by Maya Angelou
“Good evening, you all surprised me. Sure did. Didn’t expect to see you. Sure didn’t.”
Mother walked toward him holding money in her hand.
“Who did you expect? Queen Victoria?”
“No. No, ma’am. I mean … Our people … in here … It’s kinda new seeing us … and everything.”
“This is for you.” She gave him the tip. “We are just ordinary guests in the hotel. Thank you and good night.” She opened the door and waited. When he walked out mumbling good night, she closed the door with finality.
“Mom, you were almost rude.”
“Well, baby, I figure like this. He’s colored and I’m colored, but we are not cousins. Let’s have a drink.” She smiled.
During the next two days, Mother showed me off to some old card-playing friends she had known twenty years earlier.
“This is my baby. She’s been to Egypt, all around Milan, Italy, and Spain and Yugoslavia. She’s a singer and dancer, you know.” When her friends were satisfactorily impressed with my accomplishments, Mother made certain of their wonder by adding, “Of course, I’ll be shipping out myself in a few days.”
We hugged in the empty lobby of the Desert Hotel; the convention had ended the day before our departure.
“Take care of yourself. Take care of your son, and remember New York City is just like Fresno. Just more of the same people in bigger buildings. Black folks can’t change because white folks won’t change. Ask for what you want and be prepared to pay for what you get.” She kissed me and her voice softened to a whisper. “Let me leave first, baby. I hate to see the back of someone I love.”
We embraced again and I watched her walk, hips swaying, into the bright street.
—
Back at home I collected myself and called Guy, who responded by coming into the living room and then walking back to lean against the doorjamb.
“Guy, I want to talk to you. Please sit down.” At this stage, he never sat if he could stand, towering above the boredom of life. He sat, obviously to pacify me.
“Guy, we’re going to move.” Aha, a flicker of interest in his eyes, which he quickly controlled.
“Again? Okay. I can pack in twenty minutes. I’ve timed myself.” I held on to the natural wince that struggled to surface.
In his nine years of schooling, we had lived in five areas of San Francisco, three townships in Los Angeles, New York City, Hawaii and Cleveland, Ohio. I followed the jobs, and against the advice of a pompous school psychologist, I had taken Guy along. The psychologist had been white, obviously educated and with those assets I knew he was also well-to-do. How could he know what a young Negro boy needed in a racist world?
When the money was plentiful, we lived in swank hotels and called room service. At other times we stayed in boardinghouses. I strung sheets as room dividers, and cooked our favorite food illegally on a two-burner hot plate. Because we moved so often, Guy had little chance to make or keep friends, but we were together and generally we had laughed a lot. Now that post-puberty had laid claim to him, our friendly badinage was gone and I was menacing him with one more move.
“This is the last time. Last time, I think.”
His face said he didn’t believe me.
“We’re going to New York City.” His eyes lit up again and just as quickly dulled.
“I want to leave Saturday. John and Grace Killens are looking for an apartment for us. I’ll stay with them and in two weeks you’ll join me. Is that all right?” Parent power becomes so natural, only children notice it. I wasn’t really asking his permission. He knew it and didn’t answer.
“I thought I’d ask Ray if he’d like to stay in the house with you for two weeks. Just to be company for you. That O.K. with you?”
“That’s perfectly all right, Mother.” He stood up. He was so long, his legs seemed to start just at his arm sockets. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Thus he ended our unsatisfactory family chat. I still had to speak to my gentleman friend.
As we sat close in the morning’s sunshine, Ray’s handsome yellow face was as usual in benign repose.
“I’m leaving Saturday for New York.”
“Oh? Got a contract?”
“No. Not yet.”
“I don’t think that I’d like to face New York without a contract …”
Here it was.
“Just Guy and I are going. We’re going to stay.”
His whole body jumped, the muscles began to skitter around his face. For the first time I thought that maybe he cared for me. I watched him command his body. After long minutes his fists fell open, the long fingers relaxed and his lips lost their hardened ridges.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
He consented to stay in the house and send Guy to me in two weeks. After, he might take the house himself, otherwise he would close it. Of course, we would remain friends.
CHAPTER 2
John and Grace Killens lived with their two children and his mother in a roomy brownstone in Brooklyn. They accepted me as if I were a friend returning from a long journey. John met me at the door. “Girl, you finally got out of the country. Kick the mud off your shoes, come inside and make yourself at home.”
Grace was quieter. “Welcome to New York. I’m glad you came.”
Their hospitality was casual, without the large gestures that often discomfort a guest. The first days of my stay were filled with learning the house and studying the personalities of its inhabitants. John genuinely enjoyed being passionate. He was good-looking, and his dark-brown eyes in a light-brown face could alternately smolder or pierce. He talked animatedly, waving his hands as if offering them as gifts to his listeners.
Grace was pretty and petite, but she never allowed John’s success or the fact that she was his great love interfere with independent thought.
