Virgin Soul (13 page)

As he was talking, Layla crossed in front of Huey, her face to me, and mouthed, “Street, street. Hood, hood.”

No sexual bells were ringing, but his skill at spewing facts was interesting. He was urgent and political like the Fair Play for Cuba guys, only without the weight. He was lithe like the god of eloquence and theft, the one who wore winged shoes, Hermes. I stopped myself from looking to see if he had on bourgie wingtips or street brothers' pointy-toe Stacy Adams. I didn't want to feel sorry for him if he was wearing pointy toes. He was who he was.

Virgil, the house party chief of North Oakland, wanted to make sure we got the locations of the grad-night parties written down: Snake Road; Dwight Way; Fifty-ninth and Racine; Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Layla ate parties. Her face, calculating which one to hit first, lit up. Too bad the color line was so strict; she and Virgil were two of a kind.

The night was in motion. I had made it out of City College officially.

I
t never took less than an hour to get through to Admissions at State on the pay phone at 401. I stole time from transcribing; Julie watched for me; and I was prepared with
I have cramps
if the sup questioned me. After fifteen minutes Julie came out; I started to hang up.

“Don't hang up. Sup's in a meeting about the pickets. Coast is clear,” she said. Pickets were carrying signs outside 401
protesting poverty-level payments. Julie fiddled with the folding glass door to the phone booth, then got a serious look on.

“I want you to be the first to know.”

“What? Are you pregnant?”

“Heavens no!” Julie looked like she had swallowed a whale and was about to spit it out.

“What happened?”

“I'm hitting the road. The south first, then Central America.”

“You're going?” She bobbed her Dutch boy. I imagined a doll with blond hair in a toy car tooling across the plains. “Good for you, Juliegirl.”

I hung up and started out of the booth. But something pulled me back in. One more try. “When are you giving your notice?” The number starting ringing on
giving your notice.

“I wanted to see when you wanted to give it.”

“Me? Giving notice?”

“Yeah,” she said, as if it was as easy as finishing one of our paperbacks. “You can't stay at 401 forever, you know? I'll sell the Corvair. The VW engine's air-cooled, doesn't need water.”

“Julie, it's not my car, it's Allwood's.” I heard a woman's voice on the other end of the receiver. “Did I get through? I can't believe it.” I gave her my name.

Julie said, “We can start in the Southwest, work for a few weeks, take off when we feel like it, hit the road, maybe even drive to Honduras.”

“Julie, even if I don't get in, I can't just jump in a car and take off.” I was picturing the toy car with blond and brown dolls tooling toward the Gulf of Mexico.

“Why not?”

I couldn't say.

“Allwood is gone, so you don't have a boyfriend. No dependents, house, nothing.”

“I don't have an education.”

“Neither do I.”

A voice came on the line. The voice said, “Geniece Hightower?”

“Yes,” I answered. I confirmed I was an applicant for admission as a junior.

“Neither do lots of people,” Julie said. “They survive.”

“Wait a minute,” the voice said, putting me on hold.

I spoke to Julie. “I don't have parents either.” I saw Goosey fanning herself on her slipcovered couch: How could I leave without even saying good-bye?

“Nobody does once they reach the age of consent.”

“Julie, you're white, you can go anywhere.” She kept on like that wasn't so.

“Venezuela, s
eñorita Geniece. Muchas gracias
. You took Spanish.”

“French.”

“French, Spanish,
que sera, sera
, we can do it, Geniece.”

The voice came back on the line. “Brace yourself; we accepted seventy units from Oakland City, you've been admitted. Your letter's in the mail.”

I gasped and Julie patted my back like I was choking, and I managed a thank-you before I hung up and hugged Julie close to keep from floating away.

“I'm in.”

“Geniece . . . we could go all the way to South America in the VW. It's air-cooled.”

Uncle Boy-Boy's voice came to me:
Don't tell white folks your business; they'll always try to change your plans.

“Julie, I got accepted. I have my own trip.”

This was the point that I knew for sure everything was going to change.

