Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  This recognition of power comes from a true recognition of pain and oppression. An understanding that we poor and working-class people have all been exploited and enslaved in different ways. A recognizing of the commonality of that exploitation and the necessity of coming together in order to change things. It was also acknowledging that we had internalized that oppression, manifested in doubt, self-hate, mistrust, and violence. Nowhere was that more raw or clearer than in prison. The prison authorities expected, and in many ways counted on, this internalized oppression and hatred. As long as prisoners were divided, mistrustful, and violent, the force of the prison administration could reign supreme. If prisoners unified, they could run the prison, turning those cells into classrooms, conservatories, and think tanks of progressive social change.

  All power to the person. My time in Leavenworth made me realize that change begins with the individual, which ran contrary to the Marxist thinking I grew up with in the movement.

  The individual is subordinate to the organization. The minority is subordinate to the majority. The lower level is subordinate to the higher level.—Mao Tse-tung

  I was the gung-ho example of the young movement warrior who encased his feelings of confusion, betrayal, disappointment, rage, and heartbreak in a concrete ball and buried it in a place deep inside so that it wouldn’t interfere with his duties as a young revolutionary.

  Now, at Leavenworth, we were sitting and standing in a circle in the big yard, sharing personal stories that could be incorporated into characters I was creating for our next play, 30 Days and a Wake Up. When you became a “short-timer” in prison, guys would ask you how much time you had left. The answer might be “twenty-nine days and a wake-up,” which meant you had twenty-nine days left to do plus the morning you woke up to be released. I was amazed at the number of prisoners who would get down to their last few days and blow their release date by catching a new case (for possession of drugs or weapons, for example), or they’d get into a beef that would wind up with them killing or being killed. This new play was going to be a character study of six convicts down to their last thirty days.

  Our prison troupe had become fairly tight and open about sharing stories of some of the abuse, hardships, and mistakes in their lives. It came my time to share, and I talked about the journey of the Panther baby who grew up in the movement, then on the run, and now in jail.

  “You know you’re suffering from posttraumatic stress, right?” said Nitro, a super-crazy, super-talented black Vietnam veteran who had been a demolitions expert in the U.S. Marine Corps.

  “I’ve never been in the army,” I responded.

  “Yeah, but you were still in a hell of a war,” Nitro insisted. “Look at all the shit you were just talking about. Survivor guilt; self-medicated depression; feelings of alienation, anger, sadness, and attempted suicide.”

  “I never tried to kill myself,” I snapped.

  “Man you been trying to get yourself killed for years,” Nitro said, smiling, “suicide by cop, suicide by thug, suicide by prison guard.”

  Later, back in the cell block, Nitro showed me the symptom list for posttraumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a manual that we had been given as a textbook in our prison behavioral psychology class taught by the University of Kansas. Of the sixteen symptoms listed, I had twelve. The cell block started spinning with the realization that the last fifteen years had not been the fragmented episodes of a young man wrestling with beliefs and identity but rather a continuum of mind-engulfing and soul-deep pain. Like the person who can’t afford medical care and learns to live with a toothache or back pain, I had ignored the forces that were tearing me apart.

  Around the same time I received a box of FBI files from my lawyers in response to a motion we made under the Freedom of Information Act. These were secret files the FBI kept during the COINTELPRO activities against the Black Panther Party. Large sections of the files had been redacted or blanked out in the name of ongoing “national security,” but there was enough in the files to reveal how evil, insidious, and deadly the government had been in its attempts to wipe out the party. I cried as I read what had been done to us, realized how we were divided and manipulated and made to turn against one another. My healing began with those tears. I got on my knees and said a prayer of forgiveness—for myself, for all those I may have hurt, for all who had hurt me.

  Prayer, yoga, and meditation became a part of my daily routine. I read as many books as I could on positive thinking, spirituality, and transformation. I incorporated these ideas into my theater work with my fellow prisoners and into my daily conversations with every prisoner I met. I began using the words “love” and “healing” and talked about our ability to mend ourselves behind bars and to pass the energy of transformation on to other prisoners and to our family and friends on the outside. I was still fired up about progressive social change. Racism, poverty, and oppression were real things that needed to be confronted with organized movements, but I now felt that we needed to challenge these things from a place of “progressive love” and “creative personal transformation.”

  The University of Kansas offered a college extension program through which professors taught nightly classes in the recreation center. Prisoners who worked hard could earn degrees with full rights and honors in psychology and sociology. I took eighteen credits a semester and earned degrees in both areas. Our professors were tough, demanding the same amount of attention, rigor, homework, and research as they did from their students on the main campus. The prison college students were terrified of these professors, especially Dr. Moro, a petite woman in her sixties. She taught English and would rip everyone’s assignments to shreds. One day she came to class with passages of the Bible that she had redlined for grammatical errors. We figured that if God and Jesus were catching it, what chance did we have? We stood in the big yard after taking her final exam, shaking in fear, worried about our grade-point averages. Power to education.

