by Maya Angelou
Julian asked him if Muhammad’s actions at the hotel came as a surprise, and Malcolm did not answer directly. “He is young. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is his prophet and his father, I understand. Be kind to him for his sake, and mine. He has a place in my heart.”
At the airport, the ambassadors and other well-wishers swooped him away. Alice had time to arrange him for one last photo and we all shook his hand and hugged him.
Julian said in a forbidding tone, “Man, I don’t like to see you traveling alone. You know there’s a price on your head.”
Malcolm smiled. “No one can guard anyone’s life. Not even his own. Only Allah can protect. And he has let me slide so far.” He smiled for us all and then was gone.
The letdown affected our speech. There seemed to be no words to describe what we were feeling. We regarded each other with embarrassment. Malcolm’s presence had elevated us, but with his departure, we were what we had been before: a little group of Black folks, looking for a home.
I still found myself grinning when I came unexpectedly upon a clasp of confident Ghanaian children whispering in Ga or Fanti, their little legs shining and shimmering like oiled eels; my breath still crowded in my throat at the sight of African soldiers, chests thrust forward, stiffened legs and behinds high like peacocks’ tails. The forests had lost none of their mystery and the bush villages were still enchanting. But Ghana was beginning to tug at me and make me uncomfortable, like an ill fitting coat.
The job at the diamond mine had been filled before I was obliged to test my morality or lie about my academic background. Nana had become a close and generous friend who continued seeking a better paying position for me, and I spent good times with his children and friends. I was welcome in many Ghanaian homes and had sufficient male company to satisfy my needs and vanity. My housemates and the other Revolutionist Returnees provided opportunities for strong political debate and laughter, but I had to admit that I had begun to feel that I was not in my right place. Every moment in Ghana called attention to itself and each social affair was self-conscious. When I went dancing, between the beats and during the steps, I thought, “Here I am, Maya Angelou, dancing in Africa. I know I’m having a good time.” Shopping in the crowded streets I thought, “This is me at last, really me, buying peppers in Makola market, aren’t I lucky?” I decided that I was too aware of my location; not just in Accra, or in Adabraka, or Asylum Down.
I needed to get away from Africa and its cache of subtle promises and at least second-hand memories. I blamed the entire continent and history for my malaise when the real reason was more pointedly specific and as personal as a migraine.
Guy was troubling me. I was questioning my worth as a mother, and since I had been a parent over half my life, I thought if I failed in that role, success in any other area would have very little meaning.
One evening, a Ghanaian friend had come bringing gin and a terrible piece of gossip. He opened the fresh bottle, poured a few drops on the ground for the spirits, then we seated ourselves and drank comfortably.
“Sister, I have bad news about your son.” My first thought was that he had been in another accident. As soon as that idea came it vanished; I would have been telephoned.
“What news, Brother?” I stayed seated in a fake serenity.
“It is said that he has a girlfriend.” I laughed, “Well, I hope so.”
“Don’t laugh, Sister. This certain friend is thirty-six years old and is an American and works for the American Embassy.”
As I was asking, “What?” thoughts tumbled over themselves in my mind.
The woman was a year older than I. Couldn’t she find any lover older than my nineteen-year-old son? An American government employee? Ghanaians were still a little suspicious of all Americans, especially Black diplomats and employees in the embassy. I had just been made a member of the Ghana Press Club. Undoubtedly, suspicion would fall on me if the gossip was true.
“Brother, I thank you for the information. I will see to my son. Shall we freshen our drinks?”
I would not allow my informant to warn me that young men in love are like elephants in rutting time, difficult to dissuade. I knew that I could always talk to Guy.
The next day I took a break from a play in production after a student told me that my son was outside. Guy and I stood on the lawn in front of the National Theatre.
He appeared two inches taller than he had been the week before, and I had not noticed that he had grown a moustache.
“I am told that you have a girlfriend.”
He had the nerve to be annoyed with me and, worse, to show his annoyance. “Mother, did you actually call me into town to talk about that?”
“I am told that she is thirty-six years old, and works for the American Embassy.”
“Yes?” When a nineteen-year-old decides to clothe himself in dignity, nothing but pity or abject fear can penetrate his armor. I was too angry to ask for sympathy and obviously Guy had moved beyond fear of my disapproval.
“Is it true?”
“Oh, Mother, really. Don’t you think it’s time I had a life of my own?”
How could his life be separate from my life? I had been a mother of a child so long I had no preparation for life on any other level. As usual, anger, my enemy, betrayed me. I looked up at the young golden brown giant towering above my head.
“I will knock you down, Guy. Right here in front of God and everybody. Knock you down, do you hear?” I hadn’t struck him since he was seven years old and had told me that I was too big to hit a small child.
“I will knock you down and I mean it.”
His smile came from his new grown-up and distant place, and cut my heart to shreds.
He patted my head, “Yes, little mother. I’m sure you will.” Then he turned and walked away.
When he closed up and left me no entry, a sense of loss rendered me momentarily unstable.
