There were some comrades that were fearful of Robert Heard
,
but I had always felt comfortable around Big Bob. He nodded and went into the other room. After a brief phone call he came back.
“Okay, A. D. That's cool. I talked to the servant and he said it was all right. Just stay in touch.”
“Right on. I'll see you later.”
I left. At that moment, I became a civilian for the first time in ten years. I had done it. I had successfully separated myself from the party without fully cutting myself off, which is more than I can say for most. The usual voluntary exit was made late at night or while out in the field, under the duress of fear. I was glad to be free, yet I was stunned by
all that had happened. What I was going to do now, I had no idea.
I had been staying with a young lady named Pat McElroy. I met Pat out at a club one night and went home with her, eventually moving in. Lola and I had broken up, as she had fallen under the spell of Bethune. Part of me hated to leave her behind, but I had little choice. The party was the only real family Lola ever had. Pat was a free spirit like me. She was the perfect person to be with while I was making my split from the Black Panther Party.
I remember running down the street the following day, jumping up in the air as high as I could go, trying to touch the sky, feeling elated, feeling free, freer than I had ever felt.
That evening, though, the joy quickly turned to sorrow as I went through the old copies of
The Black Panther
lying before me: tattered pictures of Bunchy Carter, Fred Hampton, Chairman Bobby, the revolutionary art of Matilaba and Emory, and images of the New York 21 and of fallen comrades. I attempted to describe for Pat the memories from these past ten years of my life, and the significance of the pictures of these brave men and women I had grown to love. I turned to hide the tears slowly dribbling down my cheeks. I looked at the clock. It was 6 p.m., the time when all the comrades were returning from the field and probably getting ready to eat at Central Headquarters. I hurriedly grabbed the phone and dialed the numbers permanently etched in my mind.
“Central Headquarters, may I help you?”
“Hello, Lola.”
“Hello, Aaron. How are you doing?” She sounded hard, trying not to show her sadness.
“Okay. And you?” I knew her too well. I knew she was hurt by my departure.
One by one, I eventually spoke to as many of my former comrades as possible. Later that night I deluged myself in drink and herb, trying to sort things out.
The following week I received a call from Al Armour, one of the members of the Los Angeles cadre.
“A. D. Come by. I want to talk with you.”
When I got to Al's house, his bags were packed. “Take me to the airport. I'm going back to LA.”
Al was one of the kindest people I had ever met. He had joined the party while attending college at UCLA. He was in the shootout when the Los Angeles pigs raided the chapter office in '69. He was a veteran soldier, a good brother, and he had just begun showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
“Aren't you going to tell someone?” I answered.
“No, man. Just take me to the airport.”
I felt very close to Al Armour. He and I were similar in many ways, and he was as close as a brother to me. We had gone on several missions together, and, selfishly, I was not ready for him to disappear from my life. Reluctantly, I drove Al to the Oakland Airport, hugged him, and bid him farewell. I watched him hobble along with his bags, looking professorial in those big, thick eyeglasses covering a light-brown face as dear to me as that of Tex and Deacon and House Man and all the other comrades who worked in the trenches night and day, overcoming tremendous odds. That was the last time I would lay eyes on Al Armour.
Al's departure did not just leave me with a well of emotion. The very act of my taking him to the airport would sever my connection to the party, cutting me off permanently, leaving me alone and unconnected to anything. Big Bob and Lola had been driving in the opposite direction and had spotted Al and me heading toward the airport. When Huey found out, he was furious. He had Big Bob call me with a threatening message.
“A. D., Huey said you are helping people to leave the party. Therefore, you have twenty-four hours to get your mothafuckin' ass out of Oakland.”
The words reverberated in my mind. Fear was the first emotion to surface, slowly replaced by anger. Huey's paranoia had reached its peak. Uncertainty, fear, and resentment fought for dominance of my mind, making it difficult to focus on any one thing, any single action. I hopped in Pat's '72 Datsun and drove deep up into the Berkeley hills to an isolated spot overlooking a deep valley flooded with green trees. The cloudy day was slowly turning to darkness. There I sat for several hours.
I had given ten years of my life to the party, the people, and the movement. Ten long years in the trenches, many sleepless nights, sacrificing everything, even my family, for the sole purpose of attaining the goals of the Black Panther Party. The party had been my life. It had become my family, replacing my biological family, relegating my parents to second place. Poppy had been my hero and my leader. Huey eventually took on those roles, in many ways becoming a father figure. It's never easy to cut yourself off from your family, no matter how much they have mistreated you, no matter how many times they have let you down. You hang on, hoping that someday, somehow, things will change. And it is even more painful, more devastating when they kick you out the door, slamming it behind you.
I did not really fear Huey, nor did I hate him. However, I was angry and disgusted with him, as a child may be disgusted with an addict father who has continually taken the wrong road, yet the child hopes, futilely, that someday things might be as they were before.
That night, I went back to Pat's house. There was no way I could leave Oakland. My connection to Oakland was all I had leftâits people, its many visual signposts of my past. I decided I would not flee in fear, but I would need to be cautious. There weren't many comrades left, and I knew quite well their modes of operation. For several weeks I slept in dirty flophouses in San Francisco, coming back to Pat's house during the day, waiting until things died down. During that period, one day I ran into Randy Williams in the Mission District. When he approached with a smile on his face, I knew not to have any fear. He said, “Man, I left the party. Huey's gone crazy.”
I wasn't surprised when Randy told me Huey wanted me dead. We chatted for a few minutes before he went on his way.
