Target Zero: A Life in Writing
363
Target Zero: A Life in Writing
363eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250091536 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 363 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Target Zero
A Life in Writing
By Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2006 Estate of Eldridge CleaverAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4039-6237-9
CHAPTER 1
Eldridge Cleaver called this excerpt from his memoir Soul on Fire (1978) a 'few hazy memories of Little Rock, Arkansas,' where he was born.
CHILDHOOD LESSONS
Arkansas was a perpendicular cliff of red clay in our backyard. Our house straddled the edge of this cliff, with the back porch sticking out into empty space, resting on long stilt supporting timbers, rising up from the black dirt of our backyard below. I do not remember how high up the porch was, except that it was equal to the height of the cliff, all of it something happening over my head. I can peg these moments in time with images of my baby brother, Theophilus, five years my junior, wearing diapers and sucking on his bottle, marking me as five or six years old. Suddenly I was there, playing in the clay out of which mother said we had been formed. I still recall the vital, pungent odor of the soft clay, its cool texture. How good it felt when squeezed through fingers and toes.
Big black bumblebees, with yellow stripes across their backs, made their homes in holes in the clay. As they emerged from their holes, we sometimes trapped them in glass jars, watched them searching in confusion for a way out, and listened to their distressed buzzing through air-holes punched in the tin lids. More than once I must have spied a lizard sneaking into the old water pipe sticking out of the clay at about the level of my eyes, and more than once I must have flushed him out with a long stick, or with a stiff stream of hot pee pee artfully directed, sending the lizard scurrying for higher ground.
When Theophilus, sitting on the back porch at the top of the stilts, fell off, landed in the clay, and never even stopped sucking his bottle, the value of the clay could only have been enhanced in my eyes. I remember neither when I started nor when I stopped eating the clay, only my mother's shrill voice prophesying doom if I didn't stop. I can still see the little dark hands, feet, and legs of brothers, sisters, and perhaps friends, as over the years we shaped the world with our hands.
Years later, long after we were gone from this house at the source, great tidal waves of red gooey muck rushed at me in a recurring bad dream. In the dream I was always fleeing, or flopping about, always on the verge of being overwhelmed.
We were five children then, two girls and three boys, offspring of Leroy Cleaver and Thelma Hattie Robinson united in Holy Matrimony in 1926. I list us in rank by birth:
Wilhelmina Marie October 21, 1926
Helen Grace May 3, 1932
Leroy Eldridge August 31, 1935
James Weldon October 10, 1937
Theophilus Henry December 9, 1940
There was a great antagonism between the Cleavers and the Robinsons — going back, to my knowledge, at least to my grandfathers on both sides. They had been called, they said, by God Almighty, to preach the true gospel to their people. The difference between these two gentlemen was the classic dichotomy between black people in America, with roots that go back into slavery. Grandpa Robinson was a House Nigger and Grandpa Cleaver was a Field Nigger.
Grandpa Robinson was part of a great tribe of mulattos. They were proud of their gray-blue eyes and pointed noses, and alluded to the white and Indian blood in their veins. They ran rumors around in circles of cousins who were passing for white, about one who had married and disappeared into the white race, leaving not a trace behind, except them. Grandpa Robinson was the pillar in the Little Rock branch of his tribe. St. Andrews AME was an important church in town. He was the first to make Little Rock work for the Robinsons, and his success enabled others of his tribe to pluck up their roots in Hot Springs and Pine Bluff and migrate to Little Rock.
Grandpa Cleaver was the very opposite of Grandpa Robinson. Tall and black-skinned, he had a house that sat in the middle of a cotton farm, and he did his shopping at the company store. He raised hogs, chickens, and vegetables, and is said to have sired several families besides the one from whence my father came. The old lady I knew as Grandma is said to have been about his third wife. He lived to be 98 years old. This old man, rooted in Malvern and Camden, had been a CC rider, a circuit-riding preacher who had traveled for years throughout the region, preaching the gospel as revealed to him. He had finally settled down in Wabbaseka, which must be one of the smallest dots on any map of Arkansas. As in our house my father's piano was untouchable, his father's holy of holies was an old typewriter, and if you touched it you would go directly to hell, with a broken tail.
