Days of Rage (41 page)

DeFreeze was a quiet man, five foot nine, slender; he often spoke with the hint of an affected Jamaican lilt. Against all odds, he found stability and structure in Newark. He became a housepainter, a diligent one, and married an older woman, twenty-three-year-old Gloria Thomas, who had three children of her own. They were a mismatched pair, Thomas energetic and immaculate, DeFreeze a sullen loner with wounded eyes. Thomas was every inch a striver, friends recall, and hectored DeFreeze to make more money. He tried for a time, starting his own interior decoration outfit, the House of DeFreeze, but it went nowhere. They began to fight. Thomas did most of the hollering, yelling at DeFreeze as if he were one of her children. He began to withdraw, disappearing at night and sometimes for days at a time. Later there were stories he had turned to house burglary and armed robbery.

He began buying guns, tinkering with them in a basement workshop at their apartment house in East Orange. It was there, on the morning of March 9, 1965, two years into his new life, that the trouble began. Neighbors heard a loud bang, and the building began to fill with smoke. When police arrived, DeFreeze told them it was just a firecracker. A search revealed an unexploded bomb housed in a bamboo stem, presumably a twin to the one that exploded. DeFreeze was arrested, then indicted for illegally discharging a firearm. His wife was apoplectic. His landlord evicted them. Just as he had done as a boy, DeFreeze reacted by running away, this time to Southern California. Three weeks later he was arrested while hitchhiking on the San Bernardino Freeway; in his briefcase officers found a sawed-off shotgun, a sharpened butter knife, and a homemade tear-gas bomb. After his release he returned to Newark, only to be arrested again, carrying a homemade bomb. To this day, no one has a clue what he was up to. He was years away from being a revolutionary—he wasn’t remotely political, in fact—and there was
never an accusation that he used a bomb in anger. People in Newark, however, suspected the worst. After rumors spread that he was a violent Black Muslim, DeFreeze was unable to secure any more housepainting jobs. He convinced his wife they would have a better chance starting over in Los Angeles. And so the family moved to California.

There, it would appear, while working intermittently as a short-order cook and a painter, DeFreeze indulged his interest in guns by moonlighting as a black-market gunrunner, selling pistols and rifles to street gangs and, it was said, to members of the new Black Panther Party. His home life remained unstable. He drank, he disappeared for days, they fought; the family made do on a $370 monthly welfare check. And DeFreeze’s penchant for bizarre arrests continued. In 1967 he was arrested for running a red light—on a bicycle. In its basket officers found a pistol and two homemade bombs. DeFreeze drew probation. That December he was arrested yet again, for carrying an unlicensed pistol; a check revealed that it was one of two hundred weapons stolen from a military-supply warehouse. DeFreeze cooperated, offering to lead police to the entire cache, but once arriving at an apartment house he leaped from a second-story window and escaped. Four days later he was recaptured. This time he dutifully escorted the police to his partner’s flat, where they found the guns.

Once more, thanks to his cooperation, he drew probation. A court psychologist found DeFreeze “emotionally confused and conflicted with deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy.” Afterward DeFreeze tried to go straight, taking a course in aircraft assembly, but Lockheed turned him away when they discovered his criminal record. In the summer of 1969 his wife demanded they leave Los Angeles. This time DeFreeze chose his hometown, Cleveland, but the family’s stay came to an end after only a few months, when DeFreeze was arrested on the roof of a bank with burglary tools. His wife left him. DeFreeze returned, alone, to Los Angeles, where his wanderings finally came to an abrupt end a few weeks later, in November 1969. It was then, police said later, that he robbed a woman of a $1,000 cashier’s check, tried in vain to cash it, then led officers on a foot chase, firing at them until he ran out of bullets. His probation revoked, he was sent to prison, at Vacaville, for a minimum of five years. It is not clear that a soul in the world cared.

