Virgin Soul (17 page)

L
i-an had found a large high-ceilinged studio in the Fillmore. My half came to seventy-eight dollars for everything including utilities, a bargain even after paying forty-eight dollars for tuition. When Li-an said she would need my help to sneak out of her parents' house, it was still a bargain. I helped her sneak out of her house in the Bayview District. I had moved out at eighteen on the nose with Uncle Boy-Boy's help. No one had been delirious that I was shoving off into my brave new world, but no one begged me to stay either. In contrast, Li-an was afraid her parents would get the police in Bayview to issue an all-points bulletin for her.

When we got to her house in the Bayview section and went up to her bedroom, it took us three hours to pack her clothes, unicorns, books, stereo, her Catholic school cheerleader outfit, memorabilia. Three hours. When we got ready to go, her bedroom looked bereft. She left behind hot combs and straightening combs all over the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.

Every hill we drove down, her overloaded suitcases hit my head. The suitcase we'd placed on top of her boxes felt like it was loaded with cement. When we drove level, I'd get a break and feel the pounding. I kept driving getting my head bashed because I was wondering how it felt to be so missed that your parents would hunt you down like Jesse James. I stopped the car and made her open the top suitcase. It was full of shoes. If I had to get beaten up by a piece of Samsonite, at least it didn't have to be violently overloaded.

When we stopped at Hayes and Scott to readjust the suitcase, an older black woman stopped her car. It looked like she had double-parked to run an errand, but she stopped to get our attention. She rolled her window down.

“You girls a sight to see,” she said, leaning out. “Those African hairdos are very becoming.”

We profiled so she could see us from the side. She asked how long we'd been wearing our hair in Afros. A year for me, three months for Li-an.

“I can't take this wig hat off my head. I'm too old. Like walking round with no clothes on,” she shouted. Cars honked; she ignored them. “It do me a world of good to see you young ladies. In my day, this was impossible.

“I'm just as proud as if I got my hair cut that way.” She waved fingers swollen with arthritis and drove off.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

W
ish Woodie was standing outside the apartment building looking out of place when we drove up. I introduced them. Li-an started carrying stuff up.

“Here.” He gave me a pair of silver earrings. “I made them.”

“Wish, they give off sparkles. I love them.” I put them on and began to help him unload the Bug. Wish lugged Li-an's boxes up in forty minutes. We were cooling off with soda on boxes. I had taken the earrings off and couldn't find them. I went into the bathroom, where Li-an had been putting up toiletries. She had the earrings up to her face. She put them on and looked in the mirror.

“They look so hip and he's so not hip.”

“But he's a good guy.”

“Well, I'm going to class and then hanging out.” She dangled them from her head.

“You mean you want to wear them now?”

“Please, Gigi.” She had nicknamed me already.

I let her wear them. She was off to her class before I could think twice.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

W
ish pulled out a big joint and we lay there, tripping off each other, happy to be high and together. I heard a bird crowing outside.

“Wish, remember when we went to Stimson Beach, and the cock was crowing?”

“Yeah, it's Stinson.”

“What's the diff?”

“You sound ignorant if you say Stimson.”

“I am ignorant.” We lit up and rested on the mattress on the floor surrounded by boxes.

“Put back on the earrings.”

I hesitated. “I let Li-an wear them.”

“You what?”

“She begged me. I couldn't refuse.”

“Geniece, I made them for you. You can't appreciate that?” I didn't appreciate them. In all the moving, I was losing my attachment to stuff.

A
ll Li-an and I did was walk outside and people stared and complimented us, even if we didn't have on makeup or earrings. Li-an had a sexy walk and big sloe eyes. I didn't know if it was the naturals or the two of us together, but we attracted attention just going for a walk. Li-an and I one night went outside to the store about 2:00
A
.
M
.
Three doors down we saw a green velvet club chair partially covered by a drop cloth. Someone had set it outside a flat being painted. We eyed it the same way; it matched the green sateen drapes from Li-an's bedroom at her parents'.

“If it's here when we get back, it's ours,” I told her.

When we got back, we carried it inside, leaving the drop cloth. We didn't think twice about how heavy it was. Just not being caught was enough.

