Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  “Lumumba?” I asked, thinking maybe they had been able to steal an intimate moment together during a prison visit. Even as I asked, I knew it was impossible. Prison security on the Panthers was always extremely tight, especially after the Branch Queens prison rebellion.

  “No,” she said. “Not Lumumba.” She offered no details and I didn’t ask. All that mattered was to comfort her and hold dear the secret that my big sister Afeni was sharing.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m telling Lumumba,” Afeni answered, “and I’m keeping the baby. I didn’t think I could conceive, and it feels wrong to even think about ending this life. I know they’re going to give me three hundred years, and I know it’s crazy, but if I can pass something of my spirit on to this child, maybe the struggle will continue.”

  Afeni’s sister, Gloria Jean, wasn’t a Panther but loved and supported Afeni with all of her being. Gloria Jean would take good care of Afeni’s baby along with her own children. My worry was about Afeni when she told Lumumba. The principled, rigorous, sometimes fearsome Panther captain, who treasured duty over life, might take her out right in the courtroom.

  “Maybe you should wait,” I counseled.

  “No, I have to tell him,” Afeni replied.

  A few days later Afeni broke the news to Lumumba in the courtroom. After some tense heated moments, a cold veil dropped over Lumumba. He pronounced “I divorce thee” three times, as is the custom and procedure in Islamic law. Afeni and Lumumba Shakur were no longer husband and wife. They sat near each other for the remainder of the trial, but they barely spoke to each other after that.

  The prosecutors spent the first few weeks of the trial introducing the pistols, shotguns, and rifles that had been seized from Panther homes during the predawn raids. Firing pins had been taken out of the weapons to render them harmless, but it was a serious arsenal piled high on the table, left for the jury to gaze at for the duration of the trial. The prosecution’s point was that the Panthers were “armed to the teeth” and had been days away from an attack. Afeni and Cet would cross-examine the cops with questions about police brutality and the wanton murder of black people. After a parade of cops, who talked about surveillance operation and photos, and hours of listening to barely audible tapes of conversations between Panthers, the two star witnesses arrived.

  Gene Roberts had been part of the police department’s undercover unit, BOSS—Bureau of Special Services—for several years. After infiltrating the Nation of Islam and serving as Malcolm X’s bodyguard, he joined a Harlem black nationalist organization known as the Mau Mau and then the Panthers. Gene was a navy veteran and helped to teach weapons classes. He made several trips to Maryland with Panthers to buy weapons. Gene testified about being present at secret meetings where Panthers talked about guerrilla warfare. As a witness, Gene was bland, vague, and robotic. The only time he came to life is when he talked about Malcolm X.

  Then came Yedwa, wild-eyed and energetic, with a volatility that could not be suppressed by the witness stand. He was the spark the prosecution needed, the animated undercover cop who heroically leaped into the Panthers’ jaws of death. Afeni stood before him, pregnant and seemingly vulnerable, and dismantled his testimony and his character.

  “You testified that you were a Panther and a police officer?” Afeni asked.

  “That’s right,” Yedwa replied.

  “So, when you seduced young women in the Black Panther Party, were you being a Panther or a cop?” Afeni pressed on, hammering Yedwa about smoking marijuana, firing guns, and his erratic behavior that often created confrontations between Panthers and police. But the jury looked impassive, seemingly unmoved by the political theater and the courtroom drama happening before them. Because quiet juries are usually thought of as convicting juries, not much hope came out of the Panther 21 courtroom, even on days when the Panthers and their lawyers scored some clear points.

  The war on the streets was escalating. Not a day went by when somewhere in the country a Panther wasn’t arrested or killed. There were police raids and bombings. In New York and several other cities, Panther offices were broken into and the food for the breakfast program was destroyed. “Who does that?” I asked no one in particular as I looked at the pancake and cereal mixture that had been spilled and trampled on. “A vile, fascist, cowardly pig,” I answered as young Panthers around me nodded in agreement. That’s when I ordered the Harlem and Bronx offices be sandbagged the same way as the national headquarters in Oakland. We set up a twenty-four-hour security schedule where armed Panthers sat by gun portals waiting for the pigs to come. It was suicide, of course, and exactly how the cops wanted us to respond.

