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by Judy Juanita


  Nigger, the one-word country, the foreign language anyone can learn in an instant, the muscle on your tongue, licorice music, nigger shit, nigger please, niggers and she’s, niggers drive me up a wall, niggers never learn, no niggers allowed, niggers, niggers, niggers, eenie meenie minie moe catch a nigger by the toe, nigger-lover

  She turned her black marble eyes on me and bowed. They applauded. I just stared, her voice reverberating inside my head. Someone got up to the mike and said, “Mali is the last of Poetry at Noon. Give her a hand. And if you’re interested in taking an EC class with Mali, sign up today.”

  I went over to her. The other students crowded her, but she pulled me in, her hand soft inside mine.

  “Did I shock you?” Everyone looked at me.

  “Not in the least,” I lied. I was lying a lot at State. “I hear you loud and clear. Putting it out there so people have to deal with it.”

  “You looked shocked.”

  “It was a barrage.” She patted me big sisterly on my shoulder. Up close, she looked to be in her late twenties.

  “What’s your major?” As soon as I asked, I knew she wasn’t a student.

  “I’m from LA. Up for a poetry seminar. I might teach a course next semester. Are you an English major?”

  “No way. But I’d love to take a course from you.”

  “Well, look for Poetry with Mali.”

  “Mali what.”

  “Just Mali.”

  The next day I skimmed the Gator to see if anyone had by chance covered it. On the next-to-the-last page, in a column called “observed,” someone had written:

  Once again, the EC has taken its overly generous funding and clubbed us over the head with it, this time under the guise of culture. A Southern California Negro poet billed as Mali harangued and pontificated in the Gallery Lounge noontime happening. Thank heavens the students had the good sense to ignore thoroughly Modern Mali’s unprintable imprecations, remaining polite and silent until she finished. Would that the Malis of the world proliferate but not here at our expense.

  The Gator made journalism look like a joke, an insult. It shut down all ambitions I had to go into journalism.

  26

  By my third week in Admissions I’d gotten the hang of it—filing apps, scheduling Dumb Debs, sorting mail, getting the scuttlebutt from Fannie, manning the information window. A steady stream of anxious, frustrated, lost students searched my face for answers. The black faces gave the cursory nod, the pinched hello that said we were descended from the same folk down South who had raised us with good morning, how y’all doing, peace be with you. Some spat out the obligatories. A scent of pipe tobacco filled the space between one black man and me. I got his record.

  “I thought window duty was for whites only. Kept all the Negroes behind closed doors. You’re the first spook they let give out information. You know that, don’t you?”

  He talked like Edward R. Murrow, staccato, breathless, in a hurry to get the syllables off his tongue. But he wasn’t in a hurry to move.

  “No, I didn’t.” His form showed a 1943 birth year. The people behind him were getting irritated, clearing throats, shifting books arm to arm.

  “How long have you been here?” he barked. “I need the health plan brochure.”

  “At the window?” I gave him the health plan brochure.

  “No, at State?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “That explains all this smiling.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Let them wait. I’ve been waiting all my life.”

  He leaned in as if my face was his echo chamber. “White paddy, white paddy, you don’t shine; white paddy, white paddy, kiss my behind.”

  He picked up his books and flounced off. I was so flustered I wanted to close my eyes and make the whole exchange disappear. Instead, I had to help all the people he’d shown his ass. They addressed me curtly, as if he and I were one and the same. It took about fifteen minutes for the line to reformulate. I was mad because he was mad at white folks in general and they were pissed at me in particular. Fannie pulled my coattail.

  “Don’t ever let Horace stick his big ears through the window. Nobody, not even your mother, sticks their face past the window.”

  “How could I have stopped him?”

  “Closed it on his motherfucking face.” And lose the job. I didn’t think so.

  “Horace is crazy. Do you know how long he’s been going to State?”

