Afterward we ate dinner, which Daddy declared the best gumbo he’d ever had after each bite. Mama followed up the gumbo with a homemade peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Then she had us clear the table and wash up and told us to go watch TV in her room so she and Daddy could talk in peace. I couldn’t concentrate on TV with my daddy so near, so I sneaked back to the living room and poked my head in. Mama and Daddy were sitting on the couch and Mama was trying to kiss him, but he was pushing her away. He brushed her hands away when she tried to touch him. When he saw me, he stood up and said, “Baby girl! Go get your brother and sisters. I want to kiss them good-bye.”
I ran back with his request. As he held each of us, he promised he’d be back and pick us up to go stay with him. “Would you like that?” he asked. “Yeah!” we trumpeted. Mama stood to the side and watched, smiling in a way that didn’t touch her eyes. Then before Daddy left, I kissed and hugged him one last time for Mama.
A few weeks later, Daddy came back as promised and took my sister Louise and me to spend the whole weekend with him. After picking us up in his sporty new car that smelled like the little pine tree that swung from the rearview mirror, he drove to a nearby neighborhood. “I thought your place was near Lake Merritt, Daddy,” I said, peering at the shabby houses and apartment buildings that were as lackluster as the ones on my block. Surely Daddy didn’t live here. When he pulled up to the curb next to a large gray and white bungalow with an oil-stained and cracked driveway and an anemic lawn, he got out of the car and stuck his head back inside to tell us, “I have to see someone. Wait here for me.” Then he slammed the door and walked up to the house, straightening his shirt sleeves and adjusting his shirt collar. He knocked on the door, it opened, and he disappeared into the shadows of the house, which promptly sealed itself in his wake.
We sat waiting in the car for him for what could not have been more than twenty minutes but in the world of restless children equated to hours and hours of senseless confinement. That’s when my sister dared me to go knock on the door to see what was going on. “We didn’t come to sit cooped up in no hot car! Go tell Daddy we hungry and ready to go.” Anxious to free myself from the car, I slipped out the backseat and approached the house. I could see that there were worn-out Hot Wheels cars and the chewed-on twisted bodies of plastic toy soldiers strewn across the cracked concrete porch. I could hear conversation coming from the house as I stood on the porch but couldn’t make out the words. I tried to take a peek in the front window but the curtains were drawn tight.
After a few minutes of hesitation, I banged on the door and the conversation stopped. I could see there was a peephole in the door and I stood with my hands on my hips looking up at it. Then I heard my daddy say, “Is there a little girl out there?” and then a lady’s voice said, “I don’t see a little girl. Looks like a little boy though.”
Normally I never took offense to people mistaking me for a boy, but this time my face got all hot and my chest tightened. When the door opened and a pretty, slim lady with long braids, wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tight T-shirt answered, I was so angry I told her with my fists planted firmly on my hips, “I ain’t no boy, I’m a girl!” Then I brushed past her and stomped over to my daddy, who was sitting on the couch in the living room. “I came to tell you we tired of waiting out in the car and we hungry.”
The lady and my daddy started laughing, which only made me angrier. “Whew! She feisty, hunh?” the lady said, staring down at me. My daddy grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto his lap. I struggled to keep my feet and my temper, but then Daddy reached for my tickle spot, my neck, and I dissolved in giggles.
“I want you to meet Ann,” Daddy said. “Ann is a friend of mine and I want you to be nice to her.” I gave Ann a look that said, Don’t count on it. “I also want you to meet your brother.” My brother? I already know my brother! I was about to say when Ann left the room and came back with a little boy about the same age as my little brother. “Lawanna, meet your other brother, Randolph.” Not only was a new brother being sprung on me, he also had the same name and was a damn near carbon copy of the brother I already had. We stood in the middle of the room facing each other. He blinked at me. I blinked at him. “Give her a hug, Randy,” the lady said, as if being confronted with my father’s other family was the most normal thing in the world. When the boy reached out his skinny arms to hug me, I instinctively drew my fist back to punch him in the face, which got him to back off real quick. “Whoa, baby girl! What you doing?” my daddy asked, grabbing me by my cocked arm. “I’m going to wait in the car!” I announced, ripping my arm from his grip and heading out the door.
I never saw the boy or the woman again, although later as a young teen I would learn that I had many more half-siblings. Most were boys and, á la George Foreman, my father would name all of his boys after himself.
There were a few more trips with Daddy in which we spent the evening with him at his glass-and-steel high-rise apartment overlooking Lake Merritt. We knew he shared it with a woman, but this time he had sense enough to ask her not to be around when we were there. When we went out with Daddy in public, women were drawn to him. They laughed and giggled at things he said that were not funny. Stared into his eyes too long, extended conversations well beyond necessary, and their hands somehow found themselves squeezing a bicep or landing on his chest like wayward butterflies. I was proud that women found my daddy attractive, but I did not want to share him with them.
