by Jamal Joseph
Panther Baby
A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention
by Jamal Joseph
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2012
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2012 by Jamal Joseph. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-61620-126-5
1
The Path to Manhood
Good. Now do it blindfolded.”
I looked down at the gleaming M16 assault rifle I was holding and then up at the three Black Panther officers standing over me. I was fifteen years old, sitting in the middle of the floor in a Panther safe house. A .45-caliber pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun and an M1 carbine were laid out in front of me. My mouth was dry, and nervous sweat ran down my back. The Panthers had told me that my life and the life of my fellow Panthers were on the line. Error equals death. I looked up at Yedwa, my weapons instructor, and I spaced out. He had a shoulder holster with a .357 Magnum, a black beret, goatee, muscular physique, and a mad gleam in his eye that denoted he was a crazy brother, more commonly known as a crazy nigger (a wild-assed black man who would say anything, do anything, and who courted death with a smile).
The ghetto had a ranking system when it came to manhood. You could be a punk, hard, bad, or crazy. Being a soft dude meant that you were a goody-goody who was scared to fight. Punk dudes got no respect and often got their “ass shook and their lunch money took.” Hard dudes were fighters, but not like bad niggers, who would be swinging, cutting, and shooting while the hard dudes would be in heightened stages of argument. The bad niggers got all the respect. But to truly be a legend, you had to be a crazy nigger, meaning you had to give up on the possibility of a normal future and accept that any moment, any place, was a good time to die.
This manhood ranking system was connected to the idea of protecting your property, which was referred to as “mine” or “yours” as in, “I’ve got to protect mine” or “You gotta get yours.” This was part of the code of honor we learned from the older guys. Since we were all poor, “mine” or “yours” didn’t mean real estate, bank accounts, or stocks. It was more like a bike, sneakers, a girl, your mother’s honor, or a couple of square feet on a street corner. What you claimed and how far you would go to protect “mine” or “yours” determined your manhood ranking.
In 1968 nobody was badder than the Panthers. They took the manhood rating to another level. Not only were they willing to fight and die for “theirs,” they were also willing to lay down their lives for every man, woman, and child in the black community whether they knew them personally or not. Plus there were no boundaries to their craziness. They were willing to take on the police, the army, the government, every-damn-body.
And here I was, an orphan, a church boy, and an honor student with an M16 on my lap, pursuing the path to manhood.
“Brother, did you hear me?” Yedwa barked. “I said do it blindfolded.”
I snapped out of my daze, pulled a bandanna out of my jean pocket, and tied it around my eyes. Katara, an eighteen-year-old Panther, helped me adjust the blindfold so I couldn’t see. Then I began to disassemble the M16 by touch, laying the pieces in a line so I could grope for them when it was time to put the rifle back together.
I could hear Yedwa’s voice through my personal darkness. “If the pigs attack at night, they ain’t waitin’ for you to turn on a light to get your shit together. In fact, if you turn on a light, they’re going to use it to lock and unload on your ass.”
“Right on, brother,” said another Panther voice. I dropped the gun bolt on the floor. It clattered loudly.
“Concentrate, young brother,” Yedwa ordered. “Concentrate.”
Five minutes later I had put the M16 back together. I pulled the bandanna from my eyes. It was soaked with sweat. Yedwa took the rifle from me and with the precision of a combat veteran ejected the clip, cleared the chamber, and checked the weapon. Then he passed it around to the other Panthers. Finally he motioned for me to stand. “You took four minutes and thirty seconds. That means your ass would have been dead three and a half minutes ago. Practice so you can get your speed up.” With that he turned and put the rifle and the other weapons in a duffel bag. Then he put the duffel bag in a closet.
Katara put a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bottle of wine on the coffee table. Yedwa put a John Coltrane album on the stereo. Sadik, the other Panther, grabbed one of the large pillows near the window and pulled it over to the table. I sat on the couch next to Yedwa. We all grabbed some chicken and started greasin’ and sippin’ wine from paper cups. The brothers talked about jazz, revolutionary lovemaking (that’s where the man and woman scream, “Power to the people” instead of “Give it to me”), and bourgeois Negroes who have to be “offed” before the revolution comes.
Mainly, I listened. I had only been a Panther for about three months and I hadn’t really found my place or my groove yet. Besides, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or make the wrong joke and be thought of as a counterrevolutionary. That was far worse than being called a punk, and I heard that the consequences were much more severe. It was safer to eat my chicken and nod my head profoundly, as if I were “a deep brother.”
Sadik asked if we were off duty. Yedwa answered, “Yeah,” and headed into the bedroom.
Sadik smiled and said, “Well, it’s time to talk to Brother Roogie.” That was his code name for reefer. He produced a joint and lit it, then passed it to me. I took a hit and started coughing my lungs out.
Yedwa came back in the room and took the joint away. “Watch it, brother,” he said. “In fact, you shouldn’t even be doing that shit. What are you, fifteen?”
“Sixteen and a half,” I lied, trying to keep a straight face. By then I was floating, buzzed from the weed.
