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MONEY. In a word, Seaman believed that money was necessary,
but not as necessary as some people claimed. He talked about what he called
"economic relativism." At Folsom Prison, he said, a cigarette was
worth one-twentieth of a little jar of strawberry jam. Meanwhile, at
Soledad
, a cigarette was
worth one-thirtieth of a jar. And at Walla-Walla, a cigarette was worth the
same as a jar of jam, for one thing because the prisoners at Walla-Walla—who
knows why, maybe because of some brainwashing against food, maybe because they
were hooked on that nicotine—would have nothing to do with anything that was
sweet, and all they wanted was to breathe that smoke into their lungs. Money,
said Seaman, was ultimately a mystery, and as an uneducated man, he was hardly
the right person to try to explain it. Still, he had two things to say. The
first was that he didn't approve of the way poor people spent their money,
especially poor African Americans. It makes my blood boil, he said, when I see
a pimp cruising around the neighborhood in a limousine or a Lincoln
Continental. I can't stand it. When poor people make money, they should behave
with greater dignity, he said. When poor people make money, they should help
their neighbors. When poor people make money, they should send their children
to college and adopt an orphan, or more than one. When poor people make money,
they should admit publicly to having made only half as much. They shouldn't
even tell their children how much they really have, because then their children
will want the whole inheritance and won't be willing to share it with their
adopted siblings. When poor people make money, they should establish secret
funds, not just to help the black people rotting in this country's prisons, but
to start small businesses like laundries, bars, video stores, the profits to be
fully reinvested in the community. Scholarships. Never mind if the scholarship
students come to a bad end. Never mind if the scholarship students end up
killing themselves because they listened to too much rap, or killing their
white teacher and five classmates in a rage. The road to wealth is sown with false
starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or
our neighbors with new-found riches. We have to give it our all. We have to
squeeze water from the rocks, and from the desert too. But we can never forget
that money remains a problem to be solved, Seaman said.

FOOD. As you all know, said Seaman, pork chops saved my
life. First I was a Panther and I faced down the police in
California
and then I traveled all over the world and then I lived for years on the tab of
the
U.S.
government. When they let me out I was nobody. The Panthers no longer existed.
In the minds of some, we were old terrorists. In the minds of others, we were a
vague memory of sixties blackness, we were picturesque. Marius Newell had died
in
Santa Cruz
.
Some comrades had died in prison and others had made public apologies and
started new lives. Now there weren't just black cops. There were black people
in public office, black mayors, black businessmen, famous black lawyers, black
TV and movie stars, and the Panthers were a hindrance. So when they let me out
there was nothing left, or next to nothing, the smoldering remains of a
nightmare we had plunged into as youths and that as grown men we were leaving
behind now, practically old men, you could say, with no future ahead of us,
because during the long years in prison we'd forgotten what we knew and we'd
learned nothing, nothing but cruelty from the guards and sadism from our fellow
inmates. That was my situation. So those first months out on parole were sad and
gray. Sometimes I would sit at the window for hours watching the lights blink
on a nameless street, just smoking. I won't lie to you, terrible thoughts
crossed my mind more than once. Only one person helped me selflessly: my older
sister, God rest her soul. She invited me to stay at her house in
Detroit
, which was small, but for me it was as if a
princess in
Europe
had offered me her castle
for a resting place. My days were all alike, but they had something that today,
in hindsight, I don't hesitate to call happiness. Back then I saw only two
people regularly: my sister, who was the world's most good-hearted human being,
and my parole officer, a fat man who used to pour me a shot of whiskey in his
office and he'd say: tell me, Barry, how could you be so bad? Sometimes I
thought he said it to get me going. Sometimes I thought: this man is on the
payroll of the
California
police and he wants to get me going and then he'll shoot me in the gut. Tell me
about your b———, Barry, he would say, referring to my manly attributes, or:
tell me about the guys you killed. Talk, Barry. Talk. And he would open his
desk drawer, where I knew he kept his gun, and wait. And what could I do? Well,
I would say, I didn't meet Chairman Mao, but I did meet Lin Piao, and later on
he wanted to kill Chairman Mao and he was killed in a plane crash when he was
trying to get away to
Russia
.
A little man, wise as a serpent. Do you remember Lin Piao? And Lou would say he
had never heard of Lin Piao in his life. Well, Lou, I would say, he was something
like a Chinese cabinet member or like the Chinese secretary of state. And in
those days we didn't have a whole lot of Americans in
China
, I can
tell you. You could say we paved the way for Kissinger and Nixon. And Lou and I
could go on like that for three hours, him asking me to tell him about the guys
I'd shot in the back, and me talking about the politicians I'd met and the
countries I'd seen. Until I was finally able to get rid of him, with a little
Christian patience, and I've never seen him since. Lou probably died of
cirrhosis. And my life went on, with the same uncertainties and the same
feeling of impermanence. Then, one day I realized there was one thing I hadn't
forgotten. I hadn't forgotten how to cook. I hadn't forgotten my pork chops. With
the help of my sister, who was one of God's angels and who loved to talk about
food, I started writing down all the recipes I remembered, my mother's recipes,
the ones I'd made in prison, the ones I'd made on Saturdays at home on the roof
for my sister, though she didn't care for meat. And when I'd finished the book
I went to
New York
and took it to some publishers and one of them was interested and you all know
the rest. The book put me back in the public eye. I learned to combine cooking
with history. I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion
I felt at the kindness of so many people, from my late sister to countless
others. And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe. In
other words, the sense of wonderment at a marvelous thing, like the lilies that
bloom and die in a single day, or azaleas, or forget-me-nots. But I also
realized this wasn't enough. I couldn't live forever on my recipes for ribs, my
famous recipes. Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn
yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don't know
what you're looking for. So those of you who are interested can take out pencil
and paper now, because I'm going to read you a new recipe. It's for
duck a
l'orange.
