The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  Whites were still in the dark about the ghettos. They had been studying the “urban Negro” in every way they could think of for fifteen years, but they found out they didn’t know any more about the ghettos than when they started. Every time there was a riot, whites would call on “Negro leaders” to try to cool it, only to find out that the Negro leaders didn’t have any followers. They sent Martin Luther King into Chicago and the people ignored him. They sent Dick Gregory into Watts and the people hooted at him and threw beer cans. During the riot in Hunters Point, the mayor of San Francisco, John Shelley, went into Hunters Point with the only black member of the Board of Supervisors, and the brothers threw rocks at both of them. They sent in the middle-class black members of the Human Rights Commission, and the brothers laughed at them and called them Toms. Then they figured the leadership of the riot was “the gangs,” so they sent in the “ex-gang leaders” from groups like Youth for Service to make a “liaison with the key gang leaders.” What they didn’t know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren’t even any “key gangs,” much less “key gang leaders,” in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.

  But the idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs hung on with the poverty-youth-welfare establishment. It was considered a very sophisticated insight. The youth gangs weren’t petty criminals … they were “social bandits,” primitive revolutionaries … Of course, they were hidden from public view. That was why the true nature of ghetto leadership had eluded everyone for so long … So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the “real leaders,” the “natural leaders,” the “charismatic figures” in the ghetto jungle. These were the kind of people the social-welfare professionals in the Kennedy Administration had in mind when they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything, they would encourage the people in the ghettos to organize. They would help them become powerful enough to force the Establishment to give them what they needed. From the beginning the poverty program was aimed at helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. It was a scene in which the federal government came into the ghetto and said, “Here is some money and some field advisors. Now you organize your own pressure groups.” It was no accident that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drew up the ten-point program of the Black Panther Party one night in the offices of the North Oakland Poverty Center.

  To sell the poverty program, its backers had to give it the protective coloration of “jobs” and “education,” the Job Corps and Operation Head Start, things like that, things the country as a whole could accept. “Jobs” and “education” were things everybody could agree on. They were part of the free-enterprise ethic. They weren’t uncomfortable subjects like racism and the class structure—and giving the poor the money and the tools to fight City Hall. But from the first that was what the lion’s share of the poverty budget went into. It went into “community organizing,” which was the bureaucratic term for “power to the people,” the term for finding the real leaders of the ghetto and helping them organize the poor.

  And how could they find out the identity of these leaders of the people? Simple. In their righteous wrath they would rise up and confront you. It was a beautiful piece of circular reasoning. The real leaders of the ghetto will rise up and confront you … Therefore, when somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you, then you know he’s a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing it, it practically demanded it. Subconsciously, for administrators in the poverty establishment, public and private, confrontations became a ritual. That was the way the system worked. By 1968 it was standard operating procedure. To get a job in the post office, you filled out forms and took the civil-service exam. To get into the poverty scene, you did some mau-mauing. If you could make the flak catchers lose control of the muscles around their mouths, if you could bring fear into their faces, your application was approved.

  Ninety-nine percent of the time whites were in no physical danger whatsoever during mau-mauing. The brothers understood through and through that it was a tactic, a procedure, a game. If you actually hurt or endangered somebody at one of these sessions, you were only cutting yourself off from whatever was being handed out, the jobs, the money, the influence. The idea was to terrify but don’t touch. The term mau-mauing itself expressed this game-like quality. It expressed the put-on side of it. In public you used the same term the whites used, namely, “confrontation.” The term mau-mauing was a source of amusement in private. The term mau-mauing said, “The white man has a voodoo fear of us, because deep down he still thinks we’re savages. Right? So we’re going to do that Savage number for him.” It was like a practical joke at the expense of the white man’s superstitiousness.

