by Judy Juanita
I moved up the stairs. Now that I had begun to trip, I wasn’t afraid to take the other half tab. I was still Geniece. I felt a swoosh in back of me.
I was downstairs near the door. Had all this ecstasy been a simple walk down a flight of stairs? I looked for Bibo. No Bibo in sight. No matter. It was the end. I got hold of myself and wobbled out the door. The street looked like it had been tarred that morning. The thought of having to walk on it seemed stupid. Who would want to get that gooey? I decided to sit on the bottom step of the stairs and wait for Bibo. Or should I wait for someone?
I must have stayed like that for the next hour. Bibo never came. Where did he go? I tried to walk, and this time the street looked navigable if shiny, like patent shoes had melted on it. I walked the six blocks to my place, even though I could have sworn my feet were sinking in poured tar. I vowed to go back to weed exclusively. I love colors, but mescaline was too circuitous a path to get to them.
The next morning, Bibo rang my bell, waking us all up before the crack of dawn.
“Huey got into it with the pigs last night. One pig is dead, the other one’s hurt.” We hadn’t even put robes on.
“What happened to Huey?”
“He’s in critical condition.” He looked at us like we were totally behind the train. “It’s going down. Get yourself together. And stop worrying about being cute.”
46
We had to put out a special edition of the paper. We had to get attorneys. We had to mobilize the community. We had to raise money. I crossed the bay to see the only people I knew with money.
Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola were presiding at their dinner table. I had come for money. Ashamedly. “Neither a borrower nor a beggar be.” When I walked in the door, the first thing Ola did was give me a new straw bag. She knew I loved big purses. I hugged and thanked her.
“What costume you got planned for Halloween, Niecy?” Uncle Boy-Boy knew Halloween was my favorite holiday. But Huey had been shot October 28. Boy-Boy was avoiding asking about school. I didn’t want to lie about school. And he didn’t want lies at the table either.
“You know that Buddy and Andrea are having some problems,” Uncle Boy-Boy said. So the mocha couple floated up shit’s creek. Too bad, but it was a ways from what I needed right then. I thought about James Baldwin on love—that it doesn’t begin or end the way we set it up.
“Uncle Boy-Boy, you know I don’t ask for money. But the party needs bail money for the brothers who have been harassed by the police. We need money to pay the printer for the paper. We just need it. So some of us are asking our folks to contribute.”
Aunt Ola directed the conversation away from reality. “Niecy, do you know that Hopalong Cassidy waved directly at Buddy, like he was a little hero, during a parade in downtown Oakland in the fifties?”
I nodded. She teared a little. I’d heard this one. What difference does a fake Hopalong Cassidy make? Did money float out of his pockets and land in Buddy’s lap? Aunt Ola showed me a picture of Corliss graduating from Lone Mountain, throwing her cap in the air, her hair completely natural.
“Her hair doesn’t look like such a bad grade; maybe the Lustrasilk has a residual effect,” Aunt Ola remarked.
The meat loaf with its ketchup covering, the au gratin potatoes from scratch, the fresh mustard greens tasted different. Ola’s cooking had improved or I was eating on the run in too many crap soul food joints.
Uncle Boy-Boy brought reality back into play. “Cousin Reddy seen your boy in the jailhouse. Reddy say they put Newton in the hole in the county jail. They call it the soul breaker. But I hear your boy is holding up. Reddy say that policeman Huey shot was a badass. Says he was hard on ordinary Negroes but kept his distance from the pimps. Now, you know that ain’t right.”
“That is the original stimulus for the party. Patrol the ghetto to prevent the police from mistreating us.”
Uncle Boy-Boy kept with what he wanted to say. “Reddy also say the OPD the night of the shoot-out looking for two male Negroes riding around. And they knew that your boy had a big fuzzy natural and was light-skinned. Sound like a setup to me.”
“Uncle Reddy is the original invisible man, Uncle Boy-Boy.”
