by Judy Juanita
“I know.”
“Let’s hang our faces until they freeze,” I said. “Then come in, and the air in the room will feel like needles hitting our skin.”
“Have you ever heard of sadomasochism? We are bringing our chocolate faces in now.” I liked that about her, that she only went so far. We felt prickles anyway. We lay on her bed, side by side, and rubbed our faces.
“Now my body’s getting cold,” I said.
“The cold has to go somewhere.” She threw her leg across mine and I bumped it off and she bumped it back and we rubbed the outside of our calves, my left one, her right one, together.
“I feel your stubble,” I said.
“And you don’t have any. Your legs are so smooth.”
“I’m the hairless wonder.”
“You never grow hair on your legs?”
“Never. Look at my arms.”
She ran her hand up and down my arm, then over my fingers.
“You’re hairless. That’s unusual for somebody with so much hair on the head.”
We were silent for a while. I felt the hairs on her leg brush my leg each time she inhaled. “This is like sex.”
“I know. But it’s not.”
“I know. But it’s like it. I’m feeling the tingles.”
“I think we’re close enough for me to tell you my secret.”
I held my breath.
“It’s shameful,” Xavi whispered.
I couldn’t believe it. I was lying in bed with a lesbian. A colored lesbian. I blurted, “You’re a lesbian?”
Like the corpse in a Hollywood movie that lies in the coffin one moment and pops up wide-eyed the next, Xavi sprung to sitting position.
“No. Not on your life.”
What could be more secret than that? I thought.
She turned to me with this ultraserious look. “It’s kind of shocking.”
“You don’t have to tell a secret to match mine,” I said. “I consider my stuff a fact of life anyway, not a big dark secret.”
But I wondered what hers was. It had to do with sex. What else involved shame, secrecy, and shock?
“I had a baby two summers ago.”
“You’re a mother?” I was shocked shitless. Xavi kept on like she was purging.
“I wasn’t showing during the semester. I had it at a home for unwed mothers, but everybody found out anyway. I felt like an outcast.”
The way she said it made me shiver. “How did people find out if you gave birth during summer?”
“They found out when I was pledging. I was the laughingstock of the whole school. And my mother had me go through pledging knowing everybody had found it out. The big sisters treated me like poop, on top of the pledging crap.”
“But how did they find out?” Xavi was talking to her mother, not me.
“My mother said, ‘You’re not the first pledge with a baby off somewhere. . . . There’s no record of this, no birth certificate, no proof.’ I was going to be a soror if she had to shake up the Supreme Court. The social worker at the home told my mother I needed counseling at school, because I gave it away.”
“Oh, that’s sad. You had to give your baby away?” She nodded.
“I couldn’t keep it and I couldn’t give it up. It was a struggle.”
“So what happened?”
“I let them take the baby. My mother wrote the dean of girls a letter and sent me a copy. It was all strictly confidential. But it got out. The big sisters found out.”
“Secretaries read mail. I read confidential stuff in Admissions every day.”
“I know. That’s what I told my mother. She said the dean called and said it wouldn’t go on my record.” Xavi went to the bathroom but didn’t shut the door.
“So now you’re an AKA, and you’re not a mother, and it’s all cool?”
“I never went to another sorority function. And I pray for my baby girl every night.”
A girl. Xavi came back in the room drying her hands. “She looked like me. A replica.”
“Babies change, you know?”
“All I know is those first two weeks.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
A few days later we caught a bus to the old opera house in Bayview Hunters Point. Sisters on campus had organized a community black-is-beautiful program. When we walked in, I saw what the deal was right away: an African emporium. Money changing hands. Business. An African boutique owner had display tables full of material, African cloth for your body and head, baskets overflowing with fabulous amber beads, shell necklaces, cowrie shells, African wood carvings, drums, stools, tin masks, delicate earrings and bracelets from horsehair. People were buying left and right. Xavi bought a pair of earrings that looked like elongated drums and went to put them on in the bathroom. The sister who seemed in charge came over and asked me my name. After we got acquainted—her name was Li-an—she asked if I wanted to be in the show that night.
