Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Eldridge Cleaver Soul On Ice
Eldridge Cleaver Soul On Ice
in Soul on lee
RusTIN
ELDRIDGE
CLEAVER
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Delta
Trade Paperback
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A Delta Book
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
NewYork, NewYork 10036
2019181716151413 12
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The Dead Lecr.urer by Le~oi Jones. Copyright 1964 by LeRoi Jones. Reprinted by permission of The Sterling Lord Agency.
The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu. Reprinted with permission
of The Macmillan Company. Copyright 19 53 by Ashley Montagu.
"My Negro Problem~And Ours," Commentary by Norman Podhoreu. Permission the author, copyright February, 1963, by Norman Podhoretz.
Commentary, from a letter by Irving Louis Horowitz. Reprinted by permission of
Commentary. Copyright June, 1963, by the American Jewish Committee.
The Presidential Papers by Norman Mailer. Reprinted by permission G. P. Putnam's Sons. Copyright 1963 by Norman Mailer.
The Fire NeJCt Time by James Baldwin. Reprinted with permission of The Dial
Press, Inc. Copyright 1963, 1962 by James Baldwin.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Copyright 1955, 1957 by Jack Kerouac.
Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.
" 'Christ' and His Teachings" was first" published in Esquire.
To Beverly,
with whom I share
the ultimate oflove
)i
Contents
Preface by Ishmael Reed
Introduction by Maxwell Geismar
PA.RT ONE
1
12
19
On Becoming
Soul on Ice
Four Vignettes
-OnWatts
21
37
45
45
-Eyes
-Soul Food
47
49
SO
51
61
72
85
87
108
122
138
147
155
167
181
183
205
221
236
Preface
by Ishmael Reed
hough the young African-American hip-hop intellectuals picture Malcolm X as an apostle of armed resistance-their favorite poster is that of a rifle-bearing Malcolm, peering out
from behind curtains, preparing to do battle with his enemiesthe revolutions that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King, Jr., precipitated were textbook Sun Tzu. They produced
change-King in the law, Malcolm in consciousness-without
throwing a punch (at whites), or firing a shot. And though they
are regarded as opposites, it was Malcolm's threats that. were
partially responsible for the establishment's agreeing to some of
King's demands.
Malcolm made wolfing and jive into an art form, a..~d
though his battles were fought on television (Marshall McLuhan
referred to him as "the electronic man") and his weapons were
words, he was a symbol of black manhood; "our shining prince"
was the way Ossie Davis put it, in a eulogy delivered at
Malcolm's funeral. Black men were in need of such a prince,
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Cleaver
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they would have learned that Cleaver's most persistent intellectual quality is doubt. And doubters aren't followers and are
distrustful of structures, which is what perhaps inspired Amiri
Baraka to describe Eldridge Cleaver as a "bohemian anarchist,"
a highfalutin name for the trickster.
His supporters used him, but he used them too. And who
could blame a black man for using his wits to get out of one of
these Nazi-like pits, often guarded by depraved sadists, where
this society had cast him to rot and die at the age of twentytwo?Today, thousands of young black men like Cleaver languish
in the country's prisons while the inside traders receive light
sentences for nearly wrecking the economic system, while the
Justice Department spends millions of dollars to trap a black
mayor on a misdemeanor charge, while the B.C.C.I. moneylaundering enterprise, perhaps the biggest drug scandal in history, is ignored, and in a society where most of the S&Lers
won't even come to trial.
Had Cleaver remained in prison without the publicity
that ultimately led to his release, he'd probably be dead.
By the end of the sixties the Left and the Right, like
lovers, began to trot toward each other s.o that at the beginning
of the eighties they were in bed together. Cleaver hurt James
Baldwin (so did I) who was deemed politically incorrect by the
young lions who were so paranoid about their manhood. Baldwin was also considered a sellout, and "radical chic" was the expression introduced by the late Seymour Krim to chastise
Baldwin for permitting The Fire Next Time to be published in The
New Yorker, the epitome of uptown pretensions and snobbery.
Baldwin pretended that he didn't care. Baldwin used to tell me
that he didn't mind my criticisms of him because, "Ishmael,
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you're a writer, but that Cleaver...."Cleaver and Baldwin Wl' lerestimated each other. Far from being a clown, Cleaver is a
writer, too, and though Baldwin comes in for some vicious
'Titicism from Cleaver, it is obvious that Soul on lee is influtnced by Baldwin's flamboyantly eloquent taxidermist's style,
just as Baldwin's !f Beale Street Could Talk reminds one of El' Iridge Cleaver.
But Baldwin proved to be more reliable than Norman
Mailer who is championed in this book. Baldwin went to his
grave protesting the injustices committed against the underdogs of the world by forces and institutions more powerful
1han them, while by the end of the sixties Norman Mailer was
o;aying that he was "tired of Negroes and their rights," and there
ts only a thin intellectual partition between his recent comments blaming blacks for the drug trade and those of the
new policy elite at The New Republic (whose neo-Conservative
.1bout-face can be gauged by the fact that an endorsement from
the pre-Right wing New Republic appears on the paperback edition of Soul on Ice. The publisher, Martin Peretz, who seems to
spend all of his waking hours making up fibs about the "Wlderclass," formerly had ties with S.D.S., wouldn't you know).
Cleaver supported The New York Review cf Books, which, during
the sixties, carried instructions on how to make a Molotov
cocktail, now prints long, Wlreadable pieces by Andrew Hacker
denouncing affirmative action and seeking to divide Asian
Americans from black Americans with ignorant comments
about the model minority.
The New Left, who sought to use the Blank Panthers to
foment a violent revolution, by the late seventies, had joined
the Reagan consensus, or had begWl to wallow in a selfish
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whom the media would have us believe are being set upon by a
politically correct multiculturalis~.
And now Hollywood, which poured money into Black
l'.mther coffers, will get its money back with interest, with a
sh-w of films now in the works about the Blank Panthers
demonstrating that Cleaver's scientific socialism was no match
for the witchcraft of capitalism. (One of these films is being
;cripted by Anna Hamilton Phelan, the writer for Gorillas in the
.Mist, the favorite film of the gestapo wing of the L.A.P.D.)
c:apitalism could even transform a group that once advocated
its overthrow into box-office receipts and T-shirt revenue.
{Whatever became of Jerry Rubin and Cleaver's wife Kathleen
<:Ieaver? They went to Wall Street. Tom Hayden married Jane
hmda.)
I always wondered what would have happened if Cleaver
.md Huey Newton and the Panthers hadn't been used as pawns
in a struggle between the white Right, who destroyed them,
and the white Left, who piled an agenda on them that went
way beyond their original commnnity concerns, and who
viewed them as cannon fodder. (They wanted "a nigger to pull
the trigger" as one Panther put it.) Thanks to the Panthers, the
downtown Oakland political establishment is black but that
doesn't seem to prohibit the police from continuing to beat the
shit out of black people in Oakland (and as elsewhere in the
case of these black ceremonial governments, the cash is controlled by whites). They also elected a Congressman.
Huey Newton was shot dead in the gutter and was bitterly
denonnced, before his body was even cold, by a post-New Left
Berkeley "alternative" newspaper whose editorial line mirrors
the confusion of the Left-one week printing a long piece
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sympathetic to still-imprisoned Panther Geronimo Pratt, another week printing an article favorable to University of California anthropologist Vincent Sarvich, a member of the new
oppressed, who maintains that women and blacks are intellectually deficient because of their small brain size (the same argument that Hitler's "scientists" used to advance against the
professor's ancestors).
In this political and cultural environment Cleaver seems a
has-been and the villain in his book, Lyndon Johnson (promoter of the Great Society) and Barry Goldwater (who challenged the C.I.A.'s mining of the Nicaraguan harbor)-in
comparison to the sinister crowd in power now-seem like
populists from the quaint old days of the American Weimar.
But I suspect that history is not finished with Eldridge
Cleaver. If he never does another thing in his life, he wrote this
book. It's not just a book about the sixties like those books and
films written by his former white allies that prove that the authors were white nationalists all along because they omit, or. give
scant attention to, the role of blacks, who created the political
and cultural matrix for that decade. The conclusion of one recent film, Mark Kitchell's Berkeley in the Sixties, most of whose
narrators are white women, seems to be that the sigpificance of
the political and cultural upheaval of the sixties was that it led to
the f >rmation of the middle class feminist movement.
The reissue of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice will challenge
the current bleaching out of the black influence on the cultural
and political climate of the sixties. This book is a classic because
it is not merely a book about that decade, regarded as demonic
by some and by others as the most thrilling and humanistic of
this century, Soul on Ice is the sixties. The smell of protest,
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.m,ger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy clubs, heli'opters, and revolution is present in its pages.
The old cover's image of the lilies juxtaposed with the
young prisoner's rugged face and unkempt hair is apt.
Out of the manure that American society can often be for
hlack men, the growth and beauty of their genius cannot be repressed. Cannot be denied.
Introduction
o/ Maxwell Geismar
14
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"":"hite society that projects its brief, narrow vision of life as eternal truth. Eldridge Cleaver very fittingly opens these Letters
from Prison with the section called "On Becoming" in 1954,
when he was eighteen years old. The Supreme Court had just
outlawed segregation; he was in Folsom Prison, California, on a
marijuana charge; he would be sent back to prison again for
what he describes as rape-on-principle. There is a kind of adolescent innocence-the innocence of genius-in these early letters, just as later there is savage irony and a profound deadpan
humor about the white man's civilization in the twentiethcentury United States.
Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now
writing, and I include in this statement both the formal sociologists and those contemporary fictionists who have mainly
abandoned this province of literature for the cultivation of the
cult of sensibility. (I am aware also of what may be considered
excessive praise in this introduction; in that case I can only beg
the reader to stop reading me and start directly with Cleaver.)
As in Malcolm X's case, here is an "outside" critic who takes
pleasure in dissecting the deepest and most cherished notions
of our personal and social behavior; and it takes a certain
amount of courage and a "willed objectivity" to read him. He
rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose
until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must
either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done
us. For the "souls of black folk," in W E. B. DuBois' phrase, are
the best mirror in which to see the white American self in midtwentieth century.
It takes a certain boldness on Cleaver's part, also, to open
this collection of essays with the section not merely on rape but
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PART ONE
On Becoming
Folsom Prison
June 25, 1965
1~
22
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wtd and I did not for one minute thi~ that anything was
w ong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or
ltl't' years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader,. that
liJ.trijuana was superior to lush-yet the rulers of the land
"med all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more
p~";tified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a
tt.tsshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly
~~prisoned.
While all this was going on, our group was espousing
. tlwism. Unsophisticated and not based on any philosophical
'.tt onale, our atheism was pragmatic. I had come to believe
d,,,, there is no God; if there is, men do not know anything
.th11ut him. Therefore, all religions were phony-which made
. 11 preachers and priests, in our eyes, fakers, including the ones
,, urrying around the prison who, curiously, could put in a
f'"nd word for you with the Almighty Creator of the universe
lut could not get anything down with the warden or parole
l.n.trd-they could usher you through the Pearly Gates cifter you
,,,.,c dead, but not through the prison gate while you were still
.rim and kickina. Besides, men of the cloth who work in prison
1 \11' an ineradicable stigma attached to them in the eyes of con\'H'ts because they escort condemned men into the gas chamlwr. Such men of God are powerful arguments in favor of
.1thf'ism. Our atheism was a source of enormous pride to me.
l.11cr on, I bolstered our arguments by reading Thomas Paine
.uu I his devastating critique of Christianity in particular and orl':mized religion in general.
Through reading I was amazed to discover how confused
l~~'ople were. I had thought that, out there beyond the horizon
, .r my own ignorance, unanimity existed, that even though I
24
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.md sank its claws deeper into my soul. I knew then that I
1... 1: l'ound an important key, that if I conquered The Ogre and
I ~k1 its power over me I would be free. But I also knew _that it
,, .n a race against time and that if I did not win I would cerlnuly be broken and destroyed. I, a black man, confronted The
,~n--the white woman.
ln prison' these things withheld from and denied to the
1o1 ~:mer become precisely what he wants most of all, of
; rsl~. Because we were locked up in our cells before darkness
l1 II, I used to lie awake at night racked by painful craving to
.~, .. tleisurely stroll under the stars, or to go to the beach, to
.1. .,.,.a car on a freeway, to grow a beard, or to make love to a
nu-
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S ou I on
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E I d r i doe C I e a v e r
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E I d r i d g e
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1,. 1~1
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EI d r I dg e
CI e a v e r
TO A WHITE GIRL
I love you
Because you're white,
Not because you're charming
Or bright.
Your whiteness
Is a silky thread
Snaking through my thoughts
In redhot patterns
Of lust and desire.
I hate you
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r 11mdi,
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I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been
apprehended I would have slit some white throats. There are, of
course, many yoWlg blacks out there right now who are slitting
white throats and raping the white girl. They are not doing this
because they read LeRoi Jones' poetry, as some of his critics
seem to believe. Rather, LeRoi is expressing the funky facts
of life.
After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself
and, for 'the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong,
that I had gone astray-astray not so much from the white
man's law as from being human, civilized-for I could not approve the act of rape. Even though I had some insight into my
own motivations, I did not feel justified. I lost my self-respect.
My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered.
That is why I started to write. To save myself.
I realized that no one could save me but myself. The
prison authorities were both uninterested and. unable to help
me. I had to seek out the truth and Wlravel the snarled web of
my motivations. I had to find out who I am and what I want to
be, what type of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable. I understood that what
had happened to me had also happened to coWltless other
blacks and it would happen to many, many more.
I learned that I had been taking the easy way out, running
away from problems. I also learned that it is easier to do evil
than it is to do good. And I have been terribly impressed by the
youth of America, black and white. I am proud of them because
they have reaffirmed my faith in humanity. I have come to feel
what must be love for the young people of America and I want
SouI on Ice
35
' 1., part of the good and greatness that they want for all peo1,(, I-rom my prison cell, I have watched America slowly com'"f .1wake. It is not fully awake yet, but there is soul in the air
.... ] verywhere I see beauty. I have watched the sit-ins, the
f, ' dom raids, the Mississippi Blood Summers, demonstrations
.11"\'t'r the country, the FSM movement, the teach-ins, and the
"'"11nting protest over Lyndon Strangelove's foreign policyoil ',!' this, the thousands of little details, show me it is time
'" ,f raighten up and fly right: That is why I decided to concen1' ,,,.on my writings and efforts in this area. We are a very sick
"'1111ry-I, perhaps, am sicker than most. But I accept that. I
I .1. I you in the beginning that I am extremist by nature-so it
... uly right that I should be extremely sick.
