Virgin Soul Read online

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2013 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Judy Juanita, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Juanita, Judy.

  Virgin soul / Judy Juanita.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-62285-8

  1. African American women—Fiction. 2. Black Panther Party—Fiction. 3. San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.U17V57 2013

  813'.6—dc23 2013001522

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  In loving memory of my parents

  Marguerite Juanita and Albert Haywood Hart Jr.

  For their enduring union

  and

  for teaching me the meaning of commitment

  This is a work of fiction set in the context of events that took place during the early years of the Black Panther Party. Other than references to those historical events, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Disclaimer

  Freshman

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Sophomore

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Junior

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Senior

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Freshman

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  1

  Uncle Boy-Boy was a dentist and Aunt Ola Ray was his wife and I was not their adored child—I was more obligation than kin, their dark-skinned orphan-in-residence. I had gotten accepted into SF State as a freshman, but my “financial resources” amounted to my seventy-two-dollar monthly Social Security check. I wasn’t about to ask them to support me. It was 1964 in Oakland, California, and the Monday after I graduated high school I hotfooted over to Oakland City College and registered. Very soon thereafter, I moved to the Berkeley YWCA for $12.50 a week and kept my head attached to a Dictaphone at the Alameda County Welfare Department twenty hours a week to earn my way through school.

  Thus, one month out of high school, July 1964, I hit Oakland City College’s summer session. The powers that be had changed the name to Merritt College and were building a hills campus. But we called it City, a raggedy, in-the-flatlands, couldn’t-pass-the-earthquake-code, stimulating, politically popping repository of blacks who couldn’t get to college any other way, whites who had flunked out of the University of California, and anybody else shrewd enough to go free for two years and transfer to Berkeley, prereqs zapped. Other colleges may have been places where one and all rushed to finish, but at City, guys stayed on, growing not necessarily wiser but hipper. If women stayed longer than two, two and a half years, they were old meat. I learned fast what I wanted to be.

  When I got there, Huey Newton had been there a few, old as salt. His girlfriend’s locker was next to mine. She and I took tennis and French together and traded notes for Western Civ. I didn’t know diddly about the Greeks being invaded by the Romans, but Margaret, whose parents were Greek, knew it like the back of her hand. Our lockers were right next to my journalism classroom, where I was always dashing out of the newsroom fancying myself a kind of cub reporter on a mission around the school. Journalism was exciting where English 1A was stifling. I got used to Huey’s high-pitched voice asking me, “Have you seen Margaret?” He was always looking for her. She and I practiced often, lobbing shots on the court and using our mot du jour. Sometimes we walked to her parents’ house, a colonial three-story on nearby College Avenue, talking French all the way. They made a strange couple. Margaret was white, tall, and husky-voiced, and had dark hair down to her waist and gushed upper middle class. Huey was short and cute but street. With his pop-out-of-nowhere demeanor and pointy-toe shoes, he fit my image of a crazy nigger. What I loved was listening to the black intellectuals and white boys from the W. E. B. Du Bois Club talk; my friends lumped all of them together as Communists. On hot afternoons we sat for hours on the front lawn, cutting class or coming back after class to see if they had fainted from heat prostration. I was there as often as I was in class. Their language made no sense to me—Fair Play for Cuba sounded like U.S. volleyball teams going to Havana.

  Summer session at City was the most exciting time, because everybody was there hanging out: the black Greeks from San Francisco State and San Jose State picking up the free six credits; the students from the black colleges home for the summer; and the grads fresh out of high school. To see, be seen, and catch. Everybody ragged down. I had never seen so many fine dudes in my life. My friends and I had a rating system: the X-ray guys—they were the ones who looked clean through your clothes; the bifocals—they studied you to see if you measured up; the four-eyes—they studied, period; and the 20-20s—just right. Not fresh but willing, not snobbish but particular, and so sure they were going to be somebody.

  The 20-20s were rare. One wanted to be an accountant, not just a bookkeeper, but a certified public accountant. We were impressed. I saw him years later collecting tolls at the Bay Bridge. A
nother one never specified what he wanted to be but was earnest, polite, and neat, the trappings of aspiration as essential as aspiration itself at that stage.

