Virgin Soul (11 page)

T
he one course Allwood and I took together was summer session Cal-transfer American History. By then, Allwood had gotten his acceptance letter from Cal Tech, which didn't mean much without a scholarship. The thought of another class at City made me sick. But Allwood and I pitched together and bought one set of texts
, The Peculiar Institution
by
Kenneth Stampp and
Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery
, and read to each other. When Allwood read, walking around, crouching, or reading matter-of-factly, the voices of the yoked slaves were right with us in Oakland, as far from the antebellum South as one could get without falling in the Pacific. I heard their voices alongside echoes of Goosey, Uncle Boy-Boy, Aunt Ola Ray, and Pink.

She'd get the doctor iffen she think they real bad off. . . . I sells milk and makes my living. . . . It seem like the white people can't get over us being free and they do everything to hold us down all the time. . . . You's a fool, you is.

I liked that the men and women in the books made their own perfume, balling up their clothes in rose leaves, jasmine, and sweet basil for days.
Lay My Burden Down
was published before I was born, but their ways sounded familiar. They poured buttermilk over greens and crumbled bread in pot liquor the same way I sopped up the last of the gumbo with the ends of bread. They took care of all the children regardless of origin. They talked about poor white trash the same way my aunts and uncles did
.

Oakland even had its own version of paterollers, overseers for the massa—the oh-pee-dee, the Oakland Police Department. It even recruited in the Deep South, placing posters in Army and Marine recruiting stations. Reddy, a good friend of the family who didn't look black, called it the oh-pee-dee after he got on as a dispatcher by passing in the fifties. He told us how oh-pee-dee called us every name under the sun but the child of God—
niggers, apes, jungle bunnies, bastards, nincompoops, idiots
,
but mostly nigger
.
They'd come to work on Fridays raring to go get them some jungle bunnies, but Reddy never let out a peep about who he really was—until retirement. Then he took Helen, his very brown-skinned wife, and Wayne, his brown-skinned son, to his retirement party. Wayne was Reddy's spitting image except for his skin. At the party Reddy told them not only he was black but how happy he was that he wasn't white. And that his greatest accomplishment was getting Wayne through Stanford with the help of a Police Athletic League scholarship. Reddy going to work for the man for twenty years, smiling ugly all the while.

The folks during slavery did a whole lot of smiling ugly too, instance after grim instance of it. I identified with them, especially when, happy but bewildered, they first tasted freedom. One said: “Even the best masters in slavery couldn't be so good as the worst person in freedom
.
” Those two books got inside me, deeper and gutsier than any I'd read, more than Allwood's ten books. I was like them, exhilarated and bewildered.

Allwood and I looked at newscasts about air raids in Vietnam and the escalation of the war; Hanoi, Haiphong, Ho Chi Minh swam in my head with visions of the earth blowing up and my never having children. Allwood outlined the Radical Reconstruction and wrote his scholarship essay for Cal Tech, “The Pen or the Sword.” The Admissions brochure requested a timely topic.

It was a Tuesday when the phone rang. We were listening to President Johnson announce that twenty-two hundred Americans had been killed in Vietnam and nearly twice as many South Vietnamese. Allwood's father, sounding exactly like Allwood, asked for him. Allwood listened for a minute, said uh-huh
over and over, and, once, before he hung up, “Don't worry, I'm not going to.”

“Cal Tech called my house,” Allwood said. The school wanted to interview him in person that weekend at the Hotel Leamington in downtown Oakland.

“A coat-and-tie interview?” I asked. He nodded. “I'm impressed, Allwood.”

*   *   *

H
e couldn't allow himself 100 percent of a smile. That would have been contrary to the posture he needed to hear Stokely Carmichael speak at a school in West Berkeley. I couldn't go because I had to work. Before I left the house, I sat for a few minutes and thought about us.
He's going away. I'm staying right here.
I had never broken up with a boyfriend because I'd never had a boyfriend to break up with. I thought of Uncle Boy-Boy, who used to say about all the friend-boys who came to the house, “Don't put all your eggs in one basket.” Allwood had started out more like a friend-boy than a boyfriend. But he'd become my boyfriend and our basket of blackness didn't come with moonlight declarations of undying love or red hearts. Had the brush that painted me black sloshed my heart too? What if I left everything and went with Julie hoboing across the country? The postcards that I would send from Ill-wind-and-lotsa-noise or Why-owe-me—who would miss me?

