Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

  “Still trying to make like we don’t exist.”

  “What else did Stokely say?” I asked.

  “We’re not going to play Jew if the white man wants to play Nazi.”

  “He said that? I can see them trying to paraphrase that.”

  We turned on KDIA black radio, turned off the TV sound, fired up, and got in the groove. I combed Allwood’s hair. He hated to comb his thick, coal black hair. More often than not he picked it out with a cake cutter, patted it, and that was the extent of it. About once a week, sometimes twice if we were getting along good, I’d shampoo it in the sink. Then, with him sitting on the floor between my thighs, me on the chair, I’d comb out his hair, brush it, oil it, and braid it while we watched old movies on the black-and-white.

  The night before the interview we saw an old movie where the guy who was fourteenth in line to the throne plotted and killed off everyone to get his inheritance. Then his wife did him in once he was in line. As Maceo, James Brown’s saxophonist, would say, cold-blooded. Allwood said power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power entranced me, but I didn’t see it as corrupting, especially not the power of intellect.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Allwood walked in after the interview, sport coat on and tie loosened like a character from Father Knows Best if the son had had a Negro friend. When Allwood sat on the daybed, he looked faintly like a husband who’d had a big day at work.

  “Honey, can I get your slippers? Is baby wiped out by the men in the gray flannel suits?” He didn’t laugh.

  “Not to worry. Taste this delicious pot roast. . . . Pot roast? A little pot in the roast.”

  He still wasn’t laughing, although he was watching my every move. Something had happened at the interview, something shaming. I waited.

  “Did they take back your admission?”

  He shook his head. “Everything went fine.”

  “Did you get militant on them?”

  We had practiced appropriate answers to difficult questions. One in particular we role-played several times: “What is the best way for the Negro race to make progress? A: Education, the surefire path to improved opportunities for all citizens in a democracy.”

  “I said black. A lot.”

  “Did they react?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, they wanted to talk about the marchers in Mississippi, and Martin Luther King and Stokely marching arm in arm.”

  “How did you handle it?”

  “I quoted Adam Clayton Powell when he called Black Power a working philosophy for the new breed.” He relaxed a bit as he got into Grove Street oratorical position. “Proud young Negroes who categorically refuse to compromise or negotiate for their rights.”

  “Then it’s just a matter of them deciding on the amount of your scholarship?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You’re getting a scholarship?” Tuition alone was the cost of a new Volkswagen.

  “They’re giving me a full tuition scholarship, and partial room and board.” Allwood hugged me so tight I couldn’t see his face. I felt the artery in his throat pulse.

  “I have to leave Monday.”

  I felt the word leave in his throat, a glottal thump. My ear lay against the cord of muscle crossing his neck. It took a minute to sink in. All I could say was, “Leave how?”

  “The train.”

  I saw a train leaving a station, me watching it go. I held tight, as if we were drowning in a boat in a gusty wind. I felt moisture on my cheek and let go of him. Both of his cheeks glistened, and in his tears all my pictures of him appeared: Allwood pacing the apartment, holding forth, lecturing; reading, his uncombed head bent over as he savored his books, especially his black books, opening each one as methodically as peeling an orange; setting my paperbacks on fire, explaining they were trash and me telling him it was my trash and he better replace it. I had accustomed myself to his moods: arrogant, thoughtful, harried, studious, joking, sleepy, passionate. He said I love you but only in bed, never after, never before, and never outside of the apartment. I must have said what I was thinking, You never came with roses, because he looked sad and said, “I could go get roses now.”

  “It wouldn’t be a surprise.”