My uncle leaned back. “My passing-white cuz knows how to keep his mouth shut until he needs to open it.”
Ola had left the price tag on the straw bag. “I never gave you a gift proper for graduation.”
I pulled the tag off the straw bag and began putting the contents of my worn leather purse in it, including an issue of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. As I looked at it, I decided to show it to them.
“Here’s the very first issue of the paper.”
“Did you work on that, Niecy?” Aunt Ola asked, beginning to read the front page.
“No, I wasn’t a member yet. I knew about the Panthers but hadn’t joined.” The banner headline was WHO KILLED DENZIL DOWELL?
“Was this the young man in Richmond?” Uncle Boy-Boy got his reading glasses out.
I nodded. “You know, when the Richmond pigs shot the two others before they gunned down Denzil, the coroner found bullet holes in their armpits.”
“My goodness,” Aunt Ola said. “Does that mean they had their arms blown off?”
“Ola, the police shot the young brothers while they were holding their arms up over their heads, like they had been asked to do.” Uncle Boy-Boy scrutinized the paper. “So the Panthers are going to patrol the community and patrol the pigs.”
“Now, dear, don’t you start calling policemen that word,” Ola admonished Boy-Boy, turning to me. “Why do you use that horrible term anyway?”
Uncle Boy-Boy leaned back from the paper. “Ola, these young people are reminding us that the Gestapo in World War II did the same thing. Those Nazis treated Jews the same way, came into their communities, brutalizing and killed, shipped them off to the camps because they were a different race. Same problem, different time. Prejudice, hatred.”
“Aunt Ola,” I said. “Bobby Seale says a policeman is a pig when he violates the constitutional rights, and even human rights, of the very people he’s sworn to protect.”
“All police?”
“Ola, the ones who shoot black boys in the armpits.” Boy-Boy placed his finger next to Denzil Dowell’s image in the BPP newspaper. Ola picked up the paper and began reading it again.
“But what really frightens me are the guns. Why do you need to fight violence with violence?” she said, getting more stressed with each page she turned. “This is a very dark world, Geniece. And why are there so many cartoons with killing and blood?”
“Aunt Ola, this is what’s happening here. Not just down South. Why do you think people are rioting in all the big cities? Chicago, Detroit, LA. The police have taken the power that we have given them and abused it. They think it’s all right to trample on black people.”
“Answer my question, Niecy.”
“About violence?”
“You know it’s about the violence. Don’t play with me. I’m not as dumb as you like to think.”
I sighed. Ola’s hackles were up. “Huey P. Newton says that we’re going to defend ourselves against any racist attacks. It’s a way of showing the people that they don’t have to take all this brutality sitting down. They need to form neighborhood patrols. They need to put some fear into the pigs’ hearts.”
“Are you a parrot for these older men? They prey on younger women, you know, especially idealistic ones. Have they asked you for sex, Niecy?”
“No, Ola, actually they’re perfect gentlemen.”
“What!?” She was astounded. Manners were as important as beliefs to Ola. I was beginning to feel less shitty about asking for money.
“Yes, they are. I met Huey at Oakland City. His girlfriend’s locker was right next to mine.”
“Did he begin indoctrinating you then?”
“Ola,” Uncle Boy-Boy busted in. “You know Niecy’s too hardheaded to be indoctrinated. She’s just a natural rebel. Who’s afraid of cats. She likes some damn panthers but hates cats.”
“Well, do they hate white people?” Ola was beginning to soften up.
“That’s a cultural nationalist position. Black pride and wearing the big Afros.”
“Niecy, you’ve been doing those things since you started college. Aren’t you a cultural nationalist?”
I shook my head. “An Afro doesn’t stop bullets. Black pride is not a weapon against police brutality. And the Panthers have alliances with white radicals, something Allwood and his group would never do.”
“But all this started from those ideas of Allwood, did it not?” Ola was smarter than I thought.
