by Maya Angelou
The Liberian Residency was festooned with flags and garlands. The family and family friends waited impatiently. Servants wearing new clothes and rehearsed into numbness stood at military attention in the foyer, and the children, quieted by the importance of the occasion, formed their own small line inside the salon.
Beyond the open door, along the steps and down the walk to the entry gatehouse, Egyptian and Liberian soldiers, their weapons at the ready, awaited President Tubman. The unnatural and uncomfortable silence was broken by the arrival of cars and the shouted orders of Army officers. Joe left the family rank and descended the stairs to meet a group of beribboned and laughing men.
William V. S. Tubman was surrounded by his court of cabinet ministers, but he was clearly visible, and after the phalanx had climbed the stairs, he entered the building arm in arm with Ambassador Williamson. Although he wore a tuxedo heavily adorned with medals and ribbons, he looked like an ordinary man that one might meet in church or in the Elks Hall or in any Black American community. That impression was short-lived—for after he embraced Bahnti and the other family members, Joe presented me. “Mr. President, this is our friend, the American singer Maya Angelou.” The force of the man was befuddling. I didn’t know whether to bob or curtsy.
“Oh, Miss Angelou, I have been looking forward to this evening. To have some of A. B.’s good Liberian chop and some Negro spirituals. Welcome.” He and his energy passed me and I felt as if a light had been turned off. He was a president with a royal aura.
People born into democracies and who have learned to repeat, if not to practice, the statement that all men are created equal think themselves immune to the power of monarchies. They are pridefully certain that they would never tug their forelocks nor would their knees ever bend to a lord, laird or feudal master. But most have never had those beliefs put to test. Being physically close to extreme power causes one to experience a giddiness, an intoxication.
At that moment, I wanted to be close to President Tub-man’s aura, encompassed by, warmed, and held forever in its rich embrace.
At formal dinner, I was seated far away from the important officials, but close enough to observe them entertaining their leader. Each person had a story, told in the unique Liberian accent, and as each story concluded, President Tubman approved the telling by adding an appropriate proverb for each tale. The cabinet ministers and diplomats beamed with pride and laughed easily with and for their “Old Man.”
When dinner was finished, Joe led the guests into the decorated salon. As President Tubman sat in a thronelike chair flanked by his suddenly serious attendants, Bahnti looked at me and raised her eyebrows. Joe introduced me, saying although I was a singer and writer, much more important I was the auntie of his children, a daughter of Africa and his chosen sister.
“Mr. President, excuse me.” I was standing in the center of the salon. “I have never sung for a president. In fact, I’ve never met a president before.”
William Tubman laughed and rolled his giant cigar between his fingers. “My child,” he chuckled and his retinue chuckled, “My child, I am just a common garden variety president. Sing!” I began a traditional blues in a comfortable tempo. The president snapped his fingers and the guests slowly followed his example. When I finished the song the applause was loud and long.
“Now, my child, sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’”
I began the old song, softly. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Coming for to carry me home.” The president’s baritone joined. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Coming for to carry me home.”
Other voices picked a harmonic path into the song, and I heard Bahnti’s high soprano waver, “If you get there before I do, Coming for to carry me home, Tell all my friends I’m coming too, Coming for to carry me home.” They sounded neither like Whites nor like Black Americans, but they sang with such emotion that tears filled my eyes. Save for a few Egyptian government officials and me, all the singers were African. I knew from the dinner conversation that not one of them was fired with religious zeal, so for what chariot were they calling and what home could they possibly miss? I dropped my voice and gave them the song.
They were Americo-Liberians. Possibly five generations before, an ancestor—an American slave—had immigrated to Africa to marry into one of the local tribes. Now, after a century of intermarriage, they sat in beribboned tuxedos in this formal salon, drinking French champagne, models of the international diplomatic community. In their own land they owned rubber plantations and rice and coffee farms, and in their homes they spoke Bassa and Kru and Mandinke and Vai as easily as they spoke English.
Still, their faces glowed as they picked up the melody.
See that host all dressed in red,
Coming for to carry me home.
It looks like a band that Moses led,
Coming for to carry me home.
They were earnest and their voices were in tune, but they could not duplicate the haunting melody of our singing. While it is true that not all Black Americans can sing or dance, those who do create tones so unique that they are immediately identifiable. Of all Africans I had heard, only the Zulus, Xhosas, and Shonas of South Africa produced the velvet and wistful sounds which were capable of reaching the ear and heart with an undeniable message of pain.
Did it mean that only the African, and only the African living in total despair, pressed down by fate, refused, rejected and abandoned could develop and sing this kind of music?
The strains faded away and beautiful smiles accompanied the audience’s applause. In the absence of my creative ancestors who picked that melody out of cotton sacks, I humbly bowed my head.
When Guy met me at the airport with chocolates (expensive) and a lovely piece of African cloth which he himself had chosen at the market, I was quick to think that my absence had made his heart grow fonder. His face was young with trust again, and he was laughing again—hearty, open laughter. I concluded that my decision to stay as long as possible with Bahnti and Joe had been wise, for my son had come back from that adolescent region where the barriers were so dense and high, they kept out prying eyes and even light.
