Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  We checked other windows and saw police cars and cops with shotguns and rifles taking up positions around the building. A junkie standing across the street had seen us entering the building with guns and flagged down a cop car. I flipped over a pool table and took aim at the door. I believed for sure that the cops would batter down the door and that we would all die in a hail of bullets. Brother Brick took up a firing position near the bar. Dhoruba grabbed me by the arm. “If we start firing in here the pigs are gonna shoot all these people, not just us,” he said. I knew Dhoruba was right. No matter that there were heroin dealers there. A lot of people, innocent people who had just come to the club to party, would be slaughtered in the cross fire. We told everyone to leave the club and then stepped out into the night.

  I held a .45-caliber handgun behind my back as I pushed the door open. Dhoruba grabbed the gun from me just before I stepped into the street. He saved my life. The moment the door swung open a police spotlight blinded me. Through my squinted eyes I could see numerous police rifles and pistols pointed at me. Had I stepped out of the club with that .45, I would have been riddled with bullets and dead before I hit the ground.

  Cops grabbed me and handcuffed me. “That’s one of the dudes who robbed us,” a dealer shouted from behind the police barricade. “They got machine guns.”

  The cops dragged me into an alley and began slapping and punching me. “What are you doing with that machine gun?” they asked. “You like shooting cops?” No answer, just contempt in my eyes, which fueled the cops’ rage.

  They began bouncing my face off the brick wall like it was a basketball. One cop pulled his pistol. “There ain’t gonna be no fucking trial for you,” he said. He pointed the pistol at my chest.

  Something inside me snapped. I could hear it and physically feel it, like a highway flare being snapped open in my bowels. I leaped toward the cop, screaming. “Go ahead and pull the trigger, motherfucker. Shoot me. My life don’t mean shit anyway.” Two other cops pulled hard on my handcuffs and arms to restrain me. I meant every word. If I was going to die in an alley, it wasn’t going to be begging or running. The cop with the pistol lowered his gun and looked at me like I was crazy.

  People from the club began peeking in the alley. The cops told them to back up and dragged me to a squad car. They threw me in the backseat and stomped my testicles before slamming the door. The squad car raced to the precinct where cops took me into the building and stood me before the desk sergeant to be booked. “Armed robbery and weapons possession, Sarge,” a cop declared. They took me to the main floor of the precinct where a gauntlet of cops stood in a double row from the first floor up the staircase to the second floor. I saw a sea of blue, blackjacks, nightsticks, and fists waiting for me. I stiffened and dug my feet into the ground. “Do you have an elevator?” I asked in a burst of gallows humor.

  “Get the fuck up the stairs,” said the cop who had pulled his pistol on me, as he shoved me into the gauntlet. I put my head down as the cops pounded me. When I slipped, they used knees and kicks to get me back on my feet. They used my handcuffs to finish dragging me up the stairs. They unhandcuffed me just long enough to finger print and photograph me. Then the beatings started again, right in the squad room, in a corner near a window. I lost consciousness only to be slapped awake again.

  The cops rehandcuffed me so that my hands were now in front of me, then used a second pair of handcuffs to cuff me to an overhead radiator pipe. A dozen or so handcuffs fastened together were used like a medieval mace to beat me across the back and ribs. I cursed, spat blood, and tried to kick my attackers. No use. They held my legs and punched me in my stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I could see Dhoruba, Brick, and Gus being beaten in different parts of the squad room. They unhandcuffed me from the radiator and threw me into a cell. My left eye was swollen shut, my lips were puffy and bloody, and my ribs were cracked. I crawled in a corner and tried to find the position that hurt the least.

  Time passed, one hour, maybe two. It was hard to tell. Cops massed in front of my holding cell: lieutenants, a captain, older white men in suits. I felt like an attraction at a zoo, a broken monkey in a filthy cage. Cops entered. I was given a hamburger, a cup of tea, and some paper towels. “Clean yourself up,” a cop ordered. I went to the sink and used wetted paper towels to dab the dried blood off my face. My mouth was almost swollen shut, so I had to tear the burger into tiny pieces, dip it into the tea, and then shove it into my mouth. I knew I had to keep up my strength. My Panther training had taught me that torture comes in cycles. First, you’re interrogated, then tortured, then given a little rest before the next round begins; each cycle worse than before, and so on, until you break.

  As we were being punched, stomped, and whipped, the cops were processing our fingerprints. It took hours, often days, to match fingerprints in those days before computers. Even priority cases had to be transmitted via teletype, then matched with a physical file search against police and FBI records. Sooner or later the cops would realize that Dhoruba and I were fugitive Panther leaders from the New York 21. I was sure that the beatings would intensify after that. Detectives took me into an office with desk chairs and a file cabinet. I was handcuffed and shackled to a chair. I wriggled my hands and steeled myself for round two of torture. Rubber hoses, broken fingers, cigarette burns to my genitals—I knew what might come, having heard the stories from other prisoners on Rikers and from Panthers who had been beaten.

  The door opened and Yedwa entered. He wore a sport shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a gold detective shield dangling from his neck. Another flare went off in my stomach. The demon clawed at my back. The feelings of anxiety, heartbreak, anger, and betrayal exploded like fireworks. “Power to the people, Jamal,” he said as if the last two years of treachery and suffering had not happened.

  “What’s happening, Ralph?” I asked, spitting his slave name at him like an insult.

  He moved close to me, taking in my wounds and bruises. “You look pretty messed up,” he said with a tinge of compassion.

  “You know how it goes. Your pig buddies have been torturing me for the last few hours,” I said matter-of-factly, rejecting all compassion.

  Yedwa began bouncing on his feet like a boxer in the corner of the ring. “I know you hate me, Jamal. And I know they’re gonna give you a lot of time. You’re gonna go upstate and get in top shape so that when you come out you can hunt me down and kill me. But that’s okay, cuz I’m gonna be training too and I’ll be ready.”

  I suddenly realized that I had spent the last two years recklessly chasing this moment, the chance to again see the brother-mentor-father who so completely violated my trust and my faith. I bounced my chair around so I could look at him with the eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “You’re probably right that I’m going to get a lot of time,” I said, taking my time with each word. “And you’re definitely right that I’m going to be thinking about a lot of shit. But I’m not going to waste a single solitary second thinking about you.” Then I bounced my chair to turn away from him. He no longer deserved my gaze or my attention. He stood silently for a long moment, then left. The demon detached from my back and went out the door with him. I felt calm, like the ocean after a violent storm, and right then, though battered and chained, the boy became a man.

  15

  Posttraumatic Stress Blues

  El nombre de tu padre verdadero es Alipio Zorilla,” Alita, my maternal grandmother, somberly told me. “Fue un revolucionario que luchó junto con Fidel Castro y Che Guevara.” Your real father’s name is Alipio Zorilla. He was a revolutionary who fought alongside of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The revelation that floated melodically through the air with my grandmother’s Spanish traveled like an electric current from my ears to my gut and my brain.

  By then I was twenty-nine years old, wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison visiting room. While I had escaped prosecution as part of the Panther 21 government conspiracy, it was, somewhat ironically, my efforts as a part of the team worki
ng to rid Harlem of the insidious drug trade that ultimately landed me in prison for the first time. Out at age twenty-one, I was now back in prison, again because of acting on my political beliefs. Alita and her sister Elena had come to visit. My sister, Elba, was also there. Aunt Elena still lived in Cuba and, after years of trying, finally received a visa to visit New York. How she got into a federal prison with a Cuban passport was beyond my comprehension. Or maybe the officials wanted to see what connection I had to Cuba. Certainly the reasoning was more complex than I or the guards, who were probably electronically monitoring the conversation, could imagine. “You’re such a sweet boy, mi hijo,” Aunt Elena said, pinching my cheeks. “You don’t belong in prison. It’s your father. You have his blood, and he’s crazy. He’s a tall, handsome man. Muy inteligente. But he’s crazy. He fought in the mountains with Fidel, and he comes to the towns to give big speeches. Then he disappears for a few days and pow, una bomba, a big explosion in that town. And then your father reappears.”

