Virgin Soul (14 page)

“You know what's the most important thing you can do?” Bibo asked Allwood. “Quit school for a year and struggle for the people, day and night. Can you do that?”

Allwood stood mute. I could hear Uncle Boy-Boy drilling at the root of the matter:

And have these young men gone to college?

And do they have good jobs?

Do they even have jobs?

Do they have records?

Have they been to jail?

Are they married?

Where do you think they're going?

Are you even thinking about going with them?

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

“I
'm not quitting school,” Allwood spoke with a tone of finality. “I have to get my degree or I'm useless.”

“Your parents drilled that into your head,” Bibo said.

“There's nothing worse than a smart black man without an education,” Allwood said.

“How about smart without a conscience?” Bibo said.

I got back in. “What about all the sacrifices our parents and grandparents made to get us to this point? All their struggles were fought so we
could
become educated.”

“This is a movement from the bottom up, not the top down. It's not about being better than somebody else,” Bibo said.

“Not better than,” I said. “As good as, and able to help other people as well.”

“Allwood, give the people one year. Even white boys go to Africa for the Peace Corps for two years,” Bibo said.

“My scholarship's open this year. I have to finish, and then help my people.”

“Scholarship!” The utmost scorn filled Bibo's face.

Inside I screamed,
If I had been offered one, I would have jumped on it, baby cakes.

“Huey says cultural nationalism is irrelevant and romantic,” Bibo said, walking away, shaking his head. “Wearing a dashiki ain't a solution, brother.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
drove Allwood back to Berkeley in complete silence. Keeping an eye on the Bay Bridge traffic, I glanced at the ships coming into port, the seagulls, Alcatraz, Treasure Island, the Port of Oakland, the Naval Supply Center, the mudflats in Emeryville that ran along the shoreline. I got off the Nimitz Freeway where it began stretching toward Sacramento and the American West, at Ashby Avenue, the south end of Berkeley, my hometown, my city, home. I pulled up next to the incinerator and yanked the emergency brake.

“Allwood, why didn't you tell me this Betty Shabazz thing was about guarding her? I thought we were going to see her. All you had to do was hip me to the fact that at least some of the brothers would have guns.”

He didn't say anything.

“Bodyguards and guns go together.”

“I wasn't thinking about it.”

“Allwood, that's fucked. . . . Who else had guns?”

“Just the brothers with Huey and Bobby. The group talked it out last night. The ones who came brought unloaded guns.”

“Unloaded guns?” I shrieked. “That's some stand-up outlaws.”

He didn't say anything for a few long seconds. He didn't want to talk about it with me.

“Students are the oppressed,” he said as we went inside. “When you understand that, you know that you struggle against the system wherever you go. Wherever that is. For me, it's Cal Tech.”

Allwood's a teacher, not a social changer.
That hit me so hard I had to brace myself against the door as he changed out of his dashiki and talked. “The study of our history, our struggle, our oppression is all preparation for service to the community.”

When we got inside, Allwood folded the dashiki carefully. Suddenly he shook it all out, rolled it in a ball, put on his car coat, and stuffed it in a pocket.

“It looks like an abscess growing out of your rib,” I said.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. He shifted it to the other pocket, then looked at me. “I guess we should say good-bye?” he said. I wasn't used to a sheepish Allwood.

“Hasn't it been nice knowing me?”

He smiled. “Not nice. Deep.” We kissed, but it wasn't mush-mush. Sweet but no mush. “Your lips are still soft.”

“What was so deep about it?” I asked.

“Everything. And then some.”

“No, be for real,” I prodded. “After all this time, was it for real?”

“Of course, it was for real.”

“Then what about it was most for real?”

“You can't quantify it like that.”

“You're a scientist, aren't you?”

A smile spread across his seriousness. “You know the Model T Ford?”

I nodded. “Of course I know it.”

“But can you name the cars that came after it?”

“Chrysler, Plymouth?” I shook my head. “I don't know.”

“That's because you always remember the first one.”

“That's the deep, that I won't forget you?”

I stood as he nodded and walked down the driveway to the street. The bunched-up dashiki made his coat protrude on one side. He turned and gave me a wave.

“I didn't want to get corny on you,” he yelled back at me.

“I know,” I yelled.
I know
reverberated until I couldn't see him anymore.

“I know,” I murmured. “I know.”

I started to shiver. When I clasped my doorknob, it sent an even colder current through my palm.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

T
he incident with Betty Shabazz marked a point of departure for everybody. The Black Panther Party of Northern California had started after the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama made the panther its symbol to counter the segregationist Alabama Democratic Party, which had a rooster as its logo. A small group of brothers, including Allwood, inspired by the Alabama freedom fighters, chose the panther as its symbol. It had all started around Oakland City College and the Soul Students Advisory Council. But when Huey and Bobby insisted on revolutionary struggle, the intelligentsia and artists went one way, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense took the harsher route of integrating the gun for self-defense with politics. Each group inspired me to read and to learn.