He carried my bags into the house and the aroma of fried chicken met me at the door. I knew that dish was beyond Otu’s talent and since Alice and Vicki were gone … I looked questioningly at Guy.
He smiled and hugged me. “I cooked it, Mom. I know you hate airplane food.”
The tears on my face surprised me and distressed Guy.
We had not used weeping to manipulate each other. I apologized and Guy said, “Maybe this is not the time to talk to you.”
I insisted that the time to talk was when one had something to say. I sat, still in my traveling clothes, while Guy spoke as carefully as if he was reading a prepared treatise.
He declared his gratitude for all I had ever done. He announced that I was an excellent mother. He said no parent could have been more patient, more generous or more loving. I began to contract, to tighten my muscles and my mind for the blow which I knew was coming. Because it was not a wallop, it slipped up on and into me like a whisper.
“Mom,” he looked like the sweet boy I had such joy raising. “Mom, I’ve thought about this seriously and continuously since you left. You have finished mothering a child. You did a very good job. Now, I am a man. Your life is your own, and mine belongs to me. I am not rejecting you, I’m just explaining that our relationship has changed….”
He was not pulling at the apron strings, he was carefully and methodically untying the knots and raveling the very thread.
“I have not decided just what I want to do. Whether I shall stay in Ghana and finish at the university, or go to another country to finish my education. In any case, I shall apply for scholarship so you can be free of the burden of my tuition.”
Now the entire apron was a pile of lint and I was speechless. He talked, beckoning me into his thoughts, but I was unable to follow him. I didn’t know the road.
At the end of his speech, he hugged me
again and thanked me again, and saying he had plans for dinner, went out the door.
I walked around the empty house trying to make sense of the sentences which tumbled over themselves in my brain.
“He’s gone. My lovely little boy is gone and will never return. That big confident strange man has done away with my little boy, and he has the gall to say he loves me. How can he love me? He doesn’t know me, and I sure as hell don’t know him.”
Efua appeared at my door, drawn, her usual healthy skin the color of gun metal. When she entered the house I saw her trembling hands. I knew better than to ask any questions. At the proper time she would say why she had come to me.
When I returned from the kitchen with cool beer, she was more composed but she was still standing in the middle of the living room.
“Sister, have you seen it? Have you seen the paper?” I said no, and wondered if the president had been assassinated. I implored her to sit, but she shook her head.
“Today’s paper. Second page.”
A presidential assassination would have claimed front page.
“Sister Efua, please come, and sit and let me pour you beer.”
She remained erect, but shaking, oblivious to my entreaties.
“No one has claimed him. No one has come. Oh my Africa! What is happening to you? Oh my Africa.”
The dramatic cries overwhelmed my suddenly very small living room. She could have filled a Greek theatre stage.
“Oh my Africa! Where are you going?”
I poured a glass of beer for her and placed it on a table beside a chair. I took mine to another seat and waited.
“Oh. Oh. My country. My people.”
The moans began to fade and Efua finally came aware of her location. She gave me a wan smile. “Sister, excuse me, but I suppose you might not understand. A man, an Ashanti, a Ghanaian died two days ago. His body was lain in the morgue. No one has come for him.”
She had her gaze on me, but the vacant eyes were staring and I was not being recorded in her vision.
“Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head.
“Africa is breaking. That body in the morgue is a stone from Africa’s mountain. He belongs someplace. The day he was given a name he was also given a place which no one but he himself can fill. And after his death, that place remains his, although he has gone to the country of the dead. His family and clan will honor his possession of that place and cherish him. Never in Ghana has a body lain unclaimed for two days. That is why the newspaper has reported it. It should have been on the front page. Headlines. Africans must be shocked into realizing what is happening to them. To us.”
She shook her head and gathering her cloth around her shoulders, walked through the doorway. I followed. She stood on my porch, turning her head slowly, looking from left to right to left at the houses and cars in my street. When she spoke her voice was low, nearly a moan. “Everybody in these cities should be made to go live in his native village for one year, barefoot and in rags. We have begun to think like Europeans. Sister, mind you, our gods will become angry. I would be afraid to anger Jesus Christ, but I confess, the thought of angering African gods absolutely terrifies me.”
She leaned to kiss me farewell and walked down to her car where the chauffeur stood holding the door for her.
The visit muddled me. Efua, the model of containment, had been weeping not over the death of a stranger, but because other people who were also strangers had not come for his remains. As usual, as if I had been sent to the continent on assignment, I placed the African and Black American cultures side by side for examination. In Ghana, one unclaimed corpse merited principal news coverage, and Efua’s emotional response, while in America, Black bodies still quick with life demanded no such concern. Too often among ourselves, since lives were cheap, dying was cheaper. Since the end of slavery, Black Americans running or walking, hitchhiking or hoboing from untenable place to unsupportable place, had died in fields, in prisons, hospitals, on battlegrounds, in beds and barns, and if pain accompanied their births, only the dying knew of their deaths. They had come and gone unrecorded save in symbolic lore, and unclaimed save by the soil which turned them into earth again.
