When Black Panthers Prowled Amerika

By Pam

Nef, short for Nefertiti, is born and raised in the French West Indies. Her mother is a devout Catholic who believes in racial integration, while her father advocates armed revolution to bring down white rule around the world. Nef attends college in New York, graduating with a journalism degree, and then participates in the 1964 “Mississippi Freedom Summer” project led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Back in New York, the editor of the Harlem Herald hires Nef as a reporter. She covers fires and crimes in Harlem until her editor assigns her to do the newspaper’s first-ever investigative report, covering the Black Panther Party in Oakland.

Following the Party’s astonishing rise to national prominence, she meets Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. Cleaver wants to unleash the Panthers immediately in guerrilla warfare against the police, whereas Newton wants to establish community programs in order to enlist the support of the black community when he decides to order the revolution to begin. As Nef gets more intimately familiar with Newton (whom the Panthers reverentially call “Servant of the People,” or “Servant” for short, and the FBI dubs as the “Black Messiah”), she begins to question his veracity and intentions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665718790

Pam

In 1964, Pam joined a thousand college students participating in the “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” under the guidance of Martin Luther King Jr. Following this life-changing experience, Pam returned north to lead a civil rights group in Buffalo while earning a PhD in clinical psychology. Pam currently practices in the Bronx, New York.

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Copyright © 2022 PAM.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1880-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1881-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1879-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902882

Archway Publishing rev. date: 04/26/2022

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1   Yin and Yang

Chapter 2   Holly Springs

Chapter 3   On the Boardwalk

Chapter 4   New Grounds for Divorce

Chapter 5   Fanon’s Heirs

Chapter 6   Ready for Revolution

Chapter 7   Signs of the Times

Chapter 8   Soul on Ice

Chapter 9   Servant of the People

Chapter 10   Vanguard of the Revolution

Chapter 11   Dirge

Chapter 12   Trial of the Century

Chapter 13   What’s in an Acronym?

Chapter 14   Racism and Reactive Racism

Chapter 15   Women and Revolution

Chapter 16   Hijackers’ Den

Chapter 17   All for Naught

Chapter 18   Identity Crisis

Chapter 19   You Can’t Make This Shit Up

Chapter 20   The Election

Chapter 21   The Wheels Come off the Cart

Chapter 22   The Settling of the Dust

Historical Notes on the Black Panthers

Author’s Note

About the Author

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PROLOGUE

The Black Panther Party recognizes … that the only response

to the violence of the ruling class is the revolutionary violence

of the people. [This is our] basic premise for relating to colonial

oppression [in Amerika] where the white ruling class¸ through its

occupation police forces … terrorizes black people. Revolutionary

strategy … begins with the defensive movement of picking up the

Gun, as the condition for ending the pigs’ reign of terror by the Gun.

—The Black Panther, April 25, 1970

I n 1968, I picked up the gun. It was a Russian-made AK-47, the souvenir of a Vietnam vet who returned home a black militant ready to fight here instead of there, but who also brought back a heroin habit. Huey bought the weapon from him cheap, gave it to me as a gift, and then trained me in its use, insisting it would soon come in handy. As a woman, I did not find it cuddly, yet learned to love it anyway. The gun had become our trademark, threatening Amerika with civil war. In their corporate boardrooms and government offices, the ruling class was too complacent to realize that storm clouds were looming, although J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, had an inkling. The seeds of our revolution had been planted, and the shoots would sprout whenever Huey P. Newton, minister of defense of the Black Panther Party, issued the command. I was never among those comrades who hated honkies, but I knew which side of the color divide I belonged on. Joining the Panthers gave me a rush, like gambling my entire stake at a casino and awaiting the throw of the dice.

Once a revolutionary, I wondered what Amerika would look like when its internal African colony finally took control of its own destiny, rejecting crumbs from the capitalist table brushed onto the floor for us. What sort of new nation would rise from the ashes if a bloody insurrection were to destroy the old?

