Nine Lives of a Black Panther by Pharr Wayne

Author:Pharr, Wayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

13

BLOOD AND GUTS

“Strap me up. I’ll do it,” I said fiercely as I stood up out of my chair. I got up quickly, and as I did, I sent it clanking against the wall before it collapsed on the floor. It was about two weeks after the beating; a few of us were at Central Headquarters talking, assessing, and strategizing. Of course, the topic of the beating came up—my face was still pretty busted up from the Metro ambush, still disfigured from the swelling and badly bruised. I’d had plenty of time to think about what those jackasses had done to me. I told G that morning if he wanted to blow up the Seventy-Seventh Precinct, I was the man.

G looked at me and laughed, shaking his head at my outburst. “This nigga’s gone crazy,” he said, giving me a quizzical look.

Maybe I was crazy. But I was also dead serious. As serious as Robert Charles had been, decades before me: Charles, an articulate, law-abiding activist from around the turn of the century, gunned down five New Orleans police officers in 1900 when they tried to arrest him while he was quietly sitting on a front porch with a friend. His crime? A black man standing up against racism.

I was even more serious than Mark Essex, a young black navy man who turned sniper in the early 1970s. Essex went on a killing spree in New Orleans after being subjugated, demeaned, and humiliated by his white commanders, and even his white peers, in the military. Although he was originally from Kansas, he received his military training in San Diego, California. He was surprised at how racist things were in California. It was around that time that he became a Black Nationalist. He took the racist abuse until he finally couldn’t take it anymore. First, Essex killed five cops. A week later, he went to a Howard Johnson’s hotel and starting shooting people—he said he was only after white people. He finally went to the roof of the building, where he went out in a hail of fire, exchanging shots with police helicopters from the rooftop. Afterward, they found more than two hundred gunshot wounds in his body.

I was, in fact, deadly serious, just like Tommy Harper, who also came after me. Tommy, a local student, got so fed up with the racist system that he tried to use explosives to blow up the Compton police station in July 1970. Unfortunately for Tommy, he made some novice mistakes and blew himself up instead. But I understood his sentiments. After his death, the pigs made up a nursery rhyme about him as a joke. They sang it to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Sick bastards. Drive somebody crazy and then laugh when he dies. I thought they were sworn to serve the communities where they worked.

In my anger, I decided to ambush either Fisher or Hole or both; it didn’t matter much to me which one. Just thinking about them made my blood boil.

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