Soul Still on Ice? The Talent and Troubles of Eldridge Cleaver
Pacion, Stanley
THOUGH IT is little more than a year since Soul on Ice was published, Eldridge Cleaver has been assimilated so rapidly by popularizers and professional reviewers that it is almost impossible to...
...Cleaver's approach, which the more "progressive" segments of the white middle class are ready to buy and praise, rests on a new kind of racial superiority...
...Cleaver himself must be held accountable for much of this misunderstanding...
...The crucial question, of course, is not whether Cleaver revels in his liberation, but whether he has actually achieved it...
...At the end of her flight from her body is a skyhigh wall of ice...
...The great failing of Cleaver's book, for all its force and talents, is that it does not attempt in any way to broaden perspectives on the problem of black and white relations in America...
...Whereas older black writers like Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin felt their sense of reality shaped by the values of the white world, Cleaver declares his own voice, free and unfettered...
...For blacks too can presumably become "Omnipotent Administrators...
...Nearly half the essays were composed during Cleaver's imprisonment, and the description of a black inmate's experience in the California state prison system is appalling, as it is meant to be...
...Throughout the prison essays, Cleaver borrows freely from Malcolm X; it is an influence he readily acknowledges...
...For many of these notions of black physical superiority Cleaver is indebted to Norman Mailer who reflects, albeit more articulately, our standard cultural assumptions...
...No longer will he accept white standards that cast him as a "Menial" and force him to see his woman as an "Amazon...
...Cleaver excites every possible emotion from love to hate...
...Hopefully, Cleaver's voice will not yield the same results as Calhoun's...
...The white Omnipotent Administrator, launched on a perpetual search for his alien STANLEY PACION ated body, now becomes a worshiper of masculine prowess...
...Rather than breaking through the reader's conditioned thought-patterns and responses, it plays on them...
...To him this is an irrevocable liberation, and he celebrates it...
...I first heard about them years ago...
...It also suits all kinds of conservatives who, though passionately at odds with Cleaver's cultural theoretics, view it as a handy way to buttress the status quo...
...Italics Cleaver's.] Popular though they are in some university circles, Cleaver's cultural theoretics seem mostly nonsensical, and when pulled away from his exhortatory prose his ideas are hard to take seriously...
...I I N THE LATTER PART of his book Cleaver writes from a more ambitious social perspective...
...Though he exhorts his people to trust in their own values and achievements, he feels himself beyond the need for such prompting...
...The marble players of Folsom are legendary throughout the prison system...
...it has as its countergoal the destruction of the white ego-ideal and •the inversion of the present racial hierarchy...
...The book rejects either openly or implicitly integration, nonviolence, and the benefits of cooperation with the white community...
...In a larger context Soul on Ice reflects the latest wave of modern anti-intellectualism...
...just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty...
...He works upon a notion popular in contemporary America: the triumph of science in the West has effected a complete alienation of body from mind, flesh from intellect...
...Some guy might boast about how he is going to get out next time and stay out, and someone will put him down by saying he'll be back playing marbles like a hasbeen, a neverwas, blasted back into childhood by a crushing defeat to his final dream...
...Like so many other American autobiog SOUL STILL ON ICE...
...This essay signals a new phase in the black search for identity...
...Not only does it call upon the blacks to put trust in themselves...
...In this sense, it is a bad omen...
...There is, however, a major difference between Cleaver and Mailer...
...There is a sense of ultimate defeat about them...
...Time and again the reader is told that white women find sexual satisfaction only with black men, and Cleaver maintains the doctrine of black sexual superiority even in those essays in which he is supposed to be describing the sexual problems of black men...
...But by countering his warm appraisal of his own SOUL STILL ON ICE...
...it bears the stamp of trauma...
...In their absolutism and intolerance the two men are near equals...
...Both have the same basic defense reaction to Northern civilization...
...The only real challenge comes in Cleaver's passages on prison life, yet few reviewers have even noted their importance...
...It tells how one black man managed to overcome white hegemony, and stay alive...
...He writes an inspired and wild prose that tends to subvert rational judgment...
...To underscore this thesis Cleaver puts forth some startling illustrations...