I remember the thrill I felt when I first saw a formation of Panthers at a courthouse demonstration after they had rocketed to prominence as the baddest cats in the civil rights movement and Huey P. Newton was still as free as a black man can be in Amerika. Each Panther cradled a rifle or shotgun and dressed in an ensemble consisting of a powder-blue turtleneck under a black leather jacket, combat boots, denim jeans, a black beret, and dark sunglasses. I came upon them as they were standing at attention, staring straight ahead, awaiting orders to spring into action. When commanded to move, they marched with military precision, and when they saluted their minister of defense, it was the black power salute, right arm stiffly extended at a slight angle above the horizontal, fists tightly clenched. I was particularly struck by their rough-hewn bearing and flinty expressions; these men were ex-cons and gangbangers who had traded in their formerly crude criminal ways for disciplined revolutionary commitment.

My heart melted at the sight of these once-errant brothers who were now converts to serving the cause of our people. Huey P. Newton called it redemption, akin to being born again as a religious experience. To me, they were so appealing in their Panther uniforms that I had to resist a temptation to embrace them all, one by one.

CHAPTER 1

YIN AND YANG

Who knows? Providence may have given the Negroes of

Montgomery the historic mission of demonstrating to the

world the practical power of Christianity, the unmatched

vitality of a nonviolent, loving approach to social justice.

—Charles Lawrence, 1956, writing to Martin Luther King

who was leading a bus boycott after the arrest of Rosa

Parks for not giving up her seat to a white man.

A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn’t any whites help [in

the struggle for black civil rights]? I said, "You can help by dying.

You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.

—The Autobiography of Amiri Baraka, 1984

W hat’s in a name?

I was born on the tropical island of Guadeloupe in the French West Indies. Today, it is one of France’s overseas departments, a euphemism for what was once called colonies. The change in terminology is cosmetic, and I don’t regard myself as French, although it is my citizenship. When my ancestors came ashore on this side of the Atlantic, new identities were foisted on them. Existing family and tribal ties were severed as they were separated from one another and auctioned off to the highest bidder. They were then taken to plantations where, to communicate with overseers and other slaves, they had to learn the French language, losing their native tongues over time. As for religion, priests inducted them into the Catholic faith after Master bestowed a Christian first name on their heathen souls. Master also added his surname to brand this or that Negro as his property, confident that no one on the island would ever mistake Master’s slaves for his blood relatives. Nevertheless, many of us are his blood relatives, once Master (and his male progeny) promoted the most comely female chattel from field nigger to house nigger. It always disgusts me when I think that my light complexion is the product of generations of rape that diluted the rich ebony coloration of my African stock.

And again, what’s in a name? Why do the first and middle names my parents foisted on me—Nefertiti LaReine—create a fable of royal Egyptian heritage, whereas, in all probability, my family tree was rooted in the soil of West Africa before the shock of forced extraction from its native habitat and re-planting in the earth of the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean?

The story of my naming traces back to my parents before I was born. Years of trying to conceive a child culminated in a doctor’s diagnosis that my mother was sterile. They gave up hope and, from what I gather, sometimes teetered at the cusp of divorce. However, at the age of thirty-eight, Madame Marie Loumière miraculously turned up pregnant. After an arduous labor (in which she nearly died, her husband, Léopold, pacing helplessly at bedside), she delivered a healthy baby girl. Later on, Papa enjoyed recounting how he happened to pick this odd first and middle name for me. I took one look at my newborn daughter and gasped because she was the spitting image of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s bride! Since Maman didn’t object (likely too exhausted to say much of anything), I was subsequently baptized as if I were a reincarnation.

A child is gullible, but at pubescence, I revisited the tale of my birth, asking my father what he was thinking when he came up with my outlandish tag. Were you drunk? I queried. But Papa stuck by his implausible story. And fate is weird. There actually is a distinct likeness between me and the medium-sized hardwood bust of Queen Nefertiti that always claimed pride of place on his desk. My complexion is sepia (high-yella according to Amerikan blacks), my nose sharp, and my neck long. I have straight hair, not my parents’ nappy type. Since a crown sits atop the statuette’s head, I resemble the Egyptian queen even more when I coil my hair up under a bonnet or a hat.