I was very familiar with the Eldridge ~ho came to prison,
1.,1, lhat Eldridge no longer exists. And the one I am now is in
'""' ways a stranger to me. You may fmd this difficult to under 111 I but it is very easy for one in prison to lose his sense of self.
:\111 I if he has been undergoing all kinds of extreme, involved,
'"'I unregulated changes, then he ends up not knowing who he
1. E1ke the point of being attractive to women. You can easily
how a man can lose his arrogance or certainty on that point
<\ lilc in prison! When he's in the free world, he gets constant
It ,dhack on how he looks from the number of female heads he
IIIII!.'> when he walks down the street. In prison he gets only
lt.1tt-stares and sour frowns. Years and years ofbitter looks. lndi' dnality is not nourished in prison, neither by the officials nor
I v 1he convicts. It is a deep hole out of which to climb.
What must be done, I .believe, is that all these problemsl''rt icularly the sickness between the white woman and the
lol.l<'k man-must be brought out into the open, dealt with and
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E I d r i d 11 e
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resolved. I know that the black man's sick attitude toward the
white woman is a revolutionary sickness: it keeps him perpetually out of harmony with the system that is oppressing him.
Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the Negro
male's lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an esthetic attraction, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
His motivation is often of such a bloody, hateful, bitter, and
malignant nature that whites would really-be hard-pressed to
find it flattering. I have discussed these points with prisoners
who were convicted of rape, and their motivations are very
plain. But they are very reluctant to discuss these things with
white men who, by and large, make up the prison staffs. I believe that in the experience of these men lies the knowledge
and wisdom that must be utilized to help other youngsters who
are heading in the same direction. I think all of us, the entire
nation, will be better off if we bring it all out front. A lot of
people's feelings will be hurt, but that'"is the price- that must
be paid.
It may be that I can harm myself by speaking frankly and
directly, but I do not care about that at all. Of course I want to
get out of prison, badly, but I shall get out some day. I am more
concerned with what I am going to be after I get out. I know
that by following the course which I have charted I will find my
salv~tion. If I had followed the path laid down for me by the officials, I'd undoubtedly have long since been out of prison-but
I'd be less of a man. I'd be weaker and less certain of where I
want to go, what I want to do, and how to go about it.
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
Soul on Ice
Folsom Prison
October 9, 1965
38
E I d r i d g e CI e a v e r
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39
40
EI d r i d g e CI e a ve r
are lying and even if you could manage to fool the lawyer you
could never manage to fool yourself.
And why does it make you sad to see how everything
hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a
dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill
or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds
are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest
decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty,
of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of
heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.
So I love my lawyer. My lawyer is not an ordinary person.
My lawyer is a rebel, a revolutionary who is alienated fundamentally from the status quo, probably with as great an intensity,
conviction, and irretrievability as I am alienated from it-and
probably with more intelligence, compassion, and humanity. If
you read the papers, you are no doubt aware of my lawyer's incessant involvement in agitation against all manifestations of the
monstrous evil of our system, such as our intervention in the internal affairs of the Vietnamese people or the invasion of the
Dominican Republic by U.S. Marines. And my lawyer defends
civil rights demonstrators, sit-iners, and the Free Speech students who rebelled against the Kerr-Strong machine at the University of California. My love for my lawyer is due, in part, to
these activities and involvements; because we are always on the
same side of the issues. And I love all my allies. But this, which
may be the beginning of an explanation, does not nearly explain
what goes on between my lawyer and me.
I suppose that I should be honest and, before going any
further, admit that my lawyer is a woman-or maybe I should
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41
1.....
'"1'.'"'
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EId r i d
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themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other[ Better to maintain shallow, superficial
affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked
from the soul.
But I do not believe a beautiful relationship has to end always in carnage, or that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious with one another. If we project fraudulent, pretentious
images, or if we fantasize each other into distorted caricatures
of what we really are, then, when we awake from the trance
and see beyond the sham and front, all will dissolve, all will dit"
or be transformed into bitterness and hate. I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold
onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves
as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order
continuously to impress the second party.
If a man is free-not in prison, the Army, a monastery,
hospital, spaceship, submarine-and living a normal life with
the usual multiplicity of social relations with individuals of
both sexes, it may be that he is incapable of experiencing the
total impact of another individual upon himself. The competing
influences and conflicting forces of other personalities may di~ute one's psychic and emotional perception, to the extent that
one does not and cannot receive all that the other person is capable of sending.
Yet I may believe that a man whose soul or emotional apparatus had lain dormant in a deadening limbo of desuetude is
capable of responding from some great sunken well of his being, as though a potent catalyst had been tossed into a critical
mass, when an exciting, lovely, and lovable woman enters the
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EI d r i d g e CI e a ve r
his mind as soon as she has gone, his mind fights for a token of
her on which to peg memory. Jealously, he hoards the fading
memory of their encounter, like a miser gloating over a folio of
blue-chip stock. The unfathomable machinery of the subconscious projects an image onto the conscious mind: her bare
right arm, from curve of shoulder to fingertip. (Had his lips
quivered with desire to brand that soft, cool-looking flesh with
a kiss of fire, had his fingers itched to caress?) Such is the magic
of a woman, the female principle of nature which she embodies, and her power to resurrect and revitalize a long-isolated
and lonely man.
I was twenty-two when I came to prison and of course I
have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always
had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt I was
losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that
eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would
be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it
haunted the back of my mind. Because of this numb spot, I felt
peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a
blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know
what it was. After eight years in prison, I was visited by a
woman, a woman who was interested in my work and cared
about what happened to me. And since encountering her, I feel
life, strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of
my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has
begun to recover a definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which
makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a
little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, "push myself forward
like a train."
Four Vignettes
On Watts
Folsom Prison
A,
46
EI d r i d g e
CI e a v e r
lRed.r. A barbiturate, called Red Devi.ls; so called because of the color of the capsule and
because they are reputed to possess a vicious kick.
1Hiah-siding.
SouI
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47
Eyes
Folsom Prison,
October 2 8, 1965
' nn I was walking down Main Street in L.A. around noon on
48
EI d r i d g e CI e a ve r
.,
SouI
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49
Soul Food
Folsom Prison,
November 3, 1965
'''" lwar a lot of jazz about Soul Food. Take chitterlings: the
,dwlln blacks eat them from necessity while the black bour1 >~'ac
I"
"I'll' in the ghetto want steaks. Beif Steaks. I wish I had the
1" 1\'tT
50
EI d r i d g e CI e a v e r
A Religious Conversion,
More or less
Folsom Prison,
September 10, 1965
Once I was a Catholic. I was baptized, made my first Communion, my Confirmation, and I wore a Cross with Jesus on it
around my neck. I prayed at night, said my Rosary, went to
Confession, and said all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers to
which I was sentenced by the priest. Hopelessly enamored of
sin myself, yet appalled by the sins of others, I longed for Judgment Day and a trial before a jury of my peers-this was my
only chance to escape the flames which I could feel already
licking at my feet. I was in a California Youth Authority institution at the time, having transgressed the laws of man-God
did not indict me that time; if He did, it was a secret indictment, for I was never informed of any charges brought against
me. The reason I became a Catholic was that the rule of the institution held that every Sunday each inmate had to attend the
church of his choice. I chose the Catholic Church because all
the Negroes and Mexicans went there. The whites went to
the Protestant chapel. Had I been a fool enough to go to the
Protestant chapel, one black face in a sea of white, and with
guerrilla warfare going on between us, I might have ended up a
Christian martyr-St. Eldridge the Stupe.
It all ended one day when, at a catechism class, the priest
asked if anyone present understood the mystery of the Holy
S ouI on I c e
51
'" "' der to drive home the point that the Holy Trinity was not
.. 1... taken lightly.
I had intended to explain the Trinity with an analogy to
1 "'
Folsom Prison,
September 10, 1965
rl,,
'' ... her at San Quentin and guru to all who came to him. What
.lr.llw teach? Everything. It is easier just to say he taught Lovd1' If .md let it go at that. He himself claimed to be sort of a
.l .,rple of Alan W. Watts, whom he used to bring over to Q
'" lt,ture us now and then in Hinduisim, Zen Buddhism, and
"'' the' ways the peoples of Asia view the universe. I never
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though he had a special calling tO minister tO the pris1 ~ lie was there day and night and on Saturdays, without
I he
I al
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I J, I up
'!"1 d
""' oll to make it to the prison because his car had a blowout,
1.. ',J In full of apologies and pain next day.
l.ovdjieff had extracted from me my word that I would
"'~~' day read Merton for myself-he did not insist upon any
.
' t" some d ay."E asy enough . I gave my promr" II u lar t tme,
JUS
'
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stopped him from teaching night school. Then they took away
his pass and barred him from San Quentin.
I must say that this man has not been adequately described. Certain things I hold back on purpose, others I don't
know how to say. Until I began writing this, I did not know that
I had a vivid memory of him. But now I can close my eyes and
relive many scenes in which he goes into his act.
M)'
Folsom Prison,
September 19, 1965
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bends, butterilies, touching my toes, squats, windmills. I continue for about half an hour.
Sometimes, if I have something I want to write or type so
that I can mail it that morning, I forgo my calisthenics. But. this
is unusual. (We are required, if we want our mail to go out on
a certain day, to have it in the mailbox by about 8:00. When we
leave our cells at 7:30 to go to breakfast, we pass right by the
mailbox and drop in our mail on the way to mess hall.)
Usually, by the time I finish my calisthenics, the trusty
(we call him tiertender, or keyman) comes by and fills my little
bucket with hot water. We don't have hot running water ourselves. Each cell has a small sink with a cold-water tap, a bed, a
locker, a shelf or two along the wall, and a commode. The
trusty has a big bucket, with a long spout like the ones people
use to water their flowers, only without the sprinkler. He
pokes the spout through the bars and pours you about a gallon
of hot water. My cell door doesn't have bars on it; it is a solid
slab of steel with fifty-eight holes in it about the size of a half
dollar, and a slot in the center, at eye level, about an inch wide
and five inches long. The trusty sticks the spout through one of
the little holes and pours my hot water, and in the evenings the
guard slides my mail to me through the slot. Through the same
slot the convicts pass newspapers, books, candy, and cigarettes
Lo one another.
When the guard has mail for me he stops at the cell door
and calls my name, and I recite my number-A-29498-to
verify that I am the right Cleaver. When I get mail I avert my
eyes so I can't see who it's from. Then I sit down on my bed and
peep at it real slowly, like a poker player peeping at his cards. I
can feel when I've got a letter from you, and when I peep up on
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'"ur name on the envelope I let out a big yell. It's like having
l1 111r aces. But if the letter is not from you, it's like having two
ol1uces, a three, a four, and a five, all in scrambled suits. A bum
J. wk. Nothing. What is worse is when the guard passes my door
wi1hout pausing. l can hear his keys jingling. If he stops at my
1lnor the keys sound like Christmas bells ringing, but if he
lttcps going they just sound like-keys.
I live in the honor block. In the other block, the fronts of
tlw cells consist of nothing but bars. When I first moved into
IIH' honor block, I didn't like it at all. The cells seemed made
lir a dungeon. The heavy steel doors slammed shut with a
, l.mg of finality that chilled my soul. The first time that door
1losed on me I had the same wild, hysterical sensation I'd felt
v~~ars ago at San Quentin when they first locked me in solitary.
lor the briefest moment I felt like yelling out for help, and it
cmed that in no circumstances would I be able to endure that
nIL All in that split second I felt like calling out to the guards,
pleading with them to let me out of the cell, begging them to
l"t me go, promising them that I would be a good boy in the
luture.
But just as quickly as the feeling came, it went, dissolved,
.md I felt ~t peace with myself. I felt that I could endure anything, everything, even the test of being broken on the rack.
I've been in every type of cell they have in the prisons of California, and the door to my present cell seems the most cruel
.md ugly of all. However, I have grown to like this door. When I
go out of my cell, I can hardly wait to get back in, to slam that
1umbersome door, and hear the sharp click as the trusty snaps
the lock behind me. The trusties keep the keys to the cell of
the honor block all day, relinquishing them at night, and to get
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w.1tchTV; (3) going down to the library; or (4) going out to the
\o~rd to walk around, sit in the sun, lift weights, play some
l1mny game-lik~ checkers, chess, marbles, horseshoes, handlo.dl, baseball, shuffieboard, beating on the punching bag, bask.. tball, talk, TV, paddle-tennis, watching the other convicts
wlfo are watching other convicts. When I first came to Folsom,
I was astonished to see the old grizzled cons playing marbles.
J'he marble players of Folsom are legendary throughout the
prison system: I first heard about them years ago. There is a
~.~~nse of ultimate defeat about them .. Some guy might boast
.1hout how he is going to get out next time and stay out, and
,l)meone will put him down by saying he'll soon be back, playmg marbles like a hasbeen, a neverwas, blasted back into childhood by a crushing defeat to his final dream. The marble
players have the game down to an art, and they play all day
long, fanatically absorbed in what they are doing.
If I have a cell partner who knows the game, I play him
hess now and then, maybe a game each night. I have a chess
.~ct of my own and sometimes when I feel like doing nothing
dse, I take out a little envelope in which I keep a collection
of chess problems clipped from newspapers, and run off one
1 1r two. But I have never been able to give all my time to one of
these games.- I am seldom able to play a game of chess out on
the yard. Whenever I go out on the yard these days, I'm usually
1m my way to the library.
On the yard there is a little shack off to one corner which
s the office of the Inmates Advisory Council (IAC). Sometimes
I visit the shack to shoot the bull and get the latest drawings
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.un unable to get the type of reading material I want, and there
all
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days later he told me, "You saw through me the other day,
didn't you?"
"I see through you every day," I told him. He looked as if
he expected or wanted me to hit him or something. I told him
that te was good for nothing but to be somebody's jailhouse
wife and he laughed, then launched into a Lenny Bruce-type
tnonologue.
