by Judy Juanita
Am I scared? No time for fear.
Do I carry a gun? I handle guns like everyone else in the party.
Still on the paper like in high school? Once a scribe always a scribe? Yeah.
I opened the paper to explain the ten-point program and put them at ease. They apologized: Geniece, we have to go to church. Like polite tourists they bought all my papers, BPP-intercommunal-paper-as-souvenir. And off they went with their pressed hair, carefully outlined lips, pastel linen dresses, and matching pumps.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I made it to my poetry class for the final, a holiday party with the visiting poet Don Lee. I wanted to have been there for more, but the revolution was moving too fast. The poet wore a handmade embroidered dashiki, probably from the motherland. He looked beautiful, irrelevant, and romantic as Huey called cultural nationalists. Surely we had space somewhere for this kind of softness. Nice thought that had no place in the moment. The grand poet from Chicago finished his presentation by reciting the title poem of his book, Don’t Cry, Scream. He paused at every “scream” in his poem to shriek. Each scream tore at the box inside my chest. I pled silently: Would you please shut your mouth? He answered with a long drawn-out scream.
48
After tutorial one evening, Bibo drove to the Army-Navy store on Mission. I thought he was getting stuff for himself. When he insisted I go in, I protested that I had to study for my stat final in the car. I did not want to be buying clothes for some other woman’s man.
“Geniece, you need fatigues.” He walked me over to a table full of pants for men in green camouflage.
“I know you don’t think that’s for me. They’re not even feminine.”
“In combat, you’re not trying to look like Twiggy. It’s about protecting yourself.”
“In the jungle, yes. In San Francisco, I would just look conspicuous. I’m behind the scenes, anyway.”
I would not even try them on. “Chanting ‘off the pig’ is as masculine as I’m getting.”
In the car I needed to get things straight. “Don’t try to dress me again. Do you think you’re my father? And since you’ve never officially hit on me, you’re not my man either.”
“I’m just trying to bring you up to speed. I told you I’m married.”
“If you were my husband, I wouldn’t like you spending so much time with me.”
“We’re comrades, Geniece. At some point, you gotta get it through your head: This ain’t a tea party.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
So I was taken off guard when we kissed, off drugs, for real, and it felt way beyond comradely. It was Christmas in San Francisco. Over a period of two days right before Christmas, nearly 750 demonstrators protested at the Oakland Army Induction Center. Bibo and I were at the Potrero projects in the city, crossing the grassy area, under the squared arch consecrated with piles of Christmas gift wrapping, cardboard rectangles of discarded bicycle boxes, strands of tinsel all over. There at the doorway to the projects, he kissed me.
“This is yours,” he said.
“Mine? On lease? Your mouth, your tongue, your teeth?”
“Whatever you want. It’s yours. As long as I have a heart.”
“Thanks. When does the lease expire?”
“Who knows?”
Tammy and Yvette, the two little Tutorial Center girls from the projects, told Bibo they had Christmas presents for us. We walked up to the girls’ door, and touched lips again. The door opened as we broke apart and saw the girls standing close together, picture pretty. Their mother, Mrs. Moore, had dressed them alike in princess coats and fur hats, Tammy in green and Yvette in red.
“You look like two little women,” I told them. The door opened wider and I saw the kitchen first. The table was overturned, its chrome legs at right angles to the floor. Broken dishes covered cracked linoleum. One curtain hung torn from the rod. Drawers had been pulled out of the cabinet, dish towels and pot holders strewn across the floor.
“What happened?” Bibo spoke. I moved behind him. But he grabbed my arm and forced me to stand beside him. The girls stood in the same spot, as close as could be short of adhesion, their eyes glistening. Tammy moved first to my side, where she smothered her face in my coat. Yvette spoke first.
“My mama and her boyfriend, Mr. Johnson, had a fight today.” Her voice was strong, her eyes wide open, the first tears yet to spill out. “He beat her because she spent his money on our new clothes.”
