Panther Baby (12 page)

Afeni marched from the back where she was putting away cooking pans. Taking up a position between me and the cops, she turned her back on the lieutenant and spoke to me as though he wasn’t even there.

“Don’t say another word to him,” she commanded in a firm, controlled voice.

“Is there a problem?” the lieutenant asked.

Afeni turned to the lieutenant and said with the same firm voice, “
Th
e problem is that I don’t speak to police officers.” She then dismissed him by walking away and wiping down tables. I followed her lead and continued to mop, ignoring the cops.

“We got a call about a gun,” the lieutenant repeated. Afeni ignored him, her silence creating a wall of will between us and the cops.
Th
ey would do what they came to do, but we would be no part of it.
Th
e lieutenant watched us in quiet amazement for a minute or two, then raised his hand and gestured for his men to leave. He took one last look at us and left.

I was awed by what I had just witnessed. I wanted to speak, to explain, to apologize, to understand, but only stuttered syllables came out: “Afeni, uh, uh, ah, uh.”

She responded to my confusion by holding me in a tight embrace. “You’re a brave brother, Jamal. I’m glad you’re here with me.” We finished cleaning in silence.
Th
e moment was sealed in my consciousness, the lesson of quiet strength learned.

11

The Love of the People

I
was very excited when other members of the Panther 21 were finally released on bail.
Th
e Panther Defense Committee worked exhaustively to raise bail money, but one hundred thousand dollars per Panther was a lot of money. Although twenty-one New York Panthers had been indicted, only thirteen would actually stand trial. Lonnie Epps, a high school
student from Queens, and I were severed from the main case because of our ages. Others had avoided capture and were living underground. Lee Berry, an army veteran suffering from severe epilepsy, was deemed medically unable to stand trial.

A dynamic
member of the 21 to be released was Michael Cetewayo Tabor. Cetewayo grew up in Harlem where he was an honor student and an All-City basketball star in high school. However, he was raised in a housing project where there was an epidemic of crime and drugs, and his promising basketball career was cut short when he became addicted to heroin. Cetewayo, or Cet as we called him, kicked the drug habit and became a black nationalist. By the time he joined the Black Panther Party, he had become a brilliant self-educated black historian and political theorist. At twenty-four, he was an articulate and commanding presence with chiseled African features and a booming bass voice, reminiscent of Paul Robeson.
Th
e Panther 21 voted Cet to be the next released because of his oratory skills.

Saturdays on 125th Street were a cultural explosion.
Th
ere were street vendors selling clothing, books, records, incense, food, and almost anything else you could think of. Afros, dashikis, and
BLACK POWER
buttons would blend with silk pants, flashy jewelry, and gangster hats, creating a vibrant sea of human black energy. Along the street there were activists and believers from dozens of cultural, political, and religious groups. Each spokesperson waved a Bible, Koran, book, newspaper, or flyer at passersby, declaring that their way was the “right way” to truth and salvation.

Th
e main event and the main stage would be a Saturday afternoon on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Over time, virtually every important black leader spoke there—Marcus Garvey, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and of course Malcolm X.
Th
e Saturday afternoon crowds could range from a few dozen to a few thousand, depending on the speaker and the event. If Harlem was the black capital of the world, and 125th Street the main artery, then the corner of Seventh Avenue was its rhythmicly pulsating, energized, super-bad heart.

Th
e Harlem Panthers would go out to that corner on Saturdays with a bullhorn and some papers and start to “blow.” “Blowing” was a term borrowed from jazz musicians who could really play their instruments. A trumpet, sax, piano, or bass player would get not only applause after a dynamite solo but the compliment “Man, that cat can really blow!”
Th
e same was true for public speakers who could get to the nitty-gritty with an eloquence and passion that fired up the audience and took them on a ride.

Cet was like that—he could really blow. He would stand on the corner and start running down the Panther program, and instantly he’d draw a crowd. It was that booming voice and that mixture of sophisticated vocabulary and street slang that fired the imagination. Afeni could really blow too; she was passionate, soulful, sultry. If she were a jazz singer, she’d be somewhere between Nina Simone and Nancy Wilson: keeping it real about the battle but never letting you forget that revolutionaries were motivated by great feelings of love.

Dhoruba had been released a few weeks earlier. He was a former gang leader from the Bronx turned visual artist, and he spent most of his teen years in prison, where he immersed himself in books, nurturing a brilliant mind. Dhoruba could blow. Whipping a crowd into a frenzy with deadly verbal jabs at racism and capitalism.

