Virgin Soul (7 page)

“This looney-tune white man is the USA, your Uncle Sam. And the same mothers and fathers he's disparaging—which is a fancy white man's term for putting your ass down—those same black people are paying his salary, slaving, paying taxes so the man can write this bullshit, get a PhD off of it, and keep you down where you can't even get up and fight cuz you busy trying to prove to him that what he's saying ain't so, which he knows already and that's why he puts it out there. So you'll spend the next twenty-five years trying so hard to disprove a lie that it begins to sound like the truth and Moynihan, some potato farmer's great-grandson, gets called a prophet.”

Freed Man was through. I had attended enough church to know that. The men began clapping.

“We don't need no hand clapping.”

They stopped. “And we don't need no more Jesuses. One was enough to keep us under the yoke for four hundred years.” Well, I didn't see a collection plate, so I got up and slithered out so I wouldn't have to shake hands with the right reverend. But he called my name before I could get to the door.

“Sistuh Hightower,” he said. I nodded. He remembered my byline.

“Is this your first time at the Black House?”
How could he tell?
“Are you reporting on this?”

“No, no, no, I came with Allwood.”

“Don't be embarrassed,” he said.
Oh, shit, he could read my mind.
“You're not dressed the way the sisters dress here.”

He pointed me with his hand on my elbow back to the kitchen. “Fatimah will give you the word. She's a Nubian sister. Queens speak a language only other queens can understand. Dig?”

“Nubian?” I asked.

“Yeah. New Being. Nu-bi-an. That's the word here.”

I had no choice, it seemed, but to return.

Fatimah stood in the kitchen, smiling at me as if she had been waiting for me all night. I touched my hair. It felt wiry and woolly. She smiled again.

“You are a queen. Beautiful,” she said. I didn't know what to say.
Beautiful
. What kind of word was that to be connected with me? I had been called cute and dark, sexy and dark, long-legged and dark. Beautiful?

“You've never been called that, have you? A queen?” she asked, her voice soft and rich.

“No, never,” I said.
Napoleon nose
had been one of my nicknames from the cousins. I had a small waist and pretty feet, my one physically perfect feature. Men had singled out parts, as if the whole was worth very little but the parts could be worth something at auction. I never believed men who said I was fine because I thought they used the word interchangeably with the thought of wanting to fuck me. The brother who had called her a Nubian came to the kitchen.

“Tightening her up?” he said.

“Harris.” Fatimah's large brown eyes seemed to pour the word out to him. She had been cooking for him, I was sure. He turned to talk to someone down the hall. “Let the white kids lead a palace revolt. Let the white man be divided. Divided he falls, united we stand. When the man closes ranks is when we should be alarmed. That's when he's at his deadliest.”

He turned back to me and said to Fatimah, “Lumumba, Patrice Lumumba. She's got that same steady look in her eyes. She's got a chilling thing going down in her eyes. Yeah.”

My only frame of reference for anybody's Lumumba was a dark-as-night boy in high school with very African features. From the South, he wore Big Ben overalls and clunky workingman's shoes, and kids called him Lumumba. He had a crush on me and my friends had made fun of me because of it. They had called me Lumumba's wife, which I had hated.

When Harris walked away, I felt free to ask Fatimah. “Am I seeing things wrong or do I just happen to see a lot of light-skinned brothers in the movement with darker-skinned sisters?”

She laughed a tinkly crystal laugh. I wondered what her hair was like under her scarf.

“You picked up on that, huh? These brothers have an elevated consciousness and, yes, they're trying to prove something. Allwood is your man, right?”

I shrugged. She smiled like she knew something I didn't.

“Harris, Allwood, our light-skinned men in the movement, they feel deeply about us as sisters, as beautiful black women.”

“But is it overcompensation?”

“Maybe you see it as overcompensation. When you look outwardly, unless you look in a mirror, you can't see yourself. You can't see if you're skinny or fat or white or black. You see the people around you. Whatever they are, that's what you are. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up human, no age, no color, and no sex until your eye hits either a mirror or another person. Then it's instant. That's who you are—who you sleep with, who you eat with. So I think these brothers have grown to resent being categorized, put down because of their light skin. They're trying to prove who they are inside so they won't be judged by the outside.”

I felt a sense of alarm. “Will they dump the dark-skinned sister once they've made their point?”

She laughed again. “Did Malcolm leave Betty?”

“Malcolm X's wife was dark-skinned?”

Fatimah got a book from a stack on the table and showed me Betty Shabazz's picture. “Brother Malcolm's overcompensation benefited us all. He became as powerful as we are. He exposed us to our power and that was his power. That's why they had to kill him.”

She put the book back and walked behind me. “Let me show you something.”

With one deft movement of her hands, she twisted my hair, tighter than I had ever twisted it, into a ponytail. She pulled me up and we went to the mirror in the hall. I looked at her hands, at her long smooth fingers, with their white half-moons. They told me my mother had strong fingers with beautiful half-moons.

“Do you see how different you look with your hair off your face?” she asked me.

For so long, I had used my hair as my shield. To see myself in front of her as I saw myself in the morning was a shock.

“You are a beautiful woman.” She turned my chin from side to side. “Look at your face, your jaw, those beautiful planes. Look at the light picking them out. You're a thousand years old. They couldn't beat the African out of you. They couldn't fuck it out.”

She wouldn't let go of my head. One hand held my hair tight from my scalp, and her other hand, satin soft and cool, cupped my chin. “You have to say it,” she said.

“Say what?”

“I am such a beautiful woman.”

I said it quickly.

“No, say it slowly looking at yourself, not me.”

I said it again, but it was hard not to look at her. She was beautiful.

“Look at you. No man can make you unbeautiful. Say it as if it meant all the gold in creation was inside your beauty. Inside you.”

I looked at that mirror and saw the Geniece she saw. I wasn't only parts put together. She let go of my hair; it went back all over the place. But it didn't matter. I was not my hair or my pretty feet that no one ever saw first, or any other part, not even my mind. I was a whole new being that this woman had showed me. Bibo came sauntering down the hall and grabbed my arm, pulling me away. Fatimah smiled and watched as we walked away. He wasn't so overpowering. He wasn't overcompensating either. We went to another part of the house, but he kept pouring poetic shit into my ear.

“Elvis ripped off Big Mama Thornton . . . The hound dog . . . Jughead was an agent provocateur for the FBI. . . . Millie the Model had silicone implants, but we didn't want to hear it. . . . Yeah . . .
True Romance
tears stop where the real ones start. . . . Ike was a colored man. . . . Dinah Shore's a fugitive from the Negro race. . . . Sammy Davis Jr. got that empty eye socket from the mob. . . . Little Lotta's fat comes from the diethylstilbestrol in all those hamburgers she stuffs down her fat white gut. . . . Even if we heard it, it would have gone in one ear and out the other. . . . Archie and Veronica freaked on her daddy's bed. . . . You gotta use your imagination, otherwise you'll just be thinking some guy is peeing inside you. . . . Richie Rich made his money from black sugar workers in rural Cuba. . . . Louie Louie was a flasher. . . . Nkrumah has led Ghana into the future fabulous.”

He walked toward Allwood, who was waiting with his coat on and looked strange, as if I had gone away and we were connecting after a long absence.

“Are you ready?” Allwood asked, one hand on the door. When we got outside, the cold night air fell right on the spots where Fatimah had held my chin.

“Yeah, finally,” I said.

The next day I went to the barbershop and had my hair cut into a natural.

Sleek, short, very African.

