Space Between the Stars (5 page)

Jimmy and Calvin—both sweet and polite—shook Dad's hand when they met him, and did not look shocked when they met Mom. Their bodies were electromagnetic fields drawing me to theirs. Dad scared boys when they would call; he answered the phone, “Yeah”—his tone impatient and cold, daring them to speak. If they were courageous enough to ask for me, we would talk on the phone until Mom told me to hang up and finish my homework. Dad allowed me to go out on dates when I was sixteen, my junior year of high school.

Gloria Averbuch and Luci Li were my best friends. We were song girls together, which was the sophisticated name for cheerleaders, and we spent Friday nights after football games at Luci's house in Forest Hills. Finally, Dad trusted another family and allowed me to spend the night. Luci's father was a doctor, she had three siblings, and her house smelled of crisp greens her
mother fried with chicken in a wok. During our sleepovers, we talked about girls we knew who were getting birth control pills from Planned Parenthood and were sleeping with their boyfriends. My Pentecostal upbringing instructed us to wait until marriage to have sex, and these teachings put the fear of God's retribution in me, so I didn't consider sex a possibility. But I was curious to know how it would feel and what really happened when you took your clothes off and lay with a boy. The girls we knew and talked with in the school hallways who were having sex had so much more confidence in their bodies than I had. Sex practically crawled off the bodies of boys in their football uniforms, girls in shorter and shorter skirts, and teens just like us locked in embraces right on the street.

Gloria, Luci, and I lay on the U-shaped couch in Luci's living room, waiting for her brothers to go to bed, and clutched pillows to our chests, whispering about getting in trouble at school and everything that affected our lives. Gloria cried, telling us about her mother's mental breakdown, her anger rap-pelling off the walls, our hearts openly heaving with hers in pain. Gloria lived with her dad, a journalist with the
San Francisco Chronicle
, while her mom moved in and out of institutions. I told Luci and Gloria about Chris Anderson, the tall blond girl who had been my friend until she took me to her house on the edge of exclusive Saint Francis Woods. Mrs. Anderson came into the kitchen where Chris and I had our heads in the refrigerator. Chris introduced us, and her mother looked tersely from her daughter to me and then walked out of the room. I felt a chill of disdain and rejection and wanted to run from the house, but Chris took me to her room, where we played music.
I put her mother's rudeness out of my mind until my mom picked me up. The next morning at school, Chris's eyes were red as she told me her mom had forbade her to see me because I was not white. My heart was slashed with the familiar dagger of racism—its ignorant, tormenting recurrence in my life: being shut out, denied access because of my skin. “I thought Chris was my friend,” I told Gloria and Luci, “but she didn't know how to stand up to her mother's racism or tell her how wrong she was.” My method of coping was to withdraw from anyone who did not fight prejudice. It was too painful for me to endure alone. I never felt close to Chris after that. Mom told me that Grandmother King said to try your best to be a friend and to do what is right in life, but if people reject you, walk away.

After my story, Gloria stopped crying for herself and got mad. She was a loyal friend who could fight because she grew up being rejected, too—for her mother's lack of lucidity, for being Jewish. She lived in the Haight, a mixed neighborhood where she had played with kids of different ethnicities all her life. Gloria was warm, intense, and filled with daring. Her outrage made me feel loved. It had never occurred to me to exclude another person for their ethnicity or religion—not ever.

Luci turned on the radio and began dancing to lift our mood. Soon we were doing the Pony to the Young Rascals and the Swim to Bobby Freeman, laughing as we made faces in the sliding-glass door that reflected our forms. Our friendship encompassed a world of differences. We studied hard, but hung out, too. Sometimes Gloria and I hitchhiked from Lowell to her house in Upper Haight, unafraid of strangers and maybe to
prove we were not just pom-pom-toting song girls. We listened to Joni Mitchell records and walked to Haight and Cole, where hippies sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, smoking weed and burning incense to cover the smell. We bought long, flowing skirts at a secondhand store and wore them on weekends, without shoes. We were never “flower children,” but we were searching for who we wanted to become, and a part of us admired hippies, who were rebellious and free.

I rode the “Route 28 19th Avenue” bus home from school. Two women in front of me talked in low voices, and I heard the words “murdered” and “it's a shame.” Sidewalks were empty, and I wondered what was causing the tension I felt in the air. I pulled the rubber cord to buzz the driver before my stop, gathered my books, jumped off the bus, and ran up the street to our house.

Dad stood in the living room, looking down at the TV. A newscaster said Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot and killed on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. I looked at Dad. He stared at the screen, his hands rolled into fists at his sides. I slid my books onto the coffee table. Dad turned to me, shaking his head from side to side. “He should never have gotten involved in that garbage strike.”

I ran to my room, the TV image of Dr. King lying on the ground scorched in my eyes. I had never suffered the torturous racism of the South, never had to ride in the back of the bus unless I wanted to; but I had seen the sneers and stares of hatred because of our family's mixed color. Dad had told a story of
Grandmother being shot in the stomach by white ranchers in Oroville, California. After moving from Louisiana, she and Grandfather had built a church in the small mountain town; they hoped to be free of the segregation and oppression of the South. White ranchers burned down the first church, trying to run them out; then the ranchers fired shotguns into the second building during Sunday morning worship. Grandmother was struck while she played her tambourine, the hate-filled ranchers riding off as she lay on the floor bleeding. She survived, and the family moved to Oakland, constructing a new church on Seventh Street where the black community welcomed all races to worship a colorless God.