“Um, what do I have to do?” I thought I’d have to buy something.
“Just show up,” she said.
“When?”
“Tonight. Seven. Show starts at eight. We have to rehearse, mainly the order we come in.”
“Rehearse what?”
“You pick an African wrap from the sellers and a record you dance to.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah, each sister comes in like this.” She handed me her clipboard and then twirled around, popping her fingers and dancing. When she turned she cocked her head, more friendly than conceited. She walked to a table and put on a record. Bo Diddley’s nasal voice and guitar-twanging backbeat filled the room. Xavi was buying material for an African gele head wrap, the earrings swinging already from her lobes, her hair, in spite of the Tide, more beatnik than anything else.
I tried my turn, knowing I wasn’t brave until the dance floor was full and I got ideas. I was better at running my mouth, but the backbeat, twanging to the rafters, made me try.
“You’re all right,” Li-an said. “Come on, all we need is one more person.”
“Okay, but what about my friend?” I motioned to Xavi to come over.
Li-an added my name to the bottom of a list, telling me I was the last one. Her complexion was ruby brown, different from all the other shades of brown I had become expert at categorizing. Each of us was a wholly different shade of brown, and a different style of natural hair.
When I told Xavi about the show, as I expected, she said, “I want to do it, too.”
Li-an went to change the music.
“You can take my place. I’m not that good a dancer.”
“Be for real,” Xavi said.
“I don’t want to be in front of an audience. Somebody else can floorshow while I check out the spotlight. Take my place, please.”
“Only if you’re sure,” Xavi said, beaming.
We walked over to the turntable and I asked the person who was holding the clipboard list with my name to substitute Xavi’s.
She shook her head. “She can’t be in it. She has straight hair.”
“What’s the deal?” I popped back. Xavi looked like she had been shunned. “Are you for real?”
“This is for sisters,” she said, finished with the matter, and walked off.
My natural glare yanked at its leash. “This is not happening,” I said, looking around for Li-an.
“It’s all right. I don’t want to bogart,” Xavi said.
“Oh, I’ll be queen bogart,” I said. “This don’t sound very African. More like bringing out the nigger in me.”
I spotted Li-an, who was coming toward us with the sister clutching the clipboard in her hand.
“What’s your name?” Li-an said to Xavi.
Xavi spelled her full name, then said, “It comes from Xavier.”
“Are you a
student at State?”
Xavi nodded, her eyes working like wheels.
“What’s with this she’s-not-a-sister stuff?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, that keeps coming up,” Li-an said. “This started out as a natural show, so everybody could see all the ways sisters are getting the natural hairdo. And then, you know, it just grew.”
My leash started to slacken. Li-an kept on. “Initially somebody thought only sisters with naturals should be in it. No sisters who wear their hair straight.”
“This is her natural, as natural as she can get it. We even tried Tide,” I said.
“Really?” the sister with the clipboard said, looking at Xavi’s hair the way I did the first time I saw it cut.
At the show, Li-an put Xavi, the African wraps, and “Hey Bo Diddley” together. While Xavi strutted, Li-an whispered, “I need a roomie to split my rent. Half of $125. Know anyone?”
29
Li-an had found a large high-ceilinged studio in the Fillmore. My half came to seventy-eight dollars for everything including utilities, a bargain even after paying forty-eight dollars for tuition. When Li-an said she would need my help to sneak out of her parents’ house, it was still a bargain. I helped her sneak out of her house in the Bayview District. I had moved out at eighteen on the nose with Uncle Boy-Boy’s help. No one had been delirious that I was shoving off into my brave new world, but no one begged me to stay either. In contrast, Li-an was afraid her parents would get the police in Bayview to issue an all-points bulletin for her.
