Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

  I grabbed a tuna sandwich from the lunch truck to eat on the way to the meeting. Waiting for the M streetcar, I could see the hullabaloo and felt superior to it. I was going to meet with the program director, a man who had been a Freedom Rider, for heaven’s sake. Public nudity was frivolous, civil rights profound; the difference was clear. The BSU and the BPP occupied the radical end of the civil rights spectrum, the weighty end.

  * * *

  The sun was breaking out of the clouds over the Hayes Valley District where the program director lived. At the foot of the open door to his flat, boots, leather sandals, platforms, moccasins, and a pair of pilgrim pumps rested. Ahead of me, a guy wearing a tie-dyed tunic and bell-bottoms walked inside the living room and started reading a book. About ten minutes before the meeting was to start, a young white woman walked out of the back and started opening the curtains and blinds. She stretched as if waking and acknowledged us silently, nude as a baby except for a beaded necklace. The director, a spitting image of Che Guevara, came in, naked to the waist. Oblivious to us, they kissed, a postcoital, satisfied smacker, and went in the back. A few minutes later, he started the meeting, and she left the house in a patchwork skirt and a peasant blouse, as quietly as she had stood nude before the two of us early arrivals. As the director introduced himself and the program goals, I drew mental lines between the deep justice, civil rights freedom fighters, the shallow, sexual freedom, barefaced nudity in front of a raucous crowd, and a nude embrace in front of the afternoon sun and strangers. But the lines kept blurring. Individual freedom and hippies and Black Panthers and Blackness with a capital B and Robert Williams and armed struggle and Martin Luther King Jr., and Bull Connor’s hoses and snarling dogs and tie-dyed clothes and African art and Aretha Franklin and lava lamps and bell-bottoms, miniskirts, and Fillmore West—it all began to merge. I was beginning to suspend categorization. I couldn’t cross people and incidents off the list as casually as I had done before. Right and wrong, good and evil, those categories couldn’t hold a candle with what was compelling, educational, eye opening. My eyes were being propped open, wider every day in San Francisco. Sometimes every hour.

  32

  Tourists came to San Francisco to see panoramic Nob Hill, not Potrero Hill, the site of my tutorial assignment. Nob Hill meant wealth, flamboyance, masked balls, high society, and high rents. Potrero Hill, in southeast San Francisco, contained the projects, the sewage treatment plant, distilleries, factories, warehouses, high infant mortality rates, and my work-study job.

  Work-study was a twofer. I could get academic credit through the Experimental College and get paid two dollars an hour. EC 199 was a community service sociology practicum that involved tutoring inner-city kids. The day after the tutorial meeting, I made my way to Army Street on Potrero Hill, down into a basement, which looked dark from outside. The sunlight in the Potrero Hill classroom exposed a collection of empty food boxes and packages. The bright containers played background to a familiar figure standing, one foot in a chair, and three children, black, young, each desperately trying to get his attention, screaming, “Grits . . . grits . . . can’t you hear me? . . . call me, it’s grits.”

  “All right, all right, so you know it’s grits. Grrrrrrrits. Now, how do you spell it.” His upper lip trembled and made his mustache shake ferociously as he sounded it out, holding an empty package of hominy grits. I recognized him.

  “You look like a bulldog, Bibo.” A skinny girl made the other kids laugh.

  “Yeah, and the bulldog wants to know, How do you spell grits? Up to the board, Tammy.” He extended chalk to the skinny girl with cat eyes and a lone pigtail shooting off the side of her head.

  “I know it but I can’t spell it,” she said, walking to the board.

  “Write it, Tammy, just like you see it on the package.”

  The other kids egged her on. “Go on, Tammy. . . . You know you bad. . . . Spell it, fox. . . . Grrrrrrrits . . . spell it with your bad self.”

  “You eat grits, don’t you?” He handed her a longer piece of chalk. “Find me the letter G. Just find me a G, nothing else.”

  She studied the box and pointed to the G in GRITS on the bright label.

  “Miss Fox, Miss Tammy Fox, Miss Stone Cold Fox, you found your G. Now write it,” he said.

  Screeching the chalk against the blackboard, she wrote a crooked G and gave a dainty smile to Bibo, and a wicked one to a bigger girl behind him.

  “Tammy think she done something writing G,” the bigger girl said. “Betcha can’t spell the rest, Tammy. You so dumb for eight years old.”

  “I can spell it. Just watch me, Yvette.” Tammy looked at the box Bibo held steady and found the G again. She squinted as she sounded out the letters. When she finished, she said to the other girl, “Now!”

  “You got, it, little sister. Now write it on the board just like you spelled it.” He thumped the board with his knuckles. “Right here on this BLACKboard, dig.”

  She wrote it slowly, screeching the chalk with every letter.

  “Let’s dance. Let’s listen to records now, Bibo,” the older girl spoke in a bored-stiff voice.

  “I want my snack,” a boy next to her said. “All that screeching made me thirsty.” He got up, stretched, and looking in my direction, asked, “What fruit do we got today?”

  Bibo pointed me to an open door, putting the empty boxes and packages in order. “In the back room, back there.”

  “Oranges,” I answered when I spotted the crate.