Like Malcolm X and Sekou Odinga and Eldridge Cleaver before him, Donald DeFreeze got something from prison that he had never known: time to read, time to develop his mind. He started with pornography and men’s magazines but, soaking up the revolutionary tenor of California prisons, soon found the book, and the man, that explained it all:
Soledad Brother
by George Jackson. Reading Jackson, DeFreeze was suddenly able to understand his strange jumble of a life. None of it, he discovered, was really his fault. The black man never had a chance.
He
never had a chance. Moreover, he wasn’t really a criminal. He had been fighting for his economic freedom, for his dignity, and a repressive white government had jailed him for it. He was a political prisoner. In time DeFreeze branched out, reading the books Jackson recommended—Mao, Lenin, Che, then Fanon and Debray and the rest—and while he never became entirely conversant in left-wing ideology, he found adventure and excitement and purpose. Marxism even explained his wife: She wasn’t a striving harpy; she was just bourgeois.

In 1970, not long after DeFreeze arrived, Vacaville formally approved the charter for a two-year-old Black Culture Association. The BCA, as it was known, met two nights a week in the prison library, one for informal classes in black history, literature, and similar topics, the second a social evening, typically with a presentation by a guest speaker, poetry, music, or a film. BCA meetings came wrapped in the full regalia of black liberation; each began with clenched-fist salutes, a Swahili chant, and the hoisting of a Black Liberation Army flag. Almost to a man, BCA members adopted African-sounding names that some could never quite learn how to spell. After DeFreeze joined, he began calling himself “Cinque M’tume,” usually shortened to “Cin.”

With the BCA’s help, DeFreeze, like scores of other inmates, soon lost himself in a world of revolutionary fantasy, imagining that he would escape from prison and lead the urban revolt his idol, George Jackson, called for. As one of the BCA’s white tutors put it:

There were inmates at Vacaville who had mapped out the revolution from beginning to end, leaving nothing out in between. They knew what time the revolution would start in the morning and what day. They knew how to form a vanguard and how it would split up into cadres from the east and the west and the north and the south. To hear them talk you would think that they knew exactly how to do away with the system. The guards would hear this shit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were people who could quote long passages from Che and Mao and Marx and revolutionaries that I had never heard of.
³

DeFreeze was Exhibit A of this kind of prisoner, and it was in the BCA that he met many of the white volunteers he would eventually lead underground. He briefly lost touch with these friends, if not his revolutionary dreams, after being transferred to Soledad in December 1972. Then, on the night of March 5, 1973, as the police in far-off New York swept the streets in search of Joanne Chesimard and the remnants of the BLA, a Soledad guard in a prison truck dropped DeFreeze off at a collection of boilers at the fence line. It was 12:15 a.m., the first—and last—shift of DeFreeze’s new job as a boiler attendant. The guard was to check on him through the night. But the moment he drove off, DeFreeze jogged to the twelve-foot-high wire fence, climbed it, tearing his jeans in the process, and dropped to the far side. By the time the guard returned, at 12:40, he had vanished into the night.

At that moment DeFreeze became a free man, an escaped prisoner, and, his fevered mind was convinced, the leader of the bloody revolution that would soon sweep America. A hundred miles north, in Berkeley, in San Francisco, in the ghettos of Oakland, vanguard troops were waiting for his command; he knew it. He just had to reach them. In the cold, damp hours before dawn, DeFreeze walked east to Highway 101, where he flagged down a man driving a Ford pickup who took him ten miles north to the farming town of Gonzales. A Chicano laborer, accepting his explanation that he had been robbed, took DeFreeze into his home, gave him a bowl of soup, and, after he took a nap, allowed him to telephone friends in the Bay Area Left.

It was early; most weren’t home. Finally one, whose identity was never divulged, drove down with a change of clothes and picked up DeFreeze after lunch. On the drive north, DeFreeze spoke of the joys of reading Fanon,
Debray, Marighella, Lenin, and others, especially George Jackson. With Jackson gone, DeFreeze remarked, the revolution had no leader. It was clear who DeFreeze thought Jackson’s replacement should be. Arriving in Oakland, DeFreeze took out a list of names, people who had visited him in prison and spoken fervently of the need for a revolutionary alliance of black prisoners and white radicals. Here, however, he got his first sense of the yawning gap between cell-block sloganeering and 1973 America. Of the four or five people he managed to find that first day, not one would take him in.