A
llwood came back from Cal Tech the week after I officially got admitted. I got a jolt when he walked in the front door, but he looked odd. His car coat didn't fit anymore.

“Allwood, your wrists are sticking out of your coat. Have you grown?”

“I grew almost an inch.”

“In three months?” I couldn't believe it.

“Even my shirt size went up a half inch.”

I still dug him. That hit me. I wasn't expecting old times. We'd only talked on the phone. The soul sister and the intellectual, the two clouds no longer one behind the other. When he suggested we drive to State so I'd know the way, I didn't say I knew it by heart. Before we left, he asked if I had gotten rid of his dashiki.

“Of course not. Do you still want it?”

“I want to wear it.” He put it on in front of me. It felt strange to see his underarm hair and his arms paler than his face.

“Are you spending a lot of time in the math lab?”

“Like a big dog.”

He put his car coat over the dashiki.

“You need to dump your car coat in the Goodwill bin.”

“Just don't forget your sweater,” he said.

“I don't need it.” I had on my pink Levi's, my flat-ribbed poor boy top, and clogs. “It's sunny.”

Allwood grabbed my sweater on the way out. “It gets cold in Frisco. The ocean.”

“I know the city.”

*   *   *

I
t was misting when we came out on the Treasure Island side of the Bay Bridge. We drove past downtown San Francisco and switched freeways after Army Street. When we headed west we hit the fog. The rusted windshield wiper blades began to squeak against the glass, which ordinarily got on my nerves. But I was wound up. When I saw the signs pointing us to the zoo and San Francisco State, something started to vibrate in my gut. We rolled through the fog on Nineteenth Avenue alongside a Muni streetcar. My heart jumped in my chest as the campus, my campus, sloped into view. It was deserted except for a cadre of gray-and-white seagulls poking through the gusts of fog. A marble block stood at the entrance, a message from the ages carved on it. I twisted my neck to read it, rolling down the window. But the cold rushed in.

“Put your sweater on, Gee,” Allwood said.

I yanked it off the backseat and put it on.

“Were you excited when you enrolled at Cal Tech?”

Allwood nodded. For a few minutes we sat in the VW next to the four-story library. I started babbling and wasn't paying close attention as I started the drive back.

“Transferring is out there. So much stuff to get straight.” Allwood pointed us down the Bayshore Freeway toward the San Francisco airport.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To see Betty Shabazz.” I didn't know what he was talking about.

“We're going to see Betty Shabazz at the San Francisco airport. She's the main speaker at a program for Malcolm X tomorrow. She's arriving from back East around one-thirty.”

Betty Shabazz in the flesh. I couldn't believe it. We left the city, passed Brisbane and the homes cascading across the hills of South San Francisco in pastel stucco lines. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky.

We had passed the bare brown hills with waving grasses, chaparral, and wildflowers when Allwood said, “My dad signed the pink slip over to you. He knew we were sharing it anyway.”

He pulled it out of his coat pocket. I didn't know what to say. I hadn't paid a penny for it. I took the pink slip.

“Thanks, Allwood.” I didn't mention that the Bug needed a new carburetor. Nobody had given me anything since high school graduation, when Zenobia sent me three dozen yellow roses. My ears had gotten warm then, and they warmed as I held the pink slip between my thumb and the steering wheel. They got burning hot. I thought of the word
beneficiary
. I was his beneficiary, like he had died and gone to heaven and left me a used Volkswagen. It felt good.

I turned my mind toward Betty Shabazz. Would she look sorrowful? Fierce? Happy? Proud? I wondered if she'd have on all black. I pictured what she'd worn to Malcolm X's funeral. I pictured the draped black veil on Mrs. Kennedy. I wanted Betty Shabazz's veil to be blacker, heavier, more profound. Mx wasn't in the Nation when he died. Had she followed him out, faithful wife? Did she still pray five times a day? I thought of how I would look if I joined the Nation, wearing those long skirts all day. Geniece X. I couldn't picture it.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
llwood and I went into the airport terminal. Another brother in a dashiki, squinting at the late afternoon sun, stepped between Allwood and me. I thought he was an African tourist until I saw him slap Allwood's hand.

