My copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice weighs 3.6 ounces. It fits so comfortably into my back pocket that I hardly know it’s there. When I was carrying it around full time, and when its contents were much in my thoughts, I’d sometimes pat my back pocket to make sure of its presence.
The book was first published in 1968; my copy, from 1973, is from its tenth printing. The top left corner of the front cover shows the price: 95c. Just below the price, angling up from left to right, in bolded black letters against a dirty-white sky background, it is announced, “OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD!” Beneath that, in large, thick blue capital letters, still against the dirty-white sky, is the title, and beneath that, in bolded black letters, is the author’s name. That covers roughly the top half of the front cover, which is, in all, 8.3 by 4.7 inches. The lower half features a three-quarters profile of Cleaver, the top of his afro grazing the bottoms of the E and A in CLEAVER. His brow is furrowed, his eyes are focused on a vision in the distance, his lips are framed by mustache and beard. He is a handsome, serious man. Behind him, below the dirty-white sky, is a nondescript urban scene, blurred.
The back cover features the same background, but without Cleaver or the city–just a flat dirty-white expanse upon which are written, from top to bottom, the author’s name (in black), the title of the book (in blue), and laudatory quotes (in black) from The New Republic, The Nation, and Maxwell Geismar. And below all that is the publisher’s description (in blue), which begins, “This is the book that has set the imagination of an entire generation on flame.”
The colors of the book are white and black and blue.
As I noted in my last post, I returned to Soul on Ice in search of Cleaver’s heart. More specifically, I wanted to know what James Baldwin saw in it that kept him from retaliating to Cleaver’s rather vicious attack on him in his essay, “Notes on a Native Son.” I was curious also about whether the seeds could be found in Soul on Ice to Cleaver’s later incarnations as Moonie, Mormon, cocaine addict, fashion designer, and Republican. Finally, I wanted to get some insight into how the politics of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 70s might inform the politics surrounding the Trayvon Martin killing and it’s legal and social aftermath.
I can’t say I now know what Baldwin saw in Cleaver’s heart. “Notes on a Native Son,” the essay in Soul on Ice that directly concerns Baldwin, is most interesting, really, as a bizarre psychological study into the nature of homosexuality and especially black homosexuality (Yacub, death wish, etc). But the essay is grounded in what are surely willful misreadings of Baldwin’s work. Maybe the most egregious case occurs when Cleaver quotes Baldwin’s introduction to his essay, “Notes from a Native Son.” Baldwin, writing about his coming of age in Harlem, explains that because his African heritage had been erased, he would, in Cleaver’s paraphrase, “appropriate the white man’s heritage and make it his own.” True enough, so far. Cleaver goes on, correctly: “This terrible reality, central to the psychic stance of all American Negroes, revealed to Baldwin that he hated and feared white people.” Then Cleaver delivers the money line and afterwards goes on to develop his argument from it as if these were not Baldwin’s feelings during a part of his adolescence, but rather the feelings of the contemporary, mature Baldwin. The line is this: “This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt.” This, then, leads to Yacub and the death wish, etc.
Further, what most appalls Cleaver’s sensibility is a character, Rufus, in Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country. But Cleaver doesn’t critique the character or the novel as a character or novel. Instead, he conflates the psychology of Rufus, a bisexual who commits suicide, with the psychology of Baldwin himself. From there, Cleaver goes on to denounce Baldwin for his critique, in “Notes of a Native Son,” of Richard Wright’s Native Son. (If this is getting confusing, here’s the path: 1. Richard Wright writes Native Son; 2. James Baldwin writes “Notes of a Native Son,” critiquing Native Son; 3. Eldridge Cleaver writes “Notes on a Native Son,” critiquing Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” Got it?) In the end, it turns out that whereas Wright was virile, aggressive, a man’s man, Baldwin, conversely, “despised—not Richard Wright, but his masculinity. He cannot confront the stud in others—except that he must either submit to it or destroy it.” Baldwin, to Cleaver, wrote his classic critique of Native Son because he couldn’t tolerate Wright’s virility.
So why didn’t Baldwin retaliate? One reason might be that while Baldwin’s homosexuality was no secret, he was still not “out.” This was 1968, after all. A fight with Cleaver, even a literary one (“OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD!”), could have transformed him, in the public eye, from a writer who happened to be black and homosexual to a Black Homosexual Writer. Baldwin would have wanted no part of that. Another explanation might be that Baldwin, a believer in Martin Luther King Jr.’s platform of non-violence, believed that turning the other cheek, especially to another black activist and writer, was the right thing to do. Finally, and this may sound simplistic, Cleaver was a potentially dangerous man, in prison for committing violent, premeditated crimes (more on this in the next post). Could it be that Baldwin, who would from time to time encounter Cleaver at parties or political or literary events, simply feared Cleaver?
Next: Pocketbooks, Part 3, in which we wrap up Soul on Ice and move on to Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast.