by Judy Juanita
“We’ll help with the costs,” Ola said. “It says here you need to pay thirty-five dollars for the cap and gown and the diploma.”
I knew they would have paid for my freshman tuition—forty-eight bucks a semester—at State if I had asked, but why would I have asked? Right then I decided to pick up my AA degree and graduate. I worked for it—it was mine, even if Oakland City College was history.
I entered the auditorium on Grove Street, shocked that the whole school looked so raggedy. I was even more shocked when the program began and I was ushered onto the stage. I thought I was up there for a prize, which I couldn’t believe. My average was 2.7-something, a B–. As I began to recognize faces, I realized about fifty of us onstage were the ones getting the AA degrees. The printed program had 170 names of graduates. At least I’m not the only splib up here. Abner was onstage too. My party-friend Layla, whose father was Richmond’s first black policeman, was sitting across from me.
She slipped me a note: “Can you believe what it took to make it out of this rattrap?”
I mouthed, No I can’t, yes I can, where are the parties?
Layla motioned to the back of the auditorium. Like yesterday, if I ever saw a carbon copy of Oakland City College’s front steps, the welcoming committee stood: Virgil, Cootie, Tony, and Reynard. They were the opposite of the radicals, the Free Cuba brigade. Virgil was the ringleader, a dark-skinned, clean-headed, long-limbed dude who knew from creation where all the parties were. Tony was second in command. They were North Oakland guys. While the president of the college droned on, I thought maybe it was the turf advantage, because Oakland City sat in North Oakland. They were all cockhounds—I knew that from the cafeteria—but North Oakland had top dogs.
“Of our total student body, the students you see here today represent the three percent that transfer annually to the four-year institutions,” the president was saying. “They have fulfilled our mandate from the master plan for education. The California legislature determined back in 1950 that any person in this great state would be entitled to the highest education, right on up to the University of California, provided he had but the capacity and the will.”
I saw Huey at the back of the room talking loud and gesticulating to the Virgil-Abner contingent. Huey was political but always at the haps. I wondered what he was saying. The first time I had gone to a party up in Berkeley where there was no music playing, and there were white kids (I could tell they were UC students because the guys wore creased khaki pants and twill shirts) sitting on the floor by the wall smoking marijuana, Huey had come in and mixed as if they were his next-door neighbors.
“And these students have shown the capacity and the will to make it this far. Only time will spell the next steps. Some are going on to Berkeley and research or professorial careers. Others are transferring to the state college system to train to become teachers; others are transferring from here to specialized schools. . . .”
“And some are going to stay here and party forever,” I whispered to Layla.
“But only if they have a wang dang doodle,” she whispered back. “If all you have is a pussy you have to move on.”
I found my name in the list of graduates. They spelled it right. Good. Layla’s name was there and underneath hers was Huey’s. Layla Nelson. Huey Newton. I stared at his name, Huey P. Newton. The nerve! Old as salt—he had to be twenty-three or twenty-four—graduating with me from Oakland City College. When it came time to march and pick up our diplomas, I noticed the guys in the back ready to scope us all out. I wondered if they were trying to figure out which women they had a chance with. I was so busy scoping them back that I almost didn’t hear my name. As I walked around the room and tried to style in front of the guys I was so glad I hadn’t invited Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola. I saw Layla and then Huey pick up their diplomas. During the cheese-and-crackers reception, I tried to eavesdrop casually, so I could find out where the parties were. Instead I found out what the guys were so hot and bothered about.
“Man, I’m telling you,” Virgil was saying, “we need citizen alert patrols up here.”
“Man, people from CORE and even the NAACP tune in the police on the short-wave radio in South Central. They studying the cops,” Cootie said. He was little and had big eyes.
“Why for?” Tony said with a stammer.
“After Watts, you have to ask why?” Virgil said, with scorn. “You know, that’s when the OPD started carrying shotguns and riding fo deep. After Watts they say we keeping a watch on you stand-up Negroes.”
