Virgin Soul (4 page)

A
llwood and I went out for hamburgers and movies at the Fox Oakland. We walked down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, checking out the free-speech orators, soapbox evangelists, and secondhand bookstores. Then we'd go back to City, to the street orators rapping rapid-fire about Cuba, black history, the man. The Harvard guy loved to rant on LBJ's participation in the Kennedy assassination: “The man is out to get you, the man is out to get you, brothers and sisters, wake up, the man is out to get you.”
With utmost authority he talked about Johnson being in on the assassination and jacking off in Kennedy's neck wound on Air Force One. It was hard for me to picture that with Mrs. Kennedy in the bloodstained pink Chanel in the front of the plane. But I had a boyfriend, and he was cute.

I thought we would have our first fight over sex, not the intellect. It didn't matter to me. We went for pizza and bowling, for spaghetti and peewee golf. But all that wasn't enough for Allwood. Not nearly enough. This one Friday night, when I had made him drag us to the miniature golf range in San Leandro, right as we were about to begin the second of nine holes, he gave me a list. A reading list.

“What is this for?” I asked.

“This is your real education. Read these ten books. The revolution starts in your mind.”

I didn't know revolution from Adam, but I knew that F. Scott Fitzgerald had given Sheilah Graham a reading list of the classics—my Western Civ instructor had talked about it with a big smirk. If Allwood wanted to play it that way, I was not game. But I listened to the list out of curiosity.
Muntu
by Janheinz Jahn,
David Walker's Appeal
, never heard of them.

Black Boy
by Richard Wright.

“I read that in high school, brotherman,” I said, driving the ball to the green.

“You need to read it again,” Allwood said. “You have a different head now.”

He read on, trailing behind me, my caddie with his list.

“
The Rebirth of African Civilization
by Chancellor Williams,
Illusion and Reality
by Caldwell.”

Never heard of them, couldn't even front it off. But I wanted to have read them. I wanted to know everything that Allwood and the Harvard soapbox orator and all the rest knew. If it was all info in a book, why couldn't I know it? I was a reader. I was a student. I wanted to be smart, not the smart of the white kids transferring to Berkeley, not the pseudosmart of the black bourgies coasting on their skin color, but the smart of the radicals who I respected because they weren't cowed by anybody, least of all the passersby on Grove Street throwing insults and soda cans at them. Allwood's list was unrelenting.

The Wretched of the Earth
by F. Fanon.

“Allwood, that's only the bible. How many midday rallies have I watched? I have eyes.” I handed him the club so I could see the list for myself.

Hadn't heard of the next two,
Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America
by E. U. Essien-Udom, and
Return to My Native Land
by Aimé Césaire, but the ninth one on the list,
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois, was very familiar.

“There's a copy of this in Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola Ray's library, for heaven's sake.”

“Well, I know you know the last one on the list,” Allwood said, lining up the club head with the ball as if he was Jack Nicklaus. “But I put it there so you could reread it after you've tackled the rest.” It was
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin.

“Well, thanks for some credit.” I didn't know how Sheilah had felt with F. Scott, but I was too through. “Do you think you're dealing with an illiterate? I know some things. Okay, maybe I don't read as much as you, maybe not even a tenth, but I'm in—”

I sputtered. I wanted to say intelligent but Allwood was an intellectual. I was neither.

When we went up to my room at the Y—we could have day guests—Allwood walked over to my bookcase and pointed at the middle shelf, the eye-level shelf. It was my spot; I could go there blindfolded and pick up my favorites. He sneered as he began yanking titles off the shelf.

“Yes, Mr. Intellect, I love Taylor Caldwell and William Goldman.”

Calm down
, I had to tell myself, as I began thinking about plowing through the books I hadn't read. He took all Cal-transfer courses, could speed-read nine or ten books a week, went through the
Chronicle
, the
Trib
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and then some. I respected his intelligence.

Allwood said, “Paperback books have given the petty bourgeoisie an inflated ego problem. I read therefore I am.”