“I give Allwood credit. He introduced me to many ideas and books. But he wasn’t radical. A radical gets to the root of a problem. Books alone can’t change the problem. Somebody has to take action on the theories. That’s why I became an activist.”
Uncle Boy-Boy walked out of the room, raising his voice so I could hear him.
“Now, Niecy, you all call yourselves black revolutionaries. ‘Off the pig,’ you teach the young people, ‘Death to this Racist System.’ You’re teaching yourselves to bring the system down. ‘Kill or be killed.’ ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ But when the man turns on you because you turned on him, you want to cry foul play. And you want us to give you our hard-earned money for your beloved defense committee, for something you willfully brought on yourselves. Now, I ask you, does it make sense for me to give you my hard cash so you can make a white lawyer rich, the bail bondsmen rich, and the newspapers rich running behind and quoting you on the six o’clock news?”
He came back in the dining room with a small white envelope and shoved it in my purse.
“Uncle Boy-Boy, you know I don’t like asking anybody for anything.”
“Like your pops. Hardheaded. But you’re swimming in catastrophe here.”
* * *
When I pulled up to the Bay Bridge and opened the straw purse for the toll, I found a note from Uncle Boy-Boy with two hundred dollars in twenties, tens, fives—cash my relatives had paid him bill by sweaty bill. The note said: “Be careful, I don’t want to pick you up in a pine box.” Pinned on the note was another seventy-five dollars that I knew from the way it was pinned was Aunt Ola’s doing.
My people knew the police weren’t right.
Every tribe had sent one like me into the BPP, the people’s army, to grieve the system. The roots of the BPP lay in the goodwill of the black community and its utter disgust with the occupying army called the police. Our relatives were our invisible members. To cut these roots would have been disastrous.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
That Sunday, while my aunt and uncle were sitting, I presumed, in church, I joined a platoon of sisters inside DeFremery House, a twenty-four-room house supported by round columns, enclosed by a railing of balusters. Outside in the Oakland sun, with oaks and magnolias shedding late autumn leaves, two thousand Panther supporters, fellow travelers, and sympathizers had gathered to protest police brutality. We gathered for the revolutionary moment at DeFremery Park in West Oakland. I was a scribe, but I could do sisterly work too. Inside the creaking nineteenth-century Gothic Revival house, we peeled boiled potatoes, cracked shells of boiled eggs, and chopped celery for the potato salad to feed the people.
Elaine Brown walked in. She had set up the party’s Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles before moving to Oakland. We had had no contact, but her revolutionary singing moved me with its fervor and aching simplicity.
“Separate the egg yolks from the whites and mash them with the mustard,” she instructed us. “This is the way you do this.”
“It’s already done,” I answered. “Peeled, chopped, and mixed in with the mustard.”
She yelled at me, not like she was mad, just in charge and hierarchical. A cool anger spurted up and down my body. She didn’t know me from Adam. I was an example for the others. In the flesh, she was a high-yellow stalker. I talked to myself: I’m cool, I’m a worker, I can take it, the people matter. But it wasn’t cool.
I had scoped the set and it was looking like a scene, like a fashion or a trend. A young, healthy, fine, attractive, lively crowd here to see and be seen, to support the party, yes, but to catch and be caught. It was a dating game for young blacks in the Bay Area, a spin-off of the movement. Some of the same guys on the lawn at DeFremery I’d seen at the rifle range comparing prices for 30.06s. Gun as status symbol, metal dick.
The potato salad got made and taken outside. I tasted Elaine’s. It was tangier. Hers had bite. I understood why she was moving to the center. I had a sharper taste on my tongue than potato salad, the taste of being relegated. Not to my taste. But injustice was stronger than a bad taste.
47
I had to continually cross the SF–Oakland Bay Bridge to take care of party business. Donations for Huey’s defense fund were coming from all over the Bay. Going back to Oakland was like dragging the new-me suitcase across the Bay Bridge, with the new me falling out and refusing to cross the choppy waters. I found myself saying stuff like “I don’t have to go back”; “I’m a Bohemian”; “I belong to the world”; “I will not be pulled backward.” I still thought in my boxed-up heart I could cut myself neatly from the past.
