Virgin Soul (15 page)

“D
iscretion. That is the heart and soul of the process of public policy.” My public administration professor had thick maroon-tinged lips. “And no one is more important, more discreet, more fundamentally trust-bound than the secretary. In the delicate pads of her fingertips are your secrets, and in her ears, in the inner sanctum of her brain are your confidential deliberations. The secretaries are the nervous system of any business or office.”

I raised my hand. The way he looked at me I understood instantly I wasn't supposed to interrupt.

“If they're that important, why aren't they paid more?”

He lifted his bushy, black, caterpillar eyebrows until they stood out over his horn-rims and ran his hand over his crew cut.

“Salaries in the public sector are set by educational level, by training, and by experience. Show me a secretary with a BA, management courses on her précis, and management, or even management trainee, experience, and, voilà, you'll see a comparable salary.”

“Voilà” came with an arm gesture that said
simpleton
. A male voice behind me broke in. “That's not the point she's making.”

I turned. He didn't look like a protester, his hair wasn't long, and his shirt was laundered. But he spoke with as much authority as the professor. “Secretaries are donkeys in the office, beasts of burden. They're paid thirty-five hundred to ten thousand dollars tops, because if you pay donkeys good money, they might get the idea that they're not donkeys at all.”

The professor cut through it all. “My wife's a highly competent secretary right here in the Econ Department. She'd be highly insulted if she thought her job description was jackass.” Students, laughing, began to pack up. Class ended.

I thought of him as I got a grilled-ham-and-cheese and went to the Gallery Lounge. In the middle of the room, at the podium, moving like her body was aching, a small snappy woman kept opening her mouth wide—Aunt Ola would have called her “unladylike.” But the voice coming out of her sounded like Joe E. Lewis. I was concentrating so intently on the cheesy, buttery taste, and crunch of my sandwich that I only saw her mouth opening rhythmically. She had people stretching their necks to pick up her rhythm. I couldn't pick it up until I finished eating. She stopped and stood still, as if she was picturing something that brought her pleasure, smiling ugly.

“You know, don't you, that the entire internal structure of the black male-female relationship changed when Aretha Franklin took on Otis Redding's ‘Respect'? She changed what had been a man's plea for the love of a good woman into a woman's absolute and nonnegotiable right to a serviceable relationship, including—”

She looked around, making sure everyone was listening before she finished: “—penis, but not restricted to it, dig?”

Not many blacks hung out in the lounge. There were none to see this but me. The white students were getting off on her. I shrank, waiting for something smiling ugly to come out. She started humming and swaying. They seemed mesmerized. She was so little to have that much command. Then she looked at me and spread her arms out, whispering directly at me and smiled ugly, like my thoughts had irradiated.
Nigger.
She said it softly, as if she were calling to me right in front of all the white people.
Nigger.
She repeated it even softer. Then again, until it seemed she was weeping. But she was saying it with warmth, not hatred and accusation.
Nigger, nigger, nigger.
Like a lullaby, she whispered it. Then she was silent. She bowed her head and someone started to clap. But she threw her head back and shrieked so loud everyone jumped.

“NIGGER!!!”

She kept shrieking, saying it four or five times at that unbearable pitch. Then she grabbed herself and stood with her legs apart, like she was in the middle of sex. I was embarrassed and intrigued. She talked so fast the words jammed together.

Nigger
, the one-word country, the foreign language anyone can learn in an instant, the muscle on your tongue, licorice music,
nigger
shit,
nigger
please,
niggers
and she's,
niggers
drive me up a wall,
niggers
never learn, no
niggers
allowed,
niggers, niggers, niggers
, eenie meenie minie moe catch a
nigger
by the toe,
nigger
-lover

She turned her black marble eyes on me and bowed. They applauded. I just stared, her voice reverberating inside my head. Someone got up to the mike and said, “Mali is the last of Poetry at Noon. Give her a hand. And if you're interested in taking an EC class with Mali, sign up today.”

I went over to her. The other students crowded her, but she pulled me in, her hand soft inside mine.

“Did I shock you?” Everyone looked at me.

