Eldridge Cleaver - Soul on Ice

After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astrayastray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized.... My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself.

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER in Soul on Ice

Unsparing, unaccommodating, tough and lyrical by turns... painful, aggressive and undaunted, Soul on Ice is a book for which we have to make room.

The New Republic

This collection of letters, essays, and dramatic monologues does what good books have always done: it presents a new stirring of experience that causes hidden sediment to rise to where we can all see it.... Minds like Cleavers are sorely needed, minds that can fashion a literature which does not flaunt its culture but creates it.

The New York Review of Books

In the sixties, Cleaver became an almost mythical figure for thousands of young blacks and whites; but today, I believe, he is an authentic hero.

BAYARD RUSTIN

Soul on Ice is a book full of pain ... a dramatic and troubled book, written by a tormented black man in search of sanity.... Taken all together, this book is a black mans spiritual odyssey away from hate and crime towards understanding and convalescence.

Media and Methods

A series of machine-gun blasts that capture the mood of the black militants.

The New Leader

An original and disturbing report.... The final essays on masculinity and mass entertainment in America and the sex drives there, are original and often quite funny. Cleaver can be a mature, perhaps even a great writer.

Saturday Review

Cleaver is not simply a zealot or reactionary, but an individual who has experienced pain, injustice, and asks the philosophic question, what is being? He moves through Soul on Ice with a hunger to reaffirm his existence, sometimes in anger, sometimes with abundant pride, but the need is there to speak out, to comment, to seek truth.

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A Delta Book

Published by

Dell Publishing

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Random House, Inc.

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New York, New York 10036

Copyright 1968, 1991 by Eldridge Cleaver Copyright

Preface 1992 by Ishmael Reed

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, New York.

The trademark Delta is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

ISBN: 0-385-33379-X

Reprinted by arrangement with McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

January 1999

10 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made to the following sources for permission to quote from material already published:

The Dead Lecturer by LeRoi Jones. Copyright 1964 by LeRoi Jones. Reprinted by permission of The Sterling Lord Agency.

The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu. Reprinted with permission of The Macmillan Company. Copyright 1953 by Ashley Montagu.

My Negro ProblemAnd Ours, Commentary by Norman Podhoretz. Permis-sion the author, copyright February, 1963, by Norman Podhoretz.

Commentary, from a letter by Irving Louis Horowitz. Reprinted by permission of Commentary. Copyright June, 1963, by the American Jewish Committee.

The Presidential Papers by Norman Mailer. Reprinted by permission G. P. Putnams Sons. Copyright 1963 by Norman Mailer.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. Reprinted with permission of The Dial Press, Inc. Copyright 1963, 1962 by James Baldwin.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Copyright 1955, 1957 by Jack Kerouac. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.

Christ and His Teachings was first published in Esquire.

To Beverly,

with whom I share

the ultimate of love

Of all the beautiful people who have been so helpful in getting these writings into print, Id like to thank especially Edward M. Keating, creator of Ramparts Magazine, who was the first professional to pay any attention to my writings; Maxwell Geismar, whose criticism has helped me gain a degree of control over my materials; and David Welsh, for his invaluable assistance as an editor.

T hough the young African-American hip-hop intellectuals picture Malcolm X as an apostle of armed resistancetheir favorite poster is that of a rifle-bearing Malcolm, peering out from behind curtains, preparing to do battle with his enemies the revolutions that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., precipitated were textbook Sun Tzu. They produced changeKing in the law, Malcolm in consciousnesswithout throwing a punch (at whites), or firing a shot. And though they are regarded as opposites, it was Malcolms threats that were partially responsible for the establishments agreeing to some of Kings demands.

Malcolm made wolfing and jive into an art form, and though his battles were fought on television (Marshall McLuhan referred to him as the electronic man) and his weapons were words, he was a symbol of black manhood; our shining prince was the way Ossie Davis put it, in a eulogy delivered at Malcolms funeral. Black men were in need of such a prince, manhood being very much on the minds of black men during the sixties. Their frustration was heightened when some black children were blown to bits during church services in Birmingham, Alabama; King, Jr.s macho critics thought that he had punked out when he used children in one of his nonviolent demonstrations.

Black nationalist poet, Askia Muhammed Toure, wondered aloud But who will protect the womens quarters? the desperate cry of men whose women were being poked with cattle prods and beaten to the ground by white thugs in uniform. I wrote a long noisy rambunctious poem entitled Fanfare for an Avenging Angel, dedicated to Malcolm and, after reading it, he told me, charitably, that it reminded him of works by Virgil and Dante.

Thats how we saw Malcolm X. He would make them pay. Pay for the humiliations we suffered in a racist country. Young black intellectuals were out for revenge. They were in a Kikukyu warrior mode. On the west coast, a young black prisoner was using the Spanish dungeon of the sort that used to hold slaves as his personal library. Eldridge Cleaver was also impressed with Malcolm X and took Malcolm Xs position over that of Elijah Muhammad, whose generation called whites devils, because they had come out of the southern racist hell where the whites had shown themselves to be capable of the most fiendish acts.

As in the case of his hero, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver went to school in jail, reading, writing, meditating, and practicing his intellectual style on mentors, who were obviously no match for his probing, hungry intellect. In his book Soul on Ice, he confessed to a former career as a rapist and admitted to a relationship with white women (still the cardinal taboo in the eyes of white and black nationalists).