Panther Baby (3 page)

One Saturday James and Eric eased up next to me in the park while I was waiting my turn to play basketball.

“Dude’s sayin’ you runnin’ around lookin’ for the Panthers,” Eric said.

“Yeah, man,” I replied.

“Well, first of all be cool with that shit. You can’t let everybody know your business.” Eric looked around to see if anybody was watching or listening.
Th
en he leaned closer. “
Th
e Panthers have an office in Brooklyn. We’re rollin’ out there tomorrow. Are you down?”

“I’m down,” I replied too loudly. Eric gave me a stern look.

“I keep telling you to be cool with this shit. Meet us here at one o’clock tomorrow.”

I nodded. James pointed at my blue jeans and my Converse sneakers. “You gotta dress in all black and wear a leather coat.
Th
at’s how the Black Panthers dress.” He turned and walked away. Eric followed.

Th
at night I could barely sleep imagining what it would be like to walk into the Panther headquarters. Would I have to fight a six-foot-three Black Panther commando to prove myself? Would I be blindfolded and taken to some secret chamber to be initiated? Maybe I’d get put on a small airplane and be parachuted into a hidden training camp somewhere in Africa.

“Boy, you better get up. Do you know what time it is?”

I opened my eyes and saw Noonie standing over me. Somewhere between my visions of the Panther initiation chamber and the parachute jump into Africa I had conked out and overslept. I glanced at my alarm clock. It was already seven fifteen. “Sorry, ma’am,” I said while running to the bathroom.

Noonie was sitting at the kitchen table reading her Bible in the morning sunlight.
Th
is was her daily ritual: up at 6 a.m., morning prayers, freshen up, make me a simple breakfast, and read the Bible at the table while I ate. Noonie was no joke when it came to school, church, and discipline. She was born Jessie Mae Allen in 1898 in a poor and segregated section of North Carolina called Blue Haven, and she grew up on a farm that had been a plantation that her parents worked on as slaves. After Emancipation her parents and her nine brothers and sisters worked as sharecroppers.

Noonie told me stories of walking to school barefoot until she was eight years old and working in the tobacco fields until the sun went down. She told me how colored folks could not look white people in the eye and how they had to get off the sidewalk to let them pass. Noonie told me how white men in sheets lynched people they considered to be “uppity niggers.” One such uppity nigger was Noonie’s favorite uncle, who got beaten, lynched, and burned for striking a white man who had spit tobacco in his face.

When Noonie was fourteen she had saved enough money to buy a train ticket to Harlem. She married Pa Baltimore four years later.
Th
ey were together for sixty years until Pa passed away. For the last three years it had been Noonie and me in our modest Bronx apartment. When I was little she told me I could call her Nana for Grandma or Noonie, the name she had called her grandmother. I chose Noonie.

Noonie took me to Sunday school and church every Sunday morning. She was very religious, and church was the center of her life. She believed that shined shoes, clean fingernails, and the niceties “please” and “thank you” would take a person far in life. Although she only had a sixth-grade education, she could read well and spoke in accent-free English, developed from her years of housekeeping in white households.

Despite her experience when she was young, Noonie was not afraid of white people. When I was five years old I was coming home with Noonie from a church event when suddenly I had to pee so badly that I started crying. Noonie avoided an accident by unzipping my pants and letting me do my business between two parked cars. A burly white cop came along and threatened to write a summons. Her five-foot-two frame seemed to elongate as she got in the cop’s face and tongue-lashed him about the mayor and the city closing public bathrooms and forcing poor kids to pee on the street. After a few minutes the cop tipped his hat, said, “Sorry, ma’am,” and got out of there, moving as fast as he could. On the other hand, Noonie would literally cross the street or get off the bus to break up a fight or to scold black kids for using disrespectful language.

She was a follower of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and believed that love and peaceful protest were the tools for equality.

When Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown would appear on the TV news screaming about black power, Noonie would shake her head and talk about those ruffians in the raggedy clothes who needed haircuts. Afros, bell-bottoms, rock music, and hippies protesting the war were not Noonie’s thing. “
Th
e world is going crazy,” she would tell me, “so make sure you stay on the straight and narrow and get your education.” Although the Black Panther Party never came up in our conversations, I knew that me being part of an organization whose members carried guns and called the cops “pigs” would have her speaking in tongues and turning colors.

On the morning of my planned visit to the Black Panthers, I slipped past Noonie to the closet and grabbed the black leather jacket she had given me for Christmas. Noonie brought me to a halt without looking up from her Bible.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“To school,” I answered, hoping not to seem like an escaping convict caught in the guard-tower searchlight.

“Just like that? Without saying good-bye?” I walked over to Noonie and kissed her on the cheek, hoping that now I could make my move out the door.

Noonie gestured toward the scrambled eggs, juice, and corn flakes on the table. “Now sit down and eat your breakfast.”

“But I’m late,” I said.

“
Th
at’s right. You were late getting up. But I was not late when it came to making your breakfast and this food is not going to waste.
Th
ere are hungry children in Africa.” Noonie turned the page on her Bible.

“
Th
en let the children in Africa eat it,” I mumbled.

Noonie’s eyes shot up from the Bible. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” I said meekly. I sat down and started to inhale the food.

“Slow down.”

Th
en Noonie took in my outfit. “Why do you have on your good leather coat? And why are you dressed in all black? You going to a funeral?”

I groped for an answer. “It’s Assembly Day.”

Noonie wasn’t buying it. “I thought you wore a white shirt to assembly.”

I fished around in my oatmeal so she couldn’t see my eyes searching for a comeback. “I do, except today is Armistice Day and Mr. Seawell wants the color guard to dress in black out of respect for all those who gave their lives. Bye, Noonie.”

I jumped up and kissed her on the cheek, then headed out the door, praying she wouldn’t see through my lame story. As I pulled the apartment door shut behind me, I heard Noonie’s footsteps on the other side of the door. Would she yank it open and call me back? I wondered. I paused, then heard her lock the door. I’d made it!

I got through the morning classes without paying attention.
Th
en, when the bell rang for the last one, I headed into the hallway with the other students, looked for a side exit, and slipped out the door. I was cutting lunch and the rest of my classes for the day. I didn’t care if I was being marked absent. In fact, I didn’t even write down any of the homework assignments that day. I was going to join the Panthers, and if the teachers messed with me I would bring a battalion of the brothers into the school. We would storm the place with guns the same way I’d seen the Panthers storm the California State Legislature a few weeks earlier.

James and Eric flanked me as we sat on the subway train headed to Brooklyn. It was an hour’s ride from our stop in the Bronx, plenty of time for doubt and apprehension to build.

“You sure you ready for this?” James grilled. “Panthers don’t play. In fact, the Panthers be taking heads if you’re not serious.”

“I’m ready,” I replied, trying to be as cool as possible.

“How are you ready? You still use your slave name, ‘Eddie.’ I know that rhymes with ‘ready,’ but you ain’t really ready until you have an African name. My name is Rhaheem now.”

Eric nodded his head in agreement. “And my name is Sabu. What’s your black name?” he asked.

“I don’t have one,” I said, feeling like a total sap. “Can you give me one?”

“Let me see,” James said, closing his eyes in deep meditation. “Yeah. We’re going to call you Unbutu.”

“Unbutu,” I stammered.

“Usa,” James said.

“Usa,” I replied, confused now.

“Jamal,” James said and nodded firmly.

“Ja Mal,” I repeated phonetically.

“Yep, Unbutu Usa Jamal, that’s your name.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“What it means is he who comes together in the spirit of blackness.”

I would find out later that James—excuse me, Rhaheem—was totally pulling syllables and meanings out of the air, but at that moment, sitting in a subway car headed for Brooklyn, I had been reborn and renamed. I smiled to myself as we rode. I had a black name and a black outfit. I was almost a Panther—and we hadn’t even gotten to headquarters yet.

Th
en Rhaheem leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “You know, the Panthers are like the Mafia. Once you join, there’s no getting out.”

“I don’t care,” I responded nonchalantly, though inside I was feeling unsure.

Sabu leaned in. “Man, you know you gotta kill a white dude in order to be a Panther.”

“I don’t care,” I said with a shrug. Now I was really feeling nervous. Kill somebody? Just to join? But I was with two of the coolest guys from the neighborhood, and I couldn’t let them think I was a punk.

“Naw, get it straight,” James said indignantly. “You don’t have to kill a white dude.” With those words I began to breathe again and I felt myself relax. “You have to kill a white cop,” he said, “and you have to bring in his badge and his gun.”

All the air sucked out my lungs, and my stomach felt like an erupting volcano. But I couldn’t be a punk. “I don’t care,” I squeaked, and sat back between James and Eric, suddenly feeling like a condemned man.

We got off the subway at Nostrand Avenue and walked toward the Panther office.
Th
e closer we got, the more my spine began to rattle. Suppose the Panthers killed us just for daring to show up on their doorstep. I was hoping that one of my friends would chump out first. I could tell that we were all nervous, but none of us wanted to be the one who got teased for bitchin’ up. As we approached the office, we saw the Panther logo and the sign
BLACK PANTHER PARTY
. We walked up to the front door and were greeted warmly by a stunningly beautiful woman in a long African dress.
Th
at was enough to get the three of us inside.

We passed posters of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, both men holding guns. A burly man in a beret and a leather jacket welcomed us with a “Power to the people” greeting. We imitated his black-power salute and answered, “Power.” He pointed out three empty chairs at the back of the room.
Th
e office was packed with about fifty men and women, some wearing Panther uniforms, some wearing African garb. Everyone was “militant cool.” My heart began to race with excitement. I had made it to the inner sanctum.

Th
e meeting was being run by a handsome twenty-five-year-old man in shades and a leather jacket, seated behind a large wooden desk. People addressed him as Lieutenant Edmay or brother lieutenant. He was reading from the back page of the Black Panther Party newspaper, which listed the Ten-Point Program. After each point he would take comments from Panthers in the room. As I looked about, everyone in the room seemed older, but then I had just turned fifteen, so everyone
was
older.
Th
e Panthers in this meeting ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five.
Th
ey were students, ex-convicts, Vietnam veterans, welfare mothers, street people, the disenfranchised, the least opposing the most, the folks that Malcolm X called “the grassroots.” “Point number one,” Lieutenant Edmay recited, “we want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our community.”
Th
ere was some discussion on the point, and Edmay moved on. “Number two,” he continued, “we want full employment for our people. Number three, we want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black community.”

Th
e Panthers in the room made comments about human rights, equal justice, better housing, community action programs, and other ways to improve things in the community.
Th
ere was no conversation about murdering white people, blood oaths, and general acts of mayhem. But I couldn’t really hear what was being said because I had my own internal adolescent conversation raging in my head, a kind of mantra, with me reciting, “I’m a man. I ain’t no punk.” By the time Edmay got through a few more points, I had hyped myself up to make my bid to be a Panther.

“Number seven, we want an end to police brutality and the murder of our people.”

Th
at was my cue. I jumped to my feet. “Choose me, brother,” I shouted. “Arm me and send me on a mission. I’ll kill whitey right now.” Edmay looked at me long and hard and gestured for me to come to the front. I looked at my friends with an expression that said, “I told you I was ready.”
Th
ey looked amazed. I walked to the front of the office, under the silent and intense scrutiny of dozens of Panthers.

Lieutenant Edmay inspected me for a moment.
Th
en he pulled open the bottom drawer of the bottom desk and reached deep inside. My heart began pounding again. Damn, I thought, look how far he’s reaching in that drawer. He must be pulling out a big ass gun. Instead Edmay handed me a small stack of books.
Th
e Autobiography of Malcolm X,
Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver,
Th
e Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon, and the “Little Red Book” by Mao Tse-tung.