Amalgamation of Black Student Unions’ stand on when and how we would agree to work with white radical organizations. For too long, we believed, had our systems, movements, and ultimate liberation been co-opted by white groups pretending, maybe even believing, that they were our friends and allies. But in the end we were saddled with goals outside our communities, diverted into pathways that abandoned our people’s needs and ends.
The speech went very well, and the people there, both black and white, seemed to take my words seriously. I felt that the articulation of our goals was in itself a victory, a line drawn in the quick-drying cement that had been poured into the frame of the coming revolution.
I was very young.
She approached me after the series of speakers had made their comments, pleas, pledges, and calls for solidarity. She was short and white, pale actually, wearing loose-fitting jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She wasn’t pretty and didn’t do much in the way of makeup. Only her eyes were arresting. They were very dark, maybe even black, with a patina of silver glowing underneath now and then.
“I like what you had to say,” she told me. “Any man must stand on his own before relying on the help of others.”
Her use of the word
“That’s right,” I said. “The black man doesn’t need Mr. Charlie to pave the way. It’s the white man who wants our power.”
“Everyone wants your strength,” she said.
With that she looked into my eyes and touched my left wrist. Her fingers were cold.
“Will you have coffee with me?” she asked.
“I AM FROM RUMANIA,” she told me at the cafe across the street from the bookstore. “My parents have died and I am alone in the world. I work sometimes doing freelance copyediting and I go to meetings at night.”
“Political meetings?” I asked, wondering at the moonlight that emanated from behind her eyes.
“No kind in particular,” she said, dismissing all content with the shrug of a shoulder. “I go to readings and lectures, art openings and the like. I just want to be around people, to belong for a while.”
“You live alone?”
“Yes. I prefer it that way. Relationships seem to lose their meaning, and after a few weeks I crave solitude again.”
“How old are you?” I asked, wondering at the odd way in which she spoke.
“I am young,” she said, smiling as if there was a joke hidden among her words. “Come home with me for the night.”
“I don’t chase after white girls, Julia,” I said, because that was the name she’d given me.
“Come home with me,” she said again.
“I’ll walk you to your door,” I said, reluctantly, “but after that I have to get back to Central House.”
“What is Central House?”
“The officers and senior members of the BSUs around the city have rented a brownstone in Harlem. We live together and prepare for whatever’s coming.”
She smiled at my words and stood.
“JULIA,” A MAN SAID when we were halfway down the block from the cafe. “Wait up.”
He was tall and brawny, white and blond. He might have been a football player at some university, maybe the one I was attending.
“Martin,” she said by way of a tepid greeting.
“Where you going?” He had a thick gauze wad taped to his left forearm.
When she didn’t answer he gave me an evil look.
“This is my, my girlfriend, dude,” he said.
I didn’t reply. Instead I was preparing for a fight I didn’t think I could win. He was very big and I am, at best, a middleweight.
“Just walk away and you won’t get hurt,” the footballer added.
His tone had a pleading quality to it. This made him seem all the more dangerous.
“Hey, man,” I said. “I just met the lady, but you aren’t gonna make me go anywhere.”
He reached for me and I got ready to throw the hardest punch I could. I wasn’t about to let that white boy make me turn tail and run.
“Martin, stop,” Julia said. Each syllable was the sound of a hammer driving a nail.
Martin’s fingers splayed out like a fan and he drew the hand back as if it had been burned.
“Go away,” she said, “and don’t bother me again.”
Martin was well over six feet tall and weighed maybe two-forty, most of which was muscle. He shook like a man resisting a strong wind. The muscles of his neck bunched up and corded and he grimaced, exposing his teeth in a skull-like grin. After a minute or so of this strain, Martin turned his back to us and staggered from the sidewalk into the street and away. Cowering as he stumbled off, he gave the impression of a man reeling from a beating.
“You were ready to fight him,” Julia said.
I didn’t answer.
“He would have hurt you,” she stated.
With that she took my arm and walked me across downtown Manhattan to the pedestrian entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t question our walk. There was a buildup of energy in my blood and muscles from the fight I’d almost had, from fear of the pounding I would have surely received.
On the way she told me about her life in Rumania, her escape from the Communists to Munich where she lived with Gypsies for a time. It was a cool October evening and I listened, feeling no need to respond. For her part, she held on to my arm happily prattling about a life that seemed like a story out of a book.
When we got to the other side, she walked me to where there were many warehouses and few residences. We came to a stairwell leading down to a doorway below the surface of the street. She pushed the door open without using a key.
We went down a long hallway until coming to stairs that took us down at least three more levels. There we came to another hall and then to a door that she produced a key for.
IT WAS A SMALL, dimly lit room with a maple table in one corner and a single mattress on the floor. There were no windows, of course, and the room smelled dry and stale, like a tomb that had been sealed for centuries.
The door closed behind me and I turned to look Julia in the eye. The moons there were luminescent and her smile took my breath away. She shucked the blue T-shirt, stepped out of the loose pants, and she was naked. I realized as I lunged for her that this uncontrolled sexuality had been coming on ever since Martin had threatened me. I pulled down my pants and Julia started laughing. I dragged her to the small bed and we were together. My pants were around my ankles. My shoes were still on my feet but I couldn’t take the time to remove them. I had to be in her. I had to fuck her and to keep on fucking. Nothing could stop me. Even my orgasm only slowed down the gyrating urgency for a moment or two.
All the while Julia was laughing and talking to me in some foreign tongue. Now and again she’d pull my hair back and examine my eyes with those eerie lights in hers.
I writhed on top of her while she entwined me with her cold legs and arms. I could not stop. I could not pull away. For the first time in my life, I felt, I knew what freedom was. I understood that this passion was the only thing that touched the core of my being.
I AWOKE NOT REMEMBERING having lost consciousness, yet I must have passed out, because I was now in another room in a bed with a frame. My wrists and ankles were chained to the four corners of the bed and I was naked.
This room was also windowless and stale. It felt as if I was far underground, but I yelled anyway. I screamed and hollered until my throat was raw, but no one came. No one heard me.
As hours went past I thrashed and called out, but the chains were strong and the walls thick. There was a