When we got to her house in the Bayview section and went up to her bedroom, it took us three hours to pack her clothes, unicorns, books, stereo, her Catholic school cheerleader outfit, memorabilia. Three hours. When we got ready to go, her bedroom looked bereft. She left behind hot combs and straightening combs all over the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.
Every hill we drove down, her overloaded suitcases hit my head. The suitcase we’d placed on top of her boxes felt like it was loaded with cement. When we drove level, I’d get a break and feel the pounding. I kept driving getting my head bashed because I was wondering how it felt to be so missed that your parents would hunt you down like Jesse James. I stopped the car and made her open the top suitcase. It was full of shoes. If I had to get beaten up by a piece of Samsonite, at least it didn’t have to be violently overloaded.
When we stopped at Hayes and Scott to readjust the suitcase, an older black woman stopped her car. It looked like she had double-parked to run an errand, but she stopped to get our attention. She rolled her window down.
“You girls a sight to see,” she said, leaning out. “Those African hairdos are very becoming.”
We profiled so she could see us from the side. She asked how long we’d been wearing our hair in Afros. A year for me, three months for Li-an.
“I can’t take this wig hat off my head. I’m too old. Like walking round with no clothes on,” she shouted. Cars honked; she ignored them. “It do me a world of good to see you young ladies. In my day, this was impossible.
“I’m just as proud as if I got my hair cut that way.” She waved fingers swollen with arthritis and drove off.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Wish Woodie was standing outside the apartment building looking out of place when we drove up. I introduced them. Li-an started carrying stuff up.
“Here.” He gave me a pair of silver earrings. “I made them.”
“Wish, they give off sparkles. I love them.” I put them on and began to help him unload the Bug. Wish lugged Li-an’s boxes up in forty minutes. We were cooling off with soda on boxes. I had taken the earrings off and couldn’t find them. I went into the bathroom, where Li-an had been putting up toiletries. She had the earrings up to her face. She put them on and looked in the mirror.
“They look so hip and he’s so not hip.”
“But he’s a good guy.”
“Well, I’m going to class and then hanging out.” She dangled them from her head.
“You mean you want to wear them now?”
“Please, Gigi.” She had nicknamed me already.
I let her wear them. She was off to her class before I could think twice.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Wish pulled out a big joint and we lay there, tripping off each other, happy to be high and together. I heard a bird crowing outside.
“Wish, remember when we went to Stimson Beach, and the cock was crowing?”
“Yeah, it’s Stinson.”
“What’s the diff?”
“You sound ignorant if you say Stimson.”
“I am ignorant.” We lit up and rested on the mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes.
“Put back on the earrings.”
I hesitated. “I let Li-an wear them.”
“You what?”
“She begged me. I couldn’t refuse.”
“Geniece, I made them for you. You can’t appreciate that?” I didn’t appreciate them. In all the moving, I was losing my attachment to stuff.
30
All Li-an and I did was walk outside and people stared and complimented us, even if we didn’t have on makeup or earrings. Li-an had a sexy walk and big sloe eyes. I didn’t know if it was the naturals or the two of us together, but we attracted attention just going for a walk. Li-an and I one night went outside to the store about 2:00 A.M. Three doors down we saw a green velvet club chair partially covered by a drop cloth. Someone had set it outside a flat being painted. We eyed it the same way; it matched the green sateen drapes from Li-an’s bedroom at her parents’.
“If it’s here when we get back, it’s ours,” I told her.
When we got back, we carried it inside, leaving the drop cloth. We didn’t think twice about how heavy it was. Just not being caught was enough.
It became our first piece of furniture, and we took turns sitting in it. Li-an said, “That’s the first thing I’ve ever stolen. I can’t believe it.”
“Not even a piece of candy?”
“Nothing.”
“When I first moved out I was broke all the time.” Getting paid once a month meant macaroni and Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup, a fifty-cent meal that lasted three days. “This one time, I ran out of salt.”