Our love affair with Daddy’s return began to wear for all of us. The rumors of secret families scattered across the city and his increasingly infrequent visits took a toll. Daddy avoided our mother and chose to pop up at our apartment to leave food and clothes for us at very inopportune times. Like on days we were playing hooky from school. Right in the middle of my sisters and I watching daytime soap operas, we’d hear a tapping on the front window and see Daddy peering in at us through a crack in the drapes. We’d scatter like rats on a sinking ship. “I saw you in there! Open the door!” But we knew if we ignored him long enough, he’d go away and then we’d retrieve the items he’d leave by the door.
We began to associate him with being in trouble because eventually his visits became limited to disciplinary encounters. My mother would call him whenever we kids got into trouble beyond the pale. Which didn’t occur often. But when it did, the prospect of being on the receiving end of Daddy’s wrath was nothing to joke about.
• • •
I noticed an increase in the amount of whispered conversations between Party members in the fall leading into 1977. The topics of these conversations were obviously Grown Folks’ Business so I had to employ a host of tactics ranging from listening under open windows or, if I was in the room, pretending to be engrossed in a game or book in order to discern what had the adults in my life so agitated. Sometimes I’d blow my cover by openly listening to the adults, at which point they’d stop talking and my mother or another adult would say, “Get out of my mouth!”—a way of telling me to mind my own business. From what I gathered from stolen bits of conversation I hoarded like a pack rat, the Party was under a lot of external and internal stress.
The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), founded in 1967 and designed to identify what it characterized as “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” was in full effect. It initially targeted groups including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Agents were expressly directed to focus on black leaders they labeled “messiahs” to prevent them and their organizations from “gaining respectability,” leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad and Stokely Carmichael.
The Black Panther Party did not make the COINTELPRO list until 1969, when J. Edgar Hoover would make it the program’s main target, with an aim to “disrupt and neutralize.” By July 1969, the Party would become the target of 233 of the total authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions, which would include numerous infiltrations of FBI a
gents. Many of the actions taken against the BPP were unlawful and strove not to prevent crime but to foment violence and unrest through infiltration and by “intensifying the degree of animosity” between the BPP and other nationalist groups as well as between its members. Some of these tactics included letter forging, unlawful wiretapping and telephone voice impersonations.
These tactics, in conjunction with a growing tolerance within the Party for misuse of funds, extortion, random violence and drug abuse, would lead to its eventual downfall by creating a climate of fear from within and without. The marriage of external attacks and internal power trips also led to a cancerous culture of extreme misogyny, which I witnessed firsthand when the bully who’d chased me up a tree at school turned on my sister Deborah and assaulted her on the playground. This didn’t just happen among students. It was not unheard of for Party women to be coerced into sex and sometimes outright raped by fellow Panthers, and beaten when they lodged complaints. Teenaged girls were a common target as well. With five female children to care for, my mother turned her back on an organization that was created to protect and empower but in the end would leave many of its members traumatized, disillusioned and beholden to a new master that was slowly taking over the bodies and minds of the community: cheap cocaine.
Despite the unrest that was brewing, I never believed we would leave the Party. It was all I knew and had become a strong part of my identity. I took great pride in telling people where I went to school, that my father was a revolutionary prisoner and my comrade was Huey P. Newton. I fully expected to be the fifth person in my family to graduate from the Intercommunal Youth Institute, despite the fact that like my mama, my daddy, upon his release from prison, became less involved in the Party. I believed this right up until the day I was in the middle of math class and the school’s director, Ericka Huggins, stuck her head in the room and beckoned me to join her in the hall.
Like any kid called out of class by the principal, I racked my brain to uncover what trouble I had been up to that would warrant this visit. When I got out in the hall, she informed me I was to go straight home. “Why?” “You can’t come to school here anymore.” Then she handed me a sack lunch and sent me on my way.
Stunned and confused, I walked through the gate to the sidewalk. Then I turned back toward my school, opened the brown paper sack and threw the peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the gate, followed by a boiled egg, an apple and carrot sticks. Then I ran home.
Within a week my mother enrolled me in the closest elementary school near our home. I was bored by the activities that involved writing the alphabet in cursive over and over again until it perfectly resembled the chart on the wall above the blackboard. Science class was devoid of animals or field trips or outdoor exploration. The course was strictly book-based and involved reading and discussion only. The kids in public school were different too. As the new kid, I got picked on for being a Panther. Many people in the community viewed the Panthers as little more than power-hungry thugs. The girls, who all wore their hair relaxed, made fun of my afro and my secondhand clothes. The boys wouldn’t play with me.
I made connections with my teachers, who seemed more interested in my background as a Panther than the kids did. I was known as a teacher’s pet, preferring to spend my recess time cleaning blackboards, doing extra credit assignments and reading. I was constantly inadvertently offending some kid at school and had to sneak out early or stay late in order to avoid being jumped on the way home.
