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Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 7

 

    The takeover did not end happily. In the middle of being dressed down by Busta, the university chancellor suffered chest pains. Paramedics arrived three minutes later. Thirty seconds after they left, police stormed the room arresting Busta, Steve, Sam and a couple of other brothers who were armed. A black and white photograph, capturing the pale and disheveled chancellor being carried out on a stretcher as stem-faced Black students looked on, ran in newspapers around the world.

An hour after the siege was over, I sat wearily at my desk in the PSUIA News Center, pounding out a press release. Putting the university in the best light. Bob was busy fielding calls from the major newspapers and magazines, television networks and radio stations.  Just after I turned in my two-page press release, I noticed the young Black cameraman; his news crew and this young white reporter were still there. While they camped outside Bob’s office, waiting to get details on the student takeover and talk to him about setting up interviews on the story they had originally been assigned to do, the cameraman strolled back towards my desk and introduced himself.

“What hap, Brother? I’m Bakman, the Black man. And you are?"

“I’m Pierce Trotter. Writer and lover.”

"I heard that," Bakman laughed. "And I'm gonna keep my ladies away from you."

We went through a four-stage Black Power handshake. He told me they were working on a piece about the drug scene on campus. He wanted to know what I knew. I answered his questions only to find myself being attacked for being so upfront. We argued, first philosophically, then on principle and finally just to be arguing. Was I helping him out?  Or betraying my friends to someone who could have been out to do them harm. Was he asking me to be as paranoid as he was? Or be less trusting in a duplicitous world? By the time the argument was over, we agreed that we needed to hang out so that we could continue to straighten each other out.

 

*            *            *            *

“What time is it?" Bakman asked, grabbing his Marley tape and one of the joints I’d rolled earlier before abruptly making his way out the door. "Shit. I got a seven o’clock plane to catch. I got to go.”

I wondered how he was going to be up and out by 5:45 in the morning. Between the smoke and the wine, he was wasted. “Think you can make it home okay?” I asked as he stumbled and staggered down the hallway, brushing against the walls.

“I don’t know. Six stories down is a long way to go. But I figure I’ll make it if the creek don’t rise and the elevator don’t crash.”

“Peace.”

“As-salaam Aleikum, my brother,” Bakman said, giving me a Black Power salute. “Islam for ‘May peace be with you.’”

“Wa aliekum Salaam, my great Black teacher,” I said, gesturing in an exaggerated bow. “How many times are you going to tell me that?”

Bakman smiled. His raised fist flipped out its middle finger.

“Thanks. But no thanks. I’m saving myself for Allison.”

“You ain’t nothin’ but a fool,” he laughed, lunging into the elevator.

Bakman was gone less than 10 minutes before Allison and I were in the sack, getting down with her on top with the soundtrack to Shaft as our background music. An hour later, I opened a fresh pack of Marlboros and enjoyed a post-lovemaking smoke. Then I set the alarm on the radio on my bedside table to go off at 7:15 and called it a night.          

Tomorrow was going to be another bad day at the office.

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 6

 
 

    The armed seizure of McCardle Hall lasted from before sunset to after sunrise. Three hours into the take-over, I slipped outside to see what was going on. The air was comfortably crisp, sharply contrasting the hot, stuffy, fear-laden atmosphere I’d just left. Alongside the swarm of state troopers, county sheriffs, Springville police and national guardsmen, a growing crowd gathered. I took note of the milling throng then turned my attention back toward the building. At the lowest levels, the lighted windows were framed by late-life leaves of ivy that were quietly rustling in the darkness as the night breeze nudged them back and forth.

Suddenly the ivy changed from sable to chalk, set in caustic relief by a sheer white light. I whirled around to face the source of this starkness. Standing three yards away from me was this trio, a television news crew. One white man, who looked to be in his 40s, held a floodlight and carried a battery pack slung over his shoulder. The other, somewhere around 50, carried a shotgun microphone about three and a half feet long. The two flanked this tall, muscular Black man, shouldering a hefty Mitchell TV camera. Its lens was trained on the side of the building, capturing on film what my eyes had sighted only moments earlier. In the darkness, I caught a glimpse of the half of his face that wasn’t masked by the camera. He couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than I was. I attempted to make eye contact but he looked right past me. He was all business and communicated as much without uttering a word.