My own reaction is to have as little as possible to do with
the whites. I have no respect for a duck who runs up to me on
l he yard all buddy-buddy, and then feels obliged not to sit
down \\'ith me. It's not that I'm dying to sit with him either,
but there is a principle involved which cuts me deeply.
Talk about hypocrisy: you should see the library. We are
.tllowed to order, from the state library, only non-fiction and
law books. Of the law books, we can only order books containing court opinion. We can get any. decision of the California
District Court of Appeals, the California Supreme Court,
the U.S. District Courts, the Circuit Courts, and the U.S.
Supreme Court. But books of an explanatory nature are prohibited. Many convicts who do not have lawyers are forced to
act in propria persona. They do all right. But it would be much
easier if they could get books that showed them how properly
to plead their cause, how to prepare their petitions and briefs.
This is a perpetual sore point with the Folsom Prison Bar Assodation, as we call ourselves.
All of the novels one needs to read are unavailable, and the
librarian won't let you send for them. I asked him once if he
had read a certain book.
"Oh, yes!" he exclaimed.
"What did you think of it?' I asked.
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Killens, etc.-no action. They also have this sick thing going
when it ~mes to books by and about Negroes. Robert F.
Williams' book, Negroes with Guns, is not allowed any more, I
rdered it from the state library before it was too popular
.tround here. I devoured it and let a few friends read it, before
1he librarian dug it and put it on the blacklist. Once I ordered
I wo books from the inmate canteen with my own money.
When they arrived here from the company, the librarian impounded them, placing them on my "property" the same as
I hey did my notebooks.
I want to devote my time to reading and writing, with
verything else secondary, but I can't do that in prison. I have
to keep my eyes open at all times or I won't make it. There is
always some madness going on, and whether you like it or not
you're involved. There is no choice in the matter: you cannot
sit arid wait for things to come to you. So I engage in all kinds
of petty intrigue which I've found necessary to survival. It consumes a lot of time and energy. But it is necessary.
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tTt.:asing bitterness of their rivalry. But death made the split final and sealed it for history. These events caused a profound
l~~'rsonal crisis in my life and beliefs, as it did for other Muslims.
I >uring the bitter time of his suspension and prior to his break
with Elijah Muhammad, we had watched Malcolm X as he
:.cmght frantically to reorient himself and establish a new plattorm. It was like watching a master do a dance with death on a
highstrung tightrope. He pirouetted, twirled, turned somer:.,t.Ults in the air-but he landed firmly on his feet and was off
.md running. We watched it all, seeking a cause to condemn
Malcolm X and cast him out of our hearts. We read all the
,harges and countercharges. I found Malcolm X blameless.
It had been my experience that the quickest way to beome hated by the Muslims was to criticize Elijah Muhammad
c1r disagree with something he wrote or said. If Elijah wrote, as
he has done, that the swine is a poison creature composed of
1/3 rat, 1/3 cat, and Y3 dog and you attempted to cite scientific
facts to challenge this, you had sinned against the light, that was
.111 there was to it. How much more unlikely was it, therefore,
that Muslims would stand up and denounce Elijah himself, repudiate his authority and his theology, deny his revelation, and
take sides against him, the Messenger of Almighty God Allah?
I never dreamed. that someday I would be cast in that hapless role.
After Malcolm made his pilgrimage to Mecca, completing a triumphal tour of Africa and the Near East, during which
he received the high honors of a visiting dignitary, he returned
to the U.S.A. and set about building his newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity. He also established the Muslim
Mosque, Inc., to receive the Muslims he thought would pull
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dead by a San Quentin prison guard, and who at the time had
been my cell partner and the inmate Minister of the Muslims of
San Quentin, my leadership of the Muslims of San Quentin had
been publicly endorsed by Elijah Muham~ad's west coast representative, Minister John Shabazz of Muhammad's Los Angeles
Mosque. This was done because of the explosive conditions in
San Quentin at the time. Muslim officials wanted to avert any
Muslim-initiated violence, which had become a distinct possibility in the aftermath of Brother Booker's death. I was instructed to impose an iron discipline upon the San Quentin
Mosque, which had continued to exist despite the unending efforts of prison authorities to stamp it out. Most of the Muslims
who were in prison during those days have since been released.
I was one of the few remaining and I was therefore looked
upon by the other Muslims as one who had sacrificed and invested much in the struggle to advance the teachings of Elijah
Muhammad. For that reason, my defection to Malcolm X
caused a great deal of consternation among the Muslims of Folsom. But slowly, Malcolm was getting his machine together
and it was obvious to me that his influence was growing. Negro
inmates who had had reservations about Malcolm while he was
under Elijah's authority now embraced him, and it was clear
that they accepted Malcolm's leadership. Negroes whom we
had ~ried in vain for years to convert to Elijah's fold now lined
up with enthusiasm behind Malcolm.
I ran a regular public relations campaign for Malcolm in
Folsom. I saw to it that copies of his speeches were made and
circulated among Negro inmates. I never missed a chance to
speak favorably about Malcolm, to quote him, to explain and
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p1stify what he was trying to do. Soon I had the ear of the Muslnns, and it was not long before Malcolm had other ardent def,nders in Folsom. In a very short time Malcolm became the
lwro of the vast majority of Negro inmates. Elijah Muhammad
\\ ...s quickly becoming irrelevant, passe.
Malcolm X had a special meaning for black convicts. A
f, 1rmer prisoner himself, he had risen from the lowest depths
to great heights. For this reason he was a symbol of hope, a
1nodel for thousands of black convicts who found themselves
trapped in the vicious PPP cycle: prison-parole-prison. One
I lung that the judges, policemen, and administrators of prisons
.. ,.em never to have understood, and for which they certainly
do not make any allowances, is that Negro convicts, basically,
rJther than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of
111isdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the vic' ims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as
In cancel out their own malefactions: in the jungle there is no
right or wrong.
Rather than owing and paying a debt to society, Negro
prisoners feel that they are being abused, that their imprisonuent is simply another form of the oppression which they have
known all their lives. Negro inmates feel that they are being
robbed, that it is "society" that owes them, that should be paymg them, a debt.
America's penology does not take this into account. Malcolm X did, and black convicts know that the ascension to
power of Malcolm X or a man like him would eventually have
revolutionized penology in America. Malcolm delivered a mer' iless and damning indictment of prevailing penology. It is only
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PART TWO
ight from the go, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I
am not now, nor have I ever been, a white man. Nor, I hasten to add, am I now a Black Muslim~although I used to be.
But I am an Ofay Watcher, a member of that unchartered,
amorphous league which has members on all continents and
the islands of the seas. Ofay Watchers Anonymous, we might be
called, because we exist concealed in the shadows wherever
colored people have lmown oppression by whites, by white enslavers, colonizers, imperialists, and neo-colonialists.
Did it irritate you, compatriot, for_me to string those epi-
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thets out like that? Tolerate me. My intention was not necessarily
to sprinkle salt over anyone's wounds. I did it primarily to relieve a certain pressure on my brain. Do you cop that? If not,
then we're in trouble, because we Ofay Watchers. have a pronounced tendency to slip into that mood. If it is bothersome to
you, it is quite a task for me because not too long ago it was my
way of life to preach, as ardently as I could, that the white race
is a race of devils, created by their maker to do evil, and make
evil appear as good; that the white race is the natural, unchange
able enemy of the black man, who is the original man, owner,
maker, cream of the planet Earth; that the white race was soon
to be destroyed by Allah, and that the black man would then in
herit the earth, which has always, in fact, been his.
I have,. so to speak, washed my hands in the blood of the
martyr, Malcolm X, whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am
now caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my
own. Having renounced the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, I
find that a rebirth does not follow automatically, of its own accord, that a void is left in one's vision, and this void seeks con
stantly to obliterate itself by pulling one back to one's former
outlook. I have tried a tentative compromise by adopting a select. vocabulary, so that now when I see the whites of their eyes,
instead of saying "devil" or "beast" I say "imperialist" or "colonialist," and everyone seems to be happier.
In silence, we have spent our years watching the ofays,
trying to understand them, on the principle that you have a
better chance coping with the known than with the unknown.
Some of us have been, and some still are, interested in learning
whether it is ultimately possible to live in the same territory
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psychic pain of waking into consciousness to find their inherited heroes turned by events into villains. Communication and
understanding between the older and younger generations of
whites has entered a crisis. The elders, who, in the tradition of
privileged classes or races, genuinely do not understand the
youth, trapped by old ways of thinking and blind to the future,
have only just begun to be vexed-because the youth have only
just begun to rebel. So thoroughgoing is the revolution in the
psyches of white youth that the traditional tolerance which
every older generation has found it necessary to display is
quickly exhausted, leaving a gulf of fear, hostility, mutual misunderstanding, and contempt.
The rebellion of the oppressed peoples of the world,
along with the Negro re:volution in America, have opened the
way to a new evaluation of history, a re-examination of the role
played by the white race since the beginning of European expansion. The positive achievements are also there in the record,
and future generations will applaud them. But there can be no
applause now, not while the master still holds the whip in his
hand! Not even the master's own children can find it possible
to applaud him-he cannot even applaud himself! The negative
rings too loudly. Slave-catchers, slaveowners, murderers,
butchers, invaders, oppressors-the white heroes have acqllired new names. The great white statesmen whom school
children are taught to revere are revealed as the architects of
systems of human exploitation and slavery. Religious leaders
are exposed as condoners and justifiers of all these evil deeds.
Schoolteachers and college professors are seen as a clique of
brainwashers and whitewashers.
The white youth of today are coming to see, intuitively,
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that to escape the onus of the history their fathers made they
must face and admit the moral truth concerning the works of
their fathers. That such venerated figures as George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson owned hundr~ds of black slaves, that all
the Presidents up to Lincoln presided over a slave state, and
that every President since Lincoln connived politically and
cynically with the issues affecting the human rights and general
welfare of the broad masses of the American people-these
facts weigh heavily upon the hearts of these young people.
The elders do not like to give these youngsters credit for
heing able to understand what is going on and what has gone
on. When speaking of juvenile delinquency, or the rebellious
attitude of today's youth, the elders employ a glib rhetoric.
They speak of the "alienation of youth," the desire of the young
to be independent, the problems of"the father image" and "the
mother image" and their effect upon growing children who
lack sound models upon which to pattern themselves. But they
consider it bad form to connect the problems of the youth with
the central event of our era-the national liberation movements abroad and the Negro revolution at home. The foundations of authority have been blasted to bits iri America because
the whole society has been indicted, tried, and convicted of injustice. To the youth, the elders are Ugly Americans; to the elders, the youth have gone mad.
The rebellion of the white youth has gone through four
broadly discernible stages. First there was an initial recoiling
away, a rejection of the conformity which America expected,
and had always received, sooner or later, from its youth. The
disaffected youth were refusing to participate in the system,
having discovered that America, far from helping the underdog,
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was up to its ears in the mud trying to hold the dog down. Because of the publicity and self-advertisements of the more vocal
rebels, this period has come to be known as the beatnik era,
although not all of the youth affected by these changes thought
of themselves as beatniks. The howl of the beatniks and their
scathing, outraged denunciation of the system-characterized
by Ginsberg as Moloch, a bloodthirsty Semitic deity to which
the ancient tribes sacrificed their firstborn children-was a
serious, irrevocable declaration of war. It is revealing that the
elders looked upon the beatniks as mere obscene misfits who
were too lazy to take baths and too stingy to buy a haircut. The
elders had eyes but couldn't see, ears but couldn't hear-not
even when the message came through as clearly as in this remarkable passage from Jack Kerouac's On the Road:
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching
among the lights of the 27th and Welton in the Denver
colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that
the best the white world had offered was not enough
ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,
music, not enough night. I wished I were a Denver
Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but
what I so drearily was, a "white man" disillusioned. All
my life I'd had white ambitions .... I passed the dark
porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices
were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; the dark faces of the man behind
rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient
rocking chairs.
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these tools against the totalitarian fabric of American societyand they mean to change it.
From the beginning, America has been a schizophrenic
nation. Its two conflicting images of itself were never reconciled, because never before has the survival of its most cherished myths made a reconciliation mandatory. Once before,
during the bitter struggle between North and South climaxed
by the Civil War, the two images of America came into conflict,
although whites North and South scarcely understood it. The
image of America held by its most alienated citizens was advanced neither by the North nor by the South; it was perhaps
best expressed by Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery in 1817, escaped to the North, and became the greatest
leader-spokesman for the blacks of his era. In words that can
still, years later, arouse an audience of black Americans, Frederick Douglass delivered, in 1852, a scorching indictment in
his Fourth of July oration in Rochester:
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I
answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other
days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to
which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license;
your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds
of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts
of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers
and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all
your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, more
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.md adopt the black are greeted with such unmitigated hostility
ly their elders.
For all these years whites have been taught to believe in
llu' myth they preached, while Negroes have had to face the
litter reality of what America practiced. But without the lies
.md distortions, white Americans would not have been able to
lu the things they have done. When whites are forced to look
honestly upon the objective proof of their deeds, the cement of
111endacity holding white society together swiftly disintegrates.
! >n the other hand, the core of the black world's vision remains
mlact, and in fact begins to expand and spread into the psychol11gical territory vacated by the non-viable white lies, i.e., into
tl.e minds of young whites. It is remarkable how the system
worked for so many years, how the majority of whites reruained effectively unaware of any contradiction between their
1iew of the world and that world itself. The mechanism by
which this was rendered possible requires examination at this
point.
Let us recall that the white man, in order to justify slavery
.md, later on, to justify segregation, elaborated a complex, allpervasive myth which at one time classified the black man as a
~mbhuman beast of burden. The myth was progressively modified, gradually elevating the blacks on the scale of evolution,
following their slowly changing status, until the plateau of
separate-but-equal was reached at the close of the nineteenth
tentury. During slavery, the black was seen as a mindless
Supermasculine Menial. Forced to do the backbreal.dng work,
he was conceived in terms of his ability to do such work"field niggers," etc. The white man administered the plantation,
doing all the thinking, exercising omnipotent power over the
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back across the color line into the Great White World and passing off the watered-down loot as their own original creations.
Blacks, meanwhile, were ridiculed as Negro musicians, playing
inferior coon music.
