Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  By this time I’d caught my breath, but I was speechless from what I had just seen: black men standing down white cops. “Go straight home, young brother,” the man with the tinted glasses said. “The pigs are looking for any excuse to murder black folks tonight.” With that, the black men walked on. I scooted down to the subway and rode home. When I entered the apartment, Noonie was sitting on the couch watching images of Dr. King on TV. Tears fell from her eyes. She didn’t even ask me where I had been, which was unusual since I was about two hours late getting home. I sat next to her and put my arm around her, and we watched the TV reports of the assassination and the riots.

  By July 1968 the country was still smoldering with the hot embers of social change, but in the hills of Camp Minisink, located in upstate New York, kids and teens from Harlem were just happy to enjoy campfires and swimming in a lake, miles away from the melting asphalt of their home. Camp Minisink was the oldest African American camp in New York State. I had a job there as a junior counselor. I was also part of one of Minisink’s youth organizations known as the Order of the Feather.

  Young men who wanted to join the Order of the Feather had to pledge six months before becoming “Feathermen,” earning the right to wear the coveted maroon and white varsity-style sweater of the organization. The fraternity was modeled after the Boy Scouts Order of the Arrow and after black college fraternities. Although we were young, becoming part of the organization was a tough, disciplined, and challenging rite-of-passage process.

  We “pledgees” had to wear white shirts and maroon bow ties as uniforms, march in a precision line, address all Feathermen as “sir” or “big brother,” and do push-ups and other forms of “creative punishment” when we failed at a task or bungled an assignment. We had to read black history books (or “Negro” history as many in the community still called it), turn in written assignments, bring in our report cards, and attend career and education workshops. Pledgees were not allowed to go to parties, have girlfriends, smoke, or drink.

  I took the pledgee oath in Minisink’s Harlem Community Center along with 150 other young men. By the time we got to camp for the last few weeks of the training process, there were only thirty-five of us. A lot of guys quit or had been dismissed from the line by the older Feathermen for being slack. The idea was that if you could cross “the burning sands” of the pledge process and become a Featherman, then you could meet any challenge that life held for you as a young Negro man, and you could succeed. Most Feathermen went on to college and became successful in professions ranging from teaching and medicine to law enforcement.

  But a lot of us pledged because the Feathermen were so damn cool. All the cute girls in camp wanted to date Feathermen. Plus the Feathermen could order the pledgees to grab their food trays, do their cabin chores, and sing off-key circus songs to make their girlfriends laugh. How cool was that?

  For me and a lot of other teenage boys, the Feather represented a path to manhood. In fact, the Order of the Feather founders created the program in 1946 as a way to challenge the gang epidemic in Harlem. Their alternative was simply this: you could go through a one-night gang initiation, receive your gang jacket, and go through life ducking and dodging the cops and rival gang members, or you could go through a rigorous but positive six-month initiation and proudly wear your Featherman sweater at school, church, or any place in the community. While the Feather program didn’t eradicate the gangs, a number of boys left or avoided gangs to become Feathermen.

  Two older Feathermen who lived in my neighborhood, James, nineteen, and Eric, eighteen, gave me hell while I was pledging. I had to go to their house to do their chores and pick up their food trays in the high school lunchroom. They also made me run up to girls around school, then bend on one knee and recite corny sonnets. The girls giggled as I earnestly recited the lines the big brothers had instructed me to deliver in my best Shakespearean style, all of it romantic and silly and very, very innocent.

  When the school bus full of pledgees and Feathermen arrived in the rolling hills of Camp Minisink, things got worse. As a junior counselor I worked all day but would often be pulled from an exhausted sleep at night for push-ups and work details given by James, Eric, and other Feathermen. In a final rite-of-passage ceremony called Tap Out, we pledgees stood bare-chested around a large bonfire and received an initiation tap in the chest by Feathermen dressed in Native American and African costumes. The next night we received our Feather sweaters at a banquet in the camp dining hall. James and Eric were among the first two Feathermen to embrace me and welcome me into the organization.