I still didn’t understand why my parents pinned this grandiose appellation on me until, at age twenty, I met Dr. Alan Armistead, one of the rare breed of board-certified black psychiatrists in the USA. Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t go to his office because I needed a shrink. I boarded a train from New York to Boston in order to interview him for my college newspaper. (I was a senior at Barnard then, the affiliated woman’s college across Broadway from male-only Columbia University.) He had been an invited speaker at my school, and what he discussed struck me as important enough to merit much wider public notice, but it had gone unreported by the press. So, the press—me, editor of the school newspaper—went to see him.

Entering Dr. Armistead’s office for the first time, I was so eager to sound professional that I introduced myself by the full regalia of my name, not the abridged Nef I prefer and almost always go by. After making me spell it out on a piece of paper, Dr. Armistead shook his head and was quiet for a moment.

Nefertiti the Queen, he translated from the French, an amused expression on his face. How’s that for a regal legal title! He laughed at his own rhyme, but then his mouth tightened, and his forehead furrowed. Every baby is born into great expectations, he said almost gravely. But when parents bestow an exalted name on their child, they implicitly charge him or her to take their aspirations into account. If I don’t miss my guess, your parents dreamed you would one day exemplify noble bearing and perhaps marry a leader of our people. And as you were growing up, you might have felt you were somehow supposed to live up to that image, although quite possibly resenting it at the same time.

The doctor stopped when he saw me frowning and added, I hope I haven’t offended you, Nefertiti. I’m way out of line for a psychiatrist, but such a unique name can’t be ignored.

I was initially thrown off balance because, right from the start, Dr. Armistead was practicing his craft on me. But the frown on my face wasn’t because I found his remarks offensive; rather, I was upset at myself for revealing a glorified title that always gave people an opportunity to tease me. Although he too started out playing with my name, he made up for it by probing its significance from an interesting new perspective, enabling me to give him a pass.

As we moved on to our interview, I found myself increasingly at ease with Dr. Armistead. He was the first psychiatrist I had ever met, and he proved to be warm, witty, and down-to-earth, nothing like the stereotype described by some Barnard classmates of aloof, sex-obsessed Freudians who analyzed even the most trivial behavior as if dissecting a laboratory specimen. Keep your sanity and stay away! was the unsolicited advice I was often given.

When asked to summarize his research results for my article, Dr. Armistead said he had surveyed a thousand medical records at two Boston mental health clinics, finding that blacks tended to be diagnosed as more disturbed than whites with comparable symptoms. Moreover, drugs were more apt to be prescribed for the dark-skinned, whereas psychotherapy was far more often offered to the pale-skinned. With the chasm of color so deep, he had concluded that the odds were stacked against a Negro receiving quality treatment from a white psychiatrist.

I asked if that meant black patients should consult only black psychiatrists. Sadly, there aren’t enough of us to go around, he replied. But yes, if a black patient has the option of access to one. He stared at me to discern my reaction. Nefertiti, should you be thinking that this inference from my data is biased and self-serving, I must point out that it applies only for the time being. I will change my mind as soon as my white colleagues acknowledge their ingrained, frequently unconscious racial animus. However, right now, that seems a long way from happening. For example, I’m hardly the most popular man in the auditorium when I present my statistical tables at a professional conference!

Back in New York that night, the doctor set me thinking. Not about prejudice in psychiatry (what else is new in Amerika?) but about myself in relation to my namesake. Dr. Armistead helped me make sense of a misnomer that had always embarrassed me. I was the link that held my parents together in what might have been an otherwise untenable marriage between two people with such starkly conflicting views. Yes, they sometimes quarreled over my upbringing, but were always knit together by their mutual aspirations for me.

If I could just get over the absurd myth that it created around my persona, my name was even comical, something to play with. Subsequent to my visit to Boston, I was finally able to spoof its imagery at a costume party held off campus by male Negro students at Columbia and soul sisters from Barnard, its across-the-street counterpart. Everyone gaped when I arrived clad in a purple dress and matching cap, with a pair of silver bracelets snaking up my forearms and strappy sandals on my feet. Years later, as a Panther, I radically changed my dress, as well as my ideas about what was in vogue for black women, but on that occasion, I fancied myself a historical apparition who had her pick of any male in the room, even a prospective pharaoh.

