by Judy Juanita
She announces: “Because Eldridge is running for president of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, we have to change the front page to a banner headline, a proclamation.”
I tell her: “Absolutely not.”
She looks like I’ve lost my mind. I repeat myself, even firmer. All hell breaks loose, a Kathleen-style all hell breaking loose. She throws a Marxist shit fit.
She accuses me: “This is a hundred kinds of error, political blasphemy.”
I acknowledge it: “Yes, yes, but the paper has been put to bed, and that’s that.”
She storms out of the Oak Street flat, promising to convene the Central Committee lickety-split. If she could do that, she wouldn’t have come here first. Getting decisions made is no snap when one part of the triumvirate, Eldridge, is in prison, another, Huey, in jail, and a third, Bobby Seale, is off somewhere at any given moment, giving speeches, rallying the troops, setting up and overseeing the national-international explosion of sympathy, drinking bitter dog, getting laid, laying waste.
Has she any idea of how much work, how many hours go into this? I don’t begrudge all the high-yellow women, over and over and over, picked to sleep in the kings’ beds, but give me a break from propping them on the arrowhead of the revolution to speak for the people. As if they had been chosen by the people instead of a brother entranced by the taboo he breaks or the color gulch he crosses. It’s high-yellow hegemony. Work is work. Give credit where credit is due. I bet there are thousands like me: able-brown, consistent-brown, dependable-brown, loyal-brown, conscientious-brown, and invaluable-brown.
Don’t treat me like a mule. When you do, I balk. I study the Sisters’ Section from an early issue. I knew the editor then, also from City, a fair-skinned intelligent sister. How many people held this job before me? How many will hold it after me? Will this go on into perpetuity, one set of contradictions replaced by another? The pamphlet reads:
SISTERS UNITE. The Black Panther Party is where the BLACK MEN are. I know every black woman has to feel proud of black men who finally decided to announce to the world that they were putting an end to police brutality and black genocide. Then they were arrested even though they had not broken a law. The reason they were arrested, Sisters, is the white power structure doesn’t want any brave men with guts enough to say, Hell No, to the police force in self defense of their women, themselves and all our children. That’s really telling the power structure like it is. Become members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Sisters, we got a good thing going.
It was a good thing, just not for every sister. Some got treated like chess pieces.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Wish Woodie comes by to see me. I’m so glad we never ran into him in the Haight when we were threatening white girls with our cigarette lighters for strolling arm in arm with brothers. Wish Woodie would have been disgusted at our bigotry. He listens to music until I finish talking and laughing with my roomies.
Alone, he tears into me: “Why is Li-an still wearing the earrings I made?”
I say: “Earrings, what earrings?”
He recalls them for me.
I say: “Oh, those . . . we share everything.”
He says: “But they were personal, one-of-a-kind.”
I say: “I’m not into personal possessions like that.”
He shrugs.
I tell him: “The programs the party is instituting—free breakfast for children, free medical clinics, these aren’t welfare. We have to show the people what a just society should provide its citizens.”
He asks: “Guns? What about guns, Geniece?”
I reply: “Can’t we defend ourselves? Isn’t that a constitutional freedom, the right of the people to bear arms?”
He throws back: “Ten million black people against the whole world. It’s numerically impossible.”
I say: “The people’s spirit is greater than the man’s technology, Wish.”
He says: “I fear for your life. Not just physically but morally.”
I tell him about Eldridge’s marriage dictum. But I seem to have protection from having to screw, because I have a very specific skill with words.
Wish asks: “Have you ever heard of the blue laws lecture?”
He explains they were called blue because they were bound in blue paper, a set of forty-five little-enforced laws in a book by Samuel Peters:
Married couples have to live together or be imprisoned.
Every male has to have his hair cut, rounded like a cap.
No one shall cross a river on Sunday except clergy.
Whoever publishes a lie to the prejudice of his neighbors must sit in the stocks or get fifteen lashes.
Women can’t kiss a child on the Sabbath or on fasting day.
I ask: “So?”
Wish says: “They didn’t enforce them.”
I say: “If they didn’t enforce them, what were they for?”
Wish says: “To scare you into correct behavior. Believe you me, I would never get married because of some group dictum.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Wish Woodie’s passion touches me. I appreciate his passion for his orphaned life, for his held-up self, even understanding that his passion is not for revolution except as it turns inside an individual. I am dismayed at how the Black Panther Party and some brothers in the Black Student Union treat women as a class and individually. As sexual cannon fodder in the midst of war. As trinkets to pick up and put down. As handmaidens ever at the ready. As souvenirs to show how much sex one has happened upon. As dupes played one against the other. I know all this is centuries old. But it’s been a shock to knock my head on it in the movement.
* * *
I am happy with my own growth. Because Wish and I share being orphans, I love him for being concerned and for giving me criticism in an intellectual way, like, Geniece, don’t let them run over you. I don’t love him in any kind of romantic sense, but that may be good too. I’ve had a good jab at love as lab experiment. I would like to feel more tenderness and mutual respect. Wish and I respect each other. I admire that he survives, like a dandelion sprouting in concrete.
