by Maya Angelou
A smile struck her face like lightning when I told her I had retrieved my son and we were ready to come home. There was a glaze over her eyes. It was unnerving. My mother was anything, everything, but sentimental. I admired how quickly she pulled her old self back in charge. Typically she asked only direct questions.
“How long will you all stay this time?”
“Until I can get a house for us.”
“That sounds good. Your room is pretty much as you left it and Clyde can have the little room in back.”
I decided that a little bragging was in order. “I’ve been working at the record shop on Fillmore and the people down there gave me a raise. I’ll pay rent to you and help with the food.”
“How much are they paying you?”
When I told her, she quickly worked out a percentage. “O.K. You pay me that amount and buy a portion of food every week.”
I handed her some cash. She counted it carefully. “All right, this is a month’s rent. I’ll remember.”
She handed the money back to me. “Take this downtown and buy yourself some clothes.”
I hesitated.
“This is a gift, not a loan. You should know I don’t do business slipshod.”
To Vivian Baxter business was business, and I was her daughter; one thing did not influence the other.
“You know that I’m no baby-sitter, but Poppa Ford is still with me looking after the house. He can keep an eye on Clyde. Of course you ought to give him a little something every week. Not as much as you pay the baby-sitters, but something. Remember, you may not always get what you pay for, but you will definitely pay for what you get.”
“Yes, Mother.” I was home.
For months life was a pleasure ring and we walked safely inside its perimeter. My son was in school, reading very well, and encouraged by me, drifting into a love affair with books. He was healthy. The old fears that I would leave him were dissolving. I read Thorne Smith to him and recited Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems in a thick Black Southern accent.
On an evening walk along Fillmore, Clyde and I heard loud shouting and saw a group of people crowded around a man on the corner across the street. We stopped where we were to listen.
“Lord, we your children. We come to you just like newborn babies. Silver and gold have we none. But O Lord!”
Clyde grabbed my hand and started to pull me in the opposite direction.
“Come on, Mom. Come on.”
I bent down to him. “Why?”
“That man is crazy.” Distaste wrinkled his little face.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s shouting in the street like that.”
I stooped to my son giving no attention to the passers-by. “That’s one of the ways people praise God. Some praise in church, some in the streets and some in their hearts.”
“But Mom, is there really a God? And what does He do all the time?”
The question deserved a better answer than I could think of in the middle of the street. I said, “We’ll talk about that later, but now let’s go over and listen. Think of the sermon as a poem and the singing as great music.”
He came along and I worked my way through the crowd so he could have a clear view. The antics of the preacher and the crowd’s responses embarrassed him. I was stunned. I had grown up in a Christian Methodist Episcopal Church where my uncle was superintendent of Sunday School, and my grandmother was Mother of the Church. Until I was thirteen and left Arkansas for California, each Sunday I spent a minimum of six hours in church. Monday evenings Momma took me to Usher Board Meeting; Tuesdays the Mothers of the Church met; Wednesday was for prayer meeting; Thursday, the Deacons congregated; Fridays and Saturdays were spent in preparation for Sunday. And my son asked me if there was a God. To whom had I been praying all my life?
That night I taught him “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”
CHAPTER 2
My life was an assemblage of strivings and my energies were directed toward acquiring more than the basic needs. I was as much a part of the acquisitive, security-conscious fifties as the quiet young white girls who lived their pastel Peter Pan-collared days in clean, middle-class neighborhoods. In the Black communities, girls, whose clothes struck with gay colors and whose laughter crinkled the air, flashed streetwise smirks and longed for one picket fence. We startled with our overt flirtations and dreamed of being “one man’s woman.” We found ourselves too often unmarried, bearing lonely pregnancies and wishing for two and a half children each who would gurgle happily behind that picket fence while we drove our men to work in our friendly-looking station wagons.
I had loved one man and dramatized my losing him with all the exaggerated wailing of a wronged seventeen-year-old. I had wanted others in a ferocious desperation, believing that marriage would give me a world free from danger, disease and want.
In the record store, I lived fantasy lives through the maudlin melodies of the forties and fifties.
“You’d be so nice to come home to.”
Whoever you were.
“I’m walking by the river
’cause I’m meeting someone there tonight.”