The Negro revolution at home and national liberation
movements abroad have unceremqniously shatter-ed the world
of fantasy in which the whites have been living. It is painful that
many do not yet see that their fantasy world has been rendered
uninhabitable. in the last half of the twentieth century. But it is
away from this world that the white youth of today are turning.
The "paper tiger" hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want
desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the "White Man, lord of the
land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at myfeet. James
Bond feeds on that secret little anxiety, the psychological white
backlash, felt in some degr-ee by most whites alive. It is exasperating to see little brown men and little yellow men from the
mysterious Orient, and the opaque black men of Africa (to say
nothing of these impudent American Negroes!) who come to
the UN and talk smart to us, who are scurrying all over our
globe in their strange modes of dress-much as if they were
new, unpleasant arrivals from another planet. Many whites believe in their ulcers that it is only a matter- of time before the
Mari..ies get the signal to round up these truants and put them
back securely in their cages. But it is away from this fantasy
world that the white youth of today are turning.
In the world revolution now under way, the initiative
rests with people of color. That growing numbers of white
youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people
of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their
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insight but to the resilience of the human spirit. For today the
heroes of the initiative are people not usually thought of as white:
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tse-tung,
(iamal Abdel Nasser, Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Ben
Bella, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Parris,
Moses, Ho Chi Minh, Stokely Carmichael, W. E. B. DuBois,
James Forman, Chou En-lai.
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact
that the "American Way of Life" is a fossil of history. What do
they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig
their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old,
stiffassed hankies who don't like their new dances: Frug,
Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good
to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragassing across
the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mindsmothered Mickey Mouse music. Is it any wonder that the
youth have lost all respect for their elders, for law and order,
when for as long as they can remember all they've witnessed is
.t monumental bickering over the Negro's place in American
society and the right of people around the world to be left
alone by outside powers?They have witnessed the law, both domestic and international, being spat upon by those who do not
like its terms. Is it any wonder, then, that they feel justified, by
sitting-in and freedom riding, in breaking laws made by lawless
men? Old funny-styled, zipper-mouthed political night riders
know nothing but to haul out an investigating committee .to
look into the disturbance to find the cause of the unrest among the
youth. Look into a mirror! The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs.
Yesterday, you with your forked tongues.
A young white today cannot help but recoil from the base
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world, Joe Louis and Louis Satchmo Armstrong, who was also
noted for blowing a trumpet, were more likely to be quoted on
the subject than A. Philip Randolph or W. E. B. Du Bois. And
more recently, at the peak of a nationwide epidemic of sit-ins
and demonstrations, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called
together a group of "influentialn Negro entertainers and ath
letes to meet with him in secret, to get the message from
The Man and carry the: gospel back to the restless natives. It ac
tually seemed possible to this intelligent Enforcer of the Estab
lishment Will that Queen of the Mellow Mood Lena Horne,
and Harry Belafonte, quarterbacked by James Baldwin, wer1
qualified~not to say "willing," which they weren't~to say or
do something to make the black and white hordes of insurgents
"freeze" for a cooling-off period. Obviously, the move mad1
sense to Kennedy. It was worth trying, because Kennedy knew
that it was based on a solid tradition which had worked for
years. But times had changed, fundamentally, and Kennedy'11
attempted cool-out was greeted with hoots of scorn and con
tempt from Negroes-entertainers and athletes included. Just
as funnyman Dick Gregory got himself shot trying to "cool
off" revolting Negroes in Watts, the celebrities knew that their
standing in the black community, which suddenly had becomt'
important to them, could easily be destroyed if the impression
got out that they were cooperating in an Uncle Tom cool-out
this late in the game. The stakes were growing higher, and Negroes everywhere were becoming eager and anxious to bet
their lives against the status quo. The stupidity of the Uncle Tom
cool-out reached perhaps its most grotesque incarnation when,
after Negroes had rioted and burned in Harlem, the black
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the crown and restore it to its proper "place" in the Free World.
Muhammad Ali, in crushing the Rabbit in twelve-after punishing him at will so there could be no doubt, so that the sport!!
writers could not rob him of his victory on paper-inflicted a
psychological chastisement on "white" white America similar in
shock value to Fidel Castro's at the Bay of Pigs. If the Bay of
Pigs can be seen as a straight right hand to the psychological
jaw of white America, then Las Vegas was a perfect left hook to
the gut.
Essentially, every black champion until Muhammad Ali
has been a puppet, manipulated by whites in his private life to
control his public image. His role was to conceal the strings
from which he was suspended, so as to appear autonomous and
self-motivated before the public. But with the coming of
Muhammad Ali, the puppet-master was left with a handful of
strings to which his dancing doll was no longer attached. For
every white man, feeling himself superior to every black man,
it was a serious blow to his self-image; because Muh~mmadAli,
by the very fact that he leads an autonomous private life, cannot fulfill the psychological needs of whites.
The heavyweight champion is a symbol of masculinity to
the American male. And a black champion, as long as he is
firmly fettered in his private life, is a fallen lion at every white
ma;'s feet. Through a curious psychic mechanism, the puniest
white man experiences himself as a giant-killer, as a superman,
a great white hunter leading a gigantic ape, the black champion
tamed by the white man, around on a leash. But when the ape
breaks away from the leash, beats with deadly fists upon his
massive chest and starts talking to boot, proclaiming himself to
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lw the greatest, spouting poetry, and annihilating every gunlwarer the white hunter sics on him (the white hunter not belllg disposed to crawl into the ring himself), a very serious
.lippage takes place in the white man's self-image-because that
J,y which he difined himself no lonaer has a recoanizable identity. "If
that black ape is a man," the white hunter asks himself, "then
what am I?"
It was really Sonny Liston who marked the coming of the
..utonomous Negro to boxing. But he was nonideological and
the scandal he caused could be handled, albeit with difficulty
.tnd pain. The mystique he exuded was that of a lone wolf who
lid not belong to his people or speak for them. He was for Liston and spoke only for Liston, and this was not out of harmony
with the competitive ethic undergirding American culture. If
"very man is for himself, it was ra,tional for Liston to be for
hlmse!f. Although even this degree of autonomy in a Negro was
bitterly resented, white America could tolerate it with less hyskria, with less of a sense of being threatened. But when the
1deological Negro seized the heavyweight crown, no front of
ool could conceal the ferocious emotional eruption in white
America and among the embarrassed Uncle Toms, who were
.dso experiencing an identity crisis. Yes, even old .faithful Uncle
rom has a self-image. All men must have one or they start seeing themselves as women, women start seeing them as women,
then women lose their own self-image, and soon nobody
knows what they are themselves or what anyone else is-that is
t.o say, the world starts looking precisely as it looks today. For
there to be so deep an uproar over Muhammad Ali should indi<:ate that there is something much more serious than a boxing
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fter reading a couple of James Baldwin's books, I began experiencing that continuous delight one feels upon discovering a fascinating, brilliant talent on the scene, a talent capable
of penetrating so profoundly into one's own little world that
one knows oneself to have been unalterably changed and liberated, liberated from the frustrating grasp of whatever devils
happen to possess one. Being a Negro, I have found this to be a
rare and infrequent experience, for few of my black brothers
and sisters here in America have achieved the power, which
James Baldwin calls his revenge, which outlasts kingdoms: the
power of doing whatever cats like Baldwin do when combining
the alphabet with the volatile elements of his soul. (And, like it
or. not, a black man, unless he has become irretrievably "whiteminded," responds with an additional dimension of his being to
the articulated experience of another black-in spite of the
universality of human experience.)
I, as I imagine many others did and still do, lusted for anything that Baldwin had written. It would have been a gas for me
to sit on a pillow beneath the womb of Baldwin's typewriter
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the big white lies that compose the monolithic myth ofWhittSupremacy/Black Inferiority, in a desperate attempt on the
part of a new generation of ~hite Americans to enter into the
cosmopolitan egalitarian spirit of the twentieth. century. But let
us examine the reasoning that lies behind Baldwin's attack on
Mailer.
There is in James Baldwin's work the most grueling, ago
nizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and
the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of thc
whites that one can find in the writings of any black American
writer of note in our time. This is an appealing contradiction
and the implications of it are vast.
A rereading of Nobody Knows My Name cannot help but
convince the most avid of Baldwin's admirers of the hatred for
blacks permeating his writings. In the essay "Princes and
Powers," Baldwin's antipathy toward the black race is shockingly clear. The essay is Baldwin's interpretation of the conference of Black Writers and Artists which met in Paris in
September 1956. The portrait of Baldwin that comes through
his words is that of a mind in unrelenting opposition to the efforts of solemn, dedicated black men who have undertaken the
enormous task of rejuvenating and reclaiming the shattered
psyches and culture of the black people, a people scattered
OY~r the continents of the world and the islands of the seas,
where they exist in the mud of the floor of the foul dungeon
into which the world has been transformed by the whites.
In his report of the conference, Baldwin, the reluctant
black, dragging his feet at every step, could only ridicule the vision and efforts of these great men and heap scorn upon them,
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difference between a smile and a sneer, or it could be the journey of a nervous impulse from the depths of one's brain to the
tip of one's toe. But this impulse in its path through North
American nerves may, if it is honest, find the passage disputed:
may find the leap from the fiber of hate to that of love too taxing on its meager store of energy-and so the long trip back
may never be completed, may end in a reconnaissance, a compromise, and then a lie.
Self-hatred takes many forms; sometimes it can be
detected by no one, not by the keenest observer, not by the
self-hater himself, not by his most intimate friends. Ethnic selfhate is even more difficult to detect. But in American Negroes,
this ethnic self-hatred often takes the bizarre form of a racial
death-wish, with many and elusive manifestations. Ironically, it
provides much of the impetus behind the motivations of integration. And the attempt to suppress or deny such drives in
one's psyche leads many American Negroes to become ostentatious separationists, Black Muslims, and back-to-Africa advocates. It is no wonder that Elijah Muhammad could conceive of
the process of controlling evolution whereby the white race
was brought into being. According to Elijah, about 6300 years
ago all the people of the earth were Original Blacks. Secluded
on the island of Patmos, a mad black scientist by the name of
Y1cub set up the machinery for grafting whites out of blacks
through the operation of a birth-control system. The population on this island of Patmos was 59,999 and whenever a
couple on this island wanted to get married they were only allowed to do so if there was a difference in their color, so that by
mating black with those in the population of a brownish color
and brown with brown-but never black with black-all
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focuses on "whiteness" all the love in his pent up soul and turns
the razor edge of hatred against "blackness"-upon himself,
what he is, and all those who look like him, remind him ofhim~elf. He may even hate the darkness of night.
The racial death-wish is manifested as the driving force in
James Baldwin. His hatred for blacks, even as he pleads what he
conceives as their cause, makes him the apotheosis of the
dilemma in the ethos of the black bourgeoisie who have completely rejected their African heritage, consider the loss irrevo-
1able, and refuse to look again in that direction. This is the root
of Baldwin's violent repudiation of Mailer's The White Negro.
To understand what is at stake here, and to understand it
in terms of the life of this nation, is to know the central fact
that the relationship between black and white in America is a
power equation, a power struggle, and that this power struggle
IS not only manifested in the aggregate (civil rights, black nationalism, etc.) but also in the interpersonal relationships, actions, and reactions between blacks and whites where taken
into account. When those "two lean cats," Baldwin and Mailer,
met in a French living room, it was precisely this power equation that was at work.
It is fascinating to read (in Nobody Knows My Name) in what
terms this power equation was manifested in Bald\'Vin's immediate reaction to that meeting: "And here we were, suddenly,
circling around each other. We liked each other at once, but
each was frightened that the other would pull rank. He could
have pulled rank on me because he was more famous and had
more money and also because he was white; but I could have pulled
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that "he had penetrated into the heart of the great wilderness
which was Europe and stolen the sacred fire . . . which . . .
was . . . the assurance of his power," seems only too clearly to
:.peak more about Peter than it does about Paul. What Baldwin
;c~:ms to forget is that Cesaire explains that fire, whether sacred
c r profane, burns. In Baldwin's case, though the fire could not
burn the black off his face, it certainly did burn it out of his heart.
I am not interested in denying anything to Baldwin. I, like
I he entire nation, owe a great debt to him. But throughout the
l'ange of his work, from Go Tell It on the Mountain, through Notes
rm a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country, to The
Fire Next Time, all of which I treasure, there is a decisive quirk in
Baldwin's vision which corresponds to his relationship to black
people and to masculinity. It was this same quirk, in my opinion, that compelled Baldwin to slander Rufus Scott in Another
Country, venerate Andre Gide, repudiate The_White Negro, and
drive the blade of Brutus into the corpse of Richard Wright. As
Raldwin has said in Nobody Knows My Name, "I think that I know
::;omething about the American masculinity which most men of
my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way I have been." O.K., Sugar, but isn't it true
that Rufus Scott, the weak, craven-hearted ghost of Another
Country, bears the same relation to Bigger Thomas of Native
Son, the black rebel of the ghetto and a man, as you yourself
bore to the fallen giant, Richard Wright, a rebel and a man?
Somewhere in one of his books, Richard Wright describes
an encounter between a ghost and several young Negroes.
The young Negroes rejected the homosexual, and this was
Wright alluding to a classic, if cruel, example of a ubiquitous
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nmring like a ghost, "You took tbe best so why not take tbe rest,"
which has absolutely nothing to do with the way Negroes have
rnanaged to survive here in the hells of North America! This all
becomes very clear from what we learn of Erich, the archf,host of Another Country, of the depths of his alienation from his
body and the source of his need: "And it had taken him almost
until this very moment, on the eve of his departure, to begin to
n~cognize that part of Rufus' great power over him had to do
with the past which Erich had buried in some deep, dark place;
was connected with himself, in Alabama, when I wasn't notbtna
l>ut a child; with the cold white people and the warm black
people, warm at least for him ...."
So, too, who cannot wonder at the course of such auda' ious madness as moved Baldwin to make this startling remark
.1bout Richard Wright, in his ignoble essay "Alas, Poor
Richard": "In my own relations with him, I was always exasperted by his notions of society, politics, and history, for they
~eemed to me utterly fanciful. I never believed that he had any
real sense of how a society is put together."
Richard Wright is dead and Baldwin is alive and with us.
