Virgin Soul

by Judy Juanita

  This man, like me yet so different, had me look at his IDs. “See the first one?”

  It was his student body card from Morris Brown.

  “Your smile’s as wide as Texas. You were a freshman.”

  “You can tell.”

  “Young and dumb,” I said. “And quo vadis to the bone.”

  The second ID was a Mississippi driver’s license. The camera caught his hair growing into a bush. “They told you not to smile?”

  “Ain’t nothing to smile bout in Mississippi.”

  In the third picture, his Alabama driver’s license, a barber somewhere in the Delta had tamed his bush. His smile was a tired older smile. “You changed a lot, didn’t you?”

  “Not really. Things changed around me. I changed the world around me. I’m still the same person, I only look changed.”

  “More things change, more they stay the same?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Buddy slow dancing, like doing the grind, with Xavi. They were laughing and chatting it up. He in no way looked like a married man.

  “No. Listen carefully. I say, ‘Things change.’” The field secretary carefully put the pictures back into a wallet like they might fall apart.

  “People don’t? Why are we doing all of this?” I imagined how it would feel for him to fingerfuck me and let go of that as he refolded his arms.

  “People adjust.” He paused. “Were you involved in the riots?”

  “No. I didn’t live here then.”

  “Were they rioting where you lived?”

  “Windows being broken. Small-time looting. Silly. Why go down for a TV set?”

  “The television, the petty vandalism—it’s all symbolic,” he said. “It caused millions of dollars worth of fear. The results of that fear made a difference for those of us who survived.”

  “I can respect all that. But why burn down our neighborhoods?”

  “Are you afraid to break the law?”

  “I break the law by being black.”

  “So what’s wrong with burning down a slum?” He was cool as ice.

  “You talk about terror, about putting fear in the white man’s heart. Listen to this: We’ve been kicking this around.” I moved a little closer and detected Jade East aftershave, which perplexed me, along with the rough washed smell of his denims. Buddy walks over and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Niecy, I’m taking Xavi away from this madness,” he said. Xavi was putting on her coat. “And she may never come back.”

  Xavi started giggling and said, “Your cousin is mad. And I love it.”

  “You two hooked up that quick?” I asked her.

  She shot back at me, “If it’s right, it don’t take all night.”

  That was one of Buddy and Uncle Boy-Boy’s favorite phrases. She had gone mad. All I could do was continue talking to my SNCC guy. I didn’t see Xavi until the next day.

  “We have these wild visions of the sky lit with fire, of white folks running deranged through the streets.”

  “Why white folks?”

  “Hear me out.” He folded his arms. “The suburbs are on fire. Instead of us being devastated, living in ruins, let it be them. We even got a name: the Revolutionary Night Lighting White-frightening Fire Brigade.

  “What changes in the inner city? Geniece, let’s say your shock brigade sets fire to a suburb, burns down a few houses. Now return to the scene of the original crime, our turf. What’s changed?”

  “It’s called payback. Retribution. Justice.”

  “No, it’s stupid, thrill-seeking adventurism. The revolution is not a tea party. Read your Red Book. It will not be won in a day, sister.” He leaned off the wall, placed his hands on my shoulders. I stiffened.

  “Relax. I just want to tell you something.” He bent close enough to smell my natural hair spray. “If you want to burn something, burn down the ghetto.”

  “What would that accomplish? Look at the riots.”

  “Burn this shit down. The man would have to do something for all the displaced victims, most of whom are on one or another kind of welfare. We’re the ones in need of new housing.”

  * * *

  I picked up an A in Speech 102: Interpersonal Communication for reporting on what it was like to hear Stokely Carmichael in a small personal setting versus hearing him speak at the Greek Theatre.

  Then I got “Conversation with a SNCC Field Marshal” published in an Experimental College brochure. Minus my sexual thoughts. I wasn’t that out there.

