Joan Didion: The White Album

Q. Well, your family some incidents you remember, the influences that shaped you—

A. Living in America shaped me.

Q. Well, yes, but more specifically—

A. It reminds me of a quote from James Baldwin: “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”

“To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in large letters on a pad of paper, and then he added: “Huey P Newton quoting James Baldwin.” I could see it emblazoned above the speakers’ platform at a rally, imprinted on the letterhead of an ad hoc committee still unborn. As a matter of fact almost everything Huey Newton said had the ring of being a “quotation,” a “pronouncement” to be employed when the need arose. I had heard Huey P. Newton On Racism (“The Black Panther Party is against racism”), Huey P. Newton On Cultural Nationalism (“The Black Panther Party believes that the only culture worth holding on to is revolutionary culture”), Huey P. Newton On White Radicalism, On Police Occupation of the Ghetto, On the European Versus the African. “The European started to be sick when he denied his sexual nature,” Huey Newton said, and Charles Garry interrupted then, bringing it back to first principles. “Isn’t it true, though, Huey,” he said, “that racism got its start for economic reasons?”

This weird interlocution seemed to take on a life of its own. The small room was hot and the fluorescent light hurt my eyes and I still did not know to what extent Huey Newton understood the nature of the role in which he was cast. As it happened I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it was on the proposition that political power began at the end of the barrel of a gun (exactly what gun had even been specified, in an early memorandum from Huey P. Newton: “Army . 45; carbine; 12-gauge Magnum shotgun with 18” barrel, preferably the brand of High Standard; M- 16;. 357 Magnum pistols; P-38”), and I could appreciate as well the particular beauty in Huey Newton as “issue.” In the politics of revolution everyone was expendable, but I doubted that Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way: the value of a Scottsboro case is easier to see if you are not yourself the Scottsboro boy. “Is there anything else you want to ask Huey?” Charles Garry asked. There did not seem to be. The lawyer adjusted his tape recorder. “I’ve had a request, Huey,” he said, “from a high-school student, a reporter on his school paper, and he wanted a statement from you, and he’s going to call me tonight. Care to give me a message for him?”

Huey Newton regarded the microphone. There was a moment in which he seemed not to remember the name of the play, and then he brightened. “I would like to point out,” he said, his voice gaining volume as the memory disks clicked, high school, student, youth, message to youth, “that America is becoming a very young nation…”

I heard a moaning and a groaning, and I went over and it was— this Negro fellow was there. He had been shot in the stomach and at the time he didn’t appear in any acute distress and so I said I’d see, and I asked him if he was a Kaiser, if he belonged to Kaiser, and he said, “Yes, yes. Get a doctor. Can’t you see I’m bleeding? I’ve been shot. Now get someone out here.” And I asked him if he had his Kaiser card and he got upset at this and he said, “Come on, get a doctor out here, I’ve been shot.” I said, “I see this, but you’re not in any acute distress.”…So I told him we’d have to check to make sure he was a member….And this kind of upset him more and he called me a few nasty names and said, “Now get a doctor out here right now, I’ve been shot and I’m bleeding.” And he took his coat off and his shirt and he threw it on the desk there and he said, “Can’t you see all this blood?” And I said, “I see it.”And it wasn’t that much, and so I said, “Well, you’ll have to sign our admission sheet before you can be seen by a doctor.” And he said, “I’m not signing anything.” And I said, “You cannot be seen by a doctor unless you sign the admission sheet,” and he said, “I don’t have to sign anything” and a few more choice words…

This is an excerpt from the testimony before the Alameda County Grand Jury of Corrine Leonard, the nurse in charge of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital emergency room in Oakland at 5:30 a. m. on October 28,1967. The “Negro fellow” was of course Huey Newton, wounded that morning during the gunfire which killed John Frey. For a long time I kept a copy of this testimony pinned to my office wall, on the theory that it illustrated a collision of cultures, a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level. This theory was shattered when I learned that Huey Newton was in fact an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, i. e., in Nurse Leonard’s words, “a Kaiser.”

6

One morning in 1968 I went to see Eldridge Cleaver in the San Francisco apartment he then shared with his wife, Kathleen. To be admitted to this apartment it was necessary to ring first and then stand in the middle of Oak Street, at a place which could be observed clearly from the Cleavers’ apartment. After this scrutiny the visitor was, or was not, buzzed in. I was, and I climbed the stairs to find Kathleen Cleaver in the kitchen frying sausage and Eldridge Cleaver in the living room listening to a John Coltrane record and a number of other people all over the apartment, people everywhere, people standing in doorways and people moving around in one another’s peripheral vision and people making and taking telephone calls. “When can you move on that?” I would hear in the background, and “You can’t bribe me with a dinner, man, those Guardian dinners are all Old Left, like a wake.” Most of these other people were members of the Black Panther Party, but one of them, in the living room, was Eldridge Cleaver’s parole officer. It seems to me that I stayed about an hour. It seems to me that the three of us — Eldridge Cleaver, his parole officer and I — mainly discussed the commercial prospects of Soul on Ice, which, it happened, was being published that day. We discussed the advance ($5,000). We discussed the size of the first printing (10,000 copies). We discussed the advertising budget and we discussed the bookstores in which copies were or were not available. It was a not unusual discussion between writers, with the difference that one of the writers had his parole officer there and the other had stood out on Oak Street and been visually frisked before coming inside.

7

To Pack and Wear:

2 skirts

2 jerseys or leotards

pullover sweater

pair shoes stockings bra

nightgown, robe, slippers

cigarettes

bourbon

bag with:

shampoo

toothbrush and paste

Basis soap

razor, deodorant

aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax

face cream, powder, baby oil

To Carry:

mohair throw

typewriter

2 legal pads and pens

files

house key

This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i. e., no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.