One of Dad's most famous songs, “SK Blues,” was written before I was born. We had it on a 78 rpm record along with Dad's other recordings. Dad sang, “Give me back that wig I bought you; let your head go bald.” The song had become a hit, and Dad had traveled with his sextet, playing in nightclubs and supper clubs. Mom told Kitsaun and me that Dad stopped touring when we were born—to be at home with us. She said that when Dad's music was popular in the 1940s, he left hundred-dollar bills on top of their dresser. Now, Mom supported the family with her job at Social Security as a claims adjuster. I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill.
Many Friday nights Mom took us to the Emporium in Stonestown, where she charged dinner for us in the cafeteria. She said she put things on credit until her check from work would come. She was stretching our money so that Kitsaun and I could take lessons in the arts.
My first piano lessons were with Ms. Gaynor. I walked over the hill to her house with a small transistor radio in my hand, a white plastic earphone plugged into my ear as I listened to Aretha Franklin, Jerry Butler, and the Temptations on the R & B station, KDIA. Gold stars collected on my sheet music, even when I did not practice during the week. I did not know whether I was a natural talent or Ms. Gaynor was hard of hearing.
I progressed to classes at the Conservatory of Music, on Nineteenth Avenue, which required more practice and discipline. I studied music theory along with classical piano in halls that smelled of old sheet music and resin. Behind classroom doors, muffled notes of concertos, minuets, and scales were repeated over and over until perfection was touched for one moment. My teacher wound the metronome on top of the Steinway, willing me to play in time. Practice became a requirement for my keeping up; and Mom sat and listened to my songs in the evening after dinner.
Dad's minor chords and red-hot rhythms were a continuous backdrop to our lives—touching our thoughts, coloring our perspectives. He played his blond, hollow-body guitar for hours, running his wide hands up and down the steel strings, practicing scales or strumming along with Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell. While the news on TV showed civil rights demonstrators mowed down by fire hoses, he played his “box,” minor chords and slow dirges rising from his fingers. My teenage body shook in anger and terror as Bull Connor and George Wallace shouted brutal orders against innocent people with brown skin like mine. Dad's fingers kept moving on his guitar strings. His tunes created a safe shelter I could hide within. I slept in the cradle of his notes in the midst of a harsh world.
he front door slammed, reverberating throughout the house. Kitsaun's voice mingled with Dad's, and I heard her drop her books on the table in the kitchen. “I am so mad!” she growled.
I jumped off my bed and ran to the hall. “What happened?”
“We're graduating in four weeks. And now, I'm the only one in my whole class going to Lowell. Carol was going, but now she's thinking of going to Balboa.” Balboa was right next to our junior high, James Denman, which was next to San Miguel Elementary. They were the local schools everyone attended, on the edge of the Mission District and our Ingleside neighborhood. Lowell was an academic high school where only the best students went, and you had to have a 3.5 GPA to get in.
“Mom says you'll love Lowell,” I said. “The teachers are better, and the campus is prettier than Bal.”
Kitsaun shrugged and went downstairs to her room. After a few minutes I heard the whir of her sewing machine. A flawless seamstress, she had made my cheerleading outfit and my orchestra uniform, and she'd helped me finish my apron for homemaking class so that I would not get an F. It took me longer to hand-sew the turquoise rickrack edging around the hem than it took Kitsaun to make the whole apron.
Kitsaun graduated junior high on February 1, 1963. She bravely left her friends to attend Lowell and eased into new friendships. She began dating a fullback on the junior varsity football team, and never regretted that she didn't go to Bal. Two years later, I graduated junior high and followed her to Lowell because she loved it so much. I wore my hair rolled into a flip like Marlo Thomas on That Girl. Every morning, Kitsaun and I took the bus together, getting off at Stonestown, and walked to the campus down a street lined with eucalyptus trees. Karmen went to Balboa, so I plied fresh waters while holding on to Kitsaun and her friends. Karmen and I spent Saturdays walking from our street to West Portal to buy ice-cream cones at Baskin-Robbins. We sat on the giant sundial on Entrada Court, licking our cones and sharing high school stories. We could never figure out how the shadow hitting the Roman numerals on the concrete circle could tell us what the time was. We would stop at Saint Emydius to pray, Karmen laying a lace hanky on her head as we entered the dark Catholic church. Before entering the pew, I knelt as Karmen did, and savored the silence and vanilla smell of candles burning in rows along the sidewall. The cool, quiet sanctuary gave me a sense of God's presence and a feeling of completeness. In prayer and silence, I felt whole and strong from within.
