Panther Baby (18 page)

“Yo,
ese.
We know what you’re up here doing,” Tito said, leaning in close, “because there ain’t no secrets in the big top. But I had to come to check it out for myself. I been sitting here watching this shit for about ten minutes and I’m gonna tell you something,
ese,
that guy you’re working with, that fucking guy,
ese,
he’s not feeling his character.”

“Well, Tito, why don’t you jump into the scene and try,” I said, flabbergasted that he was actually here to critique the acting.

“You ain’t said nothing but a thing,
ese,
” Tito replied as he took off his bandanna and joined Death and Struck. Turns out that Tito had done plays in high school and showed a lot of promise as an actor even while he was gangbanging. He jumped into the scene and was terrific, not only at acting but at getting Death and Struck to relax too. Rafael also joined the group.
Th
at night I rewrote the play to include Latino characters.

A few days later, a white prisoner named Reb, who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, came to rehearsal. Reb was a fourth-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He and I had whipped each other’s asses on a couple of occasions during a “friendly workout.” It was really a mutual test to see if the Panther or the Aryan was a better martial artist. Both the matches were a draw and we headed back to the cell blocks with lots of bruises and mutual respect, at least when it came to karate. Reb came to rehearsal to see if the blacks and Latinos were forming an alliance. He left with a role in the play.

Th
at night I rewrote the play again to add a white character. Over the next few weeks, more prisoners joined the ensemble, black, white, Latino, Native American.
Th
e word “truce” was never spoken, but it was understood that our creative space needed to be a safe space where beefs and affiliations were excluded. In effect, we created our own court. We would improvise, rehearse, and argue near the bleachers in the big yard. “You expect me to say these lines, Jamal? What’s my motivation?” I would shake my head and use my pencil to scribble a new line as we continued to have a theater troupe fight under the shadow of the gun tower.

Th
e warden and the prison administration were suspicious and skeptical about our play, especially when we asked permission to build a theater set. We wrote a letter, had a meeting in the warden’s office, and invited him to a rehearsal, which he refused to attend. It looked like the whole play was in jeopardy until the recreation supervisor, Mr. Rathmore, agreed to help. Mr. Rathmore was an African American athlete who went to college on a football scholarship. He became a correction officer and was promoted to recreation supervisor, a job that was more about coaching and counseling than lockdowns and beat-downs. Mr. Rathmore agreed to do overtime without pay to supervise our set construction. Even with Mr. Rathmore putting his reputation, if not his job, on the line, the most the warden would agree to was one performance, with one day to build the set and one night to tear it down.

Mr. Rathmore understood the value of education and arts in prison. He let us use the storage room for our play rehearsals. He also set up a music room and used part of his recreation budget to buy used instruments. A few of the prisoners had played on the outside and were pretty good musicians.
Th
ey approached me about forming a pit band that could be part of the show.
Th
at
Parole by Death
was meant to be a heavy drama, not a musical, seemed not to deter them. I went back to my cell and rewrote the play once again so that there was “musical narration” in the beginning, middle, and end. By now the cast had grown to fifteen guys. Plus there were stagehands, lighting and sound techs, and the band.
Th
e Black History Month play had transformed into a major, multicultural production.

Th
ere was still one other obstacle to deal with, though. Convicts were some of the best hecklers on the planet. I had seen fights break out during prison football and softball games because of the heckling coming from the sidelines. “Ray Charles could catch the ball better than you, you hunchback, gimp-legged, fraud-ass son of a bitch.” Movie night was even worse.
Th
e hecklers would crack jokes and hurl insults that were so funny that, had they been able to hear them, the screen actors no doubt would have been reduced to tears.

My actors were some of the baddest dudes in the penitentiary.
Th
ey had robbed banks; killed people; shot it out with FBI agents; and stared down knife blades, gun barrels, and in one case, a tank. But stage fright was kicking their asses. I could see the jitters mounting as we got closer to performance day. Despite my pep talks and relaxation exercises, I could tell that my actors were feeling “some type of way” about getting on stage in front of their convict peers. So I decided to send my cast into battle early. I organized a “heckler’s rehearsal,” a sneak preview where the best hecklers in the joint could go hard at the cast.
Th
e hecklers were good, and they did not disappoint. “Oh, so Leon, you think you’re an actor now? Why don’t you act like you gonna pay me those cigarettes you owe me, punk?” At first the actors would crack up or get mad, but by the end of rehearsal they had learned to ignore the insults, dodge the jokes, and stay in character.