And I did get my pick of the litter! Toot, the star of Columbia’s football team and to me the most alluring man in the crowd, chased me from pillar to post all night, persisting until he got my phone number before I left at dawn. He called the very next evening, and we set up a date.

During four outings at movies or concerts, I managed to keep Toot’s aggressive advances in check, but he finally overcame the Catholic values about sex before marriage that my mother had inculcated in me. As a college senior, I was not a virgin, but neither was I what male chauvinists would call an easy lay (what does that derogatory phrase make them?). My internal compromise was that a suitor had to show he was primarily drawn to me as a person, which took quite a bit of proving before I could trust its sincerity. Before I was finally intimate with Toot, less than a handful of men had met this cut.

It was not long before Toot proudly introduced me to his jock friends, who congratulated him on his good luck at hooking up with such a fine sister, at the same time extending me their condolences for being with Toot. We went to some wild parties with his team, although—unlike Toot—I didn’t get into drink or drugs. That fall semester, other than time devoted to my studies, I spent every spare moment with him, attending his football games and cheering until I was hoarse whenever he carried the ball. At Christmas break, Toot proclaimed on bended knee that, with my consent, he wanted to become my royal consort after our graduation (he was a senior too). Queenie, don’t tell your ole man I’m just a commoner. Tell him I’m a duke or something.

I loved his sense of humor and generally upbeat mood, but things didn’t work out long-term in our relationship. His buddies declared he was the fastest guy on the squad—Toot-Toot!—but he had an unfortunate tendency to fumble as a running back. And that’s what happened to us.

Although Toot pressured me to set a wedding date, marriage became an issue for me because he gradually spent more and more of his free time with teammates and the coeds who draped themselves all over the athletes. Some of these girls obviously regarded my new beau as the most tantalizing catch on Columbia’s campus and buzzed around him to an extent well beyond my comfort zone. I began to develop nagging doubts about his fidelity, especially after he took a phone call when we were together that he screened from me. That really ticked me off, and, in a snit, I scolded him about patterns of behavior clearly inconsistent with what we were building. He replied that he had done nothing wrong; it just looked that way because some silly sophomore was harassing him with flirtatious calls and he didn’t want to upset me if I overheard them. That quieted me down for the moment, but in the privacy of my mind, I couldn’t help obsessing about who he might be with, whether she was prettier than me or—a train of thought best left alone—was a more adventuress sex partner. I hated such intrusive preoccupations not only because jealousy is such a painful emotion but also because it was beneath my dignity to allow myself to be turned into an insecure, suspicious, and clinging woman.

Toot finally committed what I regarded as the cardinal sin: he stood me up on a date. The tickets we bought to see a Broadway play went to waste and I also didn’t hear from him for the next two days. Then he came by to apologize, explaining that some of his homeys from Cleveland had suddenly showed up, and he couldn’t blow them off like he was better than them just for going to college. They all ended up in a strip club, acting like idiots by getting drunk as they ogled, applauded, and threw money at the strippers. According to Toot, no actual sexual contact had occurred, but he needed time to screw up the courage to face me and admit that he had patronized a low-class dive like that. I fucked up, Neffie. Can you forgive me? he said plaintively, his head bowed.

I started to get angry, stopped to think, and got angry all over again. I didn’t like the excuse he peddled (in effect, you can take a man out of the ghetto, but can’t take the ghetto out of the man), and I didn’t know whether I should even buy his story. Not that it mattered—one way or the other, Toot would always be around women and women around him. And this wasn’t the last dubious tale I would hear from him, not to mention the lies he didn’t have to tell because I would have no clue about what he did on the sly.