After filming the ivy for about 45 seconds, he turned, signaling to his crewmates that he was on the move. The three-man crew shoved and shot its way through the crowd towards the entrance of the building. The floodlight wielded by the electrician caught the many faces of the crowd. The national guardsmen, some of them no older than the students camped out in McCardle Hall, looked nervous but resolute. The state police, wearing their riot helmets with protective plastic visors, were faceless. So were the two-dozen hooded Klansmen gathered just to right of the entrance. Behind them was a group of 30 or so white frat boys. To the left of the glass double door entrances were members of the Black Panther Party and a handful of radical whites from the Students for a Democratic Society.

Other television camera lights began bathing the scene, sparring with the red sweep of the Mars lights straddling the tops of the squad cars. Leaders from each of the anti-establishment groups held an impromptu press conference to let it be known that the authorities had better be prudent. "If the pigs fuck with the Soul, we’re going to fuck up the pigs," a group of Panthers chanted. “We’re going to fuck up the pigs, if the pigs fuck with the soul.”

Everyone seemed set on a violent ending. Members of the KKK were egging on the Troopers and Guardsmen to “go in there and teach them niggers a lesson.  This is the white man’s school in the white man’s country.”

The rag tag band of SDSers fired off catcalls at the Klansmen, the cops, the guardsmen, the Greeks, the University administration, the professors and anyone and anything else that they could think of associated with the establishment.

“The only good capitalist is a dead capitalist,” one shouted. “Kill the capitalist,” another shouted.

As a credentialed member of the media, I was in and out. I talked to my brothers leading the takeover, quickly writing down the list of the 10 non-negotiable demands as if I was hearing it for a first time. I interviewed the captive school administrators and faculty, noting their outrage, sadness and unease as the events unfolded. I interviewed spectators, protesters and law enforcement officers on the outside as they wondered and worried about what was going on inside. 

I scurried back and forth throughout the night. Past Steve and Sam as they stood armed, guarding the doors. Past the police and national guardsmen as they stood armed, anxiously awaiting orders to storm the building. Through the ranks of the probing reporters, photographers and camera crews who were outside working the story, demanding I give them some account of what was going on inside. I deferred. I was only a student-employee of the PSUIA. Bob Madden would give them a full report after it was all over.

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 4

 
 

    There was a silence among the group of 20 for about 10 seconds. “This ain’t about that. This is about power and power only comes from the barrel of a gun,” Steve shouted, waving two of his pieces in the air again. “Power to the People.”

After about 35 minutes more of heated debate, a mandate was hammered out. All the leaders of the Black Student Union were to try to get hold of some firepower. Those able to get arms would lead the rest of the student protesters into the meeting.

“We need a list of 10 non-negotiable demands,” Reginald 23X pointed out.

It took nearly two more hours of impassioned arguments before agreement was reached on the 10 demands. During the entire time, I stayed silent. Listening but not offering any of my opposing opinions. I drifted in and out of the meeting. I called my lady, Allison, at our crib in the Heights, to tell her it’d be a while before I got home because of this meeting that was a drag. I called Penny, this grey chick who had left no doubt that the answer wouldn’t be no, to tell her I might drop by in an hour or so. 

I got back just in time to hear the quarrel over whether non-negotiable demand Number Five should be that a statue of Nat Turner be erected in the center of the campus circle. I started writing a couple of poems for the BSU talent show I was performing in the following Saturday night. I thought of my poems then as works that Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) would have written if he were younger or the Last Poets would have performed if they were a one-man stand. I tuned in long enough to take in a few of the arguments for non-negotiable demand Number Nine--that a “Black House” be set up on campus for Black students who didn’t want to suffer the indignity of living among racist white students. Then my thoughts drifted off again. I daydreamed about becoming a famous writer as the drone of the going-to-be revolution ran on. Finally, the list was done. I reluctantly signed on. 

I just wanted to get out of there and into Penny.