  42

  Chandro-Imi kept giving me little tasks. He asked me to find LeRoi Jones and his wife, Sylvia, an apartment. The Black Student Union had invited him to teach a class. I spent two weeks walking up and down the hills of the Fillmore and the Haight with $250 from the Associated Students in my purse. I felt mortified at failing the test. Someone else, more on the ball, had to find them a pad. We ended up temporarily putting them up at the Travelodge on Market Street.

  Then I saw LeRoi in the flesh, at his vociferous best, at the student body funding debate. I was stone-ass surprised that he was even there. I thought of him as a Big Important Writer From The East Coast In A Tweed Coat With Books Under His Arm, squirreled away from us except for class. And there he was, not in his book-lined study, surrounded by Balzac, Genet, Ionesco, or Brecht, hunched over a Smith-Corona portable as inspiration poured from his fingertips, on the phone long distance with some big bubba-tubba negotiating another run of Dutchman. Nope, he had left Beat nihilism for black nationalism. He was with us, giving much lip to the punk-ass white boys who controlled the student body budget and wanted, for some perverse reason that I’m sure would never have occurred to them in their native Stanislaus or Siskiyou counties, to pick a fight with the BSU over our altogether legitimate and defensible hiring of LeRoi. We packed the classroom for the meeting with students—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—and community people. We drowned the white boys, washed over them in a wave of derision. Every time they tried business as usual, we up-against-the-wall-motherfuckered them. They got tired of beating their heads against the united front and grudgingly agreed to give it up. Yea us.

  Yea me. Financing LeRoi meant I got financed too—I was the warm-up act, reading poetry from Gwendolyn Brooks, Don Lee, Kwame Nkrumah, Aimé Césaire, and crowd-pleasers from a new poet named Sonia Sanchez.

  LeRoi immediately set us to rehearsing and performing. As the Black Arts and Culture Troupe, we got a van, ran up costumes at the pad, and put on shows. Within a matter of days we were gone, black train down the black track, LeRoi the engine. We had an array of talent in the BSU—actors, singers, modern dancers—to supply motive force. Chandro-Imi, saying I was the quintessential naysayer, even gave me the part of the official naysayer in the play, the last line, which I delivered and even changed if I chose, since the clapping and the right-ons started just before it and nobody could hear me say squat. We took the show to colleges, centers, and any place they’d let us in—East Palo Alto, West Oakland, Western Addition, Marin City, Seaside, Hunter’s Point. I was a little star.

  The play was big fun to perform. No Romeo and Juliet here; no boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets her back stuff here. We improvised a riot, more like man gets mad, man gets Molotov, woman throws it. Sometimes I threw in Goosey’s old favorite, “Don’t let no man drag you down,” changing it, if people could hear me, to “Don’t let the man drag you down,” or the old standby, “You can do bad by yourself.” But the point of the naysayer, as LeRoi explained it to us in class, was to show that quality of self-doubt in blacks that would always accompany liberating actions, but which would be drowned out by the exulting of the people at the moment of liberation.

  Once, driving back from a show, I stood in the back of the van towering over LeRoi; I held on to the rail and observed him. He had a funny cackle, a little guy who hunched in his finely embroidered dashiki. A compact man. Even a gent
le man. He bantered, for heaven’s sake. I liked him and not at all in a sexual way. Thank goodness, he didn’t give off that vibe. His vibe was Let’s get going, let’s do business, let’s put on a really good show. Onstage he became ferocious, harsh, scary.

  The one time I saw him mix the two personas was his last night in town, our crowning performance at the Black House in the Fillmore District. LeRoi ranted, raved, screamed; he also talked soft and tender about his wife and the baby on the way. I got the shock of my life when he pointed her out. LeRoi Jones’s wife! She had foreboding eyes and was taller than I was! I had to force myself not to gape. He married up, not down!

