While doing prison time on a marijuana possession charge in the mid 1960s, Eldridge Cleaver wrote a series of letters and essays. By 1970, he had become a recognizable figure in the urban guerilla movement known as the Black Panthers and so these writings were collected and published as Soul on Ice. Readers with knowledge of Cleaver’s biography may be surprised at how nuanced some of his writing is. Then again, they might not be. A lot of readers in our age have little sense of nuance and often allow their knowledge of the author’s moral shortcomings to overshadow the meaning of these essays as they stand. Even worse, some readers use Cleaver’s essays as a stepping stone to express their own self-righteous moral outrage, using it as a vehicle for grandstanding and virtue signalling without taking into consideration anything that Soul on Ice actually says.
This collection is organized into four sections. The first deals primarily with Eldridge Cleaver’s life in Folsom Prison with, regrettably, no references to Johnny Cash. It opens with an introductory essay, “On Becoming”, in which he effectively sets the tone for all the writing that comes after. He states the purpose of his writing is for self-reflection, using his prison sentence to come to terms with the mistakes he made in his youth, all the while offering commentary on the white power structure that contributed to his disgruntlement with American society. You might say that this essay is friendly in tone, maybe even humble. Cleaver draws you in by sounding like a gentle person who got misguided in life.
Then this passage comes almost out of nowhere: “I became a rapist...Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was trampling upon the white man’s law, his system of values, and that I was defiling his women...I was getting revenge.” These thoughts, spread over two paragraphs hit the reader like a stink bomb of nuclear proportions. In fact, it hits so hard that it permanently clouds the judgment of some readers, so much so that they can not read, with any degree of accuracy, most of what comes later in this book. In fact, their judgment is sometimes so clouded, sometimes deliberately for the sake of puffing up their own sense of superiority, that they completely ignore the next paragraph which marks both a transition point in the essay and a transition point in Cleaver’s thinking. Says the author, “I took a long look at myself...and admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray – astray not so much from the white man’s law as from being human, civilized...” The author, at this point, takes responsibility for his own wrongdoings and vows to turn himself around. He admits that he owes this not only to himself but to society as a whole. Readers who are clear-headed and humanistic enough to grasp the meaning of this confession will still often admit that these hard-hitting paragraphs hang like a dark cloud over everything that Cleaver says subsequently throughout the course of Soul on Ice.
In one sense, Cleaver’s confession is a stroke of literary genius. Rarely do passages in essays like this arouse so much curiosity and strong emotion, enough so that the reader feels a strong compulsion to continue reading. Such a bold admission to possibly the worst crime a man can commit demands that it be followed up with bold analysis and even bolder insights. From this point on, the bar for success is set high; it is propped up according to whether Cleaver can deliver the goods by the last line of the last essay.
Other essays in this first section deal more specifically with life in prison. One piece, “The Christ and His Teaching”, stands out above the others, not only in this section, but also in the whole book. Cleaver writes about Lovdjieff, a prison teacher who is wildly popular with the inmates and a cause for suspicion with the prison authorities. The fact that Lovdjieff is white seems surprising at first, considering the author’s antagonism to the white power structure, but it soon becomes incidental and a matter of less importance as the essay progresses. Cleaver feels a deep bond with Lovdjieff, not just because of the teacher’s passion for knowledge but more specifically for his ability to get the author to see his life situation from multiple perspectives. At the crux of the matter is the life of Thomas Merton, a theologian who renounced material wealth to live in a monastery, dedicating his life to God. To Cleaver, this monastic life and vow of poverty looks insane; to him it looks like life in a ghetto only the imprisonment and poverty in a monk’s cell are voluntary. Cleaver thinks Lovdjieff’s lessons make Merton look like a fool but what is more important is that this forces Cleaver to look at his own prison life in a different light, it forces him to reframe his situation and consider the possibilty that he is wrong in his thinking.