“Oh, bad luck.”
“At work, I went in the lunchroom on Friday at 4:15, when it was empty, so I could pour salt into a paper bag. That way I could make macky cheese.”
She screamed, “You call it that too.”
“I was pouring away when the blind guy who did transcribing came in, whistling and poking with his stick; I thought, Oh no, I can’t live the weekend without salt; I could tell he sensed somebody; he caught me off guard; I wondered if he could smell me or hear me breathing; I stopped pouring; he moved his cane around; I started pouring again; when he heard the pouring sound, he stopped in his tracks and listened to the salt crystals flowing; the look on his face was befuddlement; he couldn’t figure it out and I wasn’t about to tell him; he left, but not before trying his darndest to figure that sound.”
“Geniece, you have no pity.”
“My stomach had no pity.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
We fooled around at night on Haight Street, at the club, the Haight Levels, laughing at hippies getting zonked. We couldn’t have been there a month when some guys from the neighborhood started throwing bottles through shopwindows. The cops came, and the boys began taunting them, cat and mouse. We waited to see the boys carted off in a paddy wagon. Then, like out of nowhere, reinforcements appeared, and the street was ringed with SFPD; the police started rushing everybody, the boys, the onlookers. They looked frightening, so bulky torsoed, coming at me, the nightsticks hanging from their waists like long black penises. My body froze. In my head I heard, I’m wearing a minidress to a
miniriot. Li-an pushed me in the direction of the Panhandle.
“Run, Geniece.”
“I can’t run fast.”
“Run, Gigi, run,” she said, and I ran fast. She shouted, “Zigzag, Gigi, zigzag,” to get me to break the straight line of fire. But the police fired tear-gas canisters. The crowd dispersed. Li-an and I ran for several blocks before we felt safe enough to slow down.
I felt the same after the riot as I did when I took the VW for its first checkup.
* * *
First car from my first real boyfriend, first servicing—I treated myself to a movie, Bonnie and Clyde. From the posters outside the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, I thought it was a Ma-and-Pa-Kettle type of movie, the kind I used to see on Sundays with my cousins for a quarter and three bottle caps. I should have known from the shoot-outs how it was going to end. I chomped away on popcorn, still not expecting what happened: just purely bullets after bullets after bullets, rounds upon rounds upon rounds, bodies falling everywhere every kind of way—and then dead quiet.
I started crying. I can die. I can actually die if I keep going this way. I don’t know if I was sobbing. I think I was. I rushed out of the theater and forgot I had a car. My thoughts hovered over the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde spilling out of old-timey cars. I felt the same walking home with Li-an from the riot. I can die if I keep going this way. Bonnie and Clyde went out like swatted mosquitoes on the screen. People in Detroit and LA died in the riots. Could that happen to me? How could it possibly happen to me? But my curious heart was stronger than any sense of fear or caution.
31
A week later I was excited about attending my first tutorial program meeting. Tutoring primary-grade students off campus would fulfill some Experimental College units. I wanted to meet the program director, whose bearded face was plastered on Freedom Rider posters used to recruit tutors on campus. An Eyewitness News truck was blocking my shortcut to the streetcar. I didn’t even bother to find out why. TV and newspaper people were there every other day. Students whooshed past. I didn’t want to be late but couldn’t avoid the commotion. Next to a poster proclaiming the Sexual Freedom League, a white guy was taking his clothes off in the Commons, as fast as if he was taking a shower. The late-morning chill from Lake Merced had me with a thick sweater on; I felt cold for him. But it was hard to look away from public nudity. Someone yelled, “You need a tan,” and someone else said, “Horny Horny.” The crowd started chanting and laughing; even students from the top floor of the library were chanting. I felt like the fly on the wall taking it in, but darn, my meeting was calling me. This was my first day at the Tutorial Center in Potrero Hill.