I went from being extremely independent and outgoing to a virtual recluse. When I could not avoid the bullies, I’d cut school until things calmed down. Despite my absences, I still managed to do well in school. It was around this time that I became obsessed with small spaces. I’d see a cabinet or a box and wonder if I was small enough to fit into it. I’d crawl in and out of cabinets at school and home. I found it peaceful folding myself into these tight dark spaces that released me from having to think about the things that were falling apart around me. My favorite place to hide was an attic crawl space in our house. The darkness, the cobwebs and the stifling heat did little to deter me from seeking this place out when I needed comfort. I began to bring up my favorite things. A diary, polished stones, my favorite books. Things I wanted protected should something catastrophic happen.
I wasn’t just imagining the worst. There was very bad tension building in the house from the most unlikely of sources. Deborah, my mother’s golden child, was in full rebellion. Now fifteen, she and Mama were fighting more and more, verbal confrontations that would end with Deborah leaving the house and not returning for days. Mama began to drink more and more. Eventually, my mother heard a rumor that Deborah was working as a prostitute. My mother told my father. The last time I’d see my parents in the same room was when Deborah returned home after more than a week on the street. She plopped down on a chair and I climbed into her lap. My mother secretly telephoned my father.
Deborah tried to leave when she saw him standing in the doorway. My parents argued with her, and the argument became a beating. My father chased her outside and continued beating her in the street. My mother did not interfere. Deborah eventually slipped free and ran into the night. Mama told us not to let her in the house if she were to return. But it would be nearly a year before I’d see her again.
Deborah’s absence from our family was like suddenly realizing that our once sturdy home was really little more than a lean-to in a storm. There was nothing and no one who could hold us up or keep us together. Things got even worse when a knee injury caused Mama to lose her welding job, making her dependent on disability checks and welfare. She also cozied up to more alcohol and drugs. She grew distant from us. Family activities ended. She was sad all the time and started drinking heavily. She’d sit on the couch for hours with her chin on her chest, listening to blues records and weeping. All she would say is, “I’m tired. I’m tired.”
Nothing would cheer her. Daddy stopped coming around. My older sisters seemed to close up as much as our mother. Although I did not want to admit it, I was on my own.
• • •
My adjustment to public school was long and difficult. Though my new school was just a few blocks from the Panther school, it might as well have been another continent. I simply didn’t know how to interact in the community outside of the Panthers. The disequilibrium I experienced upon entering public school was not unlike culture shock.
I was proud of my family’s involvement in the Party and took any opportunity to inform my new teachers and classmates that my father spent time in Soledad as a revolutionary prisoner. Instead of being impressed, the teachers looked at me with pity in their eyes and my classmates teased me for being the daughter of a jailbird. What was once a badge of honor became a liability. I’d lived a sheltered life in the Party. I did not know the Black Panther Party had deteriorated as an organization and, in the process, lost respect in the eyes of the community it originally sought to serve.
By the time I entered public school, many people in the community viewed the Panthers as a violent and corrupt group. The accomplishments of the Party began to be overshadowed by what many thought was its corruption of young black males, manifested in an alarming increase in black-on-black violence in Oakland and across the nation. Some blamed the Party for creating a “gang mentality” and a “romance with the gun” in young black males.
It was in this climate that I entered public school. I went from being loved by my teachers and respected by my classmates to being bullied. I was bullied for being a Panther and also bullied by a group of “well-off” kids because I didn’t have nice clothes. While my Goodwill ensembles served me well at the Panther school, they drew negative attention from the kids in public school. I quickly became the target of a group of popular girls. Their leader coolly informed me that if I came to school the next day wearing my blue jeans or tan pants or my white or striped shirt, she and her friends were going to beat me up after school. They’d basically described every article of c
lothing I owned.
I was scared because I knew it would be tough to get my siblings to lend me anything of their clothing, as we were all very protective of the few things we owned. So it wasn’t surprising when both Teresa and Louise refused to let me borrow their clothes. In order to avoid getting beat up, I had to resort to plan B. I got up in the middle of the night and stole a pair of one sister’s pants and another’s shirt. I got up extra early the next day and went to school before they saw me. The plan worked and I avoided getting beat up by the cool kids that day. But my sister caught me at school in one of her shirts and got so angry she demanded I take it off on the spot. So though I pilfered clothes to avoid getting in a fight with the cool kids, I ended up in a fight with my sister.
The kids also made fun of my mother whenever she came to the school. If there were papers she needed to sign or a teacher to see, she came dressed in her old welding clothes—a beanie, heavy boots, a man’s jacket and baggy pants. The kids made fun, saying my mother was a bull dyke. They refused to believe me when I told them she dressed like that because she had been a welder. It was the first time I was ever ashamed of her.