“Dirty dogs.” Cootie slit his eyes and looked at the podium as if evil was up there.
“The police are worse than dogs,” Huey said, springing to life. “Dog is too good a name for them. They’re swine. They wallow in the slop of oppression.”
I was caught between two rushing rivers. Huey, so street yet so smart, was going on and on about the patrols. Layla was blocking moves from Virgil. She never went with dark guys. She had gotten in San Jose State and started yakking about how she was going to pledge Delta Sigma Theta. While Huey talked, the guys were mesmerized. Virgil told Layla she was light enough to make AKA. Layla said her boyfriend was a Kappa. Under her breath Layla whispered to me but loud enough for Virgil to hear, “I heard Huey got arrested for trying to pass off a five-dollar bill for a twenty.”
“What do you mean?” I said. The fellas were enthralled by Huey, except for Virgil.
“You know,” she said, “he gave the clerk a five and then acted like it was a twenty. My daddy said he’s known for shortchanging, and then if he gets caught, he gets all up in court and gives the jury a first-class runaround.”
“You mean larceny?” I said and she nodded.
“Aw, man,” Virgil said, “Huey’s petitioning the United States Supreme Court.” He turned to me. “You ever heard of William O. Douglas?”
“Of course.”
“That’s who Huey appealed to, Justice Douglas, but the form he originally submitted it to was the United States Supreme Court of California.” He laughed. “Ain’t no such court. Even I know that.”
Huey looked offended. “That’s not why they turned my petition back. I didn’t attach the order of the Supreme Court of California, which had denied me a hearing and an affidavit of service.”
Layla had her light-skinned girl’s sneer on. She asked Huey, “Where did you get your legal knowledge?”
“I took a course in criminal law from the deputy DA of Alameda County.”
“From whom?” Layla clearly did not believe him.
“Ed Meese.” She rolled her eyes at me. But I didn’t roll back because I remembered the name from the Trib. I had been fascinated by the Stephanie Bryan murder, opening up the Oakland Tribune every afternoon after school, imagining with Corliss how a girl like us could be murdered. She had been fourteen, walking home from school, and had disappeared from sight. First her purse turned up. Then her body was found beneath a woodsy cabin belonging to a Clark Kent type. They executed him in San Quentin five minutes before the governor called with a reprieve.
“Four days ago,” Reynard broke into my freethinking. He was cute too but standoffish, like he was judging everybody. “The Supreme Court ruled that a person’s confession can’t be used against him in a court of law because the police never advised him of his right to any attorney or the fact that anything he said could have been used against him. Miranda.”
He wasn’t jiving around. Huey wasn’t either. I wanted to ask if Ed Meese had anything to do with it. But I didn’t want to sound stupid.
“Where did you take a course from Ed Moose?” Layla asked.
“Meese,” I corrected her. It connected right then. He was the DA when the police busted the free-speech students at Berkeley. And then I saw my uncle Reddy talking about the “oh-pee-dee,” the Oakland Police Department. He had said being a DA was a white man’s steppingstone to the governorship. And that
Earl Warren was proof positive.
“Meese, moose, mouse. What’s the diff?” Layla said.
“I took the course right here,” Huey replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “And I’ve taken courses at San Francisco Law School.” He was not at all intimidated.
“Isn’t a fool his own lawyer?” she said.
Virgil jumped in. “A fool would not have had two hung juries and gotten dismissals of misdemeanors and parking tickets.”
Layla could talk fast too. “Who but a fool would live his life in front of judges?”
I asked Huey, “Why are you petitioning the Supreme Court?”
“To erase this felony conviction from my record. I didn’t commit a felony. I’m not a felon.”
“What did you do to get in trouble in the first place?” I asked. I expected him to give me some song and dance. Instead Tony started talking about some house party they had been to, on Fifty-seventh and Genoa in North Oakland some time ago. A guy there had started bugging Huey while Huey was trying to eat.