“Hide you out?” one Berkeley student asked in exasperation. “I can’t be harboring no convicts. That’s cops-and-robbers shit.”
⁴

Finally, late that night, DeFreeze’s friend dropped him off outside Peking House, a revolutionary commune in Berkeley whose members had volunteered at Vacaville. According to lore, when the door was opened, DeFreeze’s first words were “Looka here, you know, I’m here. Let’s start the revolution.” A friend of a friend allowed DeFreeze to sleep in her apartment that first night. It was on the second night that Donald DeFreeze, soon to anoint himself “General Field Marshal Cinque” of the Symbionese Liberation Army, found his way into the bed of his first recruit, an attractive twenty-two-year-old pharmacist’s daughter named Patricia Soltysik. Her family called her Pat. She preferred “Mizmoon.” She was a sometime Berkeley student, a sometime lesbian, and a self-avowed revolutionary feminist. She was also a janitor. When she wasn’t mopping floors, Soltysik would become DeFreeze’s partner in their revolutionary assault on America.

In those early days, with no one looking that hard for DeFreeze, the two were free to drift through the bizarre bazaar that was 1973 Berkeley, a college town deep in a post-1960s intellectual hangover, a haven for aging radicals who could still talk eagerly about the coming revolution but no longer had the energy to do much about it. Berkeley’s Free Speech movement had helped launch the Movement in 1964, but its best and brightest had long since moved on to other causes; in their absence, the calls for revolution had fallen to the wayward souls who still flocked to Berkeley from across the country: the street preachers, the deluded, the lost. The Bay Area Left remained as vital as ever, still teeming with radicals devoted to every conceivable cause, but those
who clung to the idea of “armed struggle” and the viability of an underground now ran less to the brainy Ivy Leaguers of the Weather Underground than to the escaped convicts, janitors, runaways, and angry lesbians who would eventually, under DeFreeze’s leadership, become the Symbionese Liberation Army. America had changed that much in three short years. In 1970 those who called for violent revolution were viewed by many as an intellectual vanguard; in 1973 they were widely dismissed as lunatics.

Berkeley was probably the only place the SLA could have been born. It was among the few enclaves left in the United States where the notion of armed struggle was taken even the slightest bit seriously. A dozen or so flyspeck underground groups were scattered through the hills around town; about the only people who heard their calls for revolution were those sitting next to them on the couch. A few, however, tried to mount isolated actions. During DeFreeze’s time in Berkeley members of a radical commune called the Tribal Thumb Collective were arrested for a bank robbery. Police tied another group, the August Seventh Guerrilla Movement, to a series of murders and a bizarre incident in which a cabdriver was briefly kidnapped; the ransom note demanded that Bay Area cabbies go on strike to force the release of radical convicts. This kind of violence was woven deeply into the fabric of the Bay Area in 1973. San Francisco’s mysterious Zodiac Killer was still at large. The SLA’s exploits would parallel a series of fourteen Bay Area murders by a small group of black militants dubbed the Zebra Killers.

In this environment DeFreeze and Mizmoon had little trouble gathering a guerrilla cell of their own, including a former lover of hers and DeFreeze’s friends from the Vacaville BCA. Most of their recruits were in their twenties and active in the prison movement. A few had worked with Venceremos. All believed that, with the help of black prisoners, they could use U.S. ghettos to launch the kind of urban warfare that their hero George Jackson had prophesied. Eventually they would number eight:

Nancy Ling Perry, “Fahizah”:
Tiny, barely four foot eleven, the daughter of conservative parents, Perry grew up in Santa Rosa, California, and earned an English degree at Berkeley in 1970. A heavy
drug user, reeling from a broken marriage, she was selling juice from a gypsy cart on campus when she was drawn into the SLA.

Willie Wolfe, “Cujo”:
Raised in Connecticut, the son of a wealthy doctor, Wolfe graduated from a Massachusetts boarding school before drifting west to enroll at Berkeley in 1971. Quiet but committed, he lived for a time at Peking House and spent every free hour working with inmates at Vacaville.

Camilla Hall, “Gabi”:
Originally from Minnesota, Hall, a heavyset lesbian with short blond hair and thick glasses, arrived in Berkeley in 1971, taking an apartment on Channing Way. Mizmoon was her upstairs neighbor; they had been lovers.

Russell Little, “Osceola”:
A University of Florida dropout, Little washed up in Berkeley in 1972, rooming with his best friend, Willie Wolfe, at Peking House. Drawn into the Vacaville BCA “to search out the revolutionaries, political prisoners and prisoners of war,” he became convinced that underground warfare was still tenable, that groups like Weather had failed in large part because they were afraid to take lives.