Quest for Dignity
Stevens, Shane
BOOKS Quest for Dignity Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. McGraw-Hill. 210 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Shane Stevens Is the American black man inscruta-able? Has he reached the point where white...
...And which makes America the appropriate target for revolutionary restructuring...
...But he is more than that...
...That America is polarizing into two camps—white and black—is apparent...
...Cleaver takes the reader on a journey down into the bowels of the nation, stopping to explore many of the levels of suffering...
...Open housing...
...So it is with Eldridge Cleaver, who grew up in the black hellhole of Watts and who has spent most of his adult life in prison...
...To read some of the offerings of the white middle class press regarding the feelings and aspirations of twenty-two million American citizens, one would have to answer yes to both questions...
...I welcome him also as an individual who is attempting in his writing to carve out a life style of his own...
...Because he is black he is, in his own words, a "revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America...
...That race hatred is rapidly becoming the doctrine of the land is obvious...
...There is a point where Caution ends and Cowardice begins...
...But let the white man no longer ask what the black man wants and why...
...This country is entering its most serious domestic conflict since the Civil War, and the unmistakable specter of planned genocide begins to take shape...
...Thus the rise of Black Power...
...Because Cleaver has the consummate skill to express the inexpressible—to give shape to the time-bomb ticking in the black man's skull —this book is extraordinary...
...After all, racism is the white man's bag, and black Americans have been sitting at the master's feet for more than 300 years...
...Yet the writer must always retain a certain part of himself on the periphery of events if he is to be most effective...
...In effect, the demand is for a "race-less" society in which everyone advances according to his ability, and where skin tone is merely a visual differentiation...
...At twenty-eight, with 300 years of soul-breaking experience behind him, Cleaver tells what it is to be black in white America...
...He is Bigger Thomas and Nat Turner and King Henry, and he is the invisible man and nobody knows his name...
...That is the point of no return...
...And so a new phase of social protest is begun...
...Thus the emergence of large-scale civil disorder and rebellion in the cities: more than a hundred cities across the nation during 1967...
...Let those who would deny the book's essential truth deny it...
...If it is not to have reform from within, it will have to be revolt from without...
...up from the self-inflicted slavery of pure hatred...
...And if the present economic basis of this country cannot support such a society, then it will have to be changed...
...The wonder, indeed the miracle, is that any black writer can escape this fate...
...social protest that declares it is the American system itself which has grown dangerous and unresponsive to the needs of a minority of its citizens...
...And he tells it straight...
...His maneuver— the maneuver of every black American to build blocks of sanity out of emotional chaos—is the story of the "other America," 1968...
...Is it any wonder that some black writers fall into the trap of Crow Jimism...
...The hell is there, and its name is America...
...And for the American black man that point is right here and now...
...That this condition of equal opportunity has not come about and will not come about in the natural order of things is readily apparent to the majority of black Americans...
...Because this quest for individual dignity is at the core of the central dilemma of our times, this book is important...
...He saw that race hatred led inevitably to mutual race suicide, yet even he was aware that an individual, or an entire race, had to fight back when pushed to the wall...
...Many of us are hanging in this year of fire, 1968...
...Make no mistake about it...
...Cleaver, too, has worked himself up from slavery...
...He is a writer who understands what is happening to his country and who screams out at the unforgivable tragedy and waste...
...Soul on Ice is a collection of essays straight out of Dante's Inferno...
...Where does Cleaver go from here...
...Quality education...
...Has he reached the point where white America no longer knows what the black American wants, or even who he is...
...What happens to Cleaver, the black writer, depends on what happens to Cleaver, the black man...
...Malcolm X finally freed himself of racism...
...And America is hanging with us...
...I welcome Eldridge Cleaver as a soul brother in despair...
...For those of us who believe that the writer must grapple with the moral issues of his day, that he must view himself in the context of events and not just from his own personal needs, these are dangerous times...
...Barring unimaginable change, by summer this country will be a riot of color...
...I have washed my hands in the blood of the martyr, Malcolm X, whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am now caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my own...
...As with Malcolm X, Cleaver's book is a spiritual autobiography...
...An odys-sey of a soul in search of itself, groping toward a personal humanism which will give meaning to life...
...What he has to say about the black man in America, about the mystique of the white woman, about black heroes and villains, about Vietnam, and about the whole insane racial fabric of this country is said with freshness and insight and a power of conviction that will frighten those who like their truths diluted...
...And I am not speaking about the tulip beds along the Potomac...
...Non-discriminatory employment...
...And neither is Eldridge Cleaver when he says that "no Slave should die a natural death...
...Let those who would question the book's horrific vision question it...
...And yet, the black man in America has never been clearer in expressing exactly what it is he demands of this country: Equal opportunity in law and in fact...
...At best, one can only support the other, much as a rope supports a hanged man...
...And what white America is presently doing makes crystal clear that it believes—from its national government to its occupation troops in the black ghettos—there can be only one solution to "the Negro question...
...Malcolm X, in the last year of his life, was one who did...
...With much more to come...
...The urge to be a full-time revolutionary in a country so desperately ill is overwhelming...
...Social justice for all...
Vol. 32 • May 1968 • No. 5