When we opened the curtains a few nights later, the expected jeers and insults came from the packed auditorium, but the actors kept on going. Five minutes into the play, an amazing thing happened.
Th
e audience kept shouting out comments, but they were in context with the action on stage. As the play continued, they grew quiet during the tense moments and roared during the funny ones. At the end they stood and gave the actors—their peers, their cell mates, in some cases their enemies—a five-minute standing ovation.

Th
e warden and the guards were convinced that there would be trouble during the play. Captain Foster thought the whole thing was a hoax, a distraction for an escape attempt or a gang war.
Th
e guards searched out cells several times before the play, allegedly looking for weapons and escape tools, but the real intention was to rattle us.
Th
e play turned out to be one of the most peaceful evenings ever in the prison. No stabbings. No fights. No arguments. No drugs—with the exception of our spotlight operator, Troy, who got drunk on prison wine (made from yeast and fermented potatoes) and missed half of his cues.
Th
e prisoners left their beefs and rivalries in the yard and cell blocks and came together to watch a show. We worked till two in the morning under the supervision of Mr. Rathmore, tearing the set down. We were exhausted but not tired. It’s the “good-tired feeling” you get when you have worked really hard at something you believe in.

Th
e next afternoon I passed by the auditorium on my way back from recreation period in the big yard.
Th
e auditorium door was open, which was unusual. Every door and gate in Leavenworth stays locked, with a guard nearby. I entered and stood in the back of the auditorium.
Th
e stage was empty, but my mental cinema could clearly see and hear the performance and the applause from the night before. One by one, my cast and crew drifted in and stood near me quietly watching the stage. Joseph Omiwale, Willie “Subhi” Post, Ernest “Nitro” Jenkins, Mr. Cody, Death, Struck, Tito, Raphael, Abdush Shakur, Donald Lowery, and Native American leader Leonard Peltier, who was our adviser and dramaturge. Abdush broke our collective meditation. “It’s true what they say,” he said with a smile. “You always return to the scene of the crime.”

We laughed and continued to linger in the auditorium, even though we knew we were “out of bounds” and could all be sent to the hole for being in an unauthorized area without an escort.

“When is the next play?” Omiwale asked.

“I haven’t written it,” I replied with a shrug, never having considered a play beyond the Black History Month extravaganza.

“So write the damn thing,” Subhi said, implying that I should stop fucking around and get to work.

Over the next three years I wrote several more plays, which we mounted. I collaborated with the musicians to write songs for the productions and wrote a collection of poetry. Susan L. Taylor, the editor of
Essence
magazine, saw one of the poems and published it. I was still a prisoner, but I’d found a new kind of freedom.

17

Pain to Power

A
ll power to the people.
Th
e phrase I learned as a fifteen-year-old Panther in training came back to me as I looked around the prison yard. “Black power to black people, white power to white people, brown power to brown people, red power to red people, yellow power to yellow people, and Panther power to the vanguard,” my Panther teachers emphasized.

Th
is recognition of power comes from a true recognition of pain and oppression. An understanding that we poor and working-class people have all been exploited and enslaved in different ways. A recognizing of the commonality of that exploitation and the necessity of coming together in order to change things. It was also acknowledging that we had internalized that oppression, manifested in doubt, self-hate, mistrust, and violence. Nowhere was that more raw or clearer than in prison.
Th
e prison authorities expected, and in many ways counted on, this internalized oppression and hatred. As long as prisoners were divided, mistrustful, and violent, the force of the prison administration could reign supreme. If prisoners unified, they could run the prison, turning those cells into classrooms, conservatories, and think tanks of progressive social change.

All power to the person.
My time in Leavenworth made me realize that change begins with the individual, which ran contrary to the Marxist thinking I grew up with in the movement.

Th
e individual is subordinate to the organization.
Th
e minority is subordinate to the majority.
Th
e lower level is subordinate to the higher level.—
Mao Tse-tung

I was the gung-ho example of the young movement warrior who encased his feelings of confusion, betrayal, disappointment, rage, and heartbreak in a concrete ball and buried it in a place deep inside so that it wouldn’t interfere with his duties as a young revolutionary.

Now, at Leavenworth, we were sitting and standing in a circle in the big yard, sharing personal stories that could be incorporated into characters I was creating for our next play,
30 Days and a Wake Up.
When you became a “short-timer” in prison, guys would ask you how much time you had left.
Th
e answer might be “twenty-nine days and a wake-up,” which meant you had twenty-nine days left to do plus the morning you woke up to be released. I was amazed at the number of prisoners who would get down to their last few days and blow their release date by catching a new case (for possession of drugs or weapons, for example), or they’d get into a beef that would wind up with them killing or being killed.
Th
is new play was going to be a character study of six convicts down to their last thirty days.