  Fannie had her hand on her hip and her chin on her chest. “Wearing those same Perma Press hopsack slacks and square-bottomed Rooster ties?”

  Another evaluator chimed in. “Isn’t he the guy who smokes Peach Brandy cigarillos? I think his cigars are mellow.”

  “You would,” Fannie said.

  “So what if he’s been here since Ike? He’s cool.”

  “It’s not cool to have been here long enough to get three bachelors,” Fannie said, as she went back to her cubicle.

  “He’s been here twelve years?” I asked.

  “No, dummy,” Fannie said. “And he is not the norm. He is the exception.”

  The other evaluator shouted over the wall. “All kinds of students take years and years to get their degrees. That’s the beauty of State.”

  Fannie made an ugly face, crunching her freckles into a mass. She whispered, “For white people. Not for splibs. If a boot stay, it’s because he’s stupid. Horace is case in point. Negroes have to get in, graduate, and get out. Shit. White folks have”—she raised her voice—“all the time in the world . . . la de dah.”

  She put her hands on me. “Come here, tall girl.”

  We went into her cubicle. Lined up, shelf upon shelf, were college catalogs: Berkeley, UCLA, University of Oregon, Ohio State, Colgate. She turned on her calculator and sat down.

  “How many units are you going to transfer with?”

  “Seventy from Oakland City.”

  “And how many are you taking this semester.”

  I was embarrassed to tell her eighteen EC.

  She raised her eyebrows and pulled her glasses down her nose. “Eighteen Mickey Mouse. All the same on paper. All you need is 120 to pick up your sheepskin. That’s all you consider. Every semester you ask yourself, How close am I to 120 units?”

  She ripped off the tape from the adding machine and handed it to me.

  “Not with the sequence of courses I have to take as a psych major.”

  “Then switch.”

  “Switch?”

  “Switch majors, dummy. Take social science, the easiest way to get out. This ain’t no playground. It’s an institution, dig? Like San Quentin. Don’t stay here longer than you have to. You might can’t get out.”

  “I haven’t even started, really.”

  “Who’s supporting you? Mommy? Daddy?” I shook my head. “If the Dumb Debs can do it, so can you. I’m just saying, don’t act like you got all the time in the world. I’m divorced with two kids in Catholic school. I do it by myself. Colored women can’t depend on Prince Charming. I came from junior college too and whipped through in four semesters without Experimental Disneyland. You can do it. Horace is here because he wants someplace to bullshit. He could’ve had his degree. I know his wife. His kids play in the same league with mine; she’s carrying the weight. You know what kind of car he drives? A Corvair! Perfect, looks the same from the back and the front. Ditto Horace. Asshole to asshole.”

  I thought of City, the street-corner orators who were in their mid- to late twenties. “College is Horace’s game?”

  “Exactly. He’s in engineering, which I grant you can take a while. But that hammerhead’s been here long enough to grow rust.”

  “Horace is a dud?”

  “Actually, Horace is smart. As long as wifey’s content that he’s working on his degree, he got it made in the shade.”

  Fannie marched
me out of her cubicle. “You can do this. Here’s what you need to do. I know you’re commuting from the East Bay. Move into the dorms. You can’t take all those units, work twenty-five hours here, and go back and forth.”

  “I can’t move in the dorms. I can’t afford dorm housing.”

  “Not the dorms, dummy, IH.”

  Interim Housing. IH. I had referred several people there. Emergency housing.

