Study Guide to Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

INTRODUCTION TO ELDRIDGE CLEAVER

It would be difficult to explain Eldridge Cleaver’s position to the proverbial man from Mars. It would be difficult even to find a parallel to Eldridge Cleaver’s situation in the world of letters. For here is a man who has spent most of his life either in a black ghetto or in a prison, who nevertheless becomes one of the literary finds of our time. Here is a man who elicits praise from hundreds of thousands of readers even while he provokes bullets from the authorities. He becomes a fugitive from his native land even while the people of the land are making him a best-selling author. The more we learn about Cleaver, the more we read of his work, the more we see him as an anomaly, an enigma, the more questions we raise about the health of our world. For how can such an exuberant talent become a fugitive from democracy? How can democracy so fail such a talent, his art, and his audience? Clearly, to read and discuss Cleaver is to come to closer grips not only with the literature but also with the central agonies of our time.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Eldridge Cleaver calls Arkansas his home state. He was born there in 1935. His most vivid memory of his home state takes Cleaver back to that day in Little Rock when he burned with humiliation as a white man tried to force his father off the sidewalk. Such experiences help explain why the Cleavers moved to California, where Eldridge grew up mainly in the black ghetto of Los Angeles and for a time lived in Watts. He was a restless boy, and at the age of twelve he started getting into trouble with the authorities. He was often suspected of vandalism and petty crimes. But even then he must have been good-looking and romantic. When he was sixteen, women exclaimed over his beautiful brown eyes, and not much later he was having an affair with an attractive married woman whose husband was overseas. But young Cleaver was caught in possession of marijuana. That ended his precocious love life and his formal education: in 1954, one month after the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation, he was transferred out of high school into Soledad State Prison.

FIRST IMPRISONMENT

There Cleaver put his free time to good use. He read hungrily and on Saturdays, in the library, he discussed his reading with his fellow prisoners. One man, named Pontifelt, inspired the others to read Plato and Emerson. Although Cleaver laughed at the time about his Plato hang-up, he was later to prove he had been profoundly influenced by the ancient Greek. The Mind-Body dichotomy which pervades Platonic idealism would later be put to ingenious use in Cleaver’s own myths. And the dialogue, Plato’s favorite form for developing ideas, would become one of many literary forms Cleaver tried out. Meanwhile, imagine twenty-year-old inmate Cleaver thinking of Plato’s Ideal state while watching the civil-rights struggle on the prison TV! Plato’s new state would be started by excluding everyone over ten years of age, so that pure reason could grow unpoisoned by bias and tradition. In Plato’s Republic, every man and woman would have equal opportunity to rise in public life according to objective tests of his ability. Citizens would respect the law because it was just. On TV, Cleaver watched the segregationists holding on to the exclusive privileges of their unproved supremacy, defying the law of the land with impunity. Cleaver was outraged. If he was in prison for defying the law, why were they out there free, with the police on their side? The image of the police that Cleaver formed from prison TV was an image of an armed force not on the side of justice but on the side of entrenched power, privilege, and prejudice.

FREEDOM AND REVENGE

The Cleaver who was paroled from Soledad was eager for revenge on the white world, especially revenge for the way white men - for centuries - had systematically and cynically commandeered the black woman. Cleaver felt that like the white man, he too should be above the law. Manic and truculent, he roamed white neighborhoods where, as a one-man insurrectionary force, he attacked white women. As the magazine writer Don Schanche describes it, Cleaver was caught trying to rape a white girl in the back seat of her bound boyfriend’s car.