Our prison troupe had become fairly tight and open about sharing stories of some of the abuse, hardships, and mistakes in their lives. It came my time to share, and I talked about the journey of the Panther baby who grew up in the movement, then on the run, and now in jail.

“You know you’re suffering from posttraumatic stress, right?” said Nitro, a super-crazy, super-talented black Vietnam veteran who had been a demolitions expert in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I’ve never been in the army,” I responded.

“Yeah, but you were still in a hell of a war,” Nitro insisted. “Look at all the shit you were just talking about. Survivor guilt; self-medicated depression; feelings of alienation, anger, sadness, and attempted suicide.”

“I never tried to kill myself,” I snapped.

“Man you been trying to get yourself killed for years,” Nitro said, smiling, “suicide by cop, suicide by thug, suicide by prison guard.”

Later, back in the cell block, Nitro showed me the symptom list for posttraumatic stress disorder in the
Diagnostic
and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders
,
a manual that we had been given as a textbook in our prison behavioral psychology class taught by the University of Kansas. Of the sixteen symptoms listed, I had twelve.
Th
e cell block started spinning with the realization that the last fifteen years had not been the fragmented episodes of a young man wrestling with beliefs and identity but rather a continuum of mind-engulfing and soul-deep pain. Like the person who can’t afford medical care and learns to live with a toothache or back pain, I had ignored the forces that were tearing me apart.

Around the same time I received a box of FBI files from my lawyers in response to a motion we made under the Freedom of Information Act.
Th
ese were secret files the FBI kept during the COINTELPRO activities against the Black Panther Party. Large sections of the files had been redacted or blanked out in the name of ongoing “national security,” but there was enough in the files to reveal how evil, insidious, and deadly the government had been in its attempts to wipe out the party. I cried as I read what had been done to us, realized how we were divided and manipulated and made to turn against one another. My healing began with those tears. I got on my knees and said a prayer of forgiveness—for myself, for all those I may have hurt, for all who had hurt me.

Prayer, yoga, and meditation became a part of my daily routine. I read as many books as I could on positive thinking, spirituality, and transformation. I incorporated these ideas into my theater work with my fellow prisoners and into my daily conversations with every prisoner I met. I began using the words “love” and “healing” and talked about our ability to mend ourselves behind bars and to pass the energy of transformation on to other prisoners and to our family and friends on the outside. I was still fired up about progressive social change. Racism, poverty, and oppression were real things that needed to be confronted with organized movements, but I now felt that we needed to challenge these things from a place of “progressive love” and “creative personal transformation.”

Th
e University of Kansas offered a college extension program through which professors taught nightly classes in the recreation center. Prisoners who worked hard could earn degrees with full rights and honors in psychology and sociology. I took eighteen credits a semester and earned degrees in both areas. Our professors were tough, demanding the same amount of attention, rigor, homework, and research as they did from their students on the main campus.
Th
e prison college students were terrified of these professors, especially Dr. Moro, a petite woman in her sixties. She taught English and would rip everyone’s assignments to shreds. One day she came to class with passages of the Bible that she had redlined for grammatical errors. We figured that if God and Jesus were catching it, what chance did we have? We stood in the big yard after taking her final exam, shaking in fear, worried about our grade-point averages.
Power to education.

Members of the theater group and my prison college classmates would go back to their cell blocks or courts in the big yard and engage their friends and associates with these new ideas about progressive change and transformation. We also continued to discuss class and race and the phenomenon of prison as an industry.
Th
e United States ranked third behind the Soviet Union and South Africa in the number of people locked up in its prisons. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ending of apartheid, the United States would become number one.

Th
e prison business was lucrative. Federal prisoners worked in factories for pennies an hour, making mailbags for the post office, T-shirts for the military, furniture for federal offices, and other products that were sold for fair-market rates, creating profits in the millions. Private corporations began building and running prisons under subcontract agreements with cities and states, their real profits coming not from boarding fees but from the slave labor of the prisoners.

It is cheaper to send someone to Columbia or Harvard University than to keep them in prison.
Th
e Leavenworth theater group and the college programs dramatically reduced gang activity and violence in the big top. Statistics show that there was a significant drop in recidivism for prisoners who took college courses on the inside. Yet prison recreation and education budgets have since been cut. Many of the arts and college programs no longer exist. Surprisingly, a lot of the legislation that was passed to toughen up prisons was sponsored by some of the most liberal members of Congress. It was a way for Democratic and liberal politicians to get “I’m tough on crime” votes in the face of tough election battles with Republicans.