Anyone—that is, anyone taller than I and who wanted to get married. To me. Billy Eckstine sang,
“Our little dream castle with everything gone
Is lonely and silent, the shades are all drawn
My heart is heavy as I gaze upon
A cottage for sale.”
That was my house and it was vacant. If Mr. Right would come along right now, soon we could move in and truly begin to live.
—
Louise Cox and her mother were practicing Christian Scientists. I accepted an invitation to visit their church. The interior’s severity, the mass of quiet, well-dressed whites and the lack of emotion unsettled me. I took particular notice of the few Blacks in the congregation. They appeared as soberly affluent and emotionally reserved as their fellow white parishioners. I had known churches to be temples where one made “a joyful noise unto the Lord” and quite a lot of it.
In the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the congregation wordlessly praised the Almighty. No stamping of feet or clapping of hands accompanied the worship. For the whole service, time seemed suspended and reality was just beyond the simple and expensive heavy doors.
—
“Did you like it?”
We sat in Louise’s kitchen, eating her mother’s homemade-from-scratch biscuits.
“I don’t know. I didn’t understand it.”
After a year of relentless observation, I trusted her to think me unexposed, rather than ignorant.
Her mother gave me a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. I began to wrestle with new concepts.
The tough texture of poverty in my life had been more real than sand wedged between my teeth, yet Mary Baker Eddy encouraged me to think myself prosperous. Every evening I went home to a fourteen-room house where my son and seventy-five-year-old Poppa Ford awaited my arrival. Mother usually was out dining with friends, drinking with acquaintances or gambling with strangers. Had she been there, her presence would not have greatly diminished my loneliness. My brother, who had been my ally, my first friend, had left home and closed himself to me. We had found safety in numbers when we were young, but adulthood had severed the bonds and we drifted apart over deep and dangerous seas, unanchored.
In Mother’s house, after dinner, I would read my son to sleep and return to the kitchen. Most often, the old man dreamt over an outsized cup of heavily sugared coffee. I would watch his aged ivory face, wrinkled under ghostly memories, then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire.
Science and Health told me I was never alone. “There is no place God is not.” But I couldn’t make the affirmation real for me.
—
The sailor wandered around the store. He was reading the bulletins and scanning the posters. His dark hair and oval, sensual face reminded me of Italian Renaissance p
aintings. It was strange to see a white military man in the Black area in broad daylight. I decided that he had gotten lost. He walked to the counter.
“Good morning.”
“Have you got ‘Cheers’?”
Maybe he wasn’t lost, just found himself in our neighborhood and decided to buy some records. “Cheers”? I thought of all the white singers—Jo Stafford, Helen O’Connell, Margaret Whiting, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Bob Crosby, Bing Crosby and Bob Eberle. Tex Beneke. None had recorded a song entitled “Cheers.” I ran my mind over Anita O’Day, Mel Tormé, June Christy. No “Cheers” there. He had looked like a vocal man, but then maybe he was looking for a white Big Band instrumental. Stan Kenton, Neal Hefti, Billy May. No “Cheers” in their catalogs.
“I don’t know if we have it. Who cut it?” I smiled. “Cut it” showed that I was so much a part of the record business that I wouldn’t say “Who recorded it?”
The man looked at me and said dryly, “Charlie Parker.”
Although I lived in a large city, in truth I lived in a small town within that city’s preserves. The few whites I knew who were aware of Charlie Parker were my brother’s friends and were wrapped away from me in a worldly remoteness. I stumbled to get the record. When I shucked the jacket off he said, “You don’t have to play it.” He went on, “I’ll take ‘Well You Needn’t’ by Thelonius Monk and ‘Night in Tunisia’ by Dizzy Gillespie.”
My brain didn’t want to accept the burden of my ears. Was that a white man talking? I looked to see if maybe he was a Creole. Many Negroes from the bayou country could and did pass for white. They, too, had hank-straight black hair, dark eyes and shell-cream skin.
There was nothing like a straight question: “Are you from Louisiana?”
“No, I’m from Portland.”
There is a textured grain that colors the Black voice which was missing when he spoke. I wrapped his selections and he paid for them and left. I wondered that he had been neither amiable nor rude and that he didn’t remind me of anyone I’d ever met.
