Virgin Soul (20 page)

M
y life didn't shift seismically. All I did was join. I was still a student at State. Shortly after joining I walked down the slope and into the Commons, where William 12X was preaching as usual, no one listening. As usual, the black students had gathered like covered wagons around Marcus, from the bid whist crowd, and Bibo, who was dressed in the Panther black and blue. I muscled my way into the circle. Everyone was staring at two rifles encased in leather so new the buffalo might have been nearby. Marcus unzipped a case. “I got this 30.06 from my uncle. He paid four hundred smackers. It's beautiful.”

A student said, “That's a hunting rifle. Where you going with it?”

Marcus said, “Don't know bout you, but I'm going to the rifle range and get in some practice. With my good man, here.”

“For what? Deer season?” another student piped up, sarcastic as all get out.

No one was paying our black circle any mind except for a scowling William 12X. “You can't outdevil the devil. You're not evil enough.”

Marcus sneered at him. “Old man, this is about a damn good rifle. And marksmanship. I'm not into your race game.”

“It's not a game. When you get some wisdom, you'll understand.”

I decided to go with Marcus and Bibo and two other students to the range. It was misting lightly on campus and none of us had umbrellas. My hair was getting wilder and nappier by the minute. But it was a glorious feeling, like I was doing something terribly important. We set out for Walnut Creek in two cars, Marcus, the rifles, Bibo driving, me riding shotgun in his wagon, the other students behind us.

“LBJ want a Tet offensive; this our Tet offensive right here,” Bibo says.

The road got bumpy and none the wider the farther we went. I fingered a rifle through the canvas; my mind replayed what I'd seen of gunfire: Vietnam bloodied and bombed, Audie Murphy movies, World War II newsreel clips, televised riot scenes, Watts and Detroit. I saw a crowd of faces surrounding the Lincoln monument, the face of Martin Luther King, the word—
dream
—on his forehead.

“Bullshit,” Bibo said. He held the wheel, jaw set in a bulldog scowl. The shiny cases with their new-leather smell rested on our laps like children ready to go any minute.

“Bullshit,” he repeated.

“What? What, what?” Marcus asked.

“Martin Luther King, that's what. Bullshit.”

“You mean nonviolence?” I asked.

Bibo said, “Gonna get somebody killed. He wouldn't pull that shit up here. He couldn't find two flies to drop in front of a bulldozer, let alone two brothers. If someone gets killed down there, King oughta be wiped out. He's dangerous.”

Marcus tilted toward Bibo. “How so?”

“He's dangerous to white folks, cuz they don't know how far he'll go. He's dangerous to black folks, cuz they don't know how far he's taking 'em.”

“You saying folks ain't ready for King?” Marcus asked.

“Listen! Nobody fights war with limp bodies. We need guns. This is war. White folks ain't playing. We need bombs. That's the next step.”

“That's patently ridiculous.” Marcus started laughing his ass off.

“You think so?”

Marcus kept laughing.

“You got to put fear in the man's gut. White man don't know hungry, don't know suffering. He ain't bleeding, ain't seen his woman raped. Does he study his kids hanging from trees? I want his neck on the bottom of my foot.”

When Marcus finally stopped laughing he talked with pure sarcasm. “Oh, I get it. What we need is a black mafia, hit men, silencers. Right?”

“Yeah, man, people who ain't afraid to kill, cold-blooded black men, women, and children who kill systematically. Oppression is a beast, a monster you can't kill with kindness and a picket sign. We have to crawl up the beast's leg systematically until we reach a vital point, then strike and keep moving. When the beast's hand swats us, we split, approach vital organs close to the heart, we attack en masse, deliver the death blow.”

Marcus was making fun of Bibo. “Oh yeah, it's about the killer instinct which unfortunately black folks ain't got. We got the be hip instinct, the feel good instinct, the sho nuff instinct, but we ain't killers.”

“That's what we have to become,” Bibo said. I didn't believe him. I thought it was bluster. I didn't think of any of these guys as killers. Killers had deranged eyes and choked innocent victims to death. Killers jumped into the abyss and never came back. That wasn't what being black was about. It was about pride and self-awareness, rejecting white dominance, protecting the underdog, and helping poor black people out of misery, poverty, and ignorance.

