Barry Seaman delivers a speech in a church

Barry Seaman delivers a speech in a church in which autobiography, political history, recipes, and reflections on perception share the same pulpit. Organized under five headings—danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness—the address moves from his childhood and the Black Panthers to the death of his comrade Marius Newell, Seaman’s imprisonment and parole, and the cooking that restored him to public life. Its structure turns a public talk into a record of survival: each subject revisits the question of what can sustain a person when political hopes, friends, and familiar certainties have been lost.

Setting and Structure

After Fate and Seaman walk through a park and enter a church, the Reverend Ronald K. Foster introduces Seaman in a way that suggests he has spoken there before. Seaman announces that he will address five subjects, “no more and no less”: danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness. The congregation smiles and nods, while five young men in black jackets, berets, and dark glasses watch from a corner, their impassive faces leaving open whether they will applaud or jeer. The scene places Seaman’s testimony before listeners whose reactions are not assured.

The speech does not proceed as a simple chronology. Its announced topics provide a framework, but each opens onto episodes from different periods of Seaman’s life. A gospel hymn about Moses and the Israelites’ captivity interrupts the beginning; Seaman then resumes, and his account shifts from statistics about driving to the history of the Panthers, from Newell’s death to prison life, and from cooking to the figurative language of stars. The sequence lets an anecdote or image carry the argument forward rather than treating the five headings as separate subjects.

Danger, Political Work, and Newell

Under the heading of danger, Seaman recalls growing up in California and contrasts houses with apartment buildings: buildings bring people closer to shops, taverns, churches, and museums, while a neighborhood of houses makes the car seem necessary. He supports the point with statistics about fatal car accidents in a county near Detroit and a county near Los Angeles. After pausing to use an inhaler, he admits he learned to drive at thirteen, a fact he says he is not proud of, and identifies himself as one of the founders of the Black Panthers alongside Marius Newell.

Seaman’s account of Newell makes revolutionary history inseparable from private loss. He describes Newell’s mother, Anne Jordan Newell, as a factory worker who attended church, kept a tidy home, offered sensible advice, and treated people kindly. Seaman sets that maternal care beside the Panthers’ work: he and Newell took whatever jobs they could find and bought firearms for the people’s self-defense. His judgment is that a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution, and he repeats that she is precious. The claim is not an erasure of political commitment; it measures that commitment against the sustaining work and love represented by Newell’s mother.

Newell returned to California after years away, believing that conditions had changed and that the Panthers had helped bring about part of that change. Seaman acknowledges the increased presence of Black police officers and public figures, while insisting that other things remained the same. Newell had dreamed, while imprisoned, of breathing the Pacific air and wanted to spend the rest of his life in California, perhaps starting a family. He had even said he would name his first son Frank, after a friend who died in Soledad Prison. Seaman imagines how many children it would have taken to honor all the friends lost to him, then sets that impossible arithmetic against Newell’s childlessness: Newell was killed in Santa Cruz before he could build the peaceful life he hoped for.

Seaman reports that the stated explanation for the killing was a debt, but he doubts it. He says Newell was fighting the drug trade and offers the possibility that someone hired the killer, while making clear that he was still in prison and did not know the facts. In his account, Newell had gone to Santa Cruz for the ocean, and the killer followed him there. Seaman’s recurring imagined scene places the young Panthers, armed but with their weapons left in a car, before the Pacific in winter. Newell smiles and gestures toward the sea, unable to express what he feels in words; Seaman’s response is fear and the thought that the danger is the sea. The speech does not resolve that image into a single explanation. The ocean is at once the place Newell longed to see and the setting associated with the loss Seaman cannot put aside.

Money, Prison, and the Return to Cooking

In the section on money, Seaman argues that it is necessary without being the measure of everything. His example is prison currency: a cigarette is worth one-twentieth of a small jar of strawberry jam at Folsom, one-thirtieth at Soledad, and as much as a jar at Walla-Walla, where prisoners prefer tobacco to sweets. The changing exchange rates make value dependent on a community’s circumstances and desires. Seaman calls money a mystery and, despite saying he is not the right person to explain it, turns to what he believes people should do when they acquire it.