Tammy spoke, her hands cinching my waist. “Let’s go, Bibo. We hungry.”
We looked at Bibo, who walked toward the kitchen, where he picked up a pot holder. He found a plastic garbage can that had been thrown across the room, surveying the contents spilled unevenly past the couch. Picking up the can and filling it slowly with the garbage, Bibo talked. “I cooked a turkey at the center last night. Fixed all the trimmings. Even a pecan pie.”
He looked at me. “For you guys.” I started to question him, then ran my fist over Tammy’s fur hat. “That was a nice thing to do.”
I tried to soothe Tammy, but my eyes went to Yvette. “Where’s your mother? I want to see if she’s all right.”
“She’s drunk.” Yvette watched Bibo pick up garbage. When she finally blinked, a line of tears disappeared into her fur collar.
“Is she in her bedroom?” I asked. Bibo began sliding the curtain back on the rod.
I pried Tammy’s fingers from my coat. “Let me go see about your mother. Okay, sweets?” I moved past the girls into the hall, which reeked of whiskey. In the bedroom, Mrs. Moore lay slumped, half dressed on her back, her swollen face hanging on her shoulder, a near empty fifth in her left hand.
“Vette, Tam.” Just above incoherence, the words stumbled away from her. “Pusha new cose on.”
I walked to the foot of the bed. “Mrs. Moore, this is Geniece from the Tutorial Center.” I spoke plain and loud, as if that would bring the situation into control. She tried to straighten.
“I shaid, pusha new cose on.” Her empty hand jerked, and she yelled. Pain twisted the swollen contours of her jawbone. Then she eased down. “Broke my back . . . weasel.”
She pushed her neck back onto the pillow, her grimacing face like Yvette’s characteristic scowl. I tiptoed out of the room. In the living room, partially in order, I turned to Bibo.
“We have to call an ambulance.”
As he dialed the operator, I turned to the girls and asked Yvette, “When was Mr. Johnson here?”
“He left about an hour ago.”
“Were you awake when he was here?”
“Yes.” She turned from me, looking at Bibo on the phone.
Tammy spoke up. “Yvette saw him fighting my mama. She was looking through the door. She made me get under the covers, ’cause I was crying.”
“Did he hit her?”
“He picked up the broom and hit her across the back. When she fell down, he kicked her, right here.” Yvette pointed to her left shoulder blade. “Then he kicked her in the face.”
Tammy screamed, “He was gonna kill her.”
Yvette continued calmly. “I came outta my room. They always have fights, but he was looking for a knife. That’s why he was breaking everything in the kitchen. He was looking for a knife. He said so. He said he was gonna kill my mother. When he turned around and saw me looking, he cussed at me. Then he kicked her. He kicked her over on her stomach and told her to crawl back to bed. He said crawl in front of your little yellow bastard.”
Yvette shook as she pushed the last words out. “Then he picked up the garbage and threw it at me.” She dropped on the couch, like crumpled velvet.
“The ambulance and the police are on the way over.” Bibo’s voice shook with rage and distress.
“The police! Why the police?” I asked.
“Ambulances won’t come down h
ere without a police escort,” he said.
I lost my composure. “Down here! We’re up on a hill. Why is it we’re always down somewhere?” The minute I lost my calm, the girls started to cry. I had to regain it for them. I sat on the couch between the girls. Bibo moved toward the bedroom.
“Either her back or her shoulder’s broken. I don’t think we should move her,” Bibo said.
“We have to put her clothes on. Come on.” I got up to go help him and Tammy pulled at my side.
“Are we still going to eat turkey?”
They still had on their coats, Yvette’s hands inside her muffs, two little black porcelain dolls.
“Just wait,” I told her.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Inside Mrs. Moore’s bedroom, she had fallen half out of bed, her bottle propped against the bed, still in her hand. She jerked her head around and moaned as I moved to the bureau to get her some clothing. She pulled her head to the side and looked at Bibo, her eyes surrounded by puffy bruises. She screamed in fright and dropped the bottle on the floor, where it rolled under the bed. She put her left hand beneath her pillow. Bibo stood at the foot of the bed.
