Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

  Bibo walked to the edge, target in hand. He had bowlegs like Chandro-Imi. Maybe he was a cowboy back a century ago. I watched him post the target. He walked up and unraveled his target. Cocksure he posted it. The rednecks moved fast. When they reached him, they pointed to the target. Our target was different. Theirs was abstract, round circles within a circle, ours a man’s torso with a small circle on the heart. Bibo argued with his fingers pointing, head bobbing. The men jabbed at the target. One motioned to the office. Three men, red emblems on their arms, rushed to the post, dressed alike in jumpsuits. They argued. Their shoulders jerked. Marcus began taking our target down, neatly rolling it under his arm. He came over and handed it to me.

  “I’m just getting my edumacashun, dig? Y’all too East Oakland for me. Fuck this confrontation bullshit.” He got in the second car, carrying his uncle’s rifle.

  Bibo and I left together, the noise of ricocheting bullets behind us. I sat silently. I had never handled a gun. I hadn’t grown up with guns or hunters. I knew having a weapon didn’t mean you had to use it. For heaven’s sakes, the United States had the H-bomb all those years and didn’t use it. But the threat of annihilation scared the hell out of Russia.

  I didn’t figure we were killers, not really, but if we didn’t stand up to those who would kill and annihilate us, who would?

  I understood the gun as a symbol of defiance.

  I understood that at the airport with Betty Shabazz, when the flaky Panthers showed up with empty guns, that was chickenshit. The police hadn’t shown up with unloaded guns.

  I wasn’t at Allwood’s side anymore, but I didn’t want to kill anyone or be killed. I was still on the fence between all-out revolutionary and curious Geniece. I decided to give the BPP a rest for a while, kind of a hiatus from the deep.

  40

  I didn’t fly into Dillard’s arms when I saw him again. But when he asked me out, I gave him my address. That weekend, we popped in on Pharoah Sanders in the Fillmore and ended up at Dillard’s place. His pad on Stanyan Street was so luxe I felt underdressed. It had oriental rugs, damask rose upholstery, and velvety footstools. I knew his bed wouldn’t be a mattress on the floor. It was an oak four-poster. As soon as I hit the surface of the bed Dillard went to work. He pulled off my panties with the efficiency of a gift wrapper at Christmastime. I was wondering if he’d maneuver my slip over my shoulders or wriggle it past my hips. He didn’t need to do either for slip fucking. It felt like a Ferris wheel ride, up, down, all around, but the mattress was lumpy.

  “You need a new mattress,” I told him afterward.

  “Shit, the landlady needs a new mattress. I don’t need a new nothing.”

  “This is your place?”

  “Renting.”

  “You’re not renting the bed?”

  “Bed, linen, furniture. I don’t even replace lightbulbs.”

  I got back in the rented bed while he did some coke. I ran my finger along his nostril. He grabbed my finger, licked it, and kissed it. “I have this girlfriend. She was going with this guy named Joe the Blow man. She’s crazy about him.”

  “And he’s crazy about blow, right?”

  “Yeah, but he gets stoned off LSD every weekend, it seems.”

  “He’s wired.”

  “She’s always asking, ‘How much do you love me, Joe?’ She even asks me how much. He tells her you can’t measure love.”

  “Sounds right to me.”

  “Eventually he calls her to get her stuff. She’d been half expecting it, but you know, this was bad. In tears she gets there, the door’s unlocked, she walks in, and he’s in the bedroom, fucking an Asian chick. Of course, she runs back out, crying, stunned to the bone.

  “He finally answered the question on her mind.” He was cracking up.

  I saw it as tragic. “Drugs and hallucinations and being high every day make a man cruel?”

  “Nah. He was copying The Carpetbaggers. The movie with George Peppard.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “When Peppard couldn’t get through to his old lady the soft and stupid way, he made it pictorial.”

  “Why doesn’t a guy who wants out just say he’s through, good-bye?”

  “Guys are cowards.”

  “Cruel cowards?”

  “Give you a clue, though. No man likes to think a woman will ever forget him.”

  With his index finger he touched my throat. “Even when we get to the bottom of our little soiree, it would hurt to think that you might forget me.”

  “Would you carpetbag me?”

  His face contorted. “Hollywood! That’s how the white man sells himself to the world. Paddy boy can’t teach me shit about shit. I fall into better heights than he dreams of reaching.”

  His emotion was blood kin to the defenselessness I hid from the world.

  And so I fell into Dillard’s arms.

  * * *

  The next time we got together we stopped by his mother’s Edwardian just two blocks from the Black House. Her front door closing behind us echoed like the tomb at Gethsemane. I looked through the etched glass oval onto Sutter Street, where a car went by like a windup toy.

  “You can’t hear the traffic once you get inside,” Dillard said. He opened a set of French doors. Our heels clicked across the checkerboard tiles of the foyer. The living room had wainscoting white and gleaming next to walls that were faded red like dusty persimmons.

  “This is grand,” I said to him in a gilt mirror. “Did you grow up here?”