He pulled out my copy of Philip Roth's
Letting Go
, my all-time favorite. Allwood snatched out a couple of pages at random. I didn't believe I was seeing him do that or that I was sitting there waiting to see how much more he would do. I sat there, half shell-shocked, half alert. What was this Negro going to do with my motley paper crew? He continued tearing out pages at random. A hard head makes a sore back, I heard Grandma Goosey's scratchy voice from somewhere, but his back looked perfectly straight. Maybe I was the one. Sitting there like I had lockjaw. I managed to tear my locked jaws open.

“What are you doing, you crazy-ass motherfucker? Those are mine. Did I tell you to even touch them? Fool!”

Allwood continued, going from Roth to Bellow to Mailer to Malamud to Moravia. He threw all the pages he had torn out into the wastebasket and then he struck a match.

“Oh, no, are you absolutely and totally gone?” I leaped up. He set the fire with one movement of his hand.

“What did you call me?” he said, looking devilish, enjoying himself while I beat out flames and rushed to open a window.

“Now go back and read those books and see if you missed anything. See if you missed a beat,” he said. “They ain't gotta write tight. Uncle Sam said, Jew boy, you can write all night as long as that's all you do. Write till you ain't got words left to write with. That's how I want to keep you occupied. And you think the Jew boys' bibles are sacred.”

“Moravia is Italian,” I said, tearing from the smoke, my own uncertain outrage and the sight of my paperback books burning.

“The Jew boys are a bunch of crybabies and jerk offs,” he said. “Don't cry for them. Do you think they bother to cry when we go down in flames?”

Allwood stood next to me as particles of soot drifted out the window. “Do you honestly think they cried at their desks when Watts went down?”

I didn't care what they did at their desks. All I wanted was to read what was left of my books to see if Allwood was right. Would I miss anything? Was
Letting Go
overwritten? I grabbed it and pages fell from my fingers, smudging them. A part that had been torn out but not burned was about e. e. cummings, or E. E. Cunningham, as the Gruber character called him. I remembered Gruber saying, “What is that stuff supposed to be anyway? A poem?” I remembered the phrase “Culture is everywhere” on one page and Sarah Vaughan singing on the next page, which was now dust to dust. The smoke that twisted into my nostrils had a scent not unlike a row of hot combs. My tears fell on my torn-up paperbacks, a muddle of print and soot, and I pictured Philip Roth standing side by side with Earleatha, Aunt Ola Ray's beautician. Earleatha had hot-combed my hair every two weeks from the time I was eleven until I left home. I could see Philip Roth, standing in sweaty-hot Our Beauty Shoppe on Eighty-fifth Avenue and East 14th Street, Earleatha telling him in her impatient, fast-talking way, “Oh, no, we don't need any of that in here. Maybe you want to go on up to Bancroft or MacArthur, where white folks do hair.” Telling him that as she directed traffic, the back-and-forth between her beauticians, clientele, all in various stages of unpressed and undressed hair, the slick Ricks bringing in hot clothes and hot watches, the churchy women scurrying in with the brown paper bags from Safeway with the oil and steam stains coming from the fried chicken dinners inside them.

“But you don't understand,” Roth would say, holding my restored, intact copy of
Letting Go
in hand. “Jews are not white.”

“Well, what color are they?” Earleatha would ask, resting the straightening iron on the burner, her hand on her hip. “You look white to me.”

“Everybody makes that mistake. I'm telling you, everybody,” he would reply.

“White is as white does,” Earleatha would tell him, looking at his book with disdain. “The only way you can prove it is for you to tell me something that ain't white people. Can you write about colored people?”

“We call them
shvartzahs
.”

“No, no, no. Can you write people like this?” Earleatha would have gestured to the people in the shop, the people orbiting around her as if having hair like white folks, which they neither wake up with nor come out of the shower with, is the sole objective of colored existence. That world I grew up in was just like the one phrase I remembered perfectly from the novel: “a world full of people pushing and pulling at each other with absolutely clear conscience.”

“I can try.” I put those words into Philip Roth's mouth. Why was it so important at that moment for my favorite author to have written about people like me? So I could justify reading Roth to Allwood? So that I could begin to understand why Allwood's books and the world they contained gave me more of a sense of awareness than my own supposedly lightweight book reading and apparently insignificant life heretofore had? So I could hold onto that world in my head even as I felt it disappearing? Going up in smoke every time I heard it cut down to size by Allwood's logically incessant rhetoric. It was Allwood who had the final word and not my apparitions of Philip Roth and Earleatha.