Losing the trust I once had in Toot, I pulled away. But there were other reasons too. Even though he was bright enough to be admitted to an elite, ivy-league college, he was barely squeaking by in terms of grades. I knew he was pinning his hopes after graduation on playing pro football (an uphill battle for a Columbia student), so that was his primary focus. However, as a man, he had very little social consciousness in a time of great racial upheaval and, beyond sports, lacked any discernible interests except for smoking weed, downing drugs, and guzzling booze with his buddies, as well as (before he met me) bedding the female groupies who flocked around the team like vultures. Meanwhile, I had started out as the prize showpiece on his arm and soon became, in his eyes, a woman smart, serious, and attractive enough to marry and take care of his kids, but also someone he expected to take for granted and not be too much of a drag on his fun.

Toot, normally a good-natured and amiable guy, turned ugly when I declared that our relationship was over. He went off on a jealous tear, popping up from nowhere if I just talked to another brother, threatening mayhem for either that man or myself. It was a scary time, especially when he was high on tequila or speed balls. I kept to myself and looked over my shoulder when on campus, which was as seldom as possible. Somehow, I got through this period and safely got away from him after seeing him for the last time at our graduation ceremony. He told me that he had received no offers to try out for a pro football team and was returning home to a job in Ohio that his father lined up for him as a high school gym coach.

I was sure my looks were the main reason a sought-after stud like Toot gravitated toward me at the party where I appeared as Queen of the Nile and also played a part in his hanging on as tenaciously as he did when our relationship had clearly run its course. But just before leaving Guadeloupe to attend my first year of college in New York, Maman, a primary-school teacher, lectured me that there is less to beauty than meets the eye. A man may jump through hoops to be with you, my dear, but don’t let that lull you into assuming he will never leave you, she cautioned. To keep her man, a woman should not count on physical attributes, which diminish over time. Maman also observed that beauty is never without its blemishes, a statement that prompted me to glance down at my smallish breasts.

After I graduated from Barnard, she sat me down and said more on this subject than she ever had before. I knew Maman was a stunner in her own day from pictures I saw of her when she was young, so I was sure she spoke from personal experience. Nefertiti, God has blessed you in the beauty department, so you will have more trouble fending off suitors than finding them. But too much beauty can be a problem—yes, even a curse! Like when a ruthless pervert crosses your path, exposing you to a dangerous situation. Or some bare acquaintance who insists he loves you and that you love him, pestering you ever after by sending notes or flowers, following you around, and threatening to punish you for infidelity if you dare to speak to another man! Not to mention that there are women who will hate you out of envy, not caring what kind of person you really are.

Even as I listened to her caveats, I mused that my mother had nevertheless always been enormously concerned about my appearance. Contradiction or not, I was always her Cinderella who catches the eye of the prince after she dresses up for the ball. Throughout my upbringing, Maman all but invented excuses for the two us to go shopping for the latest Parisian fashion in clothes, lingerie, and makeup. For all we knew, we may have been their only black customers, but the best stores in Guadeloupe accepted us as long as we paid in cash. On these excursions, we chose elegant, color-coordinated outfits for each other (ignoring the strain on the family budget) and finished our forays at a trendy black salon that offered manicures and pedicures, a coiffeuse equally skilled at styling her nappy or my straight hair, and juicy tidbits of local gossip. But there was also a downside to my mother’s supervision of every detail of my grooming; she was merciless whenever she spied a run in a stocking or a cracked nail. I had to be as impeccable in social presentation as she was.

In that same conversation after college, Maman went on to insist that character is the only valid measure of beauty. Character is inner beauty, she said, wagging her finger for emphasis. It casts credit or discredit when you stand before God on Judgment Day. She then bolstered this contention with a secular argument. Our people’s progress requires that we behave better than whites just to be seen as good as whites! I know it is illogical and unfair, but it is the only way we can overcome their presumption of superiority. Nothing irks me more than an islander who is lazy, superstitious, or promiscuous. Whenever one of us acts like a throwback to the jungles of Africa, white people use it as justification to keep treating all of us as hopelessly uncivilized. What we need in Guadeloupe is an uplifting Christian leader like Dr. Martin Luther King, an American I very much admire, even if he is Protestant.

