Virgin Soul (3 page)

“Oh, we can't talk English, can we?”

“Now, Geniece, he's talking about a certain kind of child, from a certain kind of home.”

“He is not. He's talking about black children. The book isn't titled
Crisis in a
Certain Kind of Black and White
.” I tore the wig off and set it down. “How much did you and Uncle Boy-Boy pay for this book?”

“Five ninety-five.”

“You paid to be insulted. Listen to this.”

Lower-class children have a limited perception of the world about them: they do not know that objects have names (table, wall, book) or that the same object may have several names (an apple is fruit, red, round, juicy). . . . The slum child's home is characterized by a general scarcity of objects: there are few toys, few pictures, few books, few magazines, few of anything except people and noise.

“This is absolutely ridiculous. Why did you underline it? Do you want to believe it?”

“That's the way it is. You don't know. You've never had to live like that.”

“Aunt Ola Ray, I'm lower class. My father left me. My grandmother raised me.”

“We all raised you and we aren't lower class.”

“Technically speaking, aren't I an orphan?”

“You never had to go through what this man is talking about.”

“Sometimes I felt like Cinderella, like a discard.”

“Niecy,” Aunt Ola came at me with an imploring look. “You're exaggerating. What did you lack for? Nothing. Not a thing.”

“Only my father and my mother. The people who made me up in the first place.”

“We're your people. You have people.”

“Who'll love me for who I am and not try to make me into an
Ebony
magazine model?”

“Geniece, you are overidentifying with the poor. It's mental indulgence and a way of feeling sorry for yourself.”

“And, Auntie, you are overidentifying with Mr. Silberman and his theories.” I handed her the wig. “I don't want to be in the wedding if I have to wear this.”

My aunt took it and fluffed it out, first the bangs, then the rolled-up sides.

“It fits you. You should wear it, not me,” I said.

She beamed at herself in her gold leaf mirror. Then she put the wig on, turned around, and beamed at me.

I
kept candy striping at the hospital with Andrea after high school, and that's where I met Wish. He was the only boy candy striper, but nobody minded, because he was so sweet and careful with the patients. Wish was the nearest to a boyfriend I had come, though petting was as far as we had gone. He took classes all over the Bay Area, because he was learning carpentry and studying architecture. When he showed me a magazine photo of a Buddhist nun who had set herself on fire in South Vietnam, I didn't know what to say. I thought it would give me nightmares, so I didn't look long. Wish cried when he folded it up. With his thick glasses, sandals, and carpenter's tool bag, he reminded me of Jesus. He was always helping me out, and I thought he would be the first one. I gave him the name Wish Woodie, because he was such a whiz with wood and stuff. But his name was Aloysius, which I thought insane for some black person to have named some tiny brown-balled baby. Then I found out he was adopted by white folks when he was eighteen months. To know that explained everything about Wish Woodie. He was like-white except he was born-black.

“Did you know that the Cadillac has tail fins sharp enough to slice a child's hand off?” he asked me one afternoon as we walked down University Avenue in Berkeley. We always met up at the post office.

It was a fog-free day, and I could see the gunmetal gray of the Bay Bridge and the rust red Golden Gate as if each bridge had been painted on a powder blue canvas.

“Wish,” I said, “why would a kid, even a pure Aborigine, take his hand and pull it like a slab of baloney against the tail fin of a Caddie?”

“Geniece, can you hear yourself? Why would you say ‘a pure Aborigine'?”

“It's a figure of speech.” Aunt Ola used it all the time.

“Don't you know Aborigines are the oppressed indigenous people of Australia? They have to live apart from society.”

“Like lepers?”

“Segregated, cast off.” Wish Woodie had full-body squareness—square shoulders, square hips, square right on down to his large square toenails.

“Okay. I won't use it anymore.”

