Virgin Soul (23 page)

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

E
ven though I was doing my work, what was going on outside the classroom was far more compelling. But I finished the year, thanks to Cal State Hayward, with decent grades:

• Psych 196, Theoretical Backgrounds, [B];
  
• Psych 112, Psych Measurements, [C-];
  
• Counseling 190: Principles and Practices, [A];
  
• Educ 177, Miseducation of the Negro, [A];
  
• Geol 5, Historical Geology, [B];
  
• English 27, American Literary Eras, 18th century, [B].
  

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

D
illard was waiting on my steps when I got home one night.

“My Ghia's been stolen,” he said. “Let me use the VW for a few days, Gee.”

“I can't loan you the car even for the night.” I thought,
Little brain, dick brain
when he started talking. It was the first time I put the paper to bed by myself. The biggies were out commanding the troops up and down California.

“Why? Muni runs twenty-four seven.”

“Because I work for the people around the clock. That's why.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, you wouldn't understand.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly. Let me tell you, shit gets old, even good shit, your shit too. Everything gets old.”

I screwed up my mouth. He wanted to lord it. He was yesterday.

“So who you screwing in the party?”

“No one.” I thought of Bibo.

“That's impossible,” he said. As fine and neat as he was, he sounded like an old, broken-down car, not sleek like his Ghia. “What's the diff between screwing for the revolution, Geniece, and servicing the quarterback on the football team? Different team, same position.”

He wanted me to feel like him, but I didn't want an angry man. That had thrilled me, the headboard banger—fuck hard, fight the system even harder. No more. The movement had softened my anger at my father for leaving. My father was a victim of the harsh reality of racism and leaving was his way of not being a victim.

“What's the deal?” Dillard said. “You back to jacking yourself off? You think you got a dick down there? I'm here to tell you—you don't.”

Later for his bitter ass.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

B
ecoming a senior was my dream come true. I thought of Juliegirl off in South America, probably a hippie with long flowing hair instead of the Dutch Boy bob. I had gone my very unorthodox way too, but getting out was still my goal. I didn't know what I could do with a psych degree in the revolution. Draft counseling? It was hard to think beyond my immediate situation. It seemed sacrilegious to think about making money while making revolution. All the same, I signed up for a yearlong seminar or special study that required enrollment in both semesters simultaneously. My faculty adviser, an old leftie with Abraham Lincoln Brigade posters all over his office, signed me off:

• English 199, Exploring Poetry, 6 units—
  Fall-Spring
  
• Geology 119, Seminar in Geologic Hazards, 6 units—
  Fall-Spring
  
• Psych 177, Seminar in Community Teaching, 6 units—
  Fall-Spring
  
• Statistics 2, 6 units—
  Fall-Spring
  

Geology and Stat were the toughies. I had used up my allowed Experimental College units. But I could handle six units of tough, as long as the other six units required papers or community work. I could finagle anything written. Maybe there would be field trips in Geology. For some reason, I loved geology. That left Statistics to barrel through.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
kept doing my do, working on the paper, managing my classes, going to tutorial. Xavi was more and more pulling a disappearing act. I figured she was involved with somebody who was apolitical. Chandro-Imi wasn't coming around so much, but I wasn't there long enough to figure out his and Li-an's stuff. I saw and heard about drug tripping. It was all around me. Various people in the party took various stuff. I took bennies to meet our deadlines for the printers. We had grown to a circulation of 125,000 after Sacramento. Bennies enabled me to stay up for two or three days at a stretch. I found out why it was called speed. Others took what I considered to be crazy-making drugs. I took pride in staying away from anything psychedelic, just weed, and that only occasionally since I had moved across the bay. Mainly I didn't want to trip out and become irredeemable, wandering through the streets of my emptied mind. A stumbled-into-nothingness spook. Something about people who drank too much made me afraid of drugs. However, I was a sucker for colors, prisms, rainbows, kaleidoscopes, impossible dreams, anything mutable, rain when the sun shines, and serious young men.

Bibo was one of the brothers who was always helping the staff at the paper, all around go-get-it guy, food, supplies, and drugs. He was like my shadow. When school was out and the tutorial program ended for the semester, I met up with him again on Oak Street. I never mentioned or asked him about robbing the man on the street. And he didn't either, like it was a silent initiation rite that I had to do once and never again. Whenever we pulled an all-night watch on Oak Street after putting the paper to bed, Bibo started telling me about mescaline as we were doing a lips-only make out. I liked kissing him and liked that he didn't push for more. He said mescaline was beautiful, mentally purifying, astounding, breathtaking, woodsy green, free meadows, spring blossoming, eye delighting, brain sensitizing, nature phantasmagoria, I fell into the witches' brew, fear, rationality, and semibourgeoisie disdain notwithstanding.

