Virgin Soul Page 2

  Another pale saleslady stepped forward to greet us—the mismatched trio. She looked at me, glanced at my bulgy, rough leather bag and my Army-Navy store wool peacoat, and smiled at them.

  “May we show you something today?” she asked them, smiling at the poodle. So much for me. She could see I wasn’t in the market for gators and fur. Looking around, I noticed a scarcity of racks. Damn! Where are all the clothes? The clothes weren’t interesting. They were like Sunday morning church clothes for the Realtors’ wives in Aunt Ola Ray’s church. Bored, I walked around a bit, looking at myself in the mirrors. When I came back to Mister and Missus Gators ’n’ Fur sitting on velvet Victorian chairs, the saleslady came out of a stockroom with pastel gowns that swished on satin hangers.

  “This is a Ceil Chapman.” She began displaying them. The husband nodded approval; the wife stroked and murmured to the dog on her lap. An ultraordinary A-line shift of yellow wool crepe with a narrow belt elicited enthusiasm from them.

  “We have a cape to match.”

  The wife said, “I like it very much.” Even the dog yapped approval.

  Her old man—like it really didn’t even matter—asked, “How much?”

  The saleslady said eight-ninety-five, but I knew she wasn’t saying $8.95.

  My bottom lip dropped, my throat went dry. I put the dress I had been looking at back in place and began walking toward the elevator. Maybe they were just saying that to astound me. Nine hundred dollars for a simple-ass yellow dress. I was in the wrong place. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have paid that much for something I wouldn’t force a dog to wear. I began to get mad, then madder. Is this what this crap is all about? Is this what the high yellas and preachers’ wives have been doing all this time? Sashaying into I. Magnin and the like, paying all of the Sunday services’ four collections and who knows what else so some washed-out, wrinkled-up white lady will think we got class, which she wouldn’t know if it slapped her. Which is what I needed to do to myself for even thinking of bringing my high behind in this mirrored contradiction. For the first time in my life I really did want to take something that didn’t belong to me. The voices inside said: Thou shall not steal. . . . If you take even one grape from the grocer, God will see that. . . . Uncle Boy-Boy said people who steal have inferiority complexes. I looked around and realized it was an impossibility—too few clothes and too many mirrors. And, dammit, I needed to go to the bathroom, knowing instantly that I could not stand the idea of any more time in this store than I had already wasted. Bathroom be damned. I got back on the elevator, thought for a minute, and pushed the top-floor button. The elevator started going up, and I reached under my skirt and pulled down my panties. Why not? Heck, it’s not against the law. I stood with my panties at midthigh as the door opened at the sixth floor and a young woman and child got on. Dammit. They got off at the fifth floor. As soon as they stepped out, I pushed the “Door Close” and “Mezzanine” buttons, pulled up my skirt, and crouched down. It came running out like water from a free faucet. Can’t drip-dry now. I pulled up my panties, felt the crotch of them slightly wet as I straightened my skirt.

  First floor. All out, colored peoples. All in, white people. I glided slowly across the floor. When I met the bright sunlight of Union Square I turned back to look and, to my utter surprise, my grandma Goosey’s face was up on a billboard next to the marble entrance, big as Texas, smiling ugly at me. My heart jumped and I broke out in a sweat. Then I realized it was only my conscience, not my real grandmother, who bought her household appliances with Blue Chip Stamps. I walked on through the square, scattering fat gray pigeons to my left and my right.

  3

  When my grades from first semester came back, I was happy:

  English 1A, [B−];

  Introduction to Western Civilization, [C+];

  French 1, [B];

  Journalism, Basic Principles, [A];

  Journalism, News Production, [A];

  Tennis, [A].

