“Gelina said it all with her beautiful words but she was burning inside with a fire to destroy the fascist insect. She came a long way to become the guerrilla warrior who died fighting the pigs. She taught me how to forget the past, to wash the blood off my hands, and make a fresh start as a revolutionary. How we laughed together, cried together, loved together, hated together. She loved the People as much as any of us.
“Gabi embraced all, she will be remembered as one of the true mothers of the Revolution. She was patient and gentle — but also a merciless killer whose shotgun barked pure death from its maw. She was murdered trying to wring justice from the fascists using the only method pigs can understand.
“Zoya died on her birthday. It is the sort of death that gives a fierce and passionate life like hers meaning. She was pure death, icy and meticulous, unflinchingly delivering vengeance upon those who would deny the People their freedom. She taught me how to kill — now she’s taught me how to die.
“Fahizah understood the importance of her own righteous example. She understood the timidity of the middle-class, cringing, hamburger-eating pig and how that fear could paralyze. Her solution was to refuse to hesitate: shoot to kill, and ask questions later. She loved the People, and freedom, and she always will be loved.
“Cinque saw the future as a beacon up ahead and he steered us there tirelessly, his strong Black hand upon the tiller of freedom. He gave us the gift of himself, when he could have been with his beautiful sisters and brothers. He taught everyone that Black people and whites could be comrades, that the fight for freedom is color-blind. He was hard on us, a strict teacher and a stern leader, but he always let us see that it was his love for the People that drove him. He always told us that it wasn’t how long you live that matters: it’s how you live. When he was assassinated by the cowardly pigs he proved that in dying for the People’s freedom his life had the highest meaning imaginable. On February 4, Cinque Mtume saved my life.
“The SLA goes on under the leadership of General Field Marshal Teko. As a fully functioning cell of the Malcolm X Combat unit of the SLA we are prepared to function autonomously. The pigs articulate no more than their own fear and alarm when they report that we are leaderless and broken.
“In the end, a small fire team of committed urban guerrillas faced down an army of cowering pigs, who could find only one way to defeat them: by setting fire to them with incendiary grenades. Perhaps in underestimating the commitment and bravery of the fallen SLA soldiers they had only their own cowardice to guide them. Now they call them suicidaclass="underline" what a joke. Only the corrupt fascist insect would mistake courage for suicide. There was no surrender then, nor will there be now. Be forewarned, pig!
“Gabi’s father understands and it gives us solace. To hear him speak so plainly and understandingly of our purpose even through his personal grief, you can see where she got her courage and strength. Likewise General Teko’s mother. Cujo’s father. What a difference between them all and the pig Galtons! One day, just before … uh … Cujo was talking to me about how my parents fucked me over. I was jealous, but happy for him, when he told me that his parents were still his parents because they’d never betray him or try to make him into who he wasn’t. He said that my parents were really Malcolm X and Assata Shakur: my true parents will never betray me either.
“The pigs probably have the little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night.
“So, pigs. You’ve killed another brave Black leader. But in tearing that one hair out of your pig head another thousand will bloom in its place! Cinque lives! The People will unite and when they do the pigs will never be able to burn them out the way they could a handful of revolutionaries.
“I died in that fire on Fifty-fourth Street, but out of the ashes, I was reborn. Our comrades did not die in vain. They did not die in vain. I turned my back on the pig I was when Cin and Cujo gave me the name Tania. I have no death wish, but I do not fear death either. I would rather die than spend my life surrounded by pigs like the uber-Pig Galtons.
“Patria o muerte, venceremos! Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”
INTERLUDE 2
Lionel Congreaves Explains the Current Situation
“HELLO, THIS IS Lionel Congreaves speaking. I am not dead yet, but I still remain high on the SLA hit list. If the caller is a terrorist, please include your affiliation, so the credit for my demise can be properly awarded.”
This recorded message greeted all callers to the home telephone of Lionel Congreaves, a man of carefully cultivated negritude, an East Bay resident of several years’ duration, the erstwhile outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange at Vacaville Prison, and a more vilified and calumniated individual than you could ever hope to find.
As a matter of strictly personal interest, Lionel Congreaves maintained a collection of rumors, coincidences, and other allegations, baseless or otherwise, concerning the Symbionese Liberation Army and those murky areas in which its activities and his own gave the appearance of intersection.
And what was it that would constitute an allegation that had some basis? An excellent and thought-provoking question, indeed.
Now, Lionel Congreaves was prepared to admit to some embellishment of his personal resume. Everyone fudged a little, here and there, and he was no exception to this general rule, which went straight to the heart of human nature (a consistently interesting area). But in his own case, he found that the problem was not with the actual claims he had made but with the implications that sprang, unbidden, from them. He meant, you put a bunch of guys in a cage and their imaginations ran wild. Because it was from prison, you see, that the “snitch jacket,” so called, for which he had so carefully been fitted, was coming. All of the porcine, so to speak, activities that had been attributed to him derived from the febrile brains of a bunch of jailbirds he’d only been trying his best to help. So much for gratitude.
All right, he had made different claims to different people at different times. But the bare facts were the same, immutable: He spoke several languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. He had served seven years in two different branches of the armed forces and later had spent time in Indochina, in Vietnam and Cambodia, working for an American construction firm. And then he had obtained a post as a language instructor at UCB and become the outside coordinator of the Afro-American Cultural Exchange, a prisoners’ group formed to provide education and foster selfesteem. A little change of pace, for Lionel Congreaves. He had been attracted to the groves of academe, to the steep green hills rising above the bay, and he’d wanted to give something back to the community. Nothing strange about that at all.
Here was a baker’s dozen, some of the rumors that Lionel Congreaves took a certain bleak pleasure in cataloging: