What we can do is say: Out of our own suffering we can recognize yours.
Out of our own outrage, we join our voices to yours.
Out of our own self-respect, we affirm your right to be self-respecting and free from unwanted invasion or attack.
What can you do?
You can refrain from spending more than ten minutes stoning or attempting to malign the messenger. Within those minutes thousands of children will be mutilated. Your idle words will have the rumble of muffled screams beneath them.
You can study the situation and be informed, so that when there are children at risk in your own neighborhood, you will be aware of it.
You can make every effort to remember that it is the act of genital mutilation we wish to get rid of, not the people who do it, all of whom need our understanding and our love.
In that regard, I’d like to share the following about my encounter with the circumciser/mutilator whom you will see on the screen. The most daunting thing about confronting evil is that it tires you, and on the day that I was to interview her I was feeling really terrible. I had seen the young girls shuffling back to the village after having been mutilated ten days before. I had seen their sadness, the lack of light in their eyes. I’d also noted the arrogance of the circumciser/mutilator as she sought to convey to us a sense of her own importance. When I asked her what she felt when she cut the children and they screamed, and she said she never heard them, I felt chilled, even in that very hot climate. Still, as we talked, and as I was compelled to confront her incredible denial of the pain she constantly inflicts, I found myself completely seeing the old woman before me. And when I did—when I recognized the limitations of her life, the choices thrust upon her by her society, a society deadly to women; when I thought of her ignorance, deliberately enforced by the patriarchal nature of her culture—I felt all my anger, dread, and even my headache, draining away. I felt only compassion, which surprised me no end, and also, in a sense, saved me.
In my fifty years among African Americans I’ve noticed that, because of our suffering and our centuries-long insecurity, we have a hard time believing we are lovable. We also have a great fear of learning “bad” things about ourselves because we are sure these “bad” things will be cause for more people not to love us. I learned this decisively when there was so much controversy over The Color Purple, and there were actually people who thought that because I exposed incest and rape within the black community, I hated black men. In that situation, as in this, there is the fear of being left behind, of being abandoned, of having no one on your side, if all your “stuff” is exposed. This feeling, which is very deep with us, is understandable: it is a legacy of our having been stolen from or expelled by Africa and rejected, as human beings, by the EuroAmericans who enslaved us, and who set about undermining our language, our families, our bodily and mental integrity, and especially our sense of the Sacred.
Today, however, it is precisely compassionate love of ourselves and of others in which we must have faith. I have learned nothing about human beings that has stopped my loving them, and this is especially true of African and African-American human beings, who seem to me unsurpassed inspirers of affection, wonder, and love.
I ask you to have courage, as you watch Warrior Marks, not to fear knowing who we are, or what we have done to ourselves in the name of religion, male domination, female shame, or terrible ignorance.
All of us who worked to make this film welcome you to this encounter with the past and present that the film represents. Warrior Marks has been shown already in nine cities in the United States and abroad. Oakland is its tenth presentation. I have a special feeling about this screening because Oakland is home to so many of the Bay Area’s African Americans. I feel a special joy to be sharing it with you and with everyone else who has come to affirm that it is the whole world today that is suffering, not just Africa, and that what our suffering is teaching us is that it is much less if we dare to encounter it together.
PART SIX
Saving the Self
Getting as Black as My Daddy
THOUGHTS ON THE UNHELPFUL
ASPECTS OF DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
Giving a Damn
Among the holiday cards I received this past Winter Solstice/Kwanza/Christmas season was one that depicted a large, naked Santa in an obscene position. It read: “Fuck You and Fuck Your Dead Mother.” An assistant, who usually opens unsolicited mail, shrugged off my feeling of assault. “It’s an impersonal message,” said she, noting it had been typed on a computer. “This same message probably was sent to lots of people.”
Still, it was addressed to me, and for at least an evening I was disturbed by it.
It symbolized for me the violent, hateful response to women’s writing that has been part of my life, and that unfortunately has by now become a misogynist tradition around the world.
It reminded me of the verbal battering that so much of the criticism of black women’s literary creations has become, and the ways in which even I am sometimes daunted in the face of such overt hostility. I say “even I” because one personal myth I’ve had is that I’m going to write just what I want to, anyhow, as a literary Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday might say, and just not give a damn.
Sometimes it’s hard not to give a damn.
We needn’t discuss the damage done to us all, as a community, when certain black male critics speak of black women writers, publicly, as “lesbians,” “cunts,” and “whores.” (In a way that would make you think the three labels are synonymous.) Or of the prolonged, obviously psychotic fixations on particular black women writers that certain black male writers have displayed. I myself would not have dreamed of such insecurity in men who are, after all, literary creators themselves, often with considerable published work to their credit.
But looking at the card, and thinking about its message, I remembered the black woman critic who, writing in The Village Voice and The Washington Post, declared that although my political writing was banal, my writing about my spiritual development was simply of no interest. I believe the essay that most offended her, in my collection Living by the Word, was the one in which I connected the natural state of my hair to the natural state of the cosmos, and found it quite appropriate as an expression of the Universe’s rich and inexhaustible creativity. I felt sorry for this critic, who could not accept my explorations and discoveries in the spirit in which I offered them—after all, what is truly banal is to think writers write books to please critics—but who instead chose to tell me she wished I’d shut up.
