One evening, while I was sitting in the school cafeteria in what was to be my last political education class, Big Bob appeared in the doorway and motioned for me to come over.
“A. D., the servant wants you to go pick up all of the weapons and dump them in the bay. Here's some money for the U-Haul truck,” he said, handing me a two-page list of addresses. “Get the biggest truck you can,” he added, as I was heading out the door. Big Bob always seemed the same, no matter what was transpiringâno emotion, no digression, just straight ahead.
I looked at the long list of the locations of the weapons. I left immediately, taking James Aaron with me to carry out our final mission. For the next seven hours we crawled in attics, beneath houses, beneath porches, and in other odd, hard-to-reach places, gathering the entire armament of the Black Panther Party, with the exception of shotguns and hand weapons. At 3 a.m. we made our way to the middle of the San Mateo Bridge in a drizzling rain. We parked. James Aaron and I had said very little during our gathering mission. We both knew the end was near. We also knew that if we got caught with this illegal cargo we would both go away for a long time.
We occasionally puffed on a joint, trying to deaden our senses. So much had happened in such a short time. A California Highway Patrol car lazily drove by. After it was out of sight, we jumped into action, opening up the back of the long truck. We began to pull and toss crates, trunks, suitcases, AK-47s, M-16s, 9mm submachine guns, a .50-caliber machine gun, a long antiaircraft weapon, and endless trunks of ammo. We watched the party's armaments fall into the dark, cold waters of the San Francisco Bay. I came across my .30-caliber assault carbine, the twin of Elmer's, which we had purchased together. For a moment I stood and reflected on how we had spray-painted the carbines black, carving “All Power to the People” in the wooden stock, with our initials. I looked at the “A. D.” one last time before I reluctantly tossed it in with the rest of the weaponry that had helped us to be the most feared and powerful political organization in American history.
Unloading the truck seemed to take us forever. The next night I was back at the bridge alone, discarding the remainder of the weapons. I made it home safely, exhausted, falling onto the bed, relieved to be done. Suddenly, something caught my eye in the closet. There were four beautiful, black M-16s with several clips and boxes of ammo, looking very seductive. Big Bob must have dropped them off. For a second I thought maybe I would keep these for myself, but I remembered the Panther oath we had all taken when we joined the party:
Obey all your orders in all your actions.
I knew this would be a dangerous time not to obey the orders given me. I jumped up and grabbed the weapons and ammo, drove down to the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, and tossed the sleek black weapons into the night, listening as they splashed into the water.
35
The End of the Line
Soul searching Looking inside . . . Soul searching Digging a little bit deeper
Gotta keep on . . . Tryin'!
âAverage White Band, “Digging Deeper,” 1976
Tex's death had a heavy impact
on all of us. His happy-go-lucky, comical ways had put everyone at ease, yet he could be serious and fearless when needed. He and Naomi had just started seeing each other. Both of them had been moving from relationship to relationship until they discovered their love for one another. Now, Naomi was walking around like a zombie. For Lola, who was already unstable, his death was the defining event that pushed her over the brink, from which she would never recover. For her young mind, it was one too many losses, one too many contradictions. Something inside of her snapped. She slowly began to transform from the person she was into someone she wasn't. Before Tex's death she did not drink or smoke weed. She was always home with the kids in the evening. She had always been conscientious and close to our little family.
We were all trying to dull our senses, trying to deny what was happening, that our revolutionary family was coming to an end and we would all have to make a decision when to leave our slowly disintegrating army. When to step outside the tent and face life on our own. Those of us who were left were just barely holding on, functioning day to day, minute to minute.
Flores's absence was also felt. He had joined the Southern California chapter at seventeen. Flores was as smooth and calm as a clear morning sky. He was the only one in the security squad who never seemed to cross the lineâhe never got drunk, never overindulged; he followed the party line, yet was still flexible enough to allow others to bend the rules and policies. He had always treated me with the utmost respect.
We knew we were the last of the warriors, the last of a dying breed. We had become a strong force, feeling invincible at times. We had considered ourselves as eternal soldiers, always thinking we would fight the enemy to victory or to death. What we had failed to realize was that the enemy, at times, was us.
The once formidable Panther military might was now in ruins. For twelve years, people like Landon and Randy Williams, Field Marshal Don Cox, Orleander Harrison, Robert Bay, Geronimo, Valentine, and many others had maintained the military power and expertise of the party. All these comrades were now either imprisoned, dead, on the run, or disillusioned. The weapons themselves were at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.
My mind in a daze, I felt no more enthusiasm, no more hope that we could continue to move the party forward. And, after all, that is what we lived for. Without the hope of a future, there seemed to be no more reason to live, no reason to exist. We had come so close to achieving something unprecedented in American history: the nonviolent capture of an American city by progressive revolutionary forces.
In late March '78, I was sometimes the driver for Huey, occasionally driving him down to UC Santa Cruz, where he was still pursuing a PhD in philosophy. During those drives our eyes would meet in the rearview mirror. He was distant, rarely speaking. I knew him more deeply than he suspected, especially the good in him and the complexity of his character.
He once asked me, “Aaron, how do you keep that inner tube from growing around your stomach? Mine is getting big.”
“I stopped eating red meat,” I answered, wondering if he would engage in conversation. He didn't. I wondered what was on his mind. What was he thinking about? I thought back to the time I first laid eyes on that baby face. He was behind steel-blue bars in the Alameda County Jail in April 1968. Those were better days for him. Now it seemed nothing he did made any sense.
