Dad rose through the ranks that had been thinned by arrests, underground escapes, and stupidity. He was the Maryland defense captain, head of the Baltimore branch. But he planned no insurrections and avoided the grand suicidal gesture that seduced others of his age. Instead, Dad mostly thought of survival. For sure, there was the threat of cops kicking down doors, infiltration by agents and operatives. But these were secondary. Dad was responsible for a commune, and when he woke in the morning he thought not of guns but of oil, electricity, water, rent, and groceries. He turned to Brother Reginald Howard, his minister of distribution and right-hand man who worked down at Bethlehem Steel.
Howard, Dad would say, we don’t have any money.
Formally, Howard’s charge was the delivery and flow of Panther newspapers, the funds from which were the lifeblood of any Panther chapter. He was a hustler in the righteous sense, the type who sold Panther newspapers at that plant between shifts. Dad would send him out into the street and Howard would speak with local grocers, highlighting all the kids the Panthers had fed, all the free shoes they’d handed out, and the mothers they’d tested for sickle cell.
Then there was the plight of the community. They would start to roll in early, drawn by the luster of the party or referred by some overwhelmed city agency, and all of them needed help. Someone got harassed by white people in East Baltimore. A husband arrested and couldn’t afford a lawyer. Someone else had been evicted and sat out.
And then there was the struggle of managing the soldiers of the impending guerrilla war. Dad was not in the company of flower power. It took all kinds, bourgeois college students, teenage mothers, plumbers, and professors. But the beloved and honored foot soldiers hailed from the back end of the world. They were risen armies of the dead — cutthroats, rapists, brigands, and murderers — who in other lives feasted on their own people’s toil. Now they’d gone Conscious and trained their guns on the System. But the reformation varied in scope. Some were as real as Malcolm straight out the joint, while others were just looking for new ways to launder their dirt.
Back in Washington, Hoover was wild and aflame. Later it all came out — reams of FBI files where agents fomented beef, trumped up charges, and coaxed the vanguard to suicidal acts. The Panthers needed only their eyes to understand. Across the country, police armed with blueprints and intelligence above their grade kicked in doors at perfect hours. They murdered Fred Hampton. Bound and gagged Bobby Seale. Eldridge was out. Attica and the Jackson brothers were on the way.
In Baltimore it went like anywhere else, and among the matters my father inherited in his new role were the numerous cases of shackled Panthers. He focused on Eddie Conway, indicted for the murder of a policeman. He was pinned by the slimmest of evidence — a jailhouse snitch and an officer who claimed to have seen his face for a few seconds in the dead of night. But the Panther leaders were only half concerned with the particulars. The romance of the movement, the theology of revolution tomorrow, made them see not one man in the balance but a symbol of the grander war.
The leadership sent orders to Dad. Conway was to boycott the trial and expose this rotting system of justice, from the pigs to the preening judge, for the bane that it was. They placed their faith in the jury, convinced that they, too, would see the sin of it all. But the Panthers’ faith exceeded their resolve, and all the talk drove them to delusion. Brothers out west promised big-shot lawyers — Charles Garry and William Kunstler. Instead, Conway got a public defender who spent all of an hour with him before the trial. In the end Conway — Brother Eddie as I came to know him — went to jail for life plus thirty-seven years and, of the many things from this time which Dad would have to carry on his conscience, that was king.
Across the nation Panthers shouldered the burdens of their comrades and the community. It was what they’d asked for. And then, in 1972, they were ordered to stop. It fell apart on bullshit rhetorical points, a game of who was really ready to go for the guns. Eldridge Cleaver allied with the New York branch, and after that it was gang war. Panthers killing each other. First the rebel Robert Webb, then party loyalist Sam Napier was found bound, gagged, burned, and shot in New York. Only weeks earlier he’d been with my father, and they’d narrowly escaped the justice of the New York faction. Dad was summoned to the headquarters in California and has remained puzzled by what he saw ever since. It was about that time it dawned on him: the world was going to go on as it was.
In California, the higher-ups informed him that Oakland was the only front that mattered, that beefs with local liquor stores were the real makings of this new world. They shut down all the regional offices, and Dad was left to stew on the many Eddie Conways, Panthers who had acted in this theater, now left in jail. Then there were the communities, where Panthers provided shoes, doctors, breakfast, and lawyers, abandoned and left to their squalor. And Dad had his own kids, now, five of them, back in Baltimore with a father away on the other side. This was too much for Dad to take. He was identified as a noncompliant and put under house arrest by the Panther Party. He scrounged together money from family and friends and flew back home.
It could’ve been worse. Whatever he faced — pissed-off mothers and grandparents, old taxes and new debt — was nothing like the chasm that swallowed others. Dad believed in revolution, but the truth is, he was always eminently suitable to the world as it was. He was an intellectual, born as it happened among people who could not see a college campus as an outcome.
He thought his country rotten, but he was a better fit than he knew. His comrades were ill equipped. This was about more than shackles of color. They flocked to their revolution because the real revolution, the one that won out — with its marching automation, its theology of efficiency and goods — had nothing for them. A radical undoing was their only way out. Behold how they died: scrounging for crack rocks; infested by AIDS; or, if lucky, under the honorable hail of gunfire.
I begin many years later, After the Fall, after the terrible dawning that the revolution had gone bacchanal, and devolved into shakedowns of drug dealers and parlor games with starlets and playboys who longed to look like danger. Dad and many of his Baltimore comrades had left the Panthers. The final hours of their youth were heartbreaking. They picketed liquor stores for donations, shook cups in Berkeley next to the white homeless, and financed a nightclub. For leaving, the Panthers condemned my father. They instructed Patsy to not allow Dad to see Johnathan. Dad wrote a letter to the central committee. There was no answer.
He was caught somewhere between the old socialism and the understanding that the people could not be moved without capital. Still, he left the Panthers with a basic belief system, a religion that he would pass on to his kids. He jettisoned Christmas and saw the great apostasy of the Fourth of July. He took a pact with a group of brothers and sisters to fast on Thanksgiving in protest over Attica, the Indians, and the sheer gluttony of Satan. Through the years, these brothers fell away. But Dad carried on.
Now he thought back to the Panthers’ heyday and his old friend Walter Lively, who like him, was young, black, and out of Philly. But Lively had an instinct for the inside, and was thus adept at moving the gears of power in the proper direction. He was a shocking blizzard of things. He was named to the city council at twenty-five as a Republican. Finagled a farm in rural Pennsylvania where Dad would stash Panthers on the run. But what struck Dad the most was Walter Lively’s dream of a propaganda machine — a vertically intergrated entity that printed, published, and distributed Consciousness to the people. Lively had assembled many pieces of printing equipment, but before bringing it to be, he was on to something else.