  And seddity, siddity, sedid, the word hasn’t gotten to Webster’s dictionary yet. The uppity, light-skinned sedids went to Snookie’s for lunch; Snookie’s was all plate-glass windows and striped candy colors. The sedids possessed money or, in lieu of that, yellow, high yellow, sandy yellow, mellow yellow, sandy, mariney, light brown, peach, or caramel skin; the line stopped there. Money for Snookie’s regulars meant living in the hills or, for dudes, driving a dick car—the Stingray or the Jaguar—in red, silver, or white. An MG was okay too. If they didn’t have the car, money, or name that signified daddy was a judge, Realtor, doctor, or lawyer, or that mother was a schoolteacher, and if they weren’t cute, i.e., keen featured, didn’t dress sharp—blue cotton slacks with the madras belt and shirt to match, gray gabardine slacks with jeff shirt and pullover sweater, uh, sleeves very full, if you please—the guys had to have a rap, a line that wouldn’t quit: You rocking, baby, from the front, the side, and all the way back. Thank goodness for equalizers, for x, the unknown factor that makes for resiliency.

  The get-down place to go was not seddity Snookie’s but dark and dusty Jo Ethel’s, the greasy spoon where Percy Mayfield blew the blues and the doughnuts were as fresh as the milk was sour. I saw Huey occasionally at Jo Ethel’s, never on the makeshift podiums with the intellectuals. I didn’t hang much anywhere and didn’t get around. The first time I heard someone call Mary Jane an aphrodisiac, I imagined that black patent leather shoes were a kind of kinky turn-on. The students talked sex like medical practitioners. Clothes hangers, quinine, horseback riding, liver pills, 1,001 ways to get unpregnant, and the corresponding 1,001 ways to get knocked up all over again. If I had taken their word as gospel, I would have thought the plumbing of every student apartment in the vicinity of City was clogged with fetuses. Good grief.

  Whenever the conversation or eyeballs rolled my way, I, biting my cinnamon roll or, better yet, getting up to go to class, assiduously hid my virginity.

  Even though I had left my aunt and uncle’s house, their home training echoed in my head: “We want you to be a virgin until you graduate from college. If you’re not a virgin, you won’t graduate. Once you have sex, you can’t think about anything else.”

  One night, when it was too late to leave the Y, I ran out of sanitary napkins. I asked at the desk. No one had any. Another resident offered me a tampon.

  “I can’t. I’m a virgin.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Seriously, you can’t use tampons?”

  “Won’t they break my hymen?” I said. She laughed uproariously.

  “Have you ridden a bicycle, honey? Your hymen’s in the wind. Anyway, in anthro we learned that virgin originally meant an independent woman who didn’t answer to anybody. Man or child. Nothing to do with sex, baby. Ever hear of the Virgin Mary?”

  I wanted to choke her. Honey. Baby. Give me a Kotex, not a lecture. I was desperate to become part of the 3 percent at City who transferred to a four-year institution. I had to keep my nose to the grindstone and make it out of there.

  And anyway, I knew I had a hymen because I could still feel it, honey.

  2

  Because of the 10:00 P.M. curfew at the YWCA, I loved going dancing Friday afternoons at the Whisky a Go Go in San Francisco. It was a hip scene where everybody black and alive in the Financial District connected, set up the weekend, the deejay playing “Out of Sight” and talking ultracrap in the background:

  I’m playing the hardest working man in showbiz both sides number one and number two. Stop thinking Vietnam. Ain’t no burning draft cards up in here. Up in heah! That’s against the law. LBJ says it’s illegal. We ’bout having fun. Vietcong’ll kill a black boonie-rat as quick as they kill a white boy. Don’t be fooled. War is the ultimate get-over. War makes the world go round.

  But back at the Alameda County Welfare Department, 401 Broadway, in downtown Oakland, I kept my nose to the grindstone and ears to the Dictaphone, except for Julie, whose desk faced mine. She couldn’t keep her nose out of a paperback, head tilted, straight Dutch Boy hair a cover for her face except for her lips. I had never seen such large lips on a white person; hers were naturally the color of chewed bubble gum.

  “Juliegirl, fake it,” I whispered. Her lip color varied with the weather; when it was cold they registered the deeper pink of pencil erasers. “Put your earphones on.” She was reading our copy of William Goldman’s Boys and Girls Together, and looked up as if I had yanked her right out of the Brooklyn in the book. Her vow was to live in every one of the fifty states. Her dream was for us to run off into the world and live by our wits.

  “Girl hoboes, Julie?”

  “Geniece, it’s called adventure.”

  “My folks would call it living pillar to post. How would we eat?”

  “Lettuce and tomato salad, fruit, day-old bread.” She walked me one lunch break to the back of the Safeway and showed me how much food the store threw away.