“Escort the sister back to the car, brother Allwood.”

I was geared up to see Betty Shabazz, the closest I'd ever get to see Mx, the man himself.

“She's cool,” Allwood told him.

“No, she's not,” the brother said, walking backward, one hand on a rifle, the other held up between us. “Stuff just went down. The brothers from the Black Panthers in Oakland almost got into it with the pigs.”

All three of us seemed to be going in different directions.

“What's happening?” I asked, trying to move toward Allwood.

“The sister should be at home, taking care of her business.”

He stepped in front of me, blocking me. I walked around him.

“Sister, I'm sorry, but you're out of line.”

Allwood turned, impatient with the brother, I thought. Instead, he said, “Geniece, go back and wait in the car.”

“Wait for what? I want to meet Betty Shabazz.”

“Sister, this is not a tea party. This is life and death.”

“I'm together.”

“No. You're holding your man up and you're holding me up. And that's reactionary.” He patted his side like he had a gun there too. “We're ready to protect the lady.”

I looked up at Allwood, but he was acting like I was something that had dropped out of his nose. I grabbed hold of his sleeve. “Tell me this doesn't mean I can't see Betty Shabazz.”

He shrugged and the brother said, “This ain't the time.”

“Oh, I get it,” I said.

“No, if you got it,” the brother said, “you would've got to stepping.”

He turned to leave and Allwood started walking with him. I stood there fuming, my lips poked out to the air controller's tower. It occurred to me that if I were anybody but Geniece Hightower, black girl from East Oakland, I would have been able to see her. Joe Blow from Kokomo rides on a plane for eight hours NYC to SF and never recognizes her or the legacy she's carrying right next to him. I started after Allwood. I knew he was listening to me even if the other brother was a stone wall.

“Allwood, if I was an ordinary passenger from Sebastopol or Colma, coming in on her flight, then I would get to see her. To them she's a colored woman on a plane. They don't see Betty Shabazz. And he's gonna tell me I'm not important enough to see her?”

“See you at the car,” Allwood said.

“Allwood, he's telling you I'm not important at all. Am I numb or dumb? Not me, sweetheart.” I felt ripped off. Big-time. But I was beginning to lose my cool. I looked around and saw more brothers, with rifles, lined up in twos. A gang of policemen walked briskly past me. I walked behind them, the police and the brothers giving each other the evil eye. No one tried to stop me. In the waiting area, brothers lined up near the gate, police and two sisters with big bowl Afros and African wraps behind them. I smiled; one nodded grimly. The other pointed to the tarmac and said, “Sister Betty's plane is here.” I got excited; the sister who had nodded touched my arm, as if to calm me.

An old cop, a Broderick Crawford type, walked up to the brothers with a camera. The next thing I knew, Huey Newton stepped up to him, as bold and as straight-backed as he had stood in my history class, and said, “Don't take any pictures.”

A knot formed in my stomach. Bobby Seale moved in front of the camera, with his knock-kneed self. The cop acted like he was going to take pictures anyway. For an instant, everyone stood there, transfixed.

Huey said, “We're going to smash it,” and I remembered his high-pitched voice; then I heard him call out, “Jive racist cop.”

Huey started talking as if he was lecturing the whole airport: “If he takes any pictures, he's going to provoke something. That's where it's going to start at.”
You're not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition
, I said silently.

“Right now,” Huey said with finality. The police began talking as if they were persuading the one with the camera to back off.
He can't shoot pictures and people at the same time
, I thought. I flashed on all the times I had seen boys and men, always colored, always in East Oakland, always spread-eagled against patrol cars or wrists manacled in the small of their backs, lying on the ground like trash. Never face-to-face. Never.

A stealthy calm settled in, like a kind of truce that everyone had agreed to invisibly as the plane taxied in. I spotted Allwood up real close to the gate and wanted to shout,
Allwood, you're a bystander! This is where it's at!
I'd have to tell him everything that had happened on the way back.

