Friday, July 8, 2016

Black Power Revisited the L.P.

Mother once received a letter from William Faulkner. Or so she said. The letter was supposedly from the Nobel-prizewinner himself—the writer who Flannery O’Connor, no mere scribbler herself, called the Dixie Limited. Faulkner was master of Southern Gothic among whose haunting characters are the bear of “The Bear” and my personal favorite Joe Christmas the mulatto killer of Light in August. Mother said she threw Faulkner’s letter away. Her papers are now at Emory University, my siblings did it without consulting me, not that that’s a problem, maybe one day an archivist will come across Faulkner’s note. Probably not. But the chances that Mother did receive a communication from the great man are better than even and even though accuracy was not always a hallmark of her work.

My mother was fortunate to live and work in another time when there were only a couple of degrees of separation between most people. African Americans were either still slaving for a white man or white woman or not. Mother was a black female journalist in an age when that particular description was unheard of, not that it’s common even today. And the world was a smaller place back then. Blacks involved in the arts or letters or politics knew each other because there weren’t many to know, especially if they were making a living doing whatever they did. And you knew white people because they were running things then as now. White society was based on race and wealth but in our own culture there was a studied informality because most everyone was black and poor. The intelligentsia included and includes many athletes and performers. Due in part to Communist influence—Brother and Sister served the same as Comrade. Mother wasn’t a Red but she knew a few. There was cooperation, you feel me, achieving common aims.  

Once we were short of money and in New York City and Mother drove in a black Mercury Comet—with me in the back seat—to a club where Duke Ellington was playing. His name was on the marquee outside. This would have been '61 or '62, that era, Kennedy had been elected but not yet killed, in the historical context, and in my personal life my older brother was getting on my nerves. Mothers said she was going into the theater to get “Duke” to cash a personal check. She came back with money, what can you say? It was a smaller community being black back then. So, like, the backstory on the Faulkner letter is that Mother was editor of a small African-American newspaper in L.A. back in the day and she had a fondness for writing provocative editorials about race relations at a time and in a place—the Golden State of California—in the years just after World War II—when diversity was not as popular a concept as it is today. After publishing fiery prose she licked stamps and mailed copies to social and political leaders who, not being subscribers to the Tribune, otherwise might not see her work. One piece made its way to Oxford, Mississippi, home of the Dixie Limited. My mother recounted for me Faulkner’s response in a single sentence, either that was all she retained or all he had written, it’s still etched in my memory more than half a century later. And once again it’s my belief that the chances are better than 50-50 this is fact not factoid, not because Mother was unfailingly accurate in her reportage but because of what she reported that Faulkner said. 

“I am all for the emancipation of the Negro,” she quoted the great man, “but if they come marching down my street I’ll be waiting on my porch with my shotgun.” If that wasn’t William Faulkner it should have been. 

The reason to remember the Dixie Limited today is not just great prose, even if he was dismissive of the Negro and even if his characters preyed upon blacks just as flesh and blood whites did and do. The reason to remember William Faulkner is because he understood thoroughly the fundamental aspect of the struggle over ethnicity in this country. It's been about violence—committing it, being victim of it or writing about it, as with Faulkner and my mother. One day in my relative youth my then-sister-in-law the playwright Pearl Cleage who came from militant stock explained the Black Liberation tri-color flag to me. “Black is for the people, green is for the land,” she told me in complete earnest, looking me dead in the eye, “and red is for the blood that must be shed to get there.” She looked at me for a moment longer still, to be sure the message had been passed on. My mother shed blood in print. One of my siblings even described the rat-a-tat-tat of a Smith-Corona, throughout the 1960s and usually after midnight, sounding like gunfire, well into the night. As for rhetoric or the actual words themselves—Faulkner had that right too. And there we haven’t done too badly either. You knew that racism was doomed when Motown got involved, protest you could dance to. Music, painting, movies, TV—daily interactions with the white man or white woman—decentralization and the wide reach of the civil rights movement has been its genius. There has been a rebellion going on and everyone is involved but no one in control, on or off the field. Led by performers or athletes as everyone everywhere seems to know what to do without being told. And we keep notes. We have the clippings because of people like my mother.

