by Judy Juanita
“Everything. And then some.”
“No, be for real,” I prodded. “After all this time, was it for real?”
“Of course, it was for real.”
“Then what about it was most for real?”
“You can’t quantify it like that.”
“You’re a scientist, aren’t you?”
A smile spread across his seriousness. “You know the Model T Ford?”
I nodded. “Of course I know it.”
“But can you name the cars that came after it?”
“Chrysler, Plymouth?” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“That’s because you always remember the first one.”
“That’s the deep, that I won’t forget you?”
I stood as he nodded and walked down the driveway to the street. The bunched-up dashiki made his coat protrude on one side. He turned and gave me a wave.
“I didn’t want to get corny on you,” he yelled back at me.
“I know,” I yelled. I know reverberated until I couldn’t see him anymore.
“I know,” I murmured. “I know.”
I started to shiver. When I clasped my doorknob, it sent an even colder current through my palm.
Junior
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
23
The incident with Betty Shabazz marked a point of departure for everybody. The Black Panther Party of Northern California had started after the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama made the panther its symbol to counter the segregationist Alabama Democratic Party, which had a rooster as its logo. A small group of brothers, including Allwood, inspired by the Alabama freedom fighters, chose the panther as its symbol. It had all started around Oakland City College and the Soul Students Advisory Council. But when Huey and Bobby insisted on revolutionary struggle, the intelligentsia and artists went one way, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense took the harsher route of integrating the gun for self-defense with politics. Each group inspired me to read and to learn.
I showed up for my first day of classes at State with hordes of students on the floors and windowsills, lining the walls and standing three-deep at the doors, seemingly eighteen thousand pleas for the same mercy: more classes.
“If you’re trying to avoid the draft, consider the Experimental College.” The psychology statistics prof refused to hand mimeographed syllabi to everyone. “You can get your student deferment with EC units too.”
When no one budged he said, “Don’t take up space if you don’t have to.”
A chorus of voices told him, “We have to.”
I didn’t know quite what to do. I was officially a junior at the hippest college in California. I had paid my forty-eight-dollar-a-semester tuition and gotten my student body card. I didn’t want to drop the EC courses I had signed up for and risk not getting any classes. I walked back outside. The fog had cleared. I sat on the grass and flapped out my peacoat. The grassy rectangle at the heart of the campus sloped downward to the Commons, the student cafeteria, and the bookstore. Students milled about, stretched out, sleeping, eating lunch, playing Frisbee, talking. My stomach grumbled; I’d saved three hundred dollars to tide me over until I found part-time work. But it was going fast. I had a work-study job interview. A clump of black girls passed by, ebullient, spiff. I half smiled; they were wrapped up in each other. They were the Andreas, the Corlisses, who had never heard of Frantz Fanon or Robert Williams. I crossed over the rectangle to the Administration building and went up the steps. I had tried so hard to get into State, swimming upstream, Allwood by my side. It was different from what I had envisioned.
But the interview was a snap. The work-study interviewer gave me a choice of on-campus work sites. I chose Admissions. The Admissions Office administrator barely looked at me, asking if I could handle the window for the next hour. I was shocked that they didn’t care if I knew anything. What if I talked crazy? Student requests for admission status, transcript evaluators poring over grades, test scores, recommendations—someone brought me a soda, which I barely had time to sip. The students were confused, anxious, upset, lost, and waiting to get in. They wanted information. I learned where all the major buildings were. The person who brought me the soda said, “Admissions is the only work-study overtime on campus. Twenty-five hours a week isn’t unusual.” My hunger subsided. The thought of quitting 401 Broadway was daunting, but I worked the window for the next two weeks nonstop. I date-stamped application entries from all over the world, scanned essays and personal information, and filed transcripts. Lives came out of the words: how little money one’s father made; the off-the-wall place one had traveled to; family crises; serious illness defeated; political activity noted like a badge of honor—“I belong to the W. E. B. Du Bois Club.” They weren’t afraid: “I participated in the freedom rides.” Stuff I never mentioned: “The protest changed my whole life.” State was a destination for radical students: “I’m a child of a union family.” Dissidents. The streets of Berkeley were the pull for people bucking the system. Nonconformists. State was pulling students like me. I was not an in-between. I was a junior facing a cast of thousands wanting to be right where I was, a part of something big, essential, swimming in the big ocean.
24
Allwood had been my guide, but he had moved on. I could too. I started my third week wearing my burgundy pantsuit from Roos Atkins and my hair in a woolly bun. I ventured to the cafeteria, ordered pea soup, and took my tray to the edge of the pool. The black pool.
“You must be new,” a guy next to me said. “Nobody eats that cheesy soup.”
“I started last week.” I didn’t mention my EC units.
“It shows. You paid grand theft for that suit.”
“Not really.”
“Oh, what then? You got it hot?”
A girl next to him said, “Don’t be so mean.” Then she spoke to me. “Forget Marcus. Your suit is sharp.”