Th
e fifth and final member of the Panther 21 to be released was Joan Bird. Soft eyes, with an even softer voice, Joan was a college nursing student who helped run the Panthers’ health cadre.
Th
e previous January the cops dragged Joan from a parked car on Harlem River Drive. Someone had fired shots at a cop car from that direction. Manhandled from the outset, she was taken to a nearby precinct where she said she was slapped, punched, and kicked.
Th
e cops grabbed her by her ankles and hung her outside a third-story window for ten minutes. Torture, plain and simple, of a young black woman, not on a plantation in the deep South during slavery, but in New York City four years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

Joan’s parents got her a lawyer and bailed her out of prison demanding that she stay away from the Panthers. She concentrated on her college classes and her court dates, only to be arrested again as part of the Panther 21 conspiracy case. “
Th
e pigs don’t let you quit,” Dhoruba used to say, “even if you try to walk away from the struggle.
Th
ey’ll never forget that you had the nerve to stand up to their tyrannical bullshit.” We didn’t know that Joan would be the last of the Panther 21 to be bailed out, but after that there was never enough money in the bail fund to open the gates for another comrade.

By now it was late spring and the feelings of optimism in the community were high.
Th
e freed members of the Panther 21 appeared together and separately at events all over the country. We were constantly on the road, speeding up and down the highway in one of the cars or vans that belonged to the party. Like most teenagers, I wanted to learn how to drive, especially when I witnessed the stuntlike exploits of Bullwhip (Cyril Innis) from Queens. My first driving lesson was literally on the highway where Bullwhip and John
Th
omas, a captain from the Panthers’ Queens chapter, pulled over and let me get behind the wheel.
Th
irty seconds later I was in traffic, driving sixty miles an hour, with Bullwhip telling me, “Just point the car and go,” and John
Th
omas screaming, “Watch where the fuck you’re going!” Not exactly the Acme Driving School, but by the time I pulled off the highway thirty minutes later I could handle a car.

A few lessons later I was doing screeching turns and forty-mile-an-hour parallel-parking stunts, just like the older Panthers. Whenever I had the chance I would commandeer the wheel and race up the highway with a car full of Panthers, blasting James Brown, Hendrix, or “American Woman” by the Guess Who. One of my SDS friends hooked me up with a phony license. Who had the time to mess with the pigs for something legitimate?

My first airplane flight was to San Francisco to visit the Panther national headquarters in Oakland. I had butterflies as the plane took off, but I had a ball with Cet, Afeni, and Dhoruba as the plane crossed the country.
Th
e ghettos of Oakland were heaven compared with the slums of Harlem. In fact, we teased the Oakland Panthers about their petty bourgeois lifestyle. “What are ya all mad about out here? Everybody’s got a house, grass, and a car,” I joked. “If we could make Harlem look like Oakland, the revolution would be over tomorrow.”
Th
en we were driven to the rougher parts of the black community in Oakland and San Francisco.
Th
e buildings may not have been the cramped, crumbling high-rise projects I knew, but the oppressive living conditions were obvious.

We met with David Hilliard, the party’s chief of staff; Masai; and other party leaders to talk about the Panther 21 case, in the course of which Hilliard told us about the hundreds of other cases pending against Panthers around the country.
Th
ey included Panther founder Huey P. Newton, who was fighting to win his appeal on manslaughter charges, and Chairman Bobby Seale, who was facing the electric chair in Connecticut in a murder conspiracy case. We were made to understand that the party’s resources were stretched thin and that some of the support for the Panther 21 needed to be placed elsewhere—not great news to us, but we understood that we were part of a war that had to be fought on many fronts.

Th
ere was a pickup truck full of sand in front of national headquarters. Panthers used the sand to fill small canvas bags that were sewn shut and stacked bunker-style inside the office.
Th
e plate-glass windows had been replaced with plywood, which was painted the party colors (black and blue). Gun portholes had been cut into the plywood.
Th
e office was being turned into a fort. I stripped down to my T-shirt and grabbed a shovel, excited that I was helping fortify our national headquarters. It never occurred to me that we might actually be building a fortified tomb for any Panther caught inside, under the barrage of police bullets.

Two days later I was back in the crumbling tenements of Harlem.
Th
e freed members of the Panther 21 had spent a lot of time together working out of the Harlem office and speaking at fund-raising events for the Panther 21. Now we were dispersed at different offices to help run daily operations and to fund-raise at events for other Panther political prisoners. Afeni was assigned to the Bronx. Dhoruba was sent to Brooklyn.