When Mom and Dad married, interracial marriage was illegal in California. They drove to Seattle to marry, where anti-miscegenation laws had been abolished. Mom's friend Audrey had been spit on by a cab driver when she was out with a black man in Chicago. Mom was followed by San Francisco police officers on her way to work when she was pregnant with me because they were watching for Dad's participation in smoking weed at after-hours jam sessions. More than once Dad fought when someone “called him out of his name,” as he would politely mask the word “nigger” to Kitsaun and me.

Frustrated and furious, I kicked my desk chair. I grabbed my stuffed dog and buried my face in his matted fur, crying, “Why? Why?” My body jerked and twisted, overtaken with anguish and despair. When would we win the struggle for equality? With Dr. King's death, integration seemed a faraway dream.

Kitsaun and I began attending rallies around the city, listening to Stokely Carmichael, a leader of SNCC (Student Nonvio-
lent Coordinating Committee) who described the power of sit-ins and passive resistance. Members of the Black Panther Party shouted out that racism could not be conquered with passive nonviolence. We listened to Kathleen Cleaver, seeing ourselves in her light brown skin and wanting her bush-like Afro. She preached against the institutional racism that was killing black men and women. Winds of change rumbled through me, jostling my old beliefs in nonviolence. The Oakland and Los Angeles police departments declared war on Huey Newton and his army of revolutionaries. Maybe we would not be able to overcome four hundred years of slavery and hatred by turning the other cheek.

Kitsaun graduated from Lowell and attended San Francisco City College. In her second semester, she met Jake, an actor who was leader of the on-campus Black Panther Party. He was a beautiful, dark-skinned black man with a wide Afro, and a mustache curling over his full lips, which he moistened often with his tongue. Jake and his friends invited us to a meeting in the East Bay where Black Panthers would demonstrate how to use guns. I found an excuse not to go, my rhetoric stronger than my nerves, and Kitsaun accompanied her new friends, absorbing the revolutionary vernacular but never brandishing violence as a solution to racism.

I visited Kitsaun at Jake's house a few blocks from ours. The front room and kitchen were filled with people talking and eating, Afro to Afro, and smoking fat joints of marijuana. I did not want to sit around discussing the revolution with people stoned out of their minds, so I left. Drugs were of no interest to me. I had no desire to alter the way I saw reality.
In my senior year at Lowell, I applied to Cal State in San Francisco and also to Dominguez Hills in Southern California. It was 1968, and students at colleges around the nation were staging demonstrations against the Vietnam War and against good-old-boy politics that kept women and people of color down. The San Francisco State campus was a few blocks from Lowell, and we witnessed students closing it down to demand a school of ethnic studies and expanded black studies and Asian studies departments. College president S. I. Hayakawa was locked in his administrative office until riot police arrested the demonstrators. This forceful move by students shook up the establishment and made a huge impression on me. I realized the impact my generation could have on our country's outdated politics. The rebellion was successful, and the courses were added to the university's curriculum.

My plan was to study black history, as well as major in English. Maybe I would be a teacher as I had pretended so many times as a child when my stuffed animals were my students. I was accepted at San Francisco State and at Cal State Dominguez Hills outside Los Angeles. I chose Dominguez Hills because my uncle Joe had helped develop the creative writing department there.

Calvin and I double-dated with Luci and her boyfriend for the senior prom. Luci confided in me that she and her date were having sex. I felt like a dolt, inexperienced and prudish, but I did not really want to sleep with Calvin. I liked him, but I knew our romance would end with high school. After the prom, Calvin and I made out against the wall in my living room. He was barely taller than I was, so I scooted down to lift my face to
his, as they did in the movies. He pressed his body against mine and I felt hardness in his pants, but I never let my guard down. At any moment Dad could have walked in and caught us. I knew that if he had yelled at me for merely talking with a boy from up the street, he'd kill a boy whose lips and body were glued to mine. Besides, I was waiting to make love when I would be swept off my feet. I no longer felt I had to wait until marriage. It was 1969, and free love was born in San Francisco. I did not even think about marriage. The world was out there for my discovery without boundaries or limits.

Graduation day, I lined up with my class in the vestibule of the Masonic Auditorium, the orchestra tuning their instruments in the pit. As “Pomp and Circumstance” began, sadness, like a tincture in my heart, mixed with my excitement to be moving on. After the ceremony, I stood with Luci and Gloria as our parents snapped photographs, the three of us wiping tears from our cheeks.

found summer work at Pacific Bell Telephone Company as a long-distance operator and prepared for my coming independence. I loved plugging the cords into the outlets and placing calls around the United States and internationally, connecting people I did not know and could not see to faraway voices as I reached out to the unknown, like I was reaching into my own unknown future by leaving home to attend college. Wanting to grow up and meet new people, I talked to the adults working my shift and pretended I was responsible and independent, too. My voice sounded capable and mature as I connected faceless people together through thick, black wires. People called my supervisors and praised my efficiency, and I won commendations for my service. Kitsaun thought that was pretty funny; I always tried so hard to please—but she was proud of me and showed my awards to anyone who came over to visit.