Panther Baby (16 page)

15

Posttraumatic Stress Blues

E
l nombre de tu padre verdadero es Alipio Zorilla,”
Alita, my maternal grandmother, somberly told me. “
Fue un revolucionario que luch
ó
junto con Fidel Castro y Che Guevara.”
Your real father’s name is Alipio Zorilla. He was a revolutionary who fought alongside of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Th
e revelation that floated melodically through the air with my grandmother’s Spanish traveled like an electric current from my ears to my gut and my brain.

By then I was twenty-nine years old, wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison visiting room. While I had escaped prosecution as part of the Panther 21 government conspiracy, it was, somewhat ironically, my efforts as a part of the team working to rid Harlem of the insidious drug trade that ultimately landed me in prison for the first time. Out at age twenty-one, I was now back in prison, again because of acting on my political beliefs. Alita and her sister Elena had come to visit. My sister, Elba, was also there. Aunt Elena still lived in Cuba and, after years of trying, finally received a visa to visit New York. How she got into a federal prison with a Cuban passport was beyond my comprehension. Or maybe the officials wanted to see what connection I had to Cuba. Certainly the reasoning was more complex than I or the guards, who were probably electronically monitoring the conversation, could imagine. “You’re such a sweet boy,
mi hijo,
” Aunt Elena said, pinching my cheeks. “You don’t belong in prison. It’s your father. You have his blood, and he’s crazy. He’s a tall, handsome man.
Muy inteligente.
But he’s crazy. He fought in the mountains with Fidel, and he comes to the towns to give big speeches.
Th
en he disappears for a few days and pow,
una bomba,
a big explosion in that town. And then your father reappears.”

“Grandma, Auntie,” I stammered in my jailhouse-acquired, self-taught Spanish. “
Th
ank you so much for finally telling me who my real father is. I’ve wanted to know for a long time, but I’m not sure if my politics is a genetic condition.”
Th
e sweet old ladies continued to pinch my cheeks and share stories about Cuba and my mother.

Th
ey reminisced about the house in Santa Clara, Cuba, which had a pool and a servant.
Th
ey reminisced about my grandfather Alfredo, originally from the island of Dominica, who immigrated to Cuba and became a prosperous engineer. My uncle Ruben, Gladys’s younger brother, would tell stories of taking his friends for food and milkshakes after school at a fancy hotel in Santa Clara, then telling the waiter to “put it on my father’s tab.” Gladys learned French from a tutor, had a debutante ball when she was a teenager, and drove her friends around in a convertible she received as a high school graduation present. She was a straight-A student and an amazing poet who would recite original and classic Spanish poems with a passion that made listeners cry. My uncle said that traffic stopped and men turned their heads when Gladys walked down the street. Instead of being jealous, girls flocked around her, drawn to her vibrant personality and generous spirit.

Gladys went to Havana where she flourished as a premed student. She met Alipio in graduate school and fell in love. Alipio was already a member of the Communist Party and was a fiery and charismatic organizer at the university. Gladys was home in Santa Clara on semester break when she realized she was pregnant. Before she could tell Alipio that she was carrying his child, she found out that he gotten his distant cousin pregnant and announced that he would do the right thing and marry her. Gladys tearfully confessed the love affair and pregnancy to Alita. She asked to be taken to the family doctor to get rid of the baby. Alita felt Gladys’s stomach and told her that she was too far along to have an abortion, and thus Gladys was sent to New York, where I was born.

Gladys placed me in “temporary care” while she learned English, earned a second bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Brooklyn College in biology, and got a job in the hospital as a lab technician. A few years later she married my stepfather, Luis, a former boxer and laborer, and gave birth to my younger sister and brother, Elba and Luis Jr.
Th
e family lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn while Gladys and Luis saved money for a house. She got her pharmacist’s license and was a step closer to the dream. She died in childbirth, just days after putting a down payment on a house in Brooklyn.

