In 1989, fourteen years after Betty disappeared, Huey was gunned down by a drug dealer he had burned. It was a few blocks away from where Huey had killed the 17-year-old prostitute Kathleen Smith. It might have been poetic, but it was not justice. He should have died sooner; he should have suffered more. On the other hand, if I had learned anything through all this, it was not to expect justice in this world, and to be grateful for that which did occur, however belated and insufficient.
Huey’s death allowed Peter and me to write his story and to describe the Panther reality I had uncovered. (We called it “Baddest” and published it as a new chapter in the paperback edition of our book Destructive Generation.) By now, we had become identified with the political right (although “libertarian irregulars” might better describe our second thoughts). What we wrote about the Panthers’ crimes, therefore, was either dismissed or simply ignored by an intellectual culture that was dominated by the left. Even though Huey’s final days had tainted the Panthers’ legacy, their glories were still fondly recalled in all the Sixties nostalgia that continued to appear on public television, in the historical monographs of politically correct academics and even in the pages of the popular press. The Panther crime wave was of no importance to anyone outside the small circle of their abandoned victims.
Then, in an irony of fate, Elaine Brown emerged from obscurity early this year to reopen the vexed questions of the Panther legacy. She had been living in a kind of semi-retirement with a wealthy French industrialist in Paris. Now she was back in America seeking to capitalize on the collective failure of memory with a self-promoting autobiography called A Taste of Power. It was published by a major New York publisher, with all the fanfare of a major New York offering.
With her usual adroitness, Elaine had managed to sugarcoat her career as a political gangster by presenting herself as a feminist heroine and victim. “What Elaine Brown writes is so astonishing,” croons novelist Alice Walker from the dust jacket of the book, “at times it is even difficult to believe she survived it. And yet she did, bringing us that amazing light of the black woman’s magical resilience, in the gloominess of our bitter despair.” “A stunning picture of a black woman’s coming of age in America,” concurs the Kirkus Reviews. “Put it on the shelf beside The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” To the Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn See, it is “beautiful, touching, . . . astonishing. . . . Movie makers, where are you?” (In fact, Suzanne DePasse, producer of Lonesome Dove, who appears to have been the guiding spirit behind the book is planning a major motion picture of Elaine’s life.77) Time magazine’s review invokes Che Guevara’s claim that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love,” and comments: “In the end, Brown discovers, love is the most demanding political act of all.”
Mercifully, this never came to pass.
A full-spread New York Times Magazine profile of Elaine (“A Black Panther’s Long Journey”), treated her as a new feminist heroine and prompted View and Style sections of newspapers in major cities across the nation to follow suit. Elaine, who reportedly received a $450,000 advance from Pantheon Books, has been touring the book circuit, doing radio and television shows from coast to coast, including a segment of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, where she appeared on a panel chaired by Charlayne Hunter Gault as an authority on black America. (“I hate this country,” she later told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a point at which you’re black in this country, poor, a woman, and you realize how powerless you are.” In contrast, Elaine once told me privately: “The poorest black in Oakland is richer than 90 percent of the world’s population.”) At Cody’s Books in Berkeley, two hundred radical nostalgists came to hear her, flanked by her “bodyguard,” Huey’s old gunman, Flores Forbes, who had served his four years on a second degree murder charge for the Richmond killing and was now prospering in his new career as an urban planner.
I read Elaine’s book. Jaded though I am, I was still amazed by its reception. The only accurate review seemed to come from the Bloods and Crips who flocked as fans to her Los Angeles appearance, recognizing that she was a gangster like them. A Taste of Power is, in its bloody prose, and despite the falsehoods designed to protect the guilty, the self-revelation of a sociopath, of the Elaine I had come to know.
“I felt justified in trying to slap the life out of her,”—this is the way Elaine introduces an incident in which she attempted to retrieve some poems from a radical lawyer named Elaine Wenders. The poems had been written by Johnny Spain, a Panther who participated in George Jackson’s murderous attempt to escape from San Quentin. Elaine describes how she entered Wenders’ office, flanked by Joan Kelley and another female lieutenant, slapped Wenders’ face and proceeded to tear the room apart, emptying desk-drawers and files onto the floor, slapping the terrified and now weeping lawyer again, and finally issuing an ultimatum: “I gave her twenty-four hours to deliver the poems to me, lest her office be blown off the map.”
Because Wenders worked in the office of Charles Garry, Huey’s personal attorney, Elaine’s thuggery produced some mild repercussions. She was called to the penthouse for a “reprimand” by Huey, who laughingly told her she was a “terrorist.” The reprimand apparently still stings and Elaine even now feels compelled to justify the violence that others seemed to consider merely impolitic: “It is impossible to summarize the biological response to an act of will in a life of submission. It would be to capture the deliciousness of chocolate, the arousing aroma of a man or a perfume, the feel of water to the dry throat. What I had begun to experience was the sensation of personal freedom, like the tremor before orgasm. The Black Panther Party had awakened that thirst in me. And it had given me the power to satisfy it.”
The thirst for violence is a prominent feature of this self-portrait: “It is a sensuous thing to know that at one’s will an enemy can be struck down,” Elaine continues. In another passage she provides one of many instances in her book of this pleasure. Here, it is a revenge exacted, after she becomes head of the Party, on a former Panther lover named Steve, who had beaten her years before. Steve is lured to a meeting where he finds himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun. While Elaine’s enforcer, Larry Henson, holds Steve at gunpoint, Elaine unleashes four members of the Squad, including the 400 pound Robert Heard, on her victim: “Four men were upon him now . . . Steve struggled for survival under the many feet stomping him. . . . Their punishment became unmerciful. When he tried to protect his body by taking the fetal position, his head became the object of their feet. The floor was rumbling, as though a platoon of pneumatic drills were breaking through its foundation. Blood was everywhere. Steve’s face disappeared.”
The taste for violence is as pervasive in Elaine’s account, as is the appetite to justify it in the name of the revolutionary cause. She describes the scene in Huey’s apartment just after he had pistol-whipped the middle-aged black tailor Preston Callins with a .357 Magnum. (Callins required brain surgery to repair the damage): “Callins’s blood now stained the penthouse ceilings and carpets and walls and plants, and [Huey’s wife’s] clothes, even the fluffy blue-and-white towels in the bathroom.” This is Elaine’s reaction to the scene: “While I noted Huey’s irreverent attitude about the whole affair, it occurred to me how little I, too, actually cared about Callins. He was neither a man nor a victim to me. I had come to believe everything would balance out in the revolutionary end. I also knew that being concerned about Callins was too costly, particularly in terms of my position in the Party. Yes, I thought, f—k Callins.”
Elaine deals with Betty’s murder in these pages, too. “I had fired Betty Van Patter shortly after hiring her. She had come to work for the Party at the behest of David Horowitz, who had been editor of Ramparts magazine and a onetime close friend of Eldridge Cleaver. He was also nominally on the board of our school. . . . She was having trouble finding work because of her arrest record. . . .” This is false on every significant count. Betty had no arrest record that Elaine or I knew about. I was one of three legal incorporators of the Learning Center and, as I have already described, the head of its Planning Committee not “nominally on the board.” Finally, I had met Eldridge Cleaver only once, in my capacity as a fledgling