Virgin Soul by Judy Juanita Read Free Book Online

braiding, combing, brushing my hair, and greasing my scalp came back. “Your kitchen never grow like the rest of your head,” she said, fingering the tightly curled naps at the nape of my neck.
Kinkabugs
, she called them.
    I accepted that she too saw the past in what I was trying to make the future. “Don’t want me to smile ugly, so I won’t,” she said, beckoning us into her tiny kitchen to smell her dinner. Aunt Ola and Goosey had their differences, but each was a past master of the silent insult, the smiling ugly.
    I could tell by the way she looked at Allwood sniffing her shrimp-fried okra, her corn bread, and her fresh apple cobbler that she liked him. If she hadn’t, Goosey would have slammed the pots shut and showed us the door. He couldn’t get over her okra. She complimented him on his teeth, acting dumbstruck that they were so white and even.
    â€œI’ve never tasted okra without the slime. Where did it go?” he asked her after the first plate. Goosey fixed him more. Allwood ate four plates, which I thought was disgusting. But they seemed to enjoy each other and his gluttony.
    â€œYou got to stir-fry your chopped okra for forty-five minutes first,” she told him, glancing at me as if to say, boy worth something if he can ask about okra.
    â€œYou mean, Mrs. Goosby,” he said, calling her as he’d been introduced, “you stood over a hot stove for forty-five minutes stirring this okra?” I couldn’t believe it, Allwood and Goosey. When he got to politics, I waited for this affinity to evaporate. Allwood started in on his concentration camp rhetoric; I started scraping plates. At one point, he even called Goosey
sistuh
Goosby. And she said, “Uh-huh.” I hated being referred to as a sistuh, as though these men had become some new breed revolutionary deacons. I had seen the deacons in church get free feelsies when sisters got happy and fell out, and I was suspicious. Same position, different condition.
    But Goosey listened intently. “Last month, there were protesters marching all down in here,” Goosey said.
    â€œThat was International Day of Protest,” Allwood said.
    â€œDidn’t look much international,” Goosey said. “Wasn’t a colored in the bunch.”
    â€œThey want those ships headed to Vietnam empty,” Allwood said.
    â€œWar’s good for colored. Only time they use us for all we’re worth,” Goosey muttered.
    â€œDon’t believe it,” Allwood said.
    She kept on, “I hear they’re building us a new post office, the biggest PO in the Bay Area.”
    â€œDon’t believe it,” Allwood said. “It’s nothing but a holding cell for nigguhs.” I flinched at the word, even though Allwood used it purely as political discourse, but Goosey didn’t bat an eyelash. “The man always uses your tax dollars, your land, your neighborhood, and your labor to enslave you. You vote him in to do it. That’s true brilliance. You don’t let him do it, you ask him to do it.”
    I had heard the rhetoric before. Interesting the first time, numbing once I knew the argument by heart. I listened for what usually came next: That’s what they did in Germany to the Jews. He didn’t say it. But I’d forgotten: He eliminated that one after he got the Volkswagen. Goosey listened patiently, then sent in her fastball, her final word on politics. I knew this by heart too.
    â€œI don’t believe nothing no politician says. On Election Day, from ’fore time they gave us the vote, I goes out of town. Catches me a Greyhound and goes right on up to Sacramento. Yes I do. They might could call here wanting to take me to the polls. But you know what I tell them? And I can be packing my bag, cool as a cucumber, know what I say?”
    She caught him there, with the same low ball on the inside that she threw the canvassers; Allwood was speechless.
    â€œI