“Donchu come near me, fool. I kill you, I swear I point this gun at yo mean-ass heart and kill you.” She had a .38 Special in her left hand. Bibo moved to the side of the bed. She was drunk enough to kill him or me. “You beat da shit outta me, in fronna my babies. I don’t care thatcha beat on me. Butchu mess with my child you cheap no good sonofabitch.”
Bibo moved back toward the door. I feared he would leave me in the room. At that moment, I realized we might die for Mr. Johnson’s bad behavior. But Bibo rolled on the floor to the right of the bed. She turned to shoot, pulling the trigger with her left index finger. The bullet passed through the closet door, piercing the air his chest occupied seconds before. Bibo sprung up and knocked the gun out of her hand. It fell to the side of the bed. I watched her as he jumped over the bed. She tried to turn quickly and wrenched the last bit of consciousness from her broken body. As he picked up the gun, she slumped. He took the pulse of her left hand. For a moment in time, we stood frozen.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Then the living room was crowded with eight people, seven of them standing, Mrs. Moore on a stretcher carried by the ambulance attendants, the black policeman talking to Bibo and me. We told him she had been beaten severely by a man friend whose address we didn’t know. The girls stood mute, with their fur hats and unruffled princess coats and reddened eyes. At the stretcher with their unconscious mother, Tammy touched her mother’s hand and calmly turned to the policeman. “Mr. Johnson live at the Winston Street Motel on the third floor. He beat her ’cause she spent his money on our outfits.”
Outside, a crowd gathered—children on brand-new bikes, a few adults pulled from holiday dinners by the siren. Teenagers in twos and threes with grim smirks, their stares said: Who got beat? Anybody die? I didn’t hear no shot. Did you?
I turned to Bibo. “I’ll go with Mrs. Moore. I guess the girls are hungry, even still.” I stepped into the ambulance and sat alongside the stretcher. Tammy stepped behind me, but Bibo lifted her up and turned her around.
“Mama’s gonna be all right. Come on, let’s go get our dinner.”
As he led the girls away, the ambulance closed up and night disappeared. The world became vivid white, bright red, barred and piped with steel. The vibrations of the siren pulsed through me like a blood transfusion as the onlookers vanished into the dark.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I was drawn into the movement by the idea of freedom for black people and the image from my childhood in East Oakland, riding to church in the backseat of my uncle’s Chrysler Newport, seeing black males spread-eagled on the ground at the mercy of hulking white policemen. Cousin Reddy’s stories from the dispatcher’s booth at the Oakland Police Department also profoundly influenced me.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Yet here I was in the emergency room with a drunken mother. And here I was working behind the scenes, laying out a newspaper. Our revolution wouldn’t change much for Mrs. Moore, whose life lay at the bottom of a bottle of liquor. I was fighting for Yvette and Tammy to have different lives, different outcomes, and different opportunities. The image that replaced the ugliness of police brutality was of Yvette and Tammy, each walking across a stage, diploma in hand, gainfully employed, living in a clean, well-maintained environment, pretty much what my aunt and uncle wanted for me. It wasn’t what I thought the revolution would be, but I could see the connections.
49
In the dark light of the world I had embraced, so much was difficult. Hard sex. Temporary love. Robberies. Murders. Shoot-outs. Emergencies. Revolutionary culture. And idiot bragging from an idiot named George Sams. There was so much to be done in putting the paper out I was able to ignore him at first. Free Huey or the sky’s the limit. The shootout made the BPP paper must-reading, our face to the world, the radical world, the black community, the Bay Area, the state. The whole world. I read over and over from the Red Book: “We are advocates of the abolition of war; we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war; and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun.” I didn’t disavow violence, but I hated the violence that George Sams bragged on.
Of everyone I met in the movement he had the thinnest veneer of trust. I disliked him intensely, everything about him, immediately, by instinct. All I ever saw him do was brag.