*   *   *

A
t the suburban range, thick-skinned, redneck, suburban, and rural white men assembled guns peacefully. Bibo, Marcus, and I fingered bullets, counting them into rounds of thirty. My green army parka, buttoned up cardigan, and long-sleeved blouse were too much. I took my parka off and unbuttoned the sweater. I went back to the car and put them on the seat. Walking from the car back to the range I saw the stalls in front of each, a lane six feet wide marked off in white. At the head of each was an old lumber post, wide enough for paper targets. The others posted theirs. I saw Bibo's wild uncombed Afro, my Nefertiti profile, gold hoops like halos on my ears. Marcus sidled up to me and whispered loudly, “What are we doing here? They could off us. No one would ever know. A band of gun-smoking black students disappear, and the world wouldn't miss a minute off the clock. You know that, don't you, Miss East Oakland?”

Bibo walked to the edge, target in hand. He had bowlegs like Chandro-Imi. Maybe he was a cowboy back a century ago. I watched him post the target. He walked up and unraveled his target. Cocksure he posted it. The rednecks moved fast. When they reached him, they pointed to the target. Our target was different. Theirs was abstract, round circles within a circle, ours a man's torso with a small circle on the heart. Bibo argued with his fingers pointing, head bobbing. The men jabbed at the target. One motioned to the office. Three men, red emblems on their arms, rushed to the post, dressed alike in jumpsuits. They argued. Their shoulders jerked. Marcus began taking our target down, neatly rolling it under his arm. He came over and handed it to me.

“I'm just getting my edumacashun, dig? Y'all too East Oakland for me. Fuck this confrontation bullshit.” He got in the second car, carrying his uncle's rifle.

Bibo and I left together, the noise of ricocheting bullets behind us. I sat silently. I had never handled a gun. I hadn't grown up with guns or hunters. I knew having a weapon didn't mean you had to use it. For heaven's sakes, the United States had the H-bomb all those years and didn't use it. But the threat of annihilation scared the hell out of Russia.

I didn't figure we were killers, not really, but if we didn't stand up to those who would kill and annihilate us, who would?

I understood the gun as a symbol of defiance.

I understood that at the airport with Betty Shabazz, when the flaky Panthers showed up with empty guns, that was chickenshit. The police hadn't shown up with unloaded guns.

I wasn't at Allwood's side anymore, but I didn't want to kill anyone or be killed. I was still on the fence between all-out revolutionary and curious Geniece. I decided to give the BPP a rest for a while, kind of a hiatus from the deep.

I
didn't fly into Dillard's arms when I saw him again. But when he asked me out, I gave him my address. That weekend, we popped in on Pharoah Sanders in the Fillmore and ended up at Dillard's place. His pad on Stanyan Street was so luxe I felt underdressed. It had oriental rugs, damask rose upholstery, and velvety footstools. I knew his bed wouldn't be a mattress on the floor. It was an oak four-poster. As soon as I hit the surface of the bed Dillard went to work. He pulled off my panties with the efficiency of a gift wrapper at Christmastime. I was wondering if he'd maneuver my slip over my shoulders or wriggle it past my hips. He didn't need to do either for slip fucking. It felt like a Ferris wheel ride, up, down, all around, but the mattress was lumpy.

“You need a new mattress,” I told him afterward.

“Shit, the landlady needs a new mattress. I don't need a new nothing.”

“This
is
your place?”

“Renting.”

“You're not renting the bed?”

“Bed, linen, furniture. I don't even replace lightbulbs.”

I got back in the rented bed while he did some coke. I ran my finger along his nostril. He grabbed my finger, licked it, and kissed it. “I have this girlfriend. She was going with this guy named Joe the Blow man. She's crazy about him.”

“And he's crazy about blow, right?”

“Yeah, but he gets stoned off LSD every weekend, it seems.”

“He's wired.”

“She's always asking, ‘How much do you love me, Joe?' She even asks me how much. He tells her you can't measure love.”