55
Li-an calls me at Oak Street in the city from the BPP office in Oakland. “The pigs just vamped on the Panther church.”
St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of downtown Oakland is the Panther church. Thanks to Father Neil, the rector and a survivor of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, we got our Free Breakfast for Children program off the ground. I see him when I cook and serve for the program.
“Twelve OPD carrying twelve-gauge shotguns have invaded Father Neil’s church,” Li-An yells, and I hear lots of commotion and sirens in the background.
“Are there police at the office too?” I ask, looking for my purse and keys. She hangs up on me. The BPP has become so hip that everybody and their mother turns out for rallies, gauging a better chance of running into people than anytime since high school. The TV cameras put us on the six o’clock news so often, they should pay us. Being a Panther is cool until the shit goes down. Then it’s just the pigs and us in our bloody intimacy. The phone rings. I know it’s Li-an again.
“Girl, you won’t believe it. Father Neil wouldn’t let the pigs in the church. He held his ground. And the pigs had to get back in their cars.”
“Should I come across the bridge?”
“What for? The shit went down without you or me. Do your job where you are, revolutionary sister.”
Another day, another encounter.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I haven’t had a period since before time. Who knows why? So much stress, so many bennies at deadline, imbalances up the wazoo. Dillard shows up again, waiting for me outside the apartment. He points to a late-model sedan
, two white men staring at us, taking notes as we talk.
He says: “I only came to hip you to these pigs keeping tabs on you.”
I say: “The FBI is always here. So what?”
Dillard says: “Do you understand how serious this shit is?”
He walks away. I don’t care.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
Bobby Seale said you only die once so don’t die a thousand times in your mind. Okay, I get it. Die once; live. I am too busy for sex. When I hit the pillow, I fantasize myself to sleep. I fantasize Bibo kissing my leg. His tongue wets my limbs like rain from a benevolent cloud. I shudder, twist my legs against his fingers, run into my body. I hear the small voice, the one that pops up every now and then when I have forgotten something important. It says: See about your period. I’m so busy on deadline and getting my papers done for school that I go to Planned Parenthood but forget to go back for the results. Between visits I tell Li-an, because I know she’s too busy to tell me what to do. She tells me we need to go horseback riding.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
We go horseback riding on Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. Horseback riding was one of the classy dates at City College. But if you got pregnant, horseback riding was supposed to dislodge the fetus, make you abort. We go early in the day. I ride my horse at a gallop, enough to bounce up and down, enough to bring a period down. It hurts. Li-an rides her horse like it’s a mule, poking along. No blood. Planned Parenthood closes on the weekend. I can’t wait for a yes or a no. When Li-an goes out, I take Carter’s Little Liver Pills by the tens. Maybe I can get sick and have my stomach pumped. I have never been sick. I don’t know anything but good health. I take one hundred Carter’s Little Liver Pills. I feel a slight nausea, nothing more than I’ve felt on and off for weeks. I don’t go to the hospital, I don’t get pumped. I show up at PP bright and early.
They say: “You’re expecting.”
I say: “I’m not exactly sexually active.”
The doctor says: “It’s the immaculate conception; we hear about it all the time.”
The next two weeks are frantic. Li-an knows, no one else. If I don’t tell anyone, then no one else ever has to know. I gather options: Leave the country and have an abortion in Norway (this from another doctor); keep doing bodily damage until I either abort or kill myself; drink quinine; get the coat hanger. I’m afraid. A woman at PP said I could have crippled myself with the liver pills. She gives me a number to call. I’m afraid. Maybe she’s the FBI, trying to get me to commit suicide. The men still sit outside the apartment watching us. Maybe she’s not the FBI but has contacts with abortionists, dirty-fingered men in bare lightbulb offices.
I break down and tell Li-an, “I can’t hurt myself anymore. I just can’t.”
Li-an says, “All men are dogs; revolutionaries are dogs with rhetoric, but dogs just the same.”
I say, “Li-an, I know you’re bitter because of Chandro-Imi’s screwing other women.”
Li-an says, “I’m not bitter, I’m pragmatic. If I was bitter, I would think the revolution starts and ends with my love life. And I would have quit all y’all.”
She suggests I see one of the white girls upstairs from us who works at UCSF Hospital. I find our neighbor at UCSF, where she works as a ward clerk.
She says: “You look worried, what’s up?”
My voice wavers: “I’m afraid. I’m out of money. I got pregnant. I can’t do it.”
She goes to another floor, comes back after a while, and shows me a memo. It explains a new law in California permitting abortion to be legal and performed by doctors in hospitals. She’s the first white person in the city to show concern for me.
She says: “Here’s a number to call. It’s an abortion shrink. You have to visit him twice, talk with him.”
I frown.
