by Maya Angelou
“Mr. Saint Subber”—or was one supposed to call him Mr. Subber?—“I need to have my hair done. May I see you tomorrow?”
He blasted my excuse. “No, no matter, I won't be looking at your hair.”
See, my legs. Just as I thought.
“I want to see what you look like.” He gave me his address and hung up.
I had come three thousand miles, so surely I had the courage to go a few more blocks.
A uniformed doorman in front of a neat East Side apartment house raised his brows when I told him my destination, but he walked me into the lobby and reluctantly handed me over to a uniformed elevator operator. The operator pulled his face down as if to say “So, hot stuff, huh?” but he said “Penthouse,” and we began our smooth ascent. When we stopped he rang a bell and the door opened.
A beautiful blond young man offered me his hand. “Miss Angelou?” He did not look as if my legs would interest him.
“Yes. Mr. Subber?”
The elevator door closed and we were in a beautifully furnished living room.
“No, I'm not Saint. My name is Tom. I'm helping on the production. Please have a seat.” He led me to a sofa. “Saint will be with you in a few minutes. What can I get you to drink?”
While he was away I looked at the room and wondered about the tenant. Paintings adorned the walls and flowers were fresh and gay on little tables. A man's voice in argument came through a louvered door.
Tom returned with a gin and tonic in a very tall, extraordinarily thin glass. He asked about my trip and tried to reassure me when I told him I was nervous.
A man rushed through the shuttered door; he was small and thin and his dark hair was cut in a “Quo Vadis.”
“Well, that's over. Oh, my God!” He threw himself on a chaise longue and gingerly put both hands to his head. “Oh, God! What do they want? Oh, my head. Virginia!”
A large Negro woman came through another door. She wore the kind of apron I had not seen since I had left the small country town in Arkansas. It was white, bibbed, starched and voluminous. She went directly to the man and began to massage his temples.
“That's all right, Saint honey, that's all right, you hear. Now don't think about it, honey. Everything's going to be all right.”
I could not believe it.
Neither had taken notice of me and I was so enthralled I frankly stared, recording the scene.
Tom and I could have been an audience while two actors performed a scene in experimental theater.
It was decidedly too new, too strange. I started laughing.
The man sat bolt upright. “Who are you?”
“I?” I held the laughter. “I'm Maya Angelou.”
“You can't be.” He was still sitting straight.
“But I am, I am Maya Angelou.” I was willing to swear to it.
“Well, my God, how tall are you?”
“I'm six feet.”
“But you can't be!” He seemed sure.
“I am, I am too.”
“Stand up. I don't believe it.”
I stood up, hoping I had not shrunk in the plane or in the taxi or in the elevator.
“My God, it's true, you're six feet tall.”
I laughed because I was happy that at least my height had not betrayed me and because he was funny.
“And a great laugh, too. Oh, my God, I know, you're a Black Carol Channing.”
That made me laugh again. He stood up and came to me.
“We'll do your hair red. Will that be all right? Red or blond?”
I said, “I don't think so.”
“Oh, you wouldn't like that?” It was a sincere question.
“Noooo.” I pictured myself with hair as red as Gwen Verdon's and started laughing again. “No, I don't think it would work.”
“All right.” He chuckled, too. “We'll think of something else.”
I was still laughing.
“What's so funny?”
When I could catch my breath I told him. “I expected you to smoke a cigar and pinch my cheeks, to roll your eyes at me and make some lewd proposition. I've been dreading that all the way from California, and I get here”— the funny bone was struck again—“I get here and … Tom and you and Virginia and my red hair.” He, too, began to laugh at the absurd situation. Tom joined in.
Saint Subber said impulsively, “Stay for dinner. Virginia, we'll be another for dinner.” For all his theatrics, or maybe because of them, I knew he was a strong man. I had always been more comfortable around strong people.
After a dinner of frogs' legs (I had never eaten them before and had to ask if they were eaten with a knife and fork or with the fingers like spare ribs), he told me to come to the theater the next morning and not to sing any special material, because Truman Capote was going to be at the theater and “Truman hates special material.”
I thanked them both for their hospitality and went back to the hotel to telephone Mom. “Do your best tomorrow” she said, “and don't worry. Remember, you've got a home to come back to.” I spoke to Clyde, who sounded fine, and hung up and went to bed.
The Alvin Theater was on Broadway and I had been asked to go to the stage door around the corner. I walked quite cheerfully among the crowds on the sidewalk. I had stopped at a music store and bought a copy of “Love for Sale,” for no reason except that it had been on display and I had heard it sung so often. If Truman Capote did not like special material, I would sing a standard for him. I noticed only after I had turned the corner at the theater that a line of Negro people stretched around the block headed in the direction I was taking. I exchanged smiles with some of the young standees and gave good mornings to some of the older women with pleasant faces. The line stopped at the stage door. I had never auditioned in New York and thought maybe all Broadway shows had their tryouts in the same theater.
