Soul on Ice (book)

Eldridge Cleaver was born in August 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, at a time when pernicious racism prevailed in the segregated South. In 1946, his family moved to Watts, California, where he began engaging in petty crime.{{cite encyclopedia |last=Bailey |first=Jeff |title=Leroy Eldridge Cleaver |date=December 18, 2023 |url=https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/leroy-eldridge-cleaver-2743/ |encyclopedia=The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture}} After a series of arrests for bicycle theft and vandalism, he was sent in 1954 to Soledad State Prison for possessing a large quantity of marijuana.{{sfn|Cummins|1994|p=95}} During this stretch in prison, he earned a high school diploma while reading the works of Machiavelli, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Lenin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Thomas Merton, and Thomas Wolfe.{{cite news |last=Warren |first=Jennifer |title=Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Dies at 62 |date=May 2, 1998 |newspaper=Los Angeles Times |access-date=May 5, 2011 |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-02-mn-45607-story.html}}{{cite book |last=Cleaver |first=Eldridge |title=Soul on Ice |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill Book Company |year=1968 |url=https://archive.org/details/soulonicebyeldridgecleaver/page/n25/mode/2up |isbn=0070113076 |page=12}}{{cite journal |title=Review: The Varieties of Black Experience |last=Larrabee |first=Harold A. |journal=The New England Quarterly |volume=43 |number=4 |date=December 1970 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/363138 |jstor=363138 |pages=638–645}}

Cleaver was released from Soledad in 1957, but was convicted later that year of sexual assault with intent to murder. He was sent to San Quentin and then transferred to Folsom. He began to write regularly about his physical and mental imprisonment, his personal transformation, and the political events and cultural happenings of the era.{{cite web |title=Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver |last=Day |first=Frank |url=https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/soul-ice-eldridge-cleaver |date=2023 |publisher=EBSCO}}

In 1965, he sent a letter to Beverly Axelrod, a Bay Area-based attorney, asking her to represent him. She agreed and their relationship would prove instrumental in the publication of Soul on Ice. They worked out an arrangement such that when she visited him in prison, she smuggled him contraband leftist books and magazines, and he in turn slipped his prison essays into the stacks of legal papers she carried with her.{{sfn|Cummins|1994|p=98}}{{cite book |last=Marine |first=Gene |title=The Black Panthers |year=1969 |page=52 |location=New York |publisher=New American Library |series=A Signet book |lccn=74017254}} She then showed his essays to Edward Michael Keating, founder of Ramparts magazine, who began publishing them in June 1966.{{cite book |last=Richardson |first=Peter |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5jf6K9MMcSUC&pg=PA68|title=A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America |year=2009 |pages=68–69 |publisher=The New Press |isbn=978-1595585257}} After Cleaver was paroled in December 1966, he was hired as a Ramparts staff writer in their San Francisco office. He also joined the fledgling Black Panther Party in Oakland.{{cite web |title=The Life of Eldridge Cleaver |last=Ide |first=Derek |url=https://picturingblackhistory.org/the-life-of-eldridge-cleaver/ |publisher=Picturing Black History |date=November 18, 2024}} His prison writings, a number of which had already appeared in Ramparts, were collected in the volume Soul on Ice, and published by McGraw-Hill in early 1968.

The essays in Soul on Ice are divided into four thematic sections:{{cite book |editor-last1=Andrews |editor-first1=William L. |editor-last2=Foster |editor-first2=Francis Smith |editor-last3=Harris |editor-first3=Trudier |title=The Oxford Companion to African American Literature |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1997 |pages=157, 680 |isbn=978-0195065107}}

• "Letters from Prison", recounting Cleaver's experiences with, and thoughts on, crime and prisons;
• "Blood of the Beast", discussing race relations and black liberation ideology;
• "Prelude to Love—Three Letters", containing two love letters Cleaver wrote to Beverly Axelrod, and one love letter from her to Cleaver;
• "White Woman, Black Man", reflecting on gender relations, black masculinity, and sexuality.

