From ‘Soul on Ice’ to ‘Soul for Hire’? The political transformation of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver

An ‘experience of defeat’?

On 6 April 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was involved in a gunfight with police in Oakland, California. ¹⁸ At the end of the siege, during which approximately 1,000 shots rang out, three police were injured and fellow Panther Bobby Hutton lay dead. A wounded Cleaver was escorted to prison as a parole violator and later released on a writ of habeas corpus, although he was subsequently indicted by a grand jury for charges including assaults with the intent to murder three police officers. Pleading not guilty, he was released on bail. Governor Reagan then led a drive to appeal (successfully) against his release, prompting Cleaver to flee the country to avoid a return to jail. After absconding, he headed for Canada, before moving on to Cuba, only to leave later on bad terms with the Castro regime. He proceeded to Algeria, where he stayed for four years, during which time he helped establish the Panthers’ International Section. It was under its auspices that Cleaver travelled to a range of countries, journeys that would come to play a pivotal role in his political reassessments. ¹⁹

His departure from American shores represented a turning point, for it was the beginning of a new phase in his life, dominated by the embrace of a host of new causes and ventures. During his seven years in hiding, Cleaver travelled not only to Cuba and Algeria, but also to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. As an explanation for his conversion during this time, he suggested that ‘travel broadens’: his experience abroad taught him that the US had the best the world could offer and that the American dream was ‘dream enough for me’. His overseas sojourn provoked a clash between his individualist instincts and those police states whose regimes were totally anathema to freedom. But it was not just the tyranny of these societies that convinced him of America’s superiority. After inquiring further into the philosophies of Marxism and Leninism, he discovered deep-seated flaws distinct from any faults in their implementation. This was a jolting experience that led him to re-examine the politics to which he had been committed for some years as a Panther and a Marxist. Now, he concluded, revolution was ‘out, we can’t afford that’. ²⁰

Cleaver’s attacks on the despots governing these systems and their flimsy justifications with reference to ‘transient’ phases of dictatorship, after which the state would gradually dissolve, undoubtedly had a familiar ring to them. Deutscher noted some common elements in the testimonies of former communists, who often began by breaking with the party over the bureaucratic corruption of Soviet socialism, but went on to jettison communism entirely. They then set themselves no less than the task of protecting humanity from it. Along similar lines, in his book The Experience of Defeat, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill wrote of the English revolution’s defeat in 1660 and its demoralising impact on radicals, many of whom, their spirits broken after the overturning of the fleeting republic, subsequently surrendered to the restored monarchy and abandoned their old beliefs. ²¹

Already, Cleaver had endured an ‘experience of defeat’ in the sense of the heavy state repression meted out to the Panthers, which contributed to the effective demise of their organisation. By the early 1970s, the goal of revolution and the abolition of racism – some important reforms notwithstanding – seemed a long way off. But, arguably, Cleaver suffered an even bigger defeat when he saw with his own eyes the Marxism and communism he had espoused steeped in dictatorship, making a mockery of all the things in which he believed. Again, this was a phenomenon common to many disillusioned revolutionaries, going back at least as far as the terror and bloodletting into which the French revolution eventually degenerated. ²²

In this sense, Cleaver’s experience was far from unique. The ex-1960s radical Ronald Radosh had also visited Cuba and been appalled by what had greeted him in the form of bogus trade unions, poor working conditions and the degrading treatment of mental health patients. Other former radicals of the same era, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, had similarly been disillusioned by Castro and his regime’s foreign policy machinations in relation to Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. What started out as a promising Third World revolution that unseated a US-backed tyrant had ended in what they judged to be another tinpot dictatorship. The same theme of defeat is repeated in the writings of Tariq Ali, who applies Christopher Hill’s approach to the numerous 1960s radicals who quit revolutionary politics and shifted markedly to the Right after the end of the anti-Vietnam war movement and capitalism’s stabilisation in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite important outcomes from the 1960s movements, including recognition of the legal rights of Blacks, women and gays, the goal of revolutionary change did not materialise: the 1970s ushered in a more conservative political climate. ²³