But I had one condition—I did not want to be left alone. Bibo assured me he wouldn't let that happen. I took a half tab. Nothing happened. I didn't trip out. I didn't freak. My soul stayed with me. And I didn't see any fantastic spring or summer, or transeasonally green Elysian fields. When I complained, Bibo said I should take the other half, because his trip was mellow. He said his heart was poised outside his body, where he could see and hear it beating, like a tom-tom. When he lay down it positioned itself.

I was getting unscrewed enough to enjoy his trip, even if mine was a no-show. Then my thighs lifted me farther from him. He was floating about the room, pink and moist, with arteries routing into his ears.
Weird
, I thought,
but harmless
. I couldn't quite deal with his joy, the goofy smile and aura so unlike his regular cool. His show was releasing him from his front. I wanted mine to do likewise, but I didn't want to play with my heart. It would be okay to sit in a meadow.

As I left to go upstairs to get the other tab, it happened, i.e., the consciousness of it, lightness, as if I had taken off ten pounds. The door at the base of the stairs was open. When I closed it behind me, something in me turned liquid, some organ near my stomach dissolving. I clutched my stomach and inside my closed eyelids were the countless diagrams I had seen of ovaries. I was on them, a comic miniature of myself about the nose and face, a white pipe-stem body sitting on a left ovary.
This isn't too bad. Kinda silly, but no scary stuff. Might this be my exit and the end of my mescaline trip?

I moved up the stairs. Now that I had begun to trip, I wasn't afraid to take the other half tab. I was still Geniece. I felt a swoosh in back of me.

I was downstairs near the door. Had all this ecstasy been a simple walk down a flight of stairs? I looked for Bibo. No Bibo in sight. No matter. It was the end. I got hold of myself and wobbled out the door. The street looked like it had been tarred that morning. The thought of having to walk on it seemed stupid.
Who would want to get that gooey?
I decided to sit on the bottom step of the stairs and wait for Bibo. Or should I wait for someone?

I must have stayed like that for the next hour. Bibo never came. Where did he go? I tried to walk, and this time the street looked navigable if shiny, like patent shoes had melted on it. I walked the six blocks to my place, even though I could have sworn my feet were sinking in poured tar. I vowed to go back to weed exclusively. I love colors, but mescaline was too circuitous a path to get to them.

The next morning, Bibo rang my bell, waking us all up before the crack of dawn.

“Huey got into it with the pigs last night. One pig is dead, the other one's hurt.” We hadn't even put robes on.

“What happened to Huey?”

“He's in critical condition.” He looked at us like we were totally behind the train. “It's going down. Get yourself together. And stop worrying about being cute.”

W
e had to put out a special edition of the paper. We had to get attorneys. We had to mobilize the community. We had to raise money. I crossed the bay to see the only people I knew with money.

Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola were presiding at their dinner table. I had come for money. Ashamedly. “Neither a borrower nor a beggar be.” When I walked in the door, the first thing Ola did was give me a new straw bag. She knew I loved big purses. I hugged and thanked her.

“What costume you got planned for Halloween, Niecy?” Uncle Boy-Boy knew Halloween was my favorite holiday. But Huey had been shot October 28. Boy-Boy was avoiding asking about school. I didn't want to lie about school. And he didn't want lies at the table either.

“You know that Buddy and Andrea are having some problems,” Uncle Boy-Boy said. So the mocha couple floated up shit's creek. Too bad, but it was a ways from what I needed right then. I thought about James Baldwin on love—that it doesn't begin or end the way we set it up.

“Uncle Boy-Boy, you know I don't ask for money. But the party needs bail money for the brothers who have been harassed by the police. We need money to pay the printer for the paper. We just need it. So some of us are asking our folks to contribute.”

Aunt Ola directed the conversation away from reality. “Niecy, do you know that Hopalong Cassidy waved directly at Buddy, like he was a little hero, during a parade in downtown Oakland in the fifties?”

