Virgin Soul (6 page)

“Mr. Linkletter called a little black boy up to the microphone, ‘And what would
you
like to be?'

“The little black boy didn't hesitate a bit. ‘I want to be a white man.' So Mr. Linkletter said, ‘Well, why would you want to be a white man when you grow up?' And the little black boy said, ‘Cuz my momma said niggers ain't shit.'”

As usual the adults hooted. The kids, who had filtered back in, laughed at the laughter. The adolescents shrugged, because the whole routine was so old.

Aunt Ola Ray continued as always. “The little boy couldn't understand why the crowd was going mad. The network cut Art Linkletter off the air. Cut him off.” She sliced the air with her hand to show how fast. “When they came back on, they had changed the subject. But millions of people had seen it. Millions.”

Aunt Ola paused. It was pause-worthy. Millions had heard colored folk speak our piece through the mouth of this one little boy. Forget Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall and Marian Anderson. All the struggles for equality, justice, and redress of grievances. My family might have been absurdly profound or profoundly absurd, but bourgie? Never.

Allwood didn't laugh, but nobody noticed. They were laughing too hard. Why was it so appealing? Was it like an inoculation? You'd never get it once they stuck the joke in your bloodstream? Was it so ludicrous as to be a basic untruth? Was it comforting to the adults that children took them so literally? Was it assuring to the adolescents that adults were not to be taken literally? Did Allwood lack humor?

As we sat there and the evening wound down and folks started to leave, Uncle Al, Pink's youngest brother, started talking to Allwood and suddenly said, “You have a brother drive an AC Transit?”

“That's my father,” Allwood answered.

Allwood's father a city bus driver? I had never asked him about his father's job.

“You swear, man? You and him, you look like brothers,” Al said, holding his youngest, Renee, barely four years old.

Uncle Al turned to her. “This here is Shakespeare's son. Shakespeare is his daddy. Remember Shakespeare, our bus driver?”

She nodded her head shyly, looking at Allwood with recognition.

“Man, I have listened to that cat blow for days. Your poppa is a heavy dude. The college kids on that route nicknamed him Shakespeare.” The more Uncle Al talked, the more some kind of light came into Allwood's face.

“Yeah, he's a Shakespeare nut. Goes to all the plays in the park and the little theaters,” Allwood said, as he rubbed and stroked his beard. “He dragged us when we were kids.”

“You know something?” Uncle Al said. “When finals and midterms come up, them college kids be asking him all kinda questions about Shakespeare. They make your old man late on his run. I seen 'em, man, they be writing what he's saying.”

Uncle Al shook his head and turned to put Renee down.

“And that's your old man.” Uncle Al kept shaking his head and smiling as he shook Allwood's hand. Allwood looked at ease for the first time all night.

Renee, clinging to her father, kept looking at Allwood as Uncle Al started walking away, his back to us. “Who him name?” Renee said shyly to me, pointing to Allwood. I repeated his name clearly, over- enunciating.

“Who him name, who him name?” Uncle Al hushed her but it became a litany.

When we got ready to leave, we passed Renee and Uncle Al. As soon as she spotted Allwood, Renee started to say something. Then she put her thumb in her mouth and started sucking furiously.

Who-him-name was right.

I finished my first year with thirty-three units, a GPA of 3.2, and a boyfriend.

We were finished connecting. We were connected.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
llwood and I had to be the only two beings on earth crossing the Bay Bridge in a silver Beetle rehearsing phrases in Arabic in March of 1965. The radio was blaring that two Marine battalions had arrived the day before on China Beach at Danang.

“Malcolm's assassinated February twenty-fifth, and LBJ approves troops to go to 'nam on February twenty-sixth. No coincidence,” Allwood said.

As we came out of the Treasure Island tunnel onto the San Francisco side of the bridge, I could tell Allwood was pushing his buttocks down into the seat by the way he was gripping the handle on the dashboard. I pushed the four one-dollar bills that the toll collector had given me into my jeans pocket. We were headed for the Black House in the Fillmore.

“Allwood, do you think pushing your ass into the seat is going to stop the bridge from swaying?”

“You're driving too fast, Geniece,” he said, craning his neck to check my speed. He was right. “As-salaam-alaikum.” Allwood said it for the umpteenth time, enunciating every syllable.

“Wa-alaikum-as-salaam,” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to say, “Wall, the lake um's a salami, brother sister baloney, and most high potentate.”

Allwood shook his head.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I take it back.” I made grabbing motions into the tight space of air around us. “I put it all back in my mouth.”

The San Francisco skyline, the offices full of yellow light and reflected dusk, glittered. Allwood sighed. I drove to Fell Street and went up the hill, practicing and being corrected until we reached Divisadero Street, where I broke.

“They will not allow me in if I don't say this exactly right? Kick me into the street if I say it wrong? Who is the boss of Salaam and Sa-laikam, anyway? Tell me. It sounds like Abbott and Costello meeting up as sheiks on the street.”