  Allwood sad, Allwood intuitive was surprising. As comfort, I repeated how much I wanted to go to a black college, all the better to absorb all the wondrous information in the world of black thought. This ordinarily made him laugh, but he wasn’t laughing. That night, before he left, while we were going at it, full strength, he whispered, You are a black college unto yourself. My Allwood.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Monday morning we talked on the phone, but from the train station with noise, people, and space between us. Allwood had to begin immediately as a math lab assistant. “I barely had time to pack, especially my books,” he grumbled, asking if I’d drop him from the course that we were in together. I had a warm flood of all the places he had touched—the radio dial, the front doorknob, the light switch in the bedroom, and especially his car coat, his long sandy fingers and walnut-looking knuckles fumbling with the dangling buttons. He left the Bug but not the pink slip for the car, and I didn’t have any money to buy it. All week Allwood’s face came at me. Even the class seemed different. The instructor, Mr. Carlisle, young, blond, and white, with a thick head of hair and a head-in-the-clouds presentation, reminded me of Allwood, mainly the thick hair. I tried not to picture us having sex.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  One afternoon the instructor announced that the Soul Students Advisory Council would be paying the class a visit. The two SSAC students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, posted themselves at opposite sides of the classroom. My warm thoughts of Allwood came up accidentally. Huey gave me a little nod, but neither of them spoke; they stood, their torsos as stiff as bayonets. I thought of the warmth of Allwood’s palms pressing my back. Look at their mugs, the student behind me whispered. They’re not cracking a smile. I thought of the scowl on Allwood’s face when he stood on the shelving ladder in the branch library. Mr. Carlisle, so pale and slight, as if his degree from Harvard had kept him out of the sun and stunted his growth, talked as though our textbook author Stampp was a colleague. “Stampp and I concur that slavery became ‘untenable’ economically.” When he used finger quotes he reminded me of Allwood. Something about that made me ache and see myself braiding Allwood’s hair. After about ten minutes, Bobby Seale said, “We came to make sure the curriculum of black history is being taught.” The chalk in Mr. Carlisle’s hand shook as he wrote on the board; he looked smaller in their presence. Bobby said we’d been brainwashed long enough. The room became a political education class. Who-him-name? Mr. Carlisle nodded after every sentence Bobby spoke, unlike any teacher I’d ever seen. It hit me with every nod of his head—I had been in love. In love. I had been in love and hadn’t even known it. Every nod felt like a tremor inside the room. I looked around, but no one was registering the same quake. Huey and Bobby left after a while, but Mr. Carlisle kept nodding. In fact, once they left he nodded after any of us spoke. I wanted to shake him and make him stop. All the fluid in my body gorged in my throat. Why was he nodding so much? Allwood had never taken me to meet his folks. Was I only acceptable in the new black world? Who-him-name? Some students had begun the nod too, but unlike his nervous gesture, theirs was begrudging. Allwood’s soft voice gurgled against my neck, You are a black college unto yourself a black college unto yourself, and I saw the curve of his earlobe, his way of holding the phone receiver between his shoulder and his jaw, his shoulder blades and the long, narrow hollow between them that I had patted dry a few times. He hadn’t bathed at my house much. I tried to count the times. It started to drive me crazy trying to figure out how many times. I saw him bending to dry his calves first, then his torso, odd since I did the opposit
e. I blinked and felt teardrops on my hand.

  What had the ex-slaves experienced in the midst of struggle, bewilderment, joy, oppression, freedom, death, liberty, injustice, hope, and terror? Mr. Carlisle was asking us. I shouted, but no sound came out, Love. Black love. He was nodding before any of us talked—if we looked like we were going to talk. Each insane nod hurt me, and I couldn’t say a word to anybody. Oh my, I wasn’t different from Andrea with her mocha dreams. Love hadn’t shown up with chocolates wrapped in passion red foil. Yet here I was, the thought of Allwood making everything as black as a field of scorpions, a black rose blooming inside me pinned beneath a black heart. Who-him-name? Malcolm Betty Lumumba Bobby Huey their bayonet bodies PE classes the Black House his loden green car coat Fair Play for Cuba the Grove Street orators my hair going from straight to bushy to sleek to bushy being swooped up by him coming as hard as I could whether or not the drowning girl opened her eyes my skull filling with the fluid it was peculiar like Marvin Gaye said and all of it was his name.

  19

  I couldn’t bear the thought of staying at City one more minute. I started calling State’s Admissions Office incessantly. I loathed pinheads who hung around the State and Berkeley extensions, taking a class and calling themselves students, picking up coeds, plastering the Cal or State decal on their car windows or wearing school sweats at the tennis courts like they really belonged. But once Allwood left, I understood. Whatever it took—whatever—I was out, even without my AA. Too bad if ten thousand other people wanted to get into San Francisco State. I had done six semesters at City, including summer sessions—seventy units, the maximum transferable. I was through with City. I was getting into State if it killed me.

  I decided to go over to State and see if showing up would make a difference. I couldn’t just keep calling Admissions. I had to put my body in motion.

  * * *

  I crossed the bay on the transbay bus. For the long ride down Market Street through downtown San Francisco, I took the M streetcar, a scowling brother at the wheel. At Macy’s, a slew of people and students boarded. A SF State binder pushed against my earlobe. By the Twin Peaks tunnel, everyone was so jammed I couldn’t turn my head. The train went into the tunnel, the lights went out, and the car seemed to glide on momentum. No one but me seemed startled that we were traveling through the belly of the city. What if we’re trapped? What if this is a dream and I never leave City and the Dictaphone? When we came to daylight, the wedged Victorians with bay windows like buckteeth had disappeared. Manor houses with manicured lawns came into view. As we pulled past the Stonestown shopping mall, swarms of students walked toward State like bees around a hive. I got scared for a minute. Everyone poured off the back exit of the streetcar. I got up slowly and stepped down. The door started to close on my foot. I heaved my purse through the door, which closed.

  “My purse is stuck,” I shouted. The conductor glanced back; the car lurched forward. He barked, “NEXT STOP.” I stood in the well as the car wheels rumbled over the tracks, passing San Francisco State and the swarms of students. I tugged at my purse. At the next light, the conductor, smiling ugly, signaled me out. I stepped out and stumbled on a heap of gravel in the middle of Nineteenth Avenue. The streetcar moved on, cars sped by.

  Another streetcar approached from the opposite direction. Several white girls, waist-length hair flying, ran across the track in front of it, laughing, their flared bell-bottoms flapping. They stopped next to me at the curb and teetered. The oncoming cars half a block away were gaining speed after the light. I started to cross, walking fast.

  “Come on,” one of them said. She caught up with me. “They can only kill us.”

