Virgin Soul (21 page)

W
hen Stokely Carmichael came to town again, Chandro-Imi told Li-an and me that we could host the party after his speech. Li-an started list making and Xavi joined in:

• clean spots off kitchen floor
  
• wax the hall (which we'd been intending to do since we moved in)
  
• hang our mirror (which we'd left sitting against the wall because we didn't want to break it and get seven years' bad luck)
  
• buy munchies
  

Li-an got to “buy” and stopped writing. We looked at Chandro-Imi, who pulled out a ten-dollar bill.

“Peanuts,” Li-an said.

“Should we go down to the candy store and buy a few boxes of Jujubes?” Xavi asked.

“This is all I have,” he said, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill. Li-an snatched it. I took it from her and waved it at him.

“But money's not the object in this. We're not capitalists,” I said, tearing the bill in half. “Are we?” I handed the halves to him.

“Are you off?” Chandro-Imi said.

“Brother-to-the-big-time, we need sixty dollars,” I said, pulling a figure out of my head. “We're going to get down on our hands and knees, wax, polish, dust, fix food, and shine up our behinds for thirty dollars? Is his name Saint Stokely?”

He shook his head, like I was pathetic, and I shook my head back at him.

“Okay, I'll get the money out of the student activities budget,” he said.

“Today,” Li-an said, putting the list down on the table. I gave her the thanks-for-kicking-in eye. She was no stranger to putting her foot down, but she looked up to Chandro-Imi. Yet I knew from Uncle Boy-Boy about money up front, even small bills.

“So what am I supposed to do with this?” Chandro-Imi held the torn twenty-dollar bill up. I went to the kitchen drawer and got some Scotch tape.

“Nothing but filthy lucre, especially by time cullud folks get it,” I said, taping it.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

U
nannounced and unattended later that evening, Stokely Carmichael walked in, glittering in the dark of the hall, wearing the SNCC overalls. He looked like himself, sexy as a motherfuck. My mouth fell open.

He smiled. “May I come in?”

I opened the door wide. I couldn't speak, and he wasn't going to cross the threshold until I did. I got my throat unthrottled. “Please. We've been waiting for you. I saw you speak last year at Berkeley.”

I almost said I'm a fan. I closed the door and watched him move into the party. Several people gasped. Xavi picked the needle off the record player. The people started to clap and shout, “Black Power,
Black Power.” All the energy in the Greek Theatre at UC, where I first saw him, filled my apartment. I barely heard the bell buzz again. Two tall black men in the trademark overalls, clunky boots, and serious, biblical beards, not goatees, presented themselves by nodding silently, as if to acknowledge that this was routine: Stokely first, “Black Power” next, and then them. I watched the three of them, distinctly tall and self-assured, as people crowded around. It didn't matter if people couldn't get to Stokely Carmichael all at once with them there. Clusters worked their way up to Stokely.

Li-an sidled up to me. “Are those his lieutenants?”

Chandro-Imi, the overseeing soul, spoke. “They're field organizers. And they're not his.”

“Well, what do they do?” she asked.

“Why don't you ask them?” he said, his smile as wide and pleased as I'd ever seen it. Li-an plunged into a cluster and started working her way up.

“So, you pulled it off?” I said to Chandro-Imi.

“No, we pulled it off. This is a unity thing,” he said.

By then, the party was in Stage III. Stage I: warm-up, arrivals. Stage II: main event, Stokely Carmichael. Stage III: hookups, departures. Stage IV: afterset talk for serious folk. Food gone and garbage heaped in the can. I hadn't shaken The Hand yet; we had this big mess to clean up. I left the kitchen mess, rum and Coke in hand, to see Stokely in the center of the room surrounded by a phalanx of worshippers.

“. . . cattle prods, racist sheriffs, vicious dogs trained to salivate at the sight of black people, courts whose main activity is injustice, century-old prisons used not only to punish blacks, but to teach them they can never win.”

Stokely Carmichael talked for forty-five minutes. No one moved; it would have been obscene. Our unbroken attention didn't faze him. He said he had been speaking before black students at white colleges for the past three months. One of the field marshals took over:

“What amazes us is how similar each group is: You're all well dressed. Have we been away from the bourgeoisie this long? Your common denominators are the Afro, dashikis, and repulsion to anything white. The others, more so than you here at SF State, are unaware of the great avalanche of power emanating from the struggle of the black South. Most of them, unlike you, the vanguard of the black student movement, have never heard of Frantz Fanon. They pay lip service to W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Marx they know best was a frizzy-haired clown with a stogie in his mouth.”

