by Judy Juanita
Li-an began singing the Tempts’ “Don’t Look Back.”
Xavi kept walking. “What we need is a beauty magazine for sisters.”
“Brilliant idea, Xavi. ‘How to Be a Chocolate Cow.’ ‘Moo-moo, I give chocolate milk,’” I said. We were crossing the park. Not that many people were around now.
“Why did she think we’re lesbians?” Xavi said.
“Because we spent the day laughing,” I said.
“Watch your step,” Li-an called back.
“She thinks,” I said, “that no ordinary black women would be together that long without bitching and crying over men.”
We had traversed the park diagonally. The N streetcar came out of the tunnel headed for downtown. A dog that had been walking placidly with its master started barking at the streetcar.
“It’s her loss,” Li-an said.
“If she only knew what nice girls she’s decided to shun,” I said. The dog chose to run right in front of me. I kept my balance but the leash tripped me. When I fell, the hats tumbled, not making a sound. Li-an and Xavi kept on walking. They finally looked around for me.
I hollered, “Weren’t you listening? Wasn’t I part of the conversation? Did you even miss me?”
Li-an paused at the curb and said, “Geniece, just keep cool and stay on course.”
37
I had been in awe of Li-an up to that point. Her half of the room was an infirmary, mine when I was there an observatory of sounds that floated through the curtain. It was like her specialty—sexual resuscitation. When the Panthers came to campus recruiting, just like Uncle Sam looking for recruits, Li-an decided we should sign up. To Panther or not.
“I’m signing. We all should. I got us applications.” Li-an laid out mimeo sheets with the ten-point program listed above the signature spaces. No was not an option.
“I don’t want to sign anything. My uncle told me, Don’t sell my body, my country, or my soul.”
Li-an aimed her load at me. “What’s the difference between being a highly visible Black Student Union member, reading poetry at the Black House, and being a Black Panther? Your name’s already on the list of subversives. What makes you think you aren’t already a Panther?”
“I don’t carry a gun and I don’t wear a black beret.” Damn if I joined the Panthers as a group act, like getting baptized in the YMCA pool when I was nine, rubbing chlorine out of my eyes with my cousins. “I have to think about it. They don’t look like they’re playing hopscotch.”
I could hear Boy-Boy in the back of my head: Niecy, you spent all this energy getting through Oakland City. It took you three years to finish your course work. For what? To become a full-fledged black militant that we see on the six o’clock news? You’re going bass ackward.
They joined. I didn’t. But I started reading the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. Nothing like the Trib or the Chron or what I learned in journalism classes and read in the Gator or The Tower. Even though I had decided against a journalism major, newspapers still entranced me. I wanted to know what was going on in the world, even if I had to ignore my distrust of so-called objective reporting. I wondered what objective meant when the front page, obits, society columns, ads reflected the World According to the White Man, black bodies in motion only on the sports pages. I’d watched Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola read the Trib front to back, even as they called old Knowland, the owner, a peckerwood. They always supplemented the World According to White Folks with the World of the Black Strivers—the Post, the California Voice, San Francisco’s Sun-Reporter, the local versions of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Daily Defender. The more I delved into the BPP paper, the more it fascinated me. For the first time in newsprint, somebody else thought some of my thoughts. Out of curiosity, I read Huey’s long pieces and Eldridge Cleaver’s editorials in the BPP paper. I had read Soul on Ice when it first appeared in segments in Ramparts, and shuddered at the man/rapist philosophizing, but his editorials pulled me in:
Later for all of the garbage of the white mother country, later for the mother country and everything in it. When we organize our own Third World institutions, then the honkies will get uptight because they won’t be able to relate to what we are into. So let them go their white way and we will go ours—deep off into the beautiful world of Blackness.
And deeper off into the world of Blackness I went, following a trajectory that had begun with Allwood and Oakland City College. Militant. The word was frightful. I had come from being entertained by militants at Oakland City to resisting political indoctrination while falling in some kind of love with a militant to enrolling in a school full of so much militancy I couldn’t blink without a rant in my face. Sure, I had fancied myself militant. That fit my naturally rebellious nature. But to be a militant was frightful. Yet intriguing.