Nine days after homecoming weekend, six days after our BSU meeting, the poplar and oak trees were sporting colorful leaves. The mums were in peak bloom. Sparrows and Warblers were chirping while gathering for a Southern migration. Great puffs of cumulus clouds drifted lazily to the northeast, randomly filtering the sun. It was cool in the shade. A warm autumn breeze rolled over the manicured green meadow in the PSU quadrangle. Forty-minutes after the benefactors’ meeting began at William H. McCardle Hall in the Melville W. Fuller Law School building, we marched in to announce we were taking over. No one would be allowed to leave until our list of 10 Non-Negotiable Demands was met. Steve, Sam, Busta and three other brothers came packing pistols and hoisting rifles. Chanting, “Bang. Bang. Beep. Beep. Ngowah. Black powah!”  the rest of us four score or so Black students came to back them up.

When we busted into the room, I was amazed at how quickly the white men grew whiter. All the blood flushed from their faces. The chancellor, who was speaking at the time, stuttered and stammered. He demanded to know the meaning of this outrage, this travesty. I wasn’t in the room 30 seconds before I caught sight of Bob Madden seated on the front row facing the podium. Bob was my boss at the Pullman State University Information Agency's News Center. He was an okay boss. It was a good gig. It paid for my tuition, my rent and gas for my ride. It paid for my food and my high.  

I couldn’t afford to lose it. 

I panicked, bumping into several Black students advancing into the room as I rapidly retreated. Jammin Sam’s scowl became a full court press on the back of my neck. I was greeted by inquisitive glares from my brothers and sisters filing in as I raced out. Carla Graham, a sister I was thisclose to pulling, who was sometimes my partner during our Bid Whist games in the student union, smiled. “Wrong way, Trotsky,” she half-teased.

                                           

*            *            *            *

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 3

 

 

  Choruses of right-ons rose up like amens at a holy-roller Pentecostal tent revival. “Ya know, you want The Man to listen to what you got to say. Then listen to me,” Steve started, slamming the guns down on the conference table in the front of the auditorium where he, Sam, and Busta sat, stared out at the rest of us. The thuds ricocheted like gunfire throughout the hollowed chamber. A brother seated in about the 11th row dove to the floor, believing one of Steve’s guns had accidentally gone off.

Within 30 minutes the tone, then the topic, went from protest to revolution. One strategy after the next was thrown on the table, each with the flare of a Molotov cocktail.  I realized we were going to live dangerously—or maybe not at all.  Steve, Sam and Busta wanted as many of us as possible to come armed to the nines during the alumni benefactors’ meeting the following week.

I signaled that I wanted to speak, and then stepped forward. Although I was an active member of the leadership of the Black Student Union, I was not that tight with the Three Musketeers-- Steve, Sam and Busta--who called the shots. That was the name I had personally given to the trio. Sam was initially offended until Busta pulled his coattail about Alexandre Dumas being a brother. Sam figured that since Dumas was Black, so were the real Three Musketeers.

“Fucking white man’s Hollywood, they always play that shit,” Sam said after Busta ran it down to him. “They even had Victor Mature play Hannibal, the greatest Black general of all time.”

My somewhat checkered stature among the group arose mainly out of my being both a Black Nationalist poet and a card-carrying member of the media. And because of Allison. Every one of them wondered how I got her and how they could take her away.

“I disagree,” I started, staring into a host of sour faces. “Naw let me back up. I agree, you know, we should be pissed and we should do something.”  I paused. Orangeburg was on my mind. I surveyed the room. Reginald 23X, who was playing catch with his pen, tossing it into the air, fumbled. Dropped the ballpoint. Every other head in the room jerked backwards to investigate the disturbance then recoiled to zero in on me. “But that something is something where we need to be cool, you know. We show up with guns and somebody could die. That somebody could be one of us.”

I spotted Steve out of the corner of my eye. He sat casually polishing one of his pistols. Jammin’ Sam jumped out of his seat, screaming from the heart: “Uh, huh, Mista Wordsmith, you wanna talk. You wanna debate. You wanna discuss. You wanna participate in verbal masta-bation. You wanna bullshit. But you don’t wanna do jackshit.” I stood there, a little sheepish, wondering if Sam knew I had jammed his main squeeze, Sally, when she discovered he was stroking Heidi and decided to put out a little revenge pussy. Neither Sally nor Heidi was sisters. There was this dictum informally observed by a slew of Black nationalists: Think Black, sleep white.

