decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing
segregation, Cleaver’s imprisonment, he argues in
Soul, awakened him to his “position in America”
and he “began to form a concept of what it meant
to be black in white America” (3). His awaken-
ing, he further argues, enlightened him to the way
whites had been able to oppress black males. His
dysfunctionality surfaces in his justification for
raping white women:
... and when I considered myself smooth
enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out
white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately,
willfully, and methodically—though looking
back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and com-
pletely 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 black women. I was
getting revenge. (1968, 14)
Using a narrative voice that recalls those of FRED-
ERICK DOUGLASS, MAYA ANGELOU, JAMES BALDWIN,
W. E. B. DUBOIS, RALPH ELLISON, MALCOLM X, and
RICHARD WRIGHT, Cleaver also seeks to create a self
beyond that of criminal other—to offer a candid,
critical vision on the status of the United States,
generational shifts, and the need for reform, par-
ticularly in the essay “The White Race and Its
Heroes.” Warning that there is a crisis in com-
munication between the older and younger white
generations, Cleaver writes:
What has suddenly happened is that the white
race has lost its heroes. Worse, its heroes have
been revealed as villains and its greatest heroes
as the arch-villains. The new generations of
whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable
record carved over the face of the globe by their
race in the last five hundred years, are rejecting
the panoply of white heroes, whose heroism
consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of
colonialism and imperialism. (1968, 68)In the end, writing becomes for Cleaver, much like
it had for Angelou, Malcolm, and Wright, a venue
to the existential self. Like them, he discovers what
Sidone Smith calls “the curative power of the act
of writing autobiography” (153). Cleaver wrote,
“I started to write [to] save myself. I realized that
no one could save me but myself.... I had to seek
out the truth and unravel the snarled web of my
motivations. I had to find out who I am and where
I want to be, what type of man I would be, and
what I could do to become the best of which I was
capable” (1968, 15).
Soul on Ice sold millions of copies and was criti-
cally acclaimed. Cleaver would follow his award-
winning text with the less successful Soul on Fire
(1978), in which he delineates his conversion to
Christianity. The book’s dedication reveals how far
Cleaver had moved philosophically from his pre-
vious militant position as a member of the Black
Panthers and revolutionary leader: “This book is
dedicated to the proposition that all human beings
are created equal—in sin—with the God-given ca-
pacity to rise above themselves. From the depths of
the pit of despair we can ascend to sublime heights
of hope and fulfillment” (dedication, Soul on Fire).
Before his death in 1989, Cleaver had also become
a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Fire. Waco, Tex.: World
Books, 1978.
———. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell Publishers, 1968.
Smith, Sidone. Where I Am Bound. Westport, Conn.
Greenwich Press, 1974.
Wilfred D. SamuelsClifton, Lucille Sayles (1936– )
Born in 1936 in Depew, New York, to Samuel L.
Sayles, a steel worker, and Thelma Moore Sayles,
a homemaker, poet Lucille Clifton grew up in
Depew and Buffalo, a child of the Great Migra-
tion of southern blacks to the industrial North.
Though her southern-born African-American
parents had little formal education, they both read108 Clifton, Lucille Sayles