*   *   *

“G
eniece, check out Chancellor Williams for your Jew boy fixation. He runs it down how the Ten Commandments came out of the African Constitution way before Moses went up Mount Sinai. Which was in Africa.”

Whenever Allwood insisted, I resisted, but only to a point. I wanted to know what he knew, feel what he felt inside that righteousness. The only way in was to surrender, and I was willing. I had plenty of motivation and a demonstrated interest, but I needed a catalyst. Allwood was the reason I became black.

N
ot long after he mutilated my copy of
Letting Go
, Allwood stood with me as we breathed in the exhaust fumes on the landing from the sooty Cypress Freeway in West Oakland, a stone's throw from the Oakland Army Base. We were at my grandma's place in the projects. I took Allwood to Goosey's because I wanted her to screen him. Good ole Goosey, my little grandma the color of peanut shells. She didn't come to the family get-togethers anymore, said all the babies made her nervous. But Goosey would tell a body the rough stuff. When the family fussed about my unpressed hair, she had muttered, “Ola pitched a shit fit about your hair,” then fixed my plate of stewed chicken, rice, and turnip greens.

To bring this bristling black knight of mine on his black horse of militancy to meet the one who sheltered me—from the world as much as from Ola's niggling ways right next door to us for that long spell of childhood—was as right as putting filé in gumbo. As I waited for her to walk her little old lady steps from rocking chair to door, her cane thumping, I heard her as she had been, firm and watchful. Goosey kept care of the little girl me and the adolescent me, took me over after my father vanished from sight when I was barely in walking shoes. I often wondered if my father's family fully supported my adoption by Goosey because they were ashamed of her son's behavior or because I was too pitiful to ignore—motherless, talking a strange gibberish at four that no one could understand.

“I'm too old to be surprised, Niecy,” she said, taking a look at my bushier-than-ever hair. Goosey made me turn around and bend my head so she could run her finger along the nape of my neck. All the nights of her braiding, combing, brushing my hair, and greasing my scalp came back. “Your kitchen never grow like the rest of your head,” she said, fingering the tightly curled naps at the nape of my neck.
Kinkabugs
, she called them.

I accepted that she too saw the past in what I was trying to make the future. “Don't want me to smile ugly, so I won't,” she said, beckoning us into her tiny kitchen to smell her dinner. Aunt Ola and Goosey had their differences, but each was a past master of the silent insult, the smiling ugly.

I could tell by the way she looked at Allwood sniffing her shrimp-fried okra, her corn bread, and her fresh apple cobbler that she liked him. If she hadn't, Goosey would have slammed the pots shut and showed us the door. He couldn't get over her okra. She complimented him on his teeth, acting dumbstruck that they were so white and even.

“I've never tasted okra without the slime. Where did it go?” he asked her after the first plate. Goosey fixed him more. Allwood ate four plates, which I thought was disgusting. But they seemed to enjoy each other and his gluttony.

“You got to stir-fry your chopped okra for forty-five minutes first,” she told him, glancing at me as if to say, boy worth something if he can ask about okra.

“You mean, Mrs. Goosby,” he said, calling her as he'd been introduced, “you stood over a hot stove for forty-five minutes stirring this okra?” I couldn't believe it, Allwood and Goosey. When he got to politics, I waited for this affinity to evaporate. Allwood started in on his concentration camp rhetoric; I started scraping plates. At one point, he even called Goosey
sistuh
Goosby. And she said, “Uh-huh.” I hated being referred to as a sistuh, as though these men had become some new breed revolutionary deacons. I had seen the deacons in church get free feelsies when sisters got happy and fell out, and I was suspicious. Same position, different condition.

But Goosey listened intently. “Last month, there were protesters marching all down in here,” Goosey said.

“That was International Day of Protest,” Allwood said.

“Didn't look much international,” Goosey said. “Wasn't a colored in the bunch.”

“They want those ships headed to Vietnam empty,” Allwood said.

“War's good for colored. Only time they use us for all we're worth,” Goosey muttered.

“Don't believe it,” Allwood said.

She kept on, “I hear they're building us a new post office, the biggest PO in the Bay Area.”

“Don't believe it,” Allwood said. “It's nothing but a holding cell for nigguhs.” I flinched at the word, even though Allwood used it purely as political discourse, but Goosey didn't bat an eyelash. “The man always uses your tax dollars, your land, your neighborhood, and your labor to enslave you. You vote him in to do it. That's true brilliance. You don't let him do it, you ask him to do it.”

I had heard the rhetoric before. Interesting the first time, numbing once I knew the argument by heart. I listened for what usually came next: That's what they did in Germany to the Jews. He didn't say it. But I'd forgotten: He eliminated that one after he got the Volkswagen. Goosey listened patiently, then sent in her fastball, her final word on politics. I knew this by heart too.

“I don't believe nothing no politician says. On Election Day, from 'fore time they gave us the vote, I goes out of town. Catches me a Greyhound and goes right on up to Sacramento. Yes I do. They might could call here wanting to take me to the polls. But you know what I tell them? And I can be packing my bag, cool as a cucumber, know what I say?”

She caught him there, with the same low ball on the inside that she threw the canvassers; Allwood was speechless.

“I tell them they can kiss it where it's red and bitter. Ain't no problem getting off the phone after that.”

Allwood let out a hearty laugh, far from his snide whistle. He continued laughing while he spread his long legs out in her tiny living room. He didn't realize what a different signal he was sending her. When the cousins came, we did hit and run: hit the kitchen; run some green under the sugar bowl; split. But Allwood and Goosey hit it off like a ball and bat. Knowing Allwood was there to swing the bat, she threw more curveballs.

“Ola say you two keeping company,” she said, with more of a question mark on her face than in her voice.

“We've been seeing a little bit of each other, yes I'd say,” Allwood said.

“Do you live at home with your parents?”

He nodded vigorously. “Home, nowhere else,” he said, slapping his knee. “I like my own bed, my own bedroom, in fact, my own house.”

“Well, there you go. You know they used to call me a nervous Nellie, I was such a hard one to sleep next to.”

I started to say that's not what he meant but had to consider maybe that was exactly what he meant.

“Nobody sleeps in my bed but me so nobody to please but me.” Goosey got up and started toward the bedroom, laughing. “A bird don't dirty his own nest. Why should I?”

Allwood started looking at the pictures on her mantel.

“Are you looking for me?” I asked.

“I saw you when I first sat down,” he said, pointing to my high school graduation picture. “I want to see what you looked like when you were little.”

“I got you some here.” Goosey hobbled back in with pictures and her letters.

She showed him the one with me howling my head off. The boy was getting RBIs without even looking.

“That Niecy's like a cat: hates to get her feet muddy and don't like rain.” Allwood studied the picture and turned to me. “Why didn't you tell me that?”

“You couldn't tell?” I was surprised.

He shook his head.

For Goosey this illustrated everything about men. She started clapping her hands and sat on the sofa between us, too through.

“Didn't I tell you? Boys get hog wild and pigtail crazy. Can't see but one thing. I was a girl, few years older than Niecy in that picture, and there was this boy lived down the way from me. We couldn't been but twelve and thirteen. He used to tell me he had a frog in his bedroom and didn't I want to see his frog. Well, after he had gone on bout this frog every day, I wanted to see it. But I never went to his house, even though he come play at mine. Folks strict like that back then about girls.

“One day, he came up to me in the school yard and said he had the frog. But he couldn't take it out or else somebody might try to kill it. He said if I promised not to tell anybody about it, I could feel it. So I put my hand in his pocket and, sure enough, I felt his frog jump when I touched it. After that, every day, he would call me over and let me touch it.”

Goosey edged up on the sofa cushion.

