Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  At three thirty, maybe four, in the morning, I’m standing on Amsterdam Avenue waiting for the light to change, or actually stuck in the same spot, watching the same stoplight explode from green to yellow to red, accompanied by bursts of music. Suddenly I feel a heavy weight on my back. A swirling shadow. My demon. I run into traffic like one of the Korean men in Mr. Charlie’s war stories. A taxi driver blares his horn. A truck bears down on me. I stop, frozen for a second, and then run. The truck barely misses me.

  The stocky white truck driver pulls the vehicle over, hops out, and walks toward me as if he plans to kick my ass. “Are you fucking crazy? What the hell is the matter with you?”

  The threat of a fight suddenly cleared my head. “Nothing’s the matter with me. Why don’t you watch where the fuck you’re going?” I yelled as I jumped into a combat stance and threw some punches at the air.

  The truck driver shook his head and climbed back in his cab. “Fuckin’ psycho,” he muttered as he pulled off.

  I rubbed my eyes and checked the streets to see if my demon was lying dead on the asphalt. Nothing. I took a couple of deep breaths and headed down the hill toward Harlem.

  Once a black teacher from a Harlem school came into the office and asked if I could come and speak to her class. I said yes and scribbled down the date on a piece of paper, then put the paper in the desk drawer and forgot about it. A couple of weeks later Afeni approached me and said that the teacher had returned to the office disappointed because I failed to show up at her class assembly. I responded about some Panther assignment that had come up that was more important. I had jumped into a car with a group of Panther officers to head up to New Haven where tension was brewing between the local police and black residents. The New Haven chapter asked for reinforcements, and I was one of the first out the door looking for “action.”

  “Nothing is more important than keeping your word once you’ve made a commitment,” Afeni said, “especially when you’ve made a commitment to black children. Their lives are already filled with disappointments and broken promises. The least you should have done was to contact the teacher and let her know that you weren’t coming.”

  Afeni had put me “in check,” and I accepted her admonition humbly. Panthers, especially Panther men, tended to have a healthy dose of arrogance to go along with the swagger. We were badass dudes who were willing to die for our beliefs, but we could also be cocky-ass dudes who felt we could do no wrong. One of our guiding principles was respecting criticism and constructive self-criticism. Afeni would often be the first to point out our personal and our organizational mistakes, especially when it came to the community. She could give the criticism gently or ferociously, but she never held back. She could theorize with the best of the party’s intellectuals and cuss with the meanest of the party’s street cats. I learned many of the important lessons of manhood from Afeni. Keeping my word, loving and caring for children, respecting women as equals, and honoring and taking time for my elders were all things that she impressed upon me.

  I also learned from her what quiet courage was and how it could be more effective than the loud bravado of leaping at flying bullets. One morning Afeni and I were alone in the dining room of a Harlem church where the Panthers conducted its breakfast program. The kids were gone, and I was mopping the dining room when a dozen cops with guns drawn stormed into the basement. A white lieutenant with a gold shield and a suit walked up to me.

  “What’s going on down here?” he asked, snarling.

  “It’s a community program,” I snapped back. “We serve free breakfast to children.”

  “We got a report that someone is down here with a gun.”

  “Ain’t no guns down here,” I replied. “I told you this is a community breakfast program.” I deliberately left out the word Black Panther, because it was clear that this raid was a setup. The pigs were about to arrest us or kill us and then conveniently find a gun that they would claim was a Panther weapon. We’d heard that Panther programs were being harassed and shut down in this way all across the country.

  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, “The 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. They would do what they came to do, but we would be no part of it. The 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. The 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. The 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. The Panther 21 voted Cet to be the next released because of his oratory skills.

  Saturdays on 125th Street were a cultural explosion. There 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.

  The 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. The 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.

  The 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!” The 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.

  The 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. The 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. The 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. “The pigs don’t let you quit,” Dhoruba used to say, “even if you try to walk away from the struggle. They’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. The 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 Thomas, a captain from the Panthers’ Queens chapter, pulled over and let me get behind the wheel. Thirty seconds later I was in traffic, driving sixty miles an hour, with Bullwhip telling me, “Just point the car and go,” and John Thomas 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. The 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.” Then we were driven to the rougher parts of the black community in Oakland and San Francisco. The 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. They 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.

  There 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. The 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. The 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. The 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. The 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. The 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. The headquarters was also shot at and vandalized. I ran PE classes, spoke around the community, and sold papers.

  The 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.

  The 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 co
mmune went up in flames. A fire of suspicious origin began at night, destroying most of the documents. The Panthers and the lawyers had no doubt that this was arson. The police and the fire marshals basically shrugged, saying that the evidence was inconclusive.

  The 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.

  The 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? The 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. They 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. This 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.”