  More troubling than the certainty of a deadly police raid were the rumors that were circulating in the party that Panthers were disappearing and being killed on the orders of other Panthers. These were things spoken of in whispers, often told by Panthers who were fugitives, passing like shadows in the night, but it was enough to fuel the general feeling of distrust and paranoia. The jailed members of the Panther 21 wrote an open letter critical of the Black Panther Party. Most of the criticism was focused on Huey Newton and the party’s Central Committee. The Central Committee responded by expelling the Panther 21. This created a rift between a number of chapters on the West Coast and some on the East Coast. Word was received that several freed members of the Panther 21, including myself, had been marked for death.

  One night Huey P. Newton spoke at Yale University, and I was part of his security team, which was a mix of East Coast and West Coast Panthers. Huey spoke to hundreds of students and supporters who crowded into the auditorium. Then we left the auditorium through a side door, stepping into the chilly New Haven night as we escorted Huey toward a waiting car. A young white photographer slipped on a patch of ice and his camera’s flash went off. The Panthers reacted to the noise and the flash by pulling their weapons. I looked around and saw a few guns pointed in the direction of the frightened photographer. The other guns were pointed at other Panthers, with New York and California Panthers ready to shoot it out in an Ivy League alley.

  We recovered, put our guns away, and got Huey into the backseat of his car. Other Panthers hopped into their escort vehicles, and the caravan departed. I was behind the wheel of a rented car with Cet and his wife, Connie Matthews, who was a confidante of Huey’s. We were supposed to rendezvous with Huey at a wealthy supporter’s home in Connecticut. Instead I drove to a Panther safe house in Harlem. The decision was made that tonight would be the night that we’d all go underground. We changed into disguises, cut our hair, put on hats and glasses, put fake ID into our wallets, executing pieces of a plan that had been worked on for months.

  “Do Afeni and Joan know?” I asked as I checked my gun and prepared to head to another location.

  “Everybody knows,” was the response.

  Latin music from the neighbor’s radio woke me up the next morning. I was in the tiny apartment of a Panther supporter in the Dominican section of Washington Heights. My back ached from the lumpy couch. I showered, found some corn flakes and not-quite-sour milk, and ate. I turned on the kitchen radio and found the soul station. I didn’t blast it, lest I give away my location as a brother hiding out in a Dominican building. Plus my ears were focused as I listened for the footsteps of cops searching. The half-hour news came on, headlined with a story about fugitive Panthers. I dropped my spoon and leaned closer. The reporter talked about warrants having been issued for Dhoruba and Cet because they failed to show up for court. Then he said Afeni and Joan had been thrown in prison and their bail was remanded. Bullshit, I thought. Everybody knew. I paced the apartment confused, stressed, pissed. I put on my glasses and my doofus hat and ventured outside to buy a paper. I came back, sat on the living room floor, and began to read. Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird: bail revoked because two of the codefendants had fled.

  That night I rendezvoused with other Panthers. No one could satisfactorily explain what went wrong. How the women w
alked into the courtroom, into a trap. I lay on the lumpy couch of the Washington Heights apartment, a gun under my pillow, feeling like hell that Afeni and Joan were back in jail, and even worse that there was nothing I could do about it.

  13

  Taking It to the Streets

  As a young Panther I would hear stories about Eldridge Cleaver, Field Marshal Don Cox (DC), and other Panther leaders who had gone underground. I had romantic visions of them living in ghetto command centers stocked with books, food, weapons, and maps of future missions. They would don disguises and head out into the night to survey and plan the epic battles that would liberate the oppressed black communities. Then Eldridge and DC managed to slip out of the country to Algeria and Cuba, so I imagined them living in guarded villas or jungle training camps with other fugitive Panthers, preparing for battle.