“The Christ and His Teachings” is more than an almost stylistically perfect essay in the way it introduces themes, points, counterpoints, and gives the reader just enough information to lead them to the main point without overstating the case. It stands out among Cleaver’s other writings because it so directly points to the heart of his thinking. It demonstrates that not only can a person change by stepping outside themselves and re-thinking the way they are, but entire societies can do the same. The purpose of the teacher, and of effective leadership, is to catalyze this process, set it in motion, liquidate fossilized ideas, and the more sincere the teacher is, the more effective their results will be with their pupils.
The carry-over of this theme of transformation being instigated by a teacher can be easily seen in the essays on Malcolm X. As is well-known, after Malcolm X went on the hajj in Mecca, he left the Nation of Islam, converted to Orthodox Sunni Islam, and renounced racism while publicly acknowledging that he would work with white people to end injustice against non-whites. While this was a controversial move that fractured the loyalties of African-American activists at the time, Cleaver writes in full support of Malcolm X’s decision, holding him up as an example for the direction society can go in the process of integration.
The chapters dealing with life in prison are the best in this collection. They are personal and self-probing, creating a clear picture of where Eldridge Cleaver stands at this point in his life. He does an effective job of rallying the reader to his side. The caveat is that, being a prisoner and one that acknowledges his guilt in the crimes he committed, he appears to be deliberately portraying himself in the most sympathetic light he possibly can. Cleaver does come across as sincere, and he probably is, but he might leave you wondering how deeply into his own moral convictions he actually went.
Aside from the section of letters Cleaver exchanges with his attorney, the rest of Soul on Ice attempts to be less personal, addressing broader and more theoretical social issues concerning white supremacy and the oppressive power structure of government and big business. Many of his ideas are naive, being broad abstractions and over-generalizations. With his shift from focus on the individual to the structures of institutionalized racism, a lot gets lost. The idea of individuals as participants in a society much larger than themselves does not get effectively connected to the broader abstract theories he proposes. There is no data to support his theories, but to be fair, Cleaver was not a social scientist and he does effectively communicate a world view, even if it is a rudimentary one at best. Some of his ideas are certainly plausible, but his arguments lack supporting evidence. On the other hand, some of his ideas, particularly in regards to gender, are questionable.
“The Primevel Mitosis” is by far the oddest and most off-putting essay in this collection. It is formulaically logical while its contents are mostly absurd. Drawing on tightly-wound Hegelian logic, the politics of the Sexual Revolution, and the Nation of Islam’s myth of Yacub, the scientist who unleashed evil on the world by creating white people in a laboratory, Cleaver argues that white men are all brain and no body, black men are all body and no brain, white women are some vaguely defined essence of pure femininity, and black women, along with homosexuals, are a hopelessly confused mish-mash of gender roles. The bizarre reasoning behind this does not need to be analyzed in depth to be dismissed. But what is most troublesome is not how misogynistic, homophobic, and shockingly racist against African-American women it is, but rather how it justifies raping white women as a tactic of political activism. At the start of this book, Cleaver denounces that idea and action as a mistake of his youth but he reasserts it here by saying that it is necessary for black men to have sex with white women for racial progress to be made. While he is advocating consensual interracial sex over rape, and there is certainly nothing wrong with interracial sex unless you are a bigot, the idea that white women can be utilized as tools for the sake of harming and disempowering white men should be regarded with suspicion. Towards the end of this book we can see how Cleaver has shifted from rape to consensual sex without actually altering the flawed philosophy that underlied his motivations to commit that crime in the first place. On top of that, while interracial relationships certainly can go a long way in eliminating racism, interracial sex is not a panacea that will magically eliminate inequality on a large scale. Cleaver is advocating a fetish, not a plan of political action.