...Though the convict is thought to have a high regard for anyone who spends time, money, and energy to set him free, his prison experience has rendered him incapable of such respect...
...If Cleaver were indeed as secure in his blackness as he claims, what inner need would drive him to write his heated panegyrics to the humanity of black people...
...Soul on Ice gives an intimate account of the needs, feelings, and waking fantasies of a black man in jail...
...an opposite emotion comes into play...
...Rather than armed insurrection, the book has as its chief lesson the almost corny admonition of the need for education...
...For a wing of the New Left Cleaver is the armed revolutionary who will level the capitalist structure...
...And because white America is incapable of saving itself, it has only one hope: its black men and women...
...The goal is racist, but in reverse of the historic American pattern, substituting a myth of white inferiority for the myth of black inferiority...
...Despite all his bitter stridency and the threat that he will level the earth to attain manhood, one leaves Cleaver's essays with the impression that he is counseling the use of books, not guns, for black America...
...Otherwise the book is mainly an index to the times, to the terrible emotive weight of con temporary ideology...
...And while his language may hint that he himself has not yet overcome the stigma of blackness, it carries his message of black pride with remarkable force...
...These days Cleaver is comfortably read...
...The notion that blacks are endowed with extraordinary physical prowess in bed fits well with the stereotyped "big buck," "nigger savage" notions of the most benighted Southern whites...
...Rage, disillusionment, prejudice, fear, love, all passions are purposely marshalled...
...Mark the use of prison imagery: Sitting at the foot of her bed like a mute Sphinx on the bank of the Nile, is the Ogre of Frigidity...
...Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the Negro male's lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an aesthetic attraction, but nothing could be further from the truth...
...Omnipotent Administrators," as Cleaver puts it, suffer from underdeveloped bodies, lack of will, sexual impotence and frigidity...
...For the conservative he may be anathema, but he also represents more attractively black economy, decentralized schools, and local autonomy vis-à-vis the federal bureaucracy...
...For all their apparent candor his words and materials seem highly calculated...
...And rather than mark a new beginning, my greeting signifies only my Return...
...This notion is, of course, an old one...
...He feels sure enough in his blackness to glory in it and extol its virtues to a wide public...
...Its resonant qualities belong more to the rally or arena than to common prose and suggest that it is meant to be read aloud, chanted at voice-top: I greet you, my Queen, not in the obsequious whine of a cringing Slave to which you have become accustomed, neither do I greet you in the new voice, the unctuous supplications of the sleek Black Bourgeois, nor the bullying bellow of the rude Free Slave—but in my own voice do I greet you anew, my greeting is not new, but as old as the Sun, Moon, and Stars...
...This is a strange passage from a man who was sentenced to prison for repeated acts of rape against white women...
...It is an argument that appeals to romantic white intellectuals who are tired of civilization's demands but who do not, of course, themselves reject its comforts or accept the vow of poverty...
...Soul on Ice embodies one of the new ideologies that have emerged since the breakdown of the liberal, legalistic, and fundamentally Christian civil-rights movement of 1954...
...But, as Cleaver points out, the relationship between black men and white women is not solely one of love...
...For Cleaver has both a white and a black audience in mind...
...Convicts hate lawyers," Cleaver writes...
...This change of tactics has its significance...
...Both share a common fear of reason and a common praise of the instinctual...
...For the black prisoner, as Cleaver explains, Malcolm X was a symbol of hope...
...That Negroes suffer dreadfully from disease, malnutrition, pathology, Cleaver neglects to mention...
...Constructed around a series of leads and responses which give it the effect of a litany, the essay is a masterpiece of cajolery and propaganda...
...people with a hostile view of white society, Cleaver accomplishes his other purpose of formulating a propaganda that subtly bares white defenses, plays on their insecurity, and softens resistance...
...But, on the whole, Cleaver's demand is for separatism...
...For Cleaver the Negro both loves and hates white women...
...while with the instincts or the physical he associates strength, brute power, force, virility, and physical beauty...
...Her basic fear is frigidity, that state in which her frantic search for Ultrafemininity collides with an icepack death of soul: where the fire in her body is extinguished by the ice in her mind...