  When I rode home I felt quivers in my gut as I crossed the Bay Bridge. Not horny quivery or having to pee quivery. A high-frequency oscillation, like when I knew Allwood was going to be the one, like when I saw Cicely Tyson on TV with George C. Scott in East Side, West Side, and it was the first time people weren’t seeing the white-looking Lena Horne or mulatto-sexy Dorothy Dandridge but an African-dark woman. Checking out the San Francisco roller-coaster skyline of buildings and lights, brooding Mount Tamalpais darker than the night, I thought about Fannie in her thirties, already flopped at marriage, raising two kids on her own. I didn’t want to end up like that. Who was she to criticize Horace? Maybe she envied him. Horace had someone. I could smell Horace’s sweetish tobacco, see him driving his Corvair assbackward, giving drivers the finger. What would I do if I graduated so soon? Take the probation officer exam for Alameda County. The social worker exam. Be an evaluator at State. Calculator, cubicle, confinement. I wasn’t even all the way in, and she wanted me to rush out.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I parked the Bug behind my apartment, breathing in the Berkeley air cooled by the San Francisco Bay. When I moved there I bought a new serape from the back of a truck, paying a man from Mexico in crisp bills that he folded into tattered, sweated-over ones. Now everything looked old, the serape threadbare, cabinets as if from a Sears Roebuck catalog. I didn’t want to turn on the lights. I put my books and purse down in the dark kitchen, groping for the kettle, the faucet, prepping my mug with a tea bag. I fingered the abstract design on the mug and blew into it, making sure a bug hadn’t gone to bug heaven on me. When I heard the kettle whistle, I turned on the light. When I poured, I saw something black, fingernail-size, float to the rim. A roach that had eluded my roach hunt floated in its coffin, my mug. I started to pour it down the drain. But first I went to the drawer where all the roaches had hidden before. Grabbing a spatula, I cursed the entire species and yanked the drawer open. No roaches jumped out. I went through the drawers, cabinets, sink, and refrigerator.

  Fannie was right; it was time.

  27

  Interim Housing, the tough-shit place for students who had no place or no money, was boot camp—showers with no curtains or walls. When I finished showering the second night, I was relieved to see no one but the other black woman on my floor. I didn’t have to parry funny looks. I had noticed her long straight hair the day before. It looked like somebody had chopped it all off. Her face was round and sweet, almost defenseless looking.

  “What happened to your hair?” I asked.

  “I cut it off.” She stepped closer, as if to give me a good look.

  “What style did you want?” I asked. “A Mia Farrow?”

  “I was tired of it.” She was reet petite, with serious black eyes like watchtowers.

  “Why didn’t you go to a beautician?” She bent her head for me to see, then motioned for me to touch it.

  “Believe it or not, I want a natural.”

  “Do you have a perm, or is your hair straight like this?” I touched her warm scalp.

  “Lustrasilk, but it’s pretty straight anyway.” Ola had used Lustrasilk for years.

  I pulled her hair lightly at angles from the roots. “You can get a natural. It would just take time for your hair to go back.”

  You could forget you had nappy hair if you Lustrasilked continuously.

  “I stopped treatments about a year ago, when I came here,” she said.

  “You’re a sophomore?”

  “Second semester junior. Nursing. My name is Xavi.”

  “Zayvee, like Jay Vee?” She nodded. “I’m Geniece. Psych.”

  “Xavi is short for Xavier. I was supposed to be a boy.”

  “What’s so special about boys?” I was trying for funny and got there. She cracked up. “Do you really want a natural?”

  “I must if I cut off all my hair.”

  “You could put Tide on it. That would strip it.”

  “You must be kidding. Tide? I can’t shampoo my hair with laundry detergent.”

  “You’d get your natural quick.”

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Xavi’s Tide-treated hair took a week to revert to a soft limp natural, with straight strands sticking out. We decided to try to room together off campus and began checking the listings at the housing office. The lady behind the desk gave us a hard time.

  “How do you girls know there’s even an apartment available?”

  Xavi was polite. “If one’s not posted, we want it before it gets posted.”

  “Any unoccupied apartments are posted on the bulletin board,” she said, barely looking at us. I’d had it with barrack green. I couldn’t sleep surrounded by ugliness.

  “If we were white, would an apartment be available?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re implying.”

  “C’mon,” I said to Xavi. “She’ll never give us a break.”