“Believe it or not,” Allwood said, “you're going to like it.” We finally parked at Hayes and Broderick.

“I don't see a black house,” I said.

“It's not painted black,” Allwood said, steering me. Behind the wheel of the VW, the gearshift in my palm, I was in charge, since Allwood couldn't drive a stick. But outside that cooped-up space, I waited for his arm to tell me which was the right house. It was a two-story Victorian with a low-angled roof jammed between two other old houses. It looked no different from the others except it was a light green between celery and vomit, which I felt like I might do.

*   *   *

G
od, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Sunday to the Fleischacker Zoo, Goosey, Boy-Boy, Uncle Pink, the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay. I could hear the fat lady cackling at the Pacific Ocean, at the stream of frazzled parents, rowdy teenagers, noisy kids, and little colored me with braids and pedal pushers. God, would I ever grow up?

“As-salaam-alaikum,” I said, as we walked up the balustraded stairway.

“Wa-alaikum-salaam,” he said back and rang the bell.

The front door had leaded stained-glass windows on each side. I peered through one and saw a man with skin the color of a Hershey bar and teeth a stunning white. Even though I saw him, when he opened the door, he startled me. Allwood gave the Muslim greeting.

“Wa-alaikum-salaam, Brother Allwood!” The man's tone was so deep it rumbled. He took my coat from me. Inside I saw San Francisco once again in the dense, narrow, vertical interior. I was almost dizzy with expectation.

“Is this the sister's first time here?” he said to Allwood. I couldn't let him not talk to me.

“As-salaam-a-laikum,” I said proudly. His bushy eyebrows raised.

“I'm Geniece Hightower. I've never been here before.” I extended my hand to him. He looked at it and laughed. More rumbling. Inside me.

“You niggas from Oakland is quaint.”
Niggas from Oakland
. Did he sing that? Did his voice go up on
niggas
and back down on
Oakland
? Whatever was coming from his dark neck was like a boat bobbing on an ocean. I couldn't take my eyes from it.

“This is our fortress against the wolf,” he said, leading up the stairs. A hand-lettered sign hung between the sconces:
IN THE BEGINNING, ALL THE WORLD WAS BLACKNESS.
They changed a quote I immediately remembered from Western Civ and John Locke: In the beginning all the world was America. It was of a piece with the Grove Street orators, so smart, so seemingly University of California–bound yet not, so Harvard yet not, and here I was in this grand Victorian transformed by blackness. Not blackness, Blackness.

“The wolf?” I felt the quivery knot in my stomach. He laughed so hard I thought I should stop asking questions.

“Everybody. The system, the world, the city.” He stopped and leaned on the mahogany banister. “The garbage in the streets, the past, the present, maybe the future.”

He raised coal black eyebrows. “Street niggas come up with a lot of existential rhetoric too.”

“Bibo,” Allwood addressed him.

“Your name is Bibo?” What a crazy-sounding name.

“Wanna check my birth certificate?” he said. He and my kinfolk shared the same odd birth certificate pun. I felt like I was bobbing alongside him.

“Bibo, what time does it start?” Allwood's voice grounded me.

“The music or the speeches?”

“The speeches.”

“Speeches for the good brother Allwood right in the Malcolm X door.” The brother pointed to a closed door. Allwood squeezed my arm. I watched wordless as Allwood walked in and the door closed behind him. I heard a familiar-sounding high-pitched male voice inside. But it was overpowered by the rumbling intonations of the man next to me.

“You belong in here.” Bibo steered me toward a kitchen where a woman was stirring something that smelled like lamb and garlic in a pan. He disappeared down the hall.

He meant to direct me to the kitchen, and I do know about manners, but from the other side of the house I heard drums, vibrations, thumping, somebody blowing poetry like a saxophonist was inside his throat. I followed the sounds to another house connected by a passageway. I bobbed along, dealing with a ferocious conga beat. That was when I saw dancers. The first thing I noticed was dark, dark sisters, their hair trimmed and moving with their bodies like fitted caps. It was a dark world and I fit, or so I thought until I looked in the mirror where their torsos twisted around me like serpents. I looked like a Tarzan native on a Hollywood movie set. I looked wild and untamed, countrified. The dancers had sculpted Afros. I had hair all over the place. The dancers had African print draped around them. I had on frayed jeans. The sheer exertion of their bodies pounding, feet stomping, and hands tapping brought up images of my family, the side where light people, the high-yellow side, just had to be light. That's all, be light and that's all. The women who were light didn't even have to know how to dance, just be light, which made them pretty. I knew the browner people in the family could be smart as hell. It was never enough. If you were brown, you better know how to do something and do it well. Even then, you didn't get slack. Clovese had her picture in her paper at work. I could tell she was real proud of it because she made copies and gave them around. But I heard my aunt say, “So dark you can hardly see her.”

