Nettie in Pantherland

Mary F. Corey reviews Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow.”

By Mary F. CoreyJanuary 14, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

EACH SPRING AT UCLA, where I teach history, I offer a seminar focused on the ideology of Black nationalism from Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party. This course has a particular resonance for my students not only because of its continuing relevance but also because UCLA has its own fraught history with the Black Panthers. In the late 1960s, the university created a “High Potential Program” whose sole purpose was to recruit gifted students of color. Among these students were some of the leading lights of the L.A. chapter of the Black Panther Party, including Elaine Brown, John Huggins, and Bunchy Carter. In 1969, at a meeting in UCLA’s Campbell Hall to determine the future of the Black studies program, Huggins and Carter were assassinated by Claude Hubert, a member of the rival US Organization, as a result of a “feud” between the two Black nationalist groups—a feud propagated by an FBI disinformation program. Hubert fled to Guyana and has never been brought to justice. The university has chosen to forget this history.

For 15 years, my students and I have sought to change the name of UCLA’s Campbell Hall to Carter-Huggins Hall, with no success. We do this as an act of historical excavation—a stand against epistemicide, in which fragments of history and culture are considered best forgotten. All of which is to say that I am invested in remembering the Black Panther Party—the iteration of Black nationalism that rose from the ashes of the classical nonviolent phase of the Civil Rights Movement, which by 1966, when Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Panthers, had made some progress but had not succeeded in altering the grim landscape of American apartheid. So I was very keen to read a new book about the subject, especially a work of fiction.

The new novel by Haitian American writer Fabienne Josaphat has a brilliant title, Kingdom of No Tomorrow, taken from a letter George Jackson wrote to Angela Davis in which he described the bleak parameters of his own destiny. The book received the PEN/Bellwether Prize in 2023 before it was even published, and has received positive reviews from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post in which words like “urgent,” “necessary,” “relevant,” and “muscular” were frequently used. These words made me uneasy, reminding me of the way book editors talked about the novel My Pafology in Percival Everett’s pitch-perfect Erasure (2001).

Josaphat has clearly done her historical homework. In her acknowledgments, she cites many of the most important recent studies of the Panthers as well as significant primary documents. Based on the depth of her research, the PEN award, and the enthusiastic reviews, I had high hopes for Kingdom of No Tomorrow, but the book, sadly, fell short of my expectations.

When we first encounter Nettie Boileau, the book’s central figure, she is visiting the home of a sick child as part of her work with a sickle cell anemia project. Nettie is a tightly wrapped 20-year-old Haitian American student at Merritt College (the birthplace of the Black Panther Party), with plans to attend medical school. When Nettie, along with her maybe-girlfriend and co-worker Clia, arrives at the Haywood house, they find trash strewn across the front lawn and a racist epithet scrawled on the white siding; the blinds are drawn, and the sick child’s mother is too afraid to open the door. For two years, her house, in an all-white neighborhood, has been targeted by the bigoted homeowner’s association. Calls to the police yielded no results. A rock has left a hole in the front window and damaged the piano. As Nettie cowers, Clia, who has a lot more street under her than her co-worker, calls the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party and assures Mrs. Haywood that help is on the way.

It arrives in the imposing person of Melvin Mosley—a Panther captain with broad shoulders, a military demeanor, and a duffel bag full of weapons. When the mob from the HOA shows up again, Melvin hands Clia a handgun and says: “You watch the back door. […] Any motherfucker comes busting through it, you shoot ’em dead, you dig? Don’t ask questions. Just kill ’em.” Then he grabs a shotgun and, undaunted by a hail of obscenities, bottles, and rocks, makes his way through the mob, points his gun at a harasser’s car, and pulls the trigger. The bullies flee. This scene is practically a Jack Reacher moment, but it is a pretty authentic Panther moment too, in which a vulnerable member of the Black community, failed by the police, is protected and served by an armed member of the Panthers.

Midway through the book, there is another sharply rendered scene in which Nettie tries and fails to save the life of Lewis, a 17-year-old comrade shot down by the police. Josaphat does a good job here of establishing the Panthers’ mission and the existential perils involved in taking on such tasks. The chances of growing old are slim to none. Death, exile, and incarceration are likely prospects. It is indeed a kingdom with no tomorrow.

But despite these fast-paced vignettes of the Panthers in action, Josaphat’s extensive research, and her good intentions, Kingdom of No Tomorrow hits some roadblocks on its way to telling Nettie Boileau’s story. First, there is the challenge posed by historical fiction: how do you show respect to the realities of context while foregrounding something imaginary? Here, the history Josaphat invokes and the fiction she has created seem mismatched. The disparities in gravitas between the two often make Nettie’s story feel like a trivial interruption of something far greater and more compelling.