  “The first one to spell orange backward gets three instead of two,” Bibo said as I put the crate down.

  The older girl reeled off the letters before he finished his sentence. “I’m almost eleven. This is baby stuff.”

  “I finally made Yvette do something,” he laughed. He had laughed the same way when he called me quaint at the Black House. I passed out oranges and gave him my work-study slip, which he studied intently.

  “What? Does it look counterfeit?”

  “I was just trying to think where I had seen the name.”

  “We met at the Black House.” Brother for Real, don’t hop off Cool City express and land in Phony Town. “Don’t act like you don’t know me. The Black House, uh-huh?”

  “Yeah,” he rubbed his chin. “Allwood’s sister, right?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a sister, period.”

  All the oranges were gone in a few minutes.

  “Dig, little warriors.” Bibo stood erect, his full figure commanding attention. “This place is ours, and we are responsible for keeping it clean. We will take pride in our surroundings, because that indicates pride in ourselves. Everybody picks up their peelings and puts them in the trash can.”

  The boy threw a peeling at Tammy that twisted around her ponytail like a bright orange ribbon.

  “Mufucka, don’t be throwing no shit at me.” She grabbed the peeling and threw it on the floor.

  “Hey, hey,” said Bibo. “Is that the way a black princess talks to her black brother?”

  “I ain’t black. You darker than me.” She pushed out her bottom lip at him. “My mama told me ain’t nobody black and ain’t nobody white. Now!”

  “Bibo.” I bent beside Tammy to pick up the peeling. “Maybe the little brother should apologize, since he started it.”

  “All right. Chester, tell Tammy you’re sorry.” Bibo put his hand on the back of the striped T-shirt Chester was wearing.

  The other kids ate their oranges slowly, section by section, looking for a showdown.

  “I ain’t telling her nothing.” Chester was unfazed. “Our teacher at school don’t do nothing when I hit Tammy. I wish it woulda hit her in her squinchy eyes.”

  “Don’t make fun of my sister. Want me to knock the stripes off your shirt?” Yvette stepped up to him.

  “Hey, you guys are acting like a bunch of Negroes. A bunch of people who hate each other.
” All eyes went to Bibo.

  “How come you always say that?” Yvette demanded. “There’s nothing wrong with Negro.”

  “Negro is a color, not a people. All of us in this room,” he gestured, “are black people. That’s a word we can use when we need to call ourselves by one name. It means we’re not ashamed anymore. We are the darkest people in the entire world, and we’re proud of what we are.”

  “Yvette not dark. She light,” Tammy spoke up. “Yvette daddy white, huh, Yvette? You got good hair, huh.”

  Bibo sat on the edge of a chair and continued, “Probably everybody in this room has some white blood in them.”

  They all grimaced and made ugly faces. He kept on.

  “But it doesn’t make any difference. Let’s do an experiment. Everybody put your hands in your hair. Feel it. Is it straight? Nappy? Now take your fingers and feel someone else’s hair. Let’s feel Geniece’s hair.”

  Everyone put their hands in my natural. “Your hair pretty. . . . How come you don’t press it? . . . I like the way it feel? . . . Your hair nappy all over. . . . Why we doing this?”

  “Now!” Bibo said. “Pull her hair. That’s right, pull it hard. Hurt her.”

  Tammy yanked it the hardest.

  “Ouch, Tammy, give me some slack.”

  Everyone pulled it, looking in my face to see how much it hurt. Even though it hurt, it didn’t hurt. It felt good that they were learning from my hard bushy head.

  “Now, let’s do that to everyone. Feel it and then pull it, me next.” Bibo put his head down. The kids were amazed at their power to hurt us. They took turns feeling, pulling, hurting, and being hurt, laughing. Bibo ended the experiment when Chester tried to pull Tammy’s twice.

  “See, no matter how nappy or straight, nobody’s hair protects them from hurt. We’re the same no matter who’s a little black or a lot black, right?”

  They nodded, and I nodded with them.

  “It’s time to go.” Yvette ran out of the basement. “I got the front seat.”

  “Last one is a Negro,” Tammy giggled.

  “You might as well go along for the ride.” Bibo emptied orange peels into a large garbage can outside the front door. “Work-study. You know you’ll end up working more than fifteen hours a week. If it’s cool with you, it’s cool with me.”

  In an old station wagon, he drove the kids to the yellowing, brown-trimmed projects on Potrero Hill and saw Chester to a doorway, where he disappeared. The girls went to another building. Bibo hollered out, “Missus Moore!” and a woman came and ushered them inside, waving at Bibo.

  “That’s the girls’ mother. I make sure I see them in, because sometimes she’s drunk.”

  We got back in and Bibo started in the direction of the Fillmore, steering with one hand, pulling the hairs of his mustache with his free hand.

  “You think you fine, don’t you?” he said. “You think being fine protects you, don’t you? It only arms you with a weapon for the time, California girl.”

  “You say that like you’re from someplace else.”

  “We’re all from someplace else.”

  “I’m a native of Berkeley, baby.”

  “Nah, you’re a native. Period.” He laughed. I kept dumping my naïveté, and it kept following me.