Baldwin says that Richard Wright held notions that were
utterly fanciful, and Baldwin is an honorable man.
"0 judgment; thou art fled to
brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!"
Wright has no need, as Caesar did, of an outraged Antony
lo plead his cause: his life and his work are his shield against the
mellow thrust of Brutus' blade. The good that he did, unlike
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Caesar's, will not be interred with his bones. It is, on the contrary, only the living who can be harmed by Brutus.
Baldwin says that in Wright's writings violence sits enthroned where sex should be. If this is so, then it is only because
in North American reality hate holds sway in love's true province. And it is only through a rank perversion that the artist,
whose duty is to tell us the truth, can turn the two-dollar trick
of wedding violence to love and sex to hate-if, to achieve
this end, one has basely to transmute rebellion into lamblikt:
submission-"You took the best," sniveled Rufus, "so why not take
the rest?" Richard Wright was not ghost enough to achieve this
cruel distortion. With him, sex, being not a spectator sport or
a panacea but the sacred vehicle of life and love, is itself sacred.
And the America which Wright knew and which is, is not tht
Garden of Eden but its opposite. Baldwin, embodying in his art
the self-flagellating policy of Martin Luther King, and giving
out falsely the news that the Day of the Ghost has arrived,
pulled it off in Another Country.
Of all black American novelists, and indeed of all American novelists of any hue, Richard Wright reigns supreme for his
profound political, economic, and social reference. Wright had
the ability, like Dreiser, of harnessing the gigantic, overwhelm
ing environmental forces and focusing them, with pinpoint
sha-.. pness, on individuals and their acts as they are caught up in
the whirlwind of the savage, anarchistic sweep of life, love,
death, and hate, pain, hope, pleasure, and despair across tht
face of a nation and the world. But, ah! "0 masters," it is Bald
win's work which is so void of a political, economic, or even <l
social reference. His characters all seem to be fucking and
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Consciencism.
ive years ago, even the most audacious visionary would not
have dared predict the slashing do-or-die desperation and
the sizzling up-tempo beat which has exploded into our politics, into our daily conversation, and into our nightmares and
dreams. The ferment beneath the surface of our formal politics
and public debate has grown more important in the last five
years than at any time since the years preceding the Civil War.
The parapolitics of the first Johnson Congress which, in contrast to most of its predecessors, seemed to resemble the dynamiting of a logjam, was actually sluggish, compromising, and
drag-footish in terms of the pressing social problems which are
feeding the conflagration raging in America's soul; problems
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.onse, both the new left and the new right are the spawn of the
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lw of the diehard enthusiasts of armed intervention in the inlornal affairs of the Dominican Republic and Latin America
,._,nerally.
It is no coincidence that such political cavemen and fos.dized intellects as Senator Stennis of Mississippi and Strom
I hurmond of South Carolina were the first to speak out against
11,,. Vietnam Day demonstrations and protest marches held
throughout America in October 1965. They who once spoke
111t so vehemently against the Negro revolution are still fightlllg the same war; they have merely retreated to different ter,,,in. The massive upsurge of the Negro people and the support
.md sympathy aroused in the white community beat the dinosaurs back from their first line of defense: the color line. But
these opponents of the Negro revolution, routed on the issue
111' civil rights, have by no means folded up their tents and
.linked away disgracefully in defeat. They have regrouped and
,ntrenched themselves on a new front. They understand that
the Negro's basic situation cannot really change without structural changes in America's political and economic system.
What the Negro now needs and consciously seeks is political and economic power. And ultimately we shall witness the
merging of the Negro revolution with a broader movement demanding disarmament and conversion of the economy to
peaceful purposes. This prospect, of an alliance between the
Negro revolution, the new left and the peace movement, fills
lhe power structure with apprehension; witness the furious reaction provoked by Martin Luther King when he called for the
cessation of American bombings of North Vietnam, negotiations with the National Liberation Front, and admission of
China into the UN.
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received a full hearing. Everybody knew that the black man had
been denied justice. No one doubted that it was time fi,r
changes and that the black man should be made a first-clao;~,
citizen. But Reconstruction ended. Blacks who had been elt
vated to high positions were brusquely kicked out into the
streets and herded along with the mass of blacks into the ghet
tos and black belts. The lyncher and the burner received virtual
license to murder blacks at will. White Americans found a new
level on which to cool the blacks out. And with the help of sud1
tools as BookerT. Washington, the doctrine of segregation wa:;
clamped firmly onto the backs of the blacks. It has taken a hun
dred years to struggle up from that level of cool-out to tht
miserable position that black Americans now find themselves
in. Time is passing. The historical opportunity which world
events now present to black Americans is running out with
every tick of the clock.
This is the last act of the show. We are living in a time
when the people of the world are making their final bid for full
and complete freedom. Never before in history has this condition prevailed. Always before there have been more or less articulate and aware pockets of people, portions of classes, etc.,
but today's is an era of mass awareness, when the smallest man
on the street is in rebellion against the system which has denied
h.m life and which he has come to understand robs him of his
dignity and self-respect. Yet he is being told that it will take
time to get programs started, to pass legislation, to educate
white people into accepting the idea that black people want
and deserve freedom. But it is physically impossible to move as
fast as the black man would like to move. Black men are deadly
serious when they say FREEDOM NOW. Even if the white man
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they mean the white man, not the black man who is a recently
freed slave. The white man is deliberately trying to make th('
people of the world turn against black Americans, because ht
knows that the day is coming when black Americans will need
the help and support of their brothers, friends, and natural al
lies around the world. If through stupidity or by following
hand-picked leaders who are the servile agents of the power
structure, black Americans allow this strategy to succeed
against them, then when the time comes and they need this
help and support from around the world, it will not be there.
All of the international love, respect, and goodwill that black
Americans now have around the world will have dried up. They
themselves will have buried it in the mud of the rice paddies of
Vietnam.
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l1i.H:ks, who in this land of private property have all private and
no property, got excited into an uproar because they noticed a
11'P before he had a chance to wash the blood off his hands.
llsually the police department can handle such flare-ups. But
1his time it was different. Things got out of hand. The blacks
wL"re running amok, burning, shooting, breaking. The police
'kpartment was powerless to control them; the chief called for
tcinforcements. Out came the National Guard, that ambiguous
hvbrid from the twilight zone where the domestic army
merges with the international; that hypocritical force poised
within America and capable of action on either level, capable of
i>J.cking up either the police or the armed forces. Unleashing
I heir formidable firepower, they crushed the blacks. But things
will never be the same again. Too many people saw that those
who turned the other cheek in Watts got their whole head
blown off. At the same time, heads were being blown off in
Vietnam. America was embarrassed, not by the quality of her
d,.~'ds but by the surplus of publicity focused upon her negative
;elling points, and a little frightened because of what all those
dead bodies, on two fronts, implied. Those corpses spoke elo'luently of potential allies and alliances. A community of interst began to emerge, dripping with blood, out of the ashes of
Watts. The blacks in Watts and all over America could now see
I he Viet Cong's point: both were on the receiving end of what
the armed forces were dishing out.
So now the blacks, stung by the new knowledge they have
unearthed, cry out: "POLICE BRUTALITY!" From one end of the
t:ountry to the other, the new war cry is raised. Th~ youth,
those nodes of compulsive energy who are all fuel and muscle,
race their motors, itch to do something. The Uncle Toms, no
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the Pentagon, who receive them from the Se<.:retary of Defense, who receives them from the President, who is shroudec
in mystery. The soldier in the field in Vietnam, the man who lie!
in the grass and squeezes the trigger when a little half-starved,
1rembling Vietnamese peasant crossed his sights, is only following orders, carrying out a policy and a plan. He hardly know!
what it is all about. They have him wired-up tight with the slogans of TV and the World Series. All he knows is that he ha!
l1een assigned to carry out a certain ritual of duties. He is well
lrained and does the best he can. He does a good job. He r:na)
want to please those above him with the quality of his perfor
mance. He may want to make sergeant, or better. This man i!
from some hicky farm in Shit Creek, Georgia. He only knev.
whom to kill after passing through boot camp. He could just a!
well come out ready to kill Swedes. He \\rill kill a Swede dead iJ
he is ordered to do so.
Same for the policeman in Watts. He is not there on hil
own. They have all been assigned. They have been told what tc
do and what not to do. They have also been told what they better not do. So when they continually do something, in ever)
filthy ghetto in this shitty land, it means only that they are following orders.
Ies no secret that in America the blacks are in total rebellion against the System. They want to get their nuts out of th(
sand. They don't like the way America is run, from top to bottom. In America, everything is owned. Everything is held al
private property. Someone has a brand on everything. There il
nothing left over. Until recently, the blacks themselves wer(
counted as part of somebody's private property, along with th(
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chickens and goats. The blacks have not forgotten this, principally because they are still treated as if they are part of
someone's inventory of assets-or perhaps, in this day of rage
against the costs of welfare, blacks are listed among the nation's
liabilities. On any account, however, blacks are in no position
to respect or help maintain the institution of private property.
What they want is to figure out a way to get some of that property for themselves, to divert it to their own needs. This is
what it is all about, and this is the real brutality involved. This
is the source of all brutality.
The police are the armed guardians of the social order.
The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the American social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the
blacks and the police. It is not solely a matter of trigger-happy
cops, of brutal cops who love to crack black heads. Mostly it's a
job to them. It pays good. And there are numerous fringe benefits. The real problem is a trigger-happy social order.
The Utopians speak of a day when there will be no police.
There will be nothing for them to do. Every man will do his
duty, will respect the rights of his neighbor, will not disturb the
peace. The needs of all will be taken care of. Everyone will have
sympathy for his fellow man. There will be no such thing as
crime. There will be, of course, no prisons. No electric chairs,
no gas chambers. The hangman's rope will be the thing of the
past. The entire earth will be a land of plenty. There will be no
crimes against property, no speculation.
It is easy to see that we are not on the verge of entering
Utopia: there are cops everywhere. North and South, the Negroes are the have-nots. They see property all around them,
property that is owned by whites. In this regard, the black
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his pregnant wife to t~e hospital and is shot dead by a police111.111. An accident. That the sun rises in the east and sets in the
west is also an accident, by design. The blacks are up in arms.
I Tom one end of America to the other, blacks are outraged at
this accident, this latest evidence of what an accident-prone
people they are, of the cruelty and pain of their lives, these
blacks at the mercy of trigger-happy Yankees and Rebs in coalition against their skin. They want the policeman's blood as a
ign that the Viet Cong is not the only answer. A sign to save
them from the deaths they must die, and inllict. The power
,t ructure, without so much as blinking an eye, wouldn't mind
tossing Bova to the mob, to restore law and' order, but it knows
m the vaults of its strength that at all cost the blacks must be
k~pt at bay, that it must uphold the police department, its
( ;uardian. Nothing must be allowed to threaten the set-up. Just ice is secondary. Security is the byword.
Meanwhile, blacks are looking on and asking tactical
1uestions. They are asked to die for the System in Vietnam. In
Watts they are killed by it. Now-NOW/-they are asking each
.. ther, in dead earnest: Why not die right here in Babylon fightuLg for a better life, like the Viet Cong? If those little cats can
do it, what's wrong with big studs like us?
A mood sets in, spreads across America, across the face of
Babylon, jells in black hearts everywhere.
'I
PART THREE
PRELUDE
TO LOVETHREE
LETTERS
V~-Titten,
tl) Mrs. Axelrod for legal assistance. She had visited him three
times before the following exchange of letters took place.]
Eldridge Cleaver
Folsom Prison
Represa, California
September 5, 1965
!>ear Beverly Axelrod:
For two charged days and restless nights after you left, I
l11afed in the case of my skull, feeling prematurely embalmed in
::orne magical ethered mist dispensed by the dialectic of our contact. When I left you sitting in that little glass cage, which I must
;omehow learn to respect because it has a special, eternal meaning now, I did not stop or pause. Including the door to that glass
,...ge, and counting the door of my cell, I passed through twelve
'~;sorted
DAY.
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at.out me, it sort of knocks me for a loop. And you? The things
you said sent me spinning. But don't stop, let me suffer-and
overcome.
I feel impelled to express myself to you extravagantly, and
words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs leap in my mind. But I beat
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Beverly Axelrod
Attorney-at-Law
San Francisco, Calif.
September 10, 1965
/l,!ar Eldrid9e Cleaver:
... The need for expression is now upon me, having fin.hed the legal matters, and I'm getting panicky. I'm not strong
11ough to take the safest course, which would be to not widen
il1f' subject matter of our correspondence, and I'm having a terrihi,_. time trying to say what I want knowing it will be read by the
,,nsors.
Your letter, which I keep rereading, shows you're going
1hrough the same turmoil I am; but I bear the onus of having alJ,Iwed it. You talk about it being lethal, and then about life coming
lo.u:k-and I know that both are true.
I'm going purely on instinct now, which is not usual for me,
l111t somehow I know I'm right, or maybe it's just that it's so imprtant that I don't care about the risk of being wrong. Am I comug through to you? I'm writing I know in an obscure kind of way
lu:cause of the damnable lack of privacy in our communications.
Believe this: I accept you. I know you little and I know you
niUch, but whichever way it goes, I accept you. Your manhood
11mes through in a thousand ways, rare and wonderful. I'm out in
llw world, with an infinity of choices. You don't have to wonder if
I'm
About that other side of the record: Did you really think I
didn't know? Another facet of the crystal might be an apter term;
I have a few facets myself. I do not fear you, I know you will
1111l
hurt me. Your hatred is large, but not nearly so vast as you
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Bever!J Axelrod
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Eldridge Cleaver
Folsom Prison
Represa, California
September 15, !965
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hope to help you find out, he is already finding out; taking it lik1
you find it is a burn, it sells yourself short: be discerning and take
only after you spot what you like-but I'm hoping that it i:~
too late for you to flip over on me because it is certainly much toe>
late for me.
Your thought, "Of all the dangers we share, probably the
greatest comes from our fantasizing about each other. Are w
making each other up?" bothers me. It would be very simple it
that were the case: I could arrange (and how easy it would be!) to
spend the rest of my life in prison and we could live happily evl'l'
after. But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship,
something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transi
tory, ephemeral, and full of pain. We humans, we are too frail
creatures to handle such titanic emotions and deep magneth
yearnings, strivings and impulses.