But this is not the worst part.
The worst part is that last summer I made a remarkable personal discovery about the wonders of my skin, and of color, and of colored people. I began writing about it, in an essay called “Getting as Black as My Daddy.” Then I hesitated. Is this banal? I thought. Is it so personal as to be uninteresting? Why not shut up about it and keep my newfound and quite joyous discovery to myself? I would simply keep the title, which I liked and which I pasted to the side of my computer, and the face of my very dark brown father in a safe and liberated section of my soul.
I realize as I write this that mentioning this unwritten essay is a sneaky way of “writing” it. And since I am aware of this, I might as well tell you some of the particulars.
I end the essay here, not telling you the particulars, as a demonstration of what, because of battering rather than constructive criticism, is sometimes lost.
Comments written for, but not delivered to, the Black Women’s Health Collective (Atlanta, Georgia).
This Side of Glory
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
DAVID HILLIARD AND THE STORY OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
BY DAVID HILLIARD AND LEWIS COLE
Saving the Self
People who experienced the Sixties and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area should read This Side of Glory by David Hilliard and Lewis Cole and share its meaning with their children. Like Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power,
it is one of recent history’s most jarring records. Elaine Brown’s book tells what it was like to be a bold, brilliant, ambitious black woman in the party, giving orders when she briefly becomes leader—while Huey Newton is in exile in Cuba—and therefore experiencing “a taste of power,” but at other times using her sexuality and being used sexually by the men in the party because that is a way she can connect with an unknown father—a cruel and superciliously bourgeois father, as it turns out—and convince her comrades she is still “just a woman.” She writes of being “disciplined” by a gathering of “brothers,” one of whom wields a bullwhip against her bare back. Nor is this the only instance of one of slavery’s strongest institutions, public flogging, being perpetuated by “revolutionaries” who denounce black people’s enslavement by whites at every turn.
Hilliard’s book pays minimal, if obligatory, attention to the role of women in the party. Hilliard was Huey Newton’s oldest and best friend among party members; they had met when Hilliard, recently arrived in Oakland from Alabama with his family, was eleven. They became extremely close, eventually sharing, as Hilliard writes, money, drugs, and women. They bonded so tightly, in fact, that Hilliard became addicted to Huey’s intelligence, beauty, and charisma and could barely manage a thought or emotion that was purely his own. He had this problem to a lesser degree with Eldridge Cleaver, the political chameleon who, in both Hilliard’s and Brown’s books, comes off as the psychotic opportunist many contemporaries took him to be. In fact, as Hilliard tells it, it was Cleaver’s action as provocateur that led to the death of Lil’ Bobby Hutton, a young idealistic Panther who idolized his elders and for whom many of the older men felt responsible, in a shootout with an overwhelmingly better-armed police force. Cleaver is also partly blamed for the subsequent hammering away at the party by police and FBI agents enraged by his highly inflammatory and militaristic rhetoric.
All of these men abused women, and apparently thought little about it. Kathleen Cleaver was beaten by Eldridge. Huey had women beaten and was charged with the shooting death of a seventeen-year-old who was selling her body to make a living. She allegedly called him a punk. Hilliard harasses a woman he likes until he forces her to go out with him. Marries her. “Fights” with her. Cheats on her. Has children by another woman. All along demonstrating more loyalty to Huey Newton than to the two women together.
It isn’t really fear of the police or the FBI that drives the men in the Black Panther Party. Panthers regularly, almost routinely, stand these “pigs” down or shoot it out with them. They absorb devastating losses from vicious police raids and murders. J. Edgar Hoover declares the Black Panthers the greatest internal threat to American security, and all the force of the United States government is unleashed against them. They are effectively, from a “military” point of view, destroyed. It is the charge of being a punk that sends each and every one of these warriors into conniptions. “Punk” is what Huey calls Eldridge as he expels him from the party—a charge so threatening that the usually glib and politically garrulous Cleaver is struck dumb.
These were men who loved, admired, and were sometimes in love with, each other. They were confused by this. Who, at the time, after all, except perhaps James Baldwin, could have taught them that love is the revolutionary emotion, partly because it cannot be limited, cannot be compartmentalized, cannot be controlled. But of course Baldwin, by Cleaver’s definition, was a punk. They were also men who grew up without fathers, or with extremely distant, remote, inaccessible ones. Men who learned about manhood from white men pursuing fake justice and bogus law and order on television. They might, like Hilliard, adore their mothers, but they dared not emulate or identify with her strengths: love of family, devotion to kin and mates, patience with children, humble service to the community. To do so would make them sissies. Sissies grow up to be punks. Each man—Hilliard, Cleaver, Newton, as well as Stokely Carmichael, always obviously distant from himself—felt empty and alone. When they met each other, counterparts and equals, it was a case of being smitten on sight. The homoeroticism in Hilliard’s carefully worded memories of Huey is so evident as to be comic. For one thing, Newton always seems caught in the act of disrobing. Then again, he spends much of his time thinking aloud in or speaking from his bed. He manages to sleep not only with Hilliard’s girlfriend, Brenda, but with his wife, Pat. He insists that Brenda spend the night with him on days she’s visited Hilliard in prison. In this same habit of sharing “substances” and women’s bodies rather than their own souls, Hilliard introduces Newton to crack.