  Almost every time that mau-mauing actually led to violence, you would find a revolutionary core to the organization that was doing it. If an organization was truly committed to revolution, then the poverty program, or the university, or whatever, was only something to hitch a ride on in the first place. Like at San Francisco State when the Black Students Union beat up the editor of the school newspaper, The Gater, and roughed up a lot of people during the strike. The BSU was allied with the Black Panthers. Stokely Carmichael, when he was with the Panthers, had come over to State and worked with the BSU, and given a speech that fired up the brothers for action. The willingness to be violent was a way of saying we are serious, we intend to go all the way, this is a revolution.

  But this was a long way from the notion that all black militants in the ghetto were ready to be violent, to be revolutionaries. They weren’t. A lot of whites seemed to think all the angry young men in the ghettos were ready to rise up and follow the Black Panthers at a moment’s notice. Actually the Panthers had a complicated status in the ghettos in San Francisco. You talked to almost any young ace on the street, and he admired the Panthers. He looked up to them. The Panthers were stone courageous. They ripped off the white man and blew his mind and fucked him around like nobody has ever done it. And so on. And yet as an organization the Panthers hardly got a toehold in the ghettos in San Francisco, even though their national headquarters were just over the Bay Bridge in Oakland. Whites always seemed to think they had the ghetto’s leaders identified and catalogued, and they were always wrong.

  Like one time in an English class at San Francisco State there was a teacher who decided to read aloud to the class from Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. This teacher was a white woman. She was one of those Peter, Paul, and Mary-type intellectuals. She didn’t wear nylons, she didn’t wear make-up, she had bangs and long straight brown hair down to below her shoulders. You see a lot of middle-class white intellectual women like that in California. They have a look that is sort of Pioneer Hip or Salt of the Earth Hip, with flat-heeled shoes and big Honest Calves. Most of the students in her class were middle-class whites. They were the average English Literature students. Most of them hadn’t even reached the Save the Earth stage, but they dressed Revolutionary Street Fighter. After the strike at State, middle-class students didn’t show up on campus any more in letter sweaters or those back-to-school items like you see in the McGregor ads. They dressed righteous and “with the people.” They would have on guerrilla gear that was so righteous that Che Guevara would have had to turn in his beret and get bucked down to company chaplain if he had come up against it. They would have on berets and hair down to the shoulders, 1958 Sierra Maestra style, and raggedy field jackets and combat boots and jeans, but not Levi’s or Slim Jims or Farahs or Wranglers or any of those tailored hip-hugging jeans, but jeans of the people, the black Can’t Bust ’Em brand, hod-carrier jeans that have an emblem on the back of a hairy gorilla, real funky jeans, and woolly green socks, the kind that you get at the Army surplus at two pair for twenty-nine cents. Or else they would go for those checked
lumberjack shirts that are so heavy and woolly that you can wear them like a jacket. It’s like the Revolution has nostalgia for the proletariat of about 1910, the Miners with Dirty Faces era, because today the oppressed, the hard-core youth in the ghetto—they aren’t into the Can’t Bust ’Ems with the gorilla and the Army surplus socks. They’re into the James Brown look. They’re into the ruffled shirts, the black belted leather pieces from Boyd’s on Market Street, the bell-cuff herringbones, all that stuff, looking sharp. If you tried to put one of those lumpy lumberjack shirts on them, they’d vomit. Anyway, most of the students in this woman’s English literature class were white middle class, but there were two or three students from the ghettos.

  She starts reading aloud from Soul on Ice, and she’s deep into it. She’s got the whole class into Eldridge Cleaver’s cellblock in San Quentin, and Cleaver is telling about his spiritual awakening and how he discovered the important revolutionary thinkers. She goes on and on, a long passage, and she has a pure serene tone going. When she finishes, she looks up in the most soulful way, with her chin up and her eyes shining, and she closes the book very softly under her chin, the way a preacher closes the Bible.

  Naturally all of the white kids are wiped out. They’re sitting there looking at each other and saying, “Far out” … “Too much” … “Wow, that’s heavy” … They’re shaking their heads and looking very solemn. It’s obvious that they just assume that Eldridge Cleaver speaks for all the black people and that what we need is a revolution … That’s the only thing that will change this rotten system … In their minds they’re now in the San Francisco State cellblock, and the only thing that is going to alter this shit is the Big Bust-out …

  The teacher lets all this sink in, and then she says: “I’d like to hear some comments.”