I wondered what had happened to him between our first meeting and his release from prison in 1974. In prison he had been brilliant in his leadership of the party, inspiring us to move forward against all odds. Many of us had thought that upon his release, Huey would set about correcting the mistakes others had made in handling the party while he was incarcerated, that he would
set everything right. But something had happened to him. Huey used to joke, “A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. . . .” In the case of Huey P. Newton, whatever happened was deadly serious. Most of us will never know the truth.
There would be speculation that the government used some form of mind control or psychological experimentation on Huey while he was locked up in the California penal system. Maybe he never meant for the Black Panther Party to grow into a national and international organization. Maybe the party would have developed differently if the government attacks on us had not been so fierce that they led to the elimination of key leaders like Fred Hampton and Bunchy Carter, and the exile of important figures like Don Cox and Pete O'Neal. Maybe things would have been different if Bobby Seale had not been locked up in Connecticut upon Huey's release. According to many memos between J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, the government's goal was to eliminate the Black Panther Party by 1969. It was due to the ferocity and determination of the party and its members that we survived as long as we did.
It was a cloudy day when a knock came at my door, and there stood Randy Williams, broad-shouldered, muscle-bound from nine-and-a-half years in Soledad Prison. He had done his time as if it had been a stroll in the park, and at the conclusion of his sentence, he came straight back to the party, as if the revolution were still occurring. Poison had recently done the same.
“Hey, Aaron. Huey told me to come by to pick up the keys to the car and your .45.”
I was not surprised or particularly concerned, for I knew this would push me closer to leaving. I handed him the keys. I picked up my Colt Combat Commander, the weapon that had been my constant companion the past four years. It was like giving up a part of me, something familiar and close. Reluctantly, I handed the gun to Randy.
“Oh, yeah,” Randy added. “You are to report to the school for maintenance.”
We barely looked at each other as he left.
The door had been opened, but it took one more incident to push me over the threshold. One evening soon after, I was part of a truckload of comrades dropped off in San Francisco's Broadway District, a popular destination for tourists and monied hipsters. We were passing out flyers for an event in support of Huey's upcoming trial. I went into a popular spot called Enrico's and began handing out flyers to the customers. I approached a table where a white couple and a Black gentleman were sitting.
The Black gentleman took one look at the flyer and jumped up and began a tirade. “Huey Newton is nothing but a two-bit gangster,” he angrily yelled. “He's a murderer and a two-bit thug!”
I looked more closely at the man as I prepared to respond, and recognized the face of someone I had once admired. It was Bill Cosby. I had spent my late nights as a young teenager watching Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as tennis-playing spies on the TV show
I Spy
, a groundbreaking series for its time. There were very few if any Black actors in leading television roles, so it was a complete joy to watch this cool and funny Black cat on TV.
I was surprised at how short Cosby was in person. I was also shocked at his explosive anger and his disparaging remarks about Huey. After he finished his tirade I could do nothing but walk out. I had no defense of our embattled leader. Everything Bill Cosby said was true. The remarks had hit home for me. And coming from Bill Cosby made it worseânot necessarily because of what I had once felt for him as a performer, but more because he had gone on to represent everything we were against. He was fast becoming the poster boy for the new integrated America, the “me” generation that espoused get-rich individualism, stripping away the cultural communalism that Black Americans once had, communalism that put our elders, children, and community first. Cosby and others in the new Black elite would go on to become filthy rich pushing consumer brands like Jell-O in an almost minstrel fashion, with no political consciousness, no talk of struggle or change for humanity, as if Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and the others had given their lives for nothing.
On the ride back in the truck I said very little. How had it all come to this? I felt both a great sense of sadness and smoldering anger. Sadness that the once powerful Black Panther Party was on its knees, its dedicated members scattered throughout the world, dead, imprisoned, or exiled. Anger that, without the party, there would be no more response to the Bill Cosbys of the world. They would be held up as the models for Black America, ensuring the end of what we had cherished, our families, elders, and communities.
The next day I was driving across the Bay Bridge, coming from a party demonstration in support of Synanon, a drug recovery program, which was under fire from the state and from former participants. Huey had ordered us to go to this demonstration. During the marching, I had no desire to be there. I no longer had any energy to represent falsehoods. As I made my way across the long, gray bridge, I realized it was almost ten years to the day that I had passed this way with Tommy Jones and Robert Bay, the two comrades who had ushered me into the party. We had stood together on that hot, muggy night on 7th Street in West Oakland, along with Orleander, Randy, and Landon, our black leather coats hiding our weapons as we defied the Oakland police. I thought about the many times I had ridden across the bridge with comrades, headed to the Frisco office or to the distribution center, to meetings, to the airport to pick up or drop off a weary Panther. Too many faces of too many beautiful men and women willing to stand strong against monumental odds, the constant arrests and attacks, the thirty-five dead comrades. We had won over the people with our programs, our beliefs in our leaders and ourselves.
“It's all over,” I said to myself, looking out over the bay. I had held on until the end, and for me the end was now.
I arrived at the office and was confronted by Lonnie D, the acting OD. “Here's fifty papers,” he said.
“I am not going out to the field,” I responded. “I'm taking a leave of absence.” I think that was the first time I had ever refused a direct order.
“You need to call Big Bob,” Lonnie D replied.
I called Big Bob and he said to come over, so I headed to the house on 10th Street. Big Bob had just finished showering. His huge body was draped in a towel. Looking in the mirror, he shaved the whiskers from his face. I noticed his .45 in its leather holster, hanging on the door.
“What's up, A. D.?”
“Bob, I need to take a year off to rest and think things over.”