  “You guys gave me hell,” I said, confused by the sudden warmth they showed me.

  “That’s because we like you,” James replied. “If you like a dude, you always pledge him harder. Plus you made us laugh.”

  From that night on I hung out with James and Eric. When they weren’t on duty as counselors, they swapped their camp T-shirts for African dashikis and hung out in their cabin featuring Black Power posters, incense, a stereo that played Miles Davis and Malcolm X records, and a red lightbulb that gave their cabin the feel of being a black militant speakeasy in the woods.

  Because of James and Eric, I got into the fashion side of black militancy first. I grew a big Afro and dressed in bell-bottoms and dashikis. My skinny fifteen-year-old butt looked like a five-foot-eleven black Q-tip. At the end of the summer, H. Rap Brown came to speak at a youth conference at Camp Minisink. The younger campers had all gone home and the cabins were now filled with high school and college students who were up for the weekend attending youth leadership workshops. H. Rap Brown was the conference keynote speaker. He was often in the news as a militant leader who dismissed integration and stood for black nationalism.

  I was blown away by his whole style: the ’fro; the shades; the finger that jabbed the air like a Zulu spear when he spoke, slicing up white America. Wow, man, Rap could rap. “You been brainwashed. You wear white to weddings, black to funerals. Angel food cake is white cake. Devil’s food cake is black. White magic is good. Black magic is evil. In cowboy movies the good guys wear the white hats and the bad guys wear black. Even Santa Claus. I mean, tell me how in the hell a fat, camel-breath redneck honkie can slide down a black chimney and still come out white? I’m telling you, you been brainwashed.” The crowd of three hundred high school and college students attending the conference went wild; we cheered Rap Brown like a rock star.

  Right then and there I decided to embrace militancy. My friend Phil teased me on the way back to our cabin that night. “You can’t announce you’re going to be a black militant like it’s a career choice. It’s a belief, not a job.” But my mind was made up. Rap Brown lived in the South, but I would find other black militants to hook up with when I got back to New York City.

  I came from camp with an Afro, wearing a dashiki, and inserting “black power” in every sentence I could, even if I was ordering ice cream. (“Give me some of those black-power sprinkles on that cone, my brother.”) I started looking for a black militant organization to join, going about it the way high school seniors scope out colleges. Since I had no real political consciousness, I entertained and rejected organizations for the most subjective reasons. The Black Muslims? Nah, I don’t really like bow ties and I do like a piece of bacon every now and then. SNCC (Student National Coordinating Committee)? No, that sounds too close to “snake,” and my friends who love to play the dozens would have a ball with that.

  One night, while sitting on the couch watching Noonie’s old black-and-white TV, I saw a news report on the Black Panther Party. Footage was shown of the Panthers, with guns, storming a session of the California State Legislature. California was about to change its laws by making it illegal to carry firearms, and the Panthers burst into the room calling the legislature racist for wanting to take away black people’s constitutional right to arm themselves for the purpose of self-defense. The old white politicians I saw on the TV screen looked scared to death. The cops who moved in on the Panthers l
ooked confused and subdued as the Panthers shouted, “Go ahead and arrest me, pig, or get the hell out of my face.” Since the guns were legal, the only thing the police could do was eject the Panthers from the legislative chambers.

  Then a reporter came on the TV talking about the Black Panther Party as an ultramilitant, dangerous organization. He cited an incident earlier that day in which the police had found a trunk full of guns and communist literature in a Black Panther’s car. My jaw dropped as I watched the news report. Look at those dudes, I thought. They’re crazy. They got black leather coats and berets, carrying guns, scaring white people, reading communist books. They’re crazy. I immediately wanted to join. I hopped around the living room, freaking out with excitement. I had found my organization, my cause. Now all I had to do was find out where the Black Panthers were in New York.