“I got shot in the neck five times by the pigs in the riots in Detroit. And survived.”
He persisted in showing me scarred exit holes of the bullets that went through his neck: “Check this out. Here, right here, this is what it looks like. I wouldn’t lie to you. You a queen.”
The very next morning, we were about to take the paper to the printer in the Mission. Bibo and I passed through a room where Sams and a BSU brother had gone, supposedly to sleep.
“Put that motherfucking gun down,” the brother was telling Sams and turning to us. He looked crazy scared. “This motherfucker been holding a shotgun to my face.”
Sams was grinning outrageously.
“I wake up to this fool holding a shotgun to my face,” the brother said.
“Wanted you to know what it’s like to wake up to the barrel of a gun. Peep that, bro,” Sams said.
The BSU brothers called him an agent provocateur and no one expelled him. He reeked of gunpowder, funk, and tobacco. In the middle of the night the special tactical squad of the San Francisco Police Department would break down the door to Eldridge and Kathleen’s apartment, ransack it looking for guns. George Sams was always around when shit like that went down. I no longer saw fearlessness. I saw nothing but foolishness when I had to be around idiots like Sams, braggadocio in the name of blackness.
I hated cliques in high school. I hated the black sororities at State with their color lines and Vidal Sassoon geometric hairdos. Shit, my family had cliques. I hated exclusion. I didn’t find it any less discomforting being in a Panther clique, even if it was called a cell. I always felt for the outsider and George Sams was a trained insider. The lumpen brother who stood watch on Oak Street as we put the paper to bed was an outsider.
“I was born and raised in the Fillmore,” he said proudly. “When my mama bathed me at night, rats hopped in the bathwater.” He was the personification of Rule Two of the BPP’s three main rules of discipline:
Obey orders in all your actions.
Do not take a single needle or a piece of thread from the poor and oppressed masses.
Turn in everything captured from the attacking enemy.
He carried on his person sliced baloney from the corner market wrapped in wax paper, sometimes hogshead cheese, a ten-cent jar of French’s mustard. He made runs to the corner sto
re for a twenty-five-cent half loaf. We nicknamed him Country. He didn’t care what we called him, we who ordered takeout and paid from petty cash.
“Hey, Country,” shouted a comrade. “Get Hostess Cupcakes, a Rocky Road for the queen, and Laura Scudder’s Potato Chips.”
I began to see purity in the faces of children, like Tammy and Yvette. It was scarce anywhere else.
50
I finished the first semester of my senior year in good standing, halfway home. February started fine. “All power to the people.” We the people, me the people, Renee the people, Renee, a black student I knew from State who worked at Safeway in Berkeley. There was no reason to shop at Safeway’s in Berkeley except it was Renee’s Safeway. We the people gave it to her. Whoever we knew was the people’s proprietor. We the people gave that proprietor license to let us lift whatever we wanted and walk out scot-free. If that sounds cavalier, it wasn’t, at least not in my actions or feelings. I was nervous and afraid of getting caught, even if Renee was at the cash register ringing up $100 of groceries at $38.06 or $50.73.
Renee beat me at nervousness. She wasn’t revolutionary, didn’t wear a natural, didn’t have mouth, was still a virgin (so I heard), had just moved from home, couldn’t dance, couldn’t outtalk the talkers or outthink the thinkers, an ordinary black girl turning into a woman, getting educated, a right-place-wrong-time person. If she were older she’d have gone straight through, graduated, and become a social worker. But we were all so much spaghetti twisted and stuck together.
The last time I saw Renee, the last time I tortured Renee, the last time I ripped off Renee was for chicken, shrimp, and sourdough bread. I was trying a made-up dish, not something from a moo magazine. On my way home from the printer’s I picked up seasonings, onions, garlic, bell pepper, something to drink, dinner napkins—who knew who might come by? And waited until Renee’s last customer had gone, and I slipped through the register, rang up my bag at nine dollars and something, but I only had a five and needed change to pay the toll on the Bay Bridge.