I found myself one of the crowd and saw folks I’d known from my early years of theater reviewing and career as a fledgling journalist. George Faison and his partner, T, were regulars. George was a dancer extraordinaire who years ago had choreographed The Wiz and garnered awards including a Tony and an Emmy, before becoming an impresario at the Faison Firehouse Theatre in Harlem. Marcia Gillespie had been editor in chief of Essence when I began there and then moved on to helm Ms. magazine and continue to influence a generation. Howard Dodson, with his ever-present cowrie shell pin decorating his lapel, was head of the Schomburg Center and another regular. Most important, there were Louise Meriwether and Rosa Guy and Helen Brodie Baldwin, Jimmy’s sister-in-law and Lover’s widow. It was like old home week the first time I went and refound acquaintances I hadn’t seen since my Sam Floyd years. There were new faces as well: Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, whose music had been the background music for much of my youth, were stalwarts and among Maya’s adopted extended family, as were numerous other notables. I found that I savored the jaunts; they became my way of beginning the year Janus-like, looking backward to look forward.
Over time, I got comfortable enough (or consumed enough red wine) to compare rings with Nick Ashford, who admired my antique black cameo collection. I shared the name of my antique jewelry dealer; he could afford the habit more than I. I brought guests with permission, sharing my very famous friend with some of my other friends and letting her know how my life had expanded. Haroldo and Mary Costa from Brazil attended one year, and Haroldo, who had been the original Orfeu in the play that would go on to become the film Orfeu and Eurydice, was so impressed with Maya that he still speaks of it years later. At one party, I was bold enough to sit on the piano bench alongside Valerie Simpson and caterwaul a few of what I hoped were on-key notes. I enjoyed the time I spent at the house on 120th Street.
On occasion, it seemed that nothing had changed and as though Jimmy might be around the corner in another room enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, his hands fluttering like hummingbirds while he explained the ways of the world to some young votary, or Sam might dance in waving a beaker of Johnnie Walker and wafting a cloud of Chanel Pour Homme. But the crowd had changed and the focus had shifted. Angelou was now firmly the center of the orbit. Paule had moved on, but Louise and Rosa were still there (until 2012 when Rosa died). At times it almost seemed that despite Maya’s worldwide fame and considerably increased fortune, little had changed in the pecking order. We had all aged, but we had all aged in sequence; I remained twenty years younger than Maya and younger than Louise, Rosa, and Paule by exactly the same distance that had existed in the 1970s. I was still the kid, the youngest of that bunch despite my gray hair and widening waist.
• • •
After our initial reconnection and my attendance at the New Year’s Day festivities, other offers of hospitality were proffered. There was one Super Bowl party Maya gave where she had purchased souvenir jerseys of the teams for her guests and we sat around discussing everything but football. The television was playing downstairs, in another part of the house, but most folks could have cared less about the game.
I especially enjoyed going in the evenings when there was no one else there so that I basically spent time with Maya and Ms. Stuckey, whom Maya unfailingly introduced as Ms. Stuckey with her insistence on formality. She’s always made a point of presenting people and especially anyone who might be conceived of as being in a subordinate position—housekeepers, cooks, companions, secretaries, drivers, and others—as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. I suspected that it was more than southern formality. It was a very real reaction to having grown up in the South and watched so many of her elders being called “out of their names” and disrespectfully by their first names for so many years. Through that, I also understood just why she insisted on being called Dr. Angelou and why she bridled when people she did not know well called her Maya. The honorific was always required and always used even by her closest friends. I, somehow, called her Maya, and I believe I was allowed to do so in acknowledgment of when I had entered her life those four decades prior, when she was still just Maya.
On our solo evenings, we talked about all manner of things. I savored the company, our developing closeness, and the connection to the past and began to visit when she was in town and share thoughts with her. We were still guarded and tentative with a respect for each other’s feelings. There remained something unspoken between us—a fragile thread that was our different links to Sam and our unspoken and yet shared knowledge of things that had transpired all those decades prior.