The pall of defeat is cast wide over the bigger story of the Panthers, many of whose leading members eventually charted paths a long way from radical politics. Apart from Cleaver, Panther founder Bobby Seale, while still involved in community organising into the twenty-first century, went on to publish his own cookbooks in the 1980s, including Bar-b-que’n with Bobby. He also acted as a promoter of the multinational Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Meanwhile, fellow Panther founder Huey P. Newton’s well-known crack cocaine addiction finally got the better of him: he was shot dead in 1989 on his home turf in West Oakland by a drug dealer. The party’s former propaganda minister and organiser of the 1968 Olympics Black Power protests, Harry Edwards, in his later guise as a conservative sociology professor, advocated a clean sweep of the streets of Los Angeles to rid them of criminal Black youth, who, in his opinion, ought to be put behind bars for lengthy spells. Fellow Panther Tony Bryant hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1969, with the intention of swapping the plane for military hardware to be used by the Panthers in the US, only to be jailed by Castro for almost twelve years. He, too, resurfaced as a repentant radical and a rightwing anti-Castro activist based in Miami. ²⁴

Problems and divisions inside the Panthers left Cleaver disillusioned and led him to question the ability of social and political movements to achieve liberation at all. A project that commenced with such promise in 1966 ended in unedifying squabbles, one of which was the public spat between Newton and Cleaver that concluded with their complete severing of all ties. State repression, including persistent harassment by the FBI, was an important contributor to this and, more broadly, was part of the story of defeat that helps explain why Cleaver ended up where he did. ²⁵

While providing important insights into the waning radicalism of individuals such as Cleaver, the structural explanation has serious weaknesses. For instance, the ‘experience of defeat’ explanation also raises a question as to how 1960s radicals such as Tariq Ali, Chris Harman and Alain Badiou weathered the darker times of the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century without losing their anti-capitalist politics. Christopher Hill himself remained an unrepentant radical, despite writing about defeat and living through the political doldrums. Not all radicals throw in the towel, even when all hope appears lost. Put simply, individuals do have the capacity to resist the rightward tide and do not automatically succumb in overwhelming situations.

A flawed radical?

Perhaps one way of explaining why Cleaver, but not other radicals, turned out the way he did is by reference to his flawed radicalism, for it may be that Cleaver’s politics were somehow more amenable than others’ to a rightward shift. Perhaps, across his various phases, there were also significant continuities, obscured by a focus on the visible ruptures in his project. In terms of another renegade, Benito Mussolini, Doriot Pels thought him best viewed from the perspective of the close ideological proximity between socialism and his later fascism. Related to this is Kimball’s dismissal of Cleaver as a serial devotee of ‘fanaticism’ (see below). The positing of a U-shaped political spectrum – where the far Right and far Left eventually cohabit – is often flawed, however, devoid as it frequently is of important historical and ideological analyses of communism vis-à-vis fascism. This framework would be less applicable in this case because of the fact that Cleaver never embraced fascism. Moreover, to assert little distance between his different stances would be to ignore the empirically observable breaks he engineered (and which he acknowledged profusely) as well as the outrage and dismay these shifts provoked among his former colleagues and supporters. ²⁶ The idea that he did change fundamentally seems, for these reasons, untenable.

One does not, however, have to accept the U-shaped political spectrum thesis to agree that Cleaver’s actions and beliefs as a radical may have prefigured his later politics or that he demonstrated continuities between his various phases. Cleaver was a radical whose flaws, it could be argued, did make it easier for him to both accept the failure of communism as well as accommodate conservatism. One such flaw was his Maoism. In one sentence in Soul on Ice, Cleaver paid homage to Mao by professing his desire to become a ‘Mao Mao’ seven times consecutively. His attraction to Maoism was shared by the Panther leadership, which sought to apply aspects of the Chinese ruler’s politics to their own battles. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale sold Mao’s Little Red Book to students from outside the gates of Berkeley, advocating that free speech activists such as Mario Savio take a leaf out of the Red Guards’ book. In the process, the Panther leaders, like some other Maoist radicals in the 1960s, betrayed a one-sided understanding of the Chinese revolution, which, as a peasant-based nationalist insurrection, can be seen in contradistinction to the classical Marxist tradition of proletarian internationalism. As late as 1971, Panther leaders such as Newton were praising the achievements of Mao’s China, where apparently the key necessities of life were abundantly available to all. ²⁷ The Panther leaders also ignored the role played in the cultural revolution of 1966–1976 by the Red Guards, many of whom were bitter enemies of the free speech for which the Berkeley activists were valiantly campaigning.