  But I couldn’t help staring. She was pregnant, nearly due. Her belly bloomed out so perfectly pregnant I could see her enlarged belly button sticking out through the African cotton like a pacifier. Her hair surrounded her proudness like so many twisted branches of a tree. Even with the baby blooming, she retained a feminine slim curve to her dancer’s figure. And she talked about California like it had a tail. She did not like California, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and, by extension, us. “California niggers are out to lunch,” I heard her say loudly several times that night. She insisted on dancing, and did a solo bit. So supple she looked boneless, she rolled over on her bloomy stomach as if it were a bag of raked leaves. When she finished her dance, she went upstairs. I heard her say, “These San Francisco niggers are trifling.”

  * * *

  Dillard was there, watching everything with a slit-eyed demeanor. I’d tried to get him to give a few hours at the Tutorial Center; he had laughed me down to the ground. I reminded him he could get credits toward his degree. “It’s all a get-over, Geniece, don’t you see that? Niggers getting over. Tutorial, BSU, the movement. It’s all Get Over City.” He had upset me so that I had written something for him. I guess I wrote it at him. It wasn’t a poem, like one by Mali. I had taken to reading it, like filler over the din of the stage crew. I read it right at him. Dillard didn’t bat an eyelash. Maybe he was high, ethereally out there; he looked like raw meat that I had eaten out of sheer hunger. He seemed to be floating in his galaxy, out of my sphere of need. We went outside to talk. I was hot and didn’t want to cool. The icy riffs in the San Francisco air ran up my nostrils and into my ears, carried on little knives.

  “Did my poetry insult you tonight?”

  “You call that poetry? Sound like somebody babbling. Telling all their business. Putting somebody else’s in the streets.” He was putting me down.

  “I think you’re an interesting sociological specimen.”

  “I think you’re full of shit. Naive, innocent shit, but shit just the same.”

  “At least, Dillard, I’m trying.”

  “Yeah, you’re trying, all right. My patience.” Every time I decided to stop seeing him altogether something changed my mind. But now the thought of him, of his hard rubbery dick, turned me off as much as it had turned me on.

  “I’m trying to help people,” I said. He was stinging me. His ridicule brought up stuff I thought I had left behind. Innocence, naïveté.

  “My people, my people, as de monkey said.”

  “You must need something you can only get here, or else you would be someplace else.” I had heard my aunt talking once about somebody’s divorce. Her comment so stuck in my brain: When a woman loses her taste for a man, it’s gone. “If you’re so cynical, why are you even here?”

  “I came to see you. To be insulted by you.”

  “It wasn’t an insult. It was a kind of praise.”

  He shook his head. “You want to convert me, Geniece. This is your church.”

  “It’s not.” I had lost my taste for him.

  “Yes, it is, and I’m the unrepentant sinner.” It was gone.

  “Dillard, we should stop seeing each other.”

  There, I had said it, and it silenced him. He looked at me like I had told him his house burned down.

  “I’m into this. You’re not,” I said, tilting my head toward the Black House. He started coughing, the smoke from his burning house caught in his throat,

  “Don’t want to be.”

  “We can still be friends,” I said.

  “That’s what your girlfriends are for.”

  “Well, it’s not going to work out. We’re different.” Why was he making this hard? He never said I love you, not even in the heat of passion. He belittled me. “Why is this difficult?”

  “Ah, difficult. That’s what my teachers always called me in grade school.” He put good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish high on his shoulders and walked off.

  I walked back into the Black House feeling just this way: I’m so alive.

  43

  Xavi, Li-an, and I had outgrown the studio. Our search for a new place was more successful than my search for the Joneses. We found a roomy flat next to a grassy park on Potomac Street, with the N streetcar crawling out of the tunnel on its way downtown, and two friendly white girls in the upstairs flat who did tai chi on the grass, their Vogue magazines stacked in wicker baskets on the landing.