After work Allwood came by to watch Stokely on the late news. Pia Lindstrom, the blond Channel 7 anchor who was Ingrid Bergman's daughter, articulated the phrase “Black Power” like it was a new disease. Stokely's eyes danced in his face inside a little square at the side of her head. Allwood looked like he was going to grab her by the neck.

“Still trying to make like we don't exist.”

“What else did Stokely say?” I asked.

“We're not going to play Jew if the white man wants to play Nazi.”

“He said that? I can see them trying to paraphrase that.”

We turned on KDIA black radio, turned off the TV sound, fired up, and got in the groove. I combed Allwood's hair. He hated to comb his thick, coal black hair. More often than not he picked it out with a cake cutter, patted it, and that was the extent of it. About once a week, sometimes twice if we were getting along good, I'd shampoo it in the sink. Then, with him sitting on the floor between my thighs, me on the chair, I'd comb out his hair, brush it, oil it, and braid it while we watched old movies on the black-and-white.

The night before the interview we saw an old movie where the guy who was fourteenth in line to the throne plotted and killed off everyone to get his inheritance. Then his wife did him in once he was in line. As Maceo, James Brown's saxophonist, would say, cold-blooded. Allwood said power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power entranced me, but I didn't see it as corrupting, especially not the power of intellect.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
llwood walked in after the interview, sport coat on and tie loosened like a character from
Father
Knows Best
if the son had had a Negro friend. When Allwood sat on the daybed, he looked faintly like a husband who'd had a big day at work.

“Honey, can I get your slippers? Is baby wiped out by the men in the gray flannel suits?” He didn't laugh.

“Not to worry. Taste this delicious pot roast. . . .
Pot
roast? A little pot
in the roast.”

He still wasn't laughing, although he was watching my every move. Something had happened at the interview, something shaming. I waited.

“Did they take back your admission?”

He shook his head. “Everything went fine.”

“Did you get militant on them?”

We had practiced appropriate answers to difficult questions. One in particular we role-played several times: “What is the best way for the Negro race to make progress? A: Education, the surefire path to improved opportunities for all citizens in a democracy.”

“I said black. A lot.”

“Did they react?”

“No. As a matter of fact, they wanted to talk about the marchers in Mississippi, and Martin Luther King and Stokely marching arm in arm.”

“How did you handle it?”

“I quoted Adam Clayton Powell when he called Black Power a working philosophy for the new breed.” He relaxed a bit as he got into Grove Street oratorical position. “Proud young Negroes who categorically refuse to compromise or negotiate for their rights.”

“Then it's just a matter of them deciding on the amount of your scholarship?”

He didn't say anything.

“You're getting a scholarship?” Tuition alone was the cost of a new Volkswagen.

“They're giving me a full tuition scholarship, and partial room and board.” Allwood hugged me so tight I couldn't see his face. I felt the artery in his throat pulse.

“I have to leave Monday.”

I felt the word
leave
in his throat, a glottal thump. My ear lay against the cord of muscle crossing his neck. It took a minute to sink in. All I could say was, “Leave how?”

“The train.”

I saw a train leaving a station, me watching it go. I held tight, as if we were drowning in a boat in a gusty wind. I felt moisture on my cheek and let go of him. Both of his cheeks glistened, and in his tears all my pictures of him appeared: Allwood pacing the apartment, holding forth, lecturing; reading, his uncombed head bent over as he savored his books, especially his black books, opening each one as methodically as peeling an orange; setting my paperbacks on fire, explaining they were trash and me telling him it was my trash and he better replace it. I had accustomed myself to his moods: arrogant, thoughtful, harried, studious, joking, sleepy, passionate. He said
I love you
but only in bed, never after, never before, and never outside of the apartment. I must have said what I was thinking,
You never came with roses
,
because he looked sad and said, “I could go get roses now.”

“It wouldn't be a surprise.”

