Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

by Maya Angelou

  Rabbi Alvin I. Fine looked like a young physical education teacher dressed up for an open house at school. I had thought all rabbis had to be old and bearded, just as all priests were Irish, collared and composites of Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. He invited me in and offered a seat.

  “You want to discuss Judaism?” There wasn't a hint of a snicker in his voice. He could have been asking a question of a fellow rabbi. I liked him.

  “I don't know anything about it, so I can't discuss it.”

  “Do you want to become a Jew?”

  “I don't know. I'd just like to read up on your faith, but I don't know the titles of any books.”

  “What is the faith of your fathers?”

  “Methodist.”

  “And what is it not giving you that you think Judaism would provide?”

  “I don't know what Judaism's got.”

  “Can you say you have applied yourself to a careful study of the Methodist tenets?”

  “No.”

  “Would you say you have totally applied the dictates of the Methodist church?”

  “No.”

  “But you want to study Judaism, an ancient faith of a foreign people?”

  He was systematically driving me to defense. If he wanted debate, I'd give him debate.

  I said, “I want to read about it, I didn't say I wanted to join your church. I like the music in the C.M.E. Church and I like the praying, but I don't like the idea of a God so frightening that I'd be afraid to meet Him.”

  “Why does your God frighten you?”

  It would sound too childish to say that when my minister threatened fire and brimstone, I could smell my flesh frying and see my skin as crisp as pork cracklings. I told him a less personal truth. “Because I'm afraid to die.”

  I expected the bromide: If a person lived a good life free of sin, he or she can die easy.

  Rabbi Fine said, “Judaism will not save you from death. Visit a Jewish cemetery.”

  I looked at him and felt the full force of my silliness in being there.

  He said, “I'll give you a list of books. Read them. Think about them. Argue with the writers and the ideas, then come back to see me.” He bent over his desk to write. I knew I would enjoy talking with him about Life, Love, Hate and mostly Death. He gave me the paper and smiled for the first time and looked even more boyish. I thanked him and left, certain that we would continue our discussion soon. I took a year to buy or borrow and read the books, but twenty years were to pass before I would see Rabbi Fine again.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tosh became such a regular in the store that his arrivals raised no eyebrows and Black customers even began saying hello to him, although he only nodded a response. He had been discharged from the Navy and found a job in an electrical appliance shop. He had taken a room in the Negro neighborhood and came to the record store every day. We talked long over the spinning records. He said he liked to talk to me because I didn't lie.

  I asked how he had come to like Black people so much.

  “I don't like Black people,” he said, dead serious. “And I don't like Italians or Jews or Irish or Orientals. I'm Greek and I don't like them either.”

  I thought he was crazy. It was one thing to be introverted, but another to admit to me that he disliked Black people.

  “Why do you dislike people?”

  “I didn't say I disliked people. Not to like people isn't the same as to dislike them.”

  He sounded profound and I needed time to mull over that idea.

  I asked if he liked children. He said he liked some children.

  I told him about my son, how bright he was and pretty and funny and sweet.

  “Does he play baseball?”

  I hadn't thought about the physical games Clyde could share with a father. A new world appeared with the question. In my next castle-building session, I would dream about a husband who would take our sons to the park to play baseball, football, basketball and tennis, while our daughter and I made cookies and other refreshments ready for their return.

  “No, he doesn't play ball yet.”

  “Let's go to the park on your day off. I'll teach him what I know.”

  I had not really examined Tosh before. He had thick black hair and the slow, sloe eyes of Mediterranean people. His face was gentle and had an air of privacy. He was handsome, but he fell some distance from the mark I had set for a husband. He was two inches shorter than I and white. My own husband was going to come handsome, six feet three inches and Black. I snatched myself away from the vague reflection and set a date for the three of us to go to Golden Gate Park.

  My son and Tosh liked each other. They played handball, and after a picnic lunch, Tosh took a portable set from a package and began to teach my son chess. The day ended at my house, where I introduced Tosh to my mother. She was hospitable, just.

