In Free My People, we studied the Black Panthers and Mao Tse-tung. As the undercover operation leads her in deeper with the group, her loyalty to the FBI begins to waver. I began a story about an FBI agent who infiltrates a Black organization with strong relationships. I was like the spook who sat by the door, learning the methods to take back to my community. I went to the relationship support group, and it was mostly white. But these folks talked about personal healing as part of changing the world. Prior to this, I had always thought self-help and therapy were for white people. Our meetings opened with check-ins, during which people talked openly about struggles in their lives. They did community organizing around police violence, street violence, and international solidarity work. The group was called Free My People, and they weren’t Black nationalists, but Black internationalists. One day, I ran across a bunch of militant Black people protesting. I began dating, to shore up my Blackness, young men from the neighborhood I met on the bus or downtown by Filene’s Basement. I finally graduated and moved into the hood in Boston. I will never forget the first Black spy book I read, The Spook Who Sat by the Door : Sam Greenlee’s novel about a secret militant who joins the CIA to learn their techniques so he can start a Black guerilla army.
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I reasoned that those titles-though steeped in misogyny-would teach me how to be properly Black. I read books from the Black Power era, like Soul on Ice. I began to wear Black nationalism like a disguise. My high school Español would never fly with the Nuyoricans.
My mom’s people are from Puerto Rico, but she doesn’t speak Spanish. Too Berkeley leftist, too mixed heritage.
I had finally left the novelist boyfriend for good, but I took the love of spy fiction with me.Īt Harvard, I never felt Black enough. Before things could escalate, I broke up with him and quickly found a new boyfriend-much too soon. He told me that he once saw his father drag his mother across the room by her hair. Another time, he forcefully banged on the roof of the car. Eventually-during an argument-the boyfriend shook me hard while I was crying. My boyfriend and I got back together, and my reading pace slowed down. I read a book a day to keep my mind off the breakup. They call it “taking time off.” One of our breakups took place when I was home during “time off” without much to do. “Hey, are you still there?” We broke up before I went off to school, but we got back together a few times while I was in college. Static crackled on the phone in the silence that followed. “I’m going to Harvard.” Unfortunately, it was the one school he had heard of. Up until that day, Yale had been my first choice. That night, I called my boyfriend and told him I’d made my college decision. With the humid East Coast air, I could look directly into the sun. That glowing pink ball was like nothing I’d seen in the Northern California sky back home. Later, I saw the sun set over the Charles River. The woman pulled it together and sent some Brown students to welcome me. She put her hand out to my mother and said, “Aya de León?” My mom and I laughed about it afterward. She looked at me-a Black high school senior-and then at my mother, a white Latina in her 40s. She had stiff blonde hair and an even stiffer smile. When we let them know that I had been accepted, the admissions officer came out to meet us in the hallway. I went to the admissions office without an appointment. One day, my boyfriend mentioned that Connery said sometimes in a relationship, it was necessary to hit a woman. Fleming named women things like Pussy Galore and had every female character throwing herself at his protagonist. The omniscient voice was fascinated with violence and objectifying women’s bodies. Ian Fleming’s 1960s prose was cold and detached. But I was so eager to be the cool girlfriend who shared all his interests that I read one of the Bond books instead. My boyfriend never let me read any of his work. I had only encountered spy books written by white men. He was writing a novel? I thought that made him unimaginably cool. That same boyfriend was writing a novel about a Black spy who drove classic European cars. His wife is killed right after the wedding, so Bond is technically a widower.
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He was mad that George Lazenby, not Sean Connery, starred in the one Bond movie where the spy fell in love. “Connery was the only real Bond,” he told me with his confident, lopsided grin. I watched my first 1960s James Bond movies with him.
When I was a senior in high school, I had an older boyfriend in community college.