Lionel Wilson and Robert Shetterly the president and chairman of the Oakland Council for Economic Development. How could I not support her efforts in behalf of a project that had seemed so worthy and to which I had dedicated so much effort?
There were other seductive aspects to her leadership as well. The Black Panther Party—the most male dominated organization of the Left—was suddenly being led by an articulate, take-charge woman. And not just one woman. Elaine’s right and left hands in the Party organization—Joan Kelley and Phyllis Jackson—were also female, as was its treasurer Gwen Goodloe.22 With Huey gone under a dark cloud, Elaine and the Center were facing formidable obstacles. My social and racial privilege always afforded me a way out of these difficulties (as my leftist conscience was constantly reproving me). How could I face myself, if I abandoned their ship now?
Many years later Gwen Goodloe contacted me. She was then working as an executive in the finance department of Hughes Aircraft, a defense contractor. How did you get your clearance, I asked her? “I told them the truth,” she said.
So I stayed. And when the Party’s treasurer, Gwen Goodloe, fled a week later, and Elaine became desperate over who would manage its finances, I suggested a solution. Betty Van Patter, who was already doing the books for the Learning Center, might be of help in handling the general accounts. This was to be my last act of assistance to the Party. The crises of the fall had piled on one another in such swift succession, that I was unable to assess the toll they were taking. But in November, an event occurred that pushed me over the edge.
There had been a second teen dance, and this time there was a shooting. A Panther named Deacon was dead. His assailant, a black youth of 16, was in the county hospital. When I phoned Elaine to ask what had happened, she exploded in the kind of violent outpouring I was now becoming used to, blaming the disaster on “the police and the CIA.” This stock paranoia was really all I needed to hear to tell me things were not what they had seemed and were terribly wrong. (Years later, I learned from Panthers who had fled and were now in contact with me that the shooting had been over drugs, which the Party was dealing from the school.)
When I walked into the school auditorium where Deacon lay in state (there is really no other term for the scene in front of me), I suddenly saw the real Party to which I had closed my eyes to for so long. Of course, the children were there, as were their parents and teachers, but dominating them and everything else physically and symbolically was the honor guard of Panther soldiers in black berets, shotguns alarmingly on display. Added to this spectacle, mingling with the mourners, there were the unmistakable gangster types, whose presence had suddenly become apparent to me after Elaine took over the Party: “Big Bob,” Perkins, Aaron, Ricardo, Larry. They were fitted in shades and Bogarts and pinstripe suits, as though waiting for action on the set of a B crime movie. In their menacing faces there was no reflection of political complexity such as Huey was so adept at projecting, or of the benevolent community efforts like the breakfast for children programs that the Center provided.
Underneath all the political rhetoric and social uplift, I suddenly realized was the stark reality of the gang. I remember a voice silently beating my head, as I sat there during the service, tears streaming down my face: “What are you doing here, David?” it screamed at me. It was my turn to flee.
Betty did not attend the funeral, and if she had would not have been able to see what I saw. Moreover, she and I had never had the kind of relationship that inspired confidences between us. As my employee, she never really approved of the way Peter and I ran Ramparts. For whatever reasons—perhaps a streak of feminist militancy—she didn’t trust me.
Just as a precaution, I had warned Betty even before Deacon’s funeral not to get involved in any part of the Party or its functioning that she didn’t feel comfortable with. But Betty kept her own counsel. In one of our few phone conversations, I mentioned the shooting at the dance. She did not take my remark further.
Later it became obvious that I hadn’t really known Betty. I had counted to some extent on her middle class scruples to keep her from any danger zones she encountered in Panther territory. But this too was an illusion. She had passions that prompted her to want a deeper involvement in what she also perceived as their struggle against oppression.
There was another reason I did not express my growing fears to Betty. The more fear I had the more I realized that it would not be okay for me to voice such criticism, having been so close to the operation. To badmouth the Party would be tantamount to treason. I had a wife and four children, who lived in neighboring Berkeley, and I would not be able to protect them or myself from Elaine’s wrath.
There were other considerations in my silence, too. What I had seen at the funeral, what I knew from hearsay and from the press were only blips on a radar screen that was highly personal, dependent on my own experience to read. I had begun to know the Panther reality, at least enough to have a healthy fear of Elaine. But how could I convey this knowledge to someone who had not been privy to the same things I had? How could I do it in such a way that they would believe me and not endanger me? Before fleeing, my Panther friends had tried to warn me about Huey through similar signs, and I had failed to understand. My ignorance was dangerous to them and to myself. Finally, only the police had ever accused the Panthers of actual crimes. Everyone I knew and respected on the left—and beyond the left—regarded the police allegations against the Panthers as malicious libels by a racist power structure bent on holding down and eliminating militant black leadership. It was one of the most powerful liberal myths of the times.
One Friday night, a month or so after Deacon’s funeral, a black man walked into the Berkeley Square, a neighborhood bar that Betty frequented, and handed her a note. Betty, who seemed to know the messenger, read the note and left shortly afterwards. She was never seen alive again.
On the following Monday, I received an anxious phone call from Tammy Van Patter, Betty’s 18-year-old daughter, who had also worked for me at Ramparts. She told me her mother was missing and asked for my help. I phoned Elaine, but got Joan Kelley instead. Joan told me that Elaine had had a fight with Betty on Thursday and fired her. (Later, Elaine lied to investigating police, telling them she had fired Betty the previous Friday and hadn’t seen her for a week before she disappeared.)
When Elaine returned my call, she immediately launched into a tirade against Betty, calling her an “idiot” who believed in astrology, and who “wanted to know too much.” She said that Betty was employed by a bookkeeping firm with offices in the Philippines, and was probably working for the C.I.A. Then Elaine turned on me for recommending that Betty be hired in the first place. She noted that I was “bawling” at Deacon’s funeral and had not “come around for a long time.” Perhaps I was scared by the dangers the Party faced, she suggested. Then she asked why was I so concerned about this white woman who was crazy, when all those brothers had been gunned down by the police? White people didn’t seem to care that much when it was black people dying. I didn’t answer her back.
A week later, when Betty still had not turned up, I called Elaine one more time, and was subjected to another torrent of abuse culminating in a threat only thinly veiled: “If you were run over by a car or something, David, I would be very upset, because people would say I did it.”
I was visited in my home by the Berkeley police. They told me they were convinced the Panthers had taken Betty hostage and had probably already killed her. From her daughter Tammy I learned that the very small circle of Betty’s friends and acquaintances had all been questioned since her disappearance, and none had seen her for some time. She had left her credit cards and birth control pills at home, and thus could not have been going on an unexpected trip when she left the Berkeley Square with the mysterious messenger. Just to the rendezvous to which she had been summoned.
Betty was found on January 13, 1975, five weeks after she had disappeared, when her water-logged body washed up on the western shore of San Francisco Bay. Her head