Mother met father because both of their fathers were working the soul circuit, and there were conventions, picnics, and various other get-togethers. Perhaps. But my father was capable of running my mother to the ground under other circumstances, totally unrelated to church, because if there was anything my father hated, it was "a chicken eating preacher." It was well understood that my mother married my father over the objections of her family, first of all her father.
My father had no patience at all with churchgoing. If you asked him, he'd tell you in a minute, "No. There ain't no God. And I'm the only Santa Claus you ever gonna see."
Mother was different. Proverbs, parables, and principles poured out of her mouth in a constant stream. She had a quotation to fit every occasion, chief among them was, "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon this earth."
When I hassled her in the kitchen as she prepared a meal, singing what came to be my song — "I'm huuuunnngrrryy!!" — Mother would retort, "Run around the house and catch Congry." Which would send me into spasms of frustrated rage.
"Get out of here, boy," she'd scat me. "Watch a pot and it'll never boil."
If her nose itched, mother would say, "Hmm! Nose itching. Company's coming." And someone was bound to show up.
She believed in God, dreams, luck, and intuition. Before she'd allow me to crawl into bed at night, I had to say my prayer, repeating it nightly down a misty string of years:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Amen.
Being the oldest boy, I was the apple of my daddy's eye, which set me at irreconcilable odds with Helen and Wilhelmina. Not so much Helen as Wilhelmina, who was my active antagonist, my implacable foe. Being neither the oldest girl nor the oldest boy, Helen played the classic neutral, wishing a plague upon both our houses. With stony objectivity, she'd tell the pure truth on either of us if we lied about who hit whom first. The rub between Wilhelmina and me wasn't any lightweight sibling rivalry. It was closer to war. This was made forever clear to me one day when Wilhelmina, crying and fussing because she had to wash dishes, threw a fork — I had patted my fanny at her, all the while tauntingly intoning, "Ha, ha, ha. You have to do the dishes" — which plunged deeply into my arm just as I ran out of the kitchen. For years thereafter, I wore the marks of the four prongs on my left forearm and remembered the incident as my first encounter with a witch.
Daddy had two jobs — waiting tables during the day in a big hotel restaurant, playing the piano in a club at night. We didn't see much of him; he was always either going or coming. When he was home, if he was not digging in the ground, he was sawing and nailing planks of wood, in a constant struggle to keep our house from collapsing. I liked helping him work, handing him the hammer or nails, or helping him shovel the dirt he dug up with the pick. Once I thought my daddy was magic. He drove the pick deep into the ground, and when he pulled it out there was a brand new penny stuck to the dirt clinging to one of the points of the pick. He gave me the penny. He repeated this magic feat five times, each time coming up with a brand new penny, giving it to me.
Daddy had a piano in a room of our house. We called it the Piano Room. Anybody who fooled around in the Piano Room was just begging for a whipping. The only person who could have her way in the Piano Room was Wilhelmina, whom Daddy was teaching how to play.
Mother had the uncanny ability to smell snakes. She said they smelled like watermelon rinds. One day she said some snakes were around somewhere close because she smelled them. Daddy said she was crazy, but agreed to have a look. He found two big blacksnakes under our house. He chopped off their heads and nailed their bodies to a tree stump in our backyard. They wiggled and thrashed around, seemingly more full of life without their heads than with them. Daddy said they'd keep it up until the sun went down, then they'd die. I watched them, glued to the spot, until mother made me come inside for dinner and bed. The next morning, I ran outside to see. The snakes were strangely stilled. I watched them for hours. Not a twitch.
Getting an education was a religion in our house. Mother was the high priestess of its doctrine. According to her, the worst thing in life was to miss an education. It was worse than going to Hell. It was Hell on earth. At least get a high school education! Later on, we'd need a high school diploma to get even the lowest job, like digging ditches. Mother never let up on this line — never — as she sought to instill in us the motivation to pursue education. She taught us how to read and gave us books for presents on birthdays and other occasions.
One day, suddenly, a dark shadow fell across our home. Daddy took an axe and chopped up his piano. Then he broke everything in the house made of glass, starting with all the dishes. He smashed the glass covers on the pictures hanging on the walls. One corner of our living room was like a family shrine, whose focus was my parents' wedding photo on the wall. Hanging around this photo, and on little whatnot shelves on either side, were our treasured family photos and memorabilia. Daddy smashed everything. Something terrible was happening. What it was I didn't know. Helen, Wilhelmina, Mother and Daddy all seemed to understand. But James, Theophilus, and I were told to shut up, get out of the room, or slapped when we demanded to know what was going on. We were never told.
After that, the fighting started. Every Saturday night, without fail, Daddy started beating Mother. There was screaming and the thunder of our feet and bodies scuffling around as we all joined in the melee. It was everybody against Daddy, and we'd all hit him as hard as we could, trying to make him stop hurting our mother. The center of my frustration was that I was unable to hit Daddy hard enough. That was the beginning of my driving ambition to hurry and grow up tall and strong, like my daddy, but bigger and stronger than he, so that I could beat him down to the ground the way he beat my mother.
I remember the comment C. P. Snow made in Variety of Men about the childhood of Joseph Stalin, comparing it to other revolutionary leaders —
Nearly all the others came from professional families. Stalin alone was born in the depths of the poor. His father was not only an impoverished shoemaker, but an increasingly unsuccessful one. He took to vodka and to ill-treating his son. At a very early age Stalin had to reckon with savage brutality: he learned to be secretive, evasive, and enduring, and to keep his mouth shut. It was an awful home, and he learned his lessons well.
One day Daddy said he was going far away and wasn't coming back. He was going to find us another house, in Chicago, Arizona, or California. Mother was getting fat in the belly and we were going to have a new house and a new baby in the family. Meanwhile, we were going to go live on Grandpa Cleaver's farm. For my mother, moving onto the Cleaver farm in Wabbaseka was like going backwards, and my two sisters shared the same feeling. My two younger brothers were too young to know the difference, but for me it was a happy occasion. There were so many exciting things happening on the farm, so many worlds to explore.
Mother took a job teaching at the little school in the area, and she kept my two sisters with her all day. I had to go to school every afternoon, while one of the neighbor ladies kept James and Theophilus. I spent the rest of the time tagging behind Grandpa Cleaver as he did his daily chores. I'd help him feed the hogs and chickens, ride on the back of his horse-drawn wagon when he went to the company store. But my greatest pleasure was to take his dog, Shep, and go out hunting rabbits. When Shep spotted a rabbit, that rabbit was as good as in the pot. Shep would run it to the ground, grab it in his mouth, and shake it to death. Then he'd bring it back to me. Proudly, I'd run home with our catch. These were the days of kissing the earth, of touching and smelling wild things growing, of running barefoot through cotton fields, of fishing in rivers and dragging in crawdad holes, of watching Grandpa and his friends slaughter hogs, of later sneaking in the smokehouse and licking the salty smoked hams hanging there. Thus I spent the time waiting for my father to send for us.
CHAPTER 2An unfinished autobiography was among the papers Eldridge Cleaver left in his studio in Pomona, California, at his death in May 1998. Its pages were still in draft form, with question marks, blank lines, and indications in parenthesis of material he intended to add later. In order to publish excerpts in this collection, the material has been slightly edited and given the title The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver based on his shorthand notations for his chapters, which were "ec1," "ec2" and so on.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ELDRIDGE CLEAVER
CHAPTER ONE
CHILDHOOD
"Eldridge, you are headed for the gas chamber," said my mother not once, but many times. Both of my grandfathers were ministers and the family was hoping that I would become one too. But I had different ideas.