I headed for the kitchen. The woman there was slight with kumquat-smooth dark skin, an ankle-length skirt draped on her. Her back formed a graceful arch over the pan, her head wrapped in a purple silk scarf with pencil-thin green stripes. She didn't see me and I didn't want her to turn around and catch me staring at her. The smell of what she was cooking taken together with her appearance was enough. I was hearing the words
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
and
as-salaam-alaikum
in a jumble in my head. If I saw her from the front a snake might spring from the top of her head and twist over and grab me from myself.
No!
I wanted to shout out at her.
No!
You can't have it. I own it.

I wanted to take in this Blackness but I didn't want to drown in it. People who were radical and black or part of the resistance to the man and the system had confidence oozing out of them. They seemed to never doubt themselves. I wasn't like that.

I turned and walked down the hall to find Allwood, my security blanket. I couldn't find the door. I got stuck in the hall. Where was Allwood who had gotten me into this? I had to go into one of the rooms. What if I walked in on somebody doing it? House parties always had a bedroom upstairs where somebody dumb would happen on somebody not so dumb. But this wasn't a house party. I took a deep breath and opened a door with a poster of Malcolm X on it.

“Some people think this is paradise. California. We're free. The South is behind us. Jim Crow is behind us. The ocean is our frontier now. We're a part of the wild, wild West. . . . Don't believe it.”

The speaker's voice was high-pitched and familiar. It was Freed Man, with his Albert Einstein mustache, at a podium, two chairs on each side of him. The room had four rows of wooden folding chairs, with an aisle about a foot wide. But the room was lopsided because everybody was sitting on one side. The men looked alike, unsmiling with big Afros. I was escorted to the empty side. I became aware of my jeans that were tight and frayed on the inside of my thigh. “You're not a part of paradise. For you—” the speaker said. Seated, I recognized everything about him, his tallness, his gangliness, his light complexion, like a faded yellow. “For you,” he repeated, with the same rhetorical flourish he used on Grove Street in Oakland in front of City College, “California is paradise with rules, a paradise for fools. And the main rule for Negroes, that is, the unschooled fools who still call themselves Negroes, the main rule is . . .”

He broke off there and started laughing. In all those lunchtimes I had watched him with the Grove Street orators and taken leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba
from him, I had never seen him look jive or relaxed. But he was laughing a deep, hearty laugh, shaking his entire torso. How could he shake and bellow like that here in this foggy black heart of San Francisco and never have seemed at ease even once in the sunshine and touch-me-I'm-blue skies of Oakland?

“Wait!” The word hit the room like a thunderclap. I started in my seat. I needed to go to the bathroom, but even more urgently needed to get his point. I was following Freed Man like I'd followed preachers' interminable sermons on Sunday afternoons. Only then I'd waited for the preachers, who as a class Uncle Boy-Boy labeled ignorant, to say something ungrammatical or simple so I could dismiss the whole sermon. But the Grove Street orators were different. They were book smart.

“That's what the man insists that you do. Wait for justice. Wait for equality. Wait until he gets ready to give you freedom. To give you justice. To hand out equality on a silver platter.”

The men started clapping. I clapped with them. They stopped. I put my hands back on my lap. Freed cleared his throat like a reverend. Did God awaken him in the night with the next day's sermon? A God like Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey or Elijah Muhammad or maybe Nat Turner? His God was definitely a black man who wore owly glasses and Big Ben Davis coveralls and carried a briefcase, like he did.

“And then he concocts a rationale for why you have to wait. Not why you should wait, why you gonna wait. Dig it. He gets some Irish cracker—who's probably been to Harlem twice in his whole life—to put together a report and put his name on it. Yeah, the Moynihan Report.”

This was Allwood's turf. I was on familiar territory here.

“Yeah, the Moynihan Report, which just means some potato farmer's great-grandson is getting over on you, making his name, his rep, paying for his wife to hire your mama to make her dinner and wash her underwear out by hand—yeah, your mother, we know why sistahs' hands be so rough—and sending his kids to a college you couldn't get in if you had straight As and perfect SATs. I know because I was one of the first Negroes at Harvard. Went in a Negro, invisible and all that shit, came out a black man. Had to. It was either break through to my blackness or die. And you see me standing here.”

The men clapped in unison. When I clapped, I broke the oneness.

“Yeah. Moynihan . . . the very name makes me want to take somebody out. Moynihan says the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it's so out of line with the rest of American society—Dig that, you-outta-line Negroes—he says we seriously retard the progress of the group as a whole.”

I still needed to pee. The walls were lettuce green semigloss; somebody had done a nice job on the trim and the windowsills . . . alabaster. Nice. I still wanted to find Allwood. But the speaker was up to the clincher here in this bedroom auditorium.

“I don't know bout you, but I got a daddy. Fo your ass,” he said
. Yeah, but do you know where he is
,
I asked with my eyes,
cuz I don't know where mine is
.