Virgin Soul (26 page)

E
verything changes in an instant.

*   *   *

M
artin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis on April 4, ten days before Easter. Riots break out across the nation in over 120 cities, including Chicago, D.C., and Baltimore, but not Oakland. Bibo and I are in the car the evening after, listening to KPFA-FM's reporting on the riots. The station plays Stokely talking about King:

White America made its biggest mistake when she killed Dr. King last night. When she killed Dr. King last night, she killed all reasonable hope. When she killed Dr. King last night, she killed the one man of our race, in this country, in the older generation who's a militant and a revolutionary, and the masses of black people would still listen to.

Silent tears are flying down Bibo's cheeks. They make me full-out cry. All in the space of twenty-four hours, the rhetoric, the buzz, the unbelievable back-and-forth—
Burn Oakland down! Huey says riots are no longer revolutionary actions. Fuck that shit! Burn baby burn
—gets to me. Stokely's voice is calm and sad:

When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us. There will be no crying, there will be no funerals. The rebellions that have been occurring around the cities of this country are just light stuff for what is about to happen. We have to retaliate for the deaths of our leaders. The execution of those deaths will not be in the courtrooms, they're going to be in the streets of the United States of America. When white America killed Dr. King last night, she made it a whole lot easier for a whole lot of black people today. There no longer needs to be intellectual discussions. Black people know that they have to get guns.

Bibo says, “King became a Panther the instant the bullet took him out. That was a bullet aimed at the people.”

“It's a crying shame that he had to give his life for us to respect him. He wasn't Martin Luther Queen. Remember when you said that?”

“I underestimated him. Feel better?”

“If one more city goes up in flames . . .” I can't finish thoughts, let alone sentences.

We stop at my place to get something to eat. The front window is broken. I open the unlocked door. Li-an and Chairman Bob, and Alex and Elsa, two middle-aged white leftists who support the party, are sitting in the messy front room, amid a pile of my stinky laundry. I turn to Li-an and start sputtering, embarrassed that my shit is on display.

“What the fuck happened?” My blood is beginning to boil.

“They had to break in. Everybody was gone and Bobby's on the run,” she says. Bobby, looking strange minus his beard or thick natural, is on the phone talking a mile a minute. I start picking up underwear. Bobby gets off the phone.

“The pigs in Oakland have been planning for weeks to take us out all at once,” he says with finality and calm. “We gotta split. It's not safe to stay here.”

There's no time to change clothes, grab food, or finish picking up. We leave the city in Alex's car, the six of us crammed together. The streets in Oakland are deserted and eerie, as if the last days are upon us and citizens are preparing quietly for disaster. It's quiet inside the car too, except Bobby says when we get to West Oakland, we have to split up. Bobby, Li-an, Bibo, and I take to the back streets. Alex and Elsa, who must be in their late forties, leave in their car. We hop over fences, scurry down side streets, and dart through backyards. The chill from the San Francisco Bay sends cold into my bones even though we keep moving.

“Where are we going?” I ask. Does he even know? Are we going to run all night? I hear sirens far off. Are we running from the police or the FBI? I look to the skies to see if Oakland is up in flames. We run out of breath at intervals, panting like hunted prey. Bobby has the stamina though he's the oldest.

“Just keep up,” Bobby barks at us.

After a few blocks, he stops and summons us around. We hunch to hear him. “Huey P. said Oakland ain't going down in flames. The pigs are just itching for a chance to shoot down blacks in the streets. But Huey said this is no longer the time for spontaneous riots.”

We get closer and closer to the Berkeley border and cross into South Berkeley, darting through vacant lots until we arrive at an innocuous duplex. Bobby goes around to a back door and we go in.

“Make yourself comfortable. Get something to eat.” He points to the fridge. He sits down in the book-filled living room and makes himself at ease. Like an afterthought, he says to Bibo and to me, “If you want to fuck, you can use the bedroom. That's fine.”

I couldn't have sex if my life depended on it.
We're comrades not lovers
, I say silently. I'm frightened to death that the FBI is going to kill us. Bobby falls asleep so fast it makes my head spin. Bibo makes calls, I presume to his wife but don't know and don't ask, since it's none of my business. I sleep fitfully on a sofa. When I wake up, Bobby and Bibo are gone. Li-an says Alex came and got them. We sprinkle cold water on our faces and leave the safe house to get back to our unsafe one.

*   *   *

T
he next night, April 6, Li-an gets a call. There's been a shoot-out in West Oakland between the police and the party. We call and wait for another call, listen to the radio for news, pace the hall, and wonder how bad it was. The radio responds with bits and pieces: Eldridge's shot, several Panthers arrested, no police injured.