...Therefore: the almost two million Negroes who belong to trade unions and thereby share in the economic protection and better conditions these organizations bring to all their members...
...More important, it marks the first successful adaptation of Old South aristocratic ideology to the black movement in the North...
...In the nature of things, one cannot be entirely certain about such matters, and there is every reason to be cautious...
...The marble players have the game down to an art, and they play all day long, fanatically absorbed in what they are doing...
...he both envies and resents body and strength...
...Together with his ex hortations that the black community educate itself and thereby risk taking on the troubles of the white American civilization, Cleaver argues that there is an inherent decadence in reason...
...In earlier essays he admits his passion for white pin-up girls, white whores and lovers, and even for a white woman who was responsible for a black man's death...
...Love, faith, and hope emerge as hate, distrust, and disillusion...
...Though Soul on Ice is not a traditional reform tract, it represents a merciless indictment of contemporary penology...
...If the "Omnipotent Administrator," that phantasm of social primitivism, signifies sexual decay and masculine weakness, then the virile blacks should —indeed must--resist as strongly as they can the socioeconomic achievement that would lead them to similar disaster...
...In Cleaver's attack on science and technology one can almost hear an echo of John C. Calhoun's description of the factory system's evils...
...For Lawrence the overthrow of the existing rational structure is determined, subject to a fated cultural life-cycle, which lies outside human volition...
...Frigid, cold, ice...
...Even as his exaltation of the instinctive appears to be heartfelt, his attack on the decadence of white civilization seems closely attuned to— and derived from—the current tone of the dominant American culture...
...There may be still another reason for this contradiction...
...The psychic core of her sensuality, the male-seeking pole of her Female Principle, the trigger of the mechanism of her orgasm, moves beyond the reach or range of the effeminate clitoris of her man...
...Nevertheless, for Cleaver prison is a horror, not because it harms the body and corrupts standard morality, but be cause it plays havoc with the mind...
...It calls into question the central concept of the American system of justice: the notion that a prisoner is paying off a debt: Rather than owing and paying a debt to society, Negro prisoners feel that they are being abused, that their imprisonment is simply another form of the oppression which they have known all their lives...
...But Cleaver himself, we are to gather, has moved beyond black celebration...
...He praises their beauty, calls them Africa's Cream, the Black Cream of the Earth, and Sable Spirit, the most precious of all skins...
...He starts his essay "Convalescence" with a quotation from Norman Podhoretz's Commentary article, "My Negro Problem—And Ours...
...Of the homosexuality supposedly rampant among convicts he says little...
...and in contrast to the "bullying bellow of the rude Free Slave" his voice is sure in its new position...
...For Cleaver intellectuals are little, ugly, weak, if not queer men, while the women of the "elite Mind class" are even more sorely affected: Even though her man is effeminate, she is required to possess and project an image that is in sharp contrast to his, more sharply feminine than his, so that the effeminate image of her man can still, by virtue of the sharp contrast in degrees of feminity, be perceived as masculine...
...Both Lawrence and Cleaver predict the end of the "old world" of reason STANLEY PACION and science: apocalypse at the doorstep...
...In prison every sentiment of civilization is reversed...
...His hatred for the white man's civilization seems simply to overcome his pride in intellectual achievement...
...But the relationship between master and disciple goes beyond a common critique of American penology...
...Or perhaps it is really the same attitude reversed —stood on its head, so to say...
...Arctic...
...Italics Cleaver's.] So alienated is the white man from his body, that even to his most important appendage he ascribes puny images...
...Since Cleaver's essays on the decadence of American civilization are of a later date than those prison essays in which he extols the virtues of reason, they may reflect an honest change of heart...
...the Negroes who are going to college and can look forward to professional careers —all of these must, by the logic of Cleaver's argument, be deflected from the temptations society now offers them, lest they be "absorbed" and thereby suffer the loss of their manhood...
...But at no point does he try to reconcile his divergent views...
...Wilhelm Reich had first viewed the proletariat, the white German proletariat, as a class able to escape bourgeois values by virtue of its basic physicality...
...Negro inmates feel that they are being robbed, that it is "society" that owes them, that should be paying them, a debt...
