Study Guide to Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, written during his time in Folsom State Prison in 1965. As a memoir and collection of short stories, Soul on Ice guides the reader through the thoughts and experiences of former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Moreover, Cleaver uses various literary devices and techniques to craft a story of change and redemption. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Cleaver’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ELDRIDGE CLEAVER

It would be difficult to explain Eldridge Cleaver’s position to the proverbial man from Mars. It would be difficult even to find a parallel to Eldridge Cleaver’s situation in the world of letters. For here is a man who has spent most of his life either in a black ghetto or in a prison, who nevertheless becomes one of the literary “finds” of our time. Here is a man who elicits praise from hundreds of thousands of readers even while he provokes bullets from the authorities. He becomes a fugitive from his native land even while the people of the land are making him a best-selling author. The more we learn about Cleaver, the more we read of his work, the more we see him as an anomaly, an enigma, the more questions we raise about the health of our world. For how can such an exuberant talent become a fugitive from democracy? How can democracy so fail such a talent, his art, and his audience? Clearly, to read and discuss Cleaver is to come to closer grips not only with the literature but also with the central agonies of our time.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Eldridge Cleaver calls Arkansas his “home state.” He was born there in 1935. His most vivid memory of his home state takes Cleaver back to that day in Little Rock when he burned with humiliation as a white man tried to force his father off the sidewalk. Such experiences help explain why the Cleavers moved to California, where Eldridge grew up mainly in the black ghetto of Los Angeles and for a time lived in Watts. He was a restless boy, and at the age of twelve he started getting into trouble with the authorities. He was often suspected of vandalism and petty crimes. But even then he must have been good-looking and romantic. When he was sixteen, women exclaimed over his “beautiful brown eyes,” and not much later he was having an affair with an attractive married woman whose husband was overseas. But young Cleaver was caught “in possession of marijuana.” That ended his precocious love life and his formal education: in 1954, one month after the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation, he was transferred out of high school into Soledad State Prison.

FIRST IMPRISONMENT

There Cleaver put his free time to good use. He read hungrily and on Saturdays, in the library, he discussed his reading with his fellow prisoners. One man, named Pontifelt, inspired the others to read Plato and Emerson. Although Cleaver laughed at the time about his Plato “hang-up,” he was later to prove he had been profoundly influenced by the ancient Greek. The Mind-Body dichotomy which pervades Platonic idealism would later be put to ingenious use in Cleaver’s own “myths.” And the dialogue, Plato’s favorite form for developing ideas, would become one of many literary forms Cleaver tried out. Meanwhile, imagine twenty-year-old inmate Cleaver thinking of Plato’s Ideal state while watching the civil-rights struggle on the prison TV! Plato’s new state would be started by excluding everyone over ten years of age, so that pure reason could grow unpoisoned by bias and tradition. In Plato’s Republic, every man and woman would have equal opportunity to rise in public life according to objective tests of his ability. Citizens would respect the law because it was just. On TV, Cleaver watched the segregationists holding on to the exclusive privileges of their unproved “supremacy,” defying the law of the land with impunity. Cleaver was outraged. If he was in prison for defying the law, why were they out there free, with the police on their side? The image of the police that Cleaver formed from prison TV was an image of an armed force not on the side of justice but on the side of entrenched power, privilege, and prejudice.

FREEDOM AND “REVENGE”

The Cleaver who was paroled from Soledad was eager for revenge on the white world, especially revenge for the way white men - for centuries - had systematically and cynically commandeered the black woman. Cleaver felt that like the white man, he too should be above the law. Manic and truculent, he roamed white neighborhoods where, as a one-man insurrectionary force, he attacked white women. As the magazine writer Don Schanche describes it, Cleaver was “caught trying to rape a white girl in the back seat of her bound boyfriend’s car.”