“Sam, I’m not going to let you front me off like that,” I replied, vainly trying to stare down the six-foot-seven anything-but-gentle giant. “Guns are deadly.  I don’t believe this is an issue worth dying for.”

“Like what is?” Sam interrupted, more pissed-off than our exchange called for.

Shit. He knew. But I knew his jock ego was not going to admit that a 155-pound, pen pusher, like me, got over with his lady. “You going to let me finish? I let you talk, big brother. Can I get a turn?” I asked, toying with the hand-carved onyx Tiki hanging from the mahogany-wood beaded necklace I wore over my black-linen dashiki.

Several of the other brothers grumbled, “Let Brother Trotsky speak.”

“Alright, I’ll let him speak. Although this is one rapper that ain’t got shit to say,” Sam growled, glaring.

I stared up at Sam, summoning the best “fuck you” face I could muster. “Let’s be for real. You know there’s nothing there. You can’t point to one thing about the cap that says, ‘This is for Negro population control.’ There will be white students kicked off the campus. There will be white students who will never have a chance to tread these hallowed halls. It’s more than just us. There ain’t 3,300 Black folks on campus. If they got rid of every last brother and sister, they’d still have about 2,700 whiteys to off.”

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 2

 

    It was an open secret that Coach Fort wasn’t exactly wild about having Black players on his team to begin with. He was one of the last holdouts, preferring whites who might not be as talented but who were, by his reckoning, better team players. He was commonly quoted as believing that whites played better-organized ball. That Blacks suffered from the star syndrome--they wanted to solo and showboat. “I’m two seconds away from grabbing my Bowie knife and slicing that big, ugly, black ape’s balls off and stuffing them in his mealy mouth,” Coach Fort ranted.

Fred Farley, Fort’s assistant coach, was trying to calm him down. “Now Johnny, I know you’re pissed off,” he spoke almost in a whisper. “But you’ve got to quiet down before this thing goes public. It’s a family matter. We’ve got to keep it a family matter.”

“That spear chucker doesn’t start another game. You got that, Fred? He doesn’t even get to start my second car.”

“Sure Johnny. That’s a cinch. We’ll start Blaustein, okay. Just calm down.”

Sam was so upset by what he overheard that he told Busta who told Steve who told Reginald 23X who told me. Of course, the brothers had to cool Sam out. “I ought to put my size 15 sneaker all the way in that muthafuckin honky’s redneck ass,” Sam said to Steve.

Steve told him to stay loose. For now. Sam took Steve’s advice. And Farley followed Coach Fort’s orders.  Almost overnight, Sam went from being a trophy Negro to becoming a Black revolutionary.

“Brother Sam is right-on, you know. We can’t let these honkies lock us out,” Busta Jones, one of PSU’s leading Black student intellectuals, said matter-of-factly. Busta, a graduate student in philosophy, was the atheist son of a nationally known Baptist preacher. “This campus is already lily-white. There are only 600 of us here right now, you know. Out of a population of 33,000.  We’ve got to deal with this. If they ram this scheme through, then Black students on this campus are past tense.”

Reginald 23X, who was the very middle class, extremely indulged Reginald Jefferson III before joining the Lost-Found Nation of Islam the year before, took the floor. “Brother Busta is right. If the white devil gets to implement his plan, then Blacks students on this campus can bend over and bid their posteriors adieu. The white devil’s plan is as plain as day, you know. Like, they limit the number of students in Springville and Black students become the spooks who no longer haunt the campus.”

Just as the bow-tied Reggie, a pre-law student who planned to go into international negotiations, was about to really get going with the oratory, Steve Tweedle made a dramatic entrance into the 600-seat lecture hall.

Steve marched to the front of the classroom in full Black Panther regalia--dark shades, black wool beret, heavy black paratrooper boots, mid-length black leather jacket and two leather bullet-laden bandoleers crisscrossing his chest. Steve was a reformed Chicago street gang leader who had gone to college and discovered The Movement. He brandished a Remington rifle in his right hand, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver in his left. A Colt .45 hung in the holster on his hip. It was the general consensus among sisters on the campus that Steve was fine. He looked like a taller, darker, bearded Huey P. Newton. His voice was deeper and richer too. “Ya know, you brothers is just playing at being angry unless you willing to pick up the gun. You want power. This is power,” he yelled, brandishing his weapons. “You want The Man’s respect. Ya know, this is what The Man respects,” he shouted as his right black-gloved fist, clutching the rifle, shot into the air. “Power to the people! Off the pigs! Power to the people! Off the Pigs!”

