When we decided to be workers, we wore loose pants and packed our shoe-dyed lunchboxes, and tied red bandannas around our throats. We rode up and down Fifth Avenue on the old open double-decker omnibuses, shouting and singing union songs at the tops of our lungs.

    Solidarity foreverrrrr, the Union makes us strong!
    When the unions' inspiration through the workers' blood shall run�

When we decided to be hussies we wore tight skirts and high heels that hurt, and followed handsome respectable-looking lawyer types down Fifth and Park Avenues, making what we thought were salacious worldly comments about their anatomies, in loud voices.

    "What a beautiful behind he has."
    "I bet he sleeps bare-angle." That was a Hunter euphemism for naked.
    "He's pretending not to hear us, foolish boy."
    "No, he's just too embarrassed to turn around."

When we were African we wrapped our heads in gaily printed skirts and talked our own made-up language in the subway on our way down to the Village. When we were Mexican, we wore full skirts and peasant blouses and huaraches and ate tacos, which we bought at a little stall in front of Fred Leighton's on MacDougal Street. Once, we exchanged the word "fucker" for "mother" in a whole day's conversation, and got put off the Number 5 bus by an irate driver.

Sometimes we roamed through the Village in dirndl skirts and cinch-belts, with flowers in our hair, taking turns strumming Gennie's guitar and singing songs which we adapted from Pablo Neruda's early poems.

    All you red Yankees are sons of a shrim
    Born of a bottle, a bottle of rum.

In the Village, we met Gennie's friend, Jean, who was a dancer also. She was dark and beautiful and lived around the corner from Gennie and went to the High School of Music and Art. Jean was engaged to a white boy named Alf, who had left school and gone to Mexico to paint with Diego Rivera. Sometimes I accompanied them to one of their dance classes at the New Dance Group on 59th Street.

But mostly, Gennie and I went out into the city by ourselves. The whole summer was made up of glorious and exciting days with Genevieve, and evenings of war at home, commencing with my mother's, "Where have you been all day, and why aren't your clothes done?" Or my room cleaned, or the kitchen floor washed, or the milk bought.

We sallied forth in the afternoon sun to launch our joint assault upon the city. On the days when we had no money for carfare downtown, we went to Central Park to watch the bears. Sometimes we just held hands and walked through the streets of Harlem around her house. They seemed so much more alive to me than the streets of Washington Heights where I lived. They reminded me of the streets around where I grew up, on 142nd Street.

We bought and ate icies which were scraped up from a block of ice and packed into a little paper cup and then liberally covered with brilliant sticky syrups kept in a rainbow of bottles lined up on either side of the ice. They were sold from rickety homemade wooden wagons with bright umbrellas shielding the ice, which was always slowly melting under an indifferently clean old Turkish towel.

These chilly cups of shaved ice were the most deliciously cooling confection in the world, made more so by the vehemence with which both of our mothers had forbidden them to us. Icies were suspected by many Black mothers of spreading polio through Harlem, and they were to be shunned, along with public swimming pools. Eventually, the icie-carts were banned from the streets by Mayor La Guardia. Wherever we were, as the shadows of late afternoon began to grow long, we began to wind our way homeward. We both knew that there was only so much we could presume before our freedom would be cut off, and we tried to keep this side of that line. Sometimes we goofed and overstepped some ignored rule, and then Gennie would be decked for a few days. For me at home, punishment was always much more swift and direct and short, and many days that summer my arms and back were sore from whatever handy weapon my mother could lay her hands on to hit me with.

When Gennie was decked, I would go over to her house for the day. We sat and talked and drank coffee at the kitchen table, or lay naked on her mother's sofa bed in the living room and listened to the radio and dank Champale, which the corner store man gave Gennie on credit because he thought it was for her mother. Sometimes we visited her grandmother who lived upstairs, and she would let us play her Nat King Cole records.

    Dance Ballerina dance
    And do your pirouettes
    In rhythm with your aching heart

Autumn came very quickly. Gennie and I saw less of each other since we were at different schools. I told her I missed her over the phone. We usually made dates to meet at Columbus Circle or in Washington Square Park, and for a while the golden leaves near each fountain hid the harshness of the confused and alien colors that were sweeping up over our paths.

Gennie and I had a fight over something or the other at the end of January. We didn't talk or see each other again for two weeks. She called me on my birthday, and we saw each other a few days later, on Washington's Birthday. We held hands in Central Park Zoo and watched the monkeys. The mandrill looked at us with great sad eyes and we agreed with him that whether we were angry or not we'd never go that long without talking again, because friendship was too important and besides, neither one of us could remember what we'd argued about.

Things I never did with Gennie: Let our bodies touch and tell the passions that we felt. Go to a Village gay bar, or any bar anywhere. Smoke reefer. Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida. Take a course in international obscenities. Learn Swahili. See Martha Graham's dance troupe. Visit Pearl Primus. Ask her to take us away with her to Africa next time. Write THE BOOK. Make love.