  “How did you come to meet Maya? Where are you from?” and “When are you going back?” Tosh held his own before that whirlwind of a woman. He looked directly at her, ignored the implied queries, answering only what he was asked outright. When he left, Mother asked me my intentions.

  “He's just a friend.”

  She said, “Well, remember that white folks have taken advantage of Black people for centuries.”

  I reminded her: “You know a lot of white people. There's Aunt Linda and Aunt Josie and Uncle Blackie. Those are your friends. And Bailey has those friends Harry and Paul, the table tennis expert.”

  “That's what I'm saying to you. They are friends. And that's all. There's a world of difference between laughing together and loving together.”

  A few days later I agreed to allow Tosh to take Clyde out alone. They came to the store as I was leaving and Clyde was full of his afternoon.

  “We rode on the cable cars and went to Fisherman's Wharf. I'm going to be a ship's captain or a cable car conductor.” His eyes jumped like targets in a game of marbles. “Mr. Angelos is going to take me to the zoo next week. I'm going to feed the animals. I might become a lion tamer.” He examined my face and added, “He said I could.”

  Although Tosh had said nothing romantic to me, I realized that through my son he was courting me as surely as Abelard courted Héloïse. I couldn't let him know I knew. The knowledge had to remain inside me, unrevealed, or I would have to make a decision, and that decision had been made for me by the centuries of slavery, the violation of my people, the violence of whites. Anger and guilt decided before my birth that Black was Black and White was White and although the two might share sex, they must never exchange love. But the true nature of the human heart is as whimsical as spring weather. All signals may aim toward a fall of rain when suddenly the skies will clear.

  Tosh grew up in a Greek community, where even Italians were considered foreign. His contact with Blacks had been restricted to the Negro sailors on his base and the music of the bebop originators.

  I would never forget the slavery tales, or my Southern past, where all whites, including the poor and ignorant, had the right to speak rudely to and even physically abuse any Negro they met. I knew the ugliness of white prejudice. Obviously there was no common ground on which Tosh and I might meet.

  I began to await his visits to the shop with an eagerness held in close control. We went to parks, the beach and dinners together. He loved W.C. Fields and adored Mae West, and the three of us howled our laughter into the quiet dark air of art movie houses.

  One night, after I had put my son to bed, we sat having coffee in the large kitchen. He asked me if I could read fortunes and put his hand in mine.

  I said, “Of course, you are going to be a great musician and be very wealthy and live a long, rich life.” I laid his hand on the table, palm open.

  He asked, “Do you see where I'm going to be married?”

  I was thrust through with disappointment. While I hadn't ever seen him in the “my husband” role, his attention had been a balm for my loneliness. Now he was saying he was planning marriage. Some childhood sweethe
art would arrive on the scene. I would be expected to be kind to her, and gracious.

  I looked at the shadowy lines in his hand and spitefully said, “Your love line is very faint. I don't see a happy marriage in your future.”

  He caught my hand and squeezed it. “I am going to be married, and I'm going to marry you.”

  The sounds refused to come together and convey meaning. I am going to marry you. He had to be talking about me, since he was addressing me, yet the two words “you” and “marry” had never been said to me before.

  Even after I accepted the content of his statement, I found nothing to say.

  “A white man? A poor white man? How can you even consider it?” Disbelief struggled across her face. My mother's diamond winked at me as her hand flew about in the air. “A white man without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.”

  She was famous for temperamental explosions but she had never been angry enough at me to hurl her full thunderbolt of rage. Now, when I told her of Tosh's proposal, she was accelerating from an “ing bing” (her phrase for a minor riot) to a full-out tantrum. With alarming speed her pretty butter-colored face became tight and reddened.

  “Think of your life. You're young. What's going to happen to you?”

  I hoped not much more than had happened already. At three years old I had been sent by train from California to Arkansas, accompanied only by my four-year-old brother; raped at seven and returned to California at thirteen. My son was born when I was sixteen, and determined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off cars with my hands.