  “More food in one night than we could eat in a month.” Even if I tried to feel hostility against her as a white person, I couldn’t. She gave each state its own nickname. Wyoming was Why-owe-me and Illinois was Ill-wind-and-lotsa-noise. She seemed capable of hurting only herself, not me. Even a man could see right through her. She said so herself. And she blushed easily. California was Can-you-afford-ah? She didn’t care about a college degree or becoming a big bubba-tubba. Oregon was Oregano, Arizona was the Arid-zone. She was a resolute nobody. She looked up sharply when she heard a big word, as if explaining it to herself phonetically. Julie, the last white girl on the face of the earth. Another coworker had been at 401 Broadway for eighteen years.

  “Imagine, Geniece,” she said more than once. “Only twelve more years until I retire at fifty-five.” The idea made me shudder. But where else was I going with no degree and sixty wpm? I could only start a new tape:

  Client was seen on February 8, 1964. All six of the children were at home running around the front steps. Some were half clad but they did have shoes on. I called her Miss Jones when I entered the residence. Client insisted I call her Queen Barbara. I told Client I would call her Miss Jones until she showed me a marriage license or a legal name change. She demanded that I call her Queen Barbara or step back out the door. I reminded Client that her next check was dependent on the report of this inspection. Client shut her mouth. I proceeded to the kitchen where I checked the contents of the cabinets. Canned goods were mostly pork and beans, Spam, and tuna. I saw a can of salmon. Told Client that was a relatively expensive purchase for a family of seven on a recipient’s income. Client told me it was and I quote “none of your damn business” what she fed her kids. Does she really think Harold Petioff cares? Let them eat pigs’ tails and pig innards for breakfast, lunch, and midnight snack—

  I shut off the transcription tape and took my foot off the Dictaphone pedal. Damn it, I had signed on already which was too bad. Enough of Harold Petioff, the social worker everyone in the pool hated to transcribe. We hated him but not because he was prejudiced. Which social workers weren’t prejudiced? I hated Harold Petioff because his prejudiced comments were longer than anyone else’s.

  Client is pregnant with her fourth child. Maybe she’ll get lucky and have triplets so she can save herself and the doctor two more trips to the hospital. . . . I told my client who listens to T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker all day long that buying blues records was a complete waste of her discretionary income.

  Day in, day out, I was breathing in noxious contempt.

  My special treat was to cross the San Francisco Bay and leave my Oakland with the beautiful man-made Lake Merritt plopped in its middle, feeling like Lot only if I looked back. I was a daughter of a multitude of colored folk who came from the South before and during WW II to get defense-industry jobs and a taste of freedo
m which allowed them to live in projects called Codornices Village, Encinal Projects, Harbor Homes, or Parchester Village in Albany, Alameda, West Oakland, or Richmond, the only places bloods lived then unless they were the funeral-home or beauty-parlor folk, or high yellas whose paler-shaded countenances magically procured them homes, put their kids in Catholic schools, opened charge accounts at uptown stores like Capwell’s and I. Magnin.

  The one and only time I went into I. Magnin in San Francisco I left behind me something better than money. I had gotten my first check from 401 Broadway and tripped on framing it. In small lettering, some government board had decreed: VOID IF NOT CASHED WITHIN SIX MONTHS OF DATE HEREON. Who in the hell kept checks for six months? I cashed it, bought Uncle Boy-Boy a pack of his favorite cigars (“They must have gotten these out of Cuba before Castro took over”), and walked past the marble facade of I. Magnin. The light was dim. I took off my sunglasses and saw fabulous scarves blemished with names of famous designers. What good can his name do me? I felt like a million bucks. In a voice the charm school people would call well modulated, a girdled saleslady addressed me: “May we help you?”

  We! She thought she owned a part of this store? “Just looking.” I couldn’t remember skin so white since my sixth-grade teacher. And the satin pillow hairdo. No bedtime bouncing around with a hairdo like that to protect. She lifted an arched eyebrow. I turned to look at my profile in the spacious, floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Just as I threw my head even farther back, I noticed a white man looking me up and down. He had on a plain navy suit with a red tie. A dick, just a store dick, but a dick all the same. They always think a Negro’s about stealing. I would if I wanted to, I wished I could tell him, although the thought of stealing made me queasy.

  Rolling my eyes at him, I stepped inside the elevator with a middle-aged couple, the woman wearing a sable coat and hat, gloves, alligator shoes, and a square bag to match. I stood quiet, not pushing any buttons, not doing anything but being. Let the machine do it all. This elevator ought to take me anywhere. To Africa, if I want, right now. Home—to get that cold piece of chicken. When the doors opened on the third floor, a tiny white poodle spilled out of her arms. I hadn’t even seen it. As I stepped out I wondered if it had been inside the sable, on her arm, in her bosom, where?