His existence had defined my own. As a child his sense of humor, attraction for puns and affection for me had lightened the single parent burden. He learned to read early because I loved to read, and I taught him to recite the poetry I had memorized in my own youth. When my seven-year-old son stood before me, beating the bones of his young chest, disclaiming, “It matters not how dark the night, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” I saw myself, as if thrown upon a screen, clearly brave, clearly sure, sculpting a good life from resistant stone.
As my mother had done for me, I told him jokes and encouraged him to laugh at life and at himself. The Black child must learn early to allow laughter to fill his mouth or the million small cruelties he encounters will congeal and clog his throat.
Guy had been a good student, but did not develop into excellence because of our brief stays in cities where we lived. When he graduated from high school at the American College in Cairo, he told me he had gone to nineteen schools in eleven years. I was sorry to think that I hadn’t noticed, but realized at the time I couldn’t have changed our movements or destinations.
I had begun dancing or singing for a living when he was seven, and contracts took me from San Francisco to New York, and all the cities between the coasts. My family and even school administrators disapproved of what they thought was my vagabond life, but I was unable to live their ideals. I had no formal education, and no training other than in dance.
Once I was called to a Los Angeles school by the child psychologist. She was a White woman, in a white smock, in a white office.
“Miss Angelou, Guy is not doing well in school because he is hyperactive. I believe that comes from being moved around so frequently.”
I sat still, looking at her, knowing that nothing she could say would influence the lives my son and I would lead.
She leaned back and pronounced, “He needs to stay put. He needs an established home life. I know that you are an entertainer and have to travel in your work, but maybe you could leave him with someone in your family. Your mother wou
ld look after him, perhaps?”
My mother, whom I loved dearly, had left me with my paternal grandmother from the time I was three until my thirteenth year. She had matured since then and become my reliable friend and a doting mother, but Guy was my responsibility and my joy.
I said nothing. The psychologist became uncomfortable as I sat silent. “He needs security, Miss Angelou. Stability will give him that security.”
I stood and spoke. “Thank you for your concern and your time, Doctor, but I am his security. Wherever we go, we go together. Wherever he is he knows that that six-foot-tall Black woman is not too far away. What I don’t furnish in stability, I make up in love. Good day.”
We left a few weeks later for Chicago, another apartment hotel and another school.
His teens had not been easy for either of us. As he grew older, he began to withdraw, and because I didn’t understand that an avalanche of sexuality had fallen upon him, I felt betrayed at his withdrawal. In our worst moments however, we had been saved by love and laughter.
But now, here in Ghana where neither of us was threatened by racial hate, where we both had separate and reasonably good lives, where it seemed we could both be happy, he had moved beyond my reach and into the arms of a cradle robber. Speaking to the woman would be a mistake. If she agreed to end the relationship, Guy would hate me for taking away his play pretty, and if she refused, we would have a fist fight.
I needed to get away from him and myself and the situation. Maybe to Europe, or Asia. I never thought of returning to America.
The cable from New York City shook the blues away. It read: “Berlin Volksopera wants original company Blacks, four days, stop. Venice Biennale, three days, stop. Ticket paid, plus salary. Can you come?” It was signed: Sidney Bernstein. Three years earlier, I had been a member of a cast which successfully presented Jean Genet’s scathing play in New York City. At first, I gave little thought to either the play or the other actors. I was ecstatic with the thought of separating myself from Guy and his brand new grown-up ways.
I rushed to talk to Alice, who was brimming with her own excitement. She had accepted the job in Ethiopia and had decided to stop in Egypt on her way to Addis Ababa. A conference of nonaligned countries would be meeting in Cairo. By adding a little money to my pre-paid ticket I could meet her there after I left Venice. The prospect of seeing Joe and Bahnti Williamson again was exhilarating. The Liberian couple had been brother and sister to me during my stay in Egypt. David Du Bois, the son of Shirley Graham and stepson of Dr. Du Bois, also lived in Cairo and we had been very close friends. A visit to Cairo sounded like the real answer to the malaise which had descended around me. When I learned that Julian and Ana Livia were also going to attend the Cairo conference, it was clear that I would accept Bernstein’s offer and rearrange my ticket to stop in Egypt on my return to Ghana.
I took delight from the flicker of worry which crossed Guy’s face. I had told him that I was leaving for Germany and Italy and Egypt. He recovered too soon to please me.
“Have a wonderful time, Mom. A wonderful time.”
Since the Ghanaian pound could not be exchanged on the international market, I swapped my cash with a friend for his Nigerian pounds and packed my new flamboyant African clothes and my gifts of gold jewelry. I was going to meet a group of sophisticated New York actors, some of whom were my friends, and I meant to strut.
I became nervous only when I thought of the years since I had been on the stage. (Playing Mother Courage in Ghana’s National Theatre didn’t really count.) The other actors, all brilliant and ferociously ambitious, had moved around New York City’s theatres, competing with professionals and growing with each role. Their names and work had become known and lauded. I decided to spend two days in Frankfurt, boning up on the play, or those actors would run me off the stage.