“Not in the least,” I lied. I was lying a lot at State. “I hear you loud and clear. Putting it out there so people have to deal with it.”

“You looked shocked.”

“It was a barrage.” She patted me big sisterly on my shoulder. Up close, she looked to be in her late twenties.

“What's your major?” As soon as I asked, I knew she wasn't a student.

“I'm from LA. Up for a poetry seminar. I might teach a course next semester. Are you an English major?”

“No way. But I'd love to take a course from you.”

“Well, look for Poetry with Mali.”

“Mali what.”

“Just Mali.”

The next day I skimmed the
Gator
to see if anyone had by chance covered it. On the next-to-the-last page, in a column called “observed,” someone had written:

Once again, the EC has taken its overly generous funding and clubbed us over the head with it, this time under the guise of culture. A Southern California Negro poet billed as Mali harangued and pontificated in the Gallery Lounge noontime happening. Thank heavens the students had the good sense to ignore thoroughly Modern Mali's unprintable imprecations, remaining polite and silent until she finished. Would that the Malis of the world proliferate but not here at our expense.

The
Gator
made journalism look like a joke, an insult. It shut down all ambitions I had to go into journalism.

B
y my third week in Admissions I'd gotten the hang of it—filing apps, scheduling Dumb Debs, sorting mail, getting the scuttlebutt from Fannie, manning the information window. A steady stream of anxious, frustrated, lost students searched my face for answers. The black faces gave the cursory nod, the pinched hello that said we were descended from the same folk down South who had raised us with good morning, how y'all doing, peace be with you. Some spat out the obligatories. A scent of pipe tobacco filled the space between one black man and me. I got his record.

“I thought window duty was for whites only. Kept all the Negroes behind closed doors. You're the first spook they let give out information. You know that, don't you?”

He talked like Edward R. Murrow, staccato, breathless, in a hurry to get the syllables off his tongue. But he wasn't in a hurry to move.

“No, I didn't.” His form showed a 1943 birth year. The people behind him were getting irritated, clearing throats, shifting books arm to arm.

“How long have you been here?” he barked. “I need the health plan brochure.”

“At the window?” I gave him the health plan brochure.

“No, at State?”

“A few weeks.”

“That explains all this smiling.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Let them wait. I've been waiting all my life.”

He leaned in as if my face was his echo chamber. “White paddy, white paddy, you don't shine; white paddy, white paddy, kiss my behind.”

He picked up his books and flounced off. I was so flustered I wanted to close my eyes and make the whole exchange disappear. Instead, I had to help all the people he'd shown his ass. They addressed me curtly, as if he and I were one and the same. It took about fifteen minutes for the line to reformulate. I was mad because he was mad at white folks in general and they were pissed at me in particular. Fannie pulled my coattail.

“Don't ever let Horace stick his big ears through the window. Nobody, not even your mother, sticks their face past the window.”

“How could I have stopped him?”

“Closed it on his motherfucking face.” And lose the job. I didn't think so.

“Horace is crazy. Do you know how long he's been going to State?”

Fannie had her hand on her hip and her chin on her chest. “Wearing those same Perma Press hopsack slacks and square-bottomed Rooster ties?”

Another evaluator chimed in. “Isn't he the guy who smokes Peach Brandy cigarillos? I think his cigars are mellow.”

“You would,” Fannie said.

“So what if he's been here since Ike? He's cool.”

“It's not cool to have been here long enough to get three bachelors,” Fannie said, as she went back to her cubicle.

“He's been here twelve years?” I asked.

“No, dummy,” Fannie said. “And he is not the norm. He is the exception.”

The other evaluator shouted over the wall. “All kinds of students take years and years to get their degrees. That's the beauty of State.”

Fannie made an ugly face, crunching her freckles into a mass. She whispered, “For white people. Not for splibs. If a boot stay, it's because he's stupid. Horace is case in point. Negroes have to get in, graduate, and get out. Shit. White folks have”—she raised her voice—“all the time in the world . . . la de dah.”

She put her hands on me. “Come here, tall girl.”

We went into her cubicle. Lined up, shelf upon shelf, were college catalogs: Berkeley, UCLA, University of Oregon, Ohio State, Colgate. She turned on her calculator and sat down.