His shoulders were wide. His jawbone was wide. He almost looked like a put-together person, with sticks, blocks, and two-by-fours—except for his color. His skin was a rich caramel shade that made me want to touch him and be touched by him all the time. Made me, ordered me to touch it. I loved being hugged by him, being enveloped in his arms. Human ropes. His other softening element in all that angularity was his hair. Wish Woodie never combed it. And he never cut it. He just washed it and let Mother Nature dry it. I loved it. It was soft as cat fur and black as velvet.

I asked him once, “Are you a
blippie
?”

“What's that?”

“A black hippie.” He thought that was so funny, but I wanted to know.

“Do you want me to be a blippie? I'll be one. But you have to be one too,” he said.

“I can't be a blippie. I comb my hair every day. And I work. At jobs where I punch in and punch out.”

“Hippies work.”

“Not at 401 Broadway. They march outside. They apply for welfare. But hippies don't work for the welfare department.”

“So quit,” he said.

That's what I liked about him. Of course I would never, in a life of Thursdays, be like Wish Woodie, who could do his carpentry and survive forever. I liked so much about Wish Woodie. I admired that Wish Woodie was comfortable anywhere and honest all the time. I felt out of place often and could tell the truth only in certain places. If I spoke my mind, I figured, I'd end up with no friends, no relatives, and definitely no guys. And he was thorough. We spent a whole weekend talking about moving to San Francisco.

“Move to the city? With you?” I said. We had come to the Copper Penny restaurant on University Avenue, where we bought little tin pans of cinnamon bread for a quarter, and got chocolate milk and an orange for our lunch.

He shrugged. “Well, with or without me, you need to move to the city.”

“How would I support myself?”

“All kinds of things to do in a city.” As often as not, Rocky Road candy bars dipped in hot chocolate were dinner.

“Well, Oakland's a city. What's the diff?”

“The Haight.”

“Well, Oakland has a . . .” I sputtered for a minute. I couldn't think of where hippies lived in Oakland except for the spillover from Telegraph in North Oakland.

“What if, Wish, I got over there and couldn't do anything?”
What if I didn't make it?
I asked myself.

“I'm trying to tell you. That's a city for you. Always something to do. That's why people go to cities.”

That night we drove to the city, to the Haight-Ashbury, to Stanyan Street, to a garage behind a sienna-trimmed white apartment building. We pressed a buzzer and the garage door opened. As its triple panels folded into the ceiling of the garage, I saw a whole wall of pressure cookers. One that looked like it was a twenty-quarter, enough to feed a platoon at Fort Ord. Lots of two- and three-quarters. A tall skinny pressure cooker that looked like a stainless steel stovepipe. Pressure cookers, tops and bottoms, Wish Woodie, a white boy who looked about fifteen, and me.

“What is this?” I said.

“This is Michael. He fixes pressure cookers,” Wish said by way of introduction. “Is this how you make your living?” I asked Michael.

“Sure. I don't need much. As a matter of fact, I have to turn away work.” Michael pulled out a shoe box full of carefully bagged marijuana. A bag and a five-dollar bill changed hands. I could hear my folks:
Don't be no educated fool.
A pressure-cooker fixer with a pot business on the side?

“Mind if we smoke one here?” Wish Woodie began to roll a joint.

“Yes, I do. I never let people do that here. I don't smoke anything, not even cigarettes.”

I looked at Michael closely. His cheeks were the pink of salmon. I could smell his breath—slightly sweet, like baby saliva. He was sexless, like a lamb.

“Do you live here?” I pointed to the apartment building overhead.

“I live wherever I find myself when my body decides to rest.”

When we got on the freeway back to Oakland, I couldn't get out of my mind the little garage stuffed to its gills with shiny and unshiny pressure cookers, Michael's salmon pink cheeks bent over them, his polishing bare arms, him singing to himself as we left, the garage door closing him off from the outside. With deep breaths I took in the San Francisco fog scented with his baby-saliva breath. I was an Oakland girl, nothing more, nothing less, born in Berkeley, steeped in Oakland like sassafras in a pot of boiling water. Across the bay was the Orient. Frisco.

