Panther Baby (19 page)

I tracked Mike down in the prison law library. He saw me enter, looked at me with contempt, and went back to taking notes from a law book. I walked behind him and gripped my blackjacks hidden in the deep pockets of my prison coat. I knew from my martial arts training how and just where to strike and kill him. I began to pull the blackjacks from my pocket.
Th
en a voice whispered in my ear, a woman’s voice: “Don’t do this.”
Th
e voice was firm, clear, and undeniably real. It was my mother’s voice, Gladys, who died when I was ten years old. I released the grips on my blackjacks and went back to my cell. I unknotted the sweat socks and let the batteries fall on the floor. I hung my head and sobbed. If I have to die in prison because I refused to live this part of the convict code, then so be it.

Th
e next day Mike was taken to the hole, then transferred to another prison.
Th
e guards had done a routine shakedown of the cell block and found two knives stashed in his cell.
Th
en the very next day I got the news that Judge Duffy had reduced my sentence.
Th
e commendations and the time off I received for good behavior meant that I would be released in less than two months. Had I let anger prevail and attacked Mike, I would have spent another ten to twenty years in prison. Had I not listened to the “angel’s voice” and submitted to the instincts of my higher self, my sentence would have never been reduced.

Finally, fifty-eight days and a wake-up later, I watched the front gate of Leavenworth roll open. Joyce was waiting for me at the bottom of the Leavenworth steps, and I ran down to her. Before I could hug her, she handcuffed our wrists together with a pair of toy plastic cuffs, held our hands high so the guards in the tower could see, and yelled, “I sentence you to life with me.”
Th
e convicts from the cell block whose windows faced the front cheered. We kissed and walked toward a car that would take us to the airport, back to where I could restart my life.

18

Making an Impact

I
was released on Christmas Eve 1987, having served about half of the sentence imposed on me. Jamal Jr., who was five years old, hugged me and said that my being home was the best Christmas present. We stayed with Joyce’s parents in Queens for three months while I worked to save enough money for an apartment in Harlem. I worked part-time as a paralegal for two dynamic African American attorneys, Anthony Ricco and Talif Warren. I also worked part-time sanding wood floors and painting for my friend David LeSeur.

Freedom felt like a mixed blessing. There were many Panthers still in prison doing long sentences on questionable convictions, like Sundiata Acoli and Sekou Odinga from the Panther 21 and Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose death penalty case has been taken up by Amnesty International.

Th
e young gunslingers who sold drugs on my Harlem block didn’t know what to make of me. One day in my suit (the only one I owned), the next day in dirty coveralls. I heard one of them whisper, “Five-oh,” the street code for a cop, as I headed to the subway. I turned around, intent on getting things straight on the spot. I wasn’t about to have a false rumor put my family in danger or get me shot in the back. I walked up to the gunslinger who was the obvious leader of the crew and said, “My name is Jamal Joseph. I want you to tell the dude who you work for to tell the dude who he works for to check with his man, who’s in the penitentiary, and find out who I am.” I turned and walked away.
Th
ree days later I passed the same group of gunslingers.
Th
e leader nodded respectfully and said, “How you doin’, Brother Jamal?”

Th
is time was the height of the crack epidemic. Drugs and guns were everywhere.
Th
e young drug crews had TEC-9s, Uzis, and Desert Eagle pistols.
Th
ey were better armed than the Black Panther Party ever was, but they didn’t have the most important and first weapon that I was given the day I walked into the Panther office: a book that dealt with life and change and mentors compelling them to read, learn, and understand the socioeconomic conditions that had brought them to this place.

One hot early July night, the dealers and gunslingers were setting off firecrackers.
Th
e popping and the explosions were so loud that they woke up Jamal and the new addition to the family, our infant son, Jad, even though our windows were closed and the air conditioner was on. I hopped out of bed and got dressed.

“Where are you going?” Joyce asked.

“To talk to these kids about these firecrackers. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Old folks are trying to get some rest in this building. Working folks have to get up in a few hours and go to their jobs.”

“You don’t know these kids,” Joyce replied. “We just moved here.”

“When I grew up, any adult in the neighborhood could talk to you, and you’d listen. You had to respect your elders.”

“But these kids are different, and they don’t know you,” Joyce said. “
Th
ey don’t know that you’re a former Panther, that you did time, taught karate, and if they knew, they probably wouldn’t give a damn.”

“I’m going anyway,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.

Joyce threw herself against the door and blocked my way. “You can’t go,” she yelled.

“Why not?” I responded.

“Because it might not be firecrackers down there. It might be guns.”