  Like a plantation slave seeking passage to freedom on the Underground Railroad, I put out the word that I was looking to hook up with the Panthers. Not that my network was particularly sophisticated, but I did ask anybody and everybody who I thought might have a lead: the bad dudes who hung out on the corner and on the basketball courts; Mr. Sunny, the neighborhood numbers runner; Mr. Pete, the neighborhood wino; and Blue, the neighborhood junkie. Word about the Panthers came back in hushed tones. They were extreme militants who existed in secret. You didn’t choose the Panthers. They chose you. So I walked around acting extra cool and extra militant, hoping that some Panther secret agent would tap me on the shoulder and guide me to their headquarters.

  One Saturday James and Eric eased up next to me in the park while I was waiting my turn to play basketball.

  “Dude’s sayin’ you runnin’ around lookin’ for the Panthers,” Eric said.

  “Yeah, man,” I replied.

  “Well, first of all be cool with that shit. You can’t let everybody know your business.” Eric looked around to see if anybody was watching or listening. Then he leaned closer. “The Panthers have an office in Brooklyn. We’re rollin’ out there tomorrow. Are you down?”

  “I’m down,” I replied too loudly. Eric gave me a stern look.

  “I keep telling you to be cool with this shit. Meet us here at one o’clock tomorrow.”

  I nodded. James pointed at my blue jeans and my Converse sneakers. “You gotta dress in all black and wear a leather coat. That’s how the Black Panthers dress.” He turned and walked away. Eric followed.

  That night I could barely sleep imagining what it would be like to walk into the Panther headquarters. Would I have to fight a six-foot-three Black Panther commando to prove myself? Would I be blindfolded and taken to some secret chamber to be initiated? Maybe I’d get put on a small airplane and be parachuted into a hidden training camp somewhere in Africa.

  “Boy, you better get up. Do you know what time it is?”

  I opened my eyes and saw Noonie standing over me. Somewhere between my visions of the Panther initiation chamber and the parachute jump into Africa I had conked out and overslept. I glanced at my alarm clock. It was already seven fifteen. “Sorry, ma’am,” I said while running to the bathroom.

  Noonie was sitting at the kitchen table reading her Bible in the morning sunlight. This was her daily ritual: up at 6 a.m., morning prayers, freshen up, make me a simple breakfast, and read the Bible at the table while I ate. Noonie was no joke when it came to school, church, and discipline. She was born Jessie Mae Allen in 1898 in a poor and segregated section of North Carolina called Blue Haven, and she grew up on a farm that had been a plantation that her parents worked on as slaves. After Emancipation her parents and her nine brothers and sisters worked as sharecroppers.

  Noonie told me stories of walking to school barefoot until she was eight years old and working in the tobacco fields until the sun went down. She told me how colored folks could not look white people in the eye and how they had to get off the sidewalk to let them pass. Noonie told me how white men in sheets lynched people they considered to be “uppity niggers.” One such uppity nigger was Noonie’s favorite uncle, who got beaten, lynched, and burned for striking a white man who had spit tobacco in his face.

  When Noonie was fourteen she had saved enough money to buy a train ticket to Harlem. She married Pa Baltimore four years later. They were together for sixty years until Pa passed away. For the last three years it had been Noonie and me in our modest Bronx apartment. When I was little she told me I could call her Nana for Grandma or Noonie, the name she had called her grandmother. I chose Noonie.

  Noonie took me to Sunday school and church every Sunday morning. She was very religious, and church was the center of her life. She believed that shined shoes, clean fingernails, and the niceties “please” and “thank you” would take a person far in life. Although she only had a sixth-grade education, she could read well and spoke in accent-free English, developed from her years of housekeeping in white households.

  Despite her experience when she was young, Noonie was not afraid of white people. When I was five years old I was coming home with Noonie from a church event when suddenly I had to pee so badly that I started crying. Noonie avoided an accident by unzipping my pants and letting me do my business between two parked cars. A burly white cop came along and threatened to write a summons. Her five-foot-two frame seemed to elongate as she got in the cop’s face and tongue-lashed him about the mayor and the city closing public bathrooms and forcing poor kids to pee on the street. After a few minutes the cop tipped his hat, said, “Sorry, ma’am,” and got out of there, moving as fast as he could. On the other hand, Noonie would literally cross the street or get off the bus to break up a fight or to scold black kids for using disrespectful language.