In the Introduction, Maxwell Geismar likens Soul on Ice to Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, stating that in both books, "the central problem is of identification as a black soul which has been 'colonized' ... by an oppressive white society that projects its brief, narrow vision of life as eternal truth."{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=xi}} Geismar especially praises the last portion of Soul on Ice where the author "has reached his own spiritual convalescence, his healed spirit (no longer racist or narrowly nationalist), and his mature power as a writer".{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=xiv}}

Cleaver immediately courts controversy in the opening essay, "On Becoming". He describes his realization as a young man that he had been "indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman."{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=10}} In the wake of the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till for allegedly flirting with a white woman, Cleaver says he developed an "antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women" that he acted upon when released from prison in 1957:{{blockquote|I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind. Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=14}}{{cite news |author=Auther, Jennifer |date=May 1, 1998 |title='He was a symbol': Eldridge Cleaver dies at 62 |newspaper=CNN |archive-date=April 8, 2010 |agency=Reuters |url=http://www.cnn.com/US/9805/01/cleaver.late.obit/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100408132521/http://www.cnn.com/US/9805/01/cleaver.late.obit/}}}} In a spirit of confession, he soon adds:{{blockquote|After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized—for I could not approve the act of rape. Even though I had some insight into my own motivations, I did not feel justified. I lost my self-respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself.{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=15}}}}

In the essay, "The White Race and Its Heroes", he mentions how he was inspired by the current generation of white youths who were battling racism in the South and thereby commanding his respect: "If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America."{{sfn|Cleaver|1968|p=83}}

In the book's other essays, he navigates through the history and present state of his country. He covers areas such as the race riots occurring in U.S. cities; the murders of Malcolm X and Emmett Till; the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy and the American Flag; Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and other black notables of the 1960s; Richard Wright's Native Son; Islam and Christianity; day-to-day prison life; and the nature of black manhood.

Cleaver also sparks controversy with his essay "Notes on a Native Son", which is a homophobic criticism of the writings of author James Baldwin."The black homosexual, when his twist has a racial nexus, is an extreme embodiment of this contradiction. The white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big Daddy, he focuses on “whiteness” all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against "blackness"—upon himself, what he is, and all those who look like him, remind him of himself." Soul on Ice, p. 103. In an article in African American Review, Zachary Manditch-Prottas called Cleaver's attack on Baldwin "the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era."{{cite journal |last=Manditch-Prottas |first=Zachary |title=Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular |journal=African American Review |volume=52 |number=2 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26795188 |jstor=26795188 |date=2019 |pages=179–195}} In her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, black feminist author Michele Wallace singled out Cleaver's Soul on Ice for reinforcing the harmful "black macho" stereotype.{{cite journal |last=Sexton |first=Jared |title=Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading Soul on Ice |journal=Social Justice |volume=30 |number=2 (92) |date=2003 |pages=28–41 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768182 |jstor=29768182}}{{harvnb|Cummins|1994|p=99.}} In Soul on Ice, Cleaver "intended to create an angry new notion of revolutionary manhood. He thus set about politicizing black masculinity."

Soon after its publication, Soul on Ice was banned from certain school libraries for its references to miscegenation.{{cite web |title=Miscegenation and Censorship |last=Fenyo |first=Mario D. |date=2022 |url=https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/miscegenation-and-censorship |publisher=EBSCO}}

It was later one of eleven books involved in the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, Island Trees School District v. Pico. The targeted books were removed from high school and junior high school libraries by the Board of Education of the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York for being "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy".{{cite web|title=Island Trees Sch. Dist. v. Pico by Pico 457 U.S. 853 (1982) |website=Justia |url=https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/853/ |access-date=September 30, 2015}}

• Another Country
• Prison literature
• Ramparts magazine

{{Reflist|30em}}

• [https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6000263k/ Finding Aid to the Eldridge Cleaver Papers] at The Bancroft Library
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20080727023810/http://www.bartleby.com/65/cl/CleaverE.html "Cleaver, Eldridge"]. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–07.

Category:1968 non-fiction books

Category:African-American autobiographies

Category:American memoirs

Category:Black Power

Category:Censored books

Category:English-language non-fiction books

Category:History of censorship

Category:Political autobiographies

Category:Prison writings