SECOND IMPRISONMENT

Convicted for “assault with intent to commit murder,” Cleaver was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1957 he entered San Quentin. This time he analyzed himself as well as his society. He realized he could no longer justify such inhuman conduct, not even as revenge or rebellion. He realized he had brutalized not only his victims, but himself. He renewed his studies, earning his high-school diploma in prison at the age of 22, reading passionately, deciding finally that this mode of thinking through which he had learned so much - the written word - could be used by him not only as a reader but also as a writer. And so now reading served three purposes for Cleaver: it helped him in his endless pursuit of answers to his questions about man’s makeup, America’s idealism vs. American practice, black history, world affairs and economics; it armed him in his perennial debates with fellow prisoners who apparently never tired of talking politics, religion, psychology; and it gave him good examples of the writer’s craft, it inspired him to develop a craft of his own. And so he read Paine and Voltaire, who apparently confirmed him in his atheism and gave him dignified precedents for combining literature with propaganda; Richard Wright, who made him wary of the American Communist Party and helped him understand the black man’s feelings toward white people; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who certainly instilled in Cleaver an even greater passion for self-honesty, self-analysis; Adam Smith, Marx and Lenin, who helped him take the step from outlaw to revolutionary; Machiavelli, who made him aware of social tactics; and then Merton, Alan W. Watts, the weekly newspaper columns of Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin, the historical works of W. E. B. DuBois, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Khalil Gibran, and Kerouac, Douglass, the Bible, Mailer, Shakespeare, Osagyefo Kwame, and hundreds of other writers. The astonishing thing about this prodigious reading is the way Cleaver integrated it: he draws on it naturally and richly, without pedantry, in all his writing and speaking, in a manner that shows he has grasped not only its essence but even the value of its usable details.

CLEAVER AS MUSLIM

Cleaver was not religious in the literal sense of believing in appeals to a personal God, but he did appreciate Elijah Muhammad’s teachings of black brotherhood and he could accept the religious implications on a symbolic level. When Cleaver saw Black Muslims denied their religious rights in prison, he joined them as a matter of principle. With his broad erudition and his experience in argumentation, he became an eloquent preacher. When his cell-mate, Muslim Brother Booker T. X., was shot and killed by a prison guard, Cleaver succeeded him as leader of the San Quentin Mosque.

“TRUSTY” IN FOLSOM

The penal authorities then transferred Cleaver to Folsom Prison where he was put into solitary confinement. His notebooks were impounded as part of the property he could reclaim after his release; at regular intervals many books that Cleaver had ordered by mail, with his own earnings, were also added to his “property.” By 1965, because of his “clean record,” Cleaver was living in the “honor block” of the prison and participated in the limited self-government allowed the inmates. He spent up to 17 hours a day reading, participating in public-speaking sessions of the Gavel Club, and writing: essays, dramatic vignettes, Platonic dialogues, free verse. By now Cleaver had served nine years on a charge for which he had been eligible for parole after only two years. He began corresponding with a prominent civil-rights lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, who visited him at Folsom, read his manuscripts, and called the attention of several literary figures to this writer behind bars. In December, 1966, Cleaver was released on parole.

THE BLACK POLITICAL SITUATION

By that time, the civil rights movement that Cleaver had watched on TV had collapsed. It had agitated for and achieved legislation in behalf of integration, but of course it was powerless itself to enforce the new laws. What little desegregation there was had benefited mainly the black middle class, who gained new opportunities in employment and education. But for the lower-class masses in the ghettos, “integration” had made little difference: they still suffered joblessness and poverty. The massive civil-rights “front” now broke up into many splinter groups: some advocating separatism or black nationalism, some violence, some non-violence. One of these new groups was the Black Panther Party for Defense, founded on the West Coast just months before Cleaver was paroled. The Panther leaders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, promulgated an aggressive program demanding: full employment for the Negro people; an end to the “robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community”; decent housing; courses in black history; exemption from military service for all Blacks; an end to “police brutality and murder”; release from prison of all black men; black jurors on juries trying blacks; a United Nations plebiscite of American Blacks to determine “the will of the black people” as far as political destiny is concerned.

PAROLE, POLITICS, PUBLICATION

In his first seventeen months out of Folsom prison, Cleaver made extraordinary progress as writer, political activist, and human being. His parole adviser agreed to his taking a job as an editor of Ramparts magazine and to his joining the Black Panthers. Ramparts, not yet a radical publication, was then a left-liberal Catholic periodical. Edward M. Keating, its creator, had been one of the literary figures who recognized Cleaver’s talent even while he was in prison. Among Cleaver’s first assignments was to travel with Stokely Carmichael, throughout the United States, and to write about him. Typical fruit of this association was Cleaver’s article, “My Father and Stokely Carmichael.” In one of his Ramparts pieces (April 1967), Cleaver wrote that what Carmichael and his cohorts most wanted was “a showdown with racism.” In the same month, Esquire published Cleaver’s piece on “The Guru of San Quentin.” By April, 1967, then, Cleaver was well established as a professional writer and editor.