It sounded like he had been set to go with a canned speech and then realized we were not kids stuck inside an isolated ivory tower. Somebody hipped him either at the airport or on the way over.

“. . . been arrested eighty-six times.”

Li-an whispered, “He didn't say eighty-six times. This makes me want to dance. New dance, the eighty-six times, doodoowop.”

“I know the South the way you know your campus. The most important lesson I've learned is how strong black people are. Without black folks, there would be no Mississippi, no Alabama, and no Georgia. We made the South, and from that came the nation. Black people are strong and resilient.”

Li-an whispered, “If he moves like that in bed, eighty-six times, doodoowop.”

He paused and looked at us, his brown eyes shining. Like an actor he could make his tear ducts work on call.

“Strength, beauty, resilience—our weapons. The fight is just begun. Prepare yourselves to struggle against oppression for the rest of your lives. When and if you have children, prepare them to struggle. When you go home, prepare your mothers and fathers, and especially your younger brothers and sisters to struggle.”

The other brother, a mariney-red man with an untrimmed natural, stood close to me in his Big Ben blue-and-white railroad overalls.

“Would you sisters like to meet Stokely?”

“Would we!” Li-an answered.

This field marshal said, “Sisters, no hollow reverence.”

I was impressed. “If he's just going to shake my hand and give me his playboy of the Western world smile, I'll check him out from the peanut gallery.”

I felt the familiar ridiculous oscillation in my abdominal cavity. I scolded myself: Don't you have any ability to differentiate? He was obviously too old, not chronologically but experientially. “You must be his bodyguard or some other kind of movement veteran, right?”

He stared at me, not unfriendly but completely cool. “Field secretary, movement veteran, worker.”

“I'm Geniece. I live here. What does a field secretary do?” I suppressed my urge for flippancy.

“We mobilize the community. Voter reg, union building, farming cooperatives, freedom schools.” He folded his long arms and leaned against the wall, at ease.

“And why have you come here? We can vote, join unions, all that.”

“We want to expand our operation into the northern cities.”

“You mean you're finished with the South?” Li-an asked.

“No, not at all,” he said. Li-an, bored, walked off.

“She's going for bigger bait, I see,” he said with no animosity. I pulled my eyes off his bony fingers and looked at him to see if he noticed me staring at him. He was observing me just as closely.

“Okay, let's stop playing games,” I said. “I can't figure this out.”

“Figure what?”

“You and him.” I pointed to Stokely and the clamor around him. “And—”

“And what?”

“If you guys are here to score or are about change for oppressed people, which can only mean liberation, a totally new and different system. Right?”

“Right.”

“How?”

“Any means necessary.”

“No, that's thoroughly nebulous,” I said. “What is the method? Guns? Voter registration? Education? Black culture and history? There's got to be a way that's clearly articulated, that the masses can relate to. Right?”

“Wrong,” he smiled. I shrugged. Out of his wallet he pulled his driver's license and two other IDs.

“Geniece, hold your hands out,” he said.

I held out my hands as I thought,
What's he going to do—spit on me?

This man, like me yet so different, had me look at his IDs. “See the first one?”

It was his student body card from Morris Brown.

“Your smile's as wide as Texas. You were a freshman.”

“You can tell.”

“Young and dumb,” I said. “And
quo vadis
to the bone.”

The second ID was a Mississippi driver's license. The camera caught his hair growing into a bush. “They told you not to smile?”

“Ain't nothing to smile bout in Mississippi.”

In the third picture, his Alabama driver's license, a barber somewhere in the Delta had tamed his bush. His smile was a tired older smile. “You changed a lot, didn't you?”

“Not really. Things changed around me. I changed the world around me. I'm still the same person, I only look changed.”

“More things change, more they stay the same?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Buddy slow dancing, like doing the grind, with Xavi. They were laughing and chatting it up. He in no way looked like a married man.

“No. Listen carefully. I say, ‘Things change.'” The field secretary carefully put the pictures back into a wallet like they might fall apart.

“People don't? Why are we doing all of this?” I imagined how it would feel for him to fingerfuck me and let go of that as he refolded his arms.

“People adjust.” He paused. “Were you involved in the riots?”

“No. I didn't live here then.”

“Were they rioting where you lived?”

“Windows being broken. Small-time looting. Silly. Why go down for a TV set?”

“The television, the petty vandalism—it's all symbolic,” he said. “It caused millions of dollars worth of fear. The results of that fear made a difference for those of us who survived.”

“I can respect all that. But why burn down our neighborhoods?”

“Are you afraid to break the law?”

“I break the law by being black.”

“So what's wrong with burning down a slum?” He was cool as ice.