  There was so much to look at. A table with inlaid marble nicked my knee as I edged past; samurai dueled and postured across the dusky blue panels of a screen. Naked from the waist up, Japanese maidens lolled about, their hair elaborately piled.

  “Here and next door.” As he opened blue-and-white porcelain jars on the mantel, they clinked like chimes.

  “What’s next door?”

  “Pops lives there. Moms here.” He sat on a red chintz sofa with curlicue fringe. “Sit. Next to me.”

  I sunk into the sofa. “This is where you get your love of luxury.”

  “You call this luxury? You should see Dad’s.”

  “What do they do for a living?”

  “Same thing yours do. Work, work, work.”

  “Not your favorite pastime?”

  “Not if that’s all there is. Dad’s a longshoreman. She teaches. Good enough?”

  I shrugged.

  “Why ask?”

  Why did he deal blow if he came from this—and was smart. “Do they know you deal?”

  “Be for real.”

  I was silent. “They’re divorced?”

  “No need for that.”

  So he was a broken-home baby too.

  “We have holidays together.”

  “Do they borrow sugar from each other?”

  He nodded. “Thanksgiving here, Christmas there.”

  A light-skinned woman came in the room with a bearing to stiffen Marie Antoinette’s spine.

  “What’s all this Thanksgiving-Christmas talk?” she said.

  Dillard got up. “Mother, this is Geniece.” I stood, but it was clear from her nod and look-me-over that I was not to cross over to her. Dillard kept opening jars without putting the tops back on.

  “I would appreciate you keeping your sticky fingers off my chinoiserie,” she declared.

  Dillard, urn top in hand, snorted. “I’m letting the haunts out.”

  “Nonsense,” his mother said. “That’s an eighteenth-century French antique.”

  He peered in an urn. “They love to hide inside. Probably a crowd inside this one. Join us, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Don’t fool with me, Dillard. That box was made from Honduras mahogany, inlaid.” She gave me a final scrutiny. “Young lady, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

 
; She left and Dillard started saying, “Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali.”

  I knew he wanted me to say it again and again. “Now what does Cassius Clay have to do with genies in jars?”

  “If you believe in Cassius Clay, who no longer exists, you might as well believe in haunts. What does the man have to do for you to honor his personhood? He’s officially declared himself Muhammad Ali.”

  “I give. Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali.”

  He began replacing the tops. “Now the haunts go back.”

  41

  When Stokely Carmichael came to town again, Chandro-Imi told Li-an and me that we could host the party after his speech. Li-an started list making and Xavi joined in:

  clean spots off kitchen floor

  wax the hall (which we’d been intending to do since we moved in)

  hang our mirror (which we’d left sitting against the wall because we didn’t want to break it and get seven years’ bad luck)

  buy munchies

  Li-an got to “buy” and stopped writing. We looked at Chandro-Imi, who pulled out a ten-dollar bill.

  “Peanuts,” Li-an said.

  “Should we go down to the candy store and buy a few boxes of Jujubes?” Xavi asked.

  “This is all I have,” he said, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill. Li-an snatched it. I took it from her and waved it at him.

  “But money’s not the object in this. We’re not capitalists,” I said, tearing the bill in half. “Are we?” I handed the halves to him.

  “Are you off?” Chandro-Imi said.

  “Brother-to-the-big-time, we need sixty dollars,” I said, pulling a figure out of my head. “We’re going to get down on our hands and knees, wax, polish, dust, fix food, and shine up our behinds for thirty dollars? Is his name Saint Stokely?”

  He shook his head, like I was pathetic, and I shook my head back at him.

  “Okay, I’ll get the money out of the student activities budget,” he said.

  “Today,” Li-an said, putting the list down on the table. I gave her the thanks-for-kicking-in eye. She was no stranger to putting her foot down, but she looked up to Chandro-Imi. Yet I knew from Uncle Boy-Boy about money up front, even small bills.

  “So what am I supposed to do with this?” Chandro-Imi held the torn twenty-dollar bill up. I went to the kitchen drawer and got some Scotch tape.

  “Nothing but filthy lucre, especially by time cullud folks get it,” I said, taping it.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Unannounced and unattended later that evening, Stokely Carmichael walked in, glittering in the dark of the hall, wearing the SNCC overalls. He looked like himself, sexy as a motherfuck. My mouth fell open.

  He smiled. “May I come in?”

  I opened the door wide. I couldn’t speak, and he wasn’t going to cross the threshold until I did. I got my throat unthrottled. “Please. We’ve been waiting for you. I saw you speak last year at Berkeley.”

  I almost said I’m a fan. I closed the door and watched him move into the party. Several people gasped. Xavi picked the needle off the record player. The people started to clap and shout, “Black Power, Black Power.” All the energy in the Greek Theatre at UC, where I first saw him, filled my apartment. I barely heard the bell buzz again. Two tall black men in the trademark overalls, clunky boots, and serious, biblical beards, not goatees, presented themselves by nodding silently, as if to acknowledge that this was routine: Stokely first, “Black Power” next, and then them. I watched the three of them, distinctly tall and self-assured, as people crowded around. It didn’t matter if people couldn’t get to Stokely Carmichael all at once with them there. Clusters worked their way up to Stokely.