  One of the ghetto brothers raises his hand, and she turns to him with the most radiant brotherly smile the human mind can imagine and says, “Yes?”

  And this student, a funky character with electric hair, says: “You know what? Ghetto people would laugh if they heard what you just read. That book wasn’t written for the ghettos. It was written for the white middle class. They published it and they read it. What is this ‘having previously dabbled in the themes and writings of Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire’ that he’s laying down in there? You try coming down in the Fillmore doing some previously dabbling and talking about Albert Camus and James Baldwin. They’d laugh you off the block. That book was written to give a thrill to white women in Palo Alto and Marin County. That book is the best suburban jive I ever heard. I don’t think he even wrote it. Eldridge Cleaver wouldn’t write something like that. I think his wife wrote it … Pre-vi-ously dab-bled … I mean like don’t dabble the people no previouslies and don’t previous the people no dabblies and don’t preevy-dabble the people with no split-level Palo Alto white bourgeois housewife Buick Estate Wagon backseat rape fantasies … you know? …”

  As you can see, the man goes completely off his bean on this subject. He’s saying every outrageous thing that bubbles up into his brain, because he wants to blow the minds of the whites in the room. They’re all staring at him with congealed faces, like they just gotted sapped in the back of the neck. They hardly had a chance to get down into the creamy pudding of their romantic Black Hero trip, when this dude comes along and unloads on them. But they don’t dare say a word against him, because he’s hard-core, and he has that ghetto patter. He’s the one who must know …

  So mostly the fellow is trying to blow their minds because they are being so smug and knowing about The Black Man. He’s saying, Don’t try to tell us who our leaders are, because you don’t know. And that’s the truth. The Panthers were righteous brothers, but there were a lot of militants in the ghettos of San Francisco who had their own numbers going. There were the Mission Rebels, the Cortland Progressives, the New Society, the United Council for Black Dignity, the Young Adults, the New Thang, the Young Men for Action … it was a list with no end … By the time you completed a list of all the organizations that existed at any given time, some new ones would have already started … Everybody had his own angle and his own way of looking at black power. The Panthers were on a very special trip. The Panthers were fighting The Pig. And the Pig was fighting the Panthers. If you joined the Panthers, you had to be ready to fight the police, because that was the trip you’d be on. One of the main things you stood to get out of it was a club up side your head, or a bullet. If you were a man who had really been worked over by the police, then you could relate to that and you were ready for that fight. The Panthers were like the Muslims in that respect. But as bad as things were in the ghettos, there weren’t but so many aces who were ready to play it all-or-nothing that way.

  The ghettos were full of “individualists” … in the sense the Russian revolutionaries used to use that word about the lumpenproletariat of Russia. The lumpenproletariat—the “underclass,” as they say today—used to drive the Russian revolutionaries up the wall. Someone like Nikolai Bukharin would end up talking about them like he was some cracker judge from the year 1911: “ … shiftlessness, lack of discipline, hatred of the old, but impotence to construct or organize anything new, an individualistic declassed ‘personality,’ whose actions are based only on foolish caprices …” He sounded like some Grand Kloogle on the bedsheet circuit.