I showed up for my first day of classes at State with hordes of students on the floors and windowsills, lining the walls and standing three-deep at the doors, seemingly eighteen thousand pleas for the same mercy: more classes.

“If you're trying to avoid the draft, consider the Experimental College.” The psychology statistics prof refused to hand mimeographed syllabi to everyone. “You can get your student deferment with EC units too.”

When no one budged he said, “Don't take up space if you don't have to.”

A chorus of voices told him, “We have to.”

I didn't know quite what to do. I was officially a junior at the hippest college in California. I had paid my forty-eight-dollar-a-semester tuition and gotten my student body card. I didn't want to drop the EC courses I had signed up for and risk not getting any classes. I walked back outside. The fog had cleared. I sat on the grass and flapped out my peacoat. The grassy rectangle at the heart of the campus sloped downward to the Commons, the student cafeteria, and the bookstore. Students milled about, stretched out, sleeping, eating lunch, playing Frisbee, talking. My stomach grumbled; I'd saved three hundred dollars to tide me over until I found part-time work. But it was going fast. I had a work-study job interview. A clump of black girls passed by, ebullient, spiff. I half smiled; they were wrapped up in each other. They were the Andreas, the Corlisses, who had never heard of Frantz Fanon or Robert Williams. I crossed over the rectangle to the Administration building and went up the steps
.
I had tried so hard to get into State, swimming upstream, Allwood by my side. It was different from what I had envisioned.

But the interview was a snap. The work-study interviewer gave me a choice of on-campus work sites. I chose Admissions. The Admissions Office administrator barely looked at me, asking if I could handle the window for the next hour. I was shocked that they didn't care if I knew anything. What if I talked crazy? Student requests for admission status, transcript evaluators poring over grades, test scores, recommendations—someone brought me a soda, which I barely had time to sip. The students were confused, anxious, upset, lost, and waiting to get in. They wanted information. I learned where all the major buildings were. The person who brought me the soda said, “Admissions is the only work-study overtime on campus. Twenty-five hours a week isn't unusual.” My hunger subsided. The thought of quitting 401 Broadway was daunting, but I worked the window for the next two weeks nonstop. I date-stamped application entries from all over the world, scanned essays and personal information, and filed transcripts. Lives came out of the words: how little money one's father made; the off-the-wall place one had traveled to; family crises; serious illness defeated; political activity noted like a badge of honor—“I belong to the W. E. B. Du Bois Club.” They weren't afraid: “I participated in the freedom rides.” Stuff I never mentioned: “The protest changed my whole life.” State was a destination for radical students: “I'm a child of a union family.” Dissidents. The streets of Berkeley were the pull for people bucking the system. Nonconformists. State was pulling students like me. I was not an in-between. I was a junior facing a cast of thousands wanting to be right where I was, a part of something big, essential, swimming in the big ocean.

A
llwood had been my guide, but he had moved on. I could too. I started my third week wearing my burgundy pantsuit from Roos Atkins and my hair in a woolly bun. I ventured to the cafeteria, ordered pea soup, and took my tray to the edge of the pool. The black pool.

“You must be new,” a guy next to me said. “Nobody eats that cheesy soup.”

“I started last week.” I didn't mention my EC units.

“It shows. You paid grand theft for that suit.”

“Not really.”

“Oh, what then? You got it hot?”

A girl next to him said, “Don't be so mean.” Then she spoke to me. “Forget Marcus. Your suit is sharp.”

I lost my taste for the soup. “I'm Geniece.”

“Where you from?” Marcus asked.

“Oakland.”

“Figures.”

“Why?” He was getting on my nerves.

“I'm from LA. I got cousins in Oakland. Humbug shit, humbug parties. Oakland is either seddity niggas or Negroes ready to fight at the drop of a hat.”

“Maybe your cousins were lame,” the girl said.

He shook his head. “Only good thing about Oakland is the scrunch. Party in Oakland and you will scrunch, sweethearts.” I thought that closer-than-close slow dance with a rub and a dip was exclusive to East Oakland.

A much older brother in a baggy suit, white shirt, and bow tie, carrying
Muhammad Speaks
newspapers, approached.

“
Muhammad Speaks
,” he said, in a voice loud enough to reach beyond the tables. “The true word. The last word. The truth of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

Lowering his voice slightly, he pointed to Marcus's ham-and-cheese sandwich. “Still eating that pork, bro?”

“And gonna keep on till the day I die, William-fifty-seven-varieties-of-Heinz X.” Marcus defiantly bit into the grilled sandwich. I wanted one.

“William 12X,” he said, veered back a table, and sold a paper. I motioned to him.

“Thank you, sister with the natural hair; I should've come to you first.”

“What do the twelve Xs mean?” I asked.

Someone laughed, a laugh of derision that didn't faze William 12X.

“X stands for the unknown. We discard the names our slave masters gave us and use X. It's the mathematical symbol for the unknown. Our last names, our real last names, are unknown. There were eleven Williams who applied for their Xs before me.”

“And where do you apply for an X?” the person who laughed asked.