When I drove back across the bay to go to a special meeting with a renowned jazz singer, I felt all that. I wouldn’t have gone to the meeting—for sisters only—at a church, except someone from the BPP needed to pick up a donation. I was too busy to go to the concert but remembered the jazz singer’s heart-shaped face and tart tone.
In person, she was even sweeter looking, with her shiny sheath and pumps. I hadn’t seen women so dressed up since Aunt Ola’s church. The women in the room were dressed in the fashion, dashikis, wraps, bubbas, their naturals cut to a barber’s T. They began asking her simple questions, the answers to which they could have gotten from liner notes or magazine articles. Didn’t they read? They were college-educated women spouting fawning, doelike homage to the esteemed visitor.
After putting the paper to bed and three days on speed, I wasn’t in the mood for stargazing. A wave of disgust came over me at the smug demureness, as if a struggle for the life of our people wasn’t going on outside to which only the privileged few had been invited. I thought I would be at least interested, not hateful. I turned, ready to hat up, when the great lady asked, “And what about these Panther girls? What do they call themselves? Pantherettes? They dress like men.”
Pantherettes? Pantherettes!? As in Ronettes and Marvelettes?
“They’re so . . . ,” she sputtered. She was reaching for the word crude, perfect innocence on her face as her off-base questions poured forth. “Do they have to dress like that? Who makes them do that? Do they carry guns?”
A tremendous anger rose in my body, beating a path to my temples. But my mouth was frozen shut. If I said a word, I would have exploded. I nibbled on butter cookies like everyone else. Michelle Stubbs, who went with Allwood’s buddy back at City College, approached me in the vestibule.
“Geniece, you look very uncomfortable. Did the Panther stuff offend you?”
“I’m not a Pantherette.”
“How come you didn’t speak up and answer her? That’s what she was asking.”
“I didn’t want to sound too strident or bitter, too black.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m not on twenty-four hours a day. Do I have to defend the party everywhere?” At home? At school? In bed? I got the donation and left.
Driving back across the bridge, I sorted things out. Was this concept of black people fighting to be free so damn alien that it couldn’t be recognized without binoculars? Who did I have to make understand this? Anybod
y at all? Why was it so important for famous people to endorse us? What was so great about talking to somebody famous? Or fucking a famous man? Or being famous, like we were collectively? Why was I in this? For the excitement? Was I willing to die for the cause? Like Mx? Or Medgar Evers? Or Nat Turner? Had any black women been martyrs? Would I like to be one? (Chairman Bob said we only die once, so there’s no use in thinking about it a thousand times.) Okay, I wouldn’t think about it, but I could ask. Who was this person I called myself and why was she doing all this?
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
The past and present of my life kept colliding. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I was standing on Sacramento Street in Berkeley in front of Byron Rumford’s Pharmacy selling the BPP newspaper. I glanced at the SF Chronicle, the right front top part housewives said they didn’t read anymore. A Marine had testified in Congress that the new M-16s jammed and killed Americans in ’nam. We had cashed in student council vouchers to the BSU and bought M-1s in Reno for the BPP.
A convertible stopped, young women in their Sunday best, my age. Exactly my age. They knew the BPP logo. They knew the police knocked heads—the heads of sons, brothers, and fathers. They were curious. They wanted to buy the BPP intercommunal newspaper. The women in the convertible called me by name. We had graduated high school together. The driver aimed a fusillade of friendly questions at me.
How long have you been a Panther, Geniece? Less than a year.
Did you quit college? Still in college.
Do you have a boyfriend? Not right now.
What do women do in the party? Run the office, do scheduling, set up rallies, march, we do everything anyone else does.
How come they wear berets? Freedom fighters all over the world wear black berets.
What do my folks think? They just want me to finish college.
Am I going to finish? Definitely.
Do I wear a uniform? Jeans are my uniform.