Alipio and Gladys wrote letters to each other even after she moved to New York and was married. Luis would tear the letters up in a jealous rage and demand that Gladys not write him. Soon after, Alipio disappeared in the mountains of Cuba to fight the revolution. My grandmother and aunt told me that Alipio eventually became a general in the Cuban military, a minister of the interior, and Cuba’s ambassador to Tanzania.

After their visit, I went back to my cell and wrote my father a long, impassioned letter and sent it via my auntie, who gave it to her daughter, a mathematics professor at the University of Havana and a friend of Alipio’s. My letter explained that I was in prison for my Black Panther beliefs and activities, suggesting that perhaps he had indeed passed on the DNA of agitation, rebellion, and revolution. I heard a few weeks later that the letter had reached him, but I never received a reply. Maybe he was in too delicate a situation or embroiled in some Cuban political intrigue that would compromise him if people became aware that he had a bastard American son. Yet it was hard for me to imagine having a son somewhere out there in the world and not trying to find him.

Th
e twelve years that passed from the night I sat in chains talking to Yedwa to where I was now, sitting in a Leavenworth cell, were intense. I spent the rest of my teenage years in various state prisons for the robbery charges. Not long after I began my sentence, the Attica rebellion happened in upstate New York.
Th
e men took control of the prison protesting the guards’ brutality, as well as the food and living conditions, and they demanded access to legal and social services. What made the rebellion powerful was the solidarity among the prisoners. Black, white, red, brown, and yellow prisoners stood together in their demands.
Th
ere was a Marxist revolutionary undertone in the writing and statements of the prisoners. Attorney William Kunstler and Panther founder Bobby Seale were part of the negotiating team, working on behalf of the prisoners.

At first the guards in our prison let us watch the news coverage of Attica on the rec room TV. By the second day the TV was gone. By the third day we were on lockdown, as was every other prison throughout the country. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller broke off the negotiations with the Attica prisoners and ordered an army of state troopers to retake the prison.
Th
e troopers fired tear gas and sprayed bullets nonstop for several minutes. When the shooting stopped, thirty-nine people lay dead in the prison yard, ten of them guards and civilian employees. It was first reported that the guards who were being held hostage were executed by the prisoners.
Th
e truth was that they died from the same indiscriminate gunfire that killed the prisoners.

I knew some of the guys who died in Attica. We had been on Rikers Island and at the Elmira Reception Center together. I looked at the newspaper pictures of the aftermath of the rebellion and knew that it could easily have been me lying in the blood and mud of Attica prison. It was one of the places the prison officials considered sending me to when I began my sentence.

Two weeks before the rebellion a prison leader named George Jackson was shot to death by guards in California’s San Quentin prison.
Th
e guards claimed that he had smuggled in a gun and was trying to escape. Most people believed that George was murdered and the gun was planted near his body after the fact. George Jackson had been sentenced to seventy years for a gas station robbery when he was seventeen years old. To the system he was another poor black kid who couldn’t afford a lawyer. Like Malcolm X, George educated himself and became a brilliant jailhouse scholar and lawyer. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary, and he helped organize chapters of the Black Panther Party throughout the California prison system. He became a best-selling author with his books
Soledad Brother
and
Blood in My Eye
. George’s great offense against the system wasn’t the petty robbery but his charismatic presence and his ability to create truces and organize warring racial prison gangs.

George Jackson’s murder and the Attica rebellion created a revolutionary spirit among prisoners around the country. Prison newspapers were founded and prisoners created political cadres and solidarity movements. At Leavenworth I organized, agitated, and spent a fair amount time “in the hole” as a result of confrontations with the guards. When they had too much of me in one place, I would be transferred to another facility and the cycle would start again. I earned a high school equivalency diploma and petitioned to be transferred to a prison that offered college courses. Since this was the one thing I really wanted, the officials took great pleasure in denying my request.