Her magazine work, though limited, was outstanding. There’s a piece she wrote about crossing the South by bus, back in the day, being in West Texas and forced to drink from a blacks-only water fountain, the classic symbol of Jim Crow oppression next to a noose, in the Greyhound terminal in Big Spring. That scene is part of my memory of family outings as a kid, just like asking Duke to cash a check. That story was in The Nation, actually, getting a drink of water at the bus station in Big Spring. A dispatch from the front in the race wars, so to speak.

If you asked me as a kid what Jim Crow was like—as it was explained to me by Mother at the time, on the road in the Comet until it died and then on the seats at the back of the Greyhound bus—it was like a tax that was added to your daily life and you paid and you paid and you paid and if you stopped paying they killed you or sent you to prison. Does that sound extreme? Not in our social circle. Mother praised Yassar Arafat in her later years. “I am not Jesus Christ,” my mother liked to say, old Negro wisdom that described her own foreign policy, “if someone strikes me I’m not going to turn the other cheek.” There are so many stories—because she lived in interesting times. That doesn’t mean it’s all true. The most important anecdote to verify—her defining moment as a journalist—occurred in the Bay Area and also defines her as a black woman in America. It needs to be confirmed, thumbs up or thumbs down—factual or not—whether Mother ratted out University of California Professor Angela Davis to the FBI after the Marin County Courthouse killings. As above, the chances are better than 50-50 it's true. 

Mother was covering cops for the Hearst paper in San Francisco, then the Examiner, now the Chronicle—her boss was Randy Hearst whose daughter Patty—nom de guerre Tania, you couldn't make this up—was principal femme fatale of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA, as in “slay.” Just like the incestuous inbred Dixie we had escaped, the Bay Area was also home to some freaky shit. The other pole politically but just as extreme and just as dangerous, maybe more. So, like, everyone—it seemed—it’s important to note that my mother’s professional reputation is at stake here. She wasn’t alone. Everyone had conflicts of interest, those days, no one was pure in service of whichever ideology. Everyone in San Francisco knew someone who was on the run, from the police or from the draft board, it was a time when, if the cops found marijuana in your backpack you could still go to prison, especially if there was a hand grenade with the weed. The moral question of the day in San Francisco or Oakland was whether to call the FBI tipline. 

Mother claimed that she saw Tania one day on the street in the Financial District, my mother was coming or going to the newspaper offices, Patty was being sought at that point principally for bank robbery—we won’t go there. Possible that Mother did see Tania. We'll never know. At this point it was relatively late in her career as a newspaper reporter, covering cops for Randy Hearst and trying to keep an eye out for the boss's daughter on any story where there was gunplay. My mother had to hump it, frankly, it was a hard job in the Bay Area where there was a lot of gunfire and a lot of cops, state, federal and local. The Black Panthers respected her, that was important, but the Bay Area’s institutions were all under siege, including the Panthers, and a lot of civic interchange ended up on the police blotter. A la the Red Brigades or Bader-Meinhof Gang, mostly it was overachieving white kids but there were all races and colors. Everyone had a plan to change society while knocking over Wells Fargo in the meantime. Today the goal of terror is to kill a lot of people but back then it was to kill certain people and Mother saw it all covering San Francisco P.D. 

There was the gunfight—some call it a massacre—at the Marin County Courthouse, across the Bay, where Judge Haley got killed, which was the bloodiest somehow for me as a kid even though the body count was relatively low. Have you ever seen the photograph of His Honor with the barrel of a shotgun taped to his head? The was in Marin massacre, and it changed Mother's life. Because after Marin, University of California Professor Angela Davis did a runner.

Mother had good sources among black revolutionary cadres, apparently better than the FBI—she found out that Dr. Davis was in hiding in New York. That is the backstory, that is another anecdote from my childhood, Mother wrote the story, God forbid. Randy Hearst published it and the FBI picked up Dr. Davis in N.Y. a short while later, on a charge of having provided the guns used in the courthouse, in Marin. That’s the story that my family accepts as factual today, more or less. It’s part of my memory—kind of—borderline, out there in the haze, in the periphery of what was important to me at age fourteen, going to school in the Oakland hills, thank you very much, not in the Badlands of downtown Oakland where a Negro could get killed. Tom Hanks was in the class behind me at Skyline High, how cool is that?