  Li-an sidled up to me. “Are those his lieutenants?”

  Chandro-Imi, the overseeing soul, spoke. “They’re field organizers. And they’re not his.”

  “Well, what do they do?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you ask them?” he said, his smile as wide and pleased as I’d ever seen it. Li-an plunged into a cluster and started working her way up.

  “So, you pulled it off?” I said to Chandro-Imi.

  “No, we pulled it off. This is a unity thing,” he said.

  By then, the party was in Stage III. Stage I: warm-up, arrivals. Stage II: main event, Stokely Carmichael. Stage III: hookups, departures. Stage IV: afterset talk for serious folk. Food gone and garbage heaped in the can. I hadn’t shaken The Hand yet; we had this big mess to clean up. I left the kitchen mess, rum and Coke in hand, to see Stokely in the center of the room surrounded by a phalanx of worshippers.

  “. . . cattle prods, racist sheriffs, vicious dogs trained to salivate at the sight of black people, courts whose main activity is injustice, century-old prisons used not only to punish blacks, but to teach them they can never win.”

  Stokely Carmichael talked for forty-five minutes. No one moved; it would have been obscene. Our unbroken attention didn’t faze him. He said he had been speaking before black students at white colleges for the past three months. One of the field marshals took over:

  “What amazes us is how similar each group is: You’re all well dressed. Have we been away from the bourgeoisie this long? Your common denominators are the Afro, dashikis, and repulsion to anything white. The others, more so than you here at SF State, are unaware of the great avalanche of power emanating from the struggle of the black South. Most of them, unlike you, the vanguard of the black student movement, have never heard of Frantz Fanon. They pay lip service to W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Marx they know best was a frizzy-haired clown with a stogie in his mouth.”

  It sounded like he had been set to go with a canned speech and then realized we were not kids stuck inside an isolated ivory tower. Somebody hipped him either at the airport or on the way over.

  “. . . been arrested eighty-six times.”

  Li-an whispered, “He didn’t say eighty-six times. This makes me want to dance. New dance, the eighty-six times, doodoowop.”

  “I know the South the way you know your campus. The most important lesson I’ve learned is how strong black people are. Without black folks, there would be no Mississippi, no Alabama, and no Georgia. We made the South, and from that came the nation. Black people are strong and resilient.”

  Li-an whispered, “If he moves like that in bed, eighty-six times, doodoowop.”

  He paused and looked at us, his brown eyes shining. Like an actor he could make his tear ducts work on call.

  “Strength, beauty, resilience—our weapons. The fight is just begun. Prepare yourselves to struggle against oppression for the rest of your lives. When and if you have children, prepare them to struggle. When you go home, prepare your mothers and fathers, and especially your younger brothers and sisters to struggle.”

  The other brother, a mariney-red man with an untrimmed natural, stood close to me in his Big Ben blue-and-white railroad overalls.

  “Would you sisters like to meet Stokely?”

  “Would we!” Li-an answered.

  This field marshal said, “Sisters, no hollow reverence.”

  I was impressed. “If he’s just going to shake my hand and give me his playboy of the Western world smile, I’ll check him out from the peanut gallery.”

  I felt the familiar ridiculous oscillation in my abdominal cavity. I scolded myself: Don’t you have any ability to differentiate? He was obviously too old, not chronologically but experientially. “You must be his bodyguard or some other kind of movement veteran, right?”

  He stared at me, not unfriendly but completely cool. “Field secretary, movement veteran, worker.”

  “I’m Geniece. I live here. What does a field secretary do?” I suppressed my urge for flippancy.

  “We mobilize the community. Voter reg, union building, farming cooperatives, freedom schools.” He folded his long arms and leaned agains
t the wall, at ease.

  “And why have you come here? We can vote, join unions, all that.”

  “We want to expand our operation into the northern cities.”

  “You mean you’re finished with the South?” Li-an asked.

  “No, not at all,” he said. Li-an, bored, walked off.

  “She’s going for bigger bait, I see,” he said with no animosity. I pulled my eyes off his bony fingers and looked at him to see if he noticed me staring at him. He was observing me just as closely.

  “Okay, let’s stop playing games,” I said. “I can’t figure this out.”

  “Figure what?”

  “You and him.” I pointed to Stokely and the clamor around him. “And—”

  “And what?”

  “If you guys are here to score or are about change for oppressed people, which can only mean liberation, a totally new and different system. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “How?”

  “Any means necessary.”

  “No, that’s thoroughly nebulous,” I said. “What is the method? Guns? Voter registration? Education? Black culture and history? There’s got to be a way that’s clearly articulated, that the masses can relate to. Right?”

  “Wrong,” he smiled. I shrugged. Out of his wallet he pulled his driver’s license and two other IDs.

  “Geniece, hold your hands out,” he said.

  I held out my hands as I thought, What’s he going to do—spit on me?