The trip on Lufthansa was a test in discomfort. The flight stewards spoke excellent English and were solicitous without being intrusive, but I kept my eyes on the script in my lap, and let my mind wander from the German accents to John Hersey’s book The Wall which had gripped me with horror in my youth. I listened to the speech of the passengers returning to their fatherland and remembered the black and white photographs of emaciated human beings rescued from Auschwitz. It was distressing. In Ghana I worked hard at forgiving those African chiefs who collaborated in the slave trade centuries before, but couldn’t find it in my heart to exonerate the stewardesses who were toddlers at the time of the Holocaust. Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.
I rehearsed in a small pension in Frankfurt until the lines came automatically to my mind and my tongue. I had learned years before that if I was to act in a play it was wise to memorize every part, even the scenes in which I did not appear. The resulting confidence would spill over into my own role.
Berlin, with its cold temperature, its high-rises, wide, clean avenues and White, White people was exactly what I wanted to see and where I needed to be. I began to relax even as I was being driven from the airport to the Hilton Hotel. When I arrived at my destination I found wide, carpeted corridors, a large, well-furnished bedroom and a bathroom white as a Protestant heaven.
I thought of some Africans I had met who so loved the glories of Europe, they were too immobilized to construct a splendid African future.
This was easy to understand. Europe had ruled long, had brought to Africa a language, a religion, modern ideas of medicine, and its own pervading self-love. How could one suggest in one’s own secret heart that Whites were not gods, descending from heaven, and like gods, bringing bounty on one hand and brutality on the other? That was the way of the gods.
After a bath, I dressed in my most glorious pale lavender silk Grand Bou Bou, and went down to meet the cast.
Raymond St. Jacques was still so handsome he looked as if he had been sculpted, then cast in copper. Cecily Tyson was smaller than I remembered and much more glamorous. We embraced and laughed at finding ourselves, of all places, in Germany. Godfrey Cambridge had been unable to come to Berlin because he was in a Broadway show, but Lex Monson and Jay Flash Riley pulled me off the floor with their embraces, and the young Lou Gossett, one half legs and the other smiles, bounced up and down to see me. James Earl Jones and I exchanged our customary cool salutes. Years before in New York City we had worked successfully creating a distance which time had not narrowed.
“Lady! Ah, my Lady!” A sonorous voice completed the welcome I had been seeking. Roscoe Lee Browne entered the rehearsal room and I nearly shouted. He had lost none of his princely air nor elegant good looks. He laughed outright when he saw me, and he spoke to me as he spoke to all women; as if we were Fairie Queens.
We embraced and walked away from the cast and began to tell each other of our current lives. We went to a bar and ordered drinks. Roscoe had heard rumors of my recent divorce, and was genuinely sorry to find that they were founded on fact. He asked about my acceptance in Ghana, adding that he had known President Nkrumah when they had both studied at Lincoln University.
I had prepared a tale for the cast, which had Africans and Black Americans lovingly striding arm in arm up a golden staircase to an all sepia paradise inhabited with black-robed Black saints strumming on ebony harps. I had no need to lie to Roscoe, who would have seen through the fiction anyway.
“We have it good, very good, or bad. Heartbreakingly bad.”
Roscoe made his face long. “Africans find it hard to forgive us slavery, don’t they?” He took my hand and said, “I thought you would have known that. My dear, they can’t forgive us, and even more terrible, they can’t forgive themselves. They’re like the young here in this tragic country. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can’t forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.” He patted my hand. “Now, dear lady, tell me the good side—but first let me hear the story you’re going to tell everyone else.”
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p; He laughed when I said I’d spare him the part about all of the Black Americans climbing aboard a chariot and humming our way to heaven.
He said, “Not unless they cast me as De Lawd.” It was wonderful to laugh again, and particularly sweet to laugh Black American rueful laughter in Germany.
The Blacks translated into German became Die Negers. Posters were on bold display throughout Berlin which made the cast snicker behind Black hands. Lex said, “It’s a good thing they’re speaking German. The first American cracker that comes up to me and says ‘I saw you in de Niggers’ is going to get a nigger beating that’ll make him do a million novenas.” That was particularly funny coming from Monson who played the Catholic priest in the play, coached the actors in church liturgy and whose youth as a devoted acolyte still influenced his adult mannerisms.
Helen Martin, who had the role of the Black Queen and whose sharp tongue was an instrument to be avoided, said, “I hope these Germans don’t think they’re getting away with something. We know who they are and what they’re saying. I hope I don’t have to read them the real Riot Act before it’s finished.”
I listened and participated in the sardonic responses and realized again the difference between the Black American and the African. Over centuries of oppression we had developed a doctrine of resistance which included false docility and sarcasm. We also had a most un-African trait: we were nearly always ready and willing to fight. Too frequently we fought among ourselves, rendering our neighborhoods dangerous to traverse. But Whites knew that our bellicosity could disperse into other places, on jobs, in elevators, on buses, and in social gatherings.