I wasn’t able to finish the letter, just mailed it half-finished, like his fatherhood had been to me. He never wrote back, which didn’t surprise me at all. Through this I learned that I had to be a real father to my own children, no matter what. The pain I was experiencing because of my parents’ promiscuity and father’s lack of responsibility was not something I wanted my children to feel.
Blue June was slated as a month to remember the fallen soldiers and citizens of the C-Nation. We went to the small S.H.U. yard three times a week—mandatory for all soldiers—and ran while doing the Universal Crip cadence. Then we’d exercise and fall into our classes. Only after this could we play basketball or lift weights. After ten months I began to lead the exercises. I quickly made the transition from soldier to sergeant of arms to intelligence officer.
I believed in what we were doing. I was introduced to Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Amilcar Cabral, Ho Chi Minh, Kim II Sung, and George Jackson. My reading picked up, and so did my writing skills. We were given a test on the contents of each book we read and were expected to write a book report about it. The reviewers were stern, and there was no favoritism. I failed so many times that it’s not even funny. I kept at it, though, and in time became one of the sharpest in the cadre.
Muhammad kept writing and sending me literature, which helped a lot. He sent one pamphlet called
We all considered ourselves communists in the C.C.O. Once, when I asked the unit if communism wasn’t actually a Eurocentric philosophy, they jumped all over me as if I had committed blasphemy. As I learned, communism as practiced in the Soviet Union was Eurocentric, and Soviet internationalist duty was looking more and more like imperialist conquests.
But I still wanted to know what movement we were attached to, and I complained to the cadre commanders about it. What was our goal as an organization, and who were we trying to liberate? This is where their knowledge fell short. No one was thinking that far ahead. No one realized that the future was three minutes ahead of us, not light years away. As Tamu says, with everything I do I try to do my best, and rightfully so. I am an extremist, so I took our revolutionary premise seriously.
As I grew and my consciousness expanded I began to see cracks and faults in our structure. We were making the same mistakes that the Black Panthers had made. We were importing revolutionary ideals, trying to apply them to our setting. In this light, those who could quote Marx, Mao, or Comrade George the most were the sharpest. It began to irritate the hell out of me. Nothing was corresponding with concrete conditions, and we had no mass appeal. On top of this, our troops sent back out into Babylon were falling prey to parochialism and tribalism.
One such case that caused a problem was that of Mumbles from the Sixties. He was supposed to try to get his homies to stop clockin’ our ’hood, in an attempt to slow down the war. But Mumbles fell back into bangin’ and was clocked on Florence and Normandie. The homies stepped to him and he dissed the ’hood. He was executed.
In response, my young homie Joker’s door was kicked in, and his innocent sixty-five-year-old mother and fourteen-year-old brother were deliberately murdered. Because Mumbles was C.C.O., they put a blue light on Joker, who had supposedly executed Mumbles. I argued that C.C.O. couldn’t blue-light any uncultured Crip for killing a comrade who was in the wrong. Joker was involved in the war and had no idea of what C.C.O. was at that time. He was not responsible to us, but Mumbles was. Mumbles was out of bounds, clocked and tagged in a free-fire zone. If anyone should have been blue-lighted it was the cowards who murdered Joker’s people.
It was things like this that caused me to question the leadership of the organization. Also, we had to contend with the new Crip organization—the Blue Notes. They saw themselves as traditionalists and saviors of the Crip culture. The organization was started on death row by Treacherous and Evil from Raymond Avenue Crips, and was supposedly headed by Tookie. B.N.C.O. (Blue Note Crip Organization) gave uncultured Crips an alternative to the rigid, more disciplined organization of CCO., which they accused of being too much like the B.G.F.’s. They further accused the C.C.O. leadership of abandoning the protocols of Crip terrorism for some unattainable revolutionary utopia. The B.N.C.O. blossomed quickly, because it appealed to the patriotic sense of Cripping. They also had such stalwart generals as Tookie, Treach, and Evil, who are all extremely smart and courageous.
Other maladies befell the leadership at Folsom, where the Mexican mafia was winning the war. Two Hoovers were stabbed for bringing unsanctioned weapons to the yard. Tony Stacy charged the Central Committee with tribalism and called for all Hoovers in the state to resign from C.C.O. That was a big blow to the organization. Imagine all the Americans pulling out of the Democratic party. The fatal blow came when the Central Committee agreed to a peace treaty with the Mexican mafia, then turned around and declared war on the Blue Notes. The Hoovers sided with the B.N.C.O. and shit began to fall apart.
San Quentin was exempt from none of this. The B.N.C.O. took off and stabbed Kidogo, Rabbit, and Roho. The Hoovers stabbed Notchie and Taliba. The C.C.O. struck back and stabbed Glen, Kencade, and Spark. Shit got crazy, fast. I cut my bed up for weapons with a hacksaw blade but was caught by a snooping pig. They charged me with destruction of state property and billed me $180 for the bed.
I went to my hearing the same day the pigs killed Weusi, a Blood from Pasadena, for defending himself against a Southern Mexican, who was also shot and killed. I refused to sign the trust withdrawal to pay for the bed by saying, “I don’t make deals with terrorists who shoot and kill Afrikan people.” The pig turned dark red and told the escort pigs to lock me up.
The most important connection I made was through Muhammad, with the New Afrikan Independence Movement. I received the New Afrikan ideological formulation material and it redeemed me. It gave me answers to all the questions I had about myself in relation to this society. I learned about how our situation in this country was that of an oppressed nation, colonized by capitalist-imperialists. The science was strong and precise. I saw then that all the talk of the C-Nation was actually an aspiration of our nationalistic reality. Once I overstood the New Afrikan ideology and pledged my allegiance to the Republic of New Afrika’s independence, I began to see Cripping in a different light. There was a faction in C.C.O. at the time claiming to be revolutionary Crips, but this was contradictory and could not be attained without transforming the criminal ideology of Crip and its relation to the masses of people. So the debate was on.
In 1987 we disbanded the C.C.O. in San Quentin. It had failed to evolve because the leadership had failed to realize that real revolution is futuristic, not static. Muhammad came to see me and we had a good visit. I believe he was seeing my growth. My test would come in the real world of society.
In 1987 I met a sister named Akiba Dhoruba Shakur, whom I affectionately called Adimu. She was a student at Cal State, Long Beach, and an aspiring revolutionary. Muhammad had introduced us through the mail, and she and I began to write and discuss politics and the future. All of my influences were positive. Those that were not, I excluded.
That same year I was let out of the Hole and sent to Folsom. All the generals and Central Committee members were there: Askari, Suma, Imara, Tabari, Sunni, and Talib. The Crip population was totally antagonistic toward them, with the exception of Talib, who became my confidant. He saw things as I did, so I turned him on to the New Afrikan Independence Movement.
After six months of ideological struggle with the others, trying to get them to make the leap with us, Talib and I left the Crips and threw our lot in with the Independence Movement.
11. NATION TIME
It’s not enough to say that I had transcended the mind-set of being a banger by this time. After having spent thirteen years of my young life inside what had initially seemed like an extended family but had turned into a war machine, I was tired and disgusted with its insatiable appetite for destruction. Destruction no longer fed my narcissism. It was not an expression of my thoughts. I wanted to construct something, which in banging is tantamount to treason.