I paced in front of the door. Panther in a cage. Feeling more trapped in my Harlem apartment than I did in my Leavenworth cell. “I have to do something,” I declared, pleading at the same time.

Joyce grabbed a pen and paper and shoved it at me, desperately trying to calm the caged Panther down. “
Th
en write, just write.”

I sat on the hallway floor, and a poem flowed from my troubled heart to the page, all about my frustration, and the inevitability of more death on the streets of Harlem, and the urgent need to try to do something, any something that could break the cycle of fear and death.

I continued to work two, sometimes three, jobs and performed community theater on the weekends. My big break in theater came when Charles Dutton, a very talented actor who had served time in prison before attending Yale Drama School, introduced me to Voza Rivers.

Voza was the executive producer of Harlem’s New Heritage
Th
eatre, founded by Roger Furman. Voza had produced hundreds of plays and concerts, including
Sarafina!,
which was then running on Broadway. He did a staged reading of my play
30 Days and a Wake Up
at the Schomburg, costarring Charles Dutton and Joyce Walker Joseph, my wife. After that there were readings and productions of my plays around the city, and I won several awards, including a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in playwriting.

A friend from the Panthers named Tony Rodgers took me to breakfast a few months after I was first released from prison. Tony was then a vice president at City College and a cofounder of Harlem Week, along with Lloyd Williams. Tony told me about a job opening at the Harlem campus of Touro College.

“Tony, I have a record,” I said, doubting the job lead.

“But you have a college degree,” Tony said. “University of Kansas, summa cum laude.” Tony laughed and made me promise to submit my résumé.

Panther founder Bobby Seale told me that whenever he got a job, the FBI would show up the next day and scare the people who had hired him by talking about his Black Panther affiliation. I wrote up a résumé and put my Black Panther membership and time in Leavenworth under “Additional Experience.” Might as well lay it all out rather than have the FBI get me fired before I even started the gig.

To my surprise, my job application and initial interview got me a second interview, this time with Stephen Adolphus, the dean of Touro’s School of General Studies. He was a distinguished-looking white academic, with glasses, a vest, and a serious manner. He, of course, went right to the “Additional Experience” part of my résumé.

“Mr. Joseph, I see you spent time in prison.”

“Yes, and as you can see I graduated with highest honors in psychology and sociology,” I said, trying to steer him back to the good points of my résumé.

“And you were really a member of the Black Panther Party?” he pressed.

“Yes, and I was a counselor at Infinity House Drug Program and day camp director at the Settlement House,” once again trying to steer him.

“So you really understand the community. If we hired you as a recruitment counselor, you could really get out there in a grassroots sort of way and find students.” It turned out that Dean Adolphus had used
Soul on Ice
and
Th
e Autobiography of Malcolm X
when he was an English professor at the State University of New York, and he pioneered prison college programs when he worked for the New York State Board of Regents.

He hired me on the spot, and I worked for Touro College for seven years as a counselor, director of student activities, and professor. Our family grew to three when Joyce gave birth to our daughter, Jindai.

I worked with Laurie Meadoff, Malik Yoba, and Kate Hillis at the City Kids Foundation, using theater arts to empower kids to create stories of personal experience, leadership, and social change. City Kids was located in Tribeca, in lower Manhattan, but it attracted teenagers from all over the city.

I began writing and directing educational films and documentaries. Michelle Satter, the director of the Sundance Film Institute, gave me a chance to spend a summer at its Utah facilities as a directing fellow. Many of the people who mentored my film have become lifelong friends, including Alice Arlen, Jim Hart, Scott Frank, and James Schamus.

In 1998, James Schamus and Lewis Cole gave me an opportunity to teach screenwriting at Columbia University.
Th
ere I became part of a gifted and dedicated faculty and have had the pleasure of working with some amazing students, including Randy Dottin and Simon Kinberg, and I became the first African American chair of the Film Program in the School of the Arts.

In 1997 Andre, a sixteen-year-old man-child who grew up in our building, was killed at a party in Harlem. He confronted a young gunslinger who had disrespected his sister, and the gunslinger shot Andre.

Andre’s mother supported her family as a secretary. She was mother and father to her children, teaching them to value education and hard work. When she got news of her son’s death, her apartment became too small to contain her grief. She ran out to the street and wailed.

Joyce and the other women from our building surrounded her, held her, and consoled her.
Th
e men from our building stood a few feet away, watching helplessly as another black mother mourned the loss of her son.
Th
is could have been Alabama during slavery, Mississippi after a lynching, or South Africa during apartheid—but this was Harlem.
Th
is was my home.
Th
is was now. I felt angry and impotent.