SECOND IMPRISONMENT

Convicted for assault with intent to commit murder, Cleaver was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1957 he entered San Quentin. This time he analyzed himself as well as his society. He realized he could no longer justify such inhuman conduct, not even as revenge or rebellion. He realized he had brutalized not only his victims, but himself. He renewed his studies, earning his high-school diploma in prison at the age of 22, reading passionately, deciding finally that this mode of thinking through which he had learned so much - the written word - could be used by him not only as a reader but also as a writer. And so now reading served three purposes for Cleaver: it helped him in his endless pursuit of answers to his questions about man’s makeup, America’s idealism vs. American practice, black history, world affairs and economics; it armed him in his perennial debates with fellow prisoners who apparently never tired of talking politics, religion, psychology; and it gave him good examples of the writer’s craft, it inspired him to develop a craft of his own. And so he read Paine and Voltaire, who apparently confirmed him in his atheism and gave him dignified precedents for combining literature with propaganda; Richard Wright, who made him wary of the American Communist Party and helped him understand the black man’s feelings toward white people; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who certainly instilled in Cleaver an even greater passion for self-honesty, self-analysis; Adam Smith, Marx and Lenin, who helped him take the step from outlaw to revolutionary; Machiavelli, who made him aware of social tactics; and then Merton, Alan W. Watts, the weekly newspaper columns of Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin, the historical works of W. E. B. DuBois, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Khalil Gibran, and Kerouac, Douglass, the Bible, Mailer, Shakespeare, Osagyefo Kwame, and hundreds of other writers. The astonishing thing about this prodigious reading is the way Cleaver integrated it: he draws on it naturally and richly, without pedantry, in all his writing and speaking, in a manner that shows he has grasped not only its essence but even the value of its usable details.

CLEAVER AS MUSLIM

Cleaver was not religious in the literal sense of believing in appeals to a personal God, but he did appreciate Elijah Muhammad’s teachings of black brotherhood and he could accept the religious implications on a symbolic level. When Cleaver saw Black Muslims denied their religious rights in prison, he joined them as a matter of principle. With his broad erudition and his experience in argumentation, he became an eloquent preacher. When his cell-mate, Muslim Brother Booker T. X., was shot and killed by a prison guard, Cleaver succeeded him as leader of the San Quentin Mosque.

TRUSTY IN FOLSOM

The penal authorities then transferred Cleaver to Folsom Prison where he was put into solitary confinement. His notebooks were impounded as part of the property he could reclaim after his release; at regular intervals many books that Cleaver had ordered by mail, with his own earnings, were also added to his property. By 1965, because of his clean record, Cleaver was living in the honor block of the prison and participated in the limited self-government allowed the inmates. He spent up to 17 hours a day reading, participating in public-speaking sessions of the Gavel Club, and writing: essays, dramatic vignettes, Platonic dialogues, free verse. By now Cleaver had served nine years on a charge for which he had been eligible for parole after only two years. He began corresponding with a prominent civil-rights lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, who visited him at Folsom, read his manuscripts, and called the attention of several literary figures to this writer behind bars. In December, 1966, Cleaver was released on parole.

THE BLACK POLITICAL SITUATION

By that time, the civil rights movement that Cleaver had watched on TV had collapsed. It had agitated for and achieved legislation in behalf of integration, but of course it was powerless itself to enforce the new laws. What little desegregation there was had benefited mainly the black middle class, who gained new opportunities in employment and education. But for the lower-class masses in the ghettos, integration had made little difference: they still suffered joblessness and poverty. The massive civil-rights front now broke up into many splinter groups: some advocating separatism or black nationalism, some violence, some non-violence. One of these new groups was the Black Panther Party for Defense, founded on the West Coast just months before Cleaver was paroled. The Panther leaders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, promulgated an aggressive program demanding: full employment for the Negro people; an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community; decent housing; courses in black history; exemption from military service for all Blacks; an end to police brutality and murder; release from prison of all black men; black jurors on juries trying blacks; a United Nations plebiscite of American Blacks to determine the will of the black people as far as political destiny is concerned.

PAROLE, POLITICS, PUBLICATION

In his first seventeen months out of Folsom prison, Cleaver made extraordinary progress as writer, political activist, and human being. His parole adviser agreed to his taking a job as an editor of Ramparts magazine and to his joining the Black Panthers. Ramparts, not yet a radical publication, was then a left-liberal Catholic periodical. Edward M. Keating, its creator, had been one of the literary figures who recognized Cleaver’s talent even while he was in prison. Among Cleaver’s first assignments was to travel with Stokely Carmichael, throughout the United States, and to write about him. Typical fruit of this association was Cleaver’s article, My Father and Stokely Carmichael. In