  We had been there barely two weeks when, after I got up late on a Saturday, all these Panthers arrived in a flash of black berets, funk, feline stealth, and unshaven jawbones, filling the hall and back room next to the kitchen, legs sprawled, arms grabbing for ashtrays, hats coming off. They locked up their pieces in the cars, and one brother stood outside watching the cars. Bobby Seale, knock-kneed and every step in charge, walked over to Li-an and set her in motion. I kissed my shower good-bye. If you can’t beat the funk join the funk. Li-an kept it moving. We set up a little assembly line to pull together tuna sandwiches. One of the brothers, tall and scrawny with bumpy skin, named Barry, kept coming in the kitchen looking at the bread and me like we were one and the same. I slicked the mayonnaise across the bread as if to say: Look all you want. That’s as far as it goes. Maybe I’m a Panther; that don’t mean I have to screw one. Take a bath; maybe I’ll think about it. So you think I’m cute. I think I’m cute. He walked over to where I sat the eggs in cold water. I picked them out, cracking and peeling.

  “I bet you break a nigger’s heart the same way you break those shells, don’t you?” He picked up a peeled egg. I thought he was about to bite it when he popped it in his mouth whole.

  “Why can’t you wait like everybody else?” I glanced back to see if anyone was looking at us. They were going off about Sacramento and the bust that had gone down. Some thirty brothers and sisters had gone up to the state capitol on May 2, to protest the gun laws.

  “Man, the sight of all those brothers carrying loaded shotguns into the State Assembly, pointing them up in the air or straight down at the ground, like Huey had taught them, man!” a brother said.

  Another brother said, “We vamped on those pigs in Sacramento. Shit.”

  The group hadn’t been arrested at the capitol. Instead, they got busted on their way back, outside Sacramento, for disturbing the peace. Bail was set at twenty-two hundred dollars for two dozen Panthers.

  “You shoulda seen the looks on the pigs’ faces when we walked into the chamber.” Two brothers slapped hands and laughed. It was like the shot heard round the world. Newspapers, national and international, carried the photos and the story.

  Barry wasn’t paying that any mind. “Everybody else ain’t as hungry as I am, can you dig it?”

  “No, I can’t, and where are your manners?”

  “I ain’t got none, can’t you tell?” When he laughed I saw between his front bottom teeth a perfectly hollowed out oval of decay.

  “You’re in my way.”

  “Yeah, and that’s where I’m gonna stay.”

  Li-an came back in. “You two look cozy, but the sandwiches aren’t done.” She started to move fast, and I followed. We laid out bread; I began putting the faces together and slicing crosswise. Before I got going good, Li-an stopped me.

  “Geniec
e, don’t slice. We’re not fixing lunch boxes. That’s not how you fix a sandwich for a man.”

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Everything black in the world was tumbling down like snow from a precipice, where it had stood for centuries, for all I knew. There was nothing for me to do but be surrounded. The brothers left the same way they came, with a lot of noise and odor. I opened windows to get a breeze from the park through the house.

  “I love me some revolutionary brothers, but they need to get hip to Ivory soap,” I said to no one in particular.

  “Ain’t nobody got to do nothing except fight for this funky system to be overthrown.” I recognized the voice but not which room it came from.

  “Now who left you here?” I shouted.

  “Chairman Bob, that’s who. If you don’t like it, talk to him.” Chairman Bob, my foot. I went to the kitchen where Li-an was picking up. “Why is he still here?”

  “You mean Barry? He’s staying with us. He needs a place to lay low, you know; he’s hot.”

  “Wait a minute.” I cleared the table. “We need a house meeting for something like this.”

  “Couldn’t wait. Bobby needed a place for him today.”

  “Like what happens if he hadn’t found a place to stay?”

  “Look.” Li-an threw up her palm. “This is the deal. Can you dig it?”

  Discussion over.

  “Well, where? Not in my bedroom.”

  “We have enough room, Geniece, more than enough. If he tries anything, tell him I will personally kick his ass.”

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Revolutionary sisters, my roomies and I did office work, opened mail, called the press conferences. The brothers from the street put their lives on the line. Street versus bourgies, smart versus rough, intelligentsia versus the lumpen. Barry broke that down as we cleaned his fourteen-shot Browning automatic, the two of us in the tiny windowless room we designated as his.