  She was a follower of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and believed that love and peaceful protest were the tools for equality.

  When Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown would appear on the TV news screaming about black power, Noonie would shake her head and talk about those ruffians in the raggedy clothes who needed haircuts. Afros, bell-bottoms, rock music, and hippies protesting the war were not Noonie’s thing. “The world is going crazy,” she would tell me, “so make sure you stay on the straight and narrow and get your education.” Although the Black Panther Party never came up in our conversations, I knew that me being part of an organization whose members carried guns and called the cops “pigs” would have her speaking in tongues and turning colors.

  On the morning of my planned visit to the Black Panthers, I slipped past Noonie to the closet and grabbed the black leather jacket she had given me for Christmas. Noonie brought me to a halt without looking up from her Bible.

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “To school,” I answered, hoping not to seem like an escaping convict caught in the guard-tower searchlight.

  “Just like that? Without saying good-bye?” I walked over to Noonie and kissed her on the cheek, hoping that now I could make my move out the door.

  Noonie gestured toward the scrambled eggs, juice, and corn flakes on the table. “Now sit down and eat your breakfast.”

  “But I’m late,” I said.

  “That’s right. You were late getting up. But I was not late when it came to making your breakfast and this food is not going to waste. There are hungry children in Africa.” Noonie turned the page on her Bible.

  “Then let the children in Africa eat it,” I mumbled.

  Noonie’s eyes shot up from the Bible. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” I said meekly. I sat down and started to inhale the food.

  “Slow down.”

  Then Noonie took in my outfit. “Why do you have on your good leather coat? And why are you dressed in all black? You going to a funeral?”

  I groped for an answer. “It’s Assembly Day.”

  Noonie wasn’t buying it. “I thought you wore a white shirt to assembly.”

  I fished around in my oatmeal so she couldn’t see my eyes searching for a comeback. “I do, except today is Armistice Day and Mr. Seawell wants the color guard to
dress in black out of respect for all those who gave their lives. Bye, Noonie.”

  I jumped up and kissed her on the cheek, then headed out the door, praying she wouldn’t see through my lame story. As I pulled the apartment door shut behind me, I heard Noonie’s footsteps on the other side of the door. Would she yank it open and call me back? I wondered. I paused, then heard her lock the door. I’d made it!

  I got through the morning classes without paying attention. Then, when the bell rang for the last one, I headed into the hallway with the other students, looked for a side exit, and slipped out the door. I was cutting lunch and the rest of my classes for the day. I didn’t care if I was being marked absent. In fact, I didn’t even write down any of the homework assignments that day. I was going to join the Panthers, and if the teachers messed with me I would bring a battalion of the brothers into the school. We would storm the place with guns the same way I’d seen the Panthers storm the California State Legislature a few weeks earlier.

  James and Eric flanked me as we sat on the subway train headed to Brooklyn. It was an hour’s ride from our stop in the Bronx, plenty of time for doubt and apprehension to build.

  “You sure you ready for this?” James grilled. “Panthers don’t play. In fact, the Panthers be taking heads if you’re not serious.”

  “I’m ready,” I replied, trying to be as cool as possible.

  “How are you ready? You still use your slave name, ‘Eddie.’ I know that rhymes with ‘ready,’ but you ain’t really ready until you have an African name. My name is Rhaheem now.”

  Eric nodded his head in agreement. “And my name is Sabu. What’s your black name?” he asked.

  “I don’t have one,” I said, feeling like a total sap. “Can you give me one?”

  “Let me see,” James said, closing his eyes in deep meditation. “Yeah. We’re going to call you Unbutu.”

  “Unbutu,” I stammered.

  “Usa,” James said.

  “Usa,” I replied, confused now.