Allwood sad, Allwood intuitive was surprising. As comfort, I repeated how much I wanted to go to a black college, all the better to absorb all the wondrous information in the world of black thought. This ordinarily made him laugh, but he wasn't laughing. That night, before he left, while we were going at it, full strength, he whispered,
You are a black college unto yourself.
My Allwood.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

M
onday morning we talked on the phone, but from the train station with noise, people, and space between us. Allwood had to begin immediately as a math lab assistant. “I barely had time to pack, especially my books,” he grumbled, asking if I'd drop him from the course that we were in together. I had a warm flood of all the places he had touched—the radio dial, the front doorknob, the light switch in the bedroom, and especially his car coat, his long sandy fingers and walnut-looking knuckles fumbling with the dangling buttons. He left the Bug but not the pink slip for the car, and I didn't have any money to buy it. All week Allwood's face came at me. Even the class seemed different. The instructor, Mr. Carlisle, young, blond, and white, with a thick head of hair and a head-in-the-clouds presentation, reminded me of Allwood, mainly the thick hair. I tried not to picture us having sex.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

O
ne afternoon the instructor announced that the Soul Students Advisory Council would be paying the class a visit. The two SSAC students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, posted themselves at opposite sides of the classroom. My warm thoughts of Allwood came up accidentally. Huey gave me a little nod, but neither of them spoke; they stood, their torsos as stiff as bayonets. I thought of the warmth of Allwood's palms pressing my back.
Look at their mugs
, the student behind me whispered.
They're not cracking a smile
. I thought of the scowl on Allwood's face when he stood on the shelving ladder in the branch library. Mr. Carlisle, so pale and slight, as if his degree from Harvard had kept him out of the sun and stunted his growth, talked as though our textbook author Stampp was a colleague. “Stampp and I concur that slavery became ‘untenable' economically.” When he used finger quotes he reminded me of Allwood. Something about that made me ache and see myself braiding Allwood's hair. After about ten minutes, Bobby Seale said, “We came to make sure the curriculum of black history is being taught.” The chalk in Mr. Carlisle's hand shook as he wrote on the board; he looked smaller in their presence. Bobby said we'd been brainwashed long enough. The room became a political education class.
Who-him-name?
Mr. Carlisle nodded after every sentence Bobby spoke, unlike any teacher I'd ever seen. It hit me with every nod of his head—I had been in love. In love. I had been in love and hadn't even known it. Every nod felt like a tremor inside the room. I looked around, but no one was registering the same quake. Huey and Bobby left after a while, but Mr. Carlisle kept nodding. In fact, once they left he nodded after any of us spoke. I wanted to shake him and make him stop. All the fluid in my body gorged in my throat. Why was he nodding so much? Allwood had never taken me to meet his folks. Was I only acceptable in the new black world?
Who-him-name?
Some students had begun the nod too, but unlike his nervous gesture, theirs was begrudging. Allwood's soft voice gurgled against my neck,
You are a black college unto yourself a black college unto yourself
, and I saw the curve of his earlobe, his way of holding the phone receiver between his shoulder and his jaw, his shoulder blades and the long, narrow hollow between them that I had patted dry a few times. He hadn't bathed at my house much. I tried to count the times. It started to drive me crazy trying to figure out how many times. I saw him bending to dry his calves first, then his torso, odd since I did the opposite. I blinked and felt teardrops on my hand.

What had the ex-slaves experienced in the midst of struggle, bewilderment, joy, oppression, freedom, death, liberty, injustice, hope, and terror? Mr. Carlisle was asking us. I shouted, but no sound came out, Love. Black love. He was nodding before any of us talked—if we looked like we were going to talk. Each insane nod hurt me, and I couldn't say a word to anybody. Oh my, I wasn't different from Andrea with her mocha dreams. Love hadn't shown up with chocolates wrapped in passion red foil. Yet here I was, the thought of Allwood making everything as black as a field of scorpions, a black rose blooming inside me pinned beneath a black heart.
Who-him-name?
Malcolm Betty Lumumba Bobby Huey their bayonet bodies PE classes the Black House his loden green car coat Fair Play for Cuba the Grove Street orators my hair going from straight to bushy to sleek to bushy being swooped up by him coming as hard as I could whether or not the drowning girl opened her eyes my skull filling with the fluid it was peculiar like Marvin Gaye said and all of it was his name.