Even then, in his army days, Dad was more aware than most. Back in training he’d scuffled with a Native American soldier, who tried to better his social standing by airing out the unit’s only black. After they were pulled apart, Dad walked up to his room, calmed down, and then returned to the common area. On a small table, he saw a copy of Black Boy. He just knew someone was fucking with him. But he picked up the book, and discerned that it was Nobody Smiling. He took it up to his room, mostly because he was touched but also to keep the book from playing a part in any further racist slights.
In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He’d read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain. He bubbled on the edge of Consciousness. The night they gunned Malcolm down, Dad and a few black soldiers were headed into town to carouse and drink. The message came over the radio, but the rest of the car kept talking.
Quiet, Dad told them. Did you hear what they just said? Malcolm is dead. There were a few looks of shallow concern and then the conversation picked up, like only a strong wind had interrupted the flow.
Now he began to come to. When on leave, he stopped at book stands in search of anything referencing his own. He read Malcolm’s memoir, and again saw some of his own struggle, and now began to feel things he’d, like us all, long repressed — the subtle, prodding sense that he was seen as less. He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?
He was discharged in 1967 and married Linda, in love, but mostly because he knew nothing else. It was wrong from the moment they left the courthouse. Afterward, they gathered with Dad’s family to talk, laugh, and drink. Halfway through the day Linda left the small party, and said she was just stepping out to visit her mother. But she never came back, and Dad spent that evening at Ms. Verla’s house pleading for his new wife’s return. She did, but they argued regularly. They’d take turns leaving and coming, and during periods of intermittent warmth, children would appear.
By the time the second child arrived, my big sister Kris, six years my senior, he was in bloom. You know one way or the other we all get touched. A Jersey housewife strolls through the supermarket and, suddenly caught by the sheen of an apple, decides to give abortions in small-town Kansas. A washed-up middling exec, who’s thrown his life away to the bottle, hears organs, finds the Word. In the midst of a Hawthorne lecture, a drug-addled sophomore is taken by dreams of the Peace Corps. All the truly living, at least once, are born again.
Since childhood, Dad had read constantly but without direction or edge. Baldwin, Wright, and Malcolm were the first signs that led him onto another path, one he followed until enveloped by a forest of black books. He lived in a busy house, but in stolen moments alone he considered the world around him, the quaking from war, riots, and assassinations, and saw in this new Knowledge a way of drawing a line.
When the years of slumber passed, and he emerged fully Conscious, everything was skewed. Was like the whole world needed a shot of V8. Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe. He was a slave still, and all around him black people heaved under the invisible yoke. He could not talk like before. Everything felt corrupted, until he found himself sitting at cookouts, wondering how, in the world of Medgar Evers, a man could sidle up, crack a beer, and spend hours essaying on Earl Weaver and the Oriole way.
Dad was working for United Airlines, unloading luggage and maintaining the cabin after passengers deplaned. In downtime, he brought back his father’s old ritual and fell into the newspapers left behind from distant cities and states. He only barely knew California, but it was in a story from that other country that Dad found his muse. His muse carried a gun.
Television remembers that era for the blown churches, Mississippi savages, and sharecroppers gone philosophical. All those great stories are Southern and built on Christ. But Dad wasn’t from those parts. He hailed from the black metropolis, walked with the great black masses, down on the Markoe Streets of the world, where we had all been down so long. He stood with those who had come to believe that our condition, the worst of this country’s condition — poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled, dumb — was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that this whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of great rot but rot itself. Dad found Gandhi absurd. Much more native to Dad were these fab headlines touting the exploits of the brothers and sisters from Oakland who did not dance, who preached righteous self-defense and Fanon.
Word to John Brown, my father was overcome. It was the spring of 1969. He began checking the schedule for planes coming from the West Coast. On board, after cleaning, he now searched for California papers, then searched through those papers for any updates on the machinations and movements of the Panther Party. He finally discovered the local Panthers after a night of cocktails with a girl who was not Linda but claimed to be down and, as proof, that very night, pointed Dad to the local office.
The next day, he arrived at the branch cocked and ready to serve. But the Panthers were in the throes of Hoover’s scripted paranoia. Everyone was a presumed agent. Members were purged. This was not a game. Alleged informants were found decomposing in the woods of Leakin Park. When Dad walked in, dripping revolutionary fervor, they held back. They wanted to know how he found them. They did not recognize the girl who pointed him their way.
He was assigned to a weekly political education class — a sort of vetting that weeded out the agents and crazies who did not so much believe in dialectical materialism and great leaps forward as in the sheen of guns and shooting at cops. It was supposed to be about more than that, which suited Dad’s bearing and penchant for books more than guns. He would listen to the autodidacts break down capitalism and the means of production. He would listen to them turn around the great conflicts many ways, and he would say nothing; until one day he saw a clear through line, then they could not shut him up. They could not turn him away.
There were no berets and powder-blue shirts. Often there weren’t even guns. Dad began as the Panther who wasn’t. He was designated a “community worker”—a tag ranking him slightly above hanger-on and giving him sleeping rights at the collective’s HQ. He would rise at five A.M., head over to the Martin de Porres Center, talk with the radical Catholics, and then head to the kitchen. The revolution was centered around pancakes, bacon, and grits; and by seven A.M., a stream of poor black kids would move through for their daily free meal. In the afternoons, he studied with his comrades. At night he worked at the airport. Somewhere in between he was a father.
This creaky arrangement held until he was busted for moving guns. He lost his job. The newspapers published his name and address. He called Linda, and she just hung up the phone. The dead connection broke his bonds to the mortal plane. He saw himself now freed from this world and all its trappings, which would soon be nil anyway. He went to work full-time for the uprising, and found his place among the great change that was burning through the city.