I
was accumulating transfer credits and hanging on to my virginity while Martin Luther King was vowing to talk to the Vietcong himself to end the war if LBJ wouldn't. Good grief. I can imagine how that was going down in the Oval Office. Guys were getting drafted left and right, the bombers were killing poor people and Buddhist monks, and accidents kept happening over there like in the movies. A B-57 loaded with bombs crashed into a South Vietnamese village and killed twelve villagers, but our crew survived miraculously, just like in the movies. My coworkers refused to read the front page of the
Oakland Tribune
. The names—Mekong, Danang, Vinh Binh—had a poetic ring to me, and it wasn't all bombs; we dropped toys and supplies over towns in South Vietnam. No matter. I had to concentrate on transferring or be a transcriptionist for the rest of my life.

I convinced
The Tower
editor that the guys on the lawn, the black intellectuals, were a new breed, incredibly smart, deep, heavy hitters, a step beyond the New Negro. He mumbled that they were just a bunch of rabble-rousers but gave me the assignment. “Out of curiosity,” he said. I approached one of the guys on the lawn, the one who was always introduced with the reminder that he had attended Harvard, like they were saying, he's that smart so you have to take his word for it.

I didn't know how to address him: guy, man, brother with the Albert Einstein mustache, splib—nothing was appropriate. I fell back on journalism.

“I'm writing a story for
The Tower
on the students who speak out here on the lawn. Can I get some info from you?”

He nodded. I went further. “Can I get your name?”

“Freed Man.”

I wrote down Friedman and he pointed a long bony yellow finger at the name in my notebook. “You got it wrong. I'm a free man. And I freed myself. First name: Freed; last name: Man. Dig it?”

I wrote it down like he said, but I knew this wasn't going anywhere with my editor.

“Anyway,” he said, like he was peeping my hole card off the bat, “I'm not a student here. You need to talk to this cat Allwood.”

I needed to meet someone who was enrolled, and Allwood, a physics major, worked at the branch library near campus. He said that Allwood had dropped out of school for a year to read a thousand books. That he was a heavyweight and wanted to get even heavier. So I shanghaied this Allwood guy at the tiny branch library shelving books.

“Can you find me a really good novel?” I said, staring at his angry black pupils with as much sophistication as I could muster and thinking what a pretty beard he had. Allwood was light and I wasn't too keen on light dudes on account of my father supposing to be light and curly haired. And on account of my being dark skinned. There are always howevers. And Allwood was exceptionally good looking, tall and skinny, and came across as pissed at having to file so many books. I completely forgot my prepared questions.

“Have you ever heard of James Baldwin?” It was a question he put to me simply, but I had about a teaspoon of simplicity to my name.

“I might have,” I said. “I have this thing of remembering everything I read but I forget the names unless they're really odd, you know.”

He knew all right and laughed, which I thought was my accomplishment.

“Here.” He shoved
Another Country
at me. “Read this,” he said, and pointed to the teenage bookshelves. “And don't get any more books from that section.”

I read it that night, the next day, and half that night. Reading it made the inside of my body stretch into a taut muscle. Rufus and his sister made me feel stronger, earthbound and sky-swept at the same time. The only things that mattered after I finished the book were love and hate, living and dying. My specialty, my major in life, i.e., newspaper reading and books, was tragedy. I couldn't keep away from it.
Another Country
felt like the world of love and hate and living and dying compressed between my hands.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
needed to see Allwood again for the story. He told me he had read three hundred books during his self-imposed exile. I'd already written that he'd read a thousand books but changed it. Three hundred, a thousand, what was the diff to me? I read two books a month. He said he had become an expert on black history, world history, and revolution. He and I walked back and forth across Grove Street to the lawn, to Jo Ethel's. With his sandy skin he could have walked into Snookie's with ease, but he had nothing but snide remarks for bourgies.

“They learned their manners from cleaning Miss Ann's tables and polishing her silverware. Then they made her manners their values, their whole way of life.”