My two employers and Louise’s handsome friend, Fred E. Pierson, cabdriver and painter, were the only whites I knew, liked and partially understood. When I met Fred, his friendliness had caused my old survival apparatus to begin meshing its gears. I suspected him (perhaps hopefully) of being personally (which meant romantically) interested in me. He helped me to paint the seven downstairs rooms at Mother’s house and told me of his great and sad and lost love affair and that he liked having me for a friend.
The next weekend the sailor returned. He browsed for a while, then came to the counter and interrupted my preoccupation with papers.
“Hi.”
I looked up as if startled. “Hello.”
“Have you any Dexter Gordon?”
“Yes, ‘Dexter’s Blues’.” Another Negro musician.
“I’ll take that.”
I asked, “How about a Dave Brubeck?”
“No. Thanks, anyway.” Brubeck was white. “But anything by Prez? Do you have ‘Lester Leaps in’?”
“Yes.”
He waited. “Do you know of any jam sessions around here?”
“Oh, you’re a musician.” That would explain it. Members from the large white jazz orchestras visited Black after-hours joints. They would ask to sit in on the jam sessions. Black musicians often refused, saying, “The white boys come, smoke up all the pot, steal the chord changes, then go back to their good paying jobs and keep us Black musicians out of the union.”
He said, “No, I just like jazz. My name is Tosh. What’s yours?”
“Marguerite. What kind of name is Tosh?”
“It’s Greek for Thomas—Enistasious. The short of it is Tosh. Are there any good jazz clubs here? Any place to meet some groovy people?”
There was Jimbo’s, a blue-lighted basement where people moved in the slow-motion air like denizens of a large aquarium, floating effortlessly in their own element.
Ivonne and I went to the night spot as often as possible. She would take money from her catering business and I from my savings; we would put on our finest clothes, and hiding behind dignified façades, enter the always crowded room. Unfortunately, our attitudes were counterproductive. We projected ourselves as coolly indifferent and distant, but the blatant truth was we were out to find any handsome, single, intelligent, interested men.
I told Tosh I didn’t know of any places like that in my neighborhood. When he left the store, I was certain he’d find his way to the downtown area, where he would be more welcome.
Louise continued encouraging me toward Christian Science. I gingerly poked into its precepts, unwilling to immerse myself in the depths because, after all, Christian Science was an intellectual religion and the God its members worshiped seemed to me all broth and no bones. The God of my childhood was an old, white, Vandyck-bearded Father Time, who roared up thunder, then puffed out His cheeks and blew down hurricanes on His errant children. He could be placated only if one fell prostrate, groveled and begged for mercy. I didn’t like that God, but He did seem more real than a Maker who was just thought and spirit. I wished for a Someone in between.
Louise’s partner was Jewish, so I spoke to him of my need and asked him about Judaism. He smiled until he sensed my seriousness, then said he attended Beth Emanu-El. He told me that there was a new rabbi who was very young and extremely modern. A Black singer had recorded “Eli Eli” and I listened to the song carefully. The beautiful high melodies and the low moaning sounded very close to the hymns of my youth. It was just possible that Judaism was going to answer my need. The Torah couldn’t be as foreign as Science and Health.
For hundreds of years, the Black American slaves had seen the parallels between their oppression and that of the Jews in Biblical times.
Go down Moses
Way down in Egypt land
Tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go.
The Prophets of Israel inhabited our songs:
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?
Then why not every man?
Ezekiel saw the wheel, up in the middle of the air.
Little David play on your harp.
The Hebrew children in the fiery furnace elicited constant sympathy from the Black community because our American experience mirrored their ancient tribulation. With that familiarity, I figured Judaism was going to be a snap!
Beth Emanu-El looked like a Tyrone Power movie set. Great arches of salmon-pink rose over a Moorish courtyard. Well-dressed children scuttled from shul and down the wide stairs.
I explained to a receptionist that I wanted to speak to Rabbi Fine.
“Why?” Her question really was, What are you doing within my hallowed halls? She repeated, “Why?”
“I want to talk to him about Judaism.”
She picked up the phone and spoke urgently.
“This way.” Stiff-legged and stiff-backed, she guided me to the end of a hall. Her gaze rested on me for a still second before she opened the door.
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.