38
I signed and joined the BPP because the party’s indignation and cry for self-determination matched my own. It took me a while to see that. To feel that. When I did, I became a member and went through basic training: PE classes, weapon handling, setting up rallies at different colleges and schools, disseminating important position papers and quotes to the media outlets, both alternative and mainstream. I began seeing the world of the BPP in every utterance around me. It was like a torrent.
Eventually I became an editor at the BPP paper. I thought I’d renounced journalism with my disgust at the Gator, but like a persistent ex-lover it kept showing up at my doorstep looking for action. This is how we put out the BPP intercommunal news service: We got documents, position papers, and editorials from Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, who was the minister of information, or George Murray, the minister of education. George, who was a fellow student at State, had handwriting that drove me absolutely nuts. Pages and pages—since he was a genius, of course—of chicken scratching that took me hours to transcribe. There were endorsements, poems, and reports of police brutality and repression from all over the Bay Area, then from all over the United States. Some needed retyping and proofreading, which I did. Many we were able to reproduce directly. Emory the artist did the entire layout and the editorial cartoons. Huey’s picture front and center, his eyes above the fold always, glistening with black defiance. Once we were through, we hand carried it to the printer. When we got it back, we sold it, alongside the rank and file, for a quarter. My ears and eyes took in so much.
I heard Huey say: “The panther never attacks first. But once he is attacked, he will respond viciously and wipe out the aggressor thoroughly, wholly, absolutely, and completely.”
I heard Ron Dellums, a Berkeley city councilman, say: “White reaction to the Panthers is hung up on words—military, violence, revolution, black. . . . People are so involved with the language they ignore what is being said. . . . The Panthers aren’t talking racism or hatred; they’re talking change.”
Huey P. Newton is the ideological descendant, heir, and successor of Malcolm X, so saith Eldridge.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Xavi and I were in the administration building at State when we ran into Eldridge, right on the landing between the first and second floors. He recognized me from PE classes. He was holding the hand of a striking, unusually pretty woman, high yellow, green-eyed, with a puffed brown-sugar natural.
“We just got married,” Eldridge told us, pride of ownership all over his face. “This is Kathleen.”
Her smile was shy like a bride’s, but the eyes spoke their own truth, wired for takeoff. She extended a smile. Eldridge said something about her being secretary to a SNCC field general. I could see her taking care of business, but not small stuff. That’s what we were there for. “Be who you is cuz you ain’t who you isn’t.” It was so stark. She was the bride, we were bridesmaids. The bridesmaids of the revolution.
Kathleen talked to me directly: “I understand you’re a writer and you’re helping with the paper.”
She
invited us to their flat on Oak Street, if we wanted, that evening. Xavi didn’t want. I did. Xavi was still a good girl. I wasn’t anymore, and I knew it.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
When I got there, Kathleen greeted me warmly in the hallway. I saw Eldridge pontificating before two cameramen and two reporters, in a living room overflowing with books, periodicals, and posters of Che, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Marx, Fanon, and the table where the paper was being laid out. Kathleen also had Priscilla—a white girl!—as her assistant, typist, and all-around handmaiden. I couldn’t believe it. I guess turnabout was fair play. The assistant pulled me into the kitchen.
She whispered, “They’re filming an NBC interview.” Bright spotlights, like klieg lights, were set in the living room around Eldridge.
The reporter was asking him, “What do you mean by the word jackanapes?”
Eldridge, as commanding as a member of Parliament, replied, “These are brothers who only want to off a pig. Adventurists, rogues.”
One of the reporters ordered the camera off and conferred with the cameraman. I turned to the kitchen, where Kathleen and the assistant were fixing beef stew. Kathleen moved with the velocity of an open fire hydrant. She stopped abruptly and turned to me.
“This is how the French do it. They don’t wash their pots after every meal. They cook in them over and over. The flavor stays and it lets the herbs seep in.”