  “What’s your major?” she said, her dark blond hair plaited in one long thick braid. Like propeller blades, we whirred our way to the sidewalk.

  “Journalism,” I said, adding, “I think.”

  “I thought I saw you before. I’m in French.”

  “This is my first semester.” I wasn’t lying. It would be my first semester once I got in.

  “Ever?”

  “No, here.”

  “And you’re just registering today?”

  I nodded as her friends pulled toward the southern border of the campus. They were a few yards away when she looked back at me. She began singing Roy Rogers’s song: “Happy trails to you, until we meet again / Happy trails to you, keep smiling until then, . . .” and they joined in. And then they disappeared into the swarm. I could hear their lilting, silly voices over the crowd, birds tweeting, cars in third gear, and motorcycles gunning.

  I had set foot on campus.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Twisting spaghetti lines of students were everywhere. Student vendors, Army recruiters, sorority and fraternity insignia tables. Students for a Democratic Society pamphlets, SDS flyers pasted on top of SDS posters, Progressive Labor Party buttons on the SDS tables, Young Socialist Alliance mimeographed handouts, exasperatingly talkative, inquisitive, long-haired, short-haired, blond-haired-blue-eyed students. I looked for friendly, inquisitive, talkative blacks, or the few faces I might have known from City. No such. Instead, an Experimental College flyer caught my eye.

  enroll in 70+ courses the college within the college the free U

  change your life change dead curricula learning is a free country

  many courses credited as instructor-approved special study 177s for 1–3 units

  anyone can teach a course

  The small print described it as “the Free University that began as student-initiated courses not in the traditional curriculum. The Council of Academic Deans has approved Experimental College courses for credit toward the General Education requirements.”

  Like a bird-watcher, I spotted the black students in multihued array, in spiff versions of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. I prepared my tentative, cool smile, shifted my purse so my opposite hand would be free to give a little wave. A girl in a suede suit glanced at me as her girlfriends fussed over her outfit. I smiled. She glanced away. I concentrated on my packet, wondering how to get on a friendly basis if no one spoke to me. I passed a table, the school paper, the Gator, stacked on it. Keeping my visual perimeter open, I scanned the headlines: ASSOCIATED STUDENTS, ACADEMIC SENATE, SELECTIVE SERVICE, STUDENT ENROLLMENT UP, VIETNAM DEMONSTRATION, ANTI-VIETNAM DEMONSTRATION. It all started to blur. The headlines, flyers, brochures, antiwar posters plastering every inch of open space, even the big sloping middle of the campus was rubbing at me, a mind bend, an optical illusion. Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Mis-Education With Paul Goodman topped the list of courses. Below this, someone had scribbled a Goodman line:

  students are the most exploited class in american society

  The courses included:

  revolution: pure and simple

  the holiness of herman hesse

  schizophrenia

  violence vs. non-violence

  lsd: an introduction

  che guevara

  the maharishi mahesh yogi

  free love, nudity, masturbation and bisexuality

  angel eyes: poetry from the beats

  beat zen, square zen, zen.

  I worked down the list. When I saw black nationalism and black psychology, I ripped the pull-offs and carried them to the next registration step. I kept reading:

  miseducation of the negro

  the history and social significance of black power

  lsd: the psychedelic experience based on timothy leary’s manual

  When I presented my list to the registration assistant, she pointed out that I had signed up for twenty-seven units, an impossibility. She showed me how my Experimental College courses would become academic units once I was officially admitted. I ended up with eighteen units, six EC courses. I bought an SF State binder of my own and went to check on my status at the Admissions Office. After an interminable wait,
a student clerk told me my folder was still in evaluation. I hated the thought of being a pinhead that hung around State or UC Extension hoping to get in.

  But I had done my best for the time being. By the time I finished, the air had cooled and students were headed in droves to the Muni streetcar stop at Nineteenth Avenue. I stood on the narrow platform until the M came. On board I stood in a throng so dense I couldn’t reach the steel rings. Sweat, tobacco breath, Juicy Fruit gum, hair, the sharp edges of books and notebooks, the feel of buttocks, the long lean slant of a back on mine, a breast perhaps not a breast pushing into me—in a blur it all became San Francisco State and I was swallowed like Jonah, whole and standing in its gut.

  20

  Aunt Ola called me up on a Sunday out of the clear blue.

  “Your uncle and I will be so proud of you when you get your BA degree. That’s what really counts in this world, you know.” I was already on the path toward my BA. I knew an AA in language arts, not that I had one yet anyway, didn’t mean squat.

  “We got this postcard notice in the mail from Merritt College. Are you thinking about nursing, Niecy?” Samuel Merritt was the name of a school of nursing in Oakland. “It’s talking about your graduation day.”

  “Merritt College is the new name for Oakland City College, Aunt Ola. They built the new hill campus and renamed it that.”

  “You must be part of what they’re calling the last AA class from the old college then. And they want you there, even though an AA isn’t much more than a high school diploma.” Ola went on about how a social worker or a probation officer needed a bachelor’s. I was focused on getting into State officially. All I needed was Ola getting huffy with me about not having the same amount of education Buddy and Corliss had.