Kingdom of No Tomorrow
By Fabienne Josaphat
Algonquin Books/Hatchette
Nettie Boileau had choices to make.
Should she sign up with the revolution taking shape in Oakland, the way her father fought back against Papa Doc in Haiti? Or should she pursue her dreams of becoming a doctor?
Which lover should she make a life with? Clia, who brought her into the Black Panther Party? Or Melvin, the magnetic rising party leader?
Then there was the question of whether to have the baby Melvin was so excited about.
Nettie's choices reflected the life-changing personal decisions so many idealistic young people made in the U.S. as the promise of the 1960s crashed into a maelstrom of violence and (in the case of the Panthers) warfare against a government violating its own laws to try to eviscerate dissent. Her story is a part of history that is still being written and rewritten and argued about as a new era of political upheaval grips the nation.
Nettie's particular story has now been told for the first time. Because unlike all the other compelling personal figures whose stories have been documented from the Panther era, Nettie exists only in imagination. Specifically, Fabienne Josaphat's imagination.
Josaphat tells 20-year-old Nettie's story – and her version of the Black Panther story – in a new novel called Kingdom of No Tomorrow (Algonquin Books/Hatchette).
She made a deliberate choice to read up on the Panthers and interview surviving members as she crafted a fictional take to the literary/historical party canon.
In the process, Josaphat took on a challenge faced by writers of contested historical fiction: How to make it "accurate." Or "true," through the details of an imagined story involving imagined characters (who react to actions of real-life figures in the story background like, in this case, Stokely Carmichael and Fred Hampton).
A skilled writer, Josaphat succeeds in drawing us into Nettie's world.
We feel her youthful idealism ignited by Carmichael's and then Hampton's oratory fire. We wrestle along with her about whether to break free from the stern direction of her aunt, who raised her and brought her to Oakland after Nettie's father, a revolutionary doctor, was murdered by Haiti's Tonton Macoutes. We feel her pulled between her romantic devotions to Clia and Melvin. We join her in weighing the implications of an abortion, processing the violent attacks by cops on Panthers, discovering the use of bombings to advance the Panther agenda. We imagine ourselves in her place. I for one can't wait to read the next chapter of Nettie's story (which Josaphat is working on).
If telling Nettie's story were the main goal of the novel, that would be the end of the critical story. If the Panther backdrop were primarily a vehicle for telling that broader universal coming-of-age story about the personal-political clashes in the cauldron of pitched civic combat, there would be no more questions to ask about the book.
Josaphat was equally committed to telling not just Nettie's story but the Panther story. She started the project, she said, with the intention of telling the Panthers' "heroic" story through fiction as a way to correct what she saw as the anti-Panther-skewed image promoted in the nonfiction canon. She stepped into the literary battlefield, where writers and researchers on both sides have defended their takes on the "truth" by seeking to discredit and wipe out their enemies with the same facts-be-dammed approach adopted by the COINTELPRO and Weatherman warriors of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I was curious to see what sources she listed in her acknowledgements. I remembered many of the titles from my own research for a book I co-wrote 20 years ago about the torture and murder of a falsely suspected Panther informer in New Haven. All the sources came from the Panther hagiography camp. They detail the party's inspirational battle against police brutality, its groundbreaking work on sickle cell anemia, its free-breakfast programs, its necessary questioning of white-controlled civil rights organizations and disempowering Great Society and urban renewal programs, its enduring promotion of Black pride, its legacy of strong female leadership, its resistance to the chilling campaign by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in cooperation with local police red squads to kill (literally, in cases like Hampton's) any challenge to the white establishment.
The list doesn't include work, most notably by the David Horowitz, that detailed murder cover-ups and other misdeeds by the fallible human beings who ran the party. True, Horowitz always saw facts or truth as secondary to the political line he sought to push, whether as editor of the pro-Panther Ramparts or in his decades of right-wing cultural warring since (as did Panther apologists like Tom Hayden, who once declared on the New Haven Green in reference to the murder of the falsely accused New Haven Panther, "A lot of educated people are going to have to be convinced the facts are irrelevant!”). But even some Panther admirers admit Horowitz raised important information, even if he himself couldn't be trusted.
Also missing from the book acknowledgements list is the work by left-of-center writers sympathetic to the Panthers, unsympathetic to COINTELPRO, who dared to honestly examine instances like Panther leader Huey Newton allegedly shooting a 17-year-old prostitute to death because she called him "baby" on a streetcorner or the evidence that he may have ordered the killing of a party bookkeeper planning to reveal financial improprieties. Journalists Hugh Pearson and Kate Coleman were banished from the Panther canon (enduring death threats in Coleman's case) for such honest reporting from the left.
In an interview about Kingdom of No Tomorrow, author Josaphat said she did read Horowitz's work. She also said that while she sought to present the Panthers as heroes, she sought as well to present the imperfections of the very human figures caught up in the party.
Indeed, Nettie's encounter with sexism in the ranks (no more or less common in the Panthers than in other New Left groups or society at large) and her discomfort with plans for a bombing add nuance (and truth) to the story. The realistic (while in some cases fictional) deaths that Nettie finds herself witness and privy to demonstrate the implications baked into the intoxicating platform for meeting violence with initiated violence (rather than true self-defense).
Those reasons, along with Josaphat's pitch-perfect dialogue and pacing and scene-unraveling, make Kingdom of No Tomorrow a successful story about a young woman caught up in the eye of a political hurricane. In the best tradition of political fiction, it taps into larger questions about personal responsibility and revolutionary ardor. I'm not sure if it succeeds in advancing the ongoing academic and literary quest to fully understand the truth of a searing, resonant moment in our country's history.
Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with "Kingdom of No Tomorrow" author Fabienne Josaphat on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven. Click here and here to read two previous combo book review/author interviews.
