Virgin Soul (22 page)

X
avi, Li-an, and I had outgrown the studio. Our search for a new place was more successful than my search for the Joneses. We found a roomy flat next to a grassy park on Potomac Street, with the N streetcar crawling out of the tunnel on its way downtown, and two friendly white girls in the upstairs flat who did tai chi on the grass, their
Vogue
magazines stacked in wicker baskets on the landing.

We had been there barely two weeks when, after I got up late on a Saturday, all these Panthers arrived in a flash of black berets, funk, feline stealth, and unshaven jawbones, filling the hall and back room next to the kitchen, legs sprawled, arms grabbing for ashtrays, hats coming off. They locked up their pieces in the cars, and one brother stood outside watching the cars. Bobby Seale, knock-kneed and every step in charge, walked over to Li-an and set her in motion. I kissed my shower good-bye. If you can't beat the funk join the funk. Li-an kept it moving. We set up a little assembly line to pull together tuna sandwiches. One of the brothers, tall and scrawny with bumpy skin, named Barry, kept coming in the kitchen looking at the bread and me like we were one and the same. I slicked the mayonnaise across the bread as if to say:
Look all you want. That's as far as it goes. Maybe I'm a Panther; that don't mean I have to screw one. Take a bath; maybe I'll think about it. So you think I'm cute. I think I'm cute.
He walked over to where I sat the eggs in cold water. I picked them out, cracking and peeling.

“I bet you break a nigger's heart the same way you break those shells, don't you?” He picked up a peeled egg. I thought he was about to bite it when he popped it in his mouth whole.

“Why can't you wait like everybody else?” I glanced back to see if anyone was looking at us. They were going off about Sacramento and the bust that had gone down. Some thirty brothers and sisters had gone up to the state capitol on May 2, to protest the gun laws.

“Man, the sight of all those brothers carrying loaded shotguns into the State Assembly, pointing them up in the air or straight down at the ground, like Huey had taught them, man!” a brother said.

Another brother said, “We vamped on those pigs in Sacramento. Shit.”

The group hadn't been arrested at the capitol. Instead, they got busted on their way back, outside Sacramento, for disturbing the peace. Bail was set at twenty-two hundred dollars for two dozen Panthers.

“You shoulda seen the looks on the pigs' faces when we walked into the chamber.” Two brothers slapped hands and laughed. It was like the shot heard round the world. Newspapers, national and international, carried the photos and the story.

Barry wasn't paying that any mind. “Everybody else ain't as hungry as I am, can you dig it?”

“No, I can't, and where are your manners?”

“I ain't got none, can't you tell?” When he laughed I saw between his front bottom teeth a perfectly hollowed out oval of decay.

“You're in my way.”

“Yeah, and that's where I'm gonna stay.”

Li-an came back in. “You two look cozy, but the sandwiches aren't done.” She started to move fast, and I followed. We laid out bread; I began putting the faces together and slicing crosswise. Before I got going good, Li-an stopped me.

“Geniece, don't slice. We're not fixing lunch boxes. That's not how you fix a sandwich for a man.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

E
verything black in the world was tumbling down like snow from a precipice, where it had stood for centuries, for all I knew. There was nothing for me to do but be surrounded. The brothers left the same way they came, with a lot of noise and odor. I opened windows to get a breeze from the park through the house.

“I love me some revolutionary brothers, but they need to get hip to Ivory soap,” I said to no one in particular.

“Ain't nobody got to do nothing except fight for this funky system to be overthrown.” I recognized the voice but not which room it came from.

“Now who left you here?” I shouted.

“Chairman Bob, that's who. If you don't like it, talk to him.” Chairman Bob, my foot. I went to the kitchen where Li-an was picking up. “Why is he still here?”

“You mean Barry? He's staying with us. He needs a place to lay low, you know; he's hot.”

“Wait a minute.” I cleared the table. “We need a house meeting for something like this.”

“Couldn't wait. Bobby needed a place for him today.”

“Like what happens if he hadn't found a place to stay?”

“Look.” Li-an threw up her palm. “This is the deal. Can you dig it?”

Discussion over.

“Well, where? Not in my bedroom.”

“We have enough room, Geniece, more than enough. If he tries anything, tell him I will personally kick his ass.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

R
evolutionary sisters, my roomies and I did office work, opened mail, called the press conferences. The brothers from the street put their lives on the line. Street versus bourgies, smart versus rough, intelligentsia versus the lumpen. Barry broke that down as we cleaned his fourteen-shot Browning automatic, the two of us in the tiny windowless room we designated as his.

“Let's get into it,” he said. I handed him a rag wrapped around a pencil to clean the chamber. “Let's fuck.”

“You're crazy.”

“You know you want to.” He blew smoke from his cigarette in my face.