  In the ghettos the brothers grew up with their own outlook, their own status system. Near the top of the heap was the pimp style. In all the commission reports and studies and syllabuses you won’t see anything about the pimp style. And yet there it was. In areas like Hunters Point boys didn’t grow up looking up to the man who had a solid job working for some company or for the city, because there weren’t enough people who had such jobs. It seemed like nobody was going to make it by working, so the king was the man who made out best by not working, by not sitting all day under the Man’s bitch box. And on the street the king was the pimp. Sixty years ago Thorstein Veblen wrote that at the very bottom of the class system, down below the “working class” and the “honest poor,” there was a “spurious aristocracy,” a leisure class of bottom dogs devoted to luxury and aristocratic poses. And there you have him, the pimp. The pimp is the dude who wears the $150 Sly Stone-style vest and pants outfit from the haberdasheries on Polk and the $35 Lester Chambers-style four-inch-brim black beaver fedora and the thin nylon socks with the vertical stripes and drives the customized sun-roof Eldorado with the Jaguar radiator cap. The pimp was the artistocrat of the street hustle. But there were other lines of work that the “spurious aristocrats” might be into. They might be into gambling, dealing drugs, dealing in stolen goods or almost anything else. They would truck around in the pimp style, too. Everything was the street hustle. When a boy was growing up, it might take the form of getting into gangs or into a crowd that used drugs. There were plenty of good-doing boys who grew up under the shadows of their mothers and were aiming toward a straight life. But they were out of it in their own community. The status system on the block would be running against them, and they wouldn’t “come out,” meaning come out of the house and be on their own, until their late teens.

  The pimp style was a supercool style that was much admired or envied. You would see some dude, just some brother from down the hall, walking down the street with his Rollo shirt on, and his black worsted bells with a three-button fly at the bell bottom of each pants leg, giving a spats effect, and he is walking with that rolling gait like he’s got a set of ball-bearing discs in his shoulders and his hips, and you can say to the dude, “Hey, Pimp!” and he’s not offended. He’ll chuckle and say, “How you doing, baby.” He’s smiling and pleased with himself, because you’re pulling his leg but at the same time you’re saying that he’s looking cool, looking sharp, looking good.

  Sometimes a group of buddies who ran together, who were “stone pimp,” as the phrase went, would move straight into the poverty program. They would do some fabulous, awesome, inspired mau-mauing, and the first thing you
knew, they would be hanging out in the poverty scene. The middle-class bureaucrats, black and white, would never know what to make of an organization like this. They couldn’t figure them out. There was one organization in a city just outside of San Francisco, in the kind of section that catches the bums, the winos, the prostitutes with the biscuits & gravy skin, the gay boys, the flaming lulus, the bike riders, the porno shops, peep shows, $8-a-week hotels with the ripped window shades flapping out. This area had everything you needed for a successful application for a poverty-program grant except for the one thing you need the most, namely, the militant youth. So that was when a remarkable ace known as Dudley showed up with a couple of dozen bonafide spurious aristocrats … his Ethnic Catering Service for skid row … There wasn’t one of them that looked much under thirty, and nobody had ever heard of any black youth in that area before anyway, but they could mau-mau as if they had been trained by the great Chaser himself … They got a grant of nearly $100,000.

  Every now and then the poverty bureaucrats from the Economic Opportunity Council or from City Hall would hold an area executive board meeting or some other kind of session at their clubhouse, and it was always a bear. A group of poverty workers and administrators would walk in there for the first time, and you could tell from the looks on their faces that something had hit them as different … and weird … They felt it … they sensed it … without knowing what it was. Actually it was a simple thing. The pimp-style aristocrats would be sitting around like a bunch of secretary birds.

  There would be Dudley and the boys … Dudley, with his Fuzzy-Wuzzy natural and his welts. Dudley was a powerful man with big slabs of muscle like Sonny Liston and these long welts, like the welted seams on top of a pair of moccasins, on his cheeks, his neck, on the backs of his fists. These welts were like a historical map of fifteen years of Saturday night knife-fighting in the Bay Area. And Dudley’s Afro … the brother had grown the rankest natural of all times. It wasn’t shaped or anything close to it. It was growing like a clump of rumpus weed by the side of the road. It was growing every which way, and it wasn’t even all one color. There was a lot of gray in it. It looked superfunky. It looked like he’d taken the stuffing out of the seat of one of those old ripped-up chairs you see out on the sidewalk with its insides spilling out after a fire on Webster Street—it looked like he’d taken the stuffing out of one of those chairs and packed it all over his head. Dudley was the fiercest looking man in the Bay Area, but there would be him and all his boys sitting around like a covey of secretary birds.