In May 1967, a contingent of Panthers, whose full name was then the Black Panther Party for Defense, carried guns into the California State Legislature in Sacramento. Supposedly it was their way of publicizing their belief that Negroes must carry weapons to protect themselves against a hostile white society. Twenty-four Panthers, including Cleaver, were disarmed and arrested. Apparently this publicity stunt was a success because, as Cleaver later told Lockwood, by the time they “got out of jail,” Panther membership had “increased dramatically.” The Party was soon involved in conflicts in which they were accused of killing policemen. As a consequence, Huey Newton was sentenced to prison (the verdict was set aside in 1970) and in October 1967, Cleaver became the chief spokesman of the Party. The Panthers now moved from a local Oakland, California Party into a national organization.

Meanwhile Maxwell Geismar, noted critic and one of the literati who had “discovered” Cleaver as a writer, wrote an Introduction for a collection of Cleaver’s prison writings and McGraw-Hill published it as Soul on Ice early in 1968. Within weeks, this book was reviewed at length in such major periodicals as The New York Times, Saturday Review, Nation, and New Republic and was soon on its way to becoming a national best-seller.

SHOOTOUT WITH POLICE

But tragedy stalked Cleaver. Apparently he was constantly followed by the Oakland police. On the night of April 6, 1968, Cleaver and Bobby Hutton, seventeen-year-old Panther treasurer, were in the lead car of a three-car Panther convoy moving through Oakland on their way to a meeting. An hour later Hutton was dead, Cleaver was wounded. Exactly what had happened has never been objectively determined, but: (1) Don Schanche, Atlantic Monthly writer who is certainly not pro-Panther, has written that he is convinced that the “confusing shootout...was provoked by the police, not the Panthers,” and (2) Lee Lockwood, distinguished news photographer and journalist, writes in his book Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver that Cleaver’s account of the shootout was “later corroborated by a California Superior Court Judge in the only ‘trial’ of the evidence that has been held.” This account, a summary of which takes two full pages in Lockwood, claims that without provocation the police opened fire on the convoy; that some of the Panthers who carried guns returned the fire; that Cleaver and Hutton, who was armed, took refuge in a basement from which Hutton fired a shotgun; that Cleaver, wounded in the leg, yelled out an offer to surrender; that when they emerged Hutton, now unarmed, was gunned down at close range. The police said Hutton had tried to run; Cleaver said that Hutton had been shoved by a policeman. In either event, Cleaver was hospitalized, his parole was revoked, he was jailed at Vacaville.

“NO FAILURE OF REHABILITATION”

His lawyers petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus and on June 12, Justice Raymond J. Sherwin ordered him released and his parole status restored. In his written opinion, the Superior Court judge said:

There is nothing to indicate why it was deemed necessary to cancel his parole before his trial on the pending of...charges of which he is presumed innocent...the uncontradicted evidence...indicated that the petitioner had been a model parolee. The peril to his parole status stemmed from no failure of personal rehabilitation, but from his undue eloquence in pursuing political goals...offensive to many of his contemporaries. Not only was there absence of cause for...cancellation of parole, it was the product of a type of pressure unbecoming...to the law enforcement paraphernalia of this State.

In short, the impression of authority tactics that Cleaver had first formed while watching prison TV was now corroborated by a high jurist.

Edward Keating drove Cleaver home. “He cried in the car,” Keating reports. “He shouted, ‘I can’t believe it.’“ But of course, Justice Sherwin’s opinion could still be reversed.

CANDIDACY FOR PRESIDENT

Cleaver was optimistic. He was newly married, to the Panthers Communications Secretary, and he was enheartened by Justice Sherwin’s formulation of the issues. Overriding those Panthers who now wanted to end all collaboration with whites, Cleaver led his Party into an alliance with white radicals who were forming a Peace and Freedom Party. They nominated Eldridge Cleaver for President and Kathleen Cleav...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Eldridge Cleaver
• 2) Introduction to Soul On Ice
• 3) Cleaver’s Themes and Techniques
• 4) Textual Analysis
• 5) Criticism
• 6) Essay Questions and Answers
• 7) Topics for Research and Criticism
• 8) Bibliography