“Man, this blood grabbed Huey’s arm, and Huey stabbed his countrified ass.”
Huey said, “I was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.”
Ooh. I got real still. Layla got still. We looked at each other. I was out of my element and Layla’s face said she was too. I started thinking John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, juke joints, pigs’ feet; roundhouse negroes, I could hear Goosey saying. The fellas started playing it, taking positions, jabbing, stabbing, and duking it out.
“Aw, man, Huey was talking race,” Virgil said. “He told this dude he was an Afro-American. And that set the dude off. Completely off.”
“Man,” Tony said, “he say, man, the dude say it just like this, ‘How do you know I’m an Afro-American?’”
They hooted, all except for Reynard, who was slick and tall and always carried a Pan Am flight bag. He was the only one dressed up, in a tie and sport coat. He said, “The guy should have known. By looking in the mirror of Huey’s face.”
Tony went on. “Then Huey say, ‘I got twenty-twenty vision and I see your black face just like mine, and you got kinky hair, just like mine. So you must be who I am. An Afro-American.’”
Reynard spoke quietly. “Huey said, ‘Therefore you must be what I am.’”
Tony, excited, talked over him. “That’s when Huey made his mistake. He turned his back on the blood.”
Huey said to Layla and me, “I wasn’t mistaken. It was logical. My steak was getting cold.” I wanted to laugh at this vision of him sitting down at some crowded house party eating a piece of steak and probably a side of potato salad on a paper plate.
“And that’s when the Negro got angry,” Tony said. “And he said to Huey, ‘Nigger, don’t turn your back on me.’”
“Oh, so that was you on the 88 bus,” Layla said to Huey. “You’re that one who started that riot when somebody stepped on your shoe. Fool ain’t know he committed a cardinal sin: Never step on a Negro’s shoe.”
I laughed with my mouth closed, but Huey looked at her like her skin was transparent.
Huey said, “This Negro goes for something in his left pocket. And he grabs my arm.”
Cootie, blocking out all the moves, said, “That fool say, ‘You must don’t know who you talking to.’ Huh! He the one. Brother stabbed him. In the temple, with the steak knife.”
“Is this a classic case of overreacting?” Layla’s voice dripped scorn. “I mean, stabbing somebody because they grabbed your arm?”
I asked Huey, “He didn’t have a knife, did he?”
Huey shrugged and said, “I didn’t know.”
“Huey told the court that fool coulda had a hand grenade or the atomic bomb in his pocket,” Cootie said, cracking up like he had been there instead of just signifying.
“Huey also said it could’ve been a handkerchief,” Reynard added.
“Why did you do it?” I asked Huey.
He replied in a deliberate voice, as if he had said it before. “Because he was angry. Because he grabbed me in a firm grip; because when he put his hand in his pocket I heard something rattling; because his face looked mad. And.” Huey paused. “Because he had a scar.”
Layla hooted on that. She said, “Uh-oh. Scar means he stepped on toes before.”
We were, all of us, ready to leave City and meet at Kwik Way Hamburgers at 21st and Telegraph, except Huey, who kept on. “Self-defense requires a double showing. You have to have been in fear of your life or serious bodily injury.”
He wasn’t just a hood. But Virgil was producing addresses for house parties like rabbits out of a hat. I wanted to hear what Huey had to say.
“And the conduct of the other party has to have been such that it would produce that state of mind in a reasonable person.” He had memorized it all.
As he was talking, Layla crossed in front of Huey, her face to me, and mouthed, “Street, street. Hood, hood.”
No sexual bells were ringing, but his skill at spewing facts was interesting. He was urgent and political like the Fair Play for Cuba guys, only without the weight. He was lithe like the god of eloquence and theft, the one who wore winged shoes, Hermes. I stopped myself from looking to see if he had on bourgie wingtips or street brothers’ pointy-toe Stacy Adams. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him if he was wearing pointy toes. He was who he was.
