Panther Baby (15 page)

As fugitives, we could not stand in the street with a bullhorn flanked by grandmothers and children denouncing drug dealers. Instead we chose to engage in “armed propaganda”—close the drug dens by force, and put fear in the drug dealers as they wondered which one of their drug spots would be hit next.

Drug den number one: Four of us in a car sitting across the street from a semi-abandoned tenement. It’s early afternoon. Late spring. Some people on the street, but not too many. We pull the car around the corner, just out of sight of the drug den. We check our weapons—pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, an M-1 carbine with a collapsible stop. We leave the car. Guns concealed under our three-quarter army fatigue and leather jackets. We enter the building. Falling plaster and gaping holes in the floor.

Brother Brick knocks on the door of the first-floor apartment.
Th
e rest of us press ourselves against the wall on either side of the door. He’d sniffed some black pepper while we were in the car so his nose would be running and his eyes would be red—like a junkie, sick with flulike symptoms and stomach cramps, in need of a fix. “Give me two,” Brother Brick says, holding out a crumpled bunch of singles when the dealer cracks the door.
Th
at’s all the space we need to kick the door in and throw the dealer to the ground. “Oh shit,” a black woman junkie says as we spread out through the tiny apartment in military formation.

Th
ere are two dealers inside and several junkies nodding or shooting up. “Everybody down,” we command, helping people into prone positions with firm shoves. A dealer starts to reach for a gun on a table. I swing a sawed-off shotgun around. “You want to die for this poison today, brother?” I ask with the barrel inches away from his face. His eyes grow big, complimenting the size of the steely black pipe that has a 12-gauge round waiting on the other side. He shakes his head no. I shove him to the floor and help to scoop the bags of heroin laid out on a coffee table with a cracked mirror top. “Drugs are genocide,” we yell to the junkies and dealers. “Stop dealing this poison or face the wrath of the people.” Moments later we are on the street ripping open the dope bags and dumping the contents into the sewer.

A small crowd had gathered: a few grandmothers, kids, folks from the community. “We’re shutting this drug den down,” we announced. “
Th
e community needs to form a people’s army to stand vigilant against drugs, police brutality, and all forms of oppression. Power to the people.”
Th
e kids were wide-eyed.
Th
e grandmothers and parents applauded as we walked around the corner, jumped into our car, and sped away.

“What are the guns about?” my childhood pastor, Reverend Lloyd, asked me a few months earlier when I visited Trinity Baptist Church in an attempt to start a free breakfast program. “
Th
e guns are not about killing people,” I answered. “It’s about trying to inflict a political consequence. Sixteen million armed black people means that racism will be bad for business, because those sixteen million will also be politically armed and understand that white people are not the enemy but that the institutions of oppression are.
Th
at’s how we’ll fight. Disrupt the capitalist system. Storm the banks and shut down the corporations. Make it bad for business to be a racist oppressor.”

Reverend Lloyd didn’t allow me to start the breakfast program at his church. I probably should have said the guns were just for self-defense, and then only in the most extreme cases. But the Black Panther Party’s courageous—some say “crazy”—stance against the police brought issues of police brutality into the national spotlight. Even if people didn’t agree with the way the Panthers used guns, ideology, and in-your-face revolutionary rhetoric to confront the police, they questioned the way the armed state responded to the Panthers, and this created protests, inquiries, and a larger conversation about human rights and political oppression in general.

As underground soldiers, we worked to make drug dealing, which we saw as a form of “ill legitimate capitalism,” bad for business. We hit drug dealers in the Bronx and Harlem, flushing the drugs down toilets and sewers, taking the money we found and giving it to grassroots community programs as well as to grandmothers and activists in the neighborhood who were helping to raise the village. A bounty was put on our heads—fifty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars, according to friends who were part of the hustling night life.
Th
e drug dealers were tired of these black militants who were fucking up business. So now there were drug dealers, cops, and some former Panther comrades who were hunting for us, all of whom definitely would prefer us dead rather than alive.

When you woke up in the morning as a Panther you had the thought that this might be the day that you went to prison or got killed. When you woke up in the morning as a soldier of the Black Liberation Army you had the thought that this was definitely the day that you would die. You were moving too fast, always armed, always in danger of instant confrontation that could wind up with bullets flying.