“I don't have to sleep with you.”

“You know you want me; I can tell.”

“Barry, frankly, you're detestable.”

“C'mon woman, let me jump on it.”

I put my hand on my hip. “Since you can't pay money, pay attention. I am not going to fuck you.”

“That's what you think.” He put the barrel across his thighs and looked into the chamber. “Baby, here I am working from can't see in the morning till can't see at night, and you gonna refuse me some poontang.”

“Barry, staying here is not about free fucking.”

“Oh, you charge for your shit? I bet if it was Huey P., you be singing a different song.”

“No, I wouldn't.”

*   *   *

W
hen I visited Huey in jail he gave me instructions for the paper, always polite, and always specific about the lumpen proletariat, everyday black people, about revolutionary art and the importance of the editorial cartoons, about the manifestos he was working on and where they should go. He alerted me when to expect position papers from Eldridge, which always went in the centerfold, and letters of support from important people, national figures and international ones, like Bertrand Russell. I knew I was a little potato on the way to big stew. Once, behind me, Huey's lady stood waiting patiently, a straight-haired brown-skinned sister who sang opera and towered over Huey. She looked bourgie. But then, I looked revolutionary, though I was afraid to sign my name on a paper the government might see.

That part of me wanted to learn how to fuck someone I held in contempt. Nobody put a gun to my head and made me fuck Barry . . . like I was a member of a Mississippi chain gang:
I was forced to sleep with a fugitive.
Fuck that.

“Yeah, pigs get itchy fingers when they see bros riding around fo-deep in black leather. Any nigger they see with black leather on, they want to fuck with.” He put the gun on the side of the bed. “Pigs changed up for now. They the ones riding around fo-deep, 'cause you got to bring some to get some.”

“Bring some to get some?”

“Yeah, if they want us, they got to come to our neighborhoods, and they ain't coming alone. 'Cause they scared, dig it?”

“Are you scared? Ever?”

“Hell, yeah. But I ain't scared to be scared. Che say, ‘Whenever death may surprise us it will be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear.'”

I sat next to him. I saw the dark beard of Che Guevara, the fierce look on Che's face, I saw a picture flash by of the island hemmed in by U.S. Navy battleships, Kennedy and Khrushchev eyeball to eyeball, playing brinkmanship. I saw the whole world tilting on its axis and people falling like dolls off the earth into space, I saw myself sitting next to an unwashed funky guy getting ready to fuck him, whatever we did anticlimactic to what was going on around us. I put the tip of my tongue into the oval of decay and sucked the ashy spit from his tongue. The jagged edge of Barry's teeth tore my tongue. I tasted blood. When he didn't finish reciting Che, I scolded him with the rest of it: “that another hand be extended to pick up our weapons, and that other men come forward.” I ran my fingers over his balls. I was trying to fuck him and fuck with him at the same time, but he overpowered me. I looked at his torso, lean and bare. I took a deep breath of funk, cleaning fluid, smoke. Fuck him and get this out of your system. He's fuckable. I went deep off in the funk, all the way in and all the way out.

“Baby, you so dark you ain't even got rim round your fingernails. Damn, that's dark.”

“I'm fucking your fugitive ass for free and you're putting me down.”

“Don't get me wrong, baby. I like it. Your pussy hair kinked so tight it's stinging me.”

When we switched and he went down on me, I came really hard. He gasped as my thighs clapped against his ears.

“Your pussy lips dark as a bulldog's nostrils. I like it.”

We came out of the clinch.

“Black as boysenberry.”

*   *   *

G
ood grief, stranger fucking was stranger than fucking. Brides in the revolution didn't stand on ceremony. In the revolution I had signed on to willfully there was no dating, no waiting.

I
liked the fluidity of the revolution.
yeah baby yeah burn baby burn
, reading ecstatic poetry as an opening and closing act for LeRoi Jones. Up and down the peninsula, arousing cheers and fears—it caught up with me. I flunked two classes at State running with the Panthers and being a little star. I applied to Cal State Hayward for the summer to pull my GPA up to snuff, a common strategy among State students. Li-an said nobody's irreplaceable, and sure enough, another sister, from LA, came in to help with the BPP newspaper. My roomies used my VW to do revolutionary work while a friend from social psychology hooked me up with her ride from the city to Hayward.