John’s mother, Mom Willie, who wore her Southern background like a magnolia corsage, eternally fresh, was robust and in her sixties. She was one of the group of black women who had raised their children, worked hard, fought for her principles and still retained some humor. She often entranced the family with graphic stories set in a sullen, racist South. The tales changed, the plots varied; her villains were always white and her heroes upstanding, courageous, clever blacks.
Barbara, the younger of the Killens children, was a bright tomboy who spoke fast and darted around the house like a cinnamon-colored wind. Her brother, Jon, larger and more gentle, moved slowly, spoke seldom and seemed to have been burdened with the responsibility of pondering the world’s imponderables.
Everyone except Jon, whose nickname was Chuck, talked incessantly, and although I enjoyed the exchange, I found the theme inexplicably irritating. They excoriated white men, white women, white children and white history, particularly as it applied to black people.
I had spent my life on city front steps, in country backyards, kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, joining in and listening to the conversations of black people, but I had never heard so much attention given to the subject of whites.
Of course, in Arkansas, when I was young, black children knowing that whites owned the cotton gin, the lumber mill, the fine houses and paved streets, had to find something which they thought whites did not possess. This need to have something all one’s own coincided with the burgeoning interest in sex. The children sang, beyond the ears of adults and wistfully:
“Whites folks ain’t got the hole …
And they ain’t got the pole …
And they ain’t got the soul …
To do it right … real right … All night.”
In the ensuing years in California the jokes came scarcer and the jobs grew meaner. Anger was always present whenever the subject of whites entered our conversations. We discussed the treatment of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the large humiliations and the petty snubs we all knew were meant to maim our spirits. I had heard white folks ridiculed, cursed and envied, but I had never
heard them dominate the entire intimate conversation of a black family.
In the Killens’ home, if entertainment was mentioned, someone would point out that Harry Belafonte, a close family friend, was working with a South African singer, Miriam Makeba, and South Africa was really no different from South Philly. If the West Indies or religion or fashion entered the conversation, in minutes we were persistently examining the nature of racial oppression, racial progress and racial integration.
I fretted at the unrelenting diatribe, not because I disagreed but because I didn’t think whites interesting enough to consume all my thoughts, nor powerful enough to control all my movements.
I found an apartment in the Killens’ neighborhood. I spent the days painting the two bedrooms and sprucing up the furniture I bought in secondhand stores, and returned each night to sleep at the Killens’ house.
One evening after the rest of the family had gone to bed, I sat up having a nightcap with John. I asked why he was so angry all the time. I told him that while I agreed with Alabama blacks who boycotted bus companies and protested against segregation, California blacks were thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from those Southern plagues.
“Girl, don’t you believe it. Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you’re black in this country, you’re on a plantation. You have to deal with masters. There might be some argument over whether they are vicious masters, but be assured that they all think they are masters … And if they think that, then you’d better believe they think you are the slave. Maybe a smart slave, a pretty slave, a good slave, but a slave just the same.”
I reminded John that I had spent a year in New York, but he countered, “You were a dancer. Dancers don’t see anything except other dancers. They don’t see; they exist to be seen. This time you should look at New York with a writer’s eyes, ears and nose. Then you’ll really see New York.”
John was right. Seven years earlier, when I studied in New York, my attention was unequally distributed between the dance studio where I was studying on scholarship, my son and my first, disintegrating marriage. Truly I had had neither the time nor mind to learn New York.
John’s eyes were blazing, and although I was his only audience, he was as intense as if he were speaking to a filled room.
“I tell you what to do. Go to Manhattan tomorrow. Go first to Times Square. You’ll see the same people you used to see in Arkansas. Their accents might be different, their dress might be different, but if they are American whites, they’re all Southern crackers. Then go to Harlem. Harlem is the largest plantation in this country. You’ll see lawyers in three-piece suits, real estate brokers in mink coats, pimps in white Cadillacs, but they’re all sharecropping. Sharecropping on a mean plantation.”
I intended to see Harlem with John’s advice in mind, but Guy arrived before I had the opportunity. I picked him up at the airport, and when he walked into the house I saw that he was already too large for the living room. We had been separated a month and he seemed to have grown two inches taller and years away from me. He looked at the hastily painted white walls and the Van Gogh prints I had chosen and matted.
“It’s O.K. It looks like every other house we’ve lived in.”
I wanted to slap him. “Well, it’s a little better than the street.”
“Oh, Mother, come now. That wasn’t necessary.” The superiority in his voice was an indication of how he had been hurt by our separation.
I grinned. “O.K. Sorry. How about the desk? You always said you wanted a big office desk. Do you like it?”
“Oh sure, but you know I wanted a desk when I was a little kid. Now …”
The air between us was burdened with his aloof scorn. I understood him too well.