A devout Roman Catholic, Maman regularly attended church, with me in tow. Not incidentally, she just as regularly admonished me to save my virginity for marriage. In Guadeloupe, she forbade me to be alone with any male of the species until age eighteen and was seemingly still convinced of my chastity until my wedding at age twenty-three. I never told her that she was locking the barn door long after the filly was gone. Actually, she never asked, but if she had, I would have said I was still a blushing maiden because I knew she had put me on a pedestal and needed me to stay up there. I always considered wishful thinking as the blind spot of this otherwise very intelligent and spiritual woman.

Papa, compared to Maman, was from another planet. Whereas my mother was café au lait in complexion, he was espresso. Sous-Maître d’hôtel at the fanciest restaurant, Tout Va Bien (All is well) in Guadeloupe’s capital of Pointe-à-Pître, he earned a decent living from wages and tips. He was very proud to have worked his way up from garçon to assistant headwaiter—quite a distinction in French society. He also looked smashing when he was wearing his tuxedo.

However, his employment there exacted a huge emotional toll. The restaurant catered to a white-only clientele, the owner scowling at even the occasional dusky mistress escorted in on the arm of a moneyed white benefactor. Aside from menial kitchen help, the managers, chefs, and cashiers were all from the same race as the customers—except for the anomaly that it was considered très chic to have dark-skinned waiters. Every evening, my ebony-hued father had to play his servile role, fawning as if privileged to accommodate a patron’s every whim, white gloves ensuring that his black fingers never touched their plates or silverware. But whenever customers were condescending or demeaning toward him, he had to stifle his resentment by dint of superhuman discipline.

Our family was privy to his true spirit, for home was the sole place where Papa could speak his mind. For example, on an Easter vacation in Guadeloupe during my college years, he sat me down and praised my command of the French language, and English too. He said these attainments would prove to be invaluable skills, partly to get ahead in a white-controlled world, but mostly so I could beat les salauds blancs at their own game, lulling them into assuming that I was a privileged black woman and therefore well off and docile enough to pose no threat to their dominance. That charade would end when blacks the world over rose up and showed our oppressors that we had collectively reached the same level of rage as had the Mau-Mau in Kenya. Papa always maintained that hardship had bred Negroes into the stronger, more cunning race. Princess, our time will come soon, he declared, eyes ablaze. The whites must pay for their sins in blood! So it is written.

I never saw that in the Bible, I naively replied. Maman neither, as far as I know.

"Not in your mother’s Bible. That’s all foolishness. In my Bible!"

That confused me. Papa, I jested, have you suddenly become a Buddhist?

"Nefertiti, this is no joke. It is about Les Damnées de la Terre by Frantz Fanon."

Never heard of him. Tell me who he is. Or was.

Papa explained that Fanon, recently deceased, was one of us, a black man from the nearby island of Martinique, a French possession just as Guadeloupe was. He studied medicine in France and went to Algeria to work in a health clinic. When an Arab revolt against French rule broke out, Fanon wrote a book that contended armed uprisings were the only way for people of color to get over the stigma of inferiority imposed by their colonial subjugation. We will turn the tables on them and see how they like it! Papa proclaimed, upending a kitchen chair as his metaphor for a race war from a man who was a servile black waiter in a segregated restaurant.

My father’s face lit up as he promised to buy me this book, and I soon received the gift of a hardcover edition. I should have read it, but I just inserted the book between other volumes on a shelf in my room and let it gather dust there. I always promised myself that I would eventually get to it, but to my shame, I did not do so until after he died, and then not even that copy.

Papa never reprimanded me for not reading a book so dear to him, although it must have been an omission hard for him to endure. However, he maintained as close a watch on my education as my mother did, in his case vigilant for signs of soul murder instead of the academic honors and social correctness my mother stressed. A critical stage occurred in my black primary school when I learned about Emperor Napoleon III’s 1848 decree prohibiting human bondage in French territory. Our teacher emphasized the significance of this event for people of African heritage in the Caribbean colonies, virtually instructing us to cry, Hallelujah! But when I came home excited about a class celebrating our emancipation, Papa was not pleased. The next morning, he took a rare day off from work and made me miss school, driving us around Guadeloupe in a rented car. Don’t be fooled, he said gravely. This royal proclamation didn’t free our people. He made me see with my own eyes how the vast majority of Negroes on the island still scratched out a pitiful subsistence, toiling on sugar plantations now owned by corporations and residing in makeshift shacks with earthen floors, just as had our forebears in slavery time.

