Constant security awareness was a theme of many of the cubs’ childhoods. Sala Cyril, 48, and her older sibling Malkia, 50, whose mother, Janet, was in the Harlem Panthers, were brought up to be what they call “hyper vigilant”. At dusk they had to close the shutters of their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, so nobody could see inside. If they got into trouble on the streets, they were told to ask a community member for help, never a police officer.
When the family ate out at a diner, the children habitually sat on the outside of the booth in case they needed to make a quick getaway. The rules were simple: never have your back to a door, check all exits when you enter a public space, be wary of anyone who you do not know.
FBI agents would frequently call at the Cyrils’ home. The interventions continued right up to a couple of weeks before Janet died of sickle cell anemia, aged 59, in 2005 – 23 years after the Panthers’ demise. Janet was already in hospice care at home, yet agents still insisted she would have to testify in a reopened 1971 case involving the murder of a San Francisco police officer.
Sala said such confrontations have left her with a sense of creeping threat that pursued her well into adulthood. “There is no end for the children,” she said. “Nothing ended, not for us.”
To this day, Sala will conduct a thorough background check on any new friend or acquaintance, trawling public records and making inquiries. Did she do a background check on me before we met for a two-hour interview in Brooklyn?
“I certainly did,” she said. “I wouldn’t have talked to you if I hadn’t.”
Loss
‘Daddy, was the cause more important than your children?’
When Ericka Abram was a toddler, her mother, Elaine Brown, traveled the world making connections with other revolutionary leaders. She visited the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Vietnam.
For the Panthers, Brown’s frenetic global dash was a sign that the party was making waves. For Ericka, not yet a year old and left in the care of a Panther minder, it had other, less lofty implications.
“She was not there when I learned to walk. And she was not there when my teeth came in,” Abram said.
In the grand revolutionary scheme of things, does it matter that Abram’s mother was absent when she learned to walk? Wasn’t the fight for Black self-determination more important than witnessing a child’s developmental milestones? Those are questions with which Abram grapples to this day.
One of Abram’s first memories was being taken to an Ike and Tina Turner concert with her grandmother. Her mother also came along, wearing a flowing pink Halston dress. “I thought my mother was so glamorous and beautiful. And strong,” Abram said. “But we didn’t know each other.”