On a brighter note, in “Convalescence”, as well as comments in other essays, Cleaver addresses the issue of white people “appropriating” African-American culture. He mentions the likes of Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles; all of these are currently whipping-boys for the anti-appropriation crowd these days, but like Lovdjieff, Eldridge Cleaver would insist that these people look at their beliefs from another angle. Cleaver DEFENDS these white people for borrowing Black people’s culture. In his era, white people were not hearing pleas from African-Americans for racial equality but they were hearing their music. It would also make sense that white people would accept other white people who encourage integration simply because they are of the same peer group. What those writers and musicians did, according to Cleaver, was making it possible for white people to see that Black people have a legitimate point of view; they have something that can benefit all races and bring people together. Jack Kerouac and The Beatles, without being explicitly political, sent the message that it is acceptable for Black people to be themselves and that it is acceptable for white people to appreciate that. While Cleaver acknowledges that their borrowing of cultural elements and styles from Black people is superficial and even corny, he makes jokes about how silly white people look when they dance to Black music, he also demonstrates how they were opening a doorway, allowing white people of all races to interact in the same physical space. These cultural icons are like Lovdjieff and Malcolm X, catalyzing change and making people reorient the frameworks they use to perceive the world.
Getting back to his opening essay and the statement about rape that hangs like a dark cloud over everything else in Soul on Ice, we have to consider whether Eldridge Cleaver lived up to the task he set himself with that statement. Aside from it being a painful confession for him to make, did he succeed in effectively using his writing to re-evaluate his life, taking responsibility, and making changes for the better? In the end, I can meet him half way and say he got off to a good start but leaves a lot to be desired. His self-reflection comes across most effectively in the chapters on prison life and the essays drop in qualoty as they go on. He shifts away to writing about larger social issues that effect him personally but take the spotlight farther away from himself than it should be. While he expresses the need to end segregation and usher in a new era of social equality, even proposing a means of doing so through interaction in social spaces surrounding popular culture, he never sufficiently addresses the question of why he, the individual man named Eldridge Cleaver, saw rape as a legitimate form of expression. He never answers the question he poses to himself. He may have done this in his private life, thinking it was too personal to publish, and he does start off with an apology and a promise to be a better person, but on a literary level, he owes it to the reader to address the issue in some detail since he brought it up in the first place. By the end, it looks like his analysis of white injustice is a way of avoiding responsibility for the crime of rape that he committed. This obviously not the impression he wanted to make.
While not all of the essays in Soul on Ice are great, there are a few high points that make it a vital work of literature. His own life is another matter. After getting kicked out of the Black Panthers for wanting to escalate violent revolution while they were more concerned with free breakfast programs for children and helping African-American people get jobs, he went from one cultish group to another, becoming a Moonie, a Mormon, and finally a republican. He even tried to start his own sect called The Church of the Sacred Sperm; sounding too much like something out of a John Waters movie, it predictably went nowhere. He also invented the penis pants. If you don’t know about them, look them up online. This is the life of a man who felt lost in the world, struggling and failing to find a place to belong. His homophobia, his emphasis on hypermasculinity, and his obsession with his own penis are easy to laugh at, but there is something horribly sad about all that. He was overcompensating for feelings of weakness and vulnerability. While he blames white society for his rage and eccentricities, and in some senses this is justifiable, he had deeper personal issues that never got addressed. I’ve met a lot of troubled people in my life and I see certain patterns; I find myself wondering if Cleaver was sexually abused as a child. When Allen Ginsberg said, “I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, he could very well have been talking about Eldridge Cleaver. He was a tragic figure and the biggest tragedy is that he never got the help he needed.
Soul on Ice has definite strengths and weaknesses. The strengths outweigh the weaknesses, especially in Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to express his anger, his hopes, and his confusion with a precise and rigid clarity. You can see his demons and angels fighting a brutal war even when he is not directly writing about himself. Like the heroes and idols he portrays in this book, he gets you to re-evaluate the way you think. Even if you don’t appreciate what he has to say, this book is a valuable historical document for students of African-American history, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and the countercultures of the 1960s.
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Ramparts Books/Dell Publishing Co. Inc., New York: 1970.