Finally, someone from the office calls the house: “The pigs killed Li'l Bobby in cold blood. Eldridge got shot.” Li'l Bobby, the youngest of all, shot and killed. Seventeen years old, the first person to join the party. I can't fathom it. I can't match his baby face with a body being plied with bullets in the heat of a fierce gun battle. In the space of the next seventy-two hours, I hear fiftyleven accounts of what happened. From Po-Rob, a brother from State who says he was in a caravan of cars out to get the pigs . . . led by Eldridge, who stopped to pee . . . at which point pigs surrounded them and they vamped. From the
Trib . . .
which relies on pig facts . . . Eldridge and Warren Wells were injured and held, with six brothers, on felony charges, including carrying a concealed weapon and attempted murder. From the party, that says the police ambushed them. From Po-Rob, who said the brothers ran and hid in different homes. . . . Some got caught. . . . Others got away. From brothers who say that Eldridge got naked before surrendering . . . to show that he was completely unarmed. . . . But Li'l Bobby wouldn't strip. From the
Trib
that says Li'l Bobby had a coat on and ran toward the police . . . crouching . . . and they couldn't see his hands. . . . Shot him seven times. From the brothers who say they saw a volley of bullets electrifying Li'l Bobby. The
Trib
says, the brothers say, the
Trib
says, the brothers say . . . The more I hear, the more my insides go bananas. For days, I can't stop crying screaming fainting listening recoiling retching agonizing, which no one hears or sees because it's all inside me. The details are stumbling all over creation, like drunks at an after-hours club, except for one: Li'l Bobby Hutton died.

*   *   *

M
LK becomes a Panther the moment the bullet took him out. Li'l Bobby becomes a peer of MLK and Mx the moment the bullets take him out. In this time of martyrs, death joins all the factions of the movement in one grieving line of rock-hard resistance, one long black line twisting around the USA, Caribbean, Great Britain, Africa, Europe. At night I lie in bed by myself, picturing Li'l Bobby, scared in the basement, refusing to take off his clothes, prison-savvy Eldridge stripping naked to save his ass, emerging into the lethal spotlight. Tears and funerals, funerals and tears—we do the BPP layout between the tears and the funerals. Li'l Bobby's funeral comes first. The community turns out full force. As much as we know, it's still unreal. In jail, behind the glass during visiting hours, Eldridge says he wishes Kathleen had an automatic beating machine so she could beat herself while he's gone. Outside the church, after the service for Li'l Bobby, I cry with my roomies. All of a sudden people start rushing past us, whipping past with gale force, talking, pointing, exclaiming. Is something going down? Not here, not now, how much more can we take? A voice shrieks: It's Marlon Brando.

Someone points him out; people are running toward him. I don't believe it. He looks like an ordinary white man, average height, balding hairline, sport coat, no tie, except he jumps up on a flatbed truck.

He vows: I will do as much as I can to inform white people time is running out.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

C
hairman Bob and Li-an travel to Beverly Hills, where they stay with Brando in his mansion, then they fly on to Atlanta for the MLK funeral. I try to glimpse them on TV, think I see them, start getting scared sick every day, hear sirens every few minutes, especially when I sleep or I'm alone. When they return from Atlanta, the chairman says Brando decided to support King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference instead of the party. Money comes in anyway from all over the world. I'm in the movement. The party is the radical end of the whole movement—civil, human, black, urban, dispossessed, whatever you want to call it. I'm in it. But I'm numb and it feels like a machine.

B
obby Seale, grubby and whiskered, in full Chairman Bob mode, armed to the teeth with his cigarettes and tape recorder, leads our indigo-bold pack through Mosswood Park at Broadway and Mac Arthur across from Kaiser Permanente Hospital, where I was born. We are trying for a secluded spot where we can listen, safe from the FBI bugs, to a tape that Huey sent us, via his lawyer, Alex. For elusion, we shift from one grassy knoll to another, as if eight or nine black people in a very bad mood aren't cause within itself for alarm or notice. Silence is golden. The tape plays Huey's tight nasal alto. Everyone listens intently. I'm next to Bibo, who fell in with the group at the International House of Pancakes on Telegraph where we met for breakfast, and I wonder:
If we're so afraid of the FBI, how come any Negro that takes a notion can join, and not only call himself a Panther, but end up inside the inside faster than you can say Jack Robinson?
I snap to attention when I hear Huey mention my name. My name comes out of the recorder like a smoke ring. I am to assume Eldridge's duties as editor in chief of the paper.

