Virgin Soul
Page 30
“I can’t believe this. What kind of prison is this?” I said.
“It’s jail, not prison. If you want to, you can do me,” Bibo said.
In the open? It had all boiled down to this? Give it up because he was a down brother? In this Niagara Falls of the West, the Alameda County jail, this library of the lumpen, each person, black mostly, a Mexican, a white, fucked for life already, a history of Western civilization in this room.
“Do I have a say in all this?”
They were working class, never-worked class, incarcerated, their lives incinerated in all this heat. It was a strange moment. I didn’t feel contempt for Bibo or any of the people around us, not even the guards. I thought about the lump of tissue and soft bone inside me.
“Yes, girl revolutionary, I love you. Do you need to hear that to get down?”
I shook my head. I had two hearts beating inside me. If I had only one, sure, I would give head, perform fellatio ferociously and tenderly, cup my lips and suck dick, stroke it with all the girl revolutionary fervor I could muster, regardless of his being married, regardless of pride, regardless of the inappropriateness of it all. But the girl revolutionary had fallen on the road back there, somewhere, where she had followed the revolution to the last rung of the ladder.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
I left Santa Rita.
All the way back to San Francisco, I saw the girl revolutionary standing by the side of the road.
Life, my own and new life, was throbbing in my body.
I had done the revolution without regret. I had done what my instincts and rationality had compelled me to do—violating so many rules, breaking hearts, having my own broken. I had done enough rotten deeds to be buried under the jail. But one law had not been violated—I had never lied to myself.
And I couldn’t lie now. I wasn’t sure which way to turn, but the road did not go further.
When I moved to Vegas to attend grad school, I dropped the old, odd, berzerkeley clothes in the Goodwill bin on San Pablo Avenue, the books on revolution and guerrilla warfare I sold at the flea market (Das Kapital, my old doorstop, got the best price), and the guns, mostly the guns, I sold back to Siegel’s Guns in Oakland and Traders’ in San Leandro. There were more of those guns than I had thought: 30.06s, revolvers, the .22 I carried in my purse with my lip blush and keys, the .357 Magnum with the barrel bigger than my palm. I had enough guns to start a gun shop of my own. But I got rid of the guns—and the bed. I was tired of them both. What did James Brown say? “Money won’t change you / But time will take you on.”
People kept finding guns after we thought we were done with them. Li-an wrote that when she left the party to go back to school full-time, she found a 9 millimeter wrapped in a shawl in the bottom drawer of my burl wood dresser. Even Xavi wrote me about her metal footlocker that I had shipped to her in Virginia. A .45 was packed inside her Mother Hubbard shoes. We had been in a war sure enough. Burn it down, burn amerikkka down. On strike, shut it down. Thinking is a free country. Resistance, resistance, resistance. Stop the Gestapo. Control your police. Whatever the man supports, we oppose. What were we planning to blow away?
Goosey died, simply put her crocheting needles down and slumped over. When I went to Fouché’s funeral home I had to get over family telling me if I looked at the dead while carrying a baby, the child would sleep forever with its eyes half open. In turbulent times, a peaceful death in old age is a blessing.
Because I assisted behind the lines of fire, transcribing the men’s story, tutoring the young, making love and potato salad, I was spared death. My shoot for the moon was on a parchment rocket. I took my small step to the moon infinitely closer by carrying to term and one month beyond. The revolution had been the father of my child, but when my water broke, Wish stepped in as my natural birth partner. When I was wheeled into the delivery room, the doctor told me I was going to have a large, healthy baby for sure. When he asked me to push like I was moving my bowels, I did, figuring he was playing—which he wasn’t. I felt a train moving through my body and bawled, “I can’t go through with this,” at which moment the doctor said, “The head’s out.” I envisioned the shoulders getting stuck. Wish bent to wipe my forehead, and I pierced his poor eardrum. The doctor said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hightower, you have a son,” and everyone started laughing and crying over the same and different things, the baby being born, Wish being called Mr. Hightower, Wish’s eardrum getting blown out, and the spectacle of young womanhood changing into motherhood.
Geniece, my virgin soul, left at that moment. But a memorial to her vibrant leapfrogging passes through these pages.
Geneva Anniece Hightower
GENEVA ANNIECE HIGHTOWER
Written Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for Master of Arts Degree
UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS, 1973
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer profound gratitude to the late Frederick Hill and the late James D. Houston, who came upon this story in its infancy at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and championed it from that moment. To my teachers and mentors Molly Giles, Phyllis Burk, and Frances Mayes at San Francisco State University, I give much thanks. To my writer friends Karen Kevorkian, Claire Ortalda, Ron Nyren, Janice Garrett Forte, and many others in many workshops, thank you so much. Gratitude is not a strong enough word for the editing of Amber Qureshi, who brought me into the fold at Viking. I thank my editor at Viking, Liz Van Hoose, and my agent, Bonnie Nadell, who pushed me over the finish line. My son, Juno, and my family have backed my dream of writing this particular work for a very long time and I love and thank them for that.