I knocked at the door and Tom opened it. I would not have been surprised if I had been given a number and told to take my place in line. Instead, he said, “Oh, Miss Angelou. Please come in. I'll tell Saint you're here.”
He led me to a corner and excused himself. The blurred forms inside the theater became more visible. There were over a hundred Negro people lined up along the backstage wall, waiting, alert.
Tom waved me over and whispered, “Saint will hear you now. Have you your music?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Give it to me,” he said, “I'll take it to the pianist. Do you want to run over it with her?”
I did not think so—after all, it was only “Love for Sale.”
“Just a minute and I'll call your name. Walk right through here.” He showed me to the wings and an entrance stage left. “The pianist is in the pit. You nod to her and she'll begin.” Just like the old Purple Onion days.
“And there's nothing to worry about.” He added, “Truman Capote is out there and Saint and Yip Harburg and Peter Hall. Do your best.”
I waited, trying not to think about trying out and thinking about New York. The Apple. I would make it and send for Clyde, then we would spend afternoons in Central Park, perhaps not as nice as Golden Gate Park, but then … I would find a lover, too; among all those millions of people there had to be a man who had been waiting for me to come along and cheer up his life. I would not think about trying out. Just wait until my name was called and then go out and sing.
“Miss Angelou, Maya Angelou.”
I walked out in front of the velvet curtain. The lights were bright and hard and white, and the theater seats, only dimly lighted near the stage, darkened into oblivion. I saw a small clump of figures in the distance. On the right side of the orchestra pit a woman sat patiently at a grand piano.
I took my position, thinking of Lloyd Clark: “Stand still, stand perfectly still, darling, still.” I stood. Wilkie's teaching ran in my thoughts: “Drop your jaw. Don't try to look pretty by grinning when you sing. Drop your jaw.” I dropped my jaw, and then nodded to the pianist, moving nothing but my head.
She stroked out th
e first notes of my song and I began.
“Love for sale, appetizing young love—”
She stopped.
“Uh, no, uh, I'm playing the verse. If you don't want the verse I'll go right to the refrain.”
I had read the verse when I bought the music, but I had never heard it sung.
“Just the love for sale' part, please.” I thought I heard a titter from backstage, but I could not be sure. She played the first three notes and I began to sing. “Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale.” I imagined I was a girl in a trench coat and a beret, standing under a streetlight in old Chinatown in a light rain. Men passed me by after looking me over and I continued my plaintive offer.
I was so engrossed in telling the story that I did not know when the music and I had parted company or quite how we could get back together. I only knew I was in one key and the piano in another. I looked at the pianist. She began to strike the keys harder, and in a vain attempt to settle correctly I began to sing louder. She lifted her hands and pounded on the piano. I raised my voice and screamed, “If you want to buy my wares” a mile away from what she was playing.
She half rose, crouched over the keyboard. There was a frantic determination in the position of her body, in the bend of her neck. She would get me back on pitch or there would just be splinters left on the piano.
Plunk plunk—she was as loud as I—and I heard a low vocal grumble as she sought to overwhelm my voice into submission. I shouted, “Follow me and climb the stairs.” A thin but definite screech slid through my nose. I dropped my jaw to try to force the sound down into the back of my mouth where I could control it. The pianist was standing. Her brow was knit and her teeth bared. She was about to attack the piano for the final chord. I barged in, overtook her and in a second outdistanced her as I yelled “Love for sale.”
She flopped on the piano stool exhausted and in defeat.
I was just a little proud that I had gotten all the way through the song. Then I heard the sounds. There were gurgles and giggles from the theater and the muffled bubbling of outright disorderly laughter from backstage.
The flush of heat crawled up my face and spread through my body the instant I realized that I was the object of derision. But I was, I told myself, the person who'd had flowers put at her feet. And I was the entertainer asked to take Eartha Kitt's role in New Faces. I was the dancer Porgy and Bess wanted to follow the fabulous Lizabeth Foster. And I was being laughed away just because I could not sing “Love for Sale.” Well, they need not.
“Excuse me,” I said, and looked over the rows of seats toward the indistinct shadows. “I understand that Mr. Capote doesn't like special material. And you've asked me to come out here to show you what I do. I am willing to sing calypso for you or I'd be just as happy to go home.”
Indeed, it would be nicer to go back to California. To my mother's big house and good food. To my son, who needed me, and Aunt Lottie, who loved me. Back to the wonderful Purple Onion where my friends would welcome me. The period between becoming a great Broadway star setting New York on its ear and returning to the family's bosom was shorter than the first intervals between the overheard laughter.
There was little sound from the audience. They clapped as if they were wearing furry gloves.
“Yes, Miss Angelou, sing whatever you like.”
I said, “I'm going to sing ‘Run Joe,’ and since I was discouraged from bringing my sheet music, I'll have to sing it a cappella.” Wilkie had told me that music sung without accompaniment was called “a cappella.”
If I was going home, I had to show them what they were missing, and that I had some place to go.
I gave them the special Saturday-night standing-room-only encore version. The one where I spun around, my body taut. The one where I yelped small noises and sighed like breaking ocean waves.