More opportunities came up for me to get away. I could have gone down south and lived on somebody’s farm, slipped back across the border to Canada for another try at Europe and Africa, or made my way to Cuba. I turned all these offers down, justifying my decision by saying that someone had to stay to help build the underground resistance movement. It was the only way to make up for my mistakes and personal failures: not spotting Yedwa as a pig, not getting more of the Panther 21 out on bail, letting Afeni and Joan walk back into prison, going into hiding and abandoning all the young Harlem and Bronx Panthers who looked to me for leadership. No, I was going to build the resistance or die trying. When the Panther 21 was convicted I would lead the charge of the resistance in storming the prisons to free them.

I was hiding out in a tiny studio apartment in Washington Heights when the news of the Panther 21 verdict came over the small kitchen radio. It was now May 1971. I had been hiding out for two months. Summation and closing arguments in the Panther 21 trial had been going on for the last several weeks. In his instructional charge to the jury, Judge John Murtagh dismissed all of the gun charges. During the long trial there had been much talk about guns, self-defense, and the constitutional right to bear arms. Judge Murtagh said that he wanted to clear away the gun rhetoric so that the jury could focus on the main conspiracy charges. Judge Murtagh’s instructions alone took two days.
Th
e trial had lasted eight months. To everyone’s surprise the jury returned with a verdict in three hours. Deliberations in such big cases usually took days or weeks, so not much deliberation probably meant the jurors’ minds had already been made up. I imagined that Afeni, Joan, and the Panthers tried to stand as erect and strong as possible as they were brought into court from their holding cells.
Th
e nooses had been fitted tightly around their necks, and the legal lynching was about to be complete.

Clarence Fox, the black jury foreman, read the verdict with a slight West Indian lilt to his voice. It made his pronouncements seem even more surreal and poetic. “Not guilty,” he answered when asked about the first count of the indictment. “Not guilty,” he repeated dozens of times, as the jury acquitted the Panthers on every single count of the indictment. Gasps of disbelief mingled with tears of joy and cheers of freedom as the two-and-a-half-year nightmare came to an end. Afeni, Lumumba, Joan, Shaba, and the rest of the Panther 21 walked free.

Th
e prosecutors and our lawyers rushed to the jury.
Th
e lawyers shook the jurors’ hands and thanked them; the prosecutors wanted to know what happened. Mr. Fox and the other jurors explained to the lawyers and the press that they had been convinced that the Panther 21 had been arrested because of their political beliefs, and while they may have been engaged in some illegal activities, there was no proof of a conspiracy to launch guerrilla warfare in New York City. Mr. Fox went on to explain that once the judge dismissed the illegal gun charges, there was nothing to establish a conviction of the Panther 21. So the Panthers did receive justice. Not from the judges and the police system that indicted us, but from twelve people who listened to the arguments and the soul-felt speeches given by the lawyers along with Cet and Afeni.

An eight-months pregnant Afeni had given her summation to the jury, convinced that her son, Tupac Shakur, would be born in prison. “Forgive me if I stray from legal jargon, for I am not a lawyer. I have chosen to defend myself against the advice of cocounsel, the court, friends, and as a matter of fact, against my own intellect. I do it now, as I have in the past, because I know better than any lawyer in America that Afeni Shakur is not guilty of the charges before you. Here I am, scared, shaking, nervous, but full of the knowledge that I cannot beg you for pity.
Th
ere is no need for that. I am tired. I am sick of this. He [the prosecutor] has not proven any of the charges against me. Why hasn’t he proven them? Because he just couldn’t. Because there was nothing to prove. So then why are we here? Why are any of us here? I don’t know. But I would appreciate it if you would end this nightmare, because I am tired of it.
Th
ere is no logical reason for us to have gone through the last two years as we have. To be threatened with imprisonment because somebody somewhere is watching and waiting to justify his being a spy. So do what you have to do. Let history record you as a jury who would not kneel to the outrageous bidding of the state. All we ask of you is that you judge us fairly. Please judge us according to the way you want to be judged.
Th
at’s all I have to say.”

“
Th
is is the people’s victory,” I declared as I joyfully danced around the little kitchen in that safe house in the Bronx. I pumped my fists and threw karate kicks in the air when I heard the news, knowing that the credit for this outcome went to the jurors. I imagined the joy the members of the 21 felt walking from the courthouse with their freedom. I wished I could go downtown to join them, but I was still a fugitive. My case had been severed from theirs, so their not guilty verdict didn’t apply to me. Plus I had missed a court appearance date and the judge issued a bail-jumping warrant for my arrest. Dhoruba was acquitted in absentia. Later we talked about surrendering ourselves for the bail-jumping charges, which carried five years, but felt we would be set up and murdered by the guards in prison, so we decided we wanted to remain underground.