Relative to the more conservative Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, the Panthers offered a radical and anti-capitalist alternative that appreciated the limits both of Black nationalism and the scope for peaceful change within existing political-economic parameters. Their appearance on the scene in 1966 was thus a lightning rod for both the Black community and the Left. But the attraction to Maoism among Panther leaders was consistent with their, at times, top-down methods, and the militarism and violence associated with Maoism appealed to elements in the Panther leadership, including Cleaver. Initially, at least, Newton was a fervent supporter of Mao’s famous adage that political power emanates from the barrels of firearms. Cleaver himself recalled having learned in the Panthers the transformative power of a single bullet. The emphasis on self-defence through arming themselves stemmed from the perceived need to mount a rearguard action against the violence visited upon Blacks by police – Seale and Newton’s original motivation behind establishing the party. But attempting to combat state violence through such means would always run up against certain limits when confronted with the armed might and centralised organisation of the American state. These limitations were reflected in the distribution of casualties between Panthers and police, heavily skewed in the latter’s favour. Moreover, it was the defeat of such a strategy that provided the political impetus for many radicals, including Cleaver, to look further afield. ²⁸

Perhaps more importantly, though, like many other Maoists, Cleaver was disillusioned when the truth emerged about the real nature of Mao’s China. There were demoralising consequences for Maoist radicals everywhere arising from the machinations there and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia (backed by China), as well as from the eventual war between China and Vietnam over Cambodia. Maoist radicals chastened by these events often shed not only their commitment to Maoism, but also their opposition to capitalism at large. For Cleaver, the nauseating sight of Chairman Mao pressing the flesh with Richard Nixon in 1972 was too much to stomach. Thus, his illusions about Mao led to disillusionment when the latter behaved like the compromised ruler of any other capitalist state. ²⁹

Similarly, Cleaver could only have been disillusioned by his experience in Cuba and the Soviet Union if he had nourished illusions about their socialist qualities in the first instance. He believed initially that the Cuban state under Castro would lend assistance to the struggle for Black power, only to be rudely disabused of this notion once he arrived there. Furthermore, what is odd is the way in which Cleaver had, at first, been greatly impressed with what he observed in Cuba, the Soviet Union and North Korea – the praises of whose ruler Kim Il-sung (the godfather of one of his children) Cleaver had sung loudly – before he cottoned on to their democratic deficits and turned against them. From a rose-tinted perspective, he would flip over to an equally lopsided denunciation of Cuba as an ‘Alcatraz with sugar cane’. Here, Cleaver showed some similarities with cold war renegades, whose lack of critical judgement initially in relation to the Soviet Union left them vulnerable to ‘the god that failed’, after which, as Hobsbawm notes, they simplistically turned what they once considered God into Satan. He admitted that when he set foot on Cuban shores, there were ‘stars in my eyes’, only to see it ultimately as one giant penitentiary. ³⁰

Cleaver therefore had a tendency to grasp something totally, uncritically and one-sidedly, with little appreciation for nuance and complexity, before moving on to something else. Arguably, he took to Christianity and Republicanism with a similar zeal. Thus, his response to reading Marx and Lenin in jail was akin to: ‘This is it, this is what I’ve been looking for.’ He wanted to emulate the revolutionary dedication of Che Guevara, so: ‘When I looked out, I saw a lot of throats that needed to be slit.’ But, in general, his socialist politics were only vaguely articulated. Despite his undeniable talents as a prose stylist, the core tenets of his ideology were never systematically developed in writing. ³¹

If Cleaver’s radical politics helped prise him away from his radicalism, there was also a sense in some quarters that he was always an opportunistic and untrustworthy radical whose loss to the Left could be deemed good riddance. ³² It is certainly true that the radical Eldridge Cleaver was often thuggish, puerile and misogynistic. Cleaver had helped call a ‘Pre-erection Day’ celebration, in which he advocated ‘pussy power’ and alliances with people in the mould of the infamous prohibition-era criminal ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. He also threatened to assassinate the children of San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Joseph Alioto, and was alleged to have participated in the torture of another Black Panther member, who consequently required psychiatric treatment. ³³