“Sounds right to me.”

“Eventually he calls her to get her stuff. She'd been half expecting it, but you know, this was bad. In tears she gets there, the door's unlocked, she walks in, and he's in the bedroom, fucking an Asian chick. Of course, she runs back out, crying, stunned to the bone.

“He finally answered the question on her mind.” He was cracking up.

I saw it as tragic. “Drugs and hallucinations and being high every day make a man cruel?”

“Nah. He was copying
The Carpetbaggers
. The movie with George Peppard.”

“I didn't see it.”

“When Peppard couldn't get through to his old lady the soft and stupid way, he made it pictorial.”

“Why doesn't a guy who wants out just say he's through, good-bye?”

“Guys are cowards.”

“Cruel cowards?”

“Give you a clue, though. No man likes to think a woman will ever forget him.”

With his index finger he touched my throat. “Even when we get to the bottom of our little soiree, it would hurt to think that you might forget me.”

“Would you carpetbag me?”

His face contorted. “Hollywood! That's how the white man sells himself to the world. Paddy boy can't teach me shit about shit. I fall into better heights than he dreams of reaching.”

His emotion was blood kin to the defenselessness I hid from the world.

And so I fell into Dillard's arms.

*   *   *

T
he next time we got together we stopped by his mother's Edwardian just two blocks from the Black House. Her front door closing behind us echoed like the tomb at Gethsemane. I looked through the etched glass oval onto Sutter Street, where a car went by like a windup toy.

“You can't hear the traffic once you get inside,” Dillard said. He opened a set of French doors. Our heels clicked across the checkerboard tiles of the foyer. The living room had wainscoting white and gleaming next to walls that were faded red like dusty persimmons.

“This is grand,” I said to him in a gilt mirror. “Did you grow up here?”

There was so much to look at. A table with inlaid marble nicked my knee as I edged past; samurai dueled and postured across the dusky blue panels of a screen. Naked from the waist up, Japanese maidens lolled about, their hair elaborately piled.

“Here and next door.” As he opened blue-and-white porcelain jars on the mantel, they clinked like chimes.

“What's next door?”

“Pops lives there. Moms here.” He sat on a red chintz sofa with curlicue fringe. “Sit. Next to me.”

I sunk into the sofa. “This is where you get your love of luxury.”

“You call this luxury? You should see Dad's.”

“What do they do for a living?”

“Same thing yours do. Work, work, work.”

“Not your favorite pastime?”

“Not if that's all there is. Dad's a longshoreman. She teaches. Good enough?”

I shrugged.

“Why ask?”

Why did he deal blow if he came from this—and was smart. “Do they know you deal?”

“Be for real.”

I was silent. “They're divorced?”

“No need for that.”

So he was a broken-home baby too.

“We have holidays together.”

“Do they borrow sugar from each other?”

He nodded. “Thanksgiving here, Christmas there.”

A light-skinned woman came in the room with a bearing to stiffen Marie Antoinette's spine.

“What's all this Thanksgiving-Christmas talk?” she said.

Dillard got up. “Mother, this is Geniece.” I stood, but it was clear from her nod and look-me-over that I was not to cross over to her. Dillard kept opening jars without putting the tops back on.

“I would appreciate you keeping your sticky fingers off my chinoiserie,” she declared.

Dillard, urn top in hand, snorted. “I'm letting the haunts out.”

“Nonsense,” his mother said. “That's an eighteenth-century French antique.”

He peered in an urn. “They love to hide inside. Probably a crowd inside this one. Join us,
s'il vous plaît
.”

“Don't fool with me, Dillard. That box was made from Honduras mahogany, inlaid.” She gave me a final scrutiny. “Young lady, I hope you know what you're doing.”

She left and Dillard started saying, “Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali
.
”

I knew he wanted me to say it again and again. “Now what does Cassius Clay have to do with genies in jars?”

“If you believe in Cassius Clay, who no longer exists, you might as well believe in haunts. What does the man have to do for you to honor his personhood? He's officially declared himself Muhammad Ali.”

“I give. Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali.”

He began replacing the tops. “Now the haunts go back.”