Virgin Soul (19 page)

W
e must have been asleep an hour when the bell started ringing off the wall. We woke up; I pressed the buzzer.

“Who is it?”

“Xavi. Let me in.”

Xavi came up the stairs, stomping into our hall.

“What is your problem, negro, at this time of night?” I wanted nothing but sleep.

“My landlady kicked me out.”

“What?!”

“The old battle-ax thinks we're a bunch of lesbians.”

That woke us up. Fully.

“While we were in her crummy studio laughing our asses off, she thought we were having sex. ‘Outrageous sex!' Her words exactly.”

“That's utterly ridiculous. Does she not know the sound of fun? Is she that decrepit?” Li-an said.

“Maybe it's been so long since she's had fun or sex she forgot both,” I said. Xavi's eyes were shiny with tears.

“She kicked me out. My stuff is on the street.”

“How could she do that?” It took us a few minutes to dress and walk across the park. It was midnight, but this was the city. The oasis. Hippies, semihippies, dudes, girls walking dogs, a couple strolling. We were not alone.

Sure enough, on the street outside Xavi's building her clothes were strewn on hangers, along with her plants, magazines, bathroom articles, the pot we had eaten spaghetti out of, bowls and utensils, and, of all things, a stethoscope. A powerful energy had seized her landlady.

“I'm a vagrant,” Xavi said, crying. “My life is spilled on the street. I've been evicted for something I didn't even do.” She started bawling. People stopped and began picking through her things.

“Off-limits,” I said. “Get away. This is not a party.”

We sat there for a minute. I saw the landlady in the window looking at the three of us. Li-an gave her a dirty look back.

“Where's your key, Xavi?” Li-an said.

“I gave it to her,” Xavi said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because she told me to give it to her.”

“And you paid her the rent on time?” I knew she had.

“This is not about money,” she said. “Don't you see? She thinks we're an abomination. We have violated nature in her view.”

Li-an and I looked at each other. We sighed.

“Come on,” Li-an said. “Let's get what we can carry.”

Xavi sighed. “How are you going to get everything?”

“We can't,” I said. “Get the clothes. Leave the plants. The pots and pans. We have all that. Get your toothbrush.”

“Lady,” Li-an muttered, “you will pay for this one day.”

I shouted up at her face in the window. “What goes around comes around.”

We loaded our arms with clothes and belongings.

“We need a wagon,” Xavi said, “a little red wagon.” She pointed to her stacks of
Glamour
,
Mademoiselle
,
Cosmopolitan
.

“How are we going to get those?”

Li-an and I were getting grumpy.

“Fuck the magazines. Let the hippies have them,” I said. Li-an's arms were full. She started walking.

“So many good articles in them,” Xavi said.

“Give the moo magazines a break,” I said. “‘How to Be an Intelligent Cow.' ‘How to Tape Your Breasts So Your Nipples Won't Show.' ‘Heifer Do's and Don'ts.'” I loaded her arms with toiletries.

“Is this yours?” I asked, picking up the stethoscope. She nodded. I plucked it up and hung it from my neck. I was too disgusted to ask her what she used it for, and frankly didn't care. I put her hats on her head and mine, one on top of another. We started walking away single file; I brought up the rear, Xavi the middle. We were silent, balancing, thinking, tired. Xavi turned to talk.

“Don't look back,” I said.

Li-an began singing the Tempts' “Don't Look Back
.
”

Xavi kept walking. “What we need is a beauty magazine for sisters.”

“Brilliant idea, Xavi. ‘How to Be a Chocolate Cow.' ‘Moo-moo, I give chocolate milk,'” I said. We were crossing the park. Not that many people were around now.

“Why did she think we're lesbians?” Xavi said.

“Because we spent the day laughing,” I said.

“Watch your step,” Li-an called back.

“She thinks,” I said, “that no ordinary black women would be together that long without bitching and crying over men.”

We had traversed the park diagonally. The N streetcar came out of the tunnel headed for downtown. A dog that had been walking placidly with its master started barking at the streetcar.

“It's her loss,” Li-an said.

“If she only knew what nice girls she's decided to shun,” I said. The dog chose to run right in front of me. I kept my balance but the leash tripped me. When I fell, the hats tumbled, not making a sound. Li-an and Xavi kept on walking. They finally looked around for me.

I hollered, “Weren't you listening? Wasn't I part of the conversation? Did you even miss me?”

Li-an paused at the curb and said, “Geniece, just keep cool and stay on course.”

I
had been in awe of Li-an up to that point. Her half of the room was an infirmary, mine when I was there an observatory of sounds that floated through the curtain. It was like her specialty—sexual resuscitation. When the Panthers came to campus recruiting, just like Uncle Sam looking for recruits, Li-an decided we should sign up. To Panther or not.