I was released from prison on my twenty-first birthday.
Th
is was pure coincidence and not a birthday gift from the prison authorities. I returned to a Harlem that felt and looked like a scorched battlefield. Drugs had become a pandemic. Some blocks resembled the aftermath of bombing raids. I walked down streets I had traveled as a confident young Panther, now feeling like we had lost the war, which meant that my young comrades had died in vain. No one talked much about the Panthers anymore. When people found out I was a former Panther who served time, they usually went the other way.
Th
ere was fear in the air. So many Panthers and Panther sympathizers had been killed, locked up, or had their lives ruined by detectives and FBI agents who would show up to get them fired from jobs, evicted from homes, and expelled from school.

I took classes at Brooklyn College, worked various jobs, and used a student loan to buy a gypsy cab. I taught karate classes in Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn. My friends Imara “Green Eyes” Diaz, Taiwan Delain, and I opened a small karate dojo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We hung pictures of Che Guevara, Don Pedro Albizu Compos (a Puerto Rican nationalist leader), and Malcolm X next to those of the Asian martial arts masters.
Th
e black and Latino kids who were our students learned about their history and progressive movements as they were learning punches, kicks, flips, and rolls. We charged ten dollars a month for unlimited lessons and five dollars for uniforms. Even though the prices were cheap and we had plenty of students, we were always in the red.
Th
e kids were too poor to pay the dues. I would drive twelve-hour shifts in my gypsy cab to pay the dojo rent and the rent on my tiny one-bedroom apartment, but I loved what we were doing.
Th
e movie
Enter the Dragon
had been tops at the box office a year earlier, and every kid in the neighborhood wanted to be Bruce Lee. Maybe the oppressor had destroyed the Black Panther Party and crushed the movement, I thought, but my young dojo warriors would be the next generation of revolutionaries.

Our top young student was an eleven-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Angel. He was cute and curly-haired, with soft brown eyes, destined to be impossibly handsome as he grew into manhood. Angel was the first to show up every day and the last to leave at night. I would sit with him in our little office/lounge in the back of the dojo to make sure he did his homework. In the mode of life in the Chinese Buddhist temples, Angel would help me sweep, mop, wash windows, and maintain the dojo.
Th
is way he earned his lessons and would feel good about the two or three dollars I would slip in his pocket. Angel had brilliant martial arts technique and high flashy kicks. He would imitate the way I sparred and did forms. When we did karate demonstrations at community centers and tournaments, the crowd would get a kick out of seeing Angel and me performing as large and small versions of each other.

We would share a pizza, a hot dog, or a chicken patty, and I would ask Angel what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer was to ask me, “What do you want to be?” to which I would say, “I don’t know. I think I’ll finish college and be a teacher or a social worker.”

Angel would smile and say, “
Th
en I want to be a teacher or a social worker.”

I would say, “Angel, what kind of car do you want to drive?” and he would say, “I don’t know. What kind of car do you want?”

I would answer, “I don’t know, maybe a Camaro or a Jaguar.” His eyes would sparkle and he would say, “
Th
en I want a Camaro or a Jaguar.” We’d finish our lunch and then talk about Bruce Lee, baseball, and traveling to Japan and China to meet the great martial arts masters.

Angel earned his black belt right after he turned thirteen. It was summer, just before the Fourth of July.
Th
e temperature was hot and the streets were filled with people hanging out and dancing to the music coming from the open tenement windows and record players blasting Latin and soul music. Kids were starting to set off firecrackers as a lead-up to the holiday.
Th
e sidewalk firework salesmen were just letting go of a few packs of firecrackers as a tease, timing their big business for a day or two before the Fourth.

Angel was buying soda in a bodega with some friends when he heard a series of pops right outside the grocery store door. “Firecrackers!” he shouted happily as he pulled out a dollar and ran outside to see if he could buy a pack or two.
Th
e firecracker pops were actually rival drug dealers shooting it out on the street in front of the bodega, and when Angel stepped out on the street he was shot between the eyes.