When we were walking past Snookie's, he said, “You're real, they're not.”

I knew he meant the light-skinned line of demarcation that meant I would have been stared at if I walked in and sat down. Like
Darkie, who told you we wanted you in here?
Even if I'd been with him.

I poured my heart into the article for
The Tower
. Allwood's picture and the interview got good space—top half of the front page—and a lot of comment. Allwood liked it; the Grove Street orator from Harvard acknowledged me one afternoon as “the together sister from the paper.” I got a sunburst from being called “together.” Even Huey said something besides, where's Margaret? He said the article showed I had my head screwed on right.

Emboldened by my little rep, I asked to cover Tracy Simms. She was brought to campus by the W. E. B. Du Bois Club,
da boys club
. She was one of two hundred historic civil rights demonstrators who had gotten arrested protesting an all-white sales force at the Sheraton-Palace in San Francisco. My cousins and I, thrill-seeking high school students, had gotten on the bus to San Francisco and sat in the lobby of the Sheraton during the sit-ins on Auto Row, gawking at the demonstrators and rich people trying to slip by the protesters. I probably laughed at Tracy Simms in my ignorance.

As soon as I got to the small auditorium and sat in the back row I felt the thoughtlessness of my participation at the Sheraton. Tracy Simms, who had chaired the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, was speaking as if she was fresh from Auto Row. Something was incongruous from the jump. Her shirt was sloppy, not the movement uniform of overalls and chambray shirt, not the good girl pressed jeans look. And her hair was half straight, half nappy, like she had chemically straightened it but rinsed it before the nappy part got straight. And her hair wasn't like mine. I had stopped straightening it at all. She looked like she couldn't decide to be a bourgie education major or a straight-out hell-raiser. The auditorium was packed with regular students, plus the entire Cuba–Castroists–
da boys club
who normally held sway over Grove Street. Only she was the one behind the podium.

When she opened her mouth, I could tell she didn't have the lingo down. Her first mistake was using the word
Negro
; people booed her. Her second mistake was being bewildered enough to use the word
integrationist
. Students interrupted her, talked over her. I felt for her. Her comeback was along the lines of “
I'm a nice colored girl who fell in deep dukey, and I just happened to be a leader because that was my way back out of dukey
.” Not on the money, honey, the audience informed her with catcalls and hisses.

I reported on the speech, and then asked my editor if I could write an editorial on the people who wouldn't let her finish her speech because she wasn't together like the street orators. He worked with me on it. I focused on their intolerance, on how they heckled her off the podium. Yes, I admitted, she was a walking inventory of political naïveté, neither a Marxist nor a socialist, but simply a black girl from Berkeley High who wound up leading a two-day sit-in, lie-down-in, sleep-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in the city. Because she turned up ordinary instead of glorious, folks got huffy.

When
The Tower
came out, you'd think I'd stripped in public. All hell broke loose. A guy everybody liked named Abner admonished me in front of the cafeteria crowd like I was a child.

“Did you write that editorial yourself or did the editor make you take the other side?”

“I have a mind of my own, thank you,” I said. The insufferably cute, insufferably fashionable, golden brown MacNair twins and their chic briefcases were attached to him.

He said, “The next time we want to see it before it's printed.”

“And who is ‘we'—the word patrol?” I replied, munching on my cinnamon roll and orange juice. “I'm an I, not a we.”

He walked off with his fashion models, glancing back like I was a fly. I was shocked to stand up to him, but more shocked that I had crossed a line and hadn't known it. All I had said was, mind your manners. Not earthshaking.

Allwood told me to keep writing.

He said, “Bourgies don't want to understand the process of social change. It upsets the pecking order.” And I'd thought Abner was chastising me for being reactionary. I hadn't thought I was the social changer. I liked that Allwood was fearless. He made it seem like I was shaking the status quo. Some energy was moving from me to him or from him to me. Whichever it was, we were connecting.