One day while at Pat's house picking up some things, I saw something out the window that sent fear racing through my entire body. It was Big Bob in the black Lincoln Town Car. I watched as he slowly got out. I ran and grabbed my .38 and waited by the door. There was a knock. I wanted to answer. Part of me sensed that Bob was coming by for consolation, but the other part of me, the fearful, paranoid part of me, held back. Bob eventually drove off, leaving me to wonder not just about the purpose of his visit, but also why I did not open the door.
A week later I learned that Big Bob had broken down in tears, telling Huey he could no longer take it. He had hung on as long as he could, holding on to the family to which we had all pledged our undying love. When I heard this I was guilt-ridden for not having opened that door. It would be many, many moons before I saw the gentle giant again.
I remember when Big Bob lent me his copy of
The Book of Five Rings
, a guide to the way of the samurai. It was a book Huey had ordered us to study. Big Bob was the quintessential samurai: hard, soft, warm, cold, merciful, merciless. He was a huge presence, not just in physical size, but in terms of his humanity as well. In many respects our lives in the party often mirrored those of the samurai. We lived to fight and to die upholding a certain honor and a certain code, while all along living our lives as the freest of men and women. We fought for our warlord for the unification of our people, until the end. Now there was nothing more to fight for.
The end seemed to come so fast. We had passed through so many phases, so many ups and downs, always emerging victorious. The early days of self-defense, when Huey led armed, defiant young men and women against the racist police forces, set an example that spread through America and created an identity of resistance and rebellion that put Huey and the party in the international spotlight. In Seattle, people like LewJack, Bobby White, Bobby Harding, Mike Tagawa, Chester, Steve, and others armed themselves, as did thousands of others across America at the time, serving notice to the pig power structure that this was a new day. The retaliation from the police was swift, relentless, deadly. Our minister of defense was wounded defending himself and was sentenced to prison, a pattern that would repeat with many others across America.
We implemented services and programs for the poor, the needy, the downtrodden, capturing the hearts and minds of millions throughout the world. In response, the US government waged an unprecedented war, covert as well as open, against the Black Panther Party and its members in particular, and against the left as a whole. We buried many of our comrades. We left even more locked away for life in dungeons and prisons throughout the empire. Yes, we made grave mistakes that eventually contributed to our demise. But we were always able to rebound, rebuild, recoup our losses, and recruit new soldiers into the ranks. It was the incremental dismantling of the party by its own founder that sealed the end to the physical organization of the Black Panther Party, leaving us with only bittersweet memories.
For those returning to their families and communities, there would be no cheering crowds, no open arms, no therapy, no counseling. Marsha Taylor, formerly Marsha Turner, committed suicide, I was told. The brilliant young woman who at age sixteen was national coordinator of the Breakfast Program had married Van Taylor, a captain of the San Francisco chapter, and they had left the party together around 1972. I heard that Calvin Bennett, a tall, dark brother from the Oakland chapter, who had worked security at the LampPost, had also taken his own life. Poison died homeless on the streets of Berkeley. Some fell into despair, joining the masses of walking wounded in America. Many eventually picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, and went on to become lawyers, professors, engineers, entertainers, filmmakers; many others continued their own forms of activism by becoming gang counselors or committing themselves to another cause; some went into politics. Many continued to do the work of the party in some form or another.
As for me, my own journey was not yet concluded.
36
The Last Hurrah
I'd like to fly far away from here Where my mind can be fresh and clear And I'd find the love that I long to see Everybody can be what they wanna be
âCommodores, “Zoom,” 1977
In April 1978,
there seemed to be so many possibilities before me. Yet I felt constrained by my past, trapped by memories of glorious days and periods of anger and despair.
Poppy asked me to come back to Seattle and work for Boeing or go back to school at the University of Washington. Unfortunately, neither of those choices held any interest for me. I had no desire to leave Oakland. I was still numb and would remain so for many years. I just wanted to find a job and work and live normally as a twenty-eight-year-old Black man. After ten years of fighting for justice, organizing, packing heat, and living as dangerously as one could in America, I was ready for a new life.
My first opportunity for employment came from none other than Big Malcolm. We ran into each other on the Bay Bridge, and I followed him to his house in Daly City, atop the highest hill. His dining room picture window opened onto a full view of San Francisco and the East Bay. We sat down and talked and smoked some pot, renewing our friendship.
Malcolm was working as a project manager for the San Francisco Housing Authority, responsible for the contract hiring for the authority's renovation of the public housing projects. His wife, Jeri, had moved back to Alaska, leaving the kids with Malcolm.
“Dixon! Wha's goin' on, buddy? You finally got the fuck away from that crazy shit over there in Oakland.” Malcolm was the same Malcolm I'd first met back in 1968, a man who never minced words. “Huey's a crazy motherfucker.”
“Yeah, it was time for me to leave,” I replied. “Shit was going too crazy for me.” I paused for a moment, thinking,
This is a very sensitive time and subject for me
.
“Say, Malcolm, can you help me with a job?” I asked.
“Yeah, buddy,” he responded. “You're right on time. The Housing Authority is hiring for youth counselors at the Valencia Gardens in the Mission District.”
I was excited. That type of work seemed right up my alleyâorganizing and working with the future revolutionaries. I put in my application, got an interview, and was given a starting date. Finally, I thought, I could make some decent money and enjoy life. But it was not to be.
Before I could even start, the funding for the youth counseling jobs was cut due to an initiative on the ballot to roll back property taxes. Property tax funds paid for many social programs as well as teachers' salaries. My new job was lost, as were thousands of others. This kind of property tax initiative would become a new weapon of the right for cutting social spending. These initiatives would sweep across the country at a time when many of the cuts would result in the loss of frontline programs that might have helped stave off the crack epidemic just beyond the horizon.