14

Rite of Passage

A
few months earlier, before I went underground, I was walking alone near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. I had just given a talk to an organization known as the Committee of Returned Volunteers. These were men and women who had served in the Peace Corps and still met to discuss and be involved in various social causes. The issue of reasonable bail and fair trials for the Panthers was something that they felt they could support.

For whatever reason, I was rolling alone that night. Usually I was escorted by one or two young Panthers from the Harlem office.
Th
at evening I sat on a park bench and watched the gay, straight, and lesbian lovers; the hippies, activists, and dog walkers; the children on roller skates, musicians, magicians, and holy people. I felt the same way I did when I was sitting on Noonie’s steps looking at the kids play in my old neighborhood. What if I just stayed here? I thought. Became a blippy (black hippie) who smoked weed, played bongos, lived between Washington Square Park and a commune in Vermont. After an hour or so I left the park and passed a church on Washington Square.
Th
e glass-cased announcement board outside the church listed the times for Sunday school and Sunday service. Beneath that was a sign:
36 BLACK PANTHERS–12 POLICE OFFICERS KILLED.
Th
is blew my mind.
Th
at church members were keeping track of how many Panthers and how many police had died in various battles.
Th
at they would care, that they had a perspective that included life lost on both sides amazed me.
Th
ere was no judgment here, just a tally of human life lost in a battle for change.

A few weeks later I was walking through Harlem with Cet, who had just gotten out of prison on bail and was still awaiting trial. It was nighttime and we were on the corner near the housing projects where Cet grew up. He was known in the neighborhood as Mike Tabor, the All-City basketball star. Cet pointed out a basketball court where some of the greatest games in Harlem had been played and a store that he robbed when he was a heroin addict feeding a hundred-dollar-a-day habit. A childhood friend of Cet’s, David, walked up to us. David and Cet crushed each other with a bear hug and grinned from ear to ear. “Mike, everybody in the neighborhood is pulling for you, man. We’ve all followed the Panther 21 case. It’s some bullshit the way they’ve been trying to frame you brothas and sistas up.”

Th
en the corner became theater as they laughed, mimed, and reenacted adventures from their youth. Cet was catching his breath from a hard laugh when he asked David what he was up to now. David looked at the ground and gave a embarrassed shrug. “I’m a pig,” he said. “I joined the force two years ago.”

I braced myself in preparation for the verbal, if not physical, ass whipping about to befall David. Cet was one of our most eloquent and powerful spokesmen, and I had seen him tear apart cops, capitalists, and politicians with biting, pointed lines. Instead Cet asked David what his job on the force was.

“Traffic, mainly. Sometimes community patrol.
Th
e other guys on the job actually get mad at me because I spend so much time talking to these kids out here about staying out of trouble.”

“
Th
en you’re a police officer, not a pig,” Cet replied. “As long as you remember that you’re out here to protect the people as opposed to these capitalist swine, you’ll be all right.”

In that moment I realized that we had to speak to everyone’s humanity. People could choose to be progressive and human, no matter what their job was. A cop wasn’t automatically a pig just because he wore a badge. And a Panther wasn’t automatically a revolutionary and a servant of the people because he put on a beret.
But th
ere was no time to check for humanity as we moved about the city as fugitives. On that day we still had arrest warrants and bounties on our heads, and we had no intention of returning to prison. Like so many before us, from all sides of the political spectrum, victory or death was the mantra.

In early June 1971 a group of us led a raid on an after-hours club in the Bronx, housed in an old two-story warehouse on a dark street. Brother Brick (who had participated in previous drug-den raids), Dhoruba, a stickup artist named Gus, and I left our car and approached the club carrying pistols and automatic weapons. We overpowered the guard at the door and took the long staircase that led from the entrance to the second floor.

Gus had told us there was a side room where dealers shot dice and exchanged large amounts of money and drugs. About thirty people were partying in the main area of the club. We fired a machine-gun burst into the ceiling when one of the club security guards tried to reach for a gun. We herded everyone into a corner and scooped up the drugs and money. Brother Brick, who was the point man, checked the streets from a window as we were about to leave. “
Th
ere are a million pigs outside,” he reported.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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