...For Cleaver the revolution has an efficient cause—that of the black American masses...
...G G IVEN THE PSYCHO-SEXUAL outlook of his later essays, it becomes easier to understand the general social outlook of Cleaver and his friends...
...In Cleaver's view imprisonment forces men into paranoia (his word), a state in which no real personal relationship is possible and normal emotions emerge topsyturvy...
...A former convict, Malcolm X had secured for himself a prominent social place, and thereby raised the hope that the way might be open to others...
...it replaces them with a demand for separatism, militancy, and black self-determination...
...Like Cleaver, he claimed the inherent superiority of instinctual predilection as a social property of the lower classes...
...Cleaver describes this behavior in a poignant passage: When I first came to Folsom, I was astonished to see the old grizzled cons playing marbles...
...and it is this love-hate relationship with white women, and all other white things (hair, noses, lips, skin) that hardens into the cement of his captivity...
...Where Mailer, no doubt honestly, believes his own dogmatics about the Negro's superiority, Cleaver's sincerity is more difficult to determine...
...His panegyric of the body and erotic ecstacy, his insistence on the degeneracy of the intellect, and his advocacy of blood consciousness have a strong Lawrencian flavor...
...As Minister of Information for the Black Panther party, he champions the cause of black pride...
...Intensely proud of his self-education, as was Malcolm X, Cleaver prints at least half a dozen literary discussions, plus numerous lists of the books he has read...
...She is terrified, because of the quality of her life, by the prospect of becoming a life-termer in the prison of frigidity...
...But while he engages strong feelings, Cleaver in no way succumbs to them...
...At times he seems to suggest that blacks can adopt the white man's way without suffering the same consequences, and that the blacks will save white society by rejuvenating it with "soul...
...But where Reich propagated his philosophy of instinctual superiority directly to the slum residents of Berlin before World War II, Cleaver aims his message to a primarily white middle-class audience...
...He wants guns and war, reminds them of Lumumba, Turner, L'Ouverture while also promising peace, a time when black and white will work together in equality...
...Cleaver's intent is to lower white self-estimation, to make inferior those who had made the blacks inferior...
...Though no one-to-one relation is possible, the traditions of the South are very much alive in this new phase of the black struggle in America...
...the small but growing number of Negroes who are finding jobs, sometimes rather good jobs, in the universities, entertainment, and even on some managerial levels...
...But Cleaver's critique also works toward another end...
...He wants to be black, not white...
...It reflects the fullswing in Cleaver's attitude toward them...
...But in identifying the catalytic agent that creates the revolution of instinct, Lawrence and Cleaver differ...
...In his last essay, "To All Black Women From All Black Men," he exhorts his people to speak their rebellion authoritatively, to walk proudly, to stop snivelling, to will their spirit and add strength to their flesh...
...Cleaver shares in the occasional ambivalence that marked Malcolm X's view of the penitentiary, for like Malcolm X he admits that he enjoys solitude...
...He demands that "soul'' break from its captivity in white America and forge STANLEY PACION a separate black identity...
...raphies, Soul on Ice is a success story...
...And the judgment is difficult to make...
...THOUGH IT is little more than a year since Soul on Ice was published, Eldridge Cleaver has been assimilated so rapidly by popularizers and professional reviewers that it is almost impossible to grasp the book in its original meaning...
...The driven rhetoric of his last essay suggests anxiety...
...In the end it is the white woman who symbolizes the sickness of white society, for she must bear the burden of her effeminate, weak, emasculate mate...
...But unlike so many other exposes of prison life, Cleaver's account deals with psychological evils, not moral or physical ones...
...Cleaver's praise of the instinctive, the irrational, and the physical finds close parallels in the writings of D. H. Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich...
...The Black Panthers as a movement may talk endlessly about getting guns, sometimes engage in shoot-outs with the police, and even intimidate unsympathetic blacks, but the path to liberation suggested in Soul on Ice is fundamentally intellectual...
...In the end, rhetoric blurs thought...
...It might even be argued that Cleaver's rhetoric is part of a conscious design...
...The sheer amount of administrative chores demanded by increased technology leaves little time for contact with body functions...