In my sophomore year I put away my viola to sing in Lowell's choir, maybe because Karmen no longer was next to me as first chair, second violin. Our class was at 7:30 A.M. and Kit-saun and I both sang tenor, a low part for some girls but just right for our vocal register. The sound of Dad's pure, clear voice reverberated in my head as I sang. Sometimes I felt as though his voice were coming from inside me. I heard his distinct enunciation of vowels, the way his mouth closed around every sound. Mr. Blackburn taught choir like a dictator, yelling at us if we sang a wrong note. But when harmonies wafted from our rounded mouths, my heart opened wide, carrying pieces of me out into the world. At the end of our concerts, we held candles and stood around the perimeter of the auditorium, singing, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” We stood—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—having to hold on to our intonation and part with great effort, our notes hanging in the air right before us. Sometimes I cried: the feeling of God stirring inside my body, too immense to hold. I could feel a celestial joining of who I was with what I learned about God's Spirit in church; and I knew that there was blessing possible through praying and grace. It spun as an ache in my chest, but a good ache that made me long to be full of the vibrating warmth.
My crush on Arnzy turned into a crush on our sophomore class president, Jimmy, and then Calvin, a star halfback on the football team of a rival school. Calvin's father was a minister, and Calvin's Sundays, like mine, were spent in church. He read the Bible and studied scriptures. At his church, the congregation prayed out loud as we did in our Oakland church. I observed a great difference between our Pentecostal church and the other black churches in my neighborhood and the Catholic and Lutheran worship services. Karmen's church listened to the priest and repeated his words. We did that at the Lutheran service, too. But most of my childhood had been spent at Christ Holy Sanctified, where we spoke out and praised God from what we felt inside. People testified out loud, during the service, about the manifestation of God's work in their lives. When I kneeled at night to pray before sleep, I thought of all that had troubled me or touched me, and I spoke out loud to God, never doubting He listened. Karmen had a little book that she read from, and she said a Hail Mary prayer from memory. I saw nothing wrong with either of the methods, but I'm glad I learned to be spontaneous with Spirit. There's nothing as comforting as being able to pray when I'm not sure of what's lurking around my soul, or when I'm thankful for a benevolent gesture from life.
Jimmy and Calvin—both sweet and polite—shook Dad's hand when they met him, and did not look shocked when they met Mom. Their bodies were electromagnetic fields drawing me to theirs. Dad scared boys when they would call; he answered the phone, “Yeah”—his tone impatient and cold, daring them to speak. If they were courageous enough to ask for me, we would talk on the phone until Mom told me to hang up and finish my homework. Dad allowed me to go out on dates when I was sixteen, my junior year of high school.
Gloria Averbuch and Luci Li were my best friends. We were song girls together, which was the sophisticated name for cheerleaders, and we spent Friday nig
hts after football games at Luci's house in Forest Hills. Finally, Dad trusted another family and allowed me to spend the night. Luci's father was a doctor, she had three siblings, and her house smelled of crisp greens her mother fried with chicken in a wok. During our sleepovers, we talked about girls we knew who were getting birth control pills from Planned Parenthood and were sleeping with their boyfriends. My Pentecostal upbringing instructed us to wait until marriage to have sex, and these teachings put the fear of God's retribution in me, so I didn't consider sex a possibility. But I was curious to know how it would feel and what really happened when you took your clothes off and lay with a boy. The girls we knew and talked with in the school hallways who were having sex had so much more confidence in their bodies than I had. Sex practically crawled off the bodies of boys in their football uniforms, girls in shorter and shorter skirts, and teens just like us locked in embraces right on the street.