Passengers streamed off the plane, an unbroken line of white people, one after another. I wondered if we'd all come here merely to confront each other. Then I saw her. I recognized her straightened hairdo with the deep bangs, her smile between a grimace and smiling ugly. She extended her arm in greeting, and a circle of brothers and sisters and then cops formed around her like rings on a tree. Everyone looked so serious, but when she looked my way I gave her fifty-two-tooth. She acknowledged me. My fear and resentment fell away as if she'd sheared them off. Then the phalanx of men with cops motored her through the airport like a Rose Bowl float. I was so giddy.

Outside the terminal Allwood and I met up. I was euphoric, but he looked just the opposite. He told me to drive, because he had to go with the brothers. He told me where everyone was headed—the
Ramparts
magazine office downtown. I got a little lost, but I got there.

I parked the Bug, got out, and saw Allwood standing across the street listening to a brother who, I could see from the back, had on countrified wide-cuffed jeans and a black leather coat. He was sounding on Allwood something ferocious.

“If you going to be for real, then be for real,” he was saying. “Petty bullshit cultural nationalist bullshit is bullshit, dig?”

Allwood didn't say anything, didn't nod his head, and didn't acknowledge me when I came up to them. Mute.

“I waited for you,” I said to him.

“Shut up,” the brother in the coat said to me without even looking at me. That pissed me off. I thought I'd left that at the airport.

“What's the deal here?”

“The deal is your man ain't got no gun,” he said, finally turning to face me. I saw he was the brother from the Black House named Bibo. He didn't look like he remembered me at all.

“You ain't packing?” he said to Allwood like I wasn't there. “How was you supposed to defend her? With your fists? A dictionary? Chairman Mao says power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

“And Jimmy Baldwin said—”

“Don't quote that faggotty bullshit from Martin Luther Queen. That intellectual bullshit ain't playing here. Either you willing to die for the people or you bullshitting.”

Allwood spoke. “I know what my duty to the masses is.”

“No, you don't. You think the masses are asses.”

“I love my people,” Allwood said.

“Enough to die for them? Don't lie. Don't front. You couldn't front in there.” Bibo pointed to the building. “So don't try to front me off. I know you going to school to get your GNP degree. Your Good Negro Papers. So you can dictate to the masses and eat crumbs from the massa. I got your number, brother Allwood, and it don't even add up to one. Your mind is revolutionary, but your heart is bourgeois.”

“You're the one,” Allwood said, “making a big mistake, writing off brothers with skills.”

“The Vietcong ain't got nothing but rice, man, and they kicking ass. Degree is your excuse.”

“When the revolution takes place,” Allwood said, “and shit goes down, believe me, brother, the people will need engineers, doctors, lawyers, social scientists, scientists, nuclear physicists.”

“You can wear all the Malcolm X sweatshirts and SNCC buttons you want. Brother, your shit is not deep. If you ain't willing to give the imperialist an ass kicking when it counts, how you going to walk up to the victory table and say what? You was too busy studying to fight?” He shook his head. “We can train the people.”

“Not that fast. Look at Guinea. They're struggling, man. Yeah, man, after they chase out the colonialists, the British, the French, they have to deal with rebuilding. Skills. Do you realize that only ten percent of adult Africans can read and write? Ten percent!”

“All I know is this,” Bibo said, pointing to the
Ramparts
building. “Those brothers in there from Oakland pulled some coattail today.”

“I'm from Oakland, man. I grew up in Oakland,” Allwood said.

I piped in. “And I'm from Oakland, and I know Huey and Bobby from City.”

Bibo stared at me and said, “Sister, it's not who you know, it's how you know them.”

He continued to talk to Allwood. “Those brothers in there. They're the real deal, man. Huey had a shotgun, Bobby was carrying a gun, the young dudes were loaded with guns, man, loaded. The Black Panther Party of Northern California looked like fools! Man, they calling them paper panthers, I ain't a paper nothing. Is that what you want to go down as?”

For a minute, they didn't talk, just stared eyeball to eyeball. I had helped Allwood fill out his application to Cal Tech. I knew what he wanted
to go down as
because I had typed it: physicist.