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I enrolled in Engl. 1B, French 2, the second half of West. Civ., and Journalism: News Writing, for spring. I was ready to write for The Tower, the college paper, and added three additional units in psychology. I was making headway on getting my chocolate buns out of City in two years flat, so I wouldn’t be old meat. I sent off for applications from Negro colleges. Some evenings I recited the names of the colleges, singing them like a spell to invoke a full scholarship somehow: Howard / Spelman / MorrisBrown / Talladega / Alcorn A&M / Philander Smith / Wilberforce / Hampton / Xavier / Wiley / BethuneCookman. But the magic only produced my family, which kept crowding into the picture I had made into flesh. Bushy unpressed hair, leather sandals, jeans, one-of-a-kind earrings from my favorite hole-in-the-wall shop in Berkeley, and eyes ringed with Maybelline black eye pencil. I had started in high school with eyeliner because it made my eyes pop. We couldn’t wear pants in high school, so it was liberating to wear jeans seven days a week. All I had to buy were cute tops to complete my wardrobe. When I started shopping, I found the earring shop that pierced ears for nothing if you bought three pairs for ten dollars. So I got my ears pierced right after I moved out of Boy-Boy’s. The hair was the biggest change. I couldn’t take the smell of chemical relaxer, even though I knew I looked like a wild thing. I tried to change when I went around family. They hated my hair, the eyes, and my jeans. They wanted pedal pushers and pert hair, like when we were girls. My solution was simple to imagine, harder to act on: Don’t go around them.

  I had been the broken-home baby, as Aunt Ola Ray called it. In my father’s family, we were all raised together. Two of his brothers had big, stable Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney families; Uncle Boy-Boy and Aunt Ola Ray had Buddy and Corliss; and the oldest son had me. Grandma Goosey called children like me the all-by-theyself babies.

  Broken-home baby. All-by-theyself babies. Both terms irritated me tremendously, whether it was Aunt Ola Ray’s pitying voice as she neatly folded yet another Butterick-Vogue-McCall’s pattern and stuck pins in the red tomato pincushion or my grandmother’s muttered cursing of wayward mens, one of them being her son, my very own flesh-and-blood father.

  “No count, pissantsy boots. Leaving these all-by-theyself babies for the family to raise.” As harsh as Goosey’s rant was, I didn’t feel as bad as when Ola Ray, who wasn’t blood, said it. In the interest of the entire family they threw us in one pot, called us all The Cousins, the boycousins and girlcousins. Even when we reached the age of consent, we remained the boycousins and the girlcousins.

  Corliss and Buddy, her brother, were my favorites. The two of them together looked like the mocha plastic bride and groom on the top of the cake. Cute. Smart. Personable. Striving their asses off. College-bound from the first day of kindergarten. Buddy was the genius who did ROTC, Reserve Officers Training Corps, all through high school. Uncle Boy-Boy said ROTC would look good on his transcript and get him into a military medical college. Corliss was held up as a role model for the rest of us, the perfect person, straight A over straight A, junior to senior high, every single course. That had to have been like some kind of fate not humanly possible. It seemed like everyone thought Corliss had no flaws and that the rest of the cousins must have had terrible complexes because we weren’t her. Personally, I didn’t think the zebras in the back of the pack worried if their stripes were crooked or if their black and white needed touching up. They kept zigzagging with the pack.

  It was one thing to have the talented tenth at home and know Corliss and Buddy without their guards up. But at Oakland City I saw that constant striving to look like an up-and-coming black bourgie as constant straining. When I started I thought matriculation was clear-cut: Get sixty units and get out of there. When I started I thought dressing sharp was a simple carryover from high school. The Snookie’s regulars had nice clothes; the girls wore cashmere cardigans and plaid tartan Pendleton skirts. But I took university transf
er classes, and the regulars in there with me didn’t come to class and didn’t finish the semester, part of a pattern. School would be jam-packed the first few weeks of the semester, everybody hanging out. Then, at midterms, fewer and fewer students. By the end of the semester, City looked like it had been evacuated. Tuition was free and the student ID card cost two dollars. That’s why I was there. Maybe the guys who stayed on were there because they couldn’t transfer. Not after two years, not after ten years. The guys who looked so hip when I was seventeen began to look like they were stranded at a way station. It puzzled me that the bourgie students looked so confident and secure inside Snookie’s, inside their no-browner-than-a-paper-bag cosmos. They assimilated the look of the white middle class but not the academic go-getting. But it didn’t get under my skin that they weren’t as smart as the radicals. Only family could get under my skin.