“I'm signing. We all should. I got us applications.” Li-an laid out mimeo sheets with the ten-point program listed above the signature spaces. No was not an option.

“I don't want to sign anything. My uncle told me, Don't sell my body, my country, or my soul.”

Li-an aimed her load at me. “What's the difference between being a highly visible Black Student Union member, reading poetry at the Black House, and being a Black Panther? Your name's already on the list of subversives. What makes you think you aren't already a Panther?”

“I don't carry a gun and I don't wear a black beret.” Damn if I joined the Panthers as a group act, like getting baptized in the YMCA pool when I was nine, rubbing chlorine out of my eyes with my cousins. “I have to think about it. They don't look like they're playing hopscotch.”

I could hear Boy-Boy in the back of my head:
Niecy, you spent all this energy getting through Oakland City. It took you three years to finish your course work. For what? To become a full-fledged black militant that we see on the six o'clock news? You're going bass ackward
.

They joined. I didn't. But I started reading the
Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
. Nothing like the
Trib
or the
Chron
or what I learned in journalism classes and read in the
Gator
or
The Tower
. Even though I had decided against a journalism major, newspapers still entranced me. I wanted to know what was going on in the world, even if I had to ignore my distrust of so-called objective reporting. I wondered what objective meant when the front page, obits, society columns, ads reflected the World According to the White Man, black bodies in motion only on the sports pages. I'd watched Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola read the
Trib
front to back, even as they called old Knowland, the owner, a peckerwood. They always supplemented the World According to White Folks with the World of the Black Strivers—the
Post
,
the
California Voice
,
San Francisco's
Sun-Reporter
, the local versions of the
Pittsburgh Courier
and the
Chicago Daily Defender
. The more I delved into the BPP paper, the more it fascinated me. For the first time in newsprint, somebody else thought some of my thoughts. Out of curiosity, I read Huey's long pieces and Eldridge Cleaver's editorials in the BPP paper. I had read
Soul
on Ice
when it first appeared in segments in
Ramparts
, and shuddered at the man/rapist philosophizing, but his editorials pulled me in:

Later for all of the garbage of the white mother country, later for the mother country and everything in it. When we organize our own Third World institutions, then the honkies will get uptight because they won't be able to relate to what we are into. So let them go their white way and we will go ours—deep off into the beautiful world of Blackness.

And deeper off into the world of Blackness I went, following a trajectory that had begun with Allwood and Oakland City College. Militant. The word was frightful. I had come from being entertained by militants at Oakland City to resisting political indoctrination while falling in some kind of love with a militant to enrolling in a school full of so much militancy I couldn't blink without a rant in my face. Sure, I had fancied myself militant. That fit my naturally rebellious nature. But to
be
a militant was frightful. Yet intriguing.

I
signed and joined the BPP because the party's indignation and cry for self-determination matched my own. It took me a while to see that. To feel that. When I did, I became a member and went through basic training: PE classes, weapon handling, setting up rallies at different colleges and schools, disseminating important position papers and quotes to the media outlets, both alternative and mainstream. I began seeing the world of the BPP in every utterance around me. It was like a torrent.

Eventually I became an editor at the BPP paper. I thought I'd renounced journalism with my disgust at the
Gator
, but like a persistent ex-lover it kept showing up at my doorstep looking for action. This is how we put out the BPP intercommunal news service: We got documents, position papers, and editorials from Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, who was the minister of information, or George Murray, the minister of education. George, who was a fellow student at State, had handwriting that drove me absolutely nuts. Pages and pages—since he was a genius, of course—of chicken scratching that took me hours to transcribe. There were endorsements, poems, and reports of police brutality and repression from all over the Bay Area, then from all over the United States. Some needed retyping and proofreading, which I did. Many we were able to reproduce directly. Emory the artist did the entire layout and the editorial cartoons. Huey's picture front and center, his eyes above the fold always, glistening with black defiance. Once we were through, we hand carried it to the printer. When we got it back, we sold it, alongside the rank and file, for a quarter. My ears and eyes took in so much.

I heard Huey say: “The panther never attacks first. But once he is attacked, he will respond viciously and wipe out the aggressor thoroughly, wholly, absolutely, and completely.”

I heard Ron Dellums, a Berkeley city councilman, say: “White reaction to the Panthers is hung up on words—military, violence, revolution, black. . . . People are so involved with the language they ignore what is being said. . . . The Panthers aren't talking racism or hatred; they're talking change.”

Huey P. Newton is the ideological descendant, heir, and successor of Malcolm X, so saith Eldridge.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

X
avi and I were in the administration building at State when we ran into Eldridge, right on the landing between the first and second floors. He recognized me from PE classes. He was holding the hand of a striking, unusually pretty woman, high yellow, green-eyed, with a puffed brown-sugar natural.

