His style was baffling, but within it we beheld a recovered collective memory. The story began in our glory years with the banishing of Bull Conner and all his backward dragons. Never had the mountaintop seemed so close at hand. But marching from victory we stumbled into a void.  And now we were here in the pit, clawing out each other's eyes. We were all—even me—so angry. We could not comprehend how it came to this. Dad tried to explain The Fall, but he was an elder and full with his own agenda. Chuck was one of us, and once we got it, we understood that he spoke beautifully in the lingua franca of our time. He took us back to '66, showed us Hoover  and his array of phone taps, the grafted, with their drugs and guns like blankets for Indians. We fell, blinded, corrupted, consumed by Reagnomics, baseheads and black on black. But now was the hour of '88. Now was the time to reverse our debased years, to take over, grab our guns again and be men.

By then I had met the great lion, Afeni Shakur, most famous of the Panther 21. She'd moved to Baltimore some years earlier, and among the Conscious she was legend. Afeni was an old comrade of my father's, but when the Panthers went to war with each other, they came down on different sides. They had comrades who'd killed their comrades, but still, all through another decade the human touch pulled them back together.

I had heard the tales, and measured against the everyday sameness of my father, Afeni was large. But what struck me was that the legend was human—that she smiled when she saw me, cooked spaghetti, and found my baby brother amusing. Her son and daughter spent time among us. Bill and Tupac traded lyrics. I took Sekiywa to see Snow White. But even then their clan was glamorous, and of that final faction that held out a Marxist hope of the empire's ruin.

Here is how it all came together: Bill, Sekyiwa, all of us, we knew who we were, in the rote manner of knowing where two streets intersect. But anything more than that, a feeling for why any kid would grab a black beret, guns and law books, was only partially there. I was slowly coming to a dawning, and then one afternoon Sekyiwa and me sat on my bedroom floor pumping "Rebel Without A Pause"—Hard, my calling card/Recorded and ordered, supporter of Chesimard

Sekiywa looked up, "That's my aunt." Rather her aunt's slave name. But Sekyiwa only partially understood how the name Chesimard had come to Chuck D. The next day I went to my father for the story. The story was all of two sentences, and then Dad, reaching up to his bookshelf for the Knowledge Of Self. On the cover, her face was off-center. She wore an Afro, and glanced over her shoulder. On the cover was her name—Assata Shakur.  I'd started down this path a few months earlier, burrowing through African Glory, a book my father republished. But now I truly became a seeker. This was not my father's story and then it was, for there, inside the tale of one Panther, was the story of them all. The cowboy impulse took me first, the thought that I, for all my awkward hands and crazy-glued glasses, was rebel blood, and that thought filled me with a stupid, childish pride. But all of us need myths. And here out West, where we all had lost religion, had taken to barbarian law, what would be our magic? What would be our sacred words?

In the summer of 1988, De La Soul ushered in the D.A.I.S.Y. age (Da Inner Sound, Y'all).

I took to Consciousness because there was nothing else, no other logic to counter death for suede, leather, and gold. My father bet his life on change. For the glory of ex-cons, abandoned mothers, and black boys lost, he had made peace with his end. I was a coward, mostly concerned with getting from one day to the next. How could I square my young life with this lineage? What would I say to the theology of my father, which held that the Conscious Act was worth more than sex, bread, or even drawn breath?

There were no answers in the broader body, where the best of us went out like Sammy Davis, and spoke like there had never been war. I will avoid the cartoons—the hardrocks loved Billy Ocean, Luther was classic, and indeed, I did sit in my 7^th period music class eyeing Arletta Holly, and humming Lost In Emotion. But you  must remember the era. Niggers were on MTV in lipstick and curls, extolling their exotic quadroons, big-upping Fred Astaire and speaking like the rest of us didn't exist. I'm talking S-curls and sequins, Lionel Ritchie dancing on the ceiling. I'm talking the corporate pop of Whitney, Richard Pryor turning into the Toy.  It was like Parliament had never happened, like James Brown had never hit. All our champions were disconnected and dishonored, handing out Image Awards, while we bled in the streets.

But now the word turned Conscious, De La refused to scowl, and Daddy-O shouted across the Atlantic gap. First, Chuck, then KRS, and then everywhere you looked MCs were reaching for Garvey's tri-color, shouting across the land, that self-destruction was at end, that the logic of white people's ice had failed us, that the day of awareness was now.

Across the land, the masses fell sway to the gospel. Old Panthers came out in camouflage to salute Chuck D. Cold killers would get a taste of "Black is Black," drop their guns and turn vegan. Brothers quoted Farrakhan with wine on their breath. Harlots performed salaat, covered their blonde french rolls in mudcloth and royal Kinte. Dark girls slashed their Appolonia posters, burned their green contacts, cut their hair, threw in braids. Gold was stashed in the top dresser. The fashion became your father's dashiki, beads, and Africa medallions.