I lost my taste for the soup. “I’m Geniece.”
“Where you from?” Marcus asked.
“Oakland.”
“Figures.”
“Why?” He was getting on my nerves.
“I’m from LA. I got cousins in Oakland. Humbug shit, humbug parties. Oakland is either seddity niggas or Negroes ready to fight at the drop of a hat.”
“Maybe your cousins were lame,” the girl said.
He shook his head. “Only good thing about Oakland is the scrunch. Party in Oakland and you will scrunch, sweethearts.” I thought that closer-than-close slow dance with a rub and a dip was exclusive to East Oakland.
A much older brother in a baggy suit, white shirt, and bow tie, carrying Muhammad Speaks newspapers, approached.
“Muhammad Speaks,” he said, in a voice loud enough to reach beyond the tables. “The true word. The last word. The truth of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”
Lowering his voice slightly, he pointed to Marcus’s ham-and-cheese sandwich. “Still eating that pork, bro?”
“And gonna keep on till the day I die, William-fifty-seven-varieties-of-Heinz X.” Marcus defiantly bit into the grilled sandwich. I wanted one.
“William 12X,” he said, veered back a table, and sold a paper. I motioned to him.
“Thank you, sister with the natural hair; I should’ve come to you first.”
“What do the twelve Xs mean?” I asked.
Someone laughed, a laugh of derision that didn’t faze William 12X.
“X stands for the unknown. We discard the names our slave masters gave us and use X. It’s the mathematical symbol for the unknown. Our last names, our real last names, are unknown. There were eleven Williams who applied for their Xs before me.”
“And where do you apply for an X?” the person who laughed asked.
“Nation of Islam headquarters on Cottage Grove in Chicago, Illinois, my sister. Paper’
s a quarter.” I paid for it, and William 12X offered one to Marcus.
“Not on your life,” Marcus said.
“I bet you subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“Yeah, and it’s only a dime.”
“You can read the devil’s rag sheet for an hour, can’t you?”
“So what if I do?”
“The devil makes you think being smart is the key to life. But Allah teaches—”
“William Triple X. I heard your spiel already. You say the same thing over and over like a tape recording.”
“If you’ve been brainwashed, as our people have, you need to hear the truth over and over again, and over some more, until it sinks in and dislodges everything negative and harmful you’ve learned about yourself.”
“Next time,” Marcus said, getting up and leaving.
“One day there won’t be a next time,” William shouted after him. “And you’ll be too lost to find your way back.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
At work I witnessed students stream in and out of the dean of admissions’s office. These appointments were listed as DD in the big appointment book. I tried to figure out what DD stood for without asking: Done Deal, Diplomatic Denial, Doubtful Decision, Dedicated Drone. I studied their expectant faces as they came in like white lemmings. All but one that I saw were white kids. Some were clearly jocks, big hunky guys, but the females looked about my age. They all looked earnest, and they all showed up on time for their appointments. When I asked Fannie, the black transcript evaluator, she crinkled her nose and told the others the names I had come up with. Big laughs.
“Whatever our total enrollment figure is, we waive the regular requirements for two percent of that figure and admit the exceptions to the rule. Most of them are jocks coming in on athletic scholarships. It stands for Dumb Deb. Dumb debutantes. The two percent quota. Mr. Somebody’s daughter or son.”
“The not-so-smart kids of important people?” I thought of all the times I had applied.
“Don’t have to be important. Just know somebody important,” Fannie said.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
In spite of my statistics professor droning on about factor analysis and covariance, I didn’t fall asleep. After class I went into the Gallery Lounge. People were casually milling about an interview area blocked by a screen. A Peace Corps sign was out. Students were browsing through the literature near a pile of luggage and knapsacks. A curly-haired man in rumpled corduroy short sleeves loosened his nubby knit tie and walked up to me.
“Are you interested in the Peace Corps?” He seemed tired. “Have you seen our brochure? Would you like to sign up for an interview?”
I nodded, an effort not to exhaust him further.
“Maybe you’d like to talk with our rep.” He pointed me toward a young black woman sitting near the luggage. She smiled and extended her hand to me.
“I’ve been on my way to Tanzania for three months,” she said with a Southern accent. She walked me to the last set of chairs. In front of her ears, she had glued her spit curls. Behind her ears, her chin-length hair had been straightened so stringently she had lost some hair at her temples. Without thinking, I said, “Who’s going to do your hair in Tanzania?”
When she laughed she was real. “I’ll fake it for as long as I can. Then go all the way back.”
“Who knows? Maybe they have hot combs over there?”
“In the city, I’m sure. But I’m going way past Tanganyika. I’m going to the bush country to set up a school.”
She was from Tallahassee and had majored in psychology at Florida A&M. A black college graduate. I was immediately in awe. “I’m a psych major too.”
“Oh, the useless degree,” she said. “Without a master’s, that is.”
“I might switch.”
“To what?”
“Education or French or maybe English.” An outright lie. I’d major in English in a hundred years. “Do you need a degree to get into the Peace Corps?”
