A Dance for Eternity

By Eddie Griffin

It is with utter amazement that here it is 2009 and I am still in the land of the living. I often tell my children that if I want excitement and entertainment, I just close my eyes and reminisce. Hollywood cannot dream or make a movie like I have lived. Hollywood action thrillers bore me.

Here is an opening scene from my memoirs, set to the music of the times. Music makes me remember. Music brings tears to my eyes. How did I survive this real life drama, Lord? I keep asking myself, and why? For what reason am I still here, and what use am I?

I was living underground, a fugitive from justice, on the run. This night on the campus of Abilene Christian College, I danced the night away with the sweetest girl in the world, with tears streaming down my face. She wanted to go with me, to live and die, like Bonnie and Clyde.

I was going to die. I knew that. I had crossed the line, and gone too far to turn around. But she took me in, anyway, and hid me out on campus.

This night we danced to the Stylistics, “You are everything”. Tomorrow, I would be gone, somewhere into the wind, with the FBI hot on my tail.



It was on this night that first heard Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.



An old white schoolmate came up to me and asked if I wanted a list of all the black snitches in Fort Worth, that maybe I wanted to turn the list over to the Black Panthers, thanks to the Dixie Mafia.

When I saw the list in secret, I cried. The list was on FBI stationary. When I showed it to a Black Panther leader, he jumped back like it was a hot potato. So, I got scared and ran away.