Throughout my childhood years, my parents fought for my ideological loyalty, often in debates conducted at the dinner table over coffee. Papa used to spew fire and smoke like La Soufrière, Guadeloupe’s active volcano, when citing his radical views of the inevitable worldwide revolt of downtrodden blacks and the terrible vengeance awaiting whites. In rebuttal, a soft-spoken Maman always rejected his assumption that white equals bigot. Instead, she urged me to mingle with those few whites who had proven by their actions that they were not racists, utilizing such occasions to exhibit the innate dignity of women of color.

I distinctly remember one particularly fierce clash on the occasion of my fifteenth birthday because it had quite an impact on me. Maman got in first licks, brandishing her Bible to show that the queen of Sheba had wed the king of the Israelites. She then baited her husband with What tint of the rainbow is the soul? and followed up with Does God judge you by your pigmentation? Afterward, turning to me, she said with serene conviction, I want my child to rise above such surface concerns as shades of skin, slant of eyes, or a hooked nose. Nefertiti, marry a man of good character, no matter what part of the world his ancestors came from.

But Papa sneered at his wife’s Christlike universal love, caricaturing it by throwing his hands up in the air and staring upward for a long time, like he was waiting in vain for God’s blessings to rain down on black folk. Then he smiled at me. I love your mother’s faith in humanity. She even trusts that white people will eventually do the right thing. But I go by what white people are doing now and believe that they will only do better when they are forced to do better, and maybe not even then. Nefertiti, when your time comes, please marry a brave, defiant black man who will disdain living a lie, something that, to my sorrow, I can be accused of … and for which I will never forgive myself.

That last admission threw me for a loop and left me spinning. I reacted to my father’s candid self-criticism with the moral absolutism of an adolescent. On the spot, Papa fell from grace in my eyes, transformed from a secret revolutionary into someone who lived off the largesse of rich whites and was scared to actually do anything about an evil social system.

Looking back, I realize that is probably why I didn’t read the Fanon book beloved by Papa and mentally distanced myself from his sham Mau-Mau politics. Only when I was with Huey P. Newton did I absolve my father from the taint of hypocrisy by recognizing the limits inherent in his circumstances. But by then it was too late; he died of a stroke six months before I met Huey, passing a mere two months after Maman had succumbed to breast cancer.

I grew up my mother’s daughter in all things feminine. However, despite impaired respect for my father’s extreme political views until I met Huey at age twenty-six, I was still influenced by Papa’s bleak outlook on race relations throughout that formative period. Maman wanted me to act as if someday soon women like me could waltz through life like race didn’t matter, but Papa painted a more realistic picture of what lay ahead. I had learned from the childhood tour of Guadeloupe we took together that the melanin in my skin would determine the life I would lead more than money, education, or even gender. At Barnard, I dated only soul brothers. As for the white females in my classes, I was close to some of the girls but never comfortable enough to accept invitations to visit their homes or invite them to mine.

My polarized parents may have pulled me in opposite directions, but they were always unanimous in rearing me as a debutante, even if there was no such thing as a coming-out ball for Negro girls on Guadeloupe. They paid tuition for me to attend the best lycée in Pointe-à-Pître as one of a sprinkle of black students, took me to a music teacher for piano lessons, and every Sunday, I sat with them in a front pew in Guadeloupe’s largest Roman Catholic church.

In addition, I was sent every summer from as early as I can remember to stay with Aunt Mathilde in New York in order to polish my fluency in the English language. During my four years of college, I also stayed in the ground-floor apartment of the Harlem brownstone she owned, while she lived on the first floor and rented the second floor to a tenant. Aunt Mathilde was my mother’s younger sister who suffered the twin tragedies of infertility and her husband’s early death of a heart attack. Like Maman, she was highly religious, but like Papa, she was quite militant. My aunt and I talked to each other in French, but she always liked to intersperse into our conversations her version of the ghetto slang she had learned in this country. Once, when discussing the plight of Negroes in the South, she said in our native tongue, I be one mean … (switching to English) muddafucka … (and back to French) if the shooting ever starts!