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Two, part 1

 

 
   

    “They know so little about you that they make big assumptions.”—Raejean Corliss
 

 
Chapter Two
 
 

    Bakman and I have been running buddies for four years. We became fast friends following the infamous Pullman State University Black student protest. We met when he dropped by the PSU Information Agency, the public relations department at the college, where I was the first part-time student employee. Bakman was assigned to shoot a special report about drugs on campus. PSU was chosen because it was in the heartland, a little more than a three-hour drive from Chicago. The university was conservative, depending on your political bent, to a fault.  I had just gotten the job a month earlier and was still naïve enough to think it was okay to let it be known that there was a wild undercurrent at PSU. So when this young Black cameraman asked me where the real partying was going on, I was the campus crier. “By that, I take it you mean the grass, acid, ludes and other mind-altering treats?”

 
I began describing dealers and pinpointing places.
 
“Hold up. Let me tell you something, my brother. I’m righteous but you don’t know that. Just who are you sourcing out? The white boys or the brothers? Or are you riding a Zebra?” Bakman asked.
 
“I was hipping you to the happening,” I answered.
 
“You mean you were just giving it up, just like that?” he said, snapping his fingers. “Not knowing nothing about me and what I’m about?”
 
I replied I knew he was a brother. That he seemed cool to me.
 
“You know, that and a dime will get you your one phone call,” Bakman replied. “I could be The Man. I could be The Man’s boy. And you and all your little college cohorts could be in the joint just on what you’ve told me.  But the reality is even worse. I am a media man. And what you’ve told me could be reported this way or that. Think about it. We are in an image war. Information can be confused, abused or misused.”
 
As it turned out, Bakman had just started as a cameraman for WATZ, the USBC-owned and operated television station in Chicago.  At the time, I was living a double life. Besides being a part-time student-employee of the PSUIA’s News Center and a campus stringer for the Weekly News, the liberal international newsmagazine, I was a Black student activist. A Black Nationalist. A rebel with the cause. An angry young man ready to forge change or to die trying. 
 
In the fall of ‘69, the Pullman State University administration announced its decision to cap the student population at 30,000 on the main campus.  In an age of extremes, of black and white, that 10 percent planned reduction instantaneously provoked the leadership of PSU’s Black Student Union.  The announced move was interpreted as a blatant attempt to limit the number of Black students on the idyllic downstate campus. Six months earlier, Black students at Cornell University showed up armed and dangerous at a campus protest. The students and their rifles were plastered on front pages and covers of newspapers and magazine all over the world and some of their demands were met.
 
Sam Williams, Pullman State’s BBMOC (Big Black Man on Campus), made the point. “Those brothers at Cornell weren’t playing. You know, they got down. They took care of business.  Like, what we gone do? Be a bunch of mad-at-the-man crybabies or be for real. Take action. Make notice.”
 
“Right on, Sam the Jam,” several of the brothers cheered, referring to Williams’ a.k.a.
 
Sam was Pullman State’s starting center until it was discovered he was not only scoring on the opposing teams but with the coach’s 17-year-old daughter. Although Sam’s extra-curricular activity never advanced beyond the whisper stage, his star faded in a flash. He began spending as much time cooling his heels on hardwood benches as he did taking easy lay-ups on hardwood courts. Then it got worse. Sam was on his way to Coach Fort’s office, ready to deny that he had diddled the daughter, when he overheard the coach telling one of his assistants “if that dumb nigger so much as looks at my Krystal again, I’m having his black ass put under the jail.”
 
It was an open secret that Coach Fort wasn’t exactly wild about having Black players on his team to begin with. He was one of the last holdouts; preferring whites who might not be as talented but who were, by his reckoning, better team players. He was commonly quoted as believing that whites played better-organized ball. That Blacks suffered from the star syndrome--they wanted to solo and showboat. “I’m two seconds away from grabbing my Bowie knife and slicing that big, ugly, black ape’s balls off and stuffing them in his mealy mouth,” Coach Fort ranted.