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Iowa, and thinning out trees in the thick, overgrown forests that skirt the Canadian border, than to be nailed to the chauvinism of San Francisco with someone constantly explaining that "the best is always yet to come, so just do your thing, and you'll be king!"

The moment he took that first step out of what no longer was his home, Emmett knew he'd made a righteous move and that he was on his way to making it real once more, compared to not.

His legs carried him through the absurd wave of do-nothing terrorism that began and ended with the explosion of the bomb factory in the wealthy Greenwich Village townhouse. They took him past Eldridge Cleaver's threat of "race war," if white radicals failed to rally to the defense of Bobby Seale, and on by the subsequent May Day weekend held to protest the chairman's "railroad" trial in a town where some Broadway shows close before they get to open in the Big Apple. He didn't even stop to take a look at those shot at Kent and Jackson State or the ones missing in the jungles of Cambodia. He did, however, pause for a moment in bewilderment at Huey P.'s release, just to figure what it might mean, now that Fred Hampton was long dead. Finally his legs brought him back to "Go" and a humid, hot summer that was lightened up a bit by a blond mouthful of a woman who was simply another day in another week.

Then Pearl died, and Emmett watched Nixon squash the prosperity that spawned the country's counterculture, causing the hardhat, blue-collar guys to beat on marching students, in hope that the President would grant some grace to labor in the economic wageprice freeze. He didn't, though, and neither did they have to stomp down the college kids who already reconsidered and subdued themselves to the yoke now that jobs were scarce.

And so, Emmett saw it all come down to money once again. On the street he heard that it had cost twenty-five thousand to bust out Leary from the San Luis Obispo minimum security farm, and that Cleaver put him under house arrest in Algiers because he didn't come through with the ten grand he promised him. Later, after three of the twenty-one Panther defendants had jumped bail from their trial in New York, two of them allegedly returned to liberate money by taking the wages from some of their black brothers and sisters, humiliating them by forcing them to strip naked in a Harlem after-hours social club where they were trying to forget their jobs as chauffeurs and domestics.

After the split became forever in the Black Panther Party, Cleaver really showed himself to be nothing more than crazy by threatening [end page 493]