THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#14, DEC/2014-FEB/2015
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 in 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 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 of 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. The 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. That 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. The 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.
The meeting was being run by a handsom 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, every in the room seemed older, but then I had just turned fifteen, so everyone was older. The Panthers in this meeting ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five. They 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.” There 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.”
The 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. There 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.”
That 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.” They 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. Then he pulled open the botton 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 a big ass gun. Instead, Edmay handed me a small stack of books. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, and the “Little Red Book” by Mao Tse-tung.
I gazed at the book and looked stupidly around the room. Books? I played hooky to come here. If I wanted books I would have stayed in school today. This must be a test, I decided. So I cocked my head to the side and slurred my voice like a black militant James Cagney. “Excuse me, brother, I thought you said you were going to arm me.”
“Excuse me brother, I just did.” There were shouts of “Power to the people!” and “Right on!” which I later found out was a revolutionary version of “amen.”
I felt embarrassed as I hung my head and walked toward my seat. Then Lieutenant Edmay called out to me: “Young brother.” I froze and turned around. “Let me ask you a question.” He launched into an articulation and cadence unique and famous to the Black Panther Party. “What if all of the racist-pig police running amok in the community, wantonly brutalizing and shooting down people, were black and the people being murdered were white? What if all these greedy-hog avaricious businessmen who are ripping off the community and selling people this rotting food and these jive-time inferior products were black and the people being ripped off were white? What if all of these fascist-swine and imperialist-demagogue politicians were black and the people who were colonized, oppressed, and stomped down were white? Would that make it correct?”
I thought hard for a moment. Something told me the answer from my heart instead of my militant Afro or my adolescent ego. “No, brother, I guess it would still be wrong.”
“That’s right,” said Edmay, smiling for the first time. “This is a class struggle, not just a race struggle. We’re not fighting a skin color; we’re fighting a corrupt capitalist system that exploits all poor people. Study those books so you can learn what the revolution is really about.”
Excerpted from Jamal Joseph, Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion & Reinvention, (Algonquin Books, 2012) pp.43-48.
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