“Yes, or a skill. Where would you like to go? It’s a big continent.”
I couldn’t even make up an answer. She seemed to sense I was dumbfounded. Go where? I didn’t have an African country on the tip of my tongue. I looked down at her snakeskin go-go boots. I decided to be honest.
“I stumbled on this. The Peace Corps sounds interesting, but I’ve never been out of California.”
“And you don’t know what you want your life to be?” she said.
“I’d like to be a probation officer or a social worker.” I went back to fabrication.
“That’s what you want to do. Not what you want to be.”
Was she waiting for me to say something stupid? To do, to be. Two of the simplest infinitives in the book.
“Don’t think so hard. I’m not trying to trick you.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m only twenty-three. And yourself?”
Twenty-three. Light-years away. I’d be a college graduate by then, taking a civil service test, wearing dresses and stockings and pumps every day. Yes, Sir, no, Sir, yes, Ma’am, no, Ma’am. The report is on your desk.
“I’m twenty, almost.”
“When I come back from the Peace Corps, I plan to get my master’s in international relations here at State.” She beamed. “And then join the State Department and travel until I’m thirty.”
“So that’s what you want to be in life.”
“No, that’s still what I want to do. I want to be a God-fearing, loving wife and mother.”
“You sound so clear. When I think of the future, it looks crystal-ball cloudy.”
“It settles down. Give it a couple of years.”
We exchanged numbers, but I knew I’d never see her again. I felt this odd suspension of my body, like it was a liquid poured in another liquid, a chemical poured into this vast space between Oakland City College and SF State, in between what I knew for sure and what was unknown. Niecy X. Niecy 57X. Niecy Who? All that unit counting at City to land in between again.
25
“Discretion. That is the heart and soul of the process of public policy.” My public administration professor had thick maroon-tinged lips. “And no one is more important, more discreet, more fundamentally trust-bound than the secretary. In the delicate pads of her fingertips are your secrets, and in her ears, in the inner sanctum of her brain are your confidential deliberations. The secretaries are the nervous system of any business or office.”
I raised my hand. The way he looked at me I understood instantly I wasn’t supposed to interrupt.
“If they’re that important, why aren’t they paid more?”
He lifted his bushy, black, caterpillar eyebrows until they stood out over his horn-rims and ran his hand over his crew cut.
“Salaries in the public sector are set by educational level, by training, and by experience. Show me a secretary with a BA, management courses on her précis, and management, or even management trainee, experience, and, voilà, you’ll see a comparable salary.”
“Voilà” came with an arm gesture that said simpleton. A male voice behind me broke in. “That’s not the point she’s making.”
I turned. He didn’t look like a protester, his hair wasn’t long, and his shirt was laundered. But he spoke with as much authority as the professor. “Secretaries are donkeys in the office, beasts of burden. They’re paid thirty-five hundred to ten thousand dollars tops, because if you pay donkeys good money, they might get the idea that they’re not donkeys at all.”
The professor cut through it all. “My wife’s a highly competent secretary right here in the Econ Department. She’d be highly insulted if she thought her job description was jackass.” Students, laughing, began to pack up. Class ended.
I thought of him as I got a grilled-
ham-and-cheese and went to the Gallery Lounge. In the middle of the room, at the podium, moving like her body was aching, a small snappy woman kept opening her mouth wide—Aunt Ola would have called her “unladylike.” But the voice coming out of her sounded like Joe E. Lewis. I was concentrating so intently on the cheesy, buttery taste, and crunch of my sandwich that I only saw her mouth opening rhythmically. She had people stretching their necks to pick up her rhythm. I couldn’t pick it up until I finished eating. She stopped and stood still, as if she was picturing something that brought her pleasure, smiling ugly.
“You know, don’t you, that the entire internal structure of the black male-female relationship changed when Aretha Franklin took on Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’? She changed what had been a man’s plea for the love of a good woman into a woman’s absolute and nonnegotiable right to a serviceable relationship, including—”
She looked around, making sure everyone was listening before she finished: “—penis, but not restricted to it, dig?”
Not many blacks hung out in the lounge. There were none to see this but me. The white students were getting off on her. I shrank, waiting for something smiling ugly to come out. She started humming and swaying. They seemed mesmerized. She was so little to have that much command. Then she looked at me and spread her arms out, whispering directly at me and smiled ugly, like my thoughts had irradiated. Nigger. She said it softly, as if she were calling to me right in front of all the white people. Nigger. She repeated it even softer. Then again, until it seemed she was weeping. But she was saying it with warmth, not hatred and accusation. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Like a lullaby, she whispered it. Then she was silent. She bowed her head and someone started to clap. But she threw her head back and shrieked so loud everyone jumped.
“NIGGER!!!”
She kept shrieking, saying it four or five times at that unbearable pitch. Then she grabbed herself and stood with her legs apart, like she was in the middle of sex. I was embarrassed and intrigued. She talked so fast the words jammed together.