“It happened this one afternoon, we were walking home from school and we stopped by the creek. I told him he needed to let that frog go. I didn't think I could keep the secret any longer, and I didn't want the frog to get kilt. That's when he told me, ‘Lindella, you got a little frog too.' And he pressed my underdrawers till he found my little frog, and showed me how to make it jump. So then we played frog every day until he asked me, ‘Lindella, can my little frog come over and visit with your little frog?'
I didn't see it was any different from plain visiting. Then my grannie saw one day that my stomach was hard and poked out and she said, ‘Come here, Lindella June, let me examine you.' They found out that I was pregnant. But I hadn't been kissing no boys, and that's what they told us could get you a baby. ‘Don't be kissing no boys, that get you pregnant.' So there I was, not even developed, didn't know bottoms up—pregnant.”

“Don't worry, Goosey. I know about protection.”

“Poppycock. If you make music, you make babies. I wanted to tell your young man how your father came into the world.”

She turned away from me and spoke directly to Allwood.

“We called him Brotherboy, because it felt more like he was my baby brother than my baby. I was thirteen. Then I had Boy-Boy at fifteen from my first husband, Mr. Hightower, who was nice enough to give Niecy's father his name too and raise him along with Boy-Boy. But Mr. Hightower died on me, bless his big heart. I was sixteen and alone with two small ones.”

I got money out to put under the sugar bowl, but Goosey wasn't through yet.

“I get low-sick, chill fever, I pulls out these letters my mama wrote me.”

Goosey had her brown, tattered letters from when Boy-Boy's grandmother had helped her get back on her feet after Boy-Boy's father died. She had read them all to me when I was young. Every few years she had me go to the variety store and buy a new red ribbon to tie around them.

Goosey patted the letters and untied the red ribbon. I let out a sigh. I was ready to go. My grandma handed us each a letter from the top of the pile. I couldn't bring myself to open the one I had, but Allwood opened his right away. He started to read but she stopped him.

“Let Niecy read it since she bout a Lindella June if I ever.”

That was what she was getting at, don't make her mistakes. I wasn't going to make her mistakes. I couldn't; they didn't have the pill then. I put the letter back on the pile and crossed my arms and shifted my impatience from foot to foot.

The brat in me came out around Goosey, the only person in the world who loved me as I was, not all gussied up. Allwood was looking at me, his eyes all wide like he was seeing me up close. Just to stop that gooey look, I took the letter and breathed hard. “Okay, I'll read it, for heaven's sake.”

To Mrs. Lindella Goosby, 18th and Fondulac, Muskogee, Oklahoma

From Mrs. Florence Stapleton, Columbus, Georgia

On the date of the fourth of June

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twelve

Dear Lindella June

Please give Ma Goosby my kindest regard—She is not as you say Adding salt to the wound—This blow has hit you an her equally hard But I hear your heart bleating like a lost sheep across the windy plains As to this so-called Rev Cleophus—Ma Goosby did write

Accusing you—Of taking an improper liking to him

Trust her in this matter—Circuit preachers can preach the gospel

Good as any man in a pulpit—But roaming is their habit

A womans heart an the prairie—Near bout equal to them

The very fact of him saying to Ma Goosby—What he never say to you

She a little piece of leather but she well put-together

Show he have less on his mind—An more round his holster

Than is good for him or yall—He sound like a dip over here

Dip over there type—Iffen I read Ma Goosby right

You still young even with death—Having sat down

Inside your heart—Trust Ma Goosby as I do

For these two God honest reasons—She is blood to your child

She been through an through the storms of life

She can also iron up a petticoat stiff as you please

An thats an accomplishment Lindella darling

Men be like found money—Iffen you find a shiny dollar on the street

Spend it dont depend on it—And dont be expecting to find it

Again—Sometime colored women happen up on mens

Like found money—You know what Poppa John used to say

White folks do business Negroes make rangements

Sometime what else can we do? Anybody you decide to get

A hold of Lindella—please remember

Here for the day gone for the morrow

We trying hard as bees in a bonnet to keep

Your heart from breaking again—A body can only take so much

Our preacher said death is a natural necessity

It must come to pass—MUST MEANS MUST

Keep the Good lord in your heart—Heep start but few goes

I am planning a late summer visit.

Love, Mama

P.S. Preacher men is the hardest mens of all to live with

Has to keep his natural devil cooped up inside him