On "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver ***

 

The last book on my Black Panther reading list, it's the only one actually by a Black Panther, as it's the only such work that I could find that was written by someone involved in the organization at the time that the Panthers were actually at their most active. I was not sure how much I would enjoy the work; I suspected that it might grow tiresome in its argument. That was not the case at all, though the work, as the chapters progressed, did have diminishing returns. Cleaver is a magnificent writer. I can see why and how this work was published. The essays are dynamic, the language beautiful.

The work is divided into sections of essays. The first section is the most intriguing. It consists of a set of letters he wrote while in prison. One essay focuses on a standard day, which, as a man of good behavior, provides him with more privileges than may others. Still, he's cut off from reading certain works considered subversive, often simply because the warden has decided such, not because a work is particularly radical. It's a personal thing. While in prison, Malcolm X was killed. The manner in which this filters to the prisoners is interesting—first as rumor and then over time confirmed. Not having access to the outside world so much, Cleaver can live in denial for a few days, even though he is one of the first to learn of what happens.

Cleaver, it seems, was taken in by the Black Muslims as well. And by Garveyism. It's interesting to see these various ideas that I read about in other works and how they played out among an actual Black Panther, as such Panthers were in some ways less inclined to find the approach of civil rights activists like MLK useful. Still, in the later passages of the book, Cleaver doesn't seem as virulently opposed to such movements as Malcolm does in the early portions of his autobiography. Like Malcolm, though, Cleaver moves away from Elijah Muhammad and some of his views.

The second section deals with current events—boxing (i.e., Muhammad Ali's fights), Vietnam (how Black Americans seemed more likely to fight this war, which in Cleaver's view is mostly a white colonialist enterprise), and James Baldwin (a writer he finds to be very good but who also is too inclined to kowtow to white views for his own good).

A collection of love letters follows and then a section mostly focused on male-female relationships. Here, the work loses steam for me. There are some interesting observations regarding why black men are attracted to white women, and why white women are attracted to black men, and how these attractions stem from the power dynamics involved in enslavement—the idea of the forbidden, of having power, and so on—but mostly Cleaver just waxes lyrical in ways that didn't seem to convey much to me.