“You talk about terror, about putting fear in the white man's heart. Listen to this: We've been kicking this around.” I moved a little closer and detected Jade East aftershave, which perplexed me, along with the rough washed smell of his denims. Buddy walks over and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

“Niecy, I'm taking Xavi away from this madness,” he said. Xavi was putting on her coat. “And she may never come back.”

Xavi started giggling and said, “Your cousin is mad. And I love it.”

“You two hooked up that quick?” I asked her.

She shot back at me, “If it's right, it don't take all night.”

That was one of Buddy and Uncle Boy-Boy's favorite phrases. She had gone mad. All I could do was continue talking to my SNCC guy. I didn't see Xavi until the next day.

“We have these wild visions of the sky lit with fire, of white folks running deranged through the streets.”

“Why white folks?”

“Hear me out.” He folded his arms. “The suburbs are on fire. Instead of us being devastated, living in ruins, let it be them. We even got a name: the Revolutionary Night Lighting White-frightening Fire Brigade.

“What changes in the inner city? Geniece, let's say your shock brigade sets fire to a suburb, burns down a few houses. Now return to the scene of the original crime, our turf. What's changed?”

“It's called payback. Retribution. Justice.”

“No, it's stupid, thrill-seeking adventurism. The revolution is not a tea party. Read your Red Book. It will not be won in a day, sister.” He leaned off the wall, placed his hands on my shoulders. I stiffened.

“Relax. I just want to tell you something.” He bent close enough to smell my natural hair spray. “If you want to burn something, burn down the ghetto.”

“What would that accomplish? Look at the riots.”

“Burn this shit down. The man would have to do something for all the displaced victims, most of whom are on one or another kind of welfare. We're the ones in need of new housing.”

*   *   *

I
picked up an A in Speech 102: Interpersonal Communication for reporting on what it was like to hear Stokely Carmichael in a small personal setting versus hearing him speak at the Greek Theatre.

Then I got “Conversation with a SNCC Field Marshal” published in an Experimental College brochure. Minus my sexual thoughts. I wasn't that out there.

C
handro-Imi kept giving me little tasks. He asked me to find LeRoi Jones and his wife, Sylvia, an apartment. The Black Student Union had invited him to teach a class. I spent two weeks walking up and down the hills of the Fillmore and the Haight with $250 from the Associated Students in my purse. I felt mortified at failing the test. Someone else, more on the ball, had to find them a pad. We ended up temporarily putting them up at the Travelodge on Market Street.

Then I saw LeRoi in the flesh, at his vociferous best, at the student body funding debate. I was stone-ass surprised that he was even there. I thought of him as a Big Important Writer From The East Coast In A Tweed Coat With Books Under His Arm, squirreled away from us except for class. And there he was, not in his book-lined study, surrounded by Balzac, Genet, Ionesco, or Brecht, hunched over a Smith-Corona portable as inspiration poured from his fingertips, on the phone long distance with some big bubba-tubba negotiating another run of
Dutchman
. Nope, he had left Beat nihilism for black nationalism. He was with us, giving much lip to the punk-ass white boys who controlled the student body budget and wanted, for some perverse reason that I'm sure would never have occurred to them in their native Stanislaus or Siskiyou counties, to pick a fight with the BSU over our altogether legitimate and defensible hiring of LeRoi. We packed the classroom for the meeting with students—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—and community people. We drowned the white boys, washed over them in a wave of derision. Every time they tried business as usual, we up-against-the-wall-motherfuckered them. They got tired of beating their heads against the united front and grudgingly agreed to give it up. Yea us.

Yea me. Financing LeRoi meant I got financed too—I was the warm-up act, reading poetry from Gwendolyn Brooks, Don Lee, Kwame Nkrumah, Aimé Césaire, and crowd-pleasers from a new poet named Sonia Sanchez.

LeRoi immediately set us to rehearsing and performing. As the Black Arts and Culture Troupe, we got a van, ran up costumes at the pad, and put on shows. Within a matter of days we were gone, black train down the black track, LeRoi the engine. We had an array of talent in the BSU—actors, singers, modern dancers—to supply motive force. Chandro-Imi, saying I was the quintessential naysayer, even gave me the part of the official naysayer in the play, the last line, which I delivered and even changed if I chose, since the clapping and the
right-ons
started just before it and nobody could hear me say squat. We took the show to colleges, centers, and any place they'd let us in—East Palo Alto, West Oakland, Western Addition, Marin City, Seaside, Hunter's Point. I was a little star.