I nodded. She teared a little. I'd heard this one. What difference does a fake Hopalong Cassidy make? Did money float out of his pockets and land in Buddy's lap? Aunt Ola showed me a picture of Corliss graduating from Lone Mountain, throwing her cap in the air, her hair completely natural.

“Her hair doesn't look like such a bad grade; maybe the Lustrasilk has a residual effect,” Aunt Ola remarked.

The meat loaf with its ketchup covering, the au gratin potatoes from scratch, the fresh mustard greens tasted different. Ola's cooking had improved or I was eating on the run in too many crap soul food joints.

Uncle Boy-Boy brought reality back into play. “Cousin Reddy seen your boy in the jailhouse. Reddy say they put Newton in the hole in the county jail. They call it the soul breaker. But I hear your boy is holding up. Reddy say that policeman Huey shot was a badass. Says he was hard on ordinary Negroes but kept his distance from the pimps. Now, you know that ain't right.”

“That is the original stimulus for the party. Patrol the ghetto to prevent the police from mistreating us.”

Uncle Boy-Boy kept with what he wanted to say. “Reddy also say the OPD the night of the shoot-out looking for two male Negroes riding around. And they knew that your boy had a big fuzzy natural and was light-skinned. Sound like a setup to me.”

“Uncle Reddy is the original invisible man, Uncle Boy-Boy.”

My uncle leaned back. “My passing-white cuz knows how to keep his mouth shut until he needs to open it.”

Ola had left the price tag on the straw bag. “I never gave you a gift proper for graduation.”

I pulled the tag off the straw bag and began putting the contents of my worn leather purse in it, including an issue of the
Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
. As I looked at it, I decided to show it to them.

“Here's the very first issue of the paper.”

“Did you work on that, Niecy?” Aunt Ola asked, beginning to read the front page.

“No, I wasn't a member yet. I knew about the Panthers but hadn't joined.” The banner headline was
WHO KILLED DENZIL DOWELL?

“Was this the young man in Richmond?” Uncle Boy-Boy got his reading glasses out.

I nodded. “You know, when the Richmond pigs shot the two others before they gunned down Denzil, the coroner found bullet holes in their armpits.”

“My goodness,” Aunt Ola said. “Does that mean they had their arms blown off?”

“Ola, the police shot the young brothers while they were holding their arms up over their heads, like they had been asked to do.” Uncle Boy-Boy scrutinized the paper. “So the Panthers are going to patrol the community and patrol the pigs.”

“Now, dear, don't you start calling policemen that word,” Ola admonished Boy-Boy, turning to me. “Why do you use that horrible term anyway?”

Uncle Boy-Boy leaned back from the paper. “Ola, these young people are reminding us that the Gestapo in World War II did the same thing. Those Nazis treated Jews the same way, came into their communities, brutalizing and killed, shipped them off to the camps because they were a different race. Same problem, different time. Prejudice, hatred.”

“Aunt Ola,” I said. “Bobby Seale says a policeman is a pig when he violates the constitutional rights, and even human rights, of the very people he's sworn to protect.”

“All police?”

“Ola, the ones who shoot black boys in the armpits.” Boy-Boy placed his finger next to Denzil Dowell's image in the BPP newspaper. Ola picked up the paper and began reading it again.

“But what really frightens me are the guns. Why do you need to fight violence with violence?” she said, getting more stressed with each page she turned. “This is a very dark world, Geniece. And why are there so many cartoons with killing and blood?”

“Aunt Ola, this is what's happening here. Not just down South. Why do you think people are rioting in all the big cities? Chicago, Detroit, LA. The police have taken the power that we have given them and abused it. They think it's all right to trample on black people.”

“Answer my question, Niecy.”

“About violence?”

“You know it's about the violence. Don't play with me. I'm not as dumb as you like to think.”

I sighed. Ola's hackles were up. “Huey P. Newton says that we're going to defend ourselves against any racist attacks. It's a way of showing the people that they don't have to take all this brutality sitting down. They need to form neighborhood patrols. They need to put some fear into the pigs' hearts.”

“Are you a parrot for these older men? They prey on younger women, you know, especially idealistic ones. Have they asked you for sex, Niecy?”

“No, Ola, actually they're perfect gentlemen.”

“What!?” She was astounded. Manners were as important as beliefs to Ola. I was beginning to feel less shitty about asking for money.

“Yes, they are. I met Huey at Oakland City. His girlfriend's locker was right next to mine.”

“Did he begin indoctrinating you then?”