The reason two people are reluctant to really strip them
selves naked in front of each other is because in doing so thC'y
make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power ow
themselves one to the other. How awful, how deadly, how cata
strophically they can hurt each other, wreck and ruin each othl'J
forever! How often, indeed, they end by inflicting pain and to
ment upon each other. Better to maintain shallow, superficial af
fairs; that way the scars are not too deep, no blood is hacked from
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cally are, then, when we awake from the trance and see beyond
the sham and front, all will dissolve, all will die and transform
into bitterness and hate. I know that sometimes people fake on
cach other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their
\t'nderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they
r,~el forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the
<1ther. I do not want to "hold" you, I want you to "stay" out of your
own need for me.
I seek the profoWld. Contrary to the advice of the Prophet,
I'll take the credit and let the cash go. What I feel for you is prol"oWld. Beverly, there is something happening between us that is
way out of the ordinary. Ours is one for the books, for the poets
to draw new inspiration from, one to silence the cynics, and one
to humble us by reminding us of how little we know about human
beings, about ourselves. I did not know that I had all these feelings
mside me ..They have never been aroused before. Now they casrade down upon my head and threaten to beat me down to the
~.round,
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Eldridge
''.
PART FOUR
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"I'll make it easy for you," the Eunuch said. "You're a gorilla, and a guerrilla is everything you are not."
The Accused opened his mouth to reply, but the Eunuch
on my left, who had cast the first stone, cut him off. "A guerrilla is a man," he snapped, his eyes flashing, "but you're some
kind of freak!"
A self-searching, inward-looking silence ensued. One
thought of blood and guns and knives, whips, ropes and chains
and trees, screams, night riders, fear, nightsticks, police dogs
and firehoses, fire, wounds and bombs, old women in pain and
young women defiled, lies, jeers, little boys frozen in their first
heat and young men destudded and old men burnt out, little
girls psychically vitiated and physically massacred ...
After a while I asked the Accused, in a neutral voice,
"Have you ever hit a black woman?"
As if his switch had been flipped, his eyes lit up and, anxious for what in his death he took to be a change of subject, the
Lazarus took the bait. The twinkle in his eye turned evil as he
leaned across the table and said, in a confidential way: "I wish I
had a nickel for every bitch whose ass I've put my foot in! I'd be
so rich right now that you lames would have to put in your requests six months in advance just to get to see me, let alone sit
down at the same table with me!"
"A home-run slash at your neck with a scimitar is the solution to all your problems, Lazarus!" hissed the Accuser, the
Eunuch on my left, his lips trembling with rage.
"What do you mean by that?" asked the Accused, affecting
not to have understood.
"He means what I mean," said the Eunuch on my right,
"that for four hundred years you have had the fear of the slave-
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master in you, but now it's time for you to know the fear of
your own kind!"
"Humph!" snorted the Accused, and he took a spoonful of
bea,.'ls into his mouth, chewing them absently. He resumed
talking after a few moments. "Black women take kindness for
weakness. Leave them the least little opening and they will put
you on the cross. I hate a black bitch. You can't trust them like
white women, and if you try to, they won't appreciate it and
they won't know how to act. It would be like trying to pamper
a cobra. Anyway, every black woman secretly hates black men.
Secretly, they all love white men-some of them will tell you
so to your face, the others will tell you by their deeds and actions. Haven't you ever noticed that just as soon as a black
woman becomes successful she marries a white man? I'm going
by what I know. I know one black bitch who always says that
there ain't nothing a black man can do for her except leave her
alone or bring her a message from, or carry a message to, a
white man.
"There is no love left between a black man and a black
woman. Take me, for instance. I love white women and hate
black women. It's just in me, so deep that I don't even try to
get it out of me any more. I'd jump over ten nigger bitches just
to get to one white woman. Ain't no such thing as an ugly
white woman. A white woman is beautiful even if she's baldheaded and only has one tooth . . . . It's not just the fact that
she's a woman that I love; I love her skin, her soft, smooth,
white skin. I like to just lick her white skin as if sweet, fresh
honey flows from her pores, and just to touch her long, soft,
silky hair. There's a softness about a white woman, something
delicate and soft inside her. But a nigger bitch seems to be full
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ing ally and she may not even realize it-but the white man
sure does. That's why, all down through history, he has propped
her up economically above you and me, to strengthen her hand
;;gainst us. But the white man is a fool because he is also fighting a war against the white woman. And it doesn't end there:
white men have a war going on against each other.
"The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of
!he coin of the myth of the beautiful dwnb blonde. The white
n1an turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weakbodied, delicate freak, a sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal;
he turned the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon
.md deposited her in his kitchen-that's the secret of Aunt
Jemima's bandanna. The white man turned himself into the
Omnipotent Administrator and established himself in the Front
Office. And he turned the black man into the Supermasculine
Menial and kicked him out into the fields. The white man wants
to be the brain and he wants us to be the muscle, the body. All
this is tied up together in a crazy way which was never too
clear to me. At one time it seems absolutely clear and at other
times I don't believe in it. It reminds me of two sets of handcuffs that have all four of us tied up together, holding all black
and white flesh in a certain mold. This is why, when you get
down to the root of it, the white man doesn't want the black
man, the black woman, or the white woman to have a higher
education. Their enlightenment would pose a threat to his
omnipotence.
"Haven't you ever wondered why the white man genuinely applauds a black man who achieves excellence with his
body in the field of sports, while he hates to see a black man
achieve excellence with his brain? The mechanics of the myth
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demand that the Brain and the Body, like east ~d west, must
never meet-especially in competition on the same level.
When it comes to the mechanics of the myth, the Brain and the
Body are mutually exclusive. There can be no true competition
between superiors a..'ld inferiors. This is why it has been so hard
historically for Negroes to break the color bar in sport after
sport. Once the color bar falls, the magic evaporates, and when
the black man starts to excel in a particular sport the question
stars floating around: 'ls boxing dying?' 'Is baseball through?'
'What happened to football?' 'What is basketball coming to?'
In fact, the new symbol of white supremacy is golf, because
there the Brain dominates the Body. But just as soon as the
Body starts ripping off a few trophies, they will be asking the
question, 'What happened to golf?'
"All this became clear when Joe Louis cleaned out Max
Schmeling in their second fight. Schmeling stood for the very
thing the white man nursed and worshiped in his own heart.
But the whites applauded Joe for crushing Schmeling. Why?
Because Joe's victory over Schmeling symbolized the triumph
of capitalistic democracy over nazism? No! There may have
been a little of that to it, but on a deeper level they applauded
Joe for the same reason they despised Ingemar Johansson,
while rewarding him handsomely, for knocking out Floyd Patter::,on. Joe's victory over Schmeling confirmed, while Floyd's
defeat contradicted, the white man's image of the black man as
the Supermasculine Menial, the personification of mindless
brute force, the perfect slave. And Sonny Liston, the mindless
Body, is preferred over loud-mouthed Cassius Clay, because,
after all, it takes at least a birdbrain to run a loud mouth, and
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the white man despises even that much brain in a black man.
And when Clay, the loud-mouthed clown, abdicates his image
as the Body and becomes Muhammad Ali, the Brain, whitey
can't hold his mud! The white man loves the Supermasculine
Menial-John Henry, the steel-driving ma.""'l, all Body, driven to
his knees by the Machine, which is the phallus symbol of the
Brain a.""'ld the ultimate ideal of the Omnipotent Administrator.
To the white man's way of thinking, this was a perfect system of
social imagery. But like all perfect systems, it had a great big
flaw right in the middle of it.
"The Omnipotent Administrator conceded to the Supermasculine Menial all of the attributes of masculinity associated
with the Body~ strength, brute power, muscle, even the beauty
of the brute body. Except one. There was this single attribute
of masculinity which he was unwilling to relinquish, even
though this particular attribute is the essence and seat of masculinity: sex. The penis. The black man's penis was the monkey
wrench in the white man's perfect machine. The penis, virili1:y,
is of the Body. It is not of the Brain: the Brain is neuter, HOMO
MACHINE. But in the deal which the white man forced upon
the black man, the black man was given the Body as his domain
while the white man preempted the Brain for himself. By and
by, the Omnipotent Administrator discovered that in the fury
of his scheming he had blundered and clipped himself of his penis (notice the puny image the white man has of his own penis.
He calls it a 'prick,' a 'peter,' a 'peeker'). So he reneged on the
bargain. He called the Supermasculine Menial back and said:
'Look, Boy, we have a final little adjustment to make. I'm still
going to be the Brain and you're still the Body. But from now
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on, you do all the Hexing but I'll do all the fucking. The Brain
must control the Body. To prove my omnipotence I mus~_cuck
old you and fetter your bull balls. I will fetter the range of your
rod and limit its reach. My prick will excel your rod. I have
made a calculation. I will have sexual freedom. But I will bind
your rod with my omnipotent will, and place a limitation on its
aspiration which you will violate on pain of death. . . . I will
have access to the white woman and I will have access to the
black woman. The black woman will have access to youbut she will also have access to me. I forbid you access to the
white woman. The white woman will have access to me, the
Omnipotent Administrator, but I deny her access to you, you,
the Supermasculine Menial. By subjecting your manhood to
the control of my will, I shall control you. The stem of the
Body, the penis, must submit to the will of the Brain.'
"It was the perfect solution, only it didn't work. It only
drove the truth underground. You can't really dissociate the penis from the Body! Not even the Brain, the Omnipotent Administrator, can do that! But you can seize the Body in a raae, in
violent and hatifulfrustration at this one areat flaw in a peifect plan,
this monkey wrench in a peifect machine, strina the Body from the
nearest tree and pluck its stranaefruit, its bia Niaaer dick, pickle it in a
bottle and take it home to the beautiful dumb blonde and rejoice in the
lie tuat not the Body but the Brain is the man."
The Lazarus stopped talking and sat there with his mouth
hanging open. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running
and was out of breath. The Eunuch on my left was staring off
into space, looking off deliberately rather than allow anyone to
see the wild look I knew would be in his eyes. Thought refused
to crystallize in my mind; I poured more coffee into my cup,
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deep, peaceful, sweet sleep. I can still recall the ecstasy of that
sleep. I have never in my life experienced such blissful sleep.
When I woke up, she was holding my head cradled in her lap
and she had a beautiful, saintly glow on her face, an expression
that was utterly foreign to anything that I had ever seen in her
before. Then I remembered the knife and a great fear came
over me. I jumped up and looked around. She had closed up
the knife and broken the blade and thrown it across the room
on the floor. My stomach trembled as I realized what a big
chance I had taken.
"Anyway, we went along fine for about a month. Our relationship was infused with new life and vitality. During that
time we did not have a single argument, not a single harsh
word passed between us. That granite, that steel (which I hate
in a black bitch!) was gone. And strangely, I felt myself acting
natural, without pretense toward her. It seemed as if we were
dancing through those days perfectly in time and in step with
each other. Then one day, we were out driving and I ran
through a red light just a little too late and this motorcycle cop
pulled me over.
" 'Say, Boy,' he said to me, 'are you color-blind?' I didn't
want a ticket so I decided to talk him out of it. I went into my
act, give him a big smile and explained to him that I was awfully sorry, that I thought that I could make it but that my old
car was too slow. He talked real bad to me, took me on a long
trip about how important it was that I obeyed the laws and
regulations and how else can a society be controlled and administered without obedience to the law. I said a bunch of Yes
Sir's and No Sir's and he told me to run along and be a good
boy. When I drove off, I looked over at my woman and she had
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marry white men. All of the Negro women who are not
celebrities wish they were so that they, too, could marry white
men. Whitey is their dream boy. When they kiss you it ain't
really you they're kissing. They close their eyes and picture their
white dream boy. Listen to the grapevine ... Jesus Christ the
pure is the black woman's psychic bridegroom. You will learn
before you die that during coition and at the moment of her orgasm, the black woman, in the first throes of her spasm, shouts
out the name of Jesus. 'Oh, Jesus, I'm coming!' she shouts to
him. And to you it will hurt. It will be like a knife in your heart.
It will be the same as if your woman, during orgasm, calls out
the name of some sneaky cat who lives down the block.
"Now there is one thing I want to tell you that is directly
related to this. To be sure, I have never understood it and I
don'~ believe that I ever will. But I have seen it work and it may
be that you brothers can understand it, and it may prove useful
to you, it may help you to make it. There is a sickness in the
white that lies at the core of their madness and this sickness
makes them act in many different ways. But there is one way it
makes some of them act that seems to contradict everything we
know about whitey and shakes many blacks up when they first
encounter it .... There are white men who will pay you to
fuck their wives. They approach you and say, 'How would you
like to fuck a white woman?' 'What is this?' you ask. 'On the
up-and-up,' he assures you. 'It's all right. She's my wife. She
needs black rod, is all. She has to have it. It's like a medicine or
drug to her. She has to have it. I'll pay you. It's all on the level,
no trick involved. Interested? You go with him and he drives
you to their home. The three of you go into the bedroom.
There is a certain type who will leave you and his wife alone
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and tell you to pile her real good. After it is all over, he will pay
you and drive you to wherever you want to go. Then there are
some who like to peep at you through a keyhole and watch you
have his woman, or peep at you through a window, or lie under
the bed and listen to the creaking of the bed as you work out.
There is another type who likes to masturbate while he stands
beside the bed and watches you pile her. There is the type who
likes to eat his woman up after you get through piling her. And
there is the type who only wants you to pile her for a little
while, just long enough to thaw her out and kick her motor
over and arouse her to heat, then he wants you to jump off real
quick and he will jump onto her and together they can make it
from there by themselves."
It did not occur to me to say anything; I didn't know what
to say. I was angry at the Infidel and repulsed by his monologue
and the importanoe he seemed to attach to these matters. My
dreams lay elsewhere and I could not begin to evaluate the things
he had been talking about. I sat there, savoring the strange
quality of the emotion which had been aroused within me. I
don't know when the Eunuch on my left started to speak, for I
first became aware ofhis voice as sound purely, a nebulous, incoherent sound, and only later did I begin to distinguish the words:
" ... fed up with it! You old Lazarus. Everything you said
was twisted, it was all dead and stinking, it was all warped and
out of joint, it was off cue, off center."The Eunuch had his jaw
set defiantly.
