At my Grandma’s house in Alabama I mentioned visting as a child in the previous post, once was when I was 7 years old, which would make it 1971. One hot night my grandma and neighbor Hoyt came out from inside the house where the heat and humidity was decidedly more intolerable. I was sitting barefoot and crosslegged on the porch floorboards shelling a large bucket full or green beans we had picked from her bean patch out back that morning. The porch was illuminated under a bright bare bulb, the only light for a mile and it seemed to attract every flying insect for twice that.
Hoyt lived down the road past the church and ran a chicken farm. Full grown with a family and a brick house that had air conditioning, I was told he was my cousin, but that didn’t make sense to me at the time since his kids, who I chased the chickens with and watched reruns of “77 Sunset Strip” drinking ice-cold Mountain Dew inside their super-cooled living room, were the same age as me and also my cousins.
I wasn’t listening much to their conversation until Hoyt walked to the edge of the porch, looked out into the night and told Grandma in a low voice full of concern that he’d heard the black panthers were coming. That got my attention. So did my Grandma who sighed heavily at the news, her eyes going wide both with resignation and fear.
The only black panther I knew was Mogli’s friend from “The Jungle Book” movie I’d seen. Grandma’s reaction showed me that the black panthers Hoyt was warning her about were no Bagheeras and I worked myself up imagining the creatures were lurking in the dark beyond the tree line past the bean patch and the chicken coop, waiting to attack.
After bedtime I lay wide awake a long while because of the stifling heat and because every sound outside became a black panther stalking ever closer. Rather than lie there burning up and terrified, I went to the kitchen and out the door to the screened-in back porch. Grabbing a broom for a weapon I took a seat in a rocking chair intently searching out into the dark, figuring if I was going to protect my Grandma from these evil cats I was going to do so a little less uncomfortably.
I’m not sure when I nodded off, but when I was suddenly awakened, it was not to a menacing predator about to tear me to pieces but to the porch screen door slamming behind Grandma who was holding eggs she’d collected from the coop and wanting to know why in blazes I was asleep on the porch clutching a broom stick. I told her because of the black panthers Hoyt said were coming. She gave me the strangest look before shaking her head with a laugh and asking to no one in particular what would they doing all the way out here. Then she left me wondering what she meant and went inside to fire up the coal stove and make breakfast.
Many years later, long after I learned of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and came to appreciate beyond their organization’s controversial legacy the core programs of empowerment and protection and assistance they created to combat racism and promote social change, I recalled that defiant stand I made on my Grandma’s back porch at which point it finally dawned on me why my Grandma reacted so strangely to me on the porch the next morning. The Black Panthers she and Hoyt spoke ominously spoke about that night had nothing to do with the black panthers their fear created in my mind.