  The lady’s face turned bright pink. “I don’t make the rules.”

  As we walked out, Xavi turned around, grabbed the room reservation list, and threw it on the desk. “This is what I think of your rules.”

  Outside the office, Xavi was shaking; when she opened her mouth her lips moved, but no sound came out. The woman called Xavi back in and gave her a housing referral and me a dirty look.

  28

  Xavi became my first off-campus friend in the city. She got a studio on Parnassus near UCSF for $105 a month. I wasn’t jealous, because I figured Xavi deserved it. She stood up to the housing office lady. I was beginning to see that defiance got results, made the rules bend at State. But Xavi and I didn’t have the same political understanding. Xavi didn’t see anything wrong with Ronald Reagan being governor. The idea of it made me ill.

  “He’s an actor. He’s used to having a director for a brain. Remember Death Valley Days?”

  “We’re not old enough to vote anyway.”

  “I don’t care. It’s like having Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse running things.”

  “My parents voted for Pat Brown. Did yours?”

  Mine. Did mine? I didn’t have parents. “I don’t have parents.” My throat got so dry I got a crick in it. She didn’t say anything. We were sitting on her bed trying on sample tubes of lipstick. I tissued off the Orange Jujube and dabbed on Carnaby Coral.

  “They all are too bright for me. When are they ever going to make lipsticks for dark lips?”

  We kept trying them on anyway—Pink Paisley, Naughty Iridescent Violette, Nectaringo, Great Granny Red—and wiping them off.

  “We look like the low-rent Supremes,” Xavi said. “You’re Diana.”

  “Because I’m the gorgeous and talented one?”

  “No, just the smile. I’m Flo.”

  Xavi dug into her jewelry hatbox and pulled out crepe paper fans in a rainbow of color. “The Supremes don’t use fans,” I said.

  “These aren’t fans, Geniece. They’re froo-froos,” she said.

  She began manipulating the crepe paper, folding and unfolding it like origami, until it fanned out into geometric shapes.

  “Froo-froo paper earrings—you never saw them?”

  “On models, not real people.”

  “They’re for pierced or unpierced,” she said, handing me a pair. She put a flap of purple and pink on one ear and a white carnation on the other. She gave me a set of blue cubes with Egyptian eyes. We tu
rned her transistor radio on and started dancing to the mirror and the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” a solid hour. Xavi could Mashed Potatoes up a breeze; I showed her how to Watusi. When the deejay got mushy, we were ready to tune him out. But he put on Ruby and the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come,” so we did cha-cha-cha and then tuned him out.

  “Open the window, Xavi. It’s funky in here.”

  We squeezed our heads into the window frame and hung out, our faces suspended. The night breezes were heavenly.

  “What happened to them?” Xavi said. “Did they die?”

  She meant my parents. I sighed.

  “My mother died when I was three. And my father left. I mean, he left Oakland.”

  “He’s still alive, though?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He went out for a pack of cigarettes and left?”

  “No, he prepared. He just didn’t tell anybody where he was headed. The family took over.” My voice got quivery. “It’s not like who am I. I know stuff. I have family. But it is like, am I a nobody?”

  “Because you have to ask?”

  “Yeah, it’s not a given.” My jumble, my puzzle, was registering with her.

  “Do you keep it a secret?”

  I couldn’t answer right away. “Everyone assumes I have parents.”

  “Who do you tell that you don’t?”

  “No one, I guess. Those who know don’t ask. Those who don’t know don’t ask.”

  “Geniece, a secret is something you keep hidden on purpose. You never told anyone?”

  “I told my boyfriend.”

  “Anybody else?”

  I scrounged around in my head. Julie. “Somebody I used to work with.”

  “Why tell me?”

  Because you have a face like a wishing well. I didn’t say that. “My cheeks are as cold as Popsicles, Xavi. Are yours?”

  “Why me?”

  “I trust you, I guess. You’re nice.”

 

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