Several of my more terrifying hours were spent in a holding cell awaiting transport to the Los Angeles County jail. Seventy, eighty prisoners, most in orange jumpsuits, loitered in the concrete bunker. There were no windows, no bars, just a door that opened from time to time, allowing prisoners in. The furniture was a single metal commode, on which men at complete ease would sit, defecate, wipe themselves. The ones in jumpsuits were being returned to County following court appearances; we in street clothes were en route from various local jails to begin our own stints at County. Once at County, I’d heard, we’d be processed, issued jumpsuits, assigned to cells.
Sometime into these hours, after I’d been sidled up to by one of about a dozen white men and handed a lit cigarette rolled in Bible paper, the door banged open and a skinny black twenty-something in tan slacks and a sloppily tucked-in button-down shirt hurtled into the room. Awkwardly, he gathered himself. Everyone, it seemed, paused to breathe: was that money sticking out from his shirt pocket? One beat, two. Three beats. Absolute silence in the cell. Then two black men stepped almost invisibly from a larger group and simultaneously, without warning, beat with their fists and knees the man with the money and then, once he went down, kicked and kicked and kicked him. Legs, ass, groin, ribs, back, head: they left no part of him be. At first, the crumpled man was yelling, “Police! Police! Help!” But that just got some laughs. Soon, we all turned away. The only sound was the panting of the two men doing their work.
I can no more forget that experience than I can forget who my children are. “Police! Police! Help!” I hear it clear as day. It’s true, I joked about it for years. I hear us laughing at the irony of the demand, a laughter the tone of which seems to me today, in retrospect, as wistful, as if we all at that moment were unexpectedly confronted with the grand joke of what we’d become, as individuals but also as a species, and were yearning, through melancholic laughter, for some mythical Time Before. But probably, the tone wasn’t at all wistful. Probably, we sounded like jackals at a feeding. Why else would I remember it as such terror? And if not such terror, why would I join a pack of jackals?
We make our own prisons, my mother used to say. That, and We are all the prisoners of our own universe. She’d done time for dressing up as a nun and passing bad checks to pharmacists for high octane prescription dope. My first memory of her is when I was six-years-old. She wore a brown leather jacket with fur lining the collar, over which her red hair spilled. She wore bell bottom jeans. We wandered around a park. She fed me from a pocketful of candy. Twenty-nine-years-old, she’d just been released to a halfway house outside San Francisco called Chrysalis. I loved her immensely, immediately. We stopped to sit on a bench. She held my hands in hers. Half a year later, clean, an NA sponsor and Assistant Director of a methadone clinic, my mother showed up in her brand new husband’s blue Dodge Colt and, accompanied by a social worker, retrieved my brother and me from our final foster home.
Again, Eldridge Cleaver’s got a hold of me (see my last 600 posts).
But it’s easy to forgive the dead.
Sometimes, toward the end of a dinner party, when the host is all but finished with the scrubbing of the pans, I’ll saunter into the kitchen and ask if I can help. I do this as a kind of joke, an ironic joke, both the aproned host in rubber gloves and I aware I’m offering only because I know my offer won’t be accepted. This is akin to how I think of my feelings about Cleaver. I get to have my cake and eat it, too.
Cleaver was what Jack Henry Abbott, in In the Belly of the Beast, calls a State Raised Convict. Born in 1935 in an overtly racist America, Cleaver was in trouble from the start, serving time in youth detention facilities and work camps. When he became aroused by the Black Liberation Movement, in 1954, he had just begun his first real prison sentence, having been caught with what he describes in Soul on Ice as “a shopping bag full of love.” Had Cleaver served his time on the marijuana charges and then gone on to live his life the way he did—Minister of Information for The Black Panthers, best-selling author, probable cop killer, exiled communist revolutionary, Born Again Christian, Moonie, Republican, fashion designer, cocaine addict, pitiful creature—it would be fairly uncomplicated to embrace him, taking into account, regarding the police officer, that The Panthers were at war with the police (in a way that is difficult to fathom today).
But here’s what complicates my forgiveness, from early on in Soul on Ice:
“I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind.
“Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man had used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation through the white race.”
When I say I get to have my cake and eat it, too, I mean there’s nothing at stake in my forgiving Cleaver, or for liking him. I am neither woman nor African American. I do not have to live with Cleaver, even a dead Cleaver, even a Cleaver as literary manifestation, as my torturer or as a member of my clan. To the latter point, I do not have to explain away his behavior, or justify it. Rather, I can act the good white Christian and forgive… the savage? But Cleaver, in the passage above, is diabolical, not savage. I mean, “smooth”? That rises to Third Reichian levels. Will I next be forgiving Goebbels, liking Himmler? Or are they too close to home, white men I could come from?