Virgin Soul (8 page)

I
was almost in love. It would be interesting to find out what it takes to be in love. That little word—
in—
is so stupidly crucial. Does it mean you have to be
inside
the love or
into
this love or
inserted
or
in
between
it? I worked myself into a frenzy over this two-letter word.

It felt like a little room was inside my body, and I had the key and I gave it to Allwood, who fumbled and got the key in the lock and pushed the door open, and the hinges kind of squeaked and Allwood went in and made himself at home. In my room. Inside my life in a room that's a part of my body, a room I never see, a room that was so inviting to him and so mysterious to me. Where in the confines of that room was the
in
in in love? What was the connection between that room and my feeling for Allwood? I think when I finally made that connection something not clear became all too clear.

Inside my room, while I was outside, he walked around in it, opening and closing the windows. In my little godforsaken, me-forsaken room. Once he was comfortable, Allwood talked a lot. He did this all the time. It threw me off at first. I never seemed to recall hearing or reading about men talking a lot when they're in the throes of passion. The image I had was they talked you into bed, and after that was accomplished, it was all grunt and groan.

What a shock to find out that Allwood, the real Allwood, the questioning Allwood instead of the statemental Allwood, came alive as he began to come.

“Do you like me because I'm light?” This was a shocker when he came up with it. He was only the most black-identified guy I'd ever known. But I was learning to let Allwood talk when he was inside the room. By not answering out loud, we got to a different kind of conversation, one we never had if I had to use my voice.

What do you mean, because you're light-skinned?
I answered him in my mind. And, as if he'd heard me, Allwood said, “Or do you like me because I'm lighter than you?”
What difference does it make at this point?
, one part of me wanted to say, the part that the talking Geniece would have said. But the other part, the part of me that liked that bodily way of exchanging information, did things I would never have said.

Out loud, I said, “Allwood, I like you because you're so smart.” That's what I thought. I never told Allwood I liked him initially because of his meanness, which I found dangerously exciting. After I got to know him, I realized he wasn't mean at all. So then, I had to think of what I thought he was to reproduce the dangerous feeling, which was how I got into my feeling for Allwood and my feeling, limited, incomplete, or not in love, such as it was for him in the first place.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
found out Allwood was not mean in between our first and second time. We were sitting on the bench outside on Grove Street. The Fair Play for Cuba guys had stopped stopping traffic; I guess they met their quota of cars coming from Berkeley into Oakland. Or maybe they had to go to class. Allwood told me some of them did matriculate to Berkeley and some just stayed at City, where they could be radical for years on end.

Abner, who was neither radical nor bourgeois, mostly a species of generalized irritant, stopped to talk to us. They greeted each other like long-losts, hugging even. Allwood never hugged the Fair Play guys. They usually nodded and grunted, no hugging.

“Man, tell your ole lady why we hang so tight. Man, tell her we ain't no fags,” Abner said. Why he would think that was beyond me, but I was curious by then.

“Aw, man, I'll get around to it,” Allwood said, and then the two of them went into a powwow right there in front of me. They started talking as if in a foreign language—one with a lot of laughing and hand slapping. When they were through, Abner went on into the building. Allwood sat there, chuckling to himself. I shook his shoulder.

“Don't just sit there. Tell me why.” He began to tell me about their church's senior class outing, when he and Abner and the other kids, most of whom attended Oakland's only all-black high school, McClymonds, had gone up to the snow near Lake Tahoe for a two-day trip. I had read about it in the
Oakland Tribune
. And even better, my best friend's friend from the same church had been there too, so I knew details: the pond that wasn't frozen solid; the sign that they ignored; the break in the ice; the kids who had fallen through; the three who drowned; the teary funerals; the sadness when the ones who didn't die graduated. I had heard those details.

“I'll never forget. I thought I was going to die. . . . There were feet kicking me in the head and it was cold, Geniece. That water was so cold. But it was a strange thing. It was very clear down there. I didn't open my eyes for the first few seconds after I fell. But when I opened them, I could see my friends, my classmates. It was so clear. But it was too cold to think. All I could do was kick and be kicked. Then I saw a girl jerk her head back and her body went limp and then horizontal.”

Allwood stood up in the broad North Oakland daylight and I believed him, because he went into position, turning, jerking, kicking, and paddling.

“I grabbed her.”

“Why did you grab her?” I asked. “She was a goner.”

“Instinct, I guess,” Allwood replied. “And I went up with her. Her body, which should have been a deadweight, carried me up to the surface.”