When I finished, the first applause came from the pianist. She was smiling and clapping so energetically that I surmised that I had rescued her recently endangered belief in the human voice. There was more applause from the audience, and this time it sounded fresh and sincere. I did not know what I was expected to do next. I stood still for a moment, then bowed and rather stiffly turned away.
“Will you wait backstage, Miss Angelou?” Tom's voice sprang through the void.
“Yes, thank you.”
Whenever I was embarrassed or felt myself endangered, I relied on my body's training to deliver me. Grandmother Henderson and Grandmother Baxter had drilled my brother and me in the posture of “shoulders back, head up, look the future in the eye,” and years of dance classes had compounded the education. I turned and walked to the wings like Cleopatra walking to the throne room (meanwhile clasping the asp in her bodice).
Backstage a few of the hopeful contenders tapped their hands together or snapped their fingers when they saw me. They grinned saucy compliments to me, probably as much for my own sassiness in standing up and talking back as for what they heard of my second song.
Saint Subber, Tom and Truman Capote came backstage and walked over to me.
Saint Subber said, “You've got a certain quality.”
Tom's praise was as generous as his manner.
Truman Capote spoke, and I thought for a desperate moment that he was pulling my leg. He said in a faint falsetto, “Miss Angelou, honey, ah love yoah work.” He sounded just like a rich old Southern white woman. He reminded me of a Countee Cullen poem:
She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores
While poor Black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.
Yet I could not detect a shred of superciliousness on his face or in his soft yielding manner. I thanked him. Tom said he would be in touch with me and I shook hands with the men and left the theater.
Outside I passed the line of people still waiting. They scanned my features intently trying to read the outcome of my ordeal and thereby prophesy their own. If I was triumphant it meant that success was in the air and might come to them. On the other hand, it could mean that I had just filled the vacancy that they themselves might have taken.
Theirs was a grievous lot. Ten or twenty jobs for two thousand or more trained, talented and anxious aspirants. Another Countee Cullen poem stated that God, should he choose, could explain why he gave the turtle such a strange yet lovely shell, why the spring follows winter, why the snake doffs its skin, “yet,” said the poet, “do I marvel at this curious thing, to make a poet Black and bid him sing.” And of all things, to bid him sing in New York City.
I thought of Porgy and Bess. Of the sixty people who sang and laughed and lived together, the camaraderie and the pride they had in one another's genius. Although I had not heard from the company administrators for three months, I had received cards from Martha Flowers and from Ned Wright. I waited around in my small hotel room and prowled my dingy lobby. I called Mother, who ordered me to keep my chin up, and Clyde, who missed me and gave me news of Fluke's latest adventures. Wilkie reminded me that “In God I live and have my being.”
On a Thursday morning I received a note which read: “Miss Angelou, the House of Flowers company is happy to inform you that you have been chosen for the part in our production. Please come to the office Thursday afternoon at three to sign your contract.”
I shared the news with my family immediately and when I hung up, the telephone rang again. I thought it was probably Saint Subber calling to congratulate me.
It was Breen's Everyman's Opera Company. Bob Dustin said, “Maya Angelou?”
“Yes.”
“This is Porgy and Bess. We called your San Francisco number and were told you were in New York.”
“Yes.”
“We want you for the role of Ruby.”
How could there be so much of a good thing?
“But I've just got a part in a new show opening on Broadway.”
“Really? Oh, that's too bad. The company is in Montreal now and we leave for Italy in four days
.”
There really was no contest. I wanted to travel, to try to speak other languages, to see the cities I had read about all my life, but most important, I wanted to be with a large, friendly group of Black people who sang so gloriously and lived with such passion.
“I don't have a passport.”
“We are being sponsored by the State Department.”
I thought about the school I had attended which was on the House Un-American Activities Committee list.
He said, “Don't worry about your passport. We can get a special dispensation. Do you want to join Porgy and Bess?”
“Yes, yes.” Yes, indeed.
“Then come to the office and we'll get you straightened out. You'll leave tomorrow afternoon for Montreal.”
I telephoned Saint Subber and explained that I had been offered another job. He asked me if I would give up a new Broadway show for a chorus part in a touring company.
I said “Yes.”
CHAPTER 16
My mind turned over and over like a flipped coin: Paris, then Clyde's motherless birthday party Rome and my son's evening prayers said to Fluke, Madrid and Clyde struggling alone with his schoolwork.
I telephoned home again. Mother was pleased and gave me a load of phrases to live by. “Treat everybody right, remember life is a two-way street. You might meet the same people on your way down that you met going up.” And “Look to the hills from whence cometh your help.” Lottie said she was proud of me and that I had it in me to become great. Wilkie told me to hum a lot, place my voice in the mask and always drop my jaw. And to keep in my heart the knowledge that there was no place where God was not.
I asked to speak with Clyde. Using a tack I loathed, I talked to him as if he was a small child with faulty English. He asked when I was coming home and when was I sending for him. His voice became faint after I said I was not coming the next week but soon. Very soon.