“Ola,” Uncle Boy-Boy busted in. “You know Niecy's too hardheaded to be indoctrinated. She's just a natural rebel. Who's afraid of cats. She likes some damn panthers but hates cats.”

“Well, do they hate white people?” Ola was beginning to soften up.

“That's a cultural nationalist position. Black pride and wearing the big Afros.”

“Niecy, you've been doing those things since you started college. Aren't you a cultural nationalist?”

I shook my head. “An Afro doesn't stop bullets. Black pride is not a weapon against police brutality. And the Panthers have alliances with white radicals, something Allwood and his group would never do.”

“But all this started from those ideas of Allwood, did it not?” Ola was smarter than I thought.

“I give Allwood credit. He introduced me to many ideas and books. But he wasn't radical. A radical gets to the root of a problem. Books alone can't change the problem. Somebody has to take action on the theories. That's why I became an activist.”

Uncle Boy-Boy walked out of the room, raising his voice so I could hear him.

“Now, Niecy, you all call yourselves black revolutionaries. ‘Off the pig,' you teach the young people, ‘Death to this Racist System.' You're teaching yourselves to bring the system down. ‘Kill or be killed.' ‘Give me liberty or give me death.' But when the man turns on you because you turned on him, you want to cry foul play. And you want us to give you our hard-earned money for your beloved defense committee, for something you willfully brought on yourselves. Now, I ask you, does it make sense for me to give you my hard cash so you can make a white lawyer rich, the bail bondsmen rich, and the newspapers rich running behind and quoting you on the six o'clock news?”

He came back in the dining room with a small white envelope and shoved it in my purse.

“Uncle Boy-Boy, you know I don't like asking anybody for anything.”

“Like your pops. Hardheaded. But you're swimming in catastrophe here.”

*   *   *

W
hen I pulled up to the Bay Bridge and opened the straw purse for the toll, I found a note from Uncle Boy-Boy with two hundred dollars in twenties, tens, fives—cash my relatives had paid him bill by sweaty bill. The note said: “Be careful, I don't want to pick you up in a pine box.”
Pinned on the note was another seventy-five dollars that I knew from the way it was pinned was Aunt Ola's doing.

My people knew the police weren't right.

Every tribe had sent one like me into the BPP, the people's army, to grieve the system. The roots of the BPP lay in the goodwill of the black community and its utter disgust with the occupying army called the police. Our relatives were our invisible members. To cut these roots would have been disastrous.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

T
hat Sunday, while my aunt and uncle were sitting, I presumed, in church, I joined a platoon of sisters inside DeFremery House, a twenty-four-room house supported by round columns, enclosed by a railing of balusters. Outside in the Oakland sun, with oaks and magnolias shedding late autumn leaves, two thousand Panther supporters, fellow travelers, and sympathizers had gathered to protest police brutality. We gathered for the revolutionary moment at DeFremery Park in West Oakland. I was a scribe, but I could do sisterly work too. Inside the creaking nineteenth-century Gothic Revival house, we peeled boiled potatoes, cracked shells of boiled eggs, and chopped celery for the potato salad to feed the people.

Elaine Brown walked in. She had set up the party's Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles before moving to Oakland. We had had no contact, but her revolutionary singing moved me with its fervor and aching simplicity.

“Separate the egg yolks from the whites and mash them with the mustard,” she instructed us. “This is the way you do this.”

“It's already done,” I answered. “Peeled, chopped, and mixed in with the mustard.”

She yelled at me, not like she was mad, just in charge and hierarchical. A cool anger spurted up and down my body. She didn't know me from Adam. I was an example for the others. In the flesh, she was a high-yellow stalker. I talked to myself:
I'm cool, I'm a worker, I can take it, the people matter.
But it wasn't cool.

I had scoped the set and it was looking like a scene, like a fashion or a trend. A young, healthy, fine, attractive, lively crowd here to see and be seen, to support the party, yes, but to catch and be caught. It was a dating game for young blacks in the Bay Area, a spin-off of the movement. Some of the same guys on the lawn at DeFremery I'd seen at the rifle range comparing prices for 30.06s. Gun as status symbol, metal dick.

The potato salad got made and taken outside. I tasted Elaine's. It was tangier. Hers had bite. I understood why she was moving to the center. I had a sharper taste on my tongue than potato salad, the taste of being relegated. Not to my taste. But injustice was stronger than a bad taste.