Nor was Cleaver’s misogyny any secret. Prior to joining the Panthers in 1966, he was a self-confessed – though contrite – rapist, who excused the crime as a revolutionary act against white women in retribution for centuries of racism. While in prison, he had toyed with various titles for a manuscript, including: ‘Confessions of a rapist’, ‘Journal of a rapist’ and ‘The footprints of the rapist’. The manuscript proceeded to describe a drug dealer who calmly and meticulously executes a rape using a gun and rope to subdue his victim and her partner at a motel, before adding insult to injury by dispossessing them of their valuables. Similar themes occupied Cleaver elsewhere in his prison writings. In an outline for the manuscript that would become Soul On Ice, entitled, ‘White woman, black man’, Cleaver wrote that the ‘excruciating and almost universal lust and craving of the American black man for white women corresponds to the sick aversion they have for black women’. Cleaver had even undergone sessions with a prison psychiatrist as a result of a nervous breakdown he suffered in part over his fascination with white women, as he agonised over the guilt he felt about his attraction to them. Some of this encroaches upon the territory of Cleaver’s psychology, which I discuss in more depth below. ³⁴

But, for now, it is important to recognise Cleaver’s misogyny as a key feature of his radicalism and which was not confined to his pre-Panther criminality. He beat his wife and Panther communications secretary Kathleen Neal, whom he was said to have kept in virtual captivity. Despite claiming to have mended his ways after he became a father, the so-called Christlam church he founded in his post-conversion days espoused deeply sexist ideas. Furthermore, in the early 1980s, Cleaver made statements to the journalist Warren Hinckle indicating his firm belief in corporal punishment for wives. ³⁵

There was consistency between his different phases, too, in relation to homosexuality, which disgusted him as a radical. Later, as a Conservative and born-again Christian, he issued a statement welcoming into his home the assassin of gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk. A strong part of his motivation for the design, while in France, of his infamous codpiece pants was the desire to counteract the apparently homosexual fashion designers’ obsession with trousers built to accentuate a man’s buttocks. This was despite suggestions that Cleaver himself had experienced homosexual desires, as well as sexual relations with men in and out of prison. ³⁶

Cleaver was undoubtedly a flawed radical, who showed some significant consistencies between his different phases. But these flaws are connectable to only some of his later affiliations. Moreover, there were numerous other 1960s radicals who shared the flaws of Maoism and also entertained illusions about Soviet Russia, without following Cleaver into Christianity and conservatism. The unavoidable fact is that radicals in the same movement, sharing very similar politics, often went in completely different directions; some remained trenchant critics of the system, while others settled their differences.

A ‘renegade mentality’?

The question is, therefore, raised as to whether there was something peculiar about Cleaver, unrelated to the political context or to any flaws he may have had as a radical. Aspects of Cleaver’s personality and psychology have already been partly alluded to, and it is to this potential explanation for his peculiar pattern of conversions that we now turn. ³⁷ Concerning Benito Mussolini, Kirkpatrick wrote about how the ‘mentality of a renegade’ possessed Il Duce. Megaro also had Mussolini in mind when he pointed to the ‘vainglory, ambition, and intellectual and emotional instability’ that all too often produced ‘the most perfect types of renegades’. This was an insight on which Megaro, alas, did not elaborate. But there is a substantial literature dealing with the impact of psychology on a person’s political behaviour. Attempts to apply this psychohistorical method have included biographical work on key historical figures, including former US president Richard Nixon, whose administration’s brutal actions in Indochina have been partly linked to his mental instability. The method can purportedly help explain seemingly irrational actions on the part of individuals. Perhaps, therefore, Cleaver’s seeming irrationality in condemning today what he insisted on yesterday can be explained by a ‘renegade mentality’. According to Marvin X, Cleaver’s former assistant and the man who introduced him to Newton and Seale in 1966, Cleaver possessed a ‘mercurial personality’ to which all benefactors ultimately fell victim because they were unable to steer him in any direction. ³⁸

Such a view is lent credence by his apparently endless list of affinities. Fellow 1960s radical Jonah Raskin has understandably dismissed Cleaver as a ‘chameleon’ who adopted whatever stance accorded with the changing times. ³⁹ Yet, Cleaver was not that simple, for the extraordinary – and sometimes bizarre – range of enterprises with which he was associated cannot be put down merely to a changing political landscape. Nor can his embrace of Christianity be reduced to a cynical attempt to extract sympathy from the courts in light of the trial awaiting him upon his return to the US in 1975 for his part in the Oakland shootout. ⁴⁰ Rather, his being born again (not for the first time, as we shall see) marked the beginning of the spawning of numerous new Cleavers, which, taken together, suggest a deep yearning for meaning and identity embedded in his psychology and which transcended politics or religion.