  Members of the theater group and my prison college classmates would go back to their cell blocks or courts in the big yard and engage their friends and associates with these new ideas about progressive change and transformation. We also continued to discuss class and race and the phenomenon of prison as an industry. The United States ranked third behind the Soviet Union and South Africa in the number of people locked up in its prisons. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ending of apartheid, the United States would become number one.

  The prison business was lucrative. Federal prisoners worked in factories for pennies an hour, making mailbags for the post office, T-shirts for the military, furniture for federal offices, and other products that were sold for fair-market rates, creating profits in the millions. Private corporations began building and running prisons under subcontract agreements with cities and states, their real profits coming not from boarding fees but from the slave labor of the prisoners.

  It is cheaper to send someone to Columbia or Harvard University than to keep them in prison. The Leavenworth theater group and the college programs dramatically reduced gang activity and violence in the big top. Statistics show that there was a significant drop in recidivism for prisoners who took college courses on the inside. Yet prison recreation and education budgets have since been cut. Many of the arts and college programs no longer exist. Surprisingly, a lot of the legislation that was passed to toughen up prisons was sponsored by some of the most liberal members of Congress. It was a way for Democratic and liberal politicians to get “I’m tough on crime” votes in the face of tough election battles with Republicans.

  My life in Leavenworth didn’t turn into a giant kumbaya circle of harmony when I started doing the work of transforming pain to power. I was part of a prison-administration-sanctioned organization called the African Culture Society. I spent a lot of hours refereeing disagreements with members who wanted to solve problems in the old-school style. The idea of parliamentary procedure, voting, consensus, and negot
iation was new and sometimes difficult learning for guys who grew up on the street and in jail.

  I would sometimes hear grapevine rumors about other prisoners who didn’t like me and who thought I was getting too much attention or “play” because of all my activities. I would ignore the rumors and continue to create power by sharing the power, teaching prisoners how to run the theater company, the African Culture Society, and the tutoring workshops without me. I felt the real point in this work was to create something that would last without me, a grassroots garden of humanity in the midst of a steel, concrete, barbed-wired jungle.

  In the sixth year of my sentence an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor came to Leavenworth to see me. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a groundbreaking acupuncturist and Black Liberation movement leader, had been arrested on a federal fugitive warrant. The Feds wanted me to testify against him in exchange for an early release. My attorney, Bill Mogulescu, was present at the meeting, and I responded with a polite but firm no. The Feds left angry and disappointed. Bill and I hung out in the visiting room, catching up and talking about one last appeal motion that I had pending before federal judge Kevin Duffy. The motion was known as Rule 35; the sentencing judge had the ability to reduce the initial sentence based on new information or mitigating circumstances.

  Bill believed that we had a shot at getting my sentence reduced. He would send the judge my straight-A college transcripts from each semester along with a commendation I had received from the NAACP for organizing an event in the prison whereby prisoners donated two thousand dollars of their commissary money for African famine relief. I also had received a commendation for helping save a prisoner from a burning cell. The judge also had letters from Joyce about our young son, Jamal, who had been hospitalized a number of times because of sickle-cell anemia. I had less faith than Bill in my appeal chances, convinced that the Feds would make me do every day of my sentence.

  When I got back to the cell block, a rumor about me was circulating, slithering about like a deadly serpent. Word was, a group of prisoners wanted to kill me because I had been talking to the Feds. A Jamaican prisoner I was close to named Hopeton told me to stay out of the yard so that he and his crew could take out the convicts who were threatening to kill me. I thanked Hopeton for having my back and went to the yard anyway.

  Sure enough, there were two groups of black prisoners squaring off and ready to go to war. A prisoner named Mike was the one who started the rumor and the beef. He was one of the guys who seemed bothered by my high profile at Leavenworth. Mike got wind that the Feds tried to make me an offer and started the rumor that I was cooperating, an indefensible violation of the convict code.

  Now other prisoners in the yard wanted to kill Mike for starting a bad rumor. I pounded my fists on one of the yard’s wooden tables as I told my “allies” how insane and backward it would be for us to start killing each other over a bullshit rumor. I pointed out that this is exactly how the Feds used COINTELPRO to destroy the Panther Party. Lesson learned. Beef settled. Or so I thought.

  Over the next few weeks, Mike continued to hammer at the rumor. Rudy Giuliani, who was then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote a letter to Judge Duffy asking him to deny my motion for sentence reduction because I had recently turned down a chance to cooperate.

  Jill Soffiyah Elijah, a brilliant black female attorney, who is now a Harvard law professor, flew out to Leavenworth to bring me a copy of the letter. I handed the letter to Mike in the mess hall where he sat at a table filled with his cronies. “If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the Feds.” Still he persisted, telling other convicts that he planned to kill me when the time was right.

  Finally, one night Mike stepped into my cell with fire in his eyes. I could tell from his breathing that he was armed and that in seconds we would be in a life-and-death battle over a knife. “What do we have to do to squash this beef?” I asked Mike as we stared each other down. A guard came by. Mike unballed his fist and started to back out of the cell.