My life in Leavenworth didn’t turn into a giant kumbaya circle of harmony when I started doing the work of transforming pain to power. I was part of a prison-administration-sanctioned organization called the African Culture Society. I spent a lot of hours refereeing disagreements with members who wanted to solve problems in the old-school style.
Th
e idea of parliamentary procedure, voting, consensus, and negotiation was new and sometimes difficult learning for guys who grew up on the street and in jail.

I would sometimes hear grapevine rumors about other prisoners who didn’t like me and who thought I was getting too much attention or “play” because of all my activities. I would ignore the rumors and continue to create power by sharing the power, teaching prisoners how to run the theater company, the African Culture Society, and the tutoring workshops without me. I felt the real point in this work was to create something that would last without me, a grassroots garden of humanity in the midst of a steel, concrete, barbed-wired jungle.

In the sixth year of my sentence an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor came to Leavenworth to see me. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a groundbreaking acupuncturist and Black Liberation movement leader, had been arrested on a federal fugitive warrant.
Th
e Feds wanted me to testify against him in exchange for an early release. My attorney, Bill Mogulescu, was present at the meeting, and I responded with a polite but firm no.
Th
e Feds left angry and disappointed. Bill and I hung out in the visiting room, catching up and talking about one last appeal motion that I had pending before federal judge Kevin Duffy.
Th
e motion was known as Rule 35; the sentencing judge had the ability to reduce the initial sentence based on new information or mitigating circumstances.

Bill believed that we had a shot at getting my sentence reduced. He would send the judge my straight-A college transcripts from each semester along with a commendation I had received from the NAACP for organizing an event in the prison whereby prisoners donated two thousand dollars of their commissary money for African famine relief. I also had received a commendation for helping save a prisoner from a burning cell.
Th
e judge also had letters from Joyce about our young son, Jamal, who had been hospitalized a number of times because of sickle-cell anemia. I had less faith than Bill in my appeal chances, convinced that the Feds would make me do every day of my sentence.

When I got back to the cell block, a rumor about me was circulating, slithering about like a deadly serpent. Word was, a group of prisoners wanted to kill me because I had been talking to the Feds. A Jamaican prisoner I was close to named Hopeton told me to stay out of the yard so that he and his crew could take out the convicts who were threatening to kill me. I thanked Hopeton for having my back and went to the yard anyway.

Sure enough, there were two groups of black prisoners squaring off and ready to go to war. A prisoner named Mike was the one who started the rumor and the beef. He was one of the guys who seemed bothered by my high profile at Leavenworth. Mike got wind that the Feds tried to make me an offer and started the rumor that I was cooperating, an indefensible violation of the convict code.

Now other prisoners in the yard wanted to kill Mike for starting a bad rumor. I pounded my fists on one of the yard’s wooden tables as I told my “allies” how insane and backward it would be for us to start killing each other over a bullshit rumor. I pointed out that this is exactly how the Feds used COINTELPRO to destroy the Panther Party. Lesson learned. Beef settled. Or so I thought.

Over the next few weeks, Mike continued to hammer at the rumor. Rudy Giuliani, who was then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote a letter to Judge Duffy asking him to deny my motion for sentence reduction because I had recently turned down a chance to cooperate.

Jill Soffiyah Elijah, a brilliant black female attorney, who is now a Harvard law professor, flew out to Leavenworth to bring me a copy of the letter. I handed the letter to Mike in the mess hall where he sat at a table filled with his cronies. “If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the Feds.” Still he persisted, telling other convicts that he planned to kill me when the time was right.

Finally, one night Mike stepped into my cell with fire in his eyes. I could tell from his breathing that he was armed and that in seconds we would be in a life-and-death battle over a knife. “What do we have to do to squash this beef?” I asked Mike as we stared each other down. A guard came by. Mike unballed his fist and started to back out of the cell.

“Ain’t nothin’ you can do,” he said. “If my mother had a terminal disease and you were the only person on the planet that could save her, that bitch would have to die.”

One of my close friends at Leavenworth had been doing all he could to mediate a peace between Mike and me. He now gave me a piece of chilly but truthful advice: “Convicts feed on weakness. You won’t let any of us kill this dude. If you don’t kill him, then Mike or one of these other convicts is gonna kill you, just because convicts feed on weakness.” College, plays, fund-raisers, healing—and here I was, still trapped by the convict code. I wasn’t about to snitch on Mike to the authorities, and I wasn’t going to let anyone else fight my battles for me. Instead I made two blackjack weapons out of batteries—which they let us have for our portable radios—placed in sweat socks.