I thought of the African gods whom Efua was loath to anger and decided that they must have been bristling with rage for centuries. How else explain the alliance of African greed and European infamy which built a slave stealing-selling industry lasting for over three centuries? Weren’t the African gods showing their anger when they allowed the strongest daughters and sons to be carried beyond the seas’ horizon? How much had they been provoked to permit disease and droughts and malnutrition to lay clouds of misery on the land? I agreed with Efua. I certainly would not like to see the gods of Africa anymore riled up than they were already.
The evening paper reported the family had come from the north to collect the body. Ghanaians breathed more easily, and so did I.
Misery is a faithful company keeper, and Comfort was dissolving under its attention. I watched for three months as her laughter diminished then disappeared along with about thirty pounds of sensuous curves. There was no jollity in her face, nor was there any strength in her hands. When she strung my hair, the movement on my head could have been caused by two sleepy snails going to rest.
“No, Sistah, I am not sick. Just weary.”
We had come to know each other well enough for me to use an admonishing tone. “Sister, you have wearied yourself into bad health. You’re so weak now you can hardly pull the comb through my hair.”
Months before she would have blamed my hair, saying that it had a mind of its own and I should have the impertinence beaten out of it.
She said only, “I am getting weaker each day.” She paused, then said, “It’s the woman. She’s doing it.”
I asked, “What woman? Doing what?”
Even Comfort’s voice was being erased. She said in a whisper, “His old wife is using some bad medicine on me. First she gave permission for us to be friendly, then when she saw how he loves me, she said ‘no.’”
“Friendly? Comfort, did she think you would be just friends with her man? Plain friends?”
“She knew we were loving. Why else would my mother speak to her mother? And she agreed. Then … and then she saw that we were more than loving. We were … he liked me. That’s when she promised I would lose. Lose everything. My looks, my weight. I would lose him and my mind. Oh, Sistah, she has power medicine. I might even lose my life.”
“Did she give you something to drink?” I thought of arsenic.
“No, I eat at home. I have a cousin and a servant from my village who look after me. No. I have taken nothing that she has touched.” She pulled a stool and sat beside me. I remarked that she looked like a little girl.
She said, “Sistah, I feel old, but I think she is taking old age from me.”
Had she talked to the woman herself? Maybe if she went to the woman …
Comfort began to shudder and I apologized for the suggestion. She waved a bony hand at me.
“No, Sistah Maya, now you see my trouble?” She shivered and her eyes were filled with despair.
“The woman came to me. To my house. My steward let her in. Sistah, I went in to her. I was surprised. She is old. Once she looked fine, but now … Oh age … I will not live to see what it can do to me.” She was near to tears, so I encouraged her to continue with her story.
“Well, Sistah, you know I was fat and fine as cocoa butter, and the man was loving me. Anyway, when she came to my house I asked her what she wanted … not sweetly, and she said she wanted to ask me two questions. God forgive me, but I was crazy. I didn’t offer her a drink. I wouldn’t even sit down. She is old, Sistah, and I still stood looking down on her.” Comfort shook her head, wanting not to believe her own rudeness. She continued.
“She was wearing an old mourning cloth; she said, ‘My first question is, do you know what love costs?’ And I told her,” Comfort crossed her hands atop her head,
“I am not a market woman, so I do not think of everything in money terms. Then she said, ‘My last question is, are you ready to pay anything for love?’ A spell must have been on me then, because I lost all my training. I talked. I raised my voice. I said I wasn’t so old and ugly I had to buy love, and I felt sorry for anybody who had to do so.
“Then I made my biggest mistake, because she stood up and said, ‘You feel sorry for the person who bought love? Is that true?’ She was looking at my mouth, and I laughed and chipsed. Sistah, I sucked my teeth at that woman. Even I can’t believe I did that. The old woman wrapped her mourning cloth tight around her and said, ‘You will lose. You will lose all,’ and then she walked out of my house. Oooh, and Sistah, see me now? The man will not come to me. My flesh is falling away. Do your people have medicine? Power medicine?”
I asked her if she had seen a doctor, and she shook her head, “European doctors have nothing to help my condition. Don’t you Black Americans have medicine?”
Many Black-owned newspapers in the United States carried announcements in the classified sections of magic practitioners.
Get your man back!
High John the Conqueror Roots
No one I knew admitted to using their services.
I had to tell Comfort that my people had no reliable medicine except that they had learned in school.
She said she had been to many African doctors and found no one able to move the terrible curse. She had even spent a week in Larteh, a town which hosts hundreds of practitioners, but had had no success. Her last hope was to travel to another country.
“Sistah, I have heard of a woman in Sierra Leone. She is very very good. I must go and stay two weeks, cleansing myself, and then she will see me. I must pay her in pure gold.”