Huey says, “I trust the sister; I'm familiar with her work from the paper at Oakland City College; she's a good writer; she participated in the struggle there.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

M
y life changes in an instant. We leave the park. I leave everything behind and yet take it with me in my head on pages as colorful as a Montgomery Ward's catalog. Bobby and Huey standing like sentinels in the classroom, monitoring the young white Harvard history professor they hired to teach the first black history course at Oakland City College. I receive a salary of $25 a week. I received $67.50 a week from 401
but this $25 comes from the people's pocketbook; it is sacred. We open the BPP mail every day to dollar bills folded in scribbled notes addressed . . . To The Party . . . for my Brothers and Sisters, some anonymous, many containing checks and donations with letters of indignation, pain, relief attached. A telegram from Bertrand Russell excites everyone, and we feature it prominently in the paper. It begins to sink in why big names are so important for the cause. H. Rap Brown, Stokely's SNCC successor, submits an article; my brain hangs on to his words, which read like an epitaph:
DO SOMETHING NIGGER IF YOU ONLY SPIT.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

L
BJ's not going to run for a second term and I wake up once more to Dillard.
When is he going to get it? When am I?
He says,
“Throw me your keys
.
” My reflexes off, I throw them. He catches. “Let's go to Vegas, let's hit the road, Jack.”
The way he says Jack leaves me cold. I move toward my keys. He goes out and down the stairs. “Geniece, I gotta make a run to Vegas, use your car?”
I look across the street where the FBI twins park. They're on coffee break. Dillard walks toward the VW. I'm in my robe, good grief. For an older guy, he moves fast. He says, “Sorry, Geniece, I have to make this run.” I say, “Sorry, Dillard, not on my time.” He fiddles with the driver door lock and pops it up. To stop his ass, I jump on the hood of my VW, smiling like a Cheshire. He smiles back. “I want my keys back.” He shakes his head and says, “Call the police, sweetheart.” He starts up my car. I say, “Motherfucker.” He backs out with me sitting on it. I think he's playing some kind of stupid game with me. “Man, I don't owe you one red cent. What the fuck is in your head?”
He shifts into neutral, then first. I grab hold of the roof, my fingers on the overhang. I am splayed on the roof as he accelerates. My grip tightens. Dillard says, “I'm going to learn you how not to trifle with my affections.”
Dillard starts to weave, trying to make me fall off. I imagine my head being crushed under a wheel. Maybe this is the way I'm supposed to go. I think about letting go. Dillard says, “I'll show your trifling ass how it feels to be trifled with.”
Why isn't anyone around? Out of desperation I call out, “Xavi, Xavi
.
” Dillard says, “No one's going to save your ass.” I shout, “Get out of my car.”
Dillard turns the corner and shouts back, “Get off the car
.
” He starts to roll up the window. “This is my car, don't you roll that window up on me
.
”
He goes in circles to get me to fall off. I hang on. He says, “I'll drive you all the way to Vegas, you can catch up with your daddy.” We have a crowd now. I keep calling out to Xavi. Dillard begins to slow down. The people stand in the street to stop the car, shouting, “
S
ave her, save her
.
” They thought I was saying, “Save me, save me
.
”
He comes to a stop. I slide off onto the street. Dillard gets out and throws my keys at me, and says, “Hussy, find my car.”
I cry out, “I don't know where your Ghia is.” He says, “Later for your butt.” I mutter, “I thought I was so sweet
.
”
He says, “You ain't no more
.
”

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
come in very late from working the paper. Somebody's been smoking a cigarette on my bed. A taboo. Xavi points to the bathroom where Li-an is sobbing.

Xavi whispers: “Li-an has broken up with Chandro-Imi. Don't go in there. She found out that he was screwing around, because she got vaginitus.”

We called it the screwing-around infection. The last straw was when Chandro paid rent on an apartment across the street and moved in some other sister. I go into the bathroom to offer comfort to my friend.

Xavi says: “We're being replaced, you know, by a new crop of sisters, fresh meat.”

Li-an's choking wail is awful, but when I move to hold her, she rips herself away from me. “I played the game, and I lost.”

“Li-an, you don't have to be tough all the time. Hurt is hurt.”

“Don't pity me. I hate pity. You need to deal with your own dialectical shit, Geniece. I dealt with mine, but at least he wasn't married. Contradiction number one, two, and three.”

I feel stung. She goes on, “Bibo, always in motion, now you see him, now you don't. The real nitty-gritty is, you're messing with a married man.”

“I'm not messing with him.” I could have added,
Because he's too slippery to catch.
She redoubles her BPP efforts. We all do.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

3:30
A.M.
Berkeley pigs break into Bobby Seale's apartment, on phony allegations of conspiracy to commit murder. My appetite is up, weight down. I blame the bennies. I only take them on deadline. I crave Goosey's sweet potato pie. I see the lonely face of the white girl Viva on one of my Berkeley runs. She lives in a studio off Telegraph, bright red hair and sensitive, almost mournful eyes. Bibo and I drop by Viva's to pick up copy from the Peace and Freedom Party for the paper. One of our jobs is to deal with white people. Eldridge does it with media and white mother country radicals. We have alliances from colleges with whites and other people of color, the Third World Liberation Front, the teachers' union. And hippies from the Peace and Freedom Party. We stand in the middle of the room because her room is junked with papers and books, the bed heaped. There's nowhere else.