  My journey to the underground was neither romantic nor sexy. I kept moving from rundown tenements to dank basement apartments, always looking over my shoulder or lying awake, expecting the cops to show up with guns blazing. I got messages by making calls from a phone booth at prearranged times to other phone booths. My Panther comrades told me that the cops were tearing up the Bronx and Harlem looking for Dhoruba, Cet, and me. We laid low while we waited for our white radical friends to get us passports and plane tickets to leave the country. Some fugitive Panthers had made their way to Cuba for asylum. Some even hijacked jets from Miami to Cuba. The Cuban government frowned on this development and established a treaty with the United States regarding hijackers. When some fugitive Panthers reported they no longer felt welcome in Cuba, the migration for Panthers in exile followed Eldridge Cleaver to Algeria.

  By then, a staggering divide had developed between Panthers on the West Coast headquartered in Oakland, California, and Panthers on the East Coast headquartered in Harlem, with the Panther 21 at the center of the controversy. Huey’s writings and speeches became more Marxist intellectual. He began to talk more about Panther community programs and political reform. East Coast Panthers began throwing their loyalty to Eldridge Cleaver, who continued preaching armed revolution and the violent overthrow of the government. Eldridge’s appeal to rank-and-file Panthers also came from the feeling that local offices and jailed Panthers from those chapters were not receiving financial and logistical support from national headquarters. This dissension was further fueled by forged letters, documents, and anonymous phone calls the FBI created as part of its counterintelligence program. Both Huey and Eldridge received these manufactured death threats, implying that each leader was out to kill the other.

  After Huey expelled the Panther 21 from the party, Eldridge Cleaver, who was now headquartered in Algeria, called Huey in Oakland to discuss the situation. The conversation disintegrated into insults and threats. The Panther leaders hung up on each other, and the East Coast/West Coast split became official. Most West Coast chapters remained loyal to Huey. New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and most East Coast chapters followed Eldridge.

  The East Coast Panthers began publishing their own version of the Panther newspaper, Right On. There were territorial battles surrounding the newspaper that resulted in Panthers being killed in Harlem and Queens. It seemed bizarre and unbelievable that the movement was deteriorating so rapidly and so bitterly. From my hiding place in a Bronx basement apartment, I imagined the FBI, CIA, and cops across the country popping champagne corks and celebrating that the Panthers were fighting one another. And I was powerless to do anything; I was on the run with less than a hundred dollars to my name.

  A week later I got word that a way had been made for me to get out of the country and to Algeria. The plan was to take a train to Montreal, pick up a fake passport, then catch a French airline to Algeria via Paris. A young sister from the movement posed as my girlfriend, and we acted like students on our way to Quebec for holiday. We had no weapons, but I was still nervous as hell as the conductor and customs agent checked my ticket and my fake driver’s license. Once in Canada I stayed in a rooming house in Quebec that catered to West Indian immigrants. Snow was piled high and I felt somewhat safe in my bundled-up disguise as I trudged around town.

  A few days later a couple of young radical Canadian students came by the rooming house with passports for us. They belonged to American soldiers in Germany, who lent them to the movement. I was given the passport of a young soldier who slightly resembled me. It wouldn’t stand up under close scrutiny, but the theory was that all blacks looked alike to white people and that once I was on the plane I would be home free to Paris and Algeria. Once I got to Algerian customs I would announce I was a member of the Black Panther Party seeking political asylum. The Algerians would take me into custody, search me, detain me, question me, and lock me up for a day or two. Then someone from the Panther headquarters that had been established in Algeria would appear, vouch for me, and I would be released. I would become a young revolutionary in exile, beyond the reach of the imperialist clutches of Babylon.

  I looked at the passport for a long time, picturing myself holding court with other Panthers who had made it to Cuba, Africa, China, and Algeria and traveling as a delegate of black liberation to North Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. Some of the fugitive Panthers I had met had become fluent in Arabic, Chinese, even Vietnamese—citizens of the revolutionary world. Some had multicultural wives. That could be me! I thought, for a moment. Then I thought about Afeni, Joan, and the rest of the Panther 21 still in jail. I thought about the young Panthers I left behind who were doing their best to keep the tattered Harlem office open. Guilt, anger, and uncertainty hit me like a wave of nausea, knowing that some of my young comrades in Harlem would get killed while I lived in exile. I would be a punk if I ran for safety while leaving everybody else behind. And in my mind, a punk was still the worst thing on the manhood-rating scale. I handed the passport back. “I’m not going,” I said. “I want to roll back down to Harlem and fight.”