Her assistant put beef cubes, carrots, chunks of potatoes, and chopped onions in the pot and turned on the burner. The cameraman resumed filming Eldridge pontificating. “Huey P. Newton is the ideological descendant, heir, and successor of Malcolm X.”
The reporter seemed fixated on getting titles right: Eldridge, minister of information; Bobby, chairman; Huey, minister of defense; Kathleen, communications secretary. I loved the grandiosity of the titles but could see the reporter’s half smirk. Which country, what nation? The black nation? The checkered nation?
As a teenager, I had rebelled against church every Sunday because I could see past the stage play of the black church, past the garbled grammar of the country preachers, the big hats and airs and Cadillac flair. Sometimes I caught the preacher misquoting the Bible, which Aunt Ola held in her lap. I said something about it once to my aunt, who shushed me with “Don’t countermand the preacher.”
This was different. I saw both the grandiloquence in Eldridge and the reporter getting all the titles right so he could make fun of them later, whether slyly on-air or privately with his colleagues. I recognized the arrogance of journalists, of smart people for whom knowledge was a commodity. I knew condescension well and how it is an important part of making broken people feel worthless. Aunt Ola Ray tried to make me feel that way, but Goosey was my homemade antidote. However, Ola’s belittling made me fight to see my worth. In the process I came to understand her lack of worth. In a way, Ola made me a freedom fighter. I so wanted not to be what she thought I should be, worthless. She was somebody because her husband had a title in front of his name. Without Boy-Boy and his title, Ola was an ordinary colored person, like the salt of the earth in the streets of Watts, Philly, and Cleveland rioting and fighting oppression. Without the insulation of my uncle’s profession, Ola might not have had time to look down her nose at other people. These journalists were looking down their noses at Eldridge and the party. They loved him because he made for a good story. But it was infatuation, not real love. And as soon as a more appealing subject came along, not only would they turn away, they would scorn him. Watching the journalists interview Eldridge, I was seeing why I didn’t take any more journalism classes once I transferred. I was also seeing why I saw through the paper panthers, even though I appreciated their breadth of knowledge. They lacked the courage to take on the power structure. What was more powerful than the police, armed and ready to be judge, jury, and executioner in our communities?
The party was taking the powerful tools of oppression and placing them foursquare in the oppressor’s face. The guns, loaded, in the state capitol. The power of the press; the war of words. We had been likened to apes and monkeys for centuries. Off the pig vomited that garbage in an instant. The power of titles. Every revolutionary coup begins with titling the soldiers, and thus entitling the people. The BPP had appropriated the language of the oppressor, as Jean-Paul Sartre said the colonial subject had to do; use the oppressor’s language, use his tools to tear down the master’s house.
I knew that oppression was alive and well, and nobody was standing up to it full force but the BPP. Huey Bobby Eldridge Kathleen David D. C. The Fortés. I was getting to know them like neighbors in the same messed-up part of town. Not a jackanape in the bunch. They were brave, which I wasn’t. But I was born with more than my share of curiosity, and I knew about being broken.
39
My life didn’t shift seismically. All I did was join. I was still a student at State. Shortly after joining I walked down the slope and into the Commons, where William 12X was preaching as usual, no one listening. As usual, the black students had gathered like covered wagons around Marcus, from the bid whist crowd, and Bibo, who was dressed in the Panther black and blue. I muscled my way into the circle. Everyone was staring at two rifles encased in leather so new the buffalo might have been nearby. Marcus unzipped a case. “I got this 30.06 from my uncle. He paid four hundred smackers. It’s beautiful.”
A student said, “That’s a hunting rifle. Where you going with it?”
Marcus said, “Don’t know bout you, but I’m going to the rifle range and get in some practice. With my good man, here.”
“For what? Deer season?” another student piped up, sarcastic as all get out.
No one was paying our black circle any mind except for a scowling William 12X. “You can’t outdevil the devil. You’re not evil enough.”
Marcus sneered at him. “Old man, this is about a damn good rifle. And marksmanship. I’m not into your race game.”
“It’s not a game. When you get some wisdom, you’ll understand.”