Yedwa turned on the black-and-white TV and adjusted the rabbit ears. The wine and the weed had my head feeling light, and my attention drifted from the conversation to the TV and to the posters of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver that were taped to the wall. Che’s eyes seemed to be looking right at me, following me as I reached for another piece of chicken. Was he trying to send me a secret revolutionary message from the beyond? I tried to play it cool as I shifted positions to see if Che was still checking me out. He was.
Suddenly Yedwa began cursing out the television. Richard Nixon was on the screen talking about the war in Vietnam.
“Quit oinking,” Yedwa shouted. “You’re a lying fucking pig.”
The rest of us started laughing, but Yedwa was incensed. He reached under the cushion of the couch, pulled out a .38, aimed at the television, and pulled the trigger. The shot sounded like a large gun cap, not like the boom you hear in the movies. My ears started ringing as I stared at the gaping hole in the Zenith picture tube.
“Damn, Yedwa. You blasted the tube,” Sadik observed as he jumped to his feet.
“Motherfucking propaganda box,” Yedwa replied with a snarl that turned into a laugh. We all started to laugh until Sadik saw a flashing light pass by the window of the third-floor apartment.
“The pigs!” he yelled as he double-checked by peeking through the curtain.
“Must have heard the shot,” Katara said.
Yedwa retrieved the duffel bag and passed out the weapons.
I wound up with the same M16 I had been trained with. We tipped over the couch. Yedwa motioned for Katara and me to duck behind it and to take aim at the front door. Yedwa and Sadik took up posts by the front window. No one talked. The only sounds were John Coltrane’s sax and our hearts pounding a
t the anticipation of the police raid. Stress flared in my body. I wondered what it would be like to take a life, how it would feel to have bullets rip through my body. My stomach pitched like it was being brushed from the inside with the hot, molten wings of butterflies flapping. My bowels churned like I was going to shit in my pants. But I couldn’t go out like that, not in front of these brothers. I took a deep breath to calm myself and looked over at Che. He was looking at the door too.
All right then, this was it. I would go out like a revolutionary, surrounded by chicken bones, a wounded TV, and a possessed poster of Che. I gripped the M16 tighter and waited for a battering ram or a tank to blow the door off the hinges. Then there were footsteps, a pause, and the jingling of keys as someone entered the next apartment. Time passed. Three minutes. Ten? Finally Yedwa turned from the window. “They split,” he said, “Guess they were messing with someone in another building.” We tried to act cocky as we put the apartment back together, but I wondered if everyone was secretly as glad as I was that we didn’t have to shoot it out.
Yedwa came over and patted me on the back. “You moved like you were ready, young brother,” he said, smiling. “You got a lotta heart.”
I beamed for a moment, then pulled my revolutionary composure together. “Thank you, brother,” I replied, trying to drop my adolescent voice an octave. But I did feel good inside. I had been near battle and I had made a good impression on a Panther officer, the crazy nigger Yedwa. His hand on my shoulder felt like the wing of an eagle about to guide his favorite offspring into flight. Yedwa invited me to sit for some more wine and a store-bought apple pie. I nodded my thanks but instead reached for my coat, saying I had to check on Noonie, my adoptive grandmother. The truth was I was dangerously close to pushing my eight o’clock curfew. It was, after all, a school night.
2
Skin Color
The nature and nurture of my background and upbringing made me a skinny, curly-headed lightning rod for the storm of social change that was sweeping America. I was conceived in Cuba, most probably in Havana, where my parents were graduate students at the university. Before my mother could break the news that she was pregnant, my father had disappeared to fight alongside Fidel and Che in the revolution. My maternal grandparents sent my mother, Gladys, to New York to have her baby. Gladys lived in Queens with a strict, overbearing aunt. She moved out of her aunt’s apartment and placed me in foster care when I was seventeen days old.
In Cuba Gladys had been a debutante whose father, Alfred, had been a successful engineer originally from the island of Dominica. She grew up speaking Spanish and French in a big airy house in Santa Clara. Her major in graduate school was biology, with the dream of becoming a doctor or researcher, but in New York, in 1952, she was an unwed black Latina woman who couldn’t speak English. Too proud and perhaps too angry to ask her father for help, she decided to place me in “temporary care” while she learned English, went back to college, and made a life for herself.
I was first raised by Alexander and Anna Jackson, a retired black couple who took foster kids into their Bronx home. Gladys found the couple through an ad in a local newspaper. Noonie Baltimore, a petite yet strong elderly black woman, came to the Jackson home as a housekeeper when I was four. When the Jacksons became ill, Noonie and her husband, Charles, became my “adopted” grandparents.
Gladys would send me money every month and visit me several times a year. She had gotten married and had two other children: my younger sister, Elba, and my baby brother, Luis. Her mother, Erundina, affectionately known as Alita, had come from Cuba to help take care of the children while Gladys worked and took college courses. There was sometimes talk of me going to Brooklyn to live with Gladys, but it never happened. She passed away during childbirth when I was ten.