There were so many shootings and so many shoot-outs that it was hard as a kid to know which ones to worry about. The SLA killed the Oakland school superintendent, by the way, a few months before me and my siblings enrolled in the district. The superintendent was a brother with a PhD—which was a big deal back then—a highly-educated Negro, of which there was a shortage, no fault of our own. Dr. Marcus Foster, may he rest in eternal peace. Dr. Foster answered his door one night and they shot him with cyanide-tipped bullets, everything was so over the top, so bloody, you couldn't just kill somebody you had to kill them a certain way. Please. Anyway my mother wrote the story, Angela Davis got picked up and even if she beat the charges which she did—it’s still a legitimate question. Did Mother sell out The Movement? The answer is in a box at Emory. My belief is that what she saw in San Francisco frightened her first and then changed her forever. She got us out, actually, relocated the family to L.A. while she continued to commute during the week to work in Baghdad by the Bay. There in the city she shared an apartment with my sister Michelle, may she rest in peace also, who wrote about movies for Hearst. Michelle claimed to have discovered Bruce Lee, by the way, and my bet is that is not true. Anyway, it was all too much for Michelle too, in the end. She went mad in S.F. That’s my belief too—that era, that time. She did it in the right order though, she went crazy in San Francisco but died in L.A.

Michelle had a favorite T-shirt, read across the front, "RATED X BY AN ALL-WHITE JURY." After a while it seemed like it was the only one she wore. She had the predisposition, too much serotonin or too little and San Francisco was the wrong place to be. To be young, artsy and black in a city with no moral code--values gone, or in transition—no barriers to behavior, in an era of no restraint. It drove her crazy literally. One Friday when Mother was home in Southern California, on her day off, there was a call from the City Desk. The Symbionese Liberation Army was cornered in what the press would later call a “bad part" of Los Angeles, which meant a black neighborhood. 

The SLA viewed itself as a military unit and a family with Field Marshal Cinque at its head, btw. That's all the background you need. They'd made the move to the Southland for the climate, you might say, like my own family, and it turned hotter than expected. 9,000 rounds were fired that day or so the Chronicle reported. The FBI and LAPD both poured bullets into the house and a fire erupted and all six people inside died. It was a brutal day in a brutal time and what the City Desk most wanted to know, when Mother came home to call in her notes, as the authorities identified the bodies—this is my memory and it may not be totally accurate but it’s close. What the City Desk wanted to know first and foremost was Tania among the dead? Which she was not. Anyway, that was pretty much it, emotionally, physically and mentally for Mother, not Tania, although Tania took it hard too when they busted her ass later, in Baghdad by the Bay. Mother could take joy in the civil rights movement because she grew up in it, the Panthers always called her Mrs. Lomax after all, not by her given name—sometimes “Sister,” but probably not more than once. The Black Panthers knew she was from another generation. But when you added the SLA and the Weathermen to the mix, and everyone else who had a gun or a grievance, it was just too much for her. She started to shut down. Mother was pretty much PTSD by that point, she hung up her notebook and tried to make sense of what she had seen. Retired at age fifty-five. And barely left the house for the next four decades. It did give her time to write.

Her principal long work, the writing that she is best known for but never published is a novel called The Ten Most-Wanted White Men, the account of a young brother, just out of the U.S. Army and knowing how to kill, who decides to assassinate the ten most prominent white bigots in America. How cool is that? Which turns out to be hard but interesting. One of the targets—Mother told me while she was deep in the writing—was Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace. She used real names, that was the beauty of her work. This was before Governor Wallace repented and found God, of course. Mother never did repent or find God, this was her revolution and in some sense mine. It's been bloody and if it were up to my mother it would have been bloodier still. The bottom line in anecdotes like these from The Movement and in our black lives, these last few decades, roughly the span of my lifetime because Mother did not live to see the mountain top—or maybe she just did, not close up but distant and in a haze. The single message that has been repeated time and time again in the last 400 years of our co-existence with white people. Resist any way you can. Violence is okay, by whatever means, you feel me? There’s been no fixed orthodoxy, no Little Black Book although someone should write one now just to make it sound as if, for historical purposes—for dramatic usage—we were more organized than we really were. No master plan ever existed—there were diverse ways of taking down the competition. Violence aside, the words, longform like Faulkner. Southern Gothic is a perfect because it really was some freaky shit. The slogan Black Pride never called to me because it was always a given.