When I was three my parents divorced in Long Beach, California, and sent me and my four-year-old brother, unescorted, to our paternal grandmother. We wore wrist tags which informed anyone concerned that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, en route to Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas.
Except for disastrous and mercifully brief encounters with each of them when I was seven, we didn’t see our parents again until I was thirteen.
Our reunion with Mother in California was a joyous festival, studded with tears, hugs and lipsticked kisses. Under and after the high spirits was my aching knowledge that she had spent years not needing us.
Now my angry son was wrestling with the same knowledge. We had been apart less than a month—he had stayed an unwelcome guest in his own home, while I had gloried in every day of our separation.
He covered the hurt with a look of unconcern, but I knew his face better than my own. Each fold, every plane, the light or shadow in his eyes had been objects of my close scrutiny. He had been born to me when I was an unmarried adventurous seventeen-year-old; we had grown up together. Since he was fatherless most of his fourteen years, the flash of panic in his eyes was exchanged for scorn whenever I brought a new man into our lives. I knew the relief when he discovered the newcomer cared for me and respected him. I recognized the confusion that changed his features each time the man packed to leave. I understood the unformed question. “She made him leave. What will she do if I displease her too?” He remained standing, hands in his pockets, waiting for me to convince him of the stability of my love. Words were useless.
“Your school is three blocks away, and there’s a large park almost as nice as the one on Fulton Street.”
At the mention of the San Francisco park where we picnicked and he learned to ride a bike, a tiny smile tried to cross his face, but he quickly took control and sent the smile away.
“… and you liked the Killens children. Well, they live around the corner.”
He nodded and spoke like an old man. “Lots of people are different when they’re visiting than when they’re at home. I’ll see if they’re the same in New York as they were in California.”
Youthful cynicism is sad to observe, because it indicates not so much knowledge learned from bitter experiences as insufficient trust even to attempt the future.
“Guy, you know I love you, and I try to be a good mother. I try to do the right thing, but I’m not perfect”—his silence agreed—“I hope you’ll remember whenever I’ve done something that hurts you that I do love you and it’s not my intention …”
He was studying my face, listening to the tone of my voice.
“Mom …” I relaxed a little. “Mother” was formal, cold, disapproving. “Mom” meant closeness, forgiveness.
“Mom, I know. I know you do the best you can. And I’m not really angry. It’s just that Los Angeles …”
“Did Ray do anything … mistreat you?”
“Oh no, Mom. He moved about a week after you left.”
“You mean you lived alone?”
Shock set my body into furious action. Every normal function accelerated. Tears surfaced and clouded my vision. Guy lost half his age and suddenly he again was a little boy of seven who slept with a butcher’s knife under his pillow one summer at camp. What did he slip under his pillow in Los Angeles while I partied safely in New York?
“My baby. Oh honey, why didn’t you tell me when I phoned? I would have come back.”
Now his was the soothing voice. “You were trying to find a job and a house. I wasn’t afraid.”
“But Guy, you’re only fourteen. Suppose something had happened to you?”
He stood silent and looked at me, evaluating my distress. Suddenly, he crossed the room and stopped beside my chair. “Mom, I’m a man. I can look after myself. Don’t worry. I’m young, but I’m a man.” He stood, bent and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m going to change the furniture around. I want my desk facing the window.” He walked down the hall.
The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion. She questions whether she loves her children enough—or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment—or even more t
errifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her. If she is unmarried, the challenges are increased. Her singleness indicates she has rejected, or has been rejected by her mate. Yet she is raising children who will become mates. Beyond her door, all authority is in the hands of people who do not look or think or act like her and her children. Teachers, doctors, sales clerks, librarians, policemen, welfare workers are white and exert control over her family’s moods, conditions and personality; yet within the home, she must display a right to rule which at any moment, by a knock at the door, or a ring of the telephone can be exposed as false. In the face of these contradictions, she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.
“Hey, Mom, come and see.”
Every piece of furniture was in a new place, and the room looked exactly the same.
“Like it? After dinner, I’ll play you a game of Scrabble. Where is the dictionary? What are we having for dinner? Does the television work? Gee, I’m famished.”
My son was home and we were a family again.
—
The Harlem Writers Guild was meeting at John’s house, and my palms were sweating and my tongue was thick. The loosely formed organization, without dues or membership cards, had one strict rule: any invited guest could sit in for three meetings, but thereafter, the visitor had to read from his or her work in progress. My time had come.
Sarah Wright and Sylvester Leeks stood in a corner talking softly. John Clarke was staring at titles in the bookcase. Mary Delany and Millie Jordan were giving their coats to Grace and exchanging greetings. The other writers were already seated around the living room in a semicircle.
John Killens walked past me, touching my shoulder, took his seat and called the meeting to order.
“O.K., everybody. Let’s start.” Chairs scraped the floor and the sounds reverberated in my armpits. “As you know, our newest member, our California singer, is going to read from her new play. What’s the title, Maya?”