It became our first piece of furniture, and we took turns sitting in it. Li-an said, “That's the first thing I've ever stolen. I can't believe it.”

“Not even a piece of candy?”

“Nothing.”

“When I first moved out I was broke all the time.” Getting paid once a month meant macaroni and Campbell's cheddar cheese soup, a fifty-cent meal that lasted three days. “This one time, I ran out of salt.”

“Oh, bad luck.”

“At work, I went in the lunchroom on Friday at 4:15, when it was empty, so I could pour salt into a paper bag. That way I could make macky cheese.”

She screamed, “You call it that too.”

“I was pouring away when the blind guy who did transcribing came in, whistling and poking with his stick; I thought,
Oh no, I can't live the weekend without salt
; I could tell he sensed somebody; he caught me off guard; I wondered if he could smell me or hear me breathing; I stopped pouring; he moved his cane around; I started pouring again; when he heard the pouring sound, he stopped in his tracks and listened to the salt crystals flowing; the look on his face was befuddlement; he couldn't figure it out and I wasn't about to tell him; he left, but not before trying his darndest to figure that sound.”

“Geniece, you have no pity.”

“My stomach had no pity.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

W
e fooled around at night on Haight Street, at the club, the Haight Levels, laughing at hippies getting zonked. We couldn't have been there a month when some guys from the neighborhood started throwing bottles through shopwindows. The cops came, and the boys began taunting them, cat and mouse. We waited to see the boys carted off in a paddy wagon. Then, like out of nowhere, reinforcements appeared, and the street was ringed with SFPD; the police started rushing everybody, the boys, the onlookers. They looked frightening, so bulky torsoed, coming at me, the nightsticks hanging from their waists like long black penises. My body froze. In my head I heard,
I'm wearing a minidress to a miniriot
. Li-an pushed me in the direction of the Panhandle.

“Run, Geniece.”

“I can't run fast.”

“Run, Gigi, run,” she said, and I ran fast. She shouted, “Zigzag, Gigi, zigzag,” to get me to break the straight line of fire. But the police fired tear-gas canisters. The crowd dispersed. Li-an and I ran for several blocks before we felt safe enough to slow down.

I felt the same after the riot as I did when I took the VW for its first checkup.

*   *   *

F
irst car from my first real boyfriend, first servicing—I treated myself to a movie,
Bonnie and Clyde
. From the posters outside the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, I thought it was a Ma-and-Pa-Kettle type of movie, the kind I used to see on Sundays with my cousins for a quarter and three bottle caps. I should have known from the shoot-outs how it was going to end. I chomped away on popcorn, still not expecting what happened: just purely bullets after bullets after bullets, rounds upon rounds upon rounds, bodies falling everywhere every kind of way—and then dead quiet.

I started crying
. I can die. I can actually die if I keep going this way.
I don't know if I was sobbing. I think I was. I rushed out of the theater and forgot I had a car. My thoughts hovered over the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde spilling out of old-timey cars. I felt the same walking home with Li-an from the riot.
I can die if I keep going this way
. Bonnie and Clyde went out like swatted mosquitoes on the screen. People in Detroit and LA died in the riots.
Could that happen to me? How could it possibly happen to me?
But my curious heart was stronger than any sense of fear or caution.

A
week later I was excited about attending my first tutorial program meeting. Tutoring primary-grade students off campus would fulfill some Experimental College units. I wanted to meet the program director, whose bearded face was plastered on Freedom Rider posters used to recruit tutors on campus. An Eyewitness News truck was blocking my shortcut to the streetcar. I didn't even bother to find out why. TV and newspaper people were there every other day. Students whooshed past. I didn't want to be late but couldn't avoid the commotion. Next to a poster proclaiming the Sexual Freedom League, a white guy was taking his clothes off in the Commons, as fast as if he was taking a shower. The late-morning chill from Lake Merced had me with a thick sweater on; I felt cold for him. But it was hard to look away from public nudity. Someone yelled, “You need a tan,” and someone else said, “Horny Horny.” The crowd started chanting and laughing; even students from the top floor of the library were chanting. I felt like the fly on the wall taking it in, but darn, my meeting was calling me. This was my first day at the Tutorial Center in Potrero Hill.