The play was big fun to perform. No
Romeo and Juliet
here; no boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets her back stuff here. We improvised a riot, more like man gets mad, man gets Molotov, woman throws it. Sometimes I threw in Goosey's old favorite, “Don't let no man drag you down,” changing it, if people could hear me, to “Don't let the man drag you down,” or the old standby, “You can do bad by yourself.” But the point of the naysayer, as LeRoi explained it to us in class, was to show that quality of self-doubt in blacks that would always accompany liberating actions, but which would be drowned out by the exulting of the people at the moment of liberation.

Once, driving back from a show, I stood in the back of the van towering over LeRoi; I held on to the rail and observed him. He had a funny cackle, a little guy who hunched in his finely embroidered dashiki. A compact man. Even a gentle man. He bantered, for heaven's sake. I liked him and not at all in a sexual way. Thank goodness, he didn't give off that vibe. His vibe was
Let's get going, let's do business, let's put on a really good show
. Onstage he became ferocious, harsh, scary.

The one time I saw him mix the two personas was his last night in town, our crowning performance at the Black House in the Fillmore District. LeRoi ranted, raved, screamed; he also talked soft and tender about his wife and the baby on the way. I got the shock of my life when he pointed her out. LeRoi Jones's wife! She had foreboding eyes and was taller than I was! I had to force myself not to gape. He married up, not down!

But I couldn't help staring. She was pregnant, nearly due. Her belly bloomed out so perfectly pregnant I could see her enlarged belly button sticking out through the African cotton like a pacifier. Her hair surrounded her proudness like so many twisted branches of a tree. Even with the baby blooming, she retained a feminine slim curve to her dancer's figure. And she talked about California like it had a tail. She did not like California, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and, by extension, us. “California niggers are out to lunch,” I heard her say loudly several times that night. She insisted on dancing, and did a solo bit. So supple she looked boneless, she rolled over on her bloomy stomach as if it were a bag of raked leaves. When she finished her dance, she went upstairs. I heard her say, “These San Francisco niggers are trifling
.
”

*   *   *

D
illard was there, watching everything with a slit-eyed demeanor. I'd tried to get him to give a few hours at the Tutorial Center; he had laughed me down to the ground. I reminded him he could get credits toward his degree.
“
It's all a get-over, Geniece, don't you see that? Niggers getting over. Tutorial, BSU, the movement. It's all Get Over City
.
” He had upset me so that I had written something for him. I guess I wrote it at him. It wasn't a poem, like one by Mali. I had taken to reading it, like filler over the din of the stage crew. I read it right at him. Dillard didn't bat an eyelash. Maybe he was high, ethereally out there; he looked like raw meat that I had eaten out of sheer hunger. He seemed to be floating in his galaxy, out of my sphere of need. We went outside to talk. I was hot and didn't want to cool. The icy riffs in the San Francisco air ran up my nostrils and into my ears, carried on little knives.

“Did my poetry insult you tonight?”

“You call that poetry? Sound like somebody babbling. Telling all their business. Putting somebody else's in the streets.” He was putting me down.

“I think you're an interesting sociological specimen.”

“I think you're full of shit. Naive, innocent shit, but shit just the same.”

“At least, Dillard, I'm trying.”

“Yeah, you're trying, all right. My patience.” Every time I decided to stop seeing him altogether something changed my mind. But now the thought of him, of his hard rubbery dick, turned me off as much as it had turned me on.

“I'm trying to help people,” I said. He was stinging me. His ridicule brought up stuff I thought I had left behind. Innocence, naïveté.

“My people, my people, as de monkey said.”

“You must need something you can only get here, or else you would be someplace else.” I had heard my aunt talking once about somebody's divorce. Her comment so stuck in my brain: When a woman loses her taste for a man, it's gone. “If you're so cynical, why are you even here?”

“I came to see you. To be insulted by you.”

“It wasn't an insult. It was a kind of praise.”

He shook his head. “You want to convert me, Geniece. This is your church.”

“It's not.” I had lost my taste for him.

“Yes, it is, and I'm the unrepentant sinner.” It was gone.

“Dillard, we should stop seeing each other.”

There, I had said it, and it silenced him. He looked at me like I had told him his house burned down.

“I'm into this. You're not,” I said, tilting my head toward the Black House. He started coughing, the smoke from his burning house caught in his throat,

“Don't want to be.”

“We can still be friends,” I said.

“That's what your girlfriends are for.”

“Well, it's not going to work out. We're different.” Why was he making this hard? He never said I love you, not even in the heat of passion. He belittled me. “Why is this difficult?”

“Ah, difficult. That's what my teachers always called me in grade school.” He put good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish high on his shoulders and walked off.

I walked back into the Black House feeling just this way:
I'm so alive
.