The Funky Facts of Life

SOUL ON ICE by Eldridge Cleaver. 210 pages. A Ramparts Book. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

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."

More important, he is an authentically gifted prose stylist capable of evoking picturesque images and fiery moods. Soul on Ice is a collection of impassioned letters and heated essays lamenting the fact that American "negritude" has been forced to cool it for too long: the book points prophetically and menacingly at the new world that had better be acoming soon.

Large Hatred. It is Cleaver's thesis--as it is James Baldwin's, among others--that the root cause of racial prejudice in America is sexual. He argues that as a result of the Negro's years of servility, the black male has been systematically robbed of his masculinity. Thus "castrated," the Negro also has been denied his development as a positive intellectual and social force. There is nothing really very new in Cleaver's analysis or black militant ideology. There is the familiar castigating of white liberals, the spewing forth of raw and undigested hate, the attempt to splice an artificial bond with victims of colonialism throughout the world. Cleaver himself has been successively an orthodox Black Muslim, a follower of Malcolm X, and is currently a Black Panther. He seems more or less intent on keeping up with the Jones boy, LeRoi, in expressing all "the funky facts of life."

But on the personal level, his chronicles of daily life in prison, his regimen of self-education there, and the account of his romance with his white female lawyer Beverly Axelrod are both eloquent and moving. It is she, in fact, who strikes the most hopeful and perceptive note in this book. "Your hatred is large," she writes to him in a letter, "but not nearly so vast as you sometimes imagine; it can be used, but it can also be soothed and softened."

Indeed, for all his rage, Cleaver himself cannot help noting that the Negro male spirit is inexorably and literally shaking loose in the twist and the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!" of the Beatles--a musical style that was hijacked, he says, from Ray Charles. The Beatles, argues Cleaver, constitute a "soul by proxy"; they are the middlemen between the white mind and the Negro body. In oversimplified terms, this suggests that the more the white man learns to shake his body and loosen up, the more he will penetrate and come to understand the Negro psyche. An interesting thought--but will it cool the summer?

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