I grabbed a tuna sandwich from the lunch truck to eat on the way to the meeting. Waiting for the M streetcar, I could see the hullabaloo and felt superior to it. I was going to meet with the program director, a man who had been a Freedom Rider, for heaven's sake. Public nudity was frivolous, civil rights profound; the difference was clear. The BSU and the BPP occupied the radical end of the civil rights spectrum, the weighty end.

*   *   *

T
he sun was breaking out of the clouds over the Hayes Valley District where the program director lived. At the foot of the open door to his flat, boots, leather sandals, platforms, moccasins, and a pair of pilgrim pumps rested. Ahead of me, a guy wearing a tie-dyed tunic and bell-bottoms walked inside the living room and started reading a book. About ten minutes before the meeting was to start, a young white woman walked out of the back and started opening the curtains and blinds. She stretched as if waking and acknowledged us silently, nude as a baby except for a beaded necklace. The director, a spitting image of Che Guevara, came in, naked to the waist. Oblivious to us, they kissed, a postcoital, satisfied smacker, and went in the back. A few minutes later, he started the meeting, and she left the house in a patchwork skirt and a peasant blouse, as quietly as she had stood nude before the two of us early arrivals. As the director introduced himself and the program goals, I drew mental lines between the deep justice, civil rights freedom fighters, the shallow, sexual freedom, barefaced nudity in front of a raucous crowd, and a nude embrace in front of the afternoon sun and strangers. But the lines kept blurring. Individual freedom and hippies and Black Panthers and Blackness with a capital B and Robert Williams and armed struggle and Martin Luther King Jr., and Bull Connor's hoses and snarling dogs and tie-dyed clothes and African art and Aretha Franklin and lava lamps and bell-bottoms, miniskirts, and Fillmore West—it all began to merge. I was beginning to suspend categorization. I couldn't cross people and incidents off the list as casually as I had done before. Right and wrong, good and evil, those categories couldn't hold a candle with what was compelling, educational, eye opening. My eyes were being propped open, wider every day in San Francisco. Sometimes every hour.

T
ourists came to San Francisco to see panoramic Nob Hill, not Potrero Hill, the site of my tutorial assignment. Nob Hill meant wealth, flamboyance, masked balls, high society, and high rents. Potrero Hill, in southeast San Francisco, contained the projects, the sewage treatment plant, distilleries, factories, warehouses, high infant mortality rates, and my work-study job.

Work-study was a twofer. I could get academic credit through the Experimental College and get paid two dollars an hour. EC 199 was a community service sociology practicum that involved tutoring inner-city kids. The day after the tutorial meeting, I made my way to Army Street on Potrero Hill, down into a basement, which looked dark from outside. The sunlight in the Potrero Hill classroom exposed a collection of empty food boxes and packages. The bright containers played background to a familiar figure standing, one foot in a chair, and three children, black, young, each desperately trying to get his attention, screaming, “Grits . . . grits . . . can't you hear me? . . . call me, it's grits.”

“All right, all right, so you know it's grits. Grrrrrrrits. Now, how do you spell it.” His upper lip trembled and made his mustache shake ferociously as he sounded it out, holding an empty package of hominy grits. I recognized him.

“You look like a bulldog, Bibo.” A skinny girl made the other kids laugh.

“Yeah, and the bulldog wants to know, How do you spell grits? Up to the board, Tammy.” He extended chalk to the skinny girl with cat eyes and a lone pigtail shooting off the side of her head.

“I know it but I can't spell it,” she said, walking to the board.

“Write it, Tammy, just like you see it on the package.”

The other kids egged her on. “Go on, Tammy. . . . You know you bad. . . . Spell it, fox. . . . Grrrrrrrits . . . spell it with your bad self.”

“You eat grits, don't you?” He handed her a longer piece of chalk. “Find me the letter G. Just find me a G, nothing else.”

She studied the box and pointed to the G in GRITS on the bright label.

“Miss Fox, Miss Tammy Fox, Miss Stone Cold Fox, you found your G. Now write it,” he said.