  “Grandma, Auntie,” I stammered in my jailhouse-acquired, self-taught Spanish. “Thank you so much for finally telling me who my real father is. I’ve wanted to know for a long time, but I’m not sure if my politics is a genetic condition.” The sweet old ladies continued to pinch my cheeks and share stories about Cuba and my mother.

  They reminisced about the house in Santa Clara, Cuba, which had a pool and a servant. They reminisced about my grandfather Alfredo, originally from the island of Dominica, who immigrated to Cuba and became a prosperous engineer. My uncle Ruben, Gladys’s younger brother, would tell stories of taking his friends for food and milkshakes after school at a fancy hotel in Santa Clara, then telling the waiter to “put it on my father’s tab.” Gladys learned French from a tutor, had a debutante ball when she was a teenager, and drove her friends around in a convertible she received as a high school graduation present. She was a straight-A student and an amazing poet who would recite original and classic Spanish poems with a passion that made listeners cry. My uncle said that traffic stopped and men turned their heads when Gladys walked down the street. Instead of being jealous, girls flocked around her, drawn to her vibrant personality and generous spirit.

  Gladys went to Havana where she flourished as a premed student. She met Alipio in graduate school and fell in love. Alipio was already a member of the Communist Party and was a fiery and charismatic organizer at the university. Gladys was home in Santa Clara on semester break when she realized she was pregnant. Before she could tell Alipio that she was carrying his child, she found out that he gotten his distant cousin pregnant and announced that he would do the right thing and marry her. Gladys tearfully confessed the love affair and pregnancy to Alita. She asked to be taken to the family doctor to get rid of the baby. Alita felt Gladys’s stomach and told her that she was too far along to have an abortion, and thus Gladys was sent to New York, where I was born.

  Gladys placed me in “temporary care” while she learned English, earned a second bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Brooklyn College in biology, and got a job in the hospital as a lab technician. A few years later she married my stepfather, Luis, a former boxer and laborer, and gave birth to my younger sister and brother, Elba and Luis Jr. The family lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn while Gladys and Luis saved money for a house. She got her pharmacist’s license and was a step closer to the dream. She died in childbirth, just days after putting a down payment on a house in Brooklyn.

  Alipio and Gladys wrote letters to each other even after she moved to New York and was married. Luis would tear the letters up in a jealous rage and demand that Gladys not write him. Soon after, Alipio disappeared in the mountains of Cuba to fight the revolution. My grandmother and aunt told me that Alipio eventually became a general in the Cuban military, a minister of the interior, and Cuba’s ambassador to Tanzania.

  After their visit, I went back to my cell and wrote my father a long, impassioned letter and sent it via my auntie, who gave it to her daughter, a mathematics professor at the University of Havana and a friend of Alipio’s. My letter explained that I was in prison for my Black Panther beliefs and activities, suggesting that perhaps he had indeed passed on the DNA of agitation, rebellion, and revolution. I heard a few weeks later that the letter had reached him, but I never received a reply. Maybe he was in too delicate a situation or embroiled in some Cuban political intrigue that would compromise him if people became aware that he had a bastard American son. Yet it was hard for me to imagine having a son somewhere out there in the world and not trying to find him.

  The twelve years that passed from the night I sat in chains talking to Yedwa to where I was now, sitting in a Leavenworth cell, were intense. I spent the rest of my teenage years in various state prisons for the robbery charges. Not long after I began my sentence, the Attica rebellion happened in upstate New York. The men took control of the prison protesting the guards’ brutality, as well as the food and living conditions, and they demanded access to legal and social services. What made the rebellion powerful was the solidarity among the prisoners. Black, white, red, brown, and yellow prisoners stood together in their demands. There was a Marxist revolutionary undertone in the writing and statements of the prisoners. Attorney William Kunstler and Panther founder Bobby Seale were part of the negotiating team, working on behalf of the prisoners.