I was sent to Jersey City.
Th
e Panther headquarters there was a rented brownstone with offices on the first floor and living quarters upstairs. Jersey City had blocks of rundown houses and vacant lots as well as a low-rise housing project.
Th
e feel was a lot like South Jamaica, Queens, or West Philadelphia, where the slums were spread out, as opposed to the congestion of Harlem or the South Side of Chicago. But the issues that we organized around were still the same: decent housing, food, and police brutality. Plus, the Jersey City cops would harass and arrest Panthers whenever they could.
Th
e headquarters was also shot at and vandalized. I ran PE classes, spoke around the community, and sold papers.

Th
e membership in Jersey City never grew beyond twenty, but community projects like the distribution of free clothing and the breakfast program were highly successful. Actually, declining membership was a reality in most chapters. People were afraid to become full-fledged members of the Panthers, but they would come out to the programs and community meetings. Who could blame them? On television, in the papers, and before their eyes, Panthers were being beaten, arrested, and killed.

I would grab a late-night ride to Harlem once or twice a week to hang out, especially to spend time with Joan Bird. I had assigned myself to be her “security team” when she was first released from prison. I made sure she got to her speaking engagements and appointments on time, and then I’d drop her at her parents’ house each evening. One evening we wound up in a Panther pad and spent the night together. Soon after, she let me know that she no longer needed a constant security detail, especially since we were just taking subways and buses to various appointments. But I was still welcome to hang out with her whenever we could make a rendezvous work.

Th
e opening of the Panther 21 trial was fast approaching. Our lawyers worked out of a space in Union Square they called “the law commune.” It consisted of open space, zigzag desks, file cabinets, and papers everywhere, thousands of pages of transcripts from tape recordings and documents crucial to our defense. Once or twice a week we would travel down to the commune to meet with the lawyers. A few weeks before the trial began the law commune went up in flames. A fire of suspicious origin began at night, destroying most of the documents.
Th
e Panthers and the lawyers had no doubt that this was arson.
Th
e police and the fire marshals basically shrugged, saying that the evidence was inconclusive.

Th
e law commune fire added to the mounting tension among and between the Panther 21. Filling sandbags on a sunny day, or hearing hundreds of people chant “Free the Panther 21” at a midnight rock concert rally, had the effect of creating a revolutionary magic spell where anything seemed possible and victory over the oppressor was assured. But fires, office bombings, arrests, and shoot-outs brought home that we were, in reality, under siege.

Th
e lawyers fought with the judge and got him to grant permission for the bailed-out members of the 21 to go back into prison for conference visits with those still imprisoned. Among the charges against us was a long indictment that cited meetings, conversations, and training sessions that we were all a part of. How could we defend ourselves unless we could compare our own recollections against the allegations in the indictment?
Th
e meetings were held in the Branch Queens House of Detention in Long Island City, usually in a small conference room or in the prison chapel. We would discuss the case, then huddle in smaller groups to talk about what was happening in the party.

One of the biggest beefs Lumumba and the other comrades on the inside had was that bail money was being diverted to other Panther cases.
Th
ey felt that we on the outside should be fighting harder to protect every dollar being raised so that it could be used for the Panther 21. We explained that some fund-raising events were dedicated to the Panther 21, but other events were for a general Panther defense fund.
Th
is led to beef number two, which was that we should be spending all of our time raising money for the Panther 21. “Not possible,” we responded. “We are part of a national movement that is fighting on many fronts. Everybody out there is working eighteen to twenty-one hours a day to help keep it together.”

Beef number three: A number of New York Panthers, including the wives and relatives of the Panther 21, had been disciplined or even suspended from the party by California Panthers who had been transferred to New York to assume leadership positions.
Th
ere was some truth to this complaint.
Th
e bailed-out members of the 21 had spent a lot of time battling bad decisions and the prevailing belief that New York and every other chapter should be run exactly like Oakland. At first these jailhouse meetings would end on a positive note. We would leave with strategies and proposals for making things in the party better. But as time went on, a rift between Panther 21 members on the inside and those outside the prison developed. Not many of the suggestions made by 21 members on the inside were implemented.
Th
ere was also frustration that Panther 21 members on the outside were too busy with national issues to give their full attention to helping the lawyers and the imprisoned members prepare for the upcoming trial.