"Yes, I know," said the Infidel, "and you youngbloods see
your big chance coming up to change all of that. Every man
with a pipe dream sees his chance as just coming. . . . But even
so, you have to admit that the white man is a bitch with his shit.
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say Jomo Kenyatta has, look right through a brick wall." The
Infidel lifted his hand and pointed at the Eunuch on my left.
"My friend had his eyes, only more so, just like this brother
here," he said. An embarrassed, frightened look showed on his
face for a moment, which he quickly suppressed. The Eunuch
on my left shifted about in his chair.
"But he recognized me, my friend did," said the Infidel.
"Immediately he knew who I was. He didn't have to pull me
from his memory, as you'd think he would have after all those
years. The minute they brought him into the visiting room I
could see that he recognized me, though he didn't call my
name. We sat down at a little table and he said to me: 'Ah! I
thought you would never get here! Now we can embark on our
great enterprise! We will transform the whole of proud Europe
into an international whorehouse, and men from all over the
earth will make their pilgrimage there and fertilize the depleted human soil with their rich and varied seed!' I said nothing to him, couldn't say anything. I just listened. He talked on
and on. He took me back, back, back. Then it was time for me
to go. I promised him I'd be back the next day. They led him
away. I never went back. Even as I promised him, I knew I
would never return, never." The Infidel paused, swallowed. He
was struggling with himself, fighting to keep under control
s<Jmething powerful, torrential, within himself. You could feel
the terrible force of the agony raging inside him. "He died two
weeks later, my friend did-from self-inflicted wounds, from
banging his own head against a jagged edge of a concrete wall."
For many minutes no one spoke. Each was submerged in
thoughts of his own. Finally, the Eunuch on my left, in a cold,
icy tone, said:
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have a deep thirst to quench. I want to drink for every black man,
woman, and child dragged to the slaughter from the shores of
Africa, for every one of my brothers and sisters who suffered
helplessly in the rotten holds of the darnned slave ships-for your
friend who bashed his own brains out in that outhouse-! want to
drink the white man's blood for every ounce of my flesh and
blood that he crushed and broke in the Caribbean Islands, for all
the souls of black folk mangled in the fetid fields of the Old South
and for every one slaughtered and lynched in the mire of the New
South-and in the North, East, and West of the hells of North
America! Only the white man's blood can wash away the pain I
feel. You shrink from shedding the white man's blood, you old
Lazarus, but I say to you that the day is here when I will march
into the Mississippi legislature "With a blazing machine gun in my
hands and a pocketful of grenades. Since I will be going to die, I
definitely will be going to kill."
"No," said the Infidel. "No. More blood V\'ill only add
crime upon crime. No!" He suddenly stood up from the table,
looked at each of us as if to plead, like a criminal before a jury
he knows is about to send him to the death chamber. He
breathed deeply as he had dcme earlier, and let his shoulders
sag. ''Blood upon blood; crime upon crime; brick of blood
upon brick of blood of a new mad Tower of Babel which, too,
will' fall. ... There can be no triumph in blood." Then he
turned and faltered slowly away from the table.
We watched him walk away. He stopped and looked back
at us, as if he half-expected, half-hoped, for us to call him back.
Then he turned and faded from our sight, from our lives.
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The roots of heterosexuality are buried in that evolutionary choice made long ago in some misty past-but not so
remote that it can't be reached with the long arm of the
mind-by some unknown forerunner of Homo sapiens. Struggling up from some murky swamp, some stagnant mudhole,
some peaceful meadow, that unknown ancestor of Man/
Woman, by some weird mitosis of the essence, divided its Unitary Self in half-into the male and female hemispheres of the
Primeval Sphere. These hemispheres evolved into what we
know today as man and woman.
When the Primeval Sphere divided itself, it established a
basic tension of attraction, a dynamic magnetism of oppositesthe Primeval Urge-which exerts an irresistible attraction between the male and female hemispheres, ever tending to fuse
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them back together into a unity in which the male and female
realize their true nature-the lost unity of the Primeval
Sphere. This is the eternal and unwavering motivation of the
male and female hemispheres, of man and woman, to transcend the Primeval Mitosis and achieve supreme identity in the
Apocalyptic Fusion.
Each half of the human equation, the male and female
hemispheres of the Primeval Sphere, must prepare themselves
for the fusion by achieving a Unitary Sexual Image, i.e., a
heterosexual identity free from the mutually exclusive, antagonistic, antipodal impediments of homosexuality (the product
of the fissure of society into antagonistic classes and a dying
culture and civilization alienated from its biology).
Man's continual striving for a Unitary Sexual Image,
which can only be achieved in a Unitary Society, becomes a basic driving force of the Class Struggle, which is, in turn, the dynamic of history. The quest for the Apocalyptic Fusion will find
optimal conditions only in a Classless Society, the absence of
classes being the sine qua non for the existence of a Unitary Society in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved.
Each social structure projects onto the screen of possibility the images of the highest type of male and female sexual
identities realizable within the limits of that society. The people
within that society are motivated and driven, by the perennial
quest for Apocalyptic Fusion, to achieve this highest identity, or
as close as they can come to the perfection of the Unitary
Sexual Image. All impediments to realization of this image become sources of alienation, obstacles in the way of the Self
seeking to realize its ultimate identity.
Since each society projects its own sexual image, the Unitary
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Society will project a Unitary Sexual Image. We can thus postulate, following the model of Marx, that in ancient communal
society, which was not cleft into antagonistic classes, there existed a Unitary Society in which a Unitary Sexual Image was in
natural coincidence with the way of life of the people. This is
the lost innocence of the Garden of Eden.
The Class Society projects a fragmented sexual image.
Each class projects a sexual image coinciding with its classfunction in society. And since its class-function will differ from
that of other classes, its sexual image will differ also and in the
same proportion. The source of the fragmentation of the Self in
Class Society lies in the alienation between the function of
man's Mind and the function of his Body. Man as thinker performs an Administrative Function in society. Man as doer
performs a Brute Power Function. These two baJ\c functions I
symbolize, when they are embodied in living meil f1mctioning
in society, as the Omnipotent Administrator and the Supermasculine Menial.
Since all men are created equal, when the Self is fragmented by the operation of the laws and forces of Class Society,
men in the elite classes usurp the controlling and Administrative Function of the society as a whole-i.e. , they usurp the
administrative component in the nature and biology of the men
in: the classes below them. Administrative power is concentrated at the apex of society, in the Godhead of the society
(pharaoh, king, president, chairman). Administrative power
beneath the apex is delegated. Those in classes to which no administrative power has been delegated have the administrative
component in their personalities suppressed, alienated, denied
expression. Those who have usurped the Administrative Func-
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traces of strength, to differentiate it further from the effeminate form of her man. An appearance of strength in her body is
called ualy.
Having projected her strength, her domestic component, onto the women beneath her, she achieves an image of
frailty, weakness, helplessness, delicacy, daintiness. Silks, ruffles, frills, bangles, and laces are her element. In the realm of
sex, because the act of sexual intercourse is both a physical and
mental process, a joint venture between the Mind and the
Body, her basic contradiction is that she is physically inadequate
while mentally voracious, with her mind in extreme conflict
with her body. The mechanism of her orgasm, which begins in
her body and ends in the psychic depths of her mind, becomes
short-circuited in the struggle between her mind and her body.
Sitting at the foot of her bed, like the mute Sphinx on the
bank of the Nile, is the Ogre of Frigidity. She is terrified, because of the quality of her life, by the prospect of becoming a
life-termer in the prison of frigidity. Her basic fear is frigidity,
the state in which her frantic search for Ultrafemininity collides with an icepack death of the soul: where the fire in her
body is extinguished by the ice in her mind. The psychic core of
her sensuality, the male-seeking pole of her Female Principle,
the trigger of the mechanism of her orgasm, moves beyond the
rea..;h or range of the effeminate clitoris of her man. Frigid,
cold, icy, ice. Arctic. Antarctic. At the end of her flight from her
body is a sky-high wall of ice. (If a lesbian is anything she is a
frigid woman, a frozen cunt, with a warp and a crack in the
wall of her ice.)
In proportion to the intensity of the Ultrafeminine's fear
and feel of the ice is her psychic lust for the flame, for the heat
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ofthe fire: the Body. The Ultrafeminine, seeking sexual satisfaction, finds only physical exhaustion in the bed of the Omnipotent Administrator, and the odds are against her finding psychic
satisfaction there. Her "psychic bridegroom" is the Supermasculine Menial. The Omnipotent Administrator, having repudiated and abdicated his body, his masculine component
which he has projected onto the men beneath him, cannot present his woman, the Ultrafeminine, with an image of masculinity capable of penetrating into the psychic depths where the
treasure of her orgasm is buried. The sexual act being a joint
venture of the Mind and Body, though he satisfy her body and
sap its strength, he cannot touch that magic spot in her mind
which triggers the mechanism of her orgasm. Bereft of psychic
satisfaction, and inhibited by social conventions and mores
from embarking on a quest for her sexual fulfillment, yet performing her function as a mother and wife to the Omnipotent
Administrator, for Ultrafeminine becomes a psychic celibate.
At the nth degree of the Ultrafeminine's scale of psychic
lust (the contours of which few men or women throughout
their entire lives ever in fact explore, resort being had to the
forms of sublimation) stands the walking phallus symbol of the
Supermasculine Menial. Though she may never have had a
sexual encounter with a Supermasculine Menial, she is fully
convinced that he can fulfill her physical need. It will be no big
thing for him to do since he can handle those Amazons down
there with him, with his strong body, rippling muscles, his
strength and fire, the driving force of his spine, the thrust of his
hips and the fiery steel of his rod. But what wets the Ultrafeminine's juice is that she is allured and tortured by the secret, intuitive knowledge that he, her psychic bridegroom, can blaze
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through the wall of her ice, plum her psychic depths, test the
oil of her soul, melt the iceberg in her brain, touch her inner
sanctum, detonate the bomb of her orgasm, and bring her
sweet release.
The chip on the Supermasculine Menial's shoulder is the
fact that he has been robbed of his mind. In an uncannily effective manner, the society in which he lives has assumed in its
very structure that he, minus a mind, is the embodiment of
Brute Power. The bias and reflex of the society are against the
cultivation or even the functioning of his mind, and it is borne
in upon him from all sides that. the society is actually deaf,
dumb, and blind to his mind. The products of his mind, unless
they are very closely associated with his social function of
Brute Power, are resented and held in contempt by society as a
whole. The further away from Brute Power his mental productions stand, the more emphatically will they be rejected and
scorned by society, and treated as upstart invasions of the realm
of the Omnipotent Administrator. His thoughts count for nothing. He doesn't run, regulate, control, or administer anything.
Indeed, he is himself regulated, manipulated, and controlled by
the Omnipotent Administrators. The struggle of his life is for
the emancipation of his mind, to receive recognition for the
prod;_cts of his mind, and official recognition of the fact that
he has a mind.
In his society, the Mind has been adjudged superior to the
Body, and he knows that he is the Body and the Omnipotent
Administrator is the Mind. It's Mind over matter, and the Body
is matter. He may despise the Omnipotent Administrator for
his physical weakness and envy him for his mind; or he may de-
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spise his own body and idolize the weak body of the Omnipotent Administrator. He may even strive to attain a weak physical image himself in order to identify with the image of the
Omnipotent Administrator. The people at the base of society,
where the Supermasculine Menial is, are well known for their
reflex of attempting to conform to the style, pattern, manners,
and habits of the upper classes, of the Omnipotent Administrators and Ultrafeminines. Just how this works itself out is a
problem for analysis by sociologists and social psychologists on
the mass level, and the headshrinkers and nutcrackers on the
individual level. What we are outlining here is a perspective
from which such analysis might best be approached.
The psychic bride of the Supermasculine Menial is the
Ultrafeminine. She is his "dream girl." She, the delicate, weak,
helpless Ultrafeminine, exerts a magnetic attraction upon him.
When he compares her with his own woman, the strong, selfreliant Amazon, lust for her burns in his brain. He recoils from
the excess of strength injected into the Amazon by the Domestic Function she performs. Also, since standards of beauty are
set by the elite, the Ultrafeminine personifies the official standard of feminine beauty of society as a whole. Influenced by
and imbued "vith this official standard of beauty, while at the
same time surrounded by Amazons who do not embody this
standard and who are in fact clashing with it, the Supermasculine Menial develops an obsessive yearning and lust for
sexual contact with the Ultrafeminine. These yearnings are
compounded by the fact that on the whole they are foredoomed to remain unfulfilled. The society has arranged things
so that the Supermascu.line Menial and the Ultrafeminine
are not likely to have access or propinquity to each other
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attribute exercises a magnetic attraction upon the female hemisphere. Usurping the Supermasculine Menial's mind, the Omnipotent Administrator usurped all sovereignty; and because of
his monopoly on sovereignty, he is the psychic bridegroom of
the Amazon. In another sense, however, being also attracted to
the body of the Supermasculine Menial, the Amazon is lost between two worlds.
In net effect, then, there will exist in. Class Society tvvo sets
of competing images. Contending for the crown of masculinity is
one image based on the Body and another based on the Mind; contending for the crown of femininity is one image based on weak,
helpless Ultrafemininity and another based on the strong, selfreliant attributes of the Amazon. In a society with a racially homogeneous population, in which the people at the top are racially the
same as the ones at the bottom, the competing images are not mutually exclusive. A Supermasculine Menial, for instance, who acquires the training of an Omnipotent Administrator, can become a
member of the elite and function accordingly-assuming the existence of some vertical social mobility, which is not, of course, always the case. But even if he is prevented from ascending the
social ladder in fact, a Supermasculine Menial can at least imagine
himself doing so without first having to transcend any biological
barriers. Like\'\'ise, an Omnipotent Administrator can descend the
social ladder, develop his muscles, and hoe the row with the
coolest serf on the manor. The women, too, can descend or ascend, depending on the merits, without having to breach a biological chain.