  “Think ahead. What the hell is he bringing you? The contempt of his people and the distrust of your own. That's a hell of a wedding gift.”

  And, of course, I was bringing him a mind crammed with a volatile mixture of insecurities and stubbornness, and a five-year-old son who had never known a father's discipline.

  “Do you love him? I admit I'd find that hard to believe. But then I know love goes where it's sent, even in a dog's behind. Do you love him? Answer me.”

  I didn't answer.

  “Then just tell me why. Just why are you going to marry him?”

  I knew Vivian Baxter appreciated honesty above all other virtues. I told her, “Because he asked me, Mother.”

  She looked at me until her eyes softened and her lips relaxed. She nodded, “All right. All right.” She turned on her high heels and strutted up the hall to her bedroom.

  Bailey came to the house at my invitation. He sat in the kitchen with Tosh as I made an evening meal. They spoke about jazz musicians and the literary virtues of Philip Wylie and Aldous Huxley. Tosh had studied literature at Reed College in Oregon and Bailey had dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. My brother had continued to read, however, spending his days on the Southern Pacific run waiting tables in the dining cars and his nights with Thomas Wolfe, Huxley and Wylie. After dinner, Bailey wished Tosh a good night and asked to speak to me. We stood in the dim doorway.

  “You invited me over for something more than dinner, didn't you?”

  I had never been successful in keeping anything from Bailey.

  “I guess so.”

  “He's in love with you. Did you know that?”

  I said he hadn't told me.

  Bailey leaned against the door; his dark, round face in the shadow was broken open by a white smile. “A smart man only tells half of what he thinks. He's a nice cat, Maya.”

  Bailey had been my protector, guide and guard since we were tots, and I knew, despite the disparity in our sizes, that he would remain my big brother as long as we lived.

  “Bail, do you think it's all right if I marry him?”

  “Did he ask you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “People will talk about me.”

  “Marry him, Maya. Be happy and prove them all fools and liars.”

  He gave me a typically sloppy Bailey kiss on the cheek and left.

  Tosh and I were married in the Courthouse on a clear Monday morning. To show her displeasure, Mother moved her fourteen rooms of furniture to Los Angeles three days before the ceremony.

  We rented a large flat, and on Tosh's orders I quit my job. At last I was a housewife, legally a member of that enviable tribe of consumers whom security made fat as butter and who under no circumstances considered living by bread alone, because their husbands brought home the bacon. I had a son, a father for him, a husband and a pretty home for us to live in. My life began to resemble a Good Housekeeping advertisement. I cooked well-balanced meals and molded fabulous jello desserts. My floors were dangerous with daily applications of wax and our furniture slick with polish.

  Clyde was sprouting with independence and opinions. Tosh told him often and with feeling that he was absolutely the most intelligent child in the world. Clyde began calling Tosh “Daddy,” although I had concocted and given him a dramatic tale during his younger years. The story told how his own father had died on the sands of some Pacific island fighting for his life and his country. I would cry at the telling of the fiction, wishing so hard it had been true.

  Tosh was a better husband that I had dared to dream. He was intelligent, kind and reliable. He told me I was beautiful (I decided that he was blinded by my color) and a brilliant conversationalist. Conversation was easy. He brought flowers for me and held my hand in the living room. My cooking received his highest praise and he laughed at my wit.

  Our home life was an Eden of constant spring, but Tosh was certain the serpent lay coiled just beyond our gate. Only two former Navy friends (white), one jazz pianist (Black) and Ivonne were allowed to visit our domestic paradise. He explained that the people I liked or had known or thought I liked were all stupid and beneath me. Those I might meet, if allowed to venture out alone, beyond our catacomb, couldn't be trusted. Clyde was the brightest, most winning boy in the world, but his friends weren't welcome in our house because they were not worthy of his time. We had tickets to silent movies and the early talkies, and on some Sundays, took our trash to the town dump. I came to love Tosh because he wrapped us in a cocoon of safety, and I made no protest at the bonds that were closing around my existence.