My father was a pianist who started off playing in church but eventually switched to jazz. He came to hate all ministers. I think it had something to do with this relationship to his father, a Baptist minister. I was never given any details on why this change took place in my father. I just saw the results.
When I was a child my mother says I was a little angel. But life's experiences sometimes take us down perilous paths. When I was 12 my life took that turn. It was probably the result of the break-up of my family.
We lived in Arkansas at the time and when I was 12, we moved to California. That's when my life really began to change. Up until that time we had a good, close family life. My mother read a lot of books to her children, and was always encouraging us to read on our own. There were six children in the family, three girls and three boys. I was the third child and the oldest boy. I felt my older sisters were tyrants whenever they tried to tell me what to do.
Then my mother and father began to fight. It was very embarrassing to me because the other kids in the neighborhood would taunt me in a very cruel manner, and say things like "Who won last night?" The most embarrassing thing I remember was one day being out in the street playing marbles with my friends, when my mother ran by, my father chasing her. A real wipe for me.
I remember reaching the point where I wanted to be able to beat my father up. He was about as tall as I am now, about six feet two inches. I was so angry at him that even at 12 I used to go up against him.
It just devastated me to do this because deep in my heart I loved my father in so many ways. But that love seemed to reverse itself and turn into the most furious hatred. My primary ambition was to grow up and get big so I could punch him out.
I reached the point where I refused to cooperate with my father on anything. He would try to get me to perform tasks round the house, and I just wouldn't do it. For example, he had a curfew on his children, requiring us to be in the house by eight o'clock each night. Lots of times I didn't have anything to do, but still I would just sit outside and wait until it was long past eight o'clock before I would go inside, where there would be a tough spanking waiting for me. That's how I handled the bitter feelings I had for my father. Eventually my parents split up, and my father moved to Chicago.
I had a lot of energy, and a meanness in my heart, a deep hatred for the society in which I lived. I didn't know anyone more alienated than I was. The racial problems that were getting a lot of coverage in the news at that time focused my hatred and rebellious feelings toward America, the white man's society. I was part of an oppressed race, and I began to feel justified in doing anything I felt like to hurt white people and their so-called establishment. I was so angry that whenever I could do anything to upset white people it gave me a feeling of delight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Target Zero by Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver. Copyright © 2006 Estate of Eldridge Cleaver. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Henry Louis Gates vii
Editor's Introduction Kathleen Cleaver xi
Early Years
"Childhood Lessons," Excerpt from Soul on Fire 3
The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver, Chapters One and Two 9
The Black Moochie, Parts I and II 15
"On Becoming," Excerpt from Soul on Ice 39
"A Day in Folsom Prison," Excerpt from Soul on Ice 51
Promises, Chapter Two 59
Revolution
Uptight in Babylon 67
"My Father and Stokely Carmichael" 91
"The Courage to Kill: Meeting the Panthers" 101
"Bunchy" 113
"Affidavit No. 1: I Am 33 Years Old" 135
Playboy Interview 143
"On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, Part I" 171
"Farewell Address" 183
Exile
The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver, Chapter Four 195
"Message to Sister Ericka Huggins of the Black Panther Party" 199
"Three Notes from Exile" 203
The Autobiography ofEldridge Cleaver, Chapter Five 219
"Towards a People's Army" 221
"Gangster Cigarettes" 225
"Culture and Revolution: Their Synthesis in Africa" 231
"Eldridge Cleaver on Ice" 241
"Exile and Death" 263
The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver, Chapter Seven 265
"Why I Left America, and Why I Am Returning" 271
Transition
The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver, Chapter Nine 275
"The One Excluded from the Conference" 279
Letter to Bobby Scale 281
"Toxic Waste and Acid Rain" 285
"The Bushwhacking of America" 289
Letter to Timothy Leary 293
"Reflections on the Million Man March" 297
"A Love Letter Writing Butterfly" 301
Black History Month Address to Grant African American Episcopal Church, Los Angeles 303
Eldridge Cleaver, My Running Buddy Cecil Brown 317
Notes 327
Index 329
Reading Group Guide 337