But in a society where there exists a racial caste system,
where the people at the top are sharply distinguished from
those at the bottom by race as well as social image, then the
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two sets of competing images can come to be considered mutually exclusive. The gulf between the Mind and the Body will
seem to coincide with the gulf between the two races. At that
point, the fear of biological miscegenation is transposed into
social imagery; and since the distinction between the two races
is founded in biology, the social distinction between Mind and
Body is made sacred. Any attempt by the Supermasculine Menial to heal his wound and reclaim his mind will be viewed as a
malignant desire to transcend the laws of nature by mixing,
"mongrelizing," miscegenating. Coming from the other side, if
a member of the elite should attempt to bridge the gulf, it will
be conceived as the rankest form of degeneracy and treason to
caste. Deep-seated fears and emotions, which are in fact connected with biological traits and are part of a mechanism to aid
racial and ethnic survival, are harnessed to social images and
thereby transformed into weapons of the Class Struggle. Race
fears are weapons in the struggle between the Omnipotent Administrator and the Supermasculine Menial for control of
sexual sovereignty.
The Supermasculine Menial and the Amazon are the least
alienated from the biological chain, although their mindsespecially the Supermasculine Menials' !-are in a general state
of underdevelopment. Still, they are the wealth of a nation, an
abt:.ndant supply of unexhausted, undeessenced human raw
material upon which the future of the society depends and with
which, through the implacable march of history to an ever
broader base of democracy and equality, the society will renew
and transform itself.
Convalescence
... just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what
seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy
them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical
grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with
all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the
dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball.
They are on the kind
if terms
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dation
[Italics added]
IRVING Louxs HoROWITZ, CHAIRMAN,
Department of Sociology,
Hobart and William Smith Colleges,
Geneva, NewYork, June 1963
So
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sun, do his deed, scratch his dirt, sell his loot to the fence while
the ostriches and owls, coasting on Euphony, one with his head
in a hole-any hole-and the other with his head in the clouds,
would only cluck and whisper and hear-see-speak no evil.
So Elvis Presley came, strumming a weird guitar and
wagging his tail across the continent, ripping off fame and fortune as he scrunched his way, and, like a latter-day Johnny
Appleseed, sowing seeds of a new rhythm and style in the
white souls of the white youth of America, whose inner hunger
and need was no longer satisfied with the antiseptic white
shoes and whiter songs of Pat Boone. "You can do anything,"
sang Elvis to Pat Boone's white shoes, "but don't you step on
my Blue Suede Shoes!"
During this period of ferment and beginnings, at about
the same time that blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, began
their historic bus boycott (giving birth to the leadership of
Martin Luther King, signifying to the nation that, with this initiative, this first affirmative step, somewhe;e in the universe a
gear in the machinery had shifted), something, a target, came
i~to focus. The tensions in the American psyche had torn a fissure in the racial Maginot Line and through this fissure, this
tiny bridge between the Mind and Body, the black masses, who
had been silent and somnolent since the '20s and '30s, were
now making a break toward the dimly seen light that beckoned
to them through the fissure. The fact that these blacks could
now take such a step was perceived by the ostriches and owls as.
a sign of national decay, a sign that the System had caved in at
that spot. And this gave birth to a fear, a fear that quickly became a focus for all the anxieties and exasperations in the
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Omnipotent Administrators' minds: and to embody this perceived decay and act as a lightning rod for the fear, the beatniks
bloomed onto the American scene.
Like pioneers staking their claims in the no-man's land
that lay along the racial Maginot Line, the beatniks, like Elvis
Presley before them, dared to do in the light of day what
America had long been doing in the sneak-thief anonymity of
night-consorted on a human level with the blacks. Reviled,
cursed, held in contempt by the "molders of public opinion;'
persecuted by the police, made into an epithet of derision by
the deep-frozen geeks of the Hog-Dog-and-Malted-Milk set,
the beatniks irreverently refused to go away. Allen Ginsberg
and Jack Kerouac ("the Suzuki rhythm boys," James Baldwin
called them, derisively, in a moment of panic, "tired of white
ambitions" and "dragging themselves through the Negro street
at dawn, looking for an angry fix"; "with,'' as Mailer puts it, "the
black man's code to fit their facts"). Bing Crosbyism, Perry Comoism, and Dinah Shoreism had led to cancer, and the vanguard of the white youth knew it.
And as the spirit of revolt crept across the continent from
that wayward bus in Montgomery, Alabama, seeping like new
life into the cracks and nooks of the northern ghettos and
sweeping in furious gales across the campuses of southern Negro
colle'ges, erupting, finally, in the sit-ins and freedom rides-as
this swirling maelstrom of social change convulsed the nation,
shocking an unsuspec.ting American public, folk music, speaking of fundamental verities, climbed slowly out of the grave;
and the hip lobe of the national ear, twitching involuntarily at
first, began to listen.
From the moment that Mrs. Rosa Parks, in that bus in
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Montgomery, Alabama, resisted the Omnipotent Administrator, contact, however fleeting, had been made with the lost
sovereignty-the Body had made contact with its Mind-and
the shock of that contact sent an electric current throughout
this nation, traversing the racial Maginot Line and striking fire
in the hearts of the whites. The wheels began to turn, the thaw
set in, and though Emmett Till and Mack Parker were dead,
though Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, though Autherine Lucy's token presence at the University of Alabama was a
mockery-notwithstanding this, it was already clear that the
1954 major surgical operation had been successful and the patient would live. The challenge loomed on the horizon: Africa,
black, enigmatic, and hard-driving, had begun to parade its
newly freed nations into the UN; and the Islam of Elijah
Muhammad, amplified as it was fired in salvos from the piercing tongue of Malcolm X, was racing through the Negro streets
with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Then, as the verbal revolt of the black masses soared to a
cacophonous peak-the Body, the Black Amazons and Supermasculine Menials, becoming conscious, shouting, in a thousand different ways, "I've aot a Mind if my own!"; and as the
senator from Massachusetts was saving the nation from the
Strangelove grasp of Dirty Dick, injecting, as he emerged victorious, a new and vivacious spirit into the people with the
style of his smile and his wife's hairdo; then, as if a signal had
been given, as if the Mind had shouted to the Body, "I'm
ready!"-the Twist, superseding the Hula Hoop,. burst upon
the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm
into the Minds and Bodies of the people. The fallout: the Hully
Gully, the Mashed Potato, the Dog, the Smashed Banana, the
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Watusi, the Frug, the Swim. The Twist was a guided missile,
launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The
Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do,
in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could
only write on the books. The twist was a form of therapy for a
convalescing nation. The Omnipotent Administrator and the
Ultrafeminine responded so dramatically, in stampede fashion,
to the Twist precisely because it afforded them the possibility
of reclaiming their Bodies again after generations of alienated
and disembodied existence.
The stiff, mechanical Omnipotent Administrators and
Ultrafeminines presented a startling spectacle as they entered
in droves onto the dance floors to learn how to Twist. They
came from every level of society, from top to bottom, writhing
pitifully though gamely about the floor, feeling exhilarating and
soothing new sensations, release from some unknown prison in
which their Bodies had been encased, a sense of freedom they
had never known before, a feeling of communion with some
mystical root-source of life and vigor, from which sprang a new
awareness and enjoyment of the flesh, a new appreciation of
the possibilities of their Bodies. They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the
cold ass, _he stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints
with the spark of life.
This spectacle truly startled many Negroes, because they
perceived it as an intrusion by the Mind into the province of
the Body, and this intimated chaos; because the Negroes knew,
from the survival experience of their everyday lives, that the
system within which they were imprisoned was based upon the
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racial Maginot Line and that the cardinal sin, crossing the
line-which was, in their experience, usually initiated from
the black side-was being committed, en masse, by the whites.
The Omnipotent Administrators and Ultrafeminines were
storming the Maginot Line! A massive assault had been
launched without parallel in American history, and to Negroes
it was confusing. Sure, they had witnessed it on an individual
scale: they had seen many ofays destroy the Maginot Line in
themselves. But this time it had all the appearances of a na.tional movement. There were even rumors that President
Kennedy and his Jackie were doing the Twist secretly in the
White House; that their Number One Boy had been sent to the
Peppermint Lounge in disguise to learn how to Twist, and he
in turn brought the trick back to the White House. These
Negroes knew that something fundamental had changed.
"Man, what done got into them ofays?" one asked.
"They trying to get back," said another.
"Shit," said a young Negro who made his living by
shoplifting. "If you ask me, I think it must be the end of the
world."
"Oooo-weee!" said a Negro musician who had been playing at a dance and was now standing back checking the
dancers. "Baby, I don't dig this action at all! Look here, baby,
pull my coat to what's going down! l mean, have I missed it
somewhere? Where've I been? Baby, I been blowing all my life
and I ain't never dug no happiness like this. You know what,
man, I'm gon' cut that fucking weed aloose. Oooo-weee!
Check that little bitch right there! What the fuck she trying to
do? Is she trying to shake it or break it? Oooo-weee!"
A Negro girl said: "Take me home, I'm sick!"
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through the night streets of Rochester, New Jersey, Philadelphia. And even though the opposition, gorging on Hot
Dogs and Malted Milk, with blood now splattered over
the white shoes, would still strike out in the dark against the
manifestations of the turning, showing the protocol of Southern Hospitality reserved for Niggers and Nigger LoversSCHWERNER-CHANEY-GOODMAN-it was still too late. For
not only had Luci Baines Johnson danced the Watusi in public
with Killer Joe, but the Beatles were on the scene, injecting
Negritude by the ton into the whites, in this post-Elvis Presleybeatnik era of ferment.
Before we toss the Beatles a homosexual kiss-saying, "If
a man be ass enough to reach for the bitch in them, that man
will kiss a man, and if a woman reaches for the stud in them,
that woman will kiss a woman"-let us marvel at the genius of
their image, which comforts the owls and ostriches in the one
spot where Elvis Presley bummed their kick: Elvis, with his onfunky (yet mechanical, alienated) bumpgrinding, was still too
much Body (too soon) for the strained collapsing psyches of
the Omnipotent Administrators and Ultrafeminines; whereas
the Beatles, afTecting the caucasoid crown of femininity and ignoring the Body on the visual plane (while their music on the
contrary being full of Body), assuaged the doubts of the owls
and ostriches by presenting an incorporeal, cerebral image.
Song and dance are, perhaps, only a little less old than
man himself. It is with his music a.nd dance, the recreation
through art of the rhythms suggested by and implicit in the
tempo of his life and cultural environment, that man purges his
soul of the tensions of daily strife and maintains his harmony in
the universe. In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cy-
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ther do I greet you in the new voice, the unctuous supplications of the sleek Black Bourgeoise, nor the bullying bellow of
the rude Free Slave-but in my own voice do I greet you, the
voice of the Black Man. And although I greet you anew, my
greetin; is not new, but as old as the Sun, Moon, and Stars. And
rather than mark a new beginning, my greeting signifies only
my Return.
I have Returned from the dead. I speak to you now from
the Here And Now. I was dead for four hundred years. For four
hundred years you have been a woman alone, bereft of her
man, a manless woman. For four hundred years I was neither
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your man nor my own man. The white stood between us, over
us, around us. The white man was your man and my man. Do
not pass lightly over this truth, my Queen, for even though the
fact of it has burned into the marrow of our bones and diluted
our blood, we must bring it to the surface of the mind, into the
realm of knowing, glue our gaze upon it and stare at it as at a
coiled serpent in a baby's playpen or the fresh flowers on a
mother's grave. It is to be pondered and realized in the heart, for
the heel of the white man's boot is our point of departure, our
point of Resolve and Return-the bloodstained pivot of our future. (But I would ask you to recall, that before we could come
up from slavery, we had to be pulled down from our throne.)
Across the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four
hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my
Queen. I feel a deep, terrifying hurt, the pain of humiliation of
the vanquished warrior. The shame of the fleet-footed sprinter
who stumbles at the start of the race. I feel unjustified. I can't
bear to look into your eyes. Don't you know (surely you must
have noticed by now: four hundred years!) that for four hundred years I have been unable to look squarely into your eyes? I
tremb~e inside each time you look at me. I can feel ... in
the ray of your eye, from a deep hiding place, a long-kept
secret you harbor. That is the unadorned truth. Not that I
would have felt justified, under the circumstances, in taking
such liberties with you, but I want you to know that I feared to
look into your eyes because I knew I would find reflected there
a merciless Indictment of my impotence and a compelling challenge to redeem my conquered manhood.
My Queen, it is hard for me to tell you what is in my
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heart for you today-what is in the heart of all my black brothers for you and all your black sisters-and I fear I will fail unless you reach out to me, tWle in on me with the antenna of
your love, the sacred love in ultimate degree which you were
Wlable to give me because I, being dead, was Wlworthy to receive it; that perfect, radical love of black on which our Fathers
thrived. Let me drink from the river of your love at its source,
let the lines of force of your love seize my soul by its core and
heal the wound of my Castration, let my convex exile end its
haWlted Odyssey in your concave essence which receives that it
may give. Flower of Africa, it is only through the liberating
power of your re-love that my manhood can be redeemed. For
it is in your eyes, before you, that my need is to be justified.
Only, only, only you and only you can condemn or set me free.
Be convinced, Sable Sister, that the past is no forbidden
vista upon which we dare not look, out of a phantom fear of
being, as the wife of Lot, turned into pillars of salt. Rather the
past is an omniscient mirror: we gaze and see reflected there
ourselves and each other~what we used to be, what we are
today, how we got this way, and what we are becoming. To decline to look into the Mirror ofThen, my heart, is to refuse to
view the face of Now.
1 have died the ninth death
if the
face and turned my back on God, have dined in the Swine's Trough, and
descended to the uttermost echelon
seized my Balls from the teeth
if a roaring lion!
Black Beauty, i\} impotent silence I listen, as if to a symphony of sorrows, to your screams for help, anguished pleas
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l heard
you then ... your scream came like a searing bolt of lightning that blazed a white streak down my black back. In a cowardly stupor, with a palpitating heart and quivering knees, I
watched the Slaver's lash of death slash through the opposing
air and bite with teeth of fire into your delicate flesft1tt the
black and tender flesh of African Motherhood, forcing the
startled Life untimely from your torn and outraged womb,
the sacred womb that cradled primal man, the womb that
incubated Ethiopia and populated Nubia and gave forth
Pharaohs unto Egypt, the womb that painted the Congo black
HER NOW . . . I HEAR YOU NOW . . . I HEAR YOU. . . .
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lie beneath that mist! And we had thought that our hard climb
out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful,
sunlit place---but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins.
But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a
New City on these ruins.