This is not something you want to eat every day, because it isn't
cheap and it will take you an hour and a half, maybe more, to make, but every
two months or when a birthday comes around, it isn't bad. These are the
ingredients, for four: a four-pound duck, two tablespoons of butter, four
cloves of garlic, two cups of broth, a few sprigs of herbs, a tablespoon of
tomato paste, four oranges, four tablespoons of sugar, three tablespoons of
brandy, black pepper, oil, and salt. Then Seaman explained the preparation,
step by step, and when he had finished explaining he said that duck made a fine
meal, and that was all.

STARS. He said that people knew many different kinds of
stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars
you see at night, say when you're driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route
80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it's the oil or the
radiator, maybe it's a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the
spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most,
and when you're done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way.
He talked about star athletes. That's a different kind of star, he said, and he
compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is
generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best,
whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started
young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way
from
Des Moines
to
Lincoln
, would live for probably millions of
years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the
traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it
might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it
doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of
semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the
traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up
at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said,
the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another
dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we
call a wave. Having reached this point, Seaman warned that stars were one
thing, meteors another. Meteors have nothing to do with stars, he said.
Meteors, especially if they're on a direct collision course with the earth,
have nothing to do with stars or dreams, though they might have something to do
with the notion of breaking away, a kind of breaking away in reverse. Then he
talked about starfish, he said he didn't know how, but each time Marius Newell
walked along a beach in
California
he came upon a starfish. But he also said that the starfish you find on the
beach are usually dead, corpses tossed up by the waves, with exceptions, of
course. Newell, he said, could always tell the dead starfish from the ones that
were still alive. I don't know how he did it, but he told them apart. And he
left the dead on the beach and returned the living to the sea, tossing them
near the rocks to give them a chance. Except once, when he brought a starfish
home and put it in a tank, with some of that Pacific brine. This was in the early
days of the Panthers, when we spent our time directing traffic in the community
so cars wouldn't speed through and kill the children. A couple of stoplights
would have come in handy, but the city wouldn't help us. So that was one of the
first of the Panthers' roles, as traffic cops. And meanwhile Marius Newell saw
to his starfish. Naturally, before too long he realized that he needed a pump
for his tank. One night he went out with Seaman and little Nelson Sanchez to
steal one. None of them was armed. They went to a store that specialized in the
sale of rare fish in
Colchester
Sun, a white
neighborhood, and they went in through the back door. When Marius had the pump
in his hands, there came a man with a shotgun. I thought that was the end of
us, said Seaman, but then Marius said: don't shoot, don't shoot, it's for my
starfish. The man with the gun didn't move. We stepped back. He stepped
forward. We stopped. He stopped. We took another step back. He came after us.
At last we got to the car that little Nelson was driving and the man stopped
less than ten feet away. When Nelson started the car the man lifted the shotgun
to his shoulder and he took aim. Step on it, I said. No, said Marius. Go slow.
The car rolled out toward the main street and the man came walking after us,
his gun raised. Now you can hit it, said Marius, and when little Nelson stepped
on the gas the man stood still, shrinking until I saw him disappear in the
rearview mirror. Of course, the pump didn't do Marius any good, and a week or
two later, for all the care he'd lavished on that starfish, it died and ended
up in the trash. Really, when you talk about stars you're speaking
figuratively. That's metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You've used a
metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes
a
hard right to the chin and
goes down, you say he's seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way
of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In
that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life
jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to
forget it. But really, there's just one star and that star isn't semblance, it
isn't metaphor, it doesn't come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it
right outside. It's the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star. When
I was young I saw a science fiction movie. A rocket ship drifts off course and
heads toward the sun. First, the astronauts start to get headaches. Then
they're all dripping sweat and they take off their spacesuits and even so they
can't stop sweating and before long they're dehydrated. The sun's gravity keeps
pulling them ceaselessly in. The sun begins to melt the hull of the ship.
Sitting in his seat, the viewer can't help feeling hot, too hot to bear. Now
I've forgotten how it ends. At the last minute they get saved, I seem to
recall, and they correct the course of that rocket ship and turn it around
toward the earth, and the huge sun is left behind, a frenzied star in the
reaches of space.