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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.