  No matter how much my family irritated me, though, I loved cousin Buddy. As a matter of fact, Buddy, if he could have, would have painted me up even more, tightened my jeans, added second hoops to my ears, and sprinkled stardust on my eyelids. Corliss may have been goody-goody but Buddy was good. Just plain good. People liked Buddy. With Corliss, it was the she-can-do-no-wrong bit. With Buddy, it was whatever he did, right or wrong, was so much fun, so outrageous, nobody minded. Of course, he was smart, smarter than anyone, so that was his first qualification. Then, he was cool.

  For his high school graduation party in 1961, Corliss and I dressed up so I could help Aunt Ola Ray serve Buddy’s friends and their dates. But Buddy banished us from the living room and the patio. Such power. Aunt Ola Ray, meek as a lamb with her genius son, obeyed. Corliss and I spent the whole evening on tiptoe watching the partygoers from the catwalk near her room. I ached somewhere deep below my stomach listening to Johnny Mathis (of course Buddy had all twenty-six albums), sang along with “Chances Are,” and stared at his friends’ lithe and perfect bodies as they leaned into each other, doing the dip and snapping their fingers. I wanted to be like them—cute hip smart and going off to college. Going across the bay to State was going away. Hardly any of Buddy’s friends were going to Berkeley, and the ones that were—Herbie, Phillip, and Reid—didn’t impress me. They looked neurasthenic, like they had asthma and would cough in your face if they kissed you. I noticed they didn’t arch when they danced. They looked as stiff as their slide rules.

  In his second year of med school in the navy, Buddy got engaged to Andrea, an old-line bourgie born with her father’s stethoscope around her high-yellow neck. Forget the silver spoon—the child of the black bourgeoisie comes equipped with the tools of her father’s labor. Andrea and I knew each other from being candy stripers at the hospital in high school. I knew she was very sincere, if a bit dull, as happens when you hit the child over the head from infancy on with status, money, and keeping up with the next-best Negro.

  As it turned out, being the only black candy stripers there, we became friends. Not boon coons, but friendly enough to share dreams, to unfold with each other.

  I want to go to Fisk, pledge my second year, meet a Meharry man in my junior year, and get married the summer after I graduate, she’d told me. This didn’t sound like a dream, more like a plan, nothing of the ethereal in it. But her face looked dreamy when she said it. I wanted to get as far away from Oakland as I possibly could and fall in love as many times as I had fingers and toes. Maybe my stuff didn’t sound so ethereal to her either. I was not surprised to hear of Andrea and Buddy in love. He hadn’t gone to Meharry Medical School in Nashville, the mecca for young mocha women wanting the mocha groom and the mocha life. But he had gone to medical school in the Navy and was interning at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in the Oakland Hills. Andrea wanted the cousins who were the right age to be in the wedding. So she called me up and asked me.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I had gone to Aunt Ola’s, who had started in on my hair, dragging me to the coffee table in her front room, opening up Ebony, her etiquette book. Aunt Ola Ray had paper-clipped a section on fancy hairdos called “Baubles, Bangles, and Bangs,” which had the three variations Aunt Ola Ray wanted the bridesmaids to wear:

  1. The Bun of Fun, 2. The Holiday Gamin, or 3. The Holiday Temptress

  All three of these hairdos were for women who pressed their hair. I hadn’t gone back to pressing mine, and it had grown long and bushy. People reacted like they didn’t know if I was on my way to the beauty shop or I was just country and didn’t know better than to walk the city streets with unpressed hair.

  “Oh, Geniece, I’ve been thinking of you,” she said, turning the pages. “You can wear one. Aren’t they beautiful?” Beneath a picture of a woman putting on a black beehive wig were the words: If you are a woman, you need a wig.

  “This is typical Ebony assimilation advertising, Aunt Ola.”