Screeching the chalk against the blackboard, she wrote a crooked G and gave a dainty smile to Bibo, and a wicked one to a bigger girl behind him.

“Tammy think she done something writing G,” the bigger girl said. “Betcha can't spell the rest, Tammy. You so dumb for eight years old.”

“I can spell it. Just watch me, Yvette.” Tammy looked at the box Bibo held steady and found the G again. She squinted as she sounded out the letters. When she finished, she said to the other girl, “Now!”

“You got, it, little sister. Now write it on the board just like you spelled it.” He thumped the board with his knuckles. “Right here on this BLACKboard, dig.”

She wrote it slowly, screeching the chalk with every letter.

“Let's dance. Let's listen to records now, Bibo,” the older girl spoke in a bored-stiff voice.

“I want my snack,” a boy next to her said. “All that screeching made me thirsty.” He got up, stretched, and looking in my direction, asked, “What fruit do we got today?”

Bibo pointed me to an open door, putting the empty boxes and packages in order. “In the back room, back there.”

“Oranges,” I answered when I spotted the crate.

“The first one to spell orange backward gets three instead of two,” Bibo said as I put the crate down.

The older girl reeled off the letters before he finished his sentence. “I'm almost eleven. This is baby stuff.”

“I finally made Yvette do something,” he laughed. He had laughed the same way when he called me quaint at the Black House. I passed out oranges and gave him my work-study slip, which he studied intently.

“What? Does it look counterfeit?”

“I was just trying to think where I had seen the name.”

“We met at the Black House.” Brother for Real, don't hop off Cool City express and land in Phony Town. “Don't act like you don't know me. The Black House, uh-huh?”

“Yeah,” he rubbed his chin. “Allwood's sister, right?”

I shook my head. “I'm a sister, period.”

All the oranges were gone in a few minutes.

“Dig, little warriors.” Bibo stood erect, his full figure commanding attention. “This place is ours, and we are responsible for keeping it clean. We will take pride in our surroundings, because that indicates pride in ourselves. Everybody picks up their peelings and puts them in the trash can.”

The boy threw a peeling at Tammy that twisted around her ponytail like a bright orange ribbon.

“Mufucka, don't be throwing no shit at me.” She grabbed the peeling and threw it on the floor.

“Hey, hey,” said Bibo. “Is that the way a black princess talks to her black brother?”

“I ain't black. You darker than me.” She pushed out her bottom lip at him. “My mama told me ain't nobody black and ain't nobody white. Now!”

“Bibo.” I bent beside Tammy to pick up the peeling. “Maybe the little brother should apologize, since he started it.”

“All right. Chester, tell Tammy you're sorry.” Bibo put his hand on the back of the striped T-shirt Chester was wearing.

The other kids ate their oranges slowly, section by section, looking for a showdown.

“I ain't telling her nothing.” Chester was unfazed. “Our teacher at school don't do nothing when I hit Tammy. I wish it woulda hit her in her squinchy eyes.”

“Don't make fun of my sister. Want me to knock the stripes off your shirt?” Yvette stepped up to him.

“Hey, you guys are acting like a bunch of Negroes. A bunch of people who hate each other.” All eyes went to Bibo.

“How come you always say that?” Yvette demanded. “There's nothing wrong with Negro.”

“Negro is a color, not a people. All of us in this room,” he gestured, “are black people. That's a word we can use when we need to call ourselves by one name. It means we're not ashamed anymore. We are the darkest people in the entire world, and we're proud of what we are.”

“Yvette not dark. She light,” Tammy spoke up. “Yvette daddy white, huh, Yvette? You got good hair, huh.”

Bibo sat on the edge of a chair and continued, “Probably everybody in this room has some white blood in them.”

They all grimaced and made ugly faces. He kept on.

“But it doesn't make any difference. Let's do an experiment. Everybody put your hands in your hair. Feel it. Is it straight? Nappy? Now take your fingers and feel someone else's hair. Let's feel Geniece's hair.”

Everyone put their hands in my natural. “Your hair pretty. . . . How come you don't press it? . . . I like the way it feel? . . . Your hair nappy all over. . . . Why we doing this?”