In truth, Maya was still Maya, and I was still stubborn. On one of our evenings, Maya discovered my continuing grief over my mother’s death. I retained Mom’s voice on my answering machine at my office; I’d discovered the message after her death. I’d call in every two weeks from wherever I was (often at great expense if I was in West Africa or the Caribbean) just to hear her voice and her sign-off of the conversation, “God be with you!” Deciding that it was excessive and wanting to help me through the grief, Maya offered to stay with me while I deleted the message. I demurred and kept it, allowing it to fade organically from my life several years later.
Another evening she surprised me by saying out of the blue, “You know, Jessica, it is all right to have loved a gay man!” Gay man? Sam? You, my elder sister, knew and you didn’t tell me? You didn’t shepherd me through the danger-water time that occurred after he died from AIDS? There were too many dragons in that closet to even think of opening the door, and that conversation never continued, changing rapidly to some banal subject that was safer ground for us both. I always wonder what the outcome would have been if we’d been brave enough to have had a longer conversation. Confession? Apology? Commiseration? We did cross a line that evening, one that brought us closer despite the lack of intimate conversation.
On occasion Maya would reach out to me, calling to ask for a recipe (ginger beer was one special request). We even did one of her Sirius radio shows together and spent an hour gleefully sharing our love of food and cooking like two best friends talking over a back fence. We shared a love for New Orleans, but she visited infrequently because of her allergy to fish, which kept her in fear of the restaurants in the city, where virtually everything is prepared with crabmeat, crawfish, or shrimp. As one who is allergic to shellfish, I could sympathize and empathize and became deputized to find some places where she would be able to sample the other side of the city’s food. When we both happened to be in New Orleans at the same time—she’d always let me know when she was going to be in town—I’d try to be there and she’d call. Often it was with a small request like asking me to search for a book of her poems that she wished to read from or join her for dinner or recommend a restaurant where she might be able to get a meal that was not cooked near seafood. It was her way of staying in touch.
It was in New Orleans after a meal that she told me in confidence about the aches and pains of her dancer’s knees. They plagued her but were inoperable because of a lung condition that meant it was unwise for her to consider anesthesia. This was confided on a walk to the ladies’ room at a hotel in New Orleans prior to a lecture she’d be giving. At a later point, again in New Orleans, she let me know she’d be heading out immediately after the lecture because her lung issue had become so difficult, she could not be without her oxygen machine for more than one hour. Her lectures were timed to the nanosecond. Following her last word, despite lavish applause and standing ovations, she would be escorted off the stage and immediately return to her breathing apparatus. Hindsight lets me know that she was increasingly allowing me into her confidence and reattaching me to her and through her to that circle of friends.
On the last trip to New Orleans where I joined her, she arrived in town in splendor, riding on the bus that Oprah had given her. It made things much easier, and the lavish accommodations were as comfortable as any hotel could have possibly been. She graciously allowed me to bring a guest, this time Dani
lle Taylor, then dean of humanities at Dillard University, where I was the inaugural scholar in the Ray Charles Chair in African American Material Culture (a position that I knew Sam, with his love of HBCUs, would have been proud to see me accept). We shared drinks and marveled at the bus’s comfort: bathtub, bedrooms, sleeping area for two drivers so that they could spell each other and never have to stop. It was a setting fit for the empress of popular literature that she’d become. I brought along cheese straws prepared for her by a friend’s daughter in fish-free surroundings, and we shared our usual conviviality.
