Seductive Poison by Deborah Layton Page B

were married, the women had to declare that it was Father they had always thought of and fantasized about when they were with their husbands. These embarrassing proclamations, coerced by Jim and his staff, were meant to discourage all of us from any form of closeness with each other.
    Young, malleable, and eager to conform, I tried to shelve and forget my yearnings for boys and a relationship. I was becoming distrustful of men. But it was harder to maintain my asexual equilibrium after Jim arranged my marriage to Mark. That the union was never consummated on the few occasions I saw Mark was a result of his devotion to Father, not mine.

    I tried to be the perfect follower and student, but life in our Santa Rosa college dorm was arduous. I had to prove myself to the residentenlightened Temple students because I was new, white, and from the privileged class. So I became a chameleon and learned to change identities quickly.
    Brenda, a newly found friend, suggested that I try a different look. “Girl, your skin’s too brown to be a honky’s.” We purchased an easy home perm kit and, with care and determination, administered the magic to my head. After less than an hour, I pulled my fingers through my cotton candy hair. It looked full and big, like Angela Davis’s. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was transfixed by my transformation. Brenda and I took a collective breath and stared at a person we did not know. She was awesome! Not a WASP, not a honky, but “Solano,” a hip, militant Chicana. Almost as impressive as Angela Davis, the one woman outside the Temple whom Father admired and constantly spoke of.
    I adorned myself with big hoop earrings and became comfortable with my new identity as the weeks passed. I was actively doing what Father said we should do: “Know how the other half lives.” I felt sure I had taken a bold step in the right direction.
    When the new quarter started, I registered for a Chicano Studies class. In this politically correct environment, I gained what I thought was a deep understanding of oppression. My white bourgeois mind developed into enlightened Chicano outrage. In class, I raised the race issue at every opportunity and verbally attacked Caucasians, pointing out all the faults of the rich white oppressor. Well versed in this rhetoric from our Family Teach-ins, I became the spokesperson for my Mexican-American classmates and all other oppressed people. When we had the occasion of hosting a guest lecturer, my professor touted me as a shining example of a self-aware Chicana. It didn’t strike me that I was repeating my childhood tendency of telling stories and lies and I never worried about being phony because I had already learned from Father that the end justifies the means.
    On one occasion, I got so caught up in my new identity that I slapped one of my white roommates in the face during one of our highly volatile college catharsis meetings. The purpose of these meetings, one hundred miles from Father’s aura was to “come into the truth,” bare our selfish souls, and admit to our weaknesses. I became incensed when Jenessa stood up, her blond hair coifed and obviously bleached, and announced, confident in her whiteness, that she was unwilling to continue in the catharsis. When she questioned the lightness of the meetings we were having outside of Father’spurview, I smacked her in order to correct the wrongness of her thinking. She wrote me up.
    Jim was not pleased. I had to stand before the congregation and explain why I had hit my comrade in the face. After acknowledging my misdeed, I was reprimanded by Jim and told to let my hair grow out—this was not the way Father had intended I apply his teachings.
    “After this grotesque breach of judgment, your meetings are forbidden,” Father declared. “Having Angela Davis’s hair does not make you an outspoken radical of her intelligence. Read If They Come in the Morning and I expect a written analysis of her thesis next week,