A
llwood and I had been more than friends but less than going all the way for almost a year. I had forty-five units and wanted to go to a black school, but who was I fooling? No moolah, no black college. But my life was changing anyway, thank goodness. I had moved to a one-bedroom apartment in South Berkeley for eighty-eight dollars a month, and I was no longer bound by the Y curfew. I put away the silver circle pin I had worn since high school to show that I was a virgin. I wasn't ashamed, but to be a sophomore and a virgin was not something to brag about, especially when you had a boyfriend.

I liked Allwood as a person. I respected his intelligence and always will. I might have been a little bit in love with him, but Allwood's idea of a good time was to debate the merits of W. E. B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington, for starters. Then he'd switch to the Harlem Renaissance and black literature, do a stretch on Paul Robeson and the radical connection between theater and socialism, do a spiel on the Pullman porters and the sociological impact of trains on black folks, jump from Jean-Paul Sartre on the language of domination imposed by the French colonialists on Algiers and end up with an analysis that connected Little Rock, Arkansas, to the Algerian war. And, of course, the Mekong Delta and the Vietcong and the war spreading into Laos and Cambodia. That swamp containing guns, soldiers, generals, and names like Westmoreland, McNamara, and Hershey was never far away. Very educational, mind you, but on any given Friday night, my cultural conditioning got the best of my intellectual affinities.

I began to see astride his lanky shoulders hung in his loden green car coat two huge globes filled with seawater. The one on his right shoulder was the American continent and the left shoulder globe was the African continent. Allwood would say
what's up?
or
you got it
, but he was giving me a globe. Then I would be equally weighted down. I got so irritated one Friday night when he started in on his Cuba-socialism-Afro-American-capitalism jazz, I exploded.

“Allwood, I have a corn on my left baby toe. I am not in the mood. Life does not begin and end with the problems of the world. Fuck Cuba. Fuck the United States too. Fuck everything troublesome for at least an hour of every day. Particularly when we're together. I will not be indoctrinated into fucking you.”

I didn't mean for the last part to come out. But I was tired of the spiel and didn't like not being able to stand him, because I wanted him to be the first. But things had to be right. I wanted to be in control of that much of my destiny. I was in essence negotiating when, where, how, but not why. We had settled the why wordlessly.

This particular Friday night, we had gone to the party house on Alcatraz Avenue right above Adeline in Berkeley. In all the times I had partied there, I never scrutinized the apartment, never cared who lived there. It was just a bunch of Sigmas who gave parties. Splibs crowded into a smoky room doing the shotgun to Junior Walker & the All-Stars. Now the front room was bare except for the radiators, a dining room chair with a faded rose velvet seat, an old brass lamp, and a brand-new stereo. The box was long and shiny and belonged somewhere else, like behind a plate-glass display window. Allwood led me through a hall to the back. I was squiggling, but he was solemn. The back room into which Allwood led me contained a single, solitary daybed, soiled and gray, with no sheet, no nothing. The thought of my bare brown bottom on a strange bed without even a clean sheet was beyond me.

I thought of the room I had imagined walking into, one with polished parquet floors and bookshelves all around. Huge yellow and brown wide-wale corduroy pillows. The bedroom was rather small for the huge bed but that was okay, because the bedspread was all gold puff, the huge window had a beautiful view of the Berkeley Hills, and the sheets were clean and creased. Into this we floated and landed, facing each other. Then Allwood glided into me effortlessly and began to climax. I told him to stop and wait for me, and he did, and we began to really feel each other, to feel sensual and come together. It was supposed to be breezy.

“Allwood.” I began to seethe. “Are you crazy. I only have one cherry. Do you think you're going to pop it on that?”

He looked embarrassed but he didn't say anything.

“You know what this reminds me of?” It brought to my mind a whorehouse.

He shook his head.

“Would you eat off that sofa, Allwood? The guys take fast girls here to do it. I can't believe this. When you said a friend's apartment, you know what I thought?”

“I know, I know. I'm sorry. Let's go.”

When we got outside and started walking toward the bus stop, Allwood looked depressed. “What are we going to do?” he said.