“I don't believe it,” I told him, even though I believed every word of it.

“She actually wasn't dead. She hadn't drowned. I never figured out if she saved me or I saved her. But we both got out alive.” Allwood sat, his face even lighter with this energy of nearly dying. I sat closer to him, as close as I could, in the middle of the day. The cold of the pond went through me.

“Abner knew, because he was the one kicking his way up, he knew. But the church gave me a special award for bravery.” Allwood buried his face in my neck.

“Like a plaque.” I couldn't understand Allwood's face in my neck at all. This was so uncharacteristic. He didn't even hug until after we had gone to bed.

I heard him say one hundred dollars. “They gave you, you got one hundred dollars for it?” He shook his head against my shoulder.

“But what did Abner know?”

“He knew that I didn't do shit. At least, if I did, it was by mistake.” Allwood straightened up. “Do you think they gave her one hundred dollars?”

“She's alive. Maybe that was her reward,” I said.

“I gave her half the money, but her mother made her give it back. Her mother said I saved her daughter's life. That's what everyone thinks. Except for Abner.” He went on, in his way, repeating, formulating this question-and-answer hypothesis over and over. Who saved whom? How did he save her? Abner knows.

He never talked about it after that time. It was like a birthmark that he had shown me and never needed to explain again. I thought about it every time he kissed my neck, which was how he began to come. Allwood, my talky, dense Allwood, so hot and sweated up, yet so cold and confused underneath the surface of that pond. I followed him as he fell through the ice, his eyes shut against the cold, the boots of his classmates and Abner kicking his eyes open. The colder the pond, the hotter my body temperature. As he paddled and pushed to the surface, dragging her limp, inert body to the surface, Allwood pulled me sweating and shivering into the room. I could not seem to enter any other way. When he broke through and gasped the air for the first time, I gasped too, coming as hard as I could. When he and the girl, now breathing and gasping too, were rescued, I could rest and open my eyes. Then Allwood came. And we could surround each other like lovers. Before we got up, sometimes I'd think,
If only I knew what it takes to be in love.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

O
ne night, when he insisted we make love first to Cecil Taylor, then Coltrane, I told Allwood, “Don't make me paint myself black.”

We had worked out a trade-off. Since I had gone to the Black House, he'd come to my family get-together. Neither of us wanted to go at first. We had that in common. It had taken time, but we were pulling together.

“The Black House. Why is there so much fuss over black? Black this, black that. Five years ago, you couldn't pay people to say the word. Now they want to lie down and die in it.”

He sighed, and from the shelf in his head picked up a book—yet another bible full of new commandments. (1. Think Black. 2. Feel Black. 3. Look Black. 4. Buy Black. 5. Learn Black. 6. Love Black. 7. Talk Black. 8. Fuck Black. 9. Act Black. 10. Be Black.) As Allwood hunted down his citation, I listened to myself. To my dismay, I sounded like my family. If I were arguing the same point with my family, I'd be Allwood and they'd be Geniece. I'd be schooling them and telling them to be black. It happened every time I visited home. My cousin called me a Stokely Carmichael windup doll. Yet here, with Allwood, I acted in direct opposition to that. I wanted the music off.

“I only want to hear us. The music will drive me crazy.”

“That,” Allwood said with the authority of a kindergarten teacher, “is just what you need.”

“No,” I said. We stopped midfuck, and I got up and lifted the needle. “I don't want craziness. I want my nice orgasm the way I'm used to it. I want my own explosion. I want your hip bone rubbing against mine, that's all that it takes.”

I had been coming on my own since I was five, when I picked up the idea that I was a mermaid. In my sleep I became one every night, a blond one with nippleless titties. Coming was nothing unusual for me. Maybe finding out right before my period started that what I did to myself after the rest of the world quieted was called sex, maybe that was unusual. It held the same amount of pleasure for me as sneezing, which I did a lot because I was allergic to pollen. Coming itself was no big deal. Why did I have to do this the black way?

I picked up the album covers. “I don't want Trane going up my vagina. It's so simple. Let's fuck, let's roll, let's come.”

“You're too practical, even about sex,” Allwood said. “You're like a man.” We argued this in the middle of sex, started it up, got it going, and, Boom! our own version of coitus interruptus. It made for a bigger climax.

“I'm not greedy, I don't want more. I want the same.”

“It's never the same, even if you think it is.”

He stood up naked, his skin the color of a Lorna Doone shortbread cookie, his penis very hard and insistent, almost an exclamation point. Allwood was the exclamatory voice; I meant to put an end to things with my once-and-for-all declarative. The music went on. I got back in bed but needed a little more arguing down to heat back up.