  At first the guards in our prison let us watch the news coverage of Attica on the rec room TV. By the second day the TV was gone. By the third day we were on lockdown, as was every other prison throughout the country. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller broke off the negotiations with the Attica prisoners and ordered an army of state troopers to retake the prison. The troopers fired tear gas and sprayed bullets nonstop for several minutes. When the shooting stopped, thirty-nine people lay dead in the prison yard, ten of them guards and civilian employees. It was first reported that the guards who were being held hostage were executed by the prisoners. The truth was that they died from the same indiscriminate gunfire that killed the prisoners.

  I knew some of the guys who died in Attica. We had been on Rikers Island and at the Elmira Reception Center together. I looked at the newspaper pictures of the aftermath of the rebellion and knew that it could easily have been me lying in the blood and mud of Attica prison. It was one of the places the prison officials considered sending me to when I began my sentence.

  Two weeks before the rebellion a prison leader named George Jackson was shot to death by guards in California’s San Quentin prison. The guards claimed that he had smuggled in a gun and was trying to escape. Most people believed that George was murdered and the gun was planted near his body after the fact. George Jackson had been sentenced to seventy years for a gas station robbery when he was seventeen years old. To the system he was another poor black kid who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Like Malcolm X, George educated himself and became a brilliant jailhouse scholar and lawyer. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary, and he helped organize chapters of the Black Panther Party throughout the California prison system. He became a best-selling author with his books Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye. George’s great offense against the system wasn’t the petty robbery but his charismatic presence and his ability to create truces and organize warring racial prison gangs.

  George Jackson’s murder and the Attica rebellion created a revolutionary spirit among prisoners around the country. Prison newspapers were founded and prisoners created political cadres and solidarity movements. At Leavenworth I organized, agitated, and spent a fair amount time “in the hole” as a result of confrontations with the guards. When they had too much of me in one place, I would be transferred to another facility and the cycle would start again. I earned a high school equivalency diploma and petitioned to be transferred to a prison that offered college courses. Since this was the one thing I really wanted, the officials took great pleasure in denying my request.

  I was released from prison on my twenty-first birthday. This was pure coincidence and not a birthd
ay gift from the prison authorities. I returned to a Harlem that felt and looked like a scorched battlefield. Drugs had become a pandemic. Some blocks resembled the aftermath of bombing raids. I walked down streets I had traveled as a confident young Panther, now feeling like we had lost the war, which meant that my young comrades had died in vain. No one talked much about the Panthers anymore. When people found out I was a former Panther who served time, they usually went the other way. There was fear in the air. So many Panthers and Panther sympathizers had been killed, locked up, or had their lives ruined by detectives and FBI agents who would show up to get them fired from jobs, evicted from homes, and expelled from school.

  I took classes at Brooklyn College, worked various jobs, and used a student loan to buy a gypsy cab. I taught karate classes in Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn. My friends Imara “Green Eyes” Diaz, Taiwan Delain, and I opened a small karate dojo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We hung pictures of Che Guevara, Don Pedro Albizu Compos (a Puerto Rican nationalist leader), and Malcolm X next to those of the Asian martial arts masters. The black and Latino kids who were our students learned about their history and progressive movements as they were learning punches, kicks, flips, and rolls. We charged ten dollars a month for unlimited lessons and five dollars for uniforms. Even though the prices were cheap and we had plenty of students, we were always in the red. The kids were too poor to pay the dues. I would drive twelve-hour shifts in my gypsy cab to pay the dojo rent and the rent on my tiny one-bedroom apartment, but I loved what we were doing. The movie Enter the Dragon had been tops at the box office a year earlier, and every kid in the neighborhood wanted to be Bruce Lee. Maybe the oppressor had destroyed the Black Panther Party and crushed the movement, I thought, but my young dojo warriors would be the next generation of revolutionaries.