Virgil, the house party chief of North Oakland, wanted to make sure we got the locations of the grad-night parties written down: Snake Road; Dwight Way; Fifty-ninth and Racine; Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Layla ate parties. Her face, calculating which one to hit first, lit up. Too bad the color line was so strict; she and Virgil were two of a kind.
The night was in motion. I had made it out of City College officially.
21
It never took less than an hour to get through to Admissions at State on the pay phone at 401. I stole time from transcribing; Julie watched for me; and I was prepared with I have cramps if the sup questioned me. After fifteen minutes Julie came out; I started to hang up.
“Don’t hang up. Sup’s in a meeting about the pickets. Coast is clear,” she said. Pickets were carrying signs outside 401 protesting poverty-level payments. Julie fiddled with the folding glass door to the phone booth, then got a serious look on.
“I want you to be the first to know.”
“What? Are you pregnant?”
“Heavens no!” Julie looked like she had swallowed a whale and was about to spit it out.
“What happened?”
“I’m hitting the road. The south first, then Central America.”
“You’re going?” She bobbed her Dutch boy. I imagined a doll with blond hair in a toy car tooling across the plains. “Good for you, Juliegirl.”
I hung up and started out of the booth. But something pulled me back in. One more try. “When are you giving your notice?” The number starting ringing on giving your notice.
“I wanted to see when you wanted to give it.”
“Me? Giving notice?”
“Yeah,” she said, as if it was as easy as finishing one of our paperbacks. “You can’t stay at 401 forever, you know? I’ll sell the Corvair. The VW engine’s air-cooled, doesn’t need water.”
“Julie, it’s not my car, it’s Allwood’s.” I heard a woman’s voice on the other end of the receiver. “Did I get through? I can’t believe it.” I gave her my name.
Julie said, “We can start in the Southwest, work for a few weeks, take off when we feel like it, hit the road, maybe even drive to Honduras.”
“Julie, even if I don’t get in, I can’t just jump in a car and take off.” I was picturing the toy car with blond and brown dolls tooling toward the Gulf of Mexico.
“Why not?”
I couldn’t say.
“Allwood is gone, so you don’t have a boyfriend. No dependents, house, nothing.”
“Neither do I.”
A voice came on the line. The voice said, “Geniece Hightower?”
“Yes,” I answered. I confirmed I was an applicant for admission as a junior.
“Neither do lots of people,” Julie said. “They survive.”
“Wait a minute,” the voice said, putting me on hold.
I spoke to Julie. “I don’t have parents either.” I saw Goosey fanning herself on her slipcovered couch: How could I leave without even saying good-bye?
“Nobody does once they reach the age of consent.”
“Julie, you’re white, you can go anywhere.” She kept on like that wasn’t so.
“Venezuela, señorita Geniece. Muchas gracias. You took Spanish.”
“French.”
“French, Spanish, que sera, sera, we can do it, Geniece.”
The voice came back on the line. “Brace yourself; we accepted seventy units from Oakland City, you’ve been admitted. Your letter’s in the mail.”
I gasped and Julie patted my back like I was choking, and I managed a thank-you before I hung up and hugged Julie close to keep from floating away.
“I’m in.”
“Geniece . . . we could go all the way to South America in the VW. It’s air-cooled.”
Uncle Boy-Boy’s voice came to me: Don’t tell white folks your business; they’ll always try to change your plans.
“Julie, I got accepted. I have my own trip.”
This was the point that I knew for sure everything was going to change.
22
Allwood came back from Cal Tech the week after I officially got admitted. I got a jolt when he walked in the front door, but he looked odd. His car coat didn’t fit anymore.
“Allwood, your wrists are sticking out of your coat. Have you grown?”
“I grew almost an inch.”
“In three months?” I couldn’t believe it.