“Nation of Islam headquarters on Cottage Grove in Chicago, Illinois, my sister. Paper's a quarter.” I paid for it, and William 12X offered one to Marcus.

“Not on your life,” Marcus said.

“I bet you subscribe to the
San Francisco Chronicle
.”

“Yeah, and it's only a dime.”

“You can read the devil's rag sheet for an hour, can't you?”

“So what if I do?”

“The devil makes you think being smart is the key to life. But Allah teaches—”

“William Triple X. I heard your spiel already. You say the same thing over and over like a tape recording.”

“If you've been brainwashed, as our people have, you need to hear the truth over and over again, and over some more, until it sinks in and dislodges everything negative and harmful you've learned about yourself.”

“Next time,” Marcus said, getting up and leaving.

“One day there won't be a next time,” William shouted after him. “And you'll be too lost to find your way back.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

A
t work I witnessed students stream in and out of the dean of admissions's office. These appointments were listed as DD in the big appointment book. I tried to figure out what DD stood for without asking: Done Deal, Diplomatic Denial, Doubtful Decision, Dedicated Drone. I studied their expectant faces as they came in like white lemmings. All but one that I saw were white kids. Some were clearly jocks, big hunky guys, but the females looked about my age. They all looked earnest, and they all showed up on time for their appointments. When I asked Fannie, the black transcript evaluator, she crinkled her nose and told the others the names I had come up with. Big laughs.

“Whatever our total enrollment figure is, we waive the regular requirements for two percent of that figure and admit the exceptions to the rule. Most of them are jocks coming in on athletic scholarships. It stands for Dumb Deb. Dumb debutantes. The two percent quota. Mr. Somebody's daughter or son.”

“The not-so-smart kids of important people?” I thought of all the times I had applied.

“Don't have to be important. Just know somebody important,” Fannie said.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
n spite of my statistics professor droning on about factor analysis and covariance, I didn't fall asleep. After class I went into the Gallery Lounge. People were casually milling about an interview area blocked by a screen. A Peace Corps sign was out. Students were browsing through the literature near a pile of luggage and knapsacks. A curly-haired man in rumpled corduroy short sleeves loosened his nubby knit tie and walked up to me.

“Are you interested in the Peace Corps?” He seemed tired. “Have you seen our brochure? Would you like to sign up for an interview?”

I nodded, an effort not to exhaust him further.

“Maybe you'd like to talk with our rep.” He pointed me toward a young black woman sitting near the luggage. She smiled and extended her hand to me.

“I've been on my way to Tanzania for three months,” she said with a Southern accent. She walked me to the last set of chairs. In front of her ears, she had glued her spit curls. Behind her ears, her chin-length hair had been straightened so stringently she had lost some hair at her temples. Without thinking, I said, “Who's going to do your hair in Tanzania?”

When she laughed she was real. “I'll fake it for as long as I can. Then go all the way back.”

“Who knows? Maybe they have hot combs over there?”

“In the city, I'm sure. But I'm going way past Tanganyika. I'm going to the bush country to set up a school.”

She was from Tallahassee and had majored in psychology at Florida A&M. A black college graduate. I was immediately in awe. “I'm a psych major too.”

“Oh, the useless degree,” she said. “Without a master's, that is.”

“I might switch.”

“To what?”

“Education or French or maybe English.” An outright lie. I'd major in English in a hundred years. “Do you need a degree to get into the Peace Corps?”

“Yes, or a skill. Where would you like to go? It's a big continent.”

I couldn't even make up an answer. She seemed to sense I was dumbfounded. Go where? I didn't have an African country on the tip of my tongue. I looked down at her snakeskin go-go boots. I decided to be honest.

“I stumbled on this. The Peace Corps sounds interesting, but I've never been out of California.”

“And you don't know what you want your life to be?” she said.

“I'd like to be a probation officer or a social worker.” I went back to fabrication.

“That's what you want to do. Not what you want to be.”

Was she waiting for me to say something stupid? To do, to be. Two of the simplest infinitives in the book.

“Don't think so hard. I'm not trying to trick you.”

“How old are you?”

“I'm only twenty-three. And yourself?”

Twenty-three. Light-years away. I'd be a college graduate by then, taking a civil service test, wearing dresses and stockings and pumps every day. Yes, Sir, no, Sir, yes, Ma'am, no, Ma'am. The report is on your desk.

“I'm twenty, almost.”

“When I come back from the Peace Corps, I plan to get my master's in international relations here at State.” She beamed. “And then join the State Department and travel until I'm thirty.”

“So that's what you want to be in life.”

“No, that's still what I want to
do.
I want to
be
a God-fearing, loving wife and mother.”

“You sound so clear. When I think of the future, it looks crystal-ball cloudy.”

“It settles down. Give it a couple of years.”

We exchanged numbers, but I knew I'd never see her again. I felt this odd suspension of my body, like it was a liquid poured in another liquid, a chemical poured into this vast space between Oakland City College and SF State, in between what I knew for sure and what was unknown. Niecy X. Niecy 57X. Niecy Who? All that unit counting at City to land in between again.