“I think sometimes,” he said, following McCoy Tyner's bang-a-bang-banging up and down my spine, “you would have been better off if you had never learned how to masturbate.”

Now how was he going to work in burning in hell, pimples, and the Black Thang? The music went on, Cecil Taylor thwacking his ivories right into my eardrums and Allwood following close behind with his tongue. He came out for breath but Cecil held his ground.

“Don't look so defiant, Geniece. It just would have been nice,” his voice had begun to slur and soften, “if your first orgasm had been with me.”

“But, Allwood,” I said, now on top of him, “I come with you because I came with me over and over first.”

“This is different. You'll never forget this,” he said. Famous last words, I thought.

He came. I came. And, glory be, as the old folks say, you learn something new every day. It was better with the music. Bigger. Creamier. Harder. Softer. Faster. Slower. So black was beautiful, and I was a believer in—if nothing else—the eighth commandment.

H
aving roaches in my place was embarrassing when we first saw them; worse was becoming pals with them. Allwood sprayed my mattress for roach eggs outside next to the brick incinerator. I sprayed the whole place, and after two days Allwood carried the mattress back inside. We sat there like it was a luxurious feather bed. I wasn't sure how he was feeling, but I was feeling sweet, sweet, sweet. I decided to thank him with my special tamale pie. After all, how many people fumigate for you?

I bought Red's Tamales (“Tuesday is Red's Tamales day
,
”
their TV ad said), six to a package, two cans of Hormel chili with meat, chopped green onions, and grated a cup of cheddar. I layered the tamales and chili with the green onions, topped it off with the cheese, and popped it in the oven. I also bought a package of frozen sliced strawberries and two packs of Hostess Twinkies.

The tamale pie aroma was chasing away the last of the roach spray, we had
The Supremes Live at the Copa
on the box, Diana Ross was belting out, “You're nobody till somebody loves you,” Allwood had rolled a couple of bombs, and the doorbell rang. I opened the door to Wish Woodie all in my face. I was stunned.
Wish Woodie Allwood Allwood. my boyfriend my friendboy.
I was used to each by himself. I hadn't anticipated a juncture of the two.

“Geniece, it's Smoky Joe's café out back,” Wish said. My landlord had burned trash in the incinerator. “And I'm getting a contact high standing here. Damn, let me in.”

I leaned against the door in the middle of a sammich, a sandwich that had gotten smooshed. I let Wish in and introduced him. He pulled his hand out of his Windbreaker but pushed it back in the nylon pocket when Allwood didn't extend his.

“Have I seen you at the poor boys' hall?” Allwood asked Wish.

“What's that?” Wish asked, turning to me.

“It's like a dorm for brothers across from City,” Allwood said, rolling a joint.

“Nah, I never hang around City,” Wish said.

“I remember your face. You hang around Telegraph?”

“You mean up at Berkeley?”

“
Up
at Berkeley? I'm talking about the Avenue. Those four blocks from Bancroft Way to Dwight Way. Maybe Sproul Plaza.”

“The Ave, yeah. I'm always up on Telegraph.” Wish's toes looked like Brazil nuts in his leather sandals.

“The rest of the campus is off-limits.” Allwood's toes looked pale in comparison. “Haven't you seen that sign on Sproul Hall:
COLORED PEOPLE NOT ALLOWED EXCEPT JANITORS
?”

“They don't welcome Communists either, but it's not quite Ole Miss.” Wish looked out at the incinerator. “I guess I didn't see you at Cinema Psychedelica.”

“Don't have the leisure to take LSD,” Allwood said. He'd sized up Wish as an acidhead. I felt bad for Wish.

Allwood kept going like he was drilling for oil. “The Avenue's your playroom?”

Wish shook his head. “I wouldn't say so. I'm a watcher.”

“Uh, watching life go by with the beatniks in Cafe Mediterranean?”

“It's Caffe Mediterrane
um
,” Wish said. We had walked by the coffeehouse often, zonked, and I knew Wish didn't even go there. Up and down Telegraph, in and out of Pepe's Pizza, Moe's Books, Sather Gate Bookstore, the bakery, record stores—Allwood and I spent the most time at the folding card tables, matching the ism to the schisms—Ban the Bomb, Young Socialist Alliance, W. E. B. Du Bois Club, Progressive Socialist Party, Berkeley CORE, Young People's Socialist League, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Wish asked, “Were you up there Vietnam Day?”