“We just got married,” Eldridge told us, pride of ownership all over his face. “This is Kathleen.”

Her smile was shy like a bride's, but the eyes spoke their own truth, wired for takeoff. She extended a smile. Eldridge said something about her being secretary to a SNCC field general. I could see her taking care of business, but not small stuff. That's what we were there for. “Be who you is cuz you ain't who you isn't
.
” It was so stark. She was the bride, we were bridesmaids. The bridesmaids of the revolution.

Kathleen talked to me directly: “I understand you're a writer and you're helping with the paper.”

She invited us to their flat on Oak Street, if we wanted, that evening. Xavi didn't want. I did. Xavi was still a good girl. I wasn't anymore, and I knew it.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

W
hen I got there, Kathleen greeted me warmly in the hallway. I saw Eldridge pontificating before two cameramen and two reporters, in a living room overflowing with books, periodicals, and posters of Che, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Marx, Fanon, and the table where the paper was being laid out. Kathleen also had Priscilla—a white girl!—as her assistant, typist, and all-around handmaiden. I couldn't believe it. I guess turnabout was fair play. The assistant pulled me into the kitchen.

She whispered, “They're filming an NBC interview.” Bright spotlights, like klieg lights, were set in the living room around Eldridge.

The reporter was asking him, “What do you mean by the word
jackanapes
?”

Eldridge, as commanding as a member of Parliament, replied, “These are brothers who only want to off a pig. Adventurists, rogues.”

One of the reporters ordered the camera off and conferred with the cameraman. I turned to the kitchen, where Kathleen and the assistant were fixing beef stew. Kathleen moved with the velocity of an open fire hydrant. She stopped abruptly and turned to me.

“This is how the French do it. They don't wash their pots after every meal. They cook in them over and over. The flavor stays and it lets the herbs seep in.”

Her assistant put beef cubes, carrots, chunks of potatoes, and chopped onions in the pot and turned on the burner. The cameraman resumed filming Eldridge pontificating. “Huey P. Newton is the ideological descendant, heir, and successor of Malcolm X.”

The reporter seemed fixated on getting titles right: Eldridge, minister of information; Bobby, chairman; Huey, minister of defense; Kathleen, communications secretary. I loved the grandiosity of the titles but could see the reporter's half smirk. Which country, what nation? The black nation? The checkered nation?

As a teenager, I had rebelled against church every Sunday because I could see past the stage play of the black church, past the garbled grammar of the country preachers, the big hats and airs and Cadillac flair. Sometimes I caught the preacher misquoting the Bible, which Aunt Ola held in her lap. I said something about it once to my aunt, who shushed me with “Don't countermand the preacher.”

This was different. I saw both the grandiloquence in Eldridge and the reporter getting all the titles right so he could make fun of them later, whether slyly on-air or privately with his colleagues. I recognized the arrogance of journalists, of smart people for whom knowledge was a commodity. I knew condescension well and how it is an important part of making broken people feel worthless. Aunt Ola Ray tried to make me feel that way, but Goosey was my homemade antidote. However, Ola's belittling made me fight to see my worth. In the process I came to understand her lack of worth. In a way, Ola made me a freedom fighter. I so wanted not to be what she thought I should be, worthless. She was somebody because her husband had a title in front of his name. Without Boy-Boy and his title, Ola was an ordinary colored person, like the salt of the earth in the streets of Watts, Philly, and Cleveland rioting and fighting oppression. Without the insulation of my uncle's profession, Ola might not have had time to look down her nose at other people. These journalists were looking down their noses at Eldridge and the party. They loved him because he made for a good story. But it was infatuation, not real love. And as soon as a more appealing subject came along, not only would they turn away, they would scorn him. Watching the journalists interview Eldridge, I was seeing why I didn't take any more journalism classes once I transferred. I was also seeing why I saw through the paper panthers, even though I appreciated their breadth of knowledge. They lacked the courage to take on the power structure. What was more powerful than the police, armed and ready to be judge, jury, and executioner in our communities?

The party was taking the powerful tools of oppression and placing them foursquare in the oppressor's face. The guns, loaded, in the state capitol. The power of the press; the war of words. We had been likened to apes and monkeys for centuries.
Off the pig
vomited that garbage in an instant. The power of titles. Every revolutionary coup begins with titling the soldiers, and thus entitling the people. The BPP had appropriated the language of the oppressor, as Jean-Paul Sartre said the colonial subject had to do; use the oppressor's language, use his tools to tear down the master's house.

I knew that oppression was alive and well, and nobody was standing up to it full force but the BPP. Huey Bobby Eldridge Kathleen David D. C. The Fortés. I was getting to know them like neighbors in the same messed-up part of town. Not a jackanape in the bunch. They were brave, which I wasn't. But I was born with more than my share of curiosity, and I knew about being broken.