  “I can read your mind. You trying to decide which man’ll be your teacher.”

  “Nothing could be further from my mind. I’m a student of the planet.”

  “Nah, you trying to make up your mind as far as who to learn from—the intellectual, the hustlers, or the petty thieves. It’s all over your face. And your body.”

  “Aren’t you a hustler?”

  “And an intellectual. Don’t leave me out of that category.”

  “Oh? I didn’t want to insult you.”

  “You had Allwood. He broke you in.”

  “Pullease.”

  “We thank you, Mr. Allwood. But the good brother’s gone, so I understand, and here you are back in the forest with the wolves. And it’s getting dark, baby cakes. The wolves is starting to howl, hungry for fresh meat. Present company excluded.”

  “Oh really?”

  “I have a queen at home raising my sons. So they don’t have to be tutored by strangers. I would never do anything to mess that up. I’m not a wolf. I’m a disabled vet.”

  “Vietnam?”

  He nodded. “’Nam taught me everything I know.”

  He pulled at his mustache. “Red Riding Hood, I’m your new guide.”

  “So you just want to be my protector?”

  “We’re going to perform an experiment,” he said, steering the wagon through the city, past the tall buildings, to the edge of the industrial nub of the city, just blocks from the transbay bus terminal.

  “You with me all the way?” His voice matched the dusky light of the street lamps.

  I couldn’t answer. I had no clue other than having seen him at the Black House where everything was new, intriguing, and dangerously different.

  He parked the wagon. We kissed, but it was not romantic, more exploration and curiosity, at least on my part. “Take off your jacket, and pull your belt as tight as you can.”

  I did. He opened my door and we walked down the street.

  “Now, just stand here and, uh, yeah, that’s right, you got it; we gonna make us some money tonight.”

  I threw my head back. Bibo waited in a darkened doorway, silently. A man in a suit with a face that matched the used concrete came down the street. My scent reached him. He slowed. Smiled at me. Stopped. Bibo’s knuckles rippled across his chin. He slumped. Bibo found his wallet. Emptied it. Threw it in the gutter. I peed on myself. My father, as big as the bridges adjoining the city, gazed at my hands holding the filthy lucre. There’s not a thief in this family. I had taken money that didn’t belong to me. And I didn’t feel guilty, even with his eyes piercing the night sky of my mind. I had ceased being a spectator. I could feel my naïveté sloughing off like snakeskin.

  33

  Outside of the Admissions Office I noticed a flyer about accelerated matriculation. I thought it might be one more way to help me graduate. I caught the end of the meeting at the Ecumenical Center across the street from the campus. Several guys from the Black Student Union were listening to a short brother in the uniform—SNCC overalls with the deep cuffs and chambray shirt. The cuffs looked a little ridiculous with his height.

  “We need more black students admitted to State. These are the last days of this corrupt white world and its hold on people of color,” he said. “We’re fighting racism, fascism, and imperialism.”

  I couldn’t keep quiet. “Do you know about the two percent rule?” He looked at me like I was high or something.

  “Sister, I was on the Freedom Rides.” That was supposed to shut me up, like who was I to interrupt a student who had come back from the dead and politicized the whole campus.

  “Yeah, and I could be wasting my time playing cards in the cafeteria. But I’m here instead.” I wasn’t going to be cowed by him, even if he pulled movement rank.

  “Oh yeah. Ever been chased down a country road by some shotgun crackers who whipped a cattle prod on your black ass? That’s why I’m here.”

  “I work in Admissions,” I said. “Two percent of the total enrollment has to be set aside for applicants who need preferential treatment. I’ve seen it in action for Dumb Debs and jocks.”

  He looked at me like I had discovered uranium. I went on. “And no way do they have the grades to get in.”

  “That’s one of the key tasks sisters with skills can take care of—getting information from the man and passing it to the people,” he said.

  Another brother said, “I suggest we try for forty students through special admit.”

  I said, “Two percent of 18,000 equals 360, not 40.”

  They all just s
at there for a minute. I said, “Why not round it up to four hundred?”

  One of the brothers said, “What it is, what it ain’t, what it oughta be.” I had to go to class. I left as they were making open admissions for four hundred students a part of a letter to the president of the college.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  The streetcar was so crowded late that afternoon I found myself pushed up against some doofus white boy from Lowell, the public preppie high school near State. I was looking out the window at the St. Francis Woods mansions, the rumbling of the streetcar wheels vibrating my nipples when the brother who had chaired the meeting approached me.

  “Chandro-Imi, what it is,” his voice low and cool even with the din. “Your suggestion was very important.”

  “Oh yeah? I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”

  “You got skills, like the sisters in SNCC.” He was cool, with his briefcase between his feet. “I like sisters with moxie.”

  “Moxie? Like balls between my legs?”

  “SNCC sisters teach literacy for voter registration, run the offices, deal with the press, take good care of brothers, and—” He paused for emphasis.

  “And they shine your shoes too, right?” I said rolling my eyes. Him being a Rider impressed me big-time. But he wasn’t going to lord it over me, like I was a sister-in-training.

  “And,” he continued with a half smile, “they do all this because they know these are the last days.”