But radical politics was one thing, Catholic morality another. When I reached my teen years, she kept me under strict wraps, making sure I attended mass every Sunday, including my turn in the confessional booth, and keeping me away from boys in the neighborhood. On my mother’s instructions, she didn’t allow any dates until I turned eighteen and, until then, imposed strict curfews, like ten o’clock on a Saturday night. I rebelled, coming home later and later, only to fight with her over where I was and what I was doing. However, I entered Barnard after my eighteenth birthday and from then on, she no longer tried to monitor my movements, giving up on me as a wayward college student. But I was far from that, not smoking pot or popping acid like so many of my peers and, despite a somewhat full social life, taking my studies seriously.

I picked up black street lingo, an idiom unto itself, from friends I made during my summer stays in Harlem before going to college. To the girls on the block, typically dressed in tank tops and shorts, I was an anomaly—a black female like them, but a foreign, uppity high-yella who wore dresses like a magazine model. They also teased me because I was too dainty to eat chicken legs with my fingers, couldn’t dance or jump rope as well as they did, and at first spoke English with an accent they pooh-poohed as french-fried. The boys were even rougher, at times tormenting and jostling me for being a stuck-up, half-nigger bitch who don’t know what the fuck she is, although they became much nicer to me once I got my womanly shape.

I just wanted to be one of the crowd during those summers, but I had to face the fact that indeed I was different. For me, it was on to college and then hopefully to a profession, while the vast majority of neighborhood kids would be absorbed as adults into the black masses—marginal people exploited as unskilled laborers or, worse yet, seen as superfluous drags on the economy.

To save the vast majority of black youth from this almost foreordained destiny, Papa dreamed of a Mau-Mau revolution, but that dream didn’t help me fit in with my childhood companions on the streets of Harlem. Meanwhile, Maman wanted me to be even more white than whites, but her grooming of me turned out to be a severe disadvantage in every facet of my summer experiences as the butt of so many slurs and jokes from my newfound friends on the block and playground. They called me bougie, whatever that was supposed to mean.

That’s when I met my first sweetheart, Carlo, who was a streetwise twenty-one to my ingenue sixteen. He adored me because I was a classy chick and did everything he could to win me over with compliments, gifts, and a much-needed introduction to ghetto culture. He showed me the seamier side of life in Harlem, pointing out dope dens, houses of prostitution, and gang-controlled turfs. He took me on jaunts along 125th Street where we listened to and sometimes heckled soapbox hell-and-damnation, end-of-the-world preachers. When I could get away from Aunt Mathilde in the evening, we went to jazz hot spots or to Birdland, where we could gyrate to the latest dances. Although he was a high school dropout, Carlo seemed to know who he was and what he wanted. Above all, he wanted me. But I had to sneak to see him, getting all too proficient at deceiving my aunt by claiming I was shopping, at a girlfriend’s house, or spending the day at the beach in Coney Island. After a month of courtship, I lost my virginity in Carlo’s mother’s place while she was at work, giving me more reason to lie and dissemble. On the other hand, however, I only saw Carlo in the summertime and had no other lover until I got to college.

Carlo worked in construction whenever he was called, but this was so seldom that soon after we started seeing each other, he began running numbers for Bumpy Johnson’s crew. He told me that Bumpy was not only the smartest man he knew but also as much a credit to the race as Jackie Robinson, because Bumpy was putting the Italian Mafia out of business in Harlem and crowed that he had created more jobs for young black men in New York than the Urban League!

In the first year of our relationship, I really dug being with Carlo. He talked a lot about what it was like to hustle for a living in an illegal and sometimes dangerous trade, but always added that he was learning how to polish his rough edges by acquiring social skills with me that would make him more than just another punk on the street. However, during the summer of the next year, when I had turned seventeen, Carlo began a pattern of going on binges with his pals, sometimes coming to see me when he was drunk and in a foul mood. If I said anything in the least bit critical, he snapped at me for being too bougie (which he had previously liked me for) and screamed that black sisters were worse than whites in