It was this constant renewal that provoked Kimball to write off Cleaver as a ‘serial extremist’, whose only enduring feature was ‘fanaticism’, noting that he was a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of pants with codpieces, which Cleaver believed could potentially eradicate indecent exposure as a crime and, not to mention, a Republican. The only running theme in Cleaver’s politics, according to Kimball, was ‘buffoonery’, putting him in league with Mussolini as well as the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin. ⁴¹

Although right to draw attention to the eccentricities of Cleaver’s post-Panther life, Kimball did not exhaust the list, which also included selling phallic-shaped ceramic pottery, the creation of a revivalist movement called Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, an attempt to fuse Christianity and Islam into a new church (Christlam), establishing a recycling business, as well as arrests over drug possession and burglary in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ⁴² In the early 1980s, Cleaver also started to take his horoscopes seriously. ⁴³ Perhaps the strangest of Cleaver’s ideas to elude Kimball was his plot to annex Treasure Island off the coast of San Francisco, so that ‘Captain Cleaver’ could reap its hidden booty. But, more to the point, Kimball’s denunciations of Cleaver as a consistent exponent of ‘fanaticism’ need to be treated critically, for, as Toscano argues, the latter’s destructive, dangerous and negative connotations have all too often been taken for granted when, in fact, fanaticism has been an important, if not indispensable, ingredient of systemic social change. The problem was not so much that Cleaver was a fanatic, but that he so easily and so often discarded his fanaticism for one cause only to replace it with fanaticism for some, very different – and often conflicting – cause, in turn raising questions about his sincerity in the first place. ⁴⁴

Just how different was the latest new cause became apparent to the psychedelic drug proponent Timothy Leary, a jail-mate of Cleaver’s at the San Diego federal prison, following the latter’s return from exile. To Leary’s surprise, Cleaver was then in the business of advocating space migration. In fact, Cleaver would later rejoin the former Harvard professor in 1977 at a benefit gig for those who were interested in unlocking the key to immortality and who were willing to preserve human bodies until such time as a key was discovered. The degree to which Cleaver shared this hope for another chance at life, and how such ambitions fitted with his growing piety, remains unclear, but the fact of his participation in this venture suggests some sympathies for it. ⁴⁵

To this already lengthy compilation of causes and movements in which Cleaver invested over the course of his life, we can add several others. For instance, he was also, prior to his political radicalisation, a Catholic, although he says he became so initially for pragmatic reasons: in a California youth facility at the time, he wished to mix with the Blacks and Mexicans rather than the white Protestants, so he chose the religion on this basis. As we already know, he had been a Muslim while in jail, before jumping ship to follow Malcolm X after disagreements in the Nation of Islam. Prior to becoming a Panther, he also gave serious thought to Judaism, which he situated in the context of going down ‘all the blind alleys … I’ve really tried to find some answers and some solutions.’ Speaking in the late 1970s, Cleaver saw his coming to Christianity as his return ‘back home’, a final resting place. ⁴⁶

But this was not to be. In fact, the final cause to which Cleaver dedicated himself was nothing less than the future of the planet. We get a strong sense of déjà vu when we read the recollections of Cleaver’s then girlfriend, who remembered that he ‘couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like he had a new purpose, a new direction.’ In some of his final reflections before his death in 1998, he admitted to being perpetually on the hunt for the truth. This led him into various sects and cults, which in turn prompted them, against Cleaver’s wishes, to claim him as one of their own. ⁴⁷

There are parallels here with Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born novelist and communist turned ex-communist and contributor to The God that Failed. Koestler was lured by a catalogue of causes, movements, cults and cures, including Zionism, Freudianism, eugenics and Lamarckism. He also fell under the influence of Gandhi’s spiritual heir Sri Vinoba Bhave, willingly subjected himself to experiments involving hallucinogens with Timothy Leary and became a believer in extra-sensory perception, to one of whose practitioners, the ‘spoon-bender’ Uri Geller, Koestler lent his enthusiastic support. Like Cleaver, he was also sexually obsessed and deeply misogynistic, not to mention a tormented individual who made numerous attempts on his own life, before finally succeeding in 1983. ⁴⁸