“Now!” Bibo said. “Pull her hair. That's right, pull it hard. Hurt her.”

Tammy yanked it the hardest.

“Ouch, Tammy, give me some slack.”

Everyone pulled it, looking in my face to see how much it hurt. Even though it hurt, it didn't hurt. It felt good that they were learning from my hard bushy head.

“Now, let's do that to everyone. Feel it and then pull it, me next.” Bibo put his head down. The kids were amazed at their power to hurt us. They took turns feeling, pulling, hurting, and being hurt, laughing. Bibo ended the experiment when Chester tried to pull Tammy's twice.

“See, no matter how nappy or straight, nobody's hair protects them from hurt. We're the same no matter who's a little black or a lot black, right?”

They nodded, and I nodded with them.

“It's time to go.” Yvette ran out of the basement. “I got the front seat.”

“Last one is a Negro,” Tammy giggled.

“You might as well go along for the ride.” Bibo emptied orange peels into a large garbage can outside the front door. “Work-study. You know you'll end up working more than fifteen hours a week. If it's cool with you, it's cool with me.”

In an old station wagon, he drove the kids to the yellowing, brown-trimmed projects on Potrero Hill and saw Chester to a doorway, where he disappeared. The girls went to another building. Bibo hollered out, “Missus Moore!” and a woman came and ushered them inside, waving at Bibo.

“That's the girls' mother. I make sure I see them in, because sometimes she's drunk.”

We got back in and Bibo started in the direction of the Fillmore, steering with one hand, pulling the hairs of his mustache with his free hand.

“You think you fine, don't you?” he said. “You think being fine protects you, don't you? It only arms you with a weapon for the time, California girl.”

“You say that like you're from someplace else.”

“We're all from someplace else.”

“I'm a native of Berkeley, baby.”

“Nah, you're a native. Period.” He laughed. I kept dumping my naïveté, and it kept following me.

“I can read your mind. You trying to decide which man'll be your teacher.”

“Nothing could be further from my mind. I'm a student of the planet.”

“Nah, you trying to make up your mind as far as who to learn from—the intellectual, the hustlers, or the petty thieves. It's all over your face. And your body.”

“Aren't you a hustler?”

“And an intellectual. Don't leave me out of that category.”

“Oh? I didn't want to insult you.”

“You had Allwood. He broke you in.”

“Pullease.”

“We thank you, Mr. Allwood. But the good brother's gone, so I understand, and here you are back in the forest with the wolves. And it's getting dark, baby cakes. The wolves is starting to howl, hungry for fresh meat. Present company excluded.”

“Oh really?”

“I have a queen at home raising my sons. So they don't have to be tutored by strangers. I would never do anything to mess that up. I'm not a wolf. I'm a disabled vet.”

“Vietnam?”

He nodded. “'Nam taught me everything I know.”

He pulled at his mustache. “Red Riding Hood, I'm your new guide.”

“So you just want to be my protector?”

“We're going to perform an experiment,” he said, steering the wagon through the city, past the tall buildings, to the edge of the industrial nub of the city, just blocks from the transbay bus terminal.

“You with me all the way?” His voice matched the dusky light of the street lamps.

I couldn't answer. I had no clue other than having seen him at the Black House where everything was new, intriguing, and dangerously different.

He parked the wagon. We kissed, but it was not romantic, more exploration and curiosity, at least on my part. “Take off your jacket, and pull your belt as tight as you can.”

I did. He opened my door and we walked down the street.

“Now, just stand here and, uh, yeah, that's right, you got it; we gonna make us some money tonight.”

I threw my head back. Bibo waited in a darkened doorway, silently. A man in a suit with a face that matched the used concrete came down the street. My scent reached him. He slowed. Smiled at me. Stopped. Bibo's knuckles rippled across his chin. He slumped. Bibo found his wallet. Emptied it. Threw it in the gutter. I peed on myself. My father, as big as the bridges adjoining the city, gazed at my hands holding the filthy lucre.
There's not a thief in this family
. I had taken money that didn't belong to me. And I didn't feel guilty, even with his eyes piercing the night sky of my mind. I had ceased being a spectator. I could feel my naïveté sloughing off like snakeskin.