...But whereas Western culture has mostly regarded the repression of primary drives for the sake of civilization as good, or at least necessary, Cleaver, like other apocalyptic instinctualists, will have none of it...
...For the first time—he seems to say—a black man openly declares his psychological emancipation from white society...
...SOUL STILL ON ICE...
...far from seeing white America saving itself, he predicts its imminent collapse...
...By employing instinctivistic ideology to strike at the ego-defenses of white middle-class America, Cleaver has started a new chapter in the history of antiintellectualism both in America and in Europe...
...By emphasizing certain passages one can make him out a spokesman for fascism, Communism, or egalitarian democracy, a skilled psychoanalyst of black identity, a party propagandist, or a harsh critic of American civilization...
...He notes how frequent this attraction is among black men...
...Though Cleaver describes himself as "a fulltime revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America," the book certainly contains no blueprint for revolution and one finds it hard, though not impossible, to picture Cleaver as an armed guerrilla...
...Cleaver notes that while the white man calls his penis a "prick," a "peter," a "pecker," the black man calls his a "rod...
...They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that 1 should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me...
...I have come to value physical grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball...
...But as a writer, he operates on an emotional level where concepts are weighed not for logic or truth, but for their propaganda impact...
...The great achievement of Cleaver's book, distinguishing it from much of black literature, is a relative freedom from self-intoxication...
...His motivation is often of such a bloody, hateful, bitter, and malignant nature that whites would really be hard pressed to find it flattering...
...Antarctic...
...He has separated himself once and for all from the feelings that caused the black man to view his own woman as less desirable than the white woman, that curse of Bigger Thomas and the younger Cleaver...
...His authenticity is never questioned because it conforms so closely to current American assumptions...
...Its doctrines of racial and biological superiority, though novel because Cleaver reverses them, have a long history of acceptance in the West...
...Through them it can once again rejuvenate itself: Still, they are the wealth of a nation, an abundant supply of unexhausted, undeessenced human raw material upon which the future of the society depends, and with which, through the implacable march of history to an ever broader base of democracy and equality, the society will renew and transform itself...
...This reversal of values is the prisoners' only defense against a world that has deprived them of wives and lovers, and of the hope of breaking the cycle of prison-parole-prison...
...And he is probably unaware of this contradiction...
...Cleaver has forged a new propaganda for his people, a propaganda of pride, destiny, and at times racial superiority...
...Both advance an insecure elitism in behalf of a sub-culture...
...C C LEAVER ALSO SPEAKS to the whites...
...The modern administrator, to insure his mastery of science, must compound intellectual faculties through a denial of bodily needs...
...His short declarative sentences forge a frenetic mood, an orgiastic trance...
...Cleaver has not yet been given credit for what he has done, a point Malcolm X likes •to make about the treatment of black people in general...
...but none is vented freely...
...nor does he offer the standard account of beatings, solitary confinement, and poor sanitary conditions...
...If anything, Cleaver's image takes on a conservative cast...
...Convicts are convinced that lawyers must have a secret little black book which no one else is ever allowed to see, a book that schools lawyers in an esoteric morality in which the Highest Good is treachery and crossing one's dumb and trusting client the noblest of deeds...
...Soon one reads Cleaver not for argument or program, but for the affective experience...
...The white American woman, according to Cleaver, is the true "soul on ice...
...Cleaver's implication is plain, though, unfortunately, it translates coarsely...
...its success reflects no more than the stalled morality of the nation...
...It is not always clear, however, whether Cleaver means to advocate that blacks remain poor or outside the social structure in order to preserve their sexual superiority...
...They purposely scoff at hopes and ambitions to spare themselves future hurt...
...For, instead of presenting a new vision of progress toward racial equality and harmony, it demonstrates that even while proclaiming themselves free of the intellectual and psychological domination of whites, black men—even black men as gifted as Cleaver—can still be trapped in the postures and fantasies of domination...
...Cleaver's scorn for the impotent, weak, degenerate intellectual and his praise of black virility have an all-too familiar ring...
...Cleaver has manumitted himself from the doctrine of white racial superiority to the degree that he is capable of inventing a new myth for the glory of his people...
Vol. 16 • July 1969 • No. 4