As with Koestler, so Cleaver believed that being reborn was integral to life itself. But the latter went further in asserting that western civilisation in the 1970s was in the midst of a completely new process of ‘re-birth and growth and creativity. In many cases, we often confuse birth pains with death throes. I’m just aware that this is a positive phenomenon that I’m part of.’ He viewed his evolution as the culmination of a long process of learning and searching. Whereas, at the end of this process, he had some semblance of an answer, others were either clueless or simply continued to sit on the fence of life. He estimates that this process commenced when he was 12 years of age, after which he experimented with the full spectrum of philosophies, religions, countries and people: ‘It has been an experience. It has been a search. It’s been an odyssey. It’s been a pilgrimage.’ ⁴⁹

Again, there are some striking similarities with Koestler in the sense of his actual enjoyment of the process of rebirth. As Cleaver lamented, ‘I just wish I could be born again every day’. It is worth noting that the sense of finality in these comments, made in the mid-1970s, is misleading, since they preceded Cleaver’s Republicanism and his environmentalism, among other endeavours. Moreover, the sense of renewal had been an enduring theme with him since at least 1965, when he had written in the third person of his arrival at prison as a different Eldridge Cleaver, a man who no longer existed and who was a foreigner to his replacement. This should come as no surprise, Cleaver suggested, for, if a person ‘has been undergoing all kinds of extreme, involved, and unregulated changes, then he ends up not knowing who he is’. But, as we already know, this was not the last occasion on which one Cleaver submitted to another. There was another rebirth just a few years later; on the night of Bobby Hutton’s death in 1968, a different Eldridge Cleaver had met with mortality. In what may have been an unintendedly prescient observation, Cleaver confided in a letter in 1965 to his lawyer Beverly Axelrod, whom he at one point had plans to marry, that he had dreams of becoming a writer. But his problem was that, ‘I can’t stick to a point’. Perhaps this was Cleaver’s more fundamental weakness in politics, in particular, and life, in general. ⁵⁰

He was perhaps not alone in this among the 1960s radicals burnt out at the end of that tumultuous decade. Jerry Rubin, who had been close to Cleaver at one time, ⁵¹ also displayed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for new movements and causes in the 1970s and 1980s. More relevant to the psychohistorical explanation, Rubin also had psychologically driven motivations for his actions and statements. By his own admission, he was addicted to fame and needed ‘attention from the outside, a platform, recognition as an outlet for my energy’. He sought to become famous in order to obtain ‘from the outside what I felt I lacked on the inside’. Rubin’s transition from anti-capitalist radical to self-publicising Yuppie businessman cannot be seen in isolation from his psychology. ⁵²

Cleaver stands out, however, as a particularly damaged figure. According to his one-time assistant, Cleaver was obsessed with the male sex organ throughout his whole life – a predilection that repeatedly got him into trouble. He also claims that Cleaver suffered from sexual addiction, as well as an addictive personality more generally. ⁵³ Cleaver’s reported participation in torture, his confession to using rape as a political weapon and his wife-battering indicate a psychologically wounded person, to say the least. As a boy, as well as being ritually beaten by his father, he had the scarring experience of witnessing his father physically abusing his mother, which led the young Cleaver to harbour desires of killing his father. But there were also possibly deep-seated resentments towards his frequently absent mother, which, it has been speculated, may have been a source of the misogyny bedevilling him his whole life.

So disturbed was Cleaver in the 1970s that he was on the verge of suicide. On the night he was about to end it all, while he was living alone on the Mediterranean coast in France in 1975, he had a spiritual experience while staring into the moon. The images of his former radical heroes – Castro, Mao, Marx and Engels – paraded in front of him, before each disappeared in a puff of smoke. Replacing these evaporated idols was an image of Jesus, propelling Cleaver down the path of Christianity and simultaneously saving his life. This raises doubts about what contribution the tyrannical nature of the regimes in the countries he visited made to his split with Marxism, ⁵⁴ and whether Cleaver was, at the time of this revelation, under the influence of narcotics is not known. But, according to his ex-wife Kathleen, speaking at the time of Cleaver’s death, Eldridge returned to the US, despite his newfound faith, ‘a very unhealthy person, unhealthy mentally, and I don’t think he’s ever quite recovered’. Before setting foot again on US territory, he admitted, his ‘inner restlessness and spiritual emptiness were to reach awful proportions’. ⁵⁵ This pathos was to haunt Cleaver on and off for the remainder of his life before he succumbed, in 1998, possibly to an affliction related to his cocaine addiction. ⁵⁶