*   *   *

A
llwood counted his change carefully. He had gotten us a motel room at Motel 6. He stood at the window of the motel room watching the freeway construction near MacArthur Boulevard.

“Pretend the money is for a good cause.” I was softening. Anger was not the proper accompaniment for the First Time. The daybed in my apartment would have been suitable if we were going to be mad. I wanted glorious. We fiddled around. I checked the bedclothes, looked in the closet for a ghost of romance; Allwood read the Gideon Bible.

“Anything you like in there?”

He looked at me, a little sad. He sat on the bed. I felt this enormous warmth move me. I had won the Battle of the Motel Room.

“Allwood,” I began so softly I surprised myself. “I'm sorry for acting shitty. Let's just relax.”

We lay there for a few minutes, Allwood fully dressed except for his loden green car coat, which he had hung with no small amount of care in the empty closet. Then we began to kiss. Routine, routine. Off with my blouse. Not so routine, but not so different either. The hands on the thigh bit. Routine, routine. His lips on my breasts. The norm lately. Only more exciting now. His shirt came off. Out of the ordinary. Thin Allwood had a set of dark nipples like buoys on the yellow sea of his chest. I touched them; they got hard just like mine. Really nice. I kissed them. He started laughing. Then he got up and began to unzip. Allwood's Big Moment. I stared. He wore white briefs.

Hair black and curled—I probably would have fainted if it had been anything else—from his navel down to his penis. I had never seen one not in a photo or on a statue or a baby boy. It looked like it had been planted there, with all that hair for soil, just dangling there amid his beige-colored balls.

“Allwood, this is rather nice.” I began to take my clothes off. I hung them over the chair. When I looked back, Allwood was staring at me, lying down, his penis standing straight up, well, maybe a forty-five-degree angle. I felt a tension in my thighs.

“Allwood, where did you get that yellow missile?”

“Huh?”

“God, Allwood, is all that supposed to be inside me?”

“Yeah, but not at first.”

“When? What happens now?”

“You can either hop on it or I can hop on you.”

“It's going to hurt?”

“Not too much.”

He laughed. It was okay for him to feel humorous. A nuclear submarine with destroyer force wasn't aiming for his gut.

“Are you serious?”

“C'mon, Geniece. It's just like when we kiss and feelsies. Only more.”

So we did some kissing and touching. Only I was thinking,
Kid Geniece, this is the real thing, a real live loud moan, a real live hard penis, a real body moving against me instead of the thought bubble above my head.
My pelvic area went into its own orbit. How easy, nothing complicated about this. Follow the circle, Geniece. Allwood sat back on his knees again, rubbing the yellow missile. It had a new face, bloodied.

“It has blood on it. . . . What happened? . . . How come I didn't feel it? . . . I'm not a virgin anymore, Allwood.”

He laughed. The torpedo shook. It had a new face, bloodied.

“You're still a virgin. But not for long.”

It finally happened. I felt it inside me again. It didn't hurt so much as it felt so darn pointed.

“Darn, why is it so sharp, Allwood?”

I really didn't know where to put my legs. Straight up, I was told. That's ridiculous. I tried it, Allwood moaned and the torpedo moved in a little more. Oh, now that hurt.

“When is it going to feel good?”

“Give it a few minutes.”

I felt stupid with my legs up in the air. Suddenly and partly to keep my mind off the hurt, the painful feeling, I started thinking about the window and if anyone with binoculars had caught sight of two brown legs with feet on the end sticking straight up.

“My legs are tired, Allwood.”

“All right, baby.”

Then it was like buckshot exploding inside me. Unbelievable. I felt this person exploding inside me. Allwood started moving faster. What was I supposed to do with my legs? I put them alongside his back. That was more comfortable for me, but I didn't think it was for him.

“Wrap your legs around me.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah.” His face looked like nothing I'd seen before, like he lost control of the muscles around his mouth.