  After a year, I saw the first evidence of a reptilian presence in my garden. Tosh told Clyde that there was no God. When I contradicted him, he asked me to prove His presence. I countered that we could not discuss an Entity which didn't exist. He had been a debater at his university and told me that he could have argued either side with the same power; however, he knew for a fact there was no God, so I should surrender the discussion.

  I knew I was a child of a God who existed but also the wife of a husband who was angered at my belief. I surrendered.

  I tucked away the memory of my great-grandmother (who had been a slave), who told me of praying silently under old wash pots, and of secret meetings deep in the woods to praise God (“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”). Her owner wouldn't allow his Negroes to worship God (it might give them ideas) and they did so on pain of being lashed.

  I planned a secret crawl through neighborhood churches. First I took a nice dress to Ivonne's house and left it, explaining my intent. Then, on at least one Sunday a month, I would prepare a good breakfast for my family and an equally good lie in order to get out of the house. Leaving Clyde at home (he hadn't the experience to lie), I would hurry to Ivonne's, put on the Sunday dress and rush to church. I changed sites each month, afraid that too many repeated visits would familiarize my face and that on some promenade with Tosh I would be stopped by a church member and possibly asked about last week's sermon.

  The spirituals and gospel songs were sweeter than sugar. I wanted to keep my mouth full of them and the sounds of my people singing fell like sweet o
il in my ears. When the polyrhythmic hand-clapping began and the feet started tapping, when one old lady in a corner raised her voice to scream “O Lord, Lordy Jesus,” I could hardly keep my seat. The ceremony drove into my body, to my fingers, toes, neck and thighs. My extremities shook under the emotional possession. I imposed my will on their quivering and kept them fairly still. I was terrified that once loose, once I lifted or lost my control, I would rise from my seat and dance like a puppet, up and down the aisles. I would open my mouth, and screams, shouts and field hollers would tear out my tongue in their rush to be free.

  I was elated that I could wallow in the ceremonies and never forsake control. After each service I would join the church, adding my maiden name to the roster in an attempt to repay the preacher and parishioners for the joyful experience. On the street I felt cleansed, purged and new. Then I would hurry to Ivonne's, change clothes and go back to my own clean house and pretty, though ungodly, family.

  After watching the multicolored people in church dressed in their gay Sunday finery and praising their Maker with loud voices and sensual movements, Tosh and my house looked very pale. Van Gogh and Klee posters which would please me a day later seemed irrelevant. The scatter rugs, placed so artfully the day before, appeared pretentious. For the first few hours at home I kept as tight a check on my thoughts as I had held over my body in church. By the evening meal, I was ready again for cerebral exercises and intellectual exchange.

  CHAPTER 4

  During the first year of marriage I was so enchanted with security and living with a person whose color or lack of it could startle me on an early-morning waking, and I was so busy keeping a spotless house, teaching myself to cook and serve gourmet meals and managing a happy, rambunctious growing boy that I had little time to notice public reactions to us. Aware ness gradually grew in my mind that people stared, nudged each other and frowned when we three walked in the parks or went to the movies. The distaste on their faces called me back to a history of discrimination and murders of every type. Tosh, I told myself, was Greek, not white American; there fore I needn't feel I had betrayed my race by marrying one of the enemy, nor could white Americans believe that I had so forgiven them the past that I was ready to love a member of their tribe. I never admitted that I made the same kind of rationalization about all the other non-Blacks I liked. Louise was white American (but she was a woman). David was white (but he was Jewish). Jack Simpson, Tosh's only friend, was plain white (but he was young and shy). I stared back hard at whites in the street trying to scrape the look of effrontery off their cruel faces. But I dropped my eyes when we met Negroes. I couldn't explain to all of them that my husband had not been a part of our degradation. I fought against the guilt which was slipping into my closed life as insidiously as gas escaping into a sealed room.