  The next day I got off the train in Grand Central Station and blended into the crowd. I took the subway to Seventy-second Street and went to the Hotel Alamac that was serving as dorm rooms for City College. I knocked on the door of a Panther in training named Richard Lomax. He was a couple of years older than I was and had been my pledge brother in the Order of the Feather fraternity. His eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw me.

  “They said you were in Cuba or Africa, Jamal.”

  “Get your coat and come with me right now,” I ordered. “I can’t answer any questions.”

  Richard had joined the Panthers during the eleven months that I was in prison; I had been surprised to see him at a Panther rally when I returned. Richard had always been the petit bourgeois, shirt-and-tie, college-bound kid when we were younger. I was a little unsettled by his newfound militancy and had told my fellow Panthers that I wasn’t quite sure about Richard. But at least his dorm room wasn’t under surveillance and I needed someone to walk into the Panther office and deliver a message. I waited down the block while Richard went into the office to retrieve some money. I gave him exactly four minutes to return. When five minutes passed I left and found refuge at an apartment of a sister named Janet Cyril, a dynamic organizer who had left the party to do more community organizing a few months earlier. I later found out that Richard was an undercover cop and that he had joined the Panthers hoping to use his relationship with me to further penetrate the organization.

  Dhoruba was also hiding out in New York. He didn’t make the initial trip to Canada because he was told that there were no passports and therefore no clear route to Algeria for him. Instead he should wait until a route could be created. This felt like more intrigue and suspicious promises to us. We were also hearing rumors about tensions between the international section of the Black Panther Party and the Algerian government. Panthers in Algeria might be thinking about switching asylum to North Korea or North Vietnam. The life of a revolutionary exile was looking much more problematic and not nearly so romantic.

  But at home, on t
he streets of black America, things kept getting worse. Picture blocks of abandoned tenements and crumbling buildings, with junkies scurrying in and out of vacant apartments and brick and garbage strewn alleys to buy and use drugs. These were the drug zones of Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Drug dealers would take over apartments, using some for sales and many others for dope dens called shooting galleries. A junkie could buy a bag of dope and then go across the hall to shoot drugs in one of the rooms furnished with broken-down couches or discarded mattresses. Before the drugs were sold in the dens, they were prepared in other apartments known as factories.

  Armed street soldiers stood guard while naked women and men, wearing nothing but surgical masks, mixed the pure heroin with quinine and measured it out into glassine envelopes that sold for two, three, or five dollars. Thirty envelopes bound together represented a “bundle.” Three hundred envelopes were a “load,” and so on through the ounce, pound, and kilo levels. The envelopes would be sealed with a certain color tape or be stamped with a name that represented the brand of a particular dealer or crew.

  Gold tape meant the drugs were coming from “Goldfinger,” a black gangster who adopted the name of the James Bond movie. “Country Boys” meant they were coming from Alabama. Tens of thousands of poison envelopes on the street; thousands of junkies who would beg, hustle, and steal for a fix; millions of dollars to fund the fine clothes, flashy cars, and luxurious homes of the drug dealers. They, of course, were the well-dressed puppets of the white mobs, corrupt police, military, and governments, those who truly profited from the drug trade.

  The Panthers talked about CIA-owned Air America and the drug cargo it transported out of the Golden Triangle. These profits funded mercenary groups, militias, assassinations, and other CIA covert operations. This kind of talk from the Panthers on street corners and in prison cells, union halls, and college classrooms further infuriated government officials and made them more determined to obliterate the Black Panther Party. Yet this kind of awareness and analysis also made it harder to watch the disintegration of Harlem and the Bronx because of the drug epidemic brought on with government assistance and encouragement.