Word: cleavers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SOUL ON ICE by Eldridge Cleaver. 210 pages. A Ramparts Book. McGraw-Hill...
Prisons are traditional finishing schools of writers and revolutionaries. Eldridge Cleaver is a product of both the black ghettos and the California penal system. Convicted of a marijuana charge at 18 and of assault with intent to kill at 22, Cleaver spent most of the twelve years between 1954 and 1966 in Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin state prisons. And now, at 32, he is a Ramparts staff writer and a "fulltime revolutionary in the struggle for black liberation in America...
...while away the evenings with a waitress floozy (Peggy Pope). In her firmly devoted way, the mother believes that the boy should get to know and understand his carousing father. It is a futile hope: in a drunken stupor, the father tries to kill the boy with a meat cleaver. Yet beneath the coarseness and brutality, each member of this oddly pitiable, oddly humorous ménage à quatre is reaching out for love...
...meat cleaver of sudden death on Broadway hit Oliver Hailey in 1966 when his play, First One Asleep, Whistle, a lumpy porridge of marriage and adultery, closed on its opening night. Hailey, 35, does not believe he could have survived the blow to his playwriting morale except that he had already completed Who's Happy Now?, over which he had brooded for ten years. His father had been a butcher, who frequently moved the family from one small Texas town to another-"those Panhandle towns where the main street goes on and on and on, and there...
...five days the nation's eyes turned toward Watts, and this new-found sense of importance is still very much alive; it echoes, for instance, in the words of ghetto-poet Johnnie Scott: "A man called Fear has inherited a half-acre, and is angry." Eldridge Cleaver, in a letter written from Folsom Prison shortly after the outbreak, sums it up: "Watts was a place of shame. We used to use Watts as an epithet in much the same way as city boys used "country" as a term of derision...But now, blacks are seen in Folsom saying...