Virgin Soul (29 page)

“H
ere's the lowdown on the paper,” Li-an says. She and I are driving out to State. “They're making Eldridge's cell mate the editor.”

I nearly ram a Muni streetcar. “In my place?”

“Don't get pushed out of shape,” she says, and touches my shoulder. “It's just the way things are. They make promises in prison. . . . You can still contribute articles.”

“I never do articles, I edit.”

“I'm telling you what I heard, the scuttlebutt.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
've rowed to the middle of the deep blue sea in a leaky boat, faced down Scylla and Charybdis, and now I'm being told to take a walk. Nobody's indispensable.

She says, “By the way, Bibo's back in the pen.”

“Back?”

“Don't act surprised, Geniece. He got popped robbing a gas station in fucking Fresno. Packing.”

“Armed robbery? He'll be expelled for being a jackanape.”

“Already happened. And, Geniece, don't visit his nihilist ass. Leave that for his damn wife.”

I'm silent for a few blocks, then say: “I fucked my way into this whole crusade. I thought I would have to fuck my way out.”

“Somebody else did that for you,” Li-an says. “All you have to do is step aside.” It felt like a feather had brushed against me. It didn't feel like a blow. It didn't feel like I thought it would. Everything that I had been doing was behind the scenes. Way behind. I hadn't expected to become helpful and caring. I had wanted to be admired and inspired. I wanted men to call me fine and pant after me. I wanted to be pumped up by one rally after another. I thought it was going to be fun and exciting for days on end. Yet here I was taking galleys to printers in the deep of night, delivering sausages, and scrambling eggs for children whose parents either couldn't or didn't know to say thank you, running out to Santa Rita county jail, where problem inmates were taught the skills that would help them survive outside of jail. My life was a race, not to the protests or press conferences or confrontations or the podiums where the speechifiers held sway, but to the printer and the churches where we served kids breakfast and the county jail.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

E
ven though Li-an had told me not to visit Bibo, after three visits to Santa Rita to visit other brothers I didn't even know, I visited him. I waited outside the facility for two hours while the long line of mostly women, some pushing strollers, showed their ID and had their purses searched. It took forty-five minutes before I walked past a labyrinth of zones. We were the prisoners here too. The guards led a group of six into a room as big as a hospital waiting room. Other guards stood at the far side as the detainees filed in. I was surprised that there were no barriers. It wasn't like the movies. Bibo spotted me before I spotted him. He looked different. He had shaved his mustache and trimmed his natural way down.

“Ah, my girl revolutionary. You came to see me. My own wife hasn't been out here.” We hugged. I looked around to see if the guards were looking, but they weren't. Other couples were kissing and hugging.

Bibo started talking real fast, too fast for me to understand him. “Slow down, I can't understand you.”

“You don't know bout the fire. We did it.”

“What fire? What're you talking about?”

“The Revolutionary Night Lighting, White-frightening Fire Brigade. Remember that?”

I nodded. I had been working on the paper. “You mean when I talked it up with the SNCC guy with Stokely at our party?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bunch of us . . . we went out to the suburbs and did it.”

He kept on talking while the other people in the room got even busier with the face-to-face and body-to-body jamming. “We did it. We set the night on fire.”

“You guys made a fire. Where?”

“You don't need to know where. That's why I'm in here.”

“I thought you were in for a robbery in Fresno.”

“Do I look like I'm in jail in Fresno? Who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me. What are you in for?”

“Arson, attempted murder, resisting arrest, and carrying a loaded piece in my car. I'm gonna need a whole lot of lawyering.”

I buried my head in my hands. We had just printed a long article on why the party retained the services of Charles Garry, a Marxist attorney, instead of a black lawyer. Garry had won cases for radicals and trade unionists.

“Bibo, your stuff is lumpen proletariat shit.”

The sound of a man coming right there in the room jolted our conversation. I looked around and saw a woman wiping his cum from her face and hair. The guards were talking to each other like nothing had happened.

“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.

W
hen 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

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.