She asks: “Why are you the only black people who'll talk to me?”

We laugh, but she isn't kidding. We can't tell her how contemptuously black people regard white people; she's too nice.

I ask what her real name is: It's Viva, as in viva la revolution. Like she was born in the immediate moment. And so it is, for the moment that we stand in her junky place, we are sprung from the top of our own heads.

I stop calling white girls Julie.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

B
ibo and I have come to the flatlands of Berkeley from the city to score a matchbox, though we're already high as hot-air balloons. He pulls the emergency brake on the VW all the way out of the socket. I wait in the car, but he takes so long I go inside the apartment. The guy who lives and deals there is black and has a natural, but right away I feel something different. There are no books, the first place I've been in months without books or bookshelves. Is it the 9 millimeter next to the stash? The conversation strictly centered on pricing the marijuana?
The way the guy passes us a joint, strictly business? Why am I so bothered by his rank opportunism? The People are catching hell, risking lives, dying; some of us are sacrificing school, job, and a future for this?

Shit.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
straggle in one night, see Xavi looking grave, my cousin Buddy in the hall. My mind leaps to catastrophe. Did Uncle Boy-Boy have a heart attack? Goosey die? It has to do with death. Everything does now. I see death every time I open my eyes. Instead of morning there are funerals and court appearances. Evenings bring memorials. Afternoons are dedicated to demonstrations, where some get trampled, others shot to death. TV shows interrupted by news of body counts. Gossip displaced by shoot-out stories. Lynching up North. The Panthers wear indigo and black; the cops wear indigo and black, a brotherhood of measure. Xavi's suitcase is packed; I can't imagine why Buddy is here. Xavi says she is dropping out of school: “I'm going down South with Bud.” They stand, a couple. Xavi and Buddy? Buddy talks: “Xavi and I have been seeing each other and we've decided.”
“To what? Get married? I saw you become somebody's husband in front of 150 people.” They look at each other, not in bewilderment, in love. “How did this happen?” I ask. They start smiling. I say, “Does this go as far back as the stethoscope?” They nod. “What about Andrea?”
They'll get an annulment. “I thought that was for Catholics or unconsummated unions.”
They didn't. “Didn't what?”
Consummate. “How are Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola taking this?” My roomie and my mocha cousin in love. I look at the suitcase. “Where
are you going?” “Norfolk, Virginia.” His residency. “Tonight?”
The airport. “Now?” Good grief, in the midst of all the craziness, romance, romance. Eldridge's dictum rolls through my head: “Brothers, get married so you can concentrate on revolution.”

I feel like in some way Xavi and Buddy are asking for my okay on running off together. But of course they're not. They're informing me. They're packed and on the way to the future. We get tearful as they go to the taxi waiting outside. I wave good-bye and sit on the steps in the cool night air.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I
try to parse it. Andrea was always the old way. Buddy somehow got an injection of the new way when he went into the military. And when he came back, he couldn't just have a sterile marriage and a black bourgeois life. After all, he was the cuz who farted on my pillow if I didn't give him my Popsicle. He never was going to have a sterile life. Yet Xavi is proper enough, I guess. Oh gosh, I can't figure their attraction. Somehow it's romantic.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

M
y heart feels like a river overflowing its banks. I want everybody to be happy. I want everybody to be free. My core says if other people are happy, then they'll leave me alone. And that makes me happy, because I need to explore what happiness is. I don't know what it is, but I'm curious. And I will find out what makes me happy. Likewise, if everyone is free and understands what freedom feels like, then they won't want to limit my freedom. And I can freely explore the whole world with my full heart to find what happiness means to me. Being somebody's wife and having to pick up my life and follow his life ain't it for me. But I grant that marriage brings warring clans together and civilizes men. Even Eldridge Cleaver, the great authority on romantic love, favors marriage. And I grant Xavi her freedom to explore what she wants in life and Buddy his. My cuz don't need nobody to grant him freedom. He was born with it. I, however, have had to fight for it. I had to push open a heavy screeching door to get to freedom. I felt that door creak open when I first started college and then met Allwood. It flew open in San Leandro, when I was getting fitted for my bridesmaid dress . . . and then again at Andrea and Buddy's wedding, when I found out why my father left me. And somehow wide open with Tammy and Yvette, my kinfolk out in the world.