Most interesting of all perhaps is Huey’s response to the famous photograph of himself seated like a warrior king in a large wicker chair, beret cocked to the side, legs slightly spread, a confident tilt to his handsome head, a gun in one hand, a spear in the other. He detested the photograph. Everyone else loved it. He said this photograph wasn’t him. Perhaps he recognized it for the pinup it was. It enraged him that Eldridge Cleaver had taken the photograph and that this unreal Huey—a punk with revolutionary style—was Cleaver’s view of him. A view accepted, subliminally, by warriors and masses alike.
Did these men, many of them imprisoned for long periods of time, ever have sexual relationships with other men? It’s a question that presents itself. And if they did, does this account for the over-reaction to the charge of being a punk? And the desperate need to demonstrate “manhood” even when it led to death? Would it account, perhaps, for the profound emptiness each man felt in the presence of families dutifully if absentmindedly constructed. Abusing “their” women, neglecting their children (Hilliard’s son robbed people from an early age, just for fun, and became a drug dealer and user along with his father and mother), feeling purposeful and energetic only in the frenzied acts of resistance and solidarity that seemed best enjoyed in the company of other men.
When Huey Newton rejected Hilliard as well as the party itself and saturated himself with the dust of cocaine and the fumes of crack, what was he running from? An image of himself created by a man he didn’t trust, an image the people expected to come to life? An image Newton knew was false? Or one he feared might be all too true? When David Hilliard’s life became one of constant searching for the next “rock” to smoke, what was he running from? Perhaps from the unbearable fact that in losing Huey—to drugs and paranoia long before Huey’s murder—he lost not only a childhood friend and comrade but also a lover, whether or not they ever made love.
In any event, these Black Panther brothers lived far from their true natures. They were not black panthers after all, cool and distant and sleek, but vulnerable black men whose fight against injustice, because it turned violent beyond their wildest nightmares, moved them further and further from the gentleness and humor that once, no doubt, were their core. Living far from one’s nature is not unusual in our culture, which is why the drug conquest of America is virtually complete. If you do not have your own self as your essence, you will fill the void with anything you can, from alcohol and other drugs to women (or men) and revolution, but it will still not be you. And far from leading “the people” to a clearer understanding of themselves, you will lead them only into a deeper, more cynical, and more humiliating confusion.
Revolution really must occur within. It is this that David Hilliard begins to learn when he joins an AA program after he and his wife have been reduced to living in abandoned cars, attempting to kill each other over drugs. This book is, amazingly, a belated Panther triumph, not because David Hilliard, former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party has found a way to save the masses, as the Panthers in their best moments wanted to do, but because he at last understands the value of saving the self.
A severely edited version of this essay appeared in The New York Times as an op-ed piece in 1993.
Disinformation Advertising
Diet Sprite and Spaghetti Sauce
One day a friend asked me whether I’d ever done an advertisement for Ford, the automobile manufacturer. “I don’t even like Fords!” I said, laughing
.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, handing me a clipping a friend of hers had sent her. Indeed, it was a full-page profile of me, complete with photograph, with the Ford logo and the word “Advertisement” emblazoned across the top. It had been torn from the pages of New Woman magazine. Attached to it was a letter from a woman who asked: “What does this ad mean? It appears as though Alice Walker was paid several thousand dollars to make a Ford promotion look good.… Does this mean writers with her success and status will someday be on television advertising diet Sprite or spaghetti sauce?”
I was stunned.
I had nothing whatsoever to do with this ad, had never been asked for permission to use my image or career to advance Ford’s corporate cause, and furthermore have never, to this day, driven a Ford.
I immediately sent off a letter of protest to the magazine, and letters to my attorney and agent requesting they do something about this ad, which misrepresented me. Not, ironically, in its content—which tended to praise my accomplishments—but in its presentation of my life and image under the logo of a corporation to whom I had not given permission and about which I know little. All I do know about Ford is that the truck, to me, has always symbolized perfectly the dominant white male American culture: blunt, boxy, powerful, and square.*
When I first read the letter that asked whether I and other “successful” writers would soon be touting diet Sprite and spaghetti sauce, I was annoyed by the writer’s assumption that I was complicit in the creation of the ad. What have I ever done, I fumed, that would lead anyone to think I would sink so low as to endorse an automobile company? But then I remembered hearing a black man say on television that he would do a commercial for the Ku Klux Klan for five million dollars, the sum Michael Jackson had apparently been paid to endorse a soft drink. Even as I watched the words leave his mouth I couldn’t believe it. But there they were. How, in fact, is a reader to know that there are writers and artists whose images and lives are not for sale to corporate giants?