I was still in mourning from the death of my godson, Tupac Shakur, who had been killed in Las Vegas a year earlier. Tupac called me Uncle Jamal, and we had been close since he was a little boy. He visited my karate dojo when he was young and liked to spar with the biggest students in class. He would amaze us with his poems and rhymes and thoughts about life, politics, and the black struggle for liberation. By the time I returned from prison, Tupac was performing with the rap group Digital Underground and about to embark on his solo music and acting career. We would get together and talk for hours about everything, from Bruce Lee to Malcolm X.

Our ongoing battle was over “thug life,” a concept and movement Tupac had started.

Essentially, thug life was a celebration of young brothers who hustled, gangbanged, and lived outside the law to survive. “Pac, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, George Jackson, and Bobby Seale were thugs who became politically aware and became leaders of the movement,” I would argue. “You are a Black Panther cub who grew up in the movement; why are you headed the other way?”

“Uncle Jamal, I just got to keep it real with street soldjas who kept it real with me,” Tupac would counter. “When I was on the street, trying to survive, it was the thugs who showed me love.” Tupac believed his mission was to make his art speak everyone’s truth, from the thugs and the welfare mothers to the heroes of the movement.

When I heard that Tupac had been shot in the lobby of Quad Recording Studio in Manhattan, I rushed to see him at Bellevue Hospital. Police, press, and fans were massed in front of the hospital; hospital security officers blocked my way in the lobby. “Let Jamal through,” Gloria Jean, Tupac’s aunt, yelled. “He’s family.” One of the smaller waiting rooms had been set up for Tupac’s family and close associates. About twenty-five of us were there, standing vigil, waiting to be part of the next group of four to go to Tupac’s bedside.

I was near the elevator with Tupac’s mother, Afeni, and Glo about to go up to his room when the doors opened and Tupac limped off, bandaged and bloody. I grabbed a wheelchair and we sat him down. “Pac, what are you doing?”

“I don’t want to stay here.
Th
ey’re trying to kill me.”

We wheeled him into the waiting room. Afeni tried to convince him to go back to his room, but he refused. “Jamal, you talk to him,” Afeni asked.

I knelt by the wheelchair and placed my forehead against Tupac’s. It was a private gesture of affection we had made up when he was little. “Pac, you’re wounded and you’re bleeding. We will stay with you around the clock, but you need a doctor’s care,” I pleaded.

“I don’t want to stay here, Uncle Jamal. You can take me someplace else, but I don’t want to stay here.” Tupac’s mind was set. Watani (Tupac’s manager), Afeni, and I wrapped Tupac in a blanket and began to move him toward the door.

A black hospital security sergeant blocked our way. “He can’t leave,” the sergeant ordered in a Caribbean accent.

“Is he under arrest?” I asked.

“No, but he can’t leave,” the sergeant insisted.

I pulled the sergeant to the side. “Sir, look around you,” I said calmly. “
Th
ere are ten or so former Black Panthers, ten Fruit of Islam security men, and ten young street soldiers. Don’t tell us we can’t leave. Kindly bring us the form so Mr. Shakur can sign himself out, and I would appreciate if you would escort us to the back door so we can avoid the press and the fans.” My account of those present was close enough for the sergeant to get the point. He came back with the forms, and we whisked Tupac out the back of the hospital and into a waiting car.

A few weeks later Tupac was back in Bellevue, this time in the prison ward. He had been convicted of sexual misconduct after being acquitted of more serious rape and assault charges. Tupac always maintained his innocence. He said he was asleep in a different room when other people in his entourage got involved with the young woman who had brought the charges. My paralegal ID got me through security at the hospital and into a private booth with Tupac. He was still limping from his wounds, but he looked strong. He wore a blue prison jumpsuit.

We hugged, touched foreheads, and sat down to talk. “Uncle Jamal, before you start,” Tupac said in anticipation that I might continue our ongoing debate about thug life, “let me tell you a story.
Th
ey brought in a nineteen-year-old brother to the prison ward from a jail upstate because he needs a hernia operation. He sees me and bugs out. ‘Damn Tupac, it’s you. You’re my hero!’ he said. I told him time out and asked why was I his hero? And he said, ‘You be gettin’ all the money, you be gettin’ all the bitches, you be shootin’ at the police!’ I stepped back and thought for a moment. ‘If that’s why I’m your hero, then I don’t need to be anybody’s hero,’ I told him.”

Tupac said that in that moment he realized that thug life was dead. He wanted to use his fame to create youth centers around the country where kids could get free training in creative arts and leadership. Pac told me that he was done smoking weed and drinking because they had clouded his thinking and made him “act out” in ways he regretted. “I’m going to deal with my inner peace and sobriety one day at time, the way Mommy does,” he said, referring to Afeni.