The second problem is Nettie herself. The author made a reasonable literary decision by creating a main character who is ambivalent about the events in which she finds herself. Nettie does take genuine risks during her time with the Panthers. She volunteers at the Panthers’ breakfast program and works at the free clinic. She is tailed and threatened by the FBI. But psychologically, she remains Panther-adjacent, a stance that is presumably meant to make her more “relatable” to the reader. It is also a device that helps Josaphat deal with some of the trickier aspects of the Panther story—the guns, the sexism, the in-your-face militancy. While the author expresses genuine respect for the party and a good understanding of the conditions out of which it emerged, she has offered the reader a somewhat unsympathetic scaredy-cat as an amanuensis, a character whose adolescent dithering seems out of place. By foregrounding Nettie’s inner musings, Josaphat loses some of the power of her setting, which becomes a mere backdrop for a rather pedestrian coming-of-age love story. The Panther history Josaphat has so carefully researched is highjacked by the less absorbing narrative of Nettie’s love life and the competing demands of her bougie relative Tante Mado, who wants her to avoid political activism, become a doctor, and get married.

Nettie is perpetually “at a crossroads. Was she gay? Did she have to write this down somewhere? She’d been with men and now a woman, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to decide. Not now, anyway. If she did, she did not know how it would be perceived or received by her aunt.” Nettie’s teenish jealousies feel like a distraction, and her judgments of other women are often unkind. She is particularly snarky about her next-door neighbor Gilda, a member of Students for a Democratic Society, who is depicted as a sexy, chain-smoking party animal, “not a flower child but a weed. It had invaded the garden and wanted to grow, and Nettie knew it was time to pull it.” Huh? SDS was, by and large, a group of committed young white politicos who supported the Black struggle and tended to regard the Panthers as the avant-garde of the revolution. Nettie’s dismissive put-down thus seems weirdly gratuitous.

While some of Nettie’s confusions can be blamed on her youth, almost all of the Panthers were very young. Fred Hampton, the captivating chairman of the Chicago chapter, was only 21 when he was assassinated by the Chicago police. Despite their youth, both the men and the women of the party were expected to behave like warriors even in the face of crippling fear, often sacrificing comfort and personal safety for the larger cause. Neither Nettie nor Clia, the other main female character, demonstrates this kind of all-in commitment to the cause. Clia decamps early on, fleeing to an orange grove in Clearwater, Florida, because her captain has been sexually harassing her. In spite of her volunteer work for the Panthers, Nettie’s alliance with the party feels tenuous, fueled more by her amorous life than by ideology. It is Nettie’s infatuation with the very political Clia that initially brings her to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meetings and Panther rallies. And it is only when she falls in love with Melvin—who is most likely a stand-in for Geronimo Pratt, a highly decorated Vietnam vet who was once the chair of the Panthers’ L.A. chapter—that she finds herself drawn more deeply into the fray.

Early on, we learn that Nettie has her own radical backstory. She is the child of a revolutionary Haitian doctor who devoted himself to serving the people and was assassinated by “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute paramilitary force. Nettie carries the scars of this childhood trauma. She remembers standing beside her dead father’s body, crying: “Papa! Papa! Wake up, Papa!” She escapes death by hiding in a nearby field and is eventually rescued by her father’s sister, Tante Mado, who brings her to the United States. These Haitian memories—Nettie’s recollections of the Edenic landscapes of her childhood and the horror of her father’s death—feel true and unadorned. They also help the reader understand her essential apartness. She has learned, she tells Melvin during one of their many arguments, that “being a revolutionary didn’t pay off.” I get her predicament, but at a certain point, I began to question the author’s decision to deploy a protagonist in this context who is ruled by wariness and ambivalence, even if we know its source.

Nettie does respond deeply to the Panthers’ message, and Josaphat is a fine curator of Panther rhetoric, nimbly incorporating the spoken and written words of Newton, Hampton, and Stokely Carmichael. When Nettie hears Carmichael talk about developing “an undying love for our people,” she feels “part of this our” and thinks, “There was no more she, only us.” But Nettie is not really a people person. Her mistrust of others and her personal unease often intrude on the serious business at hand. Her response to fear is often somatic: her heart “swells,” “breaks,” “thuds,” “thumps,” “races,” “skips a beat,” and even “saunters,” while her stomach “churns,” “crawls,” “turns upside down,” “burns,” and feels “like a jagged rock.” Nettie is miserable in Chicago when she moves there with Melvin, who has been tasked to help Hampton organize the new chapter. She complains about the cold winter weather and feels like she can’t breathe. While Nettie’s emotional and physical fragility, her unfriendliness, and her lack of adaptability to new circumstances do not make her a bad person, she is certainly not much of a sistuh. Indeed, one wonders if she is Panther material at all.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow loses its focus whenever Nettie’s jejune difficulties intrude upon important historical events, such as Hampton’s funeral. There is also the issue of the vast disparity between the unvarnished eloquence of Panther rhetoric and Nettie’s florid simile-laden observations, which rarely stick their landings—“like fish swimming in a half-empty barrel, thrashing and circling around in circles” (this is just one of many examples).

In writing this book, Josaphat has bravely taken on what may be an impossible task. In any case, the skills required to render this story adequately are, at least for the present, beyond this author’s reach. The precarious nature of the Panther’s existence, lived always on the brink of violence and death, may well be fiction-proof. The reality of the party’s insanely hopeful ascendance and its destruction at the hands of the FBI would probably exceed any literary frame imposed upon it. Perhaps surrealism might be up to the task—or opera, whose unapologetic hyperbole might be a match for the Panthers’ extravagantly hubristic dreams of social justice. Imagine Romeo and Juliet in black leather and berets, joined in a final tragic aria as they face a hail of bullets. It’s a thought.