  “Ain’t nothin’ you can do,” he said. “If my mother had a terminal disease and you were the only person on the planet that could save her, that bitch would have to die.”

  One of my close friends at Leavenworth had been doing all he could to mediate a peace between Mike and me. He now gave me a piece of chilly but truthful advice: “Convicts feed on weakness. You won’t let any of us kill this dude. If you don’t kill him, then Mike or one of these other convicts is gonna kill you, just because convicts feed on weakness.” College, plays, fund-raisers, healing—and here I was, still trapped by the convict code. I wasn’t about to snitch on Mike to the authorities, and I wasn’t going to let anyone else fight my battles for me. Instead I made two blackjack weapons out of batteries—which they let us have for our portable radios—placed in sweat socks.

  I tracked Mike down in the prison law library. He saw me enter, looked at me with contempt, and went back to taking notes from a law book. I walked behind him and gripped my blackjacks hidden in the deep pockets of my prison coat. I knew from my martial arts training how and just where to strike and kill him. I began to pull the blackjacks from my pocket. Then a voice whispered in my ear, a woman’s voice: “Don’t do this.” The voice was firm, clear, and undeniably real. It was my mother’s voice, Gladys, who died when I was ten years old. I released the grips on my blackjacks and went back to my cell. I unknotted the sweat socks and let the batteries fall on the floor. I hung my head and sobbed. If I have to die in prison because I refused to live this part of the convict code, then so be it.

  The next day Mike was taken to the hole, then transferred to another prison. The guards had done a routine shakedown of the cell block and found two knives stashed in his cell. Then the very next day I got the news that Judge Duffy had reduced my sentence. The commendations and the time off I received for good behavior meant that I would be released in less than two months. Had I let anger prevail and attacked Mike, I would have spent another ten to twenty years in prison. Had I not listened to the “angel’s voice” and submitted to the instincts of my higher self, my sentence would have never been reduced.

  Finally, fifty-eight days and a wake-up later, I watched the front gate of Leavenworth roll open. Joyce was waiting for me at the bottom of the Leavenworth steps, and I ran down to her. Before I could hug her, she handcuffed our wrists together with a pair of toy plastic cuffs, held our hands high so the guards in the tower could see, and yelled, “I sentence you to life with me.” The convicts from the cell block whose windows faced the front cheered. We kissed and walked toward a car that would take us to the airport, back to where I could restart my life.

  18

  Making an Impact

  I was released on Christmas Eve 1987, having served about half of the sentence imposed on me. Jamal Jr., who was five years old, hugged me and said that my being home was the best Christmas present. We stayed with Joyce’s parents in Queens for three months while I worked to save enough money for an apartment in Harlem. I worked part-time as a paralegal for two dynamic African American attorneys, Anthony Ricco and Talif Warren. I also worked part-time sanding wood floors and painting for my friend David LeSeur.

  Freedom felt like a mixed blessing. There were many Panthers still in prison doing long sentences on questionable convictions, like Sundiata Acoli and Sekou Odinga from the Panther 21 and Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose death penalty case has been taken up by Amnesty International.

  The young gunslingers who sold drugs on my Harlem block didn’t know what to make of me. One day in my suit (the only one I owned), the next day in dirty coveralls. I heard one of them whisper, “Five-oh,” the street code for a cop, as I headed to the subway. I turned around, intent on getting things straight on the spot. I wasn’t about to have a false rumor put my family in danger or get me shot in the back. I walked up to the gunslinger who was the obvious leader of the crew and said, “My name is Jamal Joseph. I want you to tell the dude who you work for to tell the dude who he works for to ch
eck with his man, who’s in the penitentiary, and find out who I am.” I turned and walked away. Three days later I passed the same group of gunslingers. The leader nodded respectfully and said, “How you doin’, Brother Jamal?”

  This time was the height of the crack epidemic. Drugs and guns were everywhere. The young drug crews had TEC-9s, Uzis, and Desert Eagle pistols. They were better armed than the Black Panther Party ever was, but they didn’t have the most important and first weapon that I was given the day I walked into the Panther office: a book that dealt with life and change and mentors compelling them to read, learn, and understand the socioeconomic conditions that had brought them to this place.

  One hot early July night, the dealers and gunslingers were setting off firecrackers. The popping and the explosions were so loud that they woke up Jamal and the new addition to the family, our infant son, Jad, even though our windows were closed and the air conditioner was on. I hopped out of bed and got dressed.

  “Where are you going?” Joyce asked.

  “To talk to these kids about these firecrackers. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Old folks are trying to get some rest in this building. Working folks have to get up in a few hours and go to their jobs.”

  “You don’t know these kids,” Joyce replied. “We just moved here.”

  “When I grew up, any adult in the neighborhood could talk to you, and you’d listen. You had to respect your elders.”

  “But these kids are different, and they don’t know you,” Joyce said. “They don’t know that you’re a former Panther, that you did time, taught karate, and if they knew, they probably wouldn’t give a damn.”