A Former Black Panther Diversifies

Now where was my copy of “Soul on Ice”? I knew I’d had one; everyone did in the 1970s, when a baby boomer’s academic library gave shelf space to home-grown insurrectionists--black, red, brown, white, even female. So I called a used-books store where the clerks--and this is a good sign--sometimes have to be coaxed away from their own reading. Did they have “Soul on Ice,” by Eldridge Cleaver? “I’ll check,” one said helpfully. He came back to the phone, sounding puzzled. “That’s in parapsychology, right?”

Is this what the end of the ‘90s has come to--intimacy sold for talk-show fodder, politics merely the bread and butter of comedians, and now the wrath of the Black Panthers inextricable from the Psychic Friends Network, and all of it sliding together into a single inseparable mess at the bottom of the century?

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On the air at KPFK radio are Eldridge Cleaver, former minister of information of the Black Panther Party, author of the seminal prison essays of “Soul on Ice,” and Bobby Seale, co-founder of the militant black-power group whose self-styling as a “party” mirrored and mocked the political structure it defied, right down to its welfare programs and policing. (Before the Panthers self-destructed in schisms, crime, violence, drugs and spying feds, its most iconic moment was walking, armed and en masse, into the California Assembly in 1967 to protest a proposal to ban loaded guns within city limits across the state. Legend holds that it took days for the seats of the legislators to dry out . . . .)

The feds ranked Cleaver one of the most dangerous men in America. Then he wasn’t in America anymore; he’d fled the country to wander the world’s outlaw nations for years, using his FBI wanted poster as a passport. And by the time he came back, disillusioned and politically empty-handed, he was no longer dangerous. The man who famously wrote, “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem,” still uses that triage device, but look who’s changed sides: Black politicians are a “bunch of scam artists” who run their communities like “a feudal fief,” and a coup d’etat will be needed to force them to let go.

Nowadays, the source of poor people’s pain is politicians and “white collar crime, [those] who are exploiting and oppressing the people.” And the cops--the “pigs” of the old Panther lexicon--are simply their tools, used “to plug the gaps in a faulty social system . . . defending those exploiters and oppressors.” This is the line he’s been telling cops in well-received speeches in Pomona, where he now lives, in La Verne, where he lectures at the local university, and wherever he’ll get an audience. Today I am an audience of one, and the ex-most dangerous man in America is telling me how he got from there to here.

“I find myself lately having to say over and over again, ‘I never thought I’d see that happen’ ”: the Soviet Union gone belly-up, Nelson Mandela out of prison, Geronimo Pratt out of prison, newspaper exposes of prison-guard misconduct.

He is 62, and when he speaks to young black people, he cannot mistake the disappointment his altered attitudes generate--that he no longer worries about armed struggle but about the hole in the ozone layer; not about black separatism but about the forgotten apex of the triangle of politics and economics--spirituality; not about prisons as political lazarettos but as “country clubs.” He longs for healed scars and not fresh wounds.

He holds a subterranean nostalgia for his days of power and camaraderie, but not for its folly. “I’ve had some experience and I’ve grown, and you begin to get wise as you grow older. Out of that I’ve got this new synthesis, and these young people don’t have that.”

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In the dead middle of the est-decade, the ‘70s, Cleaver returned home from exile, more American than when he left, and he began shopping for his self. The Marxist atheist grandson of two preachers became a born-again Christian. He ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican and even spoke at the Balboa Bay Club. He dabbled in commerce with the “Cleaver sleeve,” men’s pants with a codpiece, and descended into trivial hand-to-mouth larceny.

These days he is as diversified as the ‘90s wants us all to be--making flowerpots, lecturing the cops and college kids, assembling a book and, of course, writing the de rigueur screenplay. He is a grandfather. His daughter, Toju, born in North Korea, is an arts graduate at Sarah Lawrence; his son, Maceo, born in Algerian exile, studies business administration.

To talk with him is to perceive something of the dormant volcano about him--unpredictability, if no longer rage. “Don’t you still . . . ?” people beseech him, seeking out the old fires. If he has changed from the fierce outlaw of our gauzy recall, it means we have, too. If Eldridge Cleaver were still a revolutionary, then we could convince ourselves that our ardor is still more than banked embers, and our righteousness has not broadened along with our rumps.