I decided to go with Marcus and Bibo and two other students to the range. It was misting lightly on campus and none of us had umbrellas. My hair was getting wilder and nappier by the minute. But it was a glorious feeling, like I was doing something terribly important. We set out for Walnut Creek in two cars, Marcus, the rifles, Bibo driving, me riding shotgun in his wagon, the other students behind us.
“LBJ want a Tet offensive; this our Tet offensive right here,” Bibo says.
The road got bumpy and none the wider the farther we went. I fingered a rifle through the canvas; my mind replayed what I’d seen of gunfire: Vietnam bloodied and bombed, Audie Murphy movies, World War II newsreel clips, televised riot scenes, Watts and Detroit. I saw a crowd of faces surrounding the Lincoln monument, the face of Martin Luther King, the word—dream—on his forehead.
“Bullshit,” Bibo said. He held the wheel, jaw set in a bulldog scowl. The shiny cases with their new-leather smell rested on our laps like children ready to go any minute.
“Bullshit,” he repeated.
“What? What, what?” Marcus asked.
“Martin Luther King, that’s what. Bullshit.”
“You mean nonviolence?” I asked.
Bibo said, “Gonna get somebody killed. He wouldn’t pull that shit up here. He couldn’t find two flies to drop in front of a bulldozer, let alone two brothers. If someone gets killed down there, King oughta be wiped out. He’s dangerous.”
Marcus tilted toward Bibo. “How so?”
“He’s dangerous to white folks, cuz they don’t know how far he’ll go. He’s dangerous to black folks, cuz they don’t know how far he’s taking ’em.”
“You saying folks ain’t ready for King?” Marcus asked.
“Listen! Nobody fights war with limp bodies. We need guns. This is war. White folks ain’t playing. We need bombs. T
hat’s the next step.”
“That’s patently ridiculous.” Marcus started laughing his ass off.
“You think so?”
Marcus kept laughing.
“You got to put fear in the man’s gut. White man don’t know hungry, don’t know suffering. He ain’t bleeding, ain’t seen his woman raped. Does he study his kids hanging from trees? I want his neck on the bottom of my foot.”
When Marcus finally stopped laughing he talked with pure sarcasm. “Oh, I get it. What we need is a black mafia, hit men, silencers. Right?”
“Yeah, man, people who ain’t afraid to kill, cold-blooded black men, women, and children who kill systematically. Oppression is a beast, a monster you can’t kill with kindness and a picket sign. We have to crawl up the beast’s leg systematically until we reach a vital point, then strike and keep moving. When the beast’s hand swats us, we split, approach vital organs close to the heart, we attack en masse, deliver the death blow.”
Marcus was making fun of Bibo. “Oh yeah, it’s about the killer instinct which unfortunately black folks ain’t got. We got the be hip instinct, the feel good instinct, the sho nuff instinct, but we ain’t killers.”
“That’s what we have to become,” Bibo said. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was bluster. I didn’t think of any of these guys as killers. Killers had deranged eyes and choked innocent victims to death. Killers jumped into the abyss and never came back. That wasn’t what being black was about. It was about pride and self-awareness, rejecting white dominance, protecting the underdog, and helping poor black people out of misery, poverty, and ignorance.
* * *
At the suburban range, thick-skinned, redneck, suburban, and rural white men assembled guns peacefully. Bibo, Marcus, and I fingered bullets, counting them into rounds of thirty. My green army parka, buttoned up cardigan, and long-sleeved blouse were too much. I took my parka off and unbuttoned the sweater. I went back to the car and put them on the seat. Walking from the car back to the range I saw the stalls in front of each, a lane six feet wide marked off in white. At the head of each was an old lumber post, wide enough for paper targets. The others posted theirs. I saw Bibo’s wild uncombed Afro, my Nefertiti profile, gold hoops like halos on my ears. Marcus sidled up to me and whispered loudly, “What are we doing here? They could off us. No one would ever know. A band of gun-smoking black students disappear, and the world wouldn’t miss a minute off the clock. You know that, don’t you, Miss East Oakland?”