“That's the first time I saw Bob Moses from SNCC. If I was into heroes, he would be it,” Allwood said.

I'd never heard Allwood use the word
hero
. I wondered if he had blacked out the
non
on his SNCC button before or after seeing Bob Moses. “Norman Mailer was drunk. What a gas. Did you see that?”

Wish shook his head and said, “Norman Thomas, the socialist, the mime troupe from the City . . . Berzerkeley. Mario Savio called being at Berkeley sucking at the breast of the holy mother university.” They started slapping hands and laughing.

“Yeah, the knowledge factory,” Allwood said.

“Man, were you at Sproul Hall in sixty-four?” Wish looked at him, half in awe. Allwood shook his head.

“I wasn't there when Savio climbed on the police car during the thirty-two-hour sit-in. But I was there when he compared the university to an odious machine and told the crowd at Sproul to put their bodies on the wheels and the levers and halt it completely.”

“We saw from the City portables the sheriff's brigade riding on motorcycles to Sproul Hall,” I popped in. “The
Trib
said they had more police going down Telegraph Ave to get those students than when President Kennedy came in sixty-three.”

“I heard Mario Savio on KPFA,” Allwood said. “They play the tape over and over.”

“You have to admit Berkeley's different from a lot of places,” Wish said.

“It's still not nirvana. The white man's heaven is the black man's hell,” Allwood said.

“I was born in Berkeley.” I wanted to lighten things.

“For real?” Wish said. “That makes you a berserk baby.”

“I'm the only one in my family. Everyone else's born in the South or Oakland.” Their intensity turned from each other.

“My father and mother lived on Acton Street in Berkeley,” I said.

They sat back, Allwood relaxing instead of being on the defense.

Wish said, “Acton. That's the other side of Sacramento?” Allwood nodded.

“My father, according to my family, gambled away the mortgage in an all-night poker party. We had to move to government housing, the projects. That's how we ended up in Codornices Village on the other side of San Pablo Avenue where Berkeley Farms dairy stands now.”

Wish said he'd heard of a Codornices Village for UC student housing in Albany, the town next door to Berkeley.

“Owned by the university,” Allwood said. “Emergency federal housing. Three-quarters black, the rest students and Japanese relocated from the concentration camps. Codornices Village was their first stop. Blacks rioted in the fifties when they closed it. That's where we lived when I was a kid.”

I remembered being on the floor of our unit in Codornices crawling under the wringer washer, oil dripping onto my plaits, getting spanked.

“What if we played together, Geniece?”

I saw myself eating mud pies in the dirt with Asian children, watching the big kids play Old Maid in the grass, being scared stiff of the tall albino boy with the tuft of blond hair that looked like a horse's mane. The fear that he was a man-horse had given me nightmares.

“We were allowed to occupy every square foot between Sacramento Street and the Bayshore Freeway,” Allwood said. “It's not as though we haven't made any progress.”

“Don't venture off the plantation, even in Berkeley,” I said.

Allwood turned to Wish. “You've gone to Rumford's Pharmacy around the corner?”

Wish turned to me. “Is that where you sent me for stockings that time?”

Allwood shined that on. “Byron Rumford, the owner, was the first black elected official in Northern California. He established the Fair Employment Practices Commission and then the Fair Housing Act of 1963.”

Wish looked puzzled again and Allwood was reveling again, as he always did in ignorance. It was just a relief to me that for once I wasn't the ignorant one.

“FEPC from the Fair Employment Practices Act,” Allwood said.

I added, “Rumford passed the act, then C. L. Dellums from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters chaired the commission.”

“We had to start getting blacks elected,” Allwood said. “The Okie finokees wanted the black migration to disappear once World War II was over. It took us until 1959.”

“Wasn't good old Berkeley the base for all this?” Wish said.

“Yeah,” Allwood said. “Liberal Berkeley, which passed and then rescinded its own fair housing ordinance in 1963.”

“So I didn't die and go to heaven in 1964 when I moved here,” Wish said.

I piped up, “That's the year the school board was nearly recalled because of desegregation.”

“The white folks you have to watch real close are the liberals, in their own backyards,” Allwood said, and, finally, we all laughed together.

“My father and his whole church participated in a boycott of Berkeley downtown,” Allwood said. “
Don't buy where you can't work
. Those friendly black cashiers at Woolworth's?”

“I know. Zorro put them there,” Wish said. “Black Zorro.”

