In many instances they downgraded the theoretical and practical contributions of Third World revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Augustino Neto, and other leaders of liberation movements in the Third World.
Another thing that went against my grain was the arrogance and dogmatism i encountered in some of these groups.
A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned about the liberation of Black people i should quit school and get a job in a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have to work at a factory and organize the workers. When i asked him why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize them selves without any college students doing it for them. Some of these groups would come up with abstract, intellectual theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out to the u.s. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Vietnamese people how to run their show.
Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting together against a com mon enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who had the right line.
Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together to organize our own structures and our own revolutionary political party. Friendship is based on respect. As long as much of the white left saw their role as organizing, educating, recruiting, and directing Black revolutionaries, i could not see how any real friendship could occur. I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle. Black self-determination is a basic right, and if we do not have the right to determine our destinies, then who does? I believe that to gain our liberation, we must come from the position of power and unity and that a Black revolutionary party, led by Black revolutionary leaders, is essential. I believe in uniting with white revolutionaries to fight against a common enemy, but i was convinced that it had to be on the basis of power and unity rather than from weakness and unity at any cost.
TO MY MOMMA
To my momma,
who has swallowed the amerikan dream
and choked on it.
To my momma,
whose dreams have fought each other-
and died.
Who sees,
but cannot bear to see.
A volcano eating its own lava.
To my momma, who couldn't turn
hell into paradise
and blamed herself.
Who has always seen
reflected in her mirror
an ugly duckling.
To my momma,
who makes no demands of anyone
cause she don't think she can afford to.
Who thinks her money talks
louder than her womanhood.
To my butchfem momma,
who has always
taken care of business.
Who has never drifted
hazily to sleep
thinking, "he will take care of it."
Who has schemed so much
she sometimes schemes against herself.
To my sweet, shy momma.
Who is uneasy with people
cause she don't know how
to be phony,
and is afraid to be real.
Who has longed for sculptured gardens.
Whose potted plant
dies slowly on the window sill.
We have all been infected
with a sickness
that can be traced back
to the auction block.
You must not feel guilty
for what has been done to us.
Only the strong go crazy.
The weak just go along.
And what i thought was cruelty,
I understand was fear
that hands, stronger than yours,
and whiter than yours,
would strangle my young life
into oblivion.
Momma, i am proud of you.
I look at you
and see the strength of our people.
I have seen you struggle
in the dark;
the world beating on your back,
dragging your catch
back to our den.
Pulling your pots and pans out
to cook it.
A mop in one hand.
A pencil in the other,
marking up my homework
with your love.
The injured have no blame.
Let it fall on those who injure.
Leave the past behind
where it belongs-
and come with me
toward tomorrow.
I love you mommy
cause you are beautiful,
and i am life that springs from you:
part tree, part weed, part flower.
My roots run deep.
I have been nourished well.
Chapter 13
I am at school when i hear about it. Electric shocks are zooming down my back the way they do when i am about to go temporarily insane. On the train, headed uptown, i am ready to riot. I am having daymares on the subway, imagining myself with a long knife slashing slits in white sheets. Ku Klux Klan blood is spilling. You wanna look like a ghost, you wanna look like a ghost, my mind keeps chanting, you wanna look like a ghost, well, i'll make you one. Sitting on the subway, bloody fantasies. I look out of my daymare. Nobody is moving. Everybody screams. Everybody has a frozen face. The train is slowing down. Everybody is tensely looking at the door. I25th Street. I am going to a riot. I want to kill someone.
Martin Luther Kin
g has been murdered.
The street wakes me up. There is no blood yet. Everybody is getting into position. The wind is blowing rumors. The people are waiting. The streets are rumbling. The tanks are coming. The natives are rest less. The tanks will quiet the natives. The tanks are coming. I feel absurd and impotent.
Who am i going to attack? Where is a George Lincoln Rockwell? I am ready to kill him. He will get a chance to utter exactly two syllables before i cut him off. He isn't there. Only the rumors and the rumble of the tanks and the waiting. The store windows are filled with shit. You can't exchange Martin Luther King for shit in the store window. Smashing windows will do me no good. I am beyond that. I want blood. The tanks are waiting to crush the resistance, squelch the disturbance. It crosses my mind: i want to win. I don't want to rebel, i want to win. The revolution will not be televised on the six o'clock news. I have to get myself ready. Revolution. The word has me going.
I am back on the subway. Nobody is looking at anybody. I think i have my period. Sweat is rolling down my legs. I go home. My mother is glad to see me. She knows that i am half crazy. The television is wet with crocodile tears. REBELLION, REBELLIOUS CHILDREN, TEMPER TANTRUMS, REBELLION, REVOLUTION. I like the word.
The grim reapers are abuzz. Reports about the natives. They are excited. This is the stuff that news is made of. We are looking at each other. Impassioned speeches sizzle on their tongues, causing sour ashes to fall from our mouths. We are just sitting there. I am thinking about revolution. The tonic. Abstract. Revolution. I am tired of watching us lose. They kill our leaders, then they kill us for protesting. Protest. Protest. Revolution. If it exists, i want to find it. Bulletins. More bulletins. I'm tired of bulletins. I want bullets.
Assata: An Autobiography Page 24