She says: “It’s a formality. . . . But when you go talk like it’s already driving you nuts, being pregnant. . . . Act a little crazy or paranoid or something. . . . Then he can sign and you can get it done at Kaiser.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I go, nearly three months but hardly showing, to a psychiatrist’s office in Berkeley. He knows I’m a Panther. He’s a big donor to our clinics.
I say: “The sirens in San Francisco, all the sirens in the city drive me nuts.”
Then: “The FBI outside my apartment drives me nuts.”
I add: “My teacher from high school and his photos of the man cut in half by the train turn up in my dreams now.”
I tell him about George Sams: “He makes my skin crawl.”
I don’t have to exaggerate. I don’t have to lie.
He asks: “Anything else?”
I say: “Sometimes I can’t take the contradictions.”
He says: “You mean of the movement and radicalism?”
I shake my head: “I can’t take the fire engines racing through the city incessantly and the dogs howling afterward, the urban symphony.”
He says: “That disturbs you?”
I nod: “One night when I was zonked, I sat at the window looking at the park when, lo and behold, like Santa Claus and the reindeers, a fire engine charged through the trees and raced across the park. It was absolutely fascinating, except I thought it was headed my way.”
He asks: “You were using drugs?”
I say: “Just weed. I was transfixed by the thought of dying that way instead of being offed by the pigs. But the driver made a turn and rolled on down the street. We found out later we lived across from an emergency shortcut for the fire department.”
After a silence I ask: “Is this enough?”
He nods and signs the second trimester abortion form and walks me out to the reception area, where Bibo is waiting. We leave. I see the reflection in the windows of the shrink standing, gaping. I don’t know if it’s what I told him or that he’s seeing two live Panthers.
56
Bibo and I keep our eyes peeled for the University Avenue exit. After the San Francisco airport, we’re on our way to Palo Alto on 101 South. “How long is your appointment?”
“Less than an hour.”
“A Stanford donor. That’s big money.”
I’m going to Stanford; he’s going to a meat wholesaler in Union City who has donated sausages to the party for our Breakfast for Children program. We take the exit and drive up to the gates that I had gone through last at the school’s Black Arts Week. I had performed with LeRoi Jones.
“Take Palm to Arboretum and left on Quarry,” the guard says.
The campus is an idyllic leafy suburb with bicyclists and students with Frisbees. If I didn’t read the papers or look at TV, the My Lai massacre might seem like it took place on another planet. Or maybe Stanford is a planet, not a university. When we reach the medical school, Bibo gives me instructions. “This is how we work it. I drop you here. Cut over the Dumbarton Bridge, pick up the meat, and come back right here. I’ll be waiting, okay?”
I watch him drive away before I check out the students, guessing which came from money and which were on scholarship. I can’t figure it out. Appearances, appearances. Everything that’s gold doesn’t glitter. I go up to the sixth floor, looking for the State alumni and third-year resident I’d talked to on the phone. He finds me.
“Geniece Hightower from State?”
Now he looks like a scholarship student with his beard, jeans, and sneakers. He ushers me into the conference room and we sit across from each other. I pull out my notebook where I keep a record of all contributions given to me. I record his.
“I want you to know I read the Black Panther paper religiously. And follow the party in the news as well.”
“Why religiously?” Sounds like FBI. He laughs and pauses and laughs again.
“That’s part of why we wanted to talk
to you. All the social programs that the Black Panthers are initiating are extremely important to us. The university has pioneered studies of newborn and early childhood mortality risk and early childhood learning, and we see a correlation between child nutrition, early developmental support in child care, health, and education, and the exact kinds of programs you’re running.”
From our phone call I’d thought this would go in the direction of a donation from some Abe Lincoln Brigade radical, the kind who fought fascism in Spain in the thirties.
“The school of medicine has reserved four slots next fall for black applicants.”
The black premed students I knew had graduated State and were taking advanced sciences, hoping to get in UCSF or elsewhere. Stanford? Impossible without family connections.
“The committee has already made three selections. You’re our fourth.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Was I dreaming awake? “I don’t see how I could be a doctor.”
“I’ve followed your work, brilliant writing on social change and women.”
“I did one piece in the BPP. That’s not a body of work.” I was getting paranoid. Was this how the FBI got informants? I thought it would have been more straightforward. “My science grades, ah, I can’t even explain them away.”
He is beyond eager. “Look, we bring you in. Use the first year to bring you up to snuff. Tutors, counselors, scholarship, housing, and a stipend.”
The thought of a doctor’s uniform over my jeans is mind-blowing. Dr. Geniece. He keeps on. Would I be interested in pediatrics? Infectious diseases? Ob-gyn? Then the door to the conference room opens and an older white man, who looks like he was born with money dripping from his umbilical cord, comes in.
“Young lady, I’ve heard that you’re our newest humanitarian project.”
This is unfathomable. “Why of all the people have I turned up on your radar?”
“It’s not so far from the realm of possibility. Your tutorial program’s making quite an impact,” he says. “We are one of the funders for the program.”