That's what I loved about Wish. He knew Zorro like I knew Zorro, the masked freedom fighter from the comic book, not the Disney hero in a wimp's body. Wish was parrying with Allwood. By coming back with black Zorro, Wish was being sarcastic, like he knew that black people fought for their rights in Berkeley, and no one galloped in on a charger and gave them rights. But Allwood was too serious for the irony. Instead he had his I'm-going-to-figure-this-one-out look.

“White folks don't want to deal with a lot of this stuff they created. They have a reason to want to blow their minds with LSD,” Allwood said. “We don't.” And then we smoked two more joints before they started retracing their footsteps.

“What about the Afro-American Association?” Allwood said to Wish.

Wish shrugged his shoulders. “What's that?”

“Don Warden's organization. They have the Sunday meetings.” Allwood still had the I'm-going-to-figure-this-one-out look.

“Beats me. I never heard of Don Warden,” Wish said. Allwood sniffed the trail like a police dog.

“You never heard of Don Warden, the most prominent black attorney in the Bay Area, the man Huey Newton calls the most dangerous brother in America?” I said. I thought everybody knew Don Warden.

“He's a rite of passage for brothers,” Allwood said. “The Afro-American Association—his group—hipped us to the reality that we don't need more laws for justice, we need more justice. But after that, the association's all about Don Warden.”

We smoked the last of the rolled joints.

Wish produced a doobie from his pocket. I asked if he wanted some tamale pie. He looked at my kitchen walls. “What happened to your roaches, Geniece?”

“Sprayed them into the beyond,” I said.

“Let's hope,” Wish said, before taking a plate.

“Now I know where I've seen you. West Campus, Berkeley High,” Allwood said.

The whole room settled down. Even the incinerator calmed. We'd found it.

“I do carpentry there,” Wish said.

Allwood reacted as if that was impossible. “You're an employee of the district?”

“No, man, you know it's hard as hell to get on with Berkeley Unified.”

“Tell me. They don't let splibs swim in the pool except on Friday nights. Unwritten rule.”

“What do you do there?” Wish asked.

Allwood, holding, took a big drag and forced it into his lungs, then passed it to me. “I tutor history, physics, calculus . . . you know, white kids on the way to Stanford, Cal Tech, Reed.”

I went over to the kitchen drawer. I wanted to share my black college brochures from down south with Wish and Allwood. I stumbled a little because of my buzz. When I opened the drawer underneath the kitchen counter, my eyes weren't completely focused. Wish started pointing to me like I had the cooties, and Allwood started laughing, and I looked at my arm to see what was up.

Roaches were leaping out of my drawer, flying out, as if they'd been waiting for me to open that drawer for weeks. The three of us began swatting and slapping with the brochures. As we pounced on them and they pounced on us, I could almost hear them breeding, hatching, and listening to me and Allwood talk black, learn black, love black, fuck black all semester, hatching and scheming to scare the black out of me right at that moment. We pounced for a while, until Wish said we'd got them all.

“The last of them?” Allwood asked him.

“I hope so,” I said.

“I'm still suspicious,” Wish said. He went back to the drawer and carried it outside. Allwood followed him out. I swept up the mess and went outside. Wish had dumped the remaining contents into the trash. “They probably laid their eggs inside Geniece's black college brochures.”

He looked back to the apartment. “What's in the other drawers?”

“Silverware,” I said. “That was the only drawer with papers in it.”

“Let's put the trash in the incinerator,” Allwood said, “to be sure.”

My gibberish started. I heard it, heard myself, still high, murmuring to the flame:
Howard/Spelman/MorrisBrown/Talledega/PhilanderSmith/Wilberforce/Xavier/Hampton/Wiley/BethuneCookman.

“The talented-tenth factories,” Allwood said, tossing the brochures in the incinerator. “They nurture reactionary tendencies in the race. Not what Du Bois had in mind.”

He turned to Wish. “Don't some of the kids call you Black Jesus?”

Wish nodded and shrugged. “It's the hair.”

We stood there in a trance watching the heat ripple the air. I spoke. “When I was three, my father took me to a doctor in Berkeley, a specialist. I was talking like I just was now. I made sense to me, I guess, but no one else. The doctor told my father I was retarded. Before we left Codornices Village, a UC doctoral student worked with me, changing my speech pattern. I was her dissertation.”

The heat rippled through the chill in my body, a chill from the San Francisco Bay that settled in about 4:00
P.M.
no matter the day's temperature.

“But they say my dad grabbed me up, shouted, ‘
Is this what you get paid fair money for?
'
And stomped out of there.”