It still hurt, but I was thinking,
It's over, the pain is over, finally I'm not a virgin anymore, I'm a full-fledged member of the society of people who do it. I was doing it. No. I had done it.
Entry is act.

“I'm gonna come.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it feels real good, babe.”

“Oh, Allwood, does it? What's gonna happen?”

“Watch.” Famous last word.

Allwood's body tightened. He got real rigid. Oh my goodness, his balls flapped against my behind. Allwood moved fast and I grinded. It still hurt, but I was so curious to see what would happen. He started shuddering. I couldn't recall seeing anyone not in a horror movie shudder before, especially on top of me. Oh my goodness, was Allwood in pain too? Everything felt so tight, like we'd locked into each other. Of all things to remember, I saw
Pit and the Pendulum
, the last scene where the cage closes on the lady who did Vincent Price wrong. I bit his neck.

“Geniece Geniece,” Allwood shouted. The next thing I knew his tongue went all the way down my throat. For about thirty seconds, I thought I was going to die of suffocation.

“Did you come?”

“Did I!”

“Was it the way it's supposed to be?” My legs were wrapped around his back.

“Yeah exactly.”

“Did you like it?” Everything felt gooey.

“Be quiet for a minute. Stop fucking with me.”

I count to sixty.

“Why is it still hard, Allwood?”

“Because I'm ready to go again.”

“What does that mean?”

“This is just a rest period.”

“You're kidding.” All of a sudden I feel sore.

“No, I'm not.”

“You're going to repeat the whole thing?” I wanted to get up and see how much blood I lost. I shifted around.

“Don't do that.”

“I have to go to the bathroom, Allwood.”

“Okay, okay, get up.” It came right out like a greased pole. Allwood yawned and stretched. My legs felt like they'd been stretched apart for hours.

“How long did it take, Allwood?”

“I thought you had to use the bathroom.” Allwood looked at his watch. “About half an hour.”

“That's all? I feel like a jockey.” I was afraid to look, so I didn't even lift up.

“You can close your legs.”

“Okay, don't rush me.”

I rolled over. It felt sticky. The sheet had a spot not bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Oh crap.

“Is that it, Allwood?” I was disappointed.

“Is that what?” he laughed.

“My cherry.”

“Yeah, you want to take it home for a souvenir.”

This was a big letdown, a really big letdown.

“I'm glad this is not my wedding night. I would want a divorce, or at the very least a good explanation.”

“Next time,” he said, slapping my fanny, “it'll be better. For you.”

“Allwood,” I said on my way to the bathroom, “was I good?”

“Fair. C+.” I didn't know if he was kidding. What was I supposed to do? Stand on my head?

Allwood walked into the shower. For the first time since we stepped into the motel room I remembered that everything had been very mellow and that we'd been relating like ordinary people the entire night. No politics, no heavy rap.

“You get an A. No kidding. You handled yourself like a pro.” Allwood laughed, but it made me feel funny. Now that I wasn't a virgin, that could be insulting.

I wondered what Allwood would think if he could have seen inside my mind. He probably wouldn't have cared. Maybe he would. Then again he couldn't see inside mine and I couldn't see in his, other than all the bookshelves. Maybe ignorance is bliss, maybe it's plain ignorant.

“Allwood, I don't think I want to do it again,” I told him after we cleaned up.

“I know,” he said. “You got up.”

“You mean ordinarily you start right back up and don't clean it up or anything?”

“It depends.” Allwood started putting his clothes on. I knew he was getting lonesome for his car coat.

“Do you get any of the six dollars back, since you only stayed an hour?”

“No. Let's hurry up. I'm hungry.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
mid this frenzy, I got my semester grades:

• Poli Sci, [A];
  
• French 3, [A];
  
• Journalism, [A], of course;
  
• Physiology 1-1 Lab, [D]. This really hurt my GPA, because it was a five-unit course.
  

I couldn't figure out if this being almost in love was hurting or helping my GPA.