Gloria, Luci, and I lay on the U-shaped couch in Luci's living room, waiting for her brothers to go to bed, and clutched pillows to our chests, whispering about getting in trouble at school and everything that affected our lives. Gloria cried, telling us about her mother's mental breakdown, her anger rap-pelling off the walls, our hearts openly heaving with hers in pain. Gloria lived with her dad, a journalist with the San Francisco Chronicle, while her mom moved in and out of institutions. I told Luci and Gloria about Chris Anderson, the tall blond girl who had been my friend until she took me to her house on the edge of exclusive Saint Francis Woods. Mrs. Anderson came into the kitchen where Chris and I had our heads in the refrigerator. Chris introduced us, and her mother looked tersely from her daughter to me and then walked out of the room. I felt a chill of disdain and rejection and wanted to run from the house, but Chris took me to her room, where we played music. I put her mother's rudeness out of my mind until my mom picked me up. The next morning at school, Chris's eyes were red as she told me her mom had forbade her to see me because I was not white. My heart was slashed with the familiar dagger of racism—its ignorant, tormenting recurrence in my life: being shut out, denied access because of my skin. “I thought Chris was my friend,” I told Gloria and Luci, “but she didn't know how to stand up to her mother's racism or tell her how wrong she was.” My method of coping was to withdraw from anyone who did not fight prejudice. It was too painful for me to endure alone. I never felt close to Chris after that. Mom told me that Grandmother King said to try your best to be a friend and to do what is right in life, but if people reject you, walk away.
After my story, Gloria stopped crying for herself and got mad. She was a loyal friend who could fight because she grew up being rejected, too—for her mother's lack of lucidity, for being Jewish. She lived in the Haight, a mixed neighborhood where she had played with kids of different ethnicities all her life. Gloria was warm, intense, and filled with daring. Her outrage made me feel loved. It had never occurred to me to exclude another person for their ethnicity or religion—not ever.
Luci turned on the radio and began dancing to lift our mood. Soon we were doing the Pony to the Young Rascals and the Swim to Bobby Freeman, laughing as we made faces in the sliding-glass door that reflected our forms. Our friendship encompassed a world of differences. We studied hard, but hung out, too. Sometimes Gloria and I hitchhiked from Lowell to her house in Upper Haight, unafraid of strangers and maybe to prove we were not just pom-pom-toting song girls. We listened to Joni Mitchell records and walked to Haight and Cole, where hippies sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, smoking weed and burning incense to cover the smell. We bought long, flowing skirts at a secondhand store and wore them on weekends, without shoes. We were never “flower children,” but we were searching for who we wanted to become, and a part of us admired hippies, who were rebellious and free.
San Francisco, April 4, 1968
I rode the “Route 28 19th Avenue” bus home from school. Two women in front of me talked in low voices, and I heard the words “murdered” and “it's a shame.” Sidewalks were empty, and I wondered what was causing the tension I felt in the air. I pulled the rubber cord to buzz the driver before my stop, gathered my books, jumped off the bus, and ran up the street to our house.
Dad stood in the living room, looking down at the TV. A newscaster said Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot and killed on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. I looked at Dad. He stared at the screen, his hands rolled into fists at his sides. I slid my books onto the coffee table. Dad turned to me, shaking his head from side to side. “He should never have gotten involved in that garbage strike.”
I ran to my room, the TV image of Dr. King lying on the ground scorched in my eyes. I had never suffered the torturous racism of the South, never had to ride in the back of the bus unless I wanted to; but I had seen the sneers and stares of hatred because of our family's mixed color. Dad had told a story of Grandmother being shot in the stomach by white ranchers in Oroville, California. After moving from Louisiana, she and Grandfather had built a church in the small mountain town; they hoped to be free of the segregation and oppression of the South. White ranchers burned down the first church, trying to run them out; then the ranchers fired shotguns into the second building during Sunday morning worship. Grandmother was struck while she played her tambourine, the hate-filled ranchers riding off as she lay on the floor bleeding. She survived, and the family moved to Oakland, constructing a new church on Seventh Street where the black community welcomed all races to worship a colorless God.