Along with New Year’s festivities in New York, Maya also gave a magnificent Thanksgiving celebration in Winston-Salem, where her main house was located. There, she’d entertain as many as two hundred people at dinner, pulling out all of the stops and creating an event that turned into a weekend extravaganza, complete with organized manicures and facials for the women, church services on Sunday for all attendees, and, of course, a lavish Thanksgiving dinner for all. Although I was invited on several occasions, tangential seemed to be the best place for me. I do not like hordes of people, and my relationship with Maya seemed to flourish best on a one-on-one basis. I’d been invited to Winston-Salem at other times of the year, but I’d always demurred, knowing that there was still unspoken conversation between us and things that needed straightening out. Finally, I also knew that Maya still drank with the same quiet, ferocious determination that marked everything she did, and I didn’t want to be caught alone in the house with her if the liquor started to speak. So I continued to go to the New Year’s Day parties, becoming a bit of a regular. I even met Guy, Maya’s son; I’d not met him during the Sam Floyd years.
One year though, I’d arrived and timidly headed to my usual spot in the dining room on the perimeter of the round table where I could be near Maya and also Louise and Rosa. Guy, who was there as well and did not know me, was getting ready to say something about my presence at the table, when quietly, with her usual control and grace, Maya told him that I in fact did belong at the table. She informed him how long I’d known her and insisted that I join the crowd of elders at her large circular table, the focal point of her festivities. There, looking around at Rosa, Louise, and Maya and thinking of the years we’d known one another and the roads that had been taken, I marveled at the distance that we’d traveled separately together.
Gradually I came to feel myself to be a regular in Maya’s circle, but my illusions of being a real part of the crowd were squelched one year. Having journeyed from New Orleans in time to make what had become the annual party. Intuition kicked in, and I thought, or as Maya would have put it, “my Toby hunched me,” that before embarking on the fifty-dollar taxi ride that would take me to Harlem, I’d better call, as I’d heard from no one. I called and got no answer. Well, that just might mean that the house was full and no one heard the phone, but after three or four calls, I realized that something was up. I searched my phone and realized that I had George Faison’s number and called him. I was gob-smacked when he said they were not in Harlem at all but had decided that year to go to Florida and were basking beside the pool in Miami.
I spent that New Year’s Day by myself in New York and made my black-eyed peas, collards, and pork dinner from the just-in-case set of leftovers that I keep in my freezer. (I’d rather have stale frozen leftovers than challenge the gods by not having my Hoppin’ John, greens, and pig on New Year’s Day.) After that, I extended my New Orleans stay to include festivities with friends in that town and said good-bye to the New Year’s Day parties. It was now over for sure, or so I thought.
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* * *
Maya Angelou’s New Year’s Kale
Greens are traditional on African American New Year’s tables. If Hoppin’ John means luck, the greens are for folding money. The type of greens is not specified and different families have their own traditions. My family went with collards, so that’s what I crave on January first. In her cookbook Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, Maya Angelou gave us her recipe for collard greens. It uses turkey wings. However, according to her personal assistant of many years, Lydia Stuckey, she preferred the taste of kale and usually served kale at her expansive table on New Year’s Day—and she prepared it with a ham hock. It was not your healthy kale that is currently of the moment, but a down-home rendition of a holiday classic. The non-swine-eating folks didn’t mind in the least; there were so many other dishes in her lavish spread and plenty of delights for them to savor.
– Serves four –
1 meaty ham hock
4 pounds fresh kale, picked over and cleaned, with the tough center stem removed
2 medium onions, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon minced hot red chiles, or to taste
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Hot sauce, to taste
Vinegar, to taste
Place the ham hock in water to cover, bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 11/2 hours. Add the kale, half of the chopped onions, the chiles, salt, pepper, and more water, if needed and continue to cook until the ham hock is falling off the bone and the greens are done. Serve with the hot sauce, vinegar, and the remaining chopped onions.
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Chapter Ten
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* * *
IT AIN’T OVER ’TIL IT’S OVER!
But even that was not the end of things. I had learned from Sam and Jimmy that “every good-bye ain’t gone and every shut eye ain’t sleep.” The saying is correct. It ain’t over until it’s over, and my time with Maya and the folks who remained in the circle of friends was not over as I thought it was.