*   *   *

C
al State was different from State: modern new spacious empty devoid. Was it too hot to take classes? I became an anthropological specimen. Sisters wore their hair cascading onto their shoulders, black Barbies. My kinky hair was confrontation. Just walking to class minding my own I stirred things up. They looked at me, smiled weakly. One person was halfway hip. This guy, Drummond, was president of the black student group. “Call me Drum
.
”
I wanted to tell him,
I'm already there square
. But he wasn't square, just bourgie conceited unctuous full of it. We met in the hall between the buildings by the pool, yeah.
We real cool we meet at the pool.
That's how black we were. That's where he laid down his heaviest rap, me in my swimsuit with the foam rubber cups, him with his stuff hanging out anthropologically. We met surrounded by white folks swimming and sunning, the rest of the world in a snit over Vietnam. San Francisco and the long hot summer of urban riot fears a world away.

Drum said: “Let me take you to the beach. We could get down and around.”

“Take me to the beach? Not let's go, let me take you? You a camel with humps?”

“Let's play hooky,” he said. I knew this was about nookie. He touched my hair, fascinated by a natural woman. He said the biggest turn-on was seeing me float on my back with no cap on like a white girl. What did this dude want?
Yeah man, got down with a queen, made her holler and scream.
Wouldn't know my name if I plastered it on my forehead. I drew my leg to my chest, extended it to the sky. I was an aquanette. His rap sounded light in the sun, like margarine for butter.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
walked home every afternoon from where my ride dropped me off, the hippies shitting in doorways, psychedelic posters plastering the windows, doors, streets, phone poles, windshields, up and down the street. I got high with my roomies. We tripped down Haight Street, zeroed in on brothers with white girls, creeping up on them. Xavi had her lighter; I had the SNCC poem; Xavi lit her fire as I fired off the poem syllable by syllable:

Bro / ther / we / don't / want / to / harm / you / we / on / ly / want / to /

bring / you / home

If the white girl dared open her mouth we threw down with our homemade poetry:

Shut up hussy / before we burn / your blond

stringy stuff back into baldness / like a

baby / !huh!

School was unreal. I ripped off my books. The bookstore was a joke. I bought Rocky Road candy bars, five for fifty-nine cents, and stashed the books in my big straw bag. The more I stole the bigger bag I had the next time. The only cheating, stealing, lying I didn't do was on my own test.
Too smart to cheat
, I thought, but wouldn't say so to my buddies, who suggested we sit in a row at the back of the room and copy from our driver. I used my own answers. I aced the test, sailed out high, took my bag to the campus bookstore, got even higher on the LP collection I had eyeballed for days—Coltrane Miles Pharaoh MJQ Archie Cecil. I was supposed to pass on all that? It was my finest hour, actually two. I stuffed my bag, waited for the bookstore to empty, put in a couple of albums, chatted with the clerk, waited for her to gab on the phone, put in a couple more, kept my eye on the clock so I wouldn't miss my ride. My purse was too heavy to walk itself across the bay. I'd have my roomies gaping at me when I got home. I put my initials on each album, even though my roomies said they were the property of the house.

I passed all my tests, got cockier, went back to the bookstore the next week and outright lifted two chunky textbooks—my straw for gold—figured on thirty bucks. The buyback desk kept me waiting. I saw a student go by I'd known at City College. I felt for him. I wondered if he ever got laid, left his mama's house, got loaded, wondered, wondered, wondered, when a campus cop took me by the hand, escorted me gingerly to the storeroom. Stacks, cartons, piles, reams, shelves, towers of books surrounded us. He questioned me. Where did I get the books? I stonewalled. What do you mean where? Here. When did you buy them? A few weeks ago. Did I know they put them on the shelf today? Today? Yes today. Sign this. I read a sign-on-the-line don't-do-this-dastardly-deed-ever-again-here-or-you're-a-goner form. No arrest. No record. Just a good scare. I signed my name. My hand was shaking. A damn good scare. I got up to leave, didn't want to miss my ride to the city. A brother came in, maybe thirty years old. He looked hipped to it, short, bearded, dark-skinned; the other man left. The brother motioned for me to sit. I sat. He asked questions. I answered the truth: who I was; where I lived; where I went to school. He looked like a black Rumpelstiltskin, a gnome, but we thought the same thing about the campus: scenic, panoramic, breathtaking; students dull, unimaginative, content. I told him about State: big gray buildings, nothing to look at, exciting as hell, overflowing with jam-packed students on the floors and windowsills, ideas, demonstrations, haps. He said this like he'd been waiting to get it off his chest for days: “I'm from Harlem. People don't play this revolution bullshit back there. You Californians are out to lunch.”
That's all he had to say. I didn't know what he meant, because people were political in Harlem and joining the BPP there too. His words echoed LeRoi Jones's wife Sylvia's rant on California at the Black House. No matter. I was off the hook and about to miss my ride. He shook my hand. What a grip. He held me as if I was falling into an abyss, reminded me three months' grace on the paper I signed, wished me luck. I got out of there, got to the parking lot just in time to see my ride leaving me, the artful dodger, to bite that red-awful Hayward dust and ride the bus back home sweet home.