“How many units are you going to transfer with?”

“Seventy from Oakland City.”

“And how many are you taking this semester.”

I was embarrassed to tell her eighteen EC.

She raised her eyebrows and pulled her glasses down her nose. “Eighteen Mickey Mouse. All the same on paper. All you need is 120 to pick up your sheepskin. That's all you consider. Every semester you ask yourself, How close am I to 120 units?”

She ripped off the tape from the adding machine and handed it to me.

“Not with the sequence of courses I have to take as a psych major.”

“Then switch.”

“Switch?”

“Switch majors, dummy. Take social science, the easiest way to get out. This ain't no playground. It's an institution, dig? Like San Quentin. Don't stay here longer than you have to. You might can't get out.”

“I haven't even started, really.”

“Who's supporting you? Mommy? Daddy?” I shook my head. “If the Dumb Debs can do it, so can you. I'm just saying, don't act like you got all the time in the world. I'm divorced with two kids in Catholic school. I do it by myself. Colored women can't depend on Prince Charming. I came from junior college too and whipped through in four semesters without Experimental Disneyland. You can do it. Horace is here because he wants someplace to bullshit. He could've had his degree. I know his wife. His kids play in the same league with mine; she's carrying the weight. You know what kind of car he drives? A Corvair! Perfect, looks the same from the back and the front. Ditto Horace. Asshole to asshole.”

I thought of City, the street-corner orators who were in their mid- to late twenties. “College is Horace's game?”

“Exactly. He's in engineering, which I grant you can take a while. But that hammerhead's been here long enough to grow rust.”

“Horace is a dud?”

“Actually, Horace is smart. As long as wifey's content that he's working on his degree, he got it made in the shade.”

Fannie marched me out of her cubicle. “You can do this. Here's what you need to do. I know you're commuting from the East Bay. Move into the dorms. You can't take all those units, work twenty-five hours here, and go back and forth.”

“I can't move in the dorms. I can't afford dorm housing.”

“Not the dorms, dummy, IH.”

Interim Housing. IH. I had referred several people there. Emergency housing.

When I rode home I felt quivers in my gut as I crossed the Bay Bridge. Not horny quivery or having to pee quivery. A high-frequency oscillation, like when I knew Allwood was going to be the one, like when I saw Cicely Tyson on TV with George C. Scott in
East Side, West Side
, and it was the first time people weren't seeing the white-looking Lena Horne or mulatto-sexy Dorothy Dandridge but an African-dark woman. Checking out the San Francisco roller-coaster skyline of buildings and lights, brooding Mount Tamalpais darker than the night, I thought about Fannie in her thirties, already flopped at marriage, raising two kids on her own. I didn't want to end up like that. Who was she to criticize Horace? Maybe she envied him. Horace had someone. I could smell Horace's sweetish tobacco, see him driving his Corvair assbackward, giving drivers the finger. What would I do if I graduated so soon? Take the probation officer exam for Alameda County. The social worker exam. Be an evaluator at State. Calculator, cubicle, confinement. I wasn't even all the way in, and she wanted me to rush out.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
parked the Bug behind my apartment, breathing in the Berkeley air cooled by the San Francisco Bay. When I moved there I bought a new serape from the back of a truck, paying a man from Mexico in crisp bills that he folded into tattered, sweated-over ones. Now everything looked old, the serape threadbare, cabinets as if from a Sears Roebuck catalog. I didn't want to turn on the lights. I put my books and purse down in the dark kitchen, groping for the kettle, the faucet, prepping my mug with a tea bag. I fingered the abstract design on the mug and blew into it, making sure a bug hadn't gone to bug heaven on me. When I heard the kettle whistle, I turned on the light. When I poured, I saw something black, fingernail-size, float to the rim. A roach that had eluded my roach hunt floated in its coffin, my mug. I started to pour it down the drain. But first I went to the drawer where all the roaches had hidden before. Grabbing a spatula, I cursed the entire species and yanked the drawer open. No roaches jumped out. I went through the drawers, cabinets, sink, and refrigerator.

Fannie was right; it was time.