After I stopped seeing Maya in Harlem, I was invited to keynote a conference at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in February 2014 and accepted gladly. Although I’m pretty good on distances and locations of most of the major cities in Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean, I’m more than a bit geographically challenged about locations in the United States. I was surprised, glancing in the airplane magazine on the flight down, to notice that Greensboro was not that far from Winston-Salem, where Maya had her primary residence. After a quick calculation with MapQuest, I realized that Winston-Salem was not really distant. It was the first time I’d spent a length of time in North Carolina, and I felt guilty at the prospect of being in the state and not trying to see Maya. The knowledge that we were proximate and, who knows, perhaps the sense that time was fading and that we needed to see each other made me pick up the phone. I called and, as she unfailingly did, she came to the phone and seemed delighted when I told her that I was in the vicinity and asked if I could visit. She sent Mr. Stanback, her driver, to pick me up at the hotel and bring me to her house. (To this day, I get into taxis in New York City and greet the astonished drivers with a good morning, afternoon, or evening before announcing where I’m headed. I used to add their name, Mr. So-and-So, before the print on the Taxi and Limousine Commission licenses got too small to read. It’s a lasting part of my training from Maya back in the day.)
Mr. Stanback negotiated the roads with studied skill, and in a little over an hour, we pulled through the gates of her home. This was home on another level—one where there were palpably deeper roots than in New York, with a softer, calmer color palette. House proud, Maya introduced me to her helpers and asked one of them to give me a tour, and I marveled at it all. Near the living room was the throne-like writing room. It was almost Shaker-like in its austerity, and dead center in the room, a high-backed, straight-backed chair sat at a small desk surrounded by four walls filled with books. There was little of the clutter and detritus of my own working environment, but rather a space that spoke of the iron discipline and steel will that got Maya there. The basement was a rabbit warren of rooms, each filled to overflowing with bookshelves on every available wall space that wasn’t filled with visually stunning art. Her pride was the home’s formal dining room and the enormous outdoor entertainment area in which she joyously
hosted a growing tribe of relatives and friends with frequency.
When I returned from the tour—glorious dining room, expansive living room, guest rooms, entertaining spaces, and an open kitchen like the one that I recalled from so many years ago in Sonoma—she was sitting at the head of the kitchen table, a stack of clipped New York Times crossword puzzles at her right hand with pen at the ready, a small pile of the books she was reading and a yellow pad of paper at her left, and a glass of scotch within reach. Although tethered to the oxygen machine that by then had been her constant for years, she was very much Maya: imperious and imperial—the phenomenal woman at home. I’d finally made it to Winston-Salem.
Increasingly over the years, we had bonded over our love of good food, good cooking, and the culture that is carried in it. I was therefore in no way surprised when in 2004 she wrote her first cookbook, and it mixed recipe and recounting. In print, it re-created the astonishing culinary performance I’d witnessed in Sonoma decades earlier. Knowing this, I’d taken her a signed copy of my friend Maricel Presilla’s award-winning cookbook, Gran Cocina Latina; she was delighted and not only intrigued by the dishes and their history, but looking forward to cooking from the book. She cooked recipes from all over the world—not only items from her vast collection of cookbooks but her own dishes created from loving the way that two ingredients combined, the way a spice set off a meat or vegetable, or simply the coordinated colors that they formed on the plate.
A gourmet without being a gourmand, she became conscious of weight in later years. I will always remember her advice on dieting: “I take a bite or two of something. Then I say to myself, ‘Now I know what that tastes like, I don’t have to devour it all.’ ” It’s excellent advice but requires amazing self-discipline, which she had in spades. Until the end, she retained a questing curiosity about culinary cultures. She’d traveled the world and retained many of its flavors in her taste buds. She especially excelled at traditional African American foods, the slow-cooked country foods of her youth; they were not just the soul-nourishing fare that she loved but also stood for tradition, history, and connectedness.
My Soul Looks Back Page 16