  “Wait till you see how it looks.” Aunt Ola left the room. I looked at myself in the gold leaf mirror above her mahogany server.

  I leafed through the magazine. An ad for Nadinola bleaching crème caught my eye: “Nadinola brightens your opportunities for romance just as swiftly and surely as it brightens and lightens your skin.”

  Aunt Ola Ray came back in with a black wig, a silky straight pageboy. Despite my frown and my pulling back, she settled the monstrosity over my bushy hair, as deftly as she used to get me to take the laxative Black Draught. She just did it. She pulled me in front of the mirror. The wig sat there like a top hat on a shelf.

  “It doesn’t fit.”

  “We’ll make it fit.”

  “No, Aunt Ola. My hair is my hair. If it’s all right with Buddy and Andrea, it should be all right with you.”

  “Buddy and Andrea! What do they know? I’m in charge of this.” For a few minutes she bunched up my hair underneath that hat. Hot and wanting to scratch my scalp, I broke loose.

  “Aunt Ola Ray, how can you read a book like Crisis in Black and White”—I picked up the book that was on her coffee table next to the Saturday Evening Post—“and not understand that this wig is yesterday?”

  I hadn’t read The Crisis in Black and White, or anything else by its author, Charles Silberman. But I had seen it boldly displayed in bookstores in Berkeley and assumed it was hip. Opening it up to a section Aunt Ola Ray or Uncle Boy-Boy had penciled, I read it back to her, dodging her attempts to make the top hat fit. Reading the first few passages, however, I realized quickly that I had assumed wrong.

  The lower-class child, moreover, tends to have poor attention span and to have great difficulty following the teacher’s orders. The reason is that he generally comes from a nonverbal household. Adults speak in short sentences, if indeed they speak at all.

  “Aunt Ola Ray, this is insulting.”

  “I think he has something.”

  “He has something, all right,” I said. “An allergy to colored people.” I continued aloud for the sake of my own amazement.

  And when they give orders to the child, it is usually in monosyllables—get this, bring that. The child has never been obliged to listen to several lengthy sentences spoken consecutively. And the speech he does hear tends to be of a very simple sort from the standpoint of grammar and syntax. In school, the class teacher who rambles on for several sentences might just as well be talking another language.

  “Oh, we can’t talk English, can we?”

  “Now, Geniece, he’s talking about a certain kind of child, from a certain kind of home.”

  “He is not. He’s talking about black children. The book isn’t titled Crisis in a Certain Kind of Black and White.” I tore the wig off and set it down. “How much did you and Uncle Boy-Boy pay for this book?”

  “Five ninety-five.”

  “You paid to be insulted. Listen to this.”

  Lower-class children have a limited perception of the world about them: they do not know that objects have names (table, wall, book) or that the s
ame object may have several names (an apple is fruit, red, round, juicy). . . . The slum child’s home is characterized by a general scarcity of objects: there are few toys, few pictures, few books, few magazines, few of anything except people and noise.

  “This is absolutely ridiculous. Why did you underline it? Do you want to believe it?”

  “That’s the way it is. You don’t know. You’ve never had to live like that.”

  “Aunt Ola Ray, I’m lower class. My father left me. My grandmother raised me.”

  “We all raised you and we aren’t lower class.”

  “Technically speaking, aren’t I an orphan?”

  “You never had to go through what this man is talking about.”

  “Sometimes I felt like Cinderella, like a discard.”

  “Niecy,” Aunt Ola came at me with an imploring look. “You’re exaggerating. What did you lack for? Nothing. Not a thing.”

  “Only my father and my mother. The people who made me up in the first place.”

  “We’re your people. You have people.”

  “Who’ll love me for who I am and not try to make me into an Ebony magazine model?”

  “Geniece, you are overidentifying with the poor. It’s mental indulgence and a way of feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “And, Auntie, you are overidentifying with Mr. Silberman and his theories.” I handed her the wig. “I don’t want to be in the wedding if I have to wear this.”

  My aunt took it and fluffed it out, first the bangs, then the rolled-up sides.