Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

First published: 1968

The Work

The seventeen essays collected in Soul on Ice contribute to the long tradition of prison writing. In the first essay, “On Becoming,” Eldridge Cleaver recalls his earlier association in Soledad prison with angry young blacks who “cursed everything American.” His reading of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and the writings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin convinced Cleaver of the nearly universal confusion that ruled in the realm of political and social affairs. Cleaver became an iconoclast who took the writings of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev (1847-1882) as his guide to political life.

Following his release from Soledad, Cleaver became obsessed with “The Ogre,” or the white woman, cultivated an image of himself as an outlaw, and committed rape as an “insurrectionary act.” Imprisonment at Folsom forced him to look at himself and to write to save himself. “I had to find out who I am and what I want to be, what type of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable.” Soul on Ice, then, among other things, is a discovery of identity.

Three decades after their writing, most of the essays retain considerable power. “The White Race and Its Heroes,” for example, offers penetrating insights into race relations in “schizophrenic” America, although its vision of a world revolution led by people of color turns out to have lacked prescience. “Lazarus, Come Forth” analyzes the significance of the black celebrity in a clear-eyed account of the Muhammad Ali boxing match with Floyd Patterson. “Notes on a Native Son” attacks James Baldwin for what Cleaver perceives as “the hatred for blacks permeating his writings” and for Baldwin’s “flippant, schoolmarmish dismissal” of Norman Mailer’s The White Negro (1957), which Cleaver found “prophetic and penetrating.” Cleaver’s contempt for Baldwin is complicated by Cleaver’s judgment of homosexuality as a sickness and by Cleaver’s charge that the homosexual Baldwin criticized Richard Wright because Baldwin despised Wright’s masculinity.

Two of the more important themes in Soul on Ice are the identification of white oppression of blacks in America with white colonial capitalist exploitation of minorities everywhere, especially in Vietnam, and a rather mystical ethic of love and sexuality preached in “The Primeval Mitosis.” “The Primeval Mitosis” analyzes the power relations between the sexes and the black and white races. Soul on Ice resists dismissal as a period piece. The book continues to impress with its energy and powers of intelligent observation.

Bibliography

Caster, Peter. Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Includes a chapter on Cleaver’s representation of the subject of imprisonment in Soul on Ice.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Fire. Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1978. The born-again Cleaver’s memoirs, written after his prison conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.

Lockwood, Lee. Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. An overview of Cleaver’s philosophy, published at the height of his fame. Contains remarks made by Cleaver while he was an expatriate fugitive from the U.S. legal system.

Parks, Gordon. “What Became of the Prophets of Rage?” Life, Spring, 1988, 32. Special issue. Devoted to a retrospective look at the activists of the 1960’s (including Cleaver) and their subsequent evolution.

Rout, Kathleen. Eldridge Cleaver. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. A thorough overview of Cleaver’s life and writings. Bibliography, index.

“Whatever Happened to . . . Eldridge Cleaver?” Ebony, March, 1988, 66-68. America’s leading black magazine looks at Cleaver’s career from the vantage point of two decades.