I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey … Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values and that I was defiling his women…

Cleaver frames this section with explanations of how he developed his violent attitude towards white women and then how, when he returned to prison for his crimes of rape, he felt he had dehumanized himself and could no longer “approve the act of rape.” (33-4)

      In Soul on Fire, the book Cleaver wrote and published after his return to the US in the mid-1970s, he offers a further account of his rape methods — one that describes his actions as a controlled performance. Cleaver wrote:

The play-acting of the criminal is hourly theater. When, in my late teens, I started to develop the rape routine in the motel circuit, I usually posed as an investigative agent or private detective coming to question a couple in their room. After tying up the man, I would first look at their I.D. cards, check out who they were, and quickly discover they were not husband and wife. I’d act like I was writing this information down on a pad, creating a scene that would plague their operative paranoia in whatever they were into or shouldn’t have been into. They wouldn’t dare report me as I had masqueraded as some off-balance investigator. All the crime shows on television played into my act. (67)

In this description, Cleaver’s act seems squarely positioned as “reverse discourse” as he takes control over his performance and the unwilling co-performers. He is mobile, quick-witted, and knows how to use the fears created by established discourses of marriage and sexual behaviour to silence his victims. Yet at the same time, one can read this described performance as embedded in that aforementioned tension between submission and resistance: Cleaver performs a version of Black hypersexual and criminal masculinity that aligns exactly with white fears and myths established during slavery and persisting through popular culture. As Cleaver states in a reverse understanding of his subject position: “All the crime shows on television played into my act.” In fact, Cleaver played into the limited, racist roles available to Black men on television as in real life.

      Through literary and visual texts, Miller’s analysis of the Black dandy and his place in American racial history provides a key conceptual frame through which to understand Cleaver’s interest in clothing and in dressing his gendered and racialized body at a point in his life when his political performance seemed to be losing an audience. Cleaver, throughout his adult life, navigated and survived American racism through performance, as did many other African Americans. White supremacy required Black Americans to perform affective states and attitudes such as inferiority, deference, happiness, and passivity for whites of all classes to avoid legal, verbal, and physical assaults. Cleaver’s stunning pants design represented the height of his performer-designer creativity, as well as a point of crisis while he hovered between an old and a new role: between his loneliness and growing irrelevance in European exile, and the compromised freedom he returned to in the United States.

      In Soul on Fire, Cleaver describes falling into a deep depression in France, during which time he experienced a spiritual epiphany of some sort and became a devout Christian. At the same time, during what seems to have been a burst of creative energy, Cleaver turned to what may have been a long term but as yet unrealized interest in clothing and its connection to gender. In western Europe and the United States, from the late 1960s through much of the 1970s, the gendering of street style clothing shifted in response to the women’s movement and the liberatory politics of youth rebellion, not all of which Cleaver agreed with.