When Mom and Dad married, interracial marriage was illegal in California. They drove to Seattle to marry, where anti-miscegenation laws had been abolished. Mom's friend Audrey had been spit on by a cab driver when she was out with a black man in Chicago. Mom was followed by San Francisco police officers on her way to work when she was pregnant with me because they were watching for Dad's participation in smoking weed at after-hours jam sessions. More than once Dad fought when someone “called him out of his name,” as he would politely mask the word “nigger” to Kitsaun and me.
Frustrated and furious, I kicked my desk chair. I grabbed my stuffed dog and buried my face in his matted fur, crying, “Why? Why?” My body jerked and twisted, overtaken with anguish and despair. When would we win the struggle for equality? With Dr. King's death, integration seemed a faraway dream.
Kitsaun and I began attending rallies around the city, listening to Stokely Carmichael, a leader of SNCC (Student Nonvio- lent Coordinating Committee) who described the power of sit-ins and passive resistance. Members of the Black Panther Party shouted out that racism could not be conquered with passive nonviolence. We listened to Kathleen Cleaver, seeing ourselves in her light brown skin and wanting her bush-like Afro. She preached against the institutional racism that was killing black men and women. Winds of change rumbled through me, jostling my old beliefs in nonviolence. The Oakland and Los Angeles police departments declared war on Huey Newton and his army of revolutionaries. Maybe we would not be able to overcome four hundred years of slavery and hatred by turning the other cheek.
Kitsaun graduated from Lowell and attended San Francisco City College. In her second semester, she met Jake, an actor who was leader of the on-campus Black Panther Party. He was a beautiful, dark-skinned black man with a wide Afro, and a mustache curling over his full lips, which he moistened often with his tongue. Jake and his friends invited us to a meeting in the East Bay where Black Panthers would demonstrate how to use guns. I found an excuse not to go, my rhetoric stronger than my nerves, and Kitsaun accompanied her new friends, absorbing the revolutionary vernacular but never brandishing violence as a solution to racism.
I visited Kitsaun at Jake's house a few blocks from ours. The front room and kitchen were filled with people talking and eating, Afro to Afro, and smoking fat joints of marijuana. I did not want to sit around discussing the revolution with people stoned out of their minds, so I left. Drugs were of no interest to me. I had no desire to alter the way I saw reality. In my senior year at Lowell, I applied to Cal State in San
Francisco and also to Dominguez Hills in Southern California. It was 1968, and students at colleges around the nation were staging demonstrations against the Vietnam War and against good-old-boy politics that kept women and people of color down. The San Francisco State campus was a few blocks from Lowell, and we witnessed students closing it down to demand a school of ethnic studies and expanded black studies and Asian studies departments. College president S. I. Hayakawa was locked in his administrative office until riot police arrested the demonstrators. This forceful move by students shook up the establishment and made a huge impression on me. I realized the impact my generation could have on our country's outdated politics. The rebellion was successful, and the courses were added to the university's curriculum.
My plan was to study black history, as well as major in English. Maybe I would be a teacher as I had pretended so many times as a child when my stuffed animals were my students. I was accepted at San Francisco State and at Cal State Dominguez Hills outside Los Angeles. I chose Dominguez Hills because my uncle Joe had helped develop the creative writing department there.
Calvin and I double-dated with Luci and her boyfriend for the senior prom. Luci confided in me that she and her date were having sex. I felt like a dolt, inexperienced and prudish, but I did not really want to sleep with Calvin. I liked him, but I knew our romance would end with high school. After the prom, Calvin and I made out against the wall in my living room. He was barely taller than I was, so I scooted down to lift my face to his, as they did in the movies. He pressed his body against mine and I felt hardness in his pants, but I never let my guard down. At any moment Dad could have walked in and caught us. I knew that if he had yelled at me for merely talking with a boy from up the street, he'd kill a boy whose lips and body were glued to mine. Besides, I was waiting to make love when I would be swept off my feet. I no longer felt I had to wait until marriage. It was 1969, and free love was born in San Francisco. I did not even think about marriage. The world was out there for my discovery without boundaries or limits.
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