He condemns the display of wealth by poor people, particularly the image of a pimp driving a limousine or Lincoln Continental, and argues that newly acquired money should benefit neighbors. His proposed uses include sending children to college, adopting orphans, creating secret funds to assist Black people imprisoned in the United States, and establishing laundries, bars, and video stores whose profits would be reinvested in the community. Scholarships, he says, remain worthwhile even when their recipients meet tragic ends. The prescriptions make money a question of collective responsibility, not simply private success.

The food section recounts Seaman’s transition from imprisoned former Panther to published author. After years in prison, he was released into a changed political landscape: Newell was dead, some comrades had died in custody, others had publicly apologized and begun new lives, and the Panthers had become a hindrance to some people’s idea of progress. Seaman says he and others emerged with little future in view, having learned cruelty from guards and sadism from fellow inmates. In the first months on parole, he sat for hours watching lights come on along an unnamed street, and terrible thoughts crossed his mind.

His older sister gave him a place to stay in Detroit, and he remembers that small house as a place of happiness in retrospect. He also recalls a parole officer who poured him whiskey and pressed him to talk about his past, sometimes opening a desk drawer where Seaman knew a gun was kept. Seaman answered by telling stories about people he had met, including Lin Piao, and about his travels. The conversations could continue for hours; they show him navigating an encounter in which the officer’s questions and the visible possibility of a weapon made speech both demanded and risky.

Seaman eventually recognizes that prison has not taken away his ability to cook. With his sister’s help, he writes down recipes: his mother’s, the ones he made in prison, and the Saturday meals he prepared on the roof at home for his sister, who did not care for meat. A publisher accepts the resulting book, bringing him back into public view. Cooking becomes a way to combine history with gratitude and confusion, including his awe at the kindness he has received. Yet success with his recipes is not a final answer. Seaman says he cannot live forever on ribs and introduces a recipe for duck a l’orange, listing ingredients for four and explaining the preparation step by step. The recipe makes change practical: the speech’s movement from a famous dish to a new one gives his appeal to turn around and change a concrete form.

Stars, Metaphor, and Usefulness

Seaman’s discussion of stars distinguishes the points of light seen in the night sky from athletes and movie stars, and from meteors on a collision course with Earth. A traveler changing a tire on Route 80 between Des Moines and Lincoln might see stars that are alive or have been dead for millions of years. Whether they are stars or dreams cannot be known from the roadside, he argues; people themselves may be part of one dream breaking away from another. He then connects the subject to Newell, who could distinguish living starfish from dead ones washed ashore and return the living to the water.

The memory leads to an early Panther episode. The group had tried directing traffic so cars would not speed through their community and kill children; the city had not supplied the stoplights they wanted. Newell once took Seaman and Nelson Sanchez to steal a pump for a starfish tank. When a man confronted them with a shotgun, Newell explained that the pump was for his starfish. As the three retreated toward their car, Newell told Sanchez to drive slowly until they reached the main street, then to accelerate. The pump did not save the starfish: a week or two later it died and was thrown away. The episode puts care, danger, and failure in the same small story, while recalling a form of community protection that preceded the Panthers’ more widely known political work.

From there, Seaman treats metaphor as a way of losing oneself in appearances or staying afloat in a sea of seeming. Metaphors can function like life jackets, he says, though some float and some sink. Against the unstable stars of figurative speech, he sets the sun as the one actual star. He recalls a science-fiction film in which a rocket drifts toward the sun, the astronauts grow overheated, and the hull begins to melt; he cannot remember the ending clearly, only that he thinks the crew is saved at the last moment and turns back toward Earth. The uncertainty of his recollection suits the speech’s larger interest in the difference between what is seen, what is remembered, and what can be known.

The five-part address makes Seaman’s experience useful without turning it into a neat account of political victory or personal recovery. He credits the Panthers with contributing to change, but places that achievement beside Newell’s killing, the losses of prison, and the limited possibilities facing former activists. The speech moves instead among maternal care, shared resources, cooking, attention to living things, and the need to change. Its remembered episodes do not erase uncertainty: Seaman advances theories about Newell’s death while acknowledging what he does not know, and he returns to an image of the sea that offers Newell a source of longing while remaining bound to danger. Through Fate’s presence as a listener and recorder, the church address becomes both public testimony and an account of how a survivor tries to make his history serve others.