By the time I came into their lives, Noonie was in her sixties and Charles “Pa” Baltimore was in his seventies. Their income consisted of Social Security and the few extra dollars Pa made taking numbers bets and Noonie made from working as a housekeeper for families in our black working-class Bronx neighborhood. They both had grown up in the South. Their parents and older siblings had been slaves. I grew up hearing firsthand stories about segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, burning crosses, beatings, and lynchings.
Pa Baltimore disliked and distrusted white people, calling them “crackers” and “redneck bastards.” Noonie was a devout Christian who went to church and prayer meetings several times a week. She had strong reservations about white people but had met some “good ones” in the years that she worked as a domestic for wealthy white families. Still, white people were to be dealt with cautiously.
Noonie and Pa had both been members of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. They told stories of the grand parades led by Garvey and thousands of his followers through Harlem in the 1920s. Pa always talked about crackers framing and deporting Marcus Garvey because of his beliefs. “Crackers hate a black man who stands up,” Pa would say. He would also refer to black people as Africans, at a time when most people used the terms “colored” and “Negro” to describe the race.
My neighborhood in the North Bronx comprised modest private homes and the Edenwald housing project. It was populated by black and Latino people up from the South and up from Harlem. This is where people with civil service or skilled labor jobs came when they had enough money to be one rung away from the ghetto but not quite enough to make it all the way to the suburbs.
The Edenwald project was a mix of working families and people on public assistance. The neighborhood had been Irish and Italian working class until Negroes started moving in during the 1950s. The whites who could afford to move away did, while the others held fast to certain blocks and avenues that gave the community an “up south” segregated feeling. Black kids didn’t play on white blocks; white teens didn’t walk through the projects. Maybe we weren’t being fire-hosed, clubbed, and bitten by German shepherds like the Negroes in the South we saw on TV, but white storekeepers would kick us out, white teenagers would jump us, and white cops would beat the shit out of us for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“If you’re black, get back.” These were the words to a song that Pa Baltimore had in his old record collection. He played it for me and told me that this song had been a big hit in America in the 1940s. He made it clear that he didn’t really like the song but played it every now and then to remind himself of how crackers felt about colored folks.
Pa Baltimore would sit in the living room and cuss out our old console model black-and-white TV. He could cuss at the TV all day, calling a young Harry Reasoner names like “a lying, onion-head motherfucking cracker.” Noonie would walk into the living room and get on him for cussing in front of me. He would apologize and a few minutes later cuss the TV out again when Tarzan came on, “How the fuck a skinny-assed little peckerwood gonna fall out a god damned plane and tell the Africans, the lions, and the tigers what to do?” Pa Baltimore’s swordlike tongue would also cut the other way when it came to black people. “Niggers are like crabs in a fucking basket. Soon as one tries to climb out, another one pulls their black ass down.”
I loved Pa Baltimore. Sometimes his comments would annoy me if there was a TV show I really wanted to watch. But most of the time he was more entertaining than the show we were watching. Besides giving me great cuss phrases I could use on my friends, such as “limp dick, rooty poot, son of a bitch,” he would help me with my homework, overpay me for running errands, and tell the best stories in the world, stories not just about things he heard but things he lived too. He had been a cook, laborer, boxer, merchant marine, and like Paul Robeson (one of his heroes), a “race” man—a black man who was passionately proud of his people.
He would tell me stories about other “race” men like W. E. B. Du Bois, Jack Johnson, and the black gangster Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson. He would share personal adventures about running into pirates off the coast of Cuba or being shot at by Dutch Schultz’s gangsters. He told me about the
Negro scientist George Washington Carver, who created over a hundred inventions from a peanut, and of Crispus Attucks, the Negro who gave his life in the American Revolution, dying before any white men. He told me wonderful stories about the South, the Caribbean, and Harlem back in their heydays; stories of Africa, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, Buffalo Soldiers, and the Black Seminole Indians of Florida.
Pa Baltimore had bad epileptic seizures that seemed to get worse, and something told me that I should spend as much time as I could with him. So each day, after I finished my homework and dinner, I would sit with him and ask him questions and listen to his stories, often even when friends called asking me to come play. When I was twelve, Pa Baltimore had a stroke and died. I was sad, but at the same time happy that I had spent time learning from him.
I didn’t become truly aware of skin color until I was in the first grade, when I started walking home one of the girls in my class. She was a cute, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl named Diane. I would carry her books like a young gentleman and walk her to the corner of her block. One day I impulsively kissed Diane on the cheek. She giggled and said that now that I had kissed her, we would have to get married when we grew up. I shrugged and said, “Okay.” She giggled and took her schoolbooks from me and ran into her house. The next day I waited for Diane after school. When she came out she told me that I could never walk her home again. She said that her mother told her that if we got married that we would have white babies and brown babies and that would be a sin.
After a sad, lonely walk home from school that day, I studied myself in the hallway mirror. I was brown, albeit a very light brown, probably thanks to my paternal white Spanish grandmother—“high yella,” as Pa Baltimore called it. Noonie saw me on the couch sulking, and I told her what Diane’s mother had said. Noonie patted my head and said that we were all God’s children, that I was too young to be worried about girls, and that it was better if I stayed with “my own kind.”
