by Maya Angelou
The Blacks was a white foreigner’s idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man’s burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions.
Max Glanville called two days later.
“Maya, we want you in the play.” The play? I had jettisoned Genet and his ill-thought-out drama.
Glanville’s voice reached through the telephone. “There are two roles and we’re just not sure which one would suit you best. So we’d like you to come down and read for us.”
I thanked him but I said I didn’t think so and hung up. I reported the call to Vus only because it gave me a subject to introduce into dinner conversation. However, he jarred me by laughing. “Americans are either quite slow or terribly arrogant. They do not know or care that there is a world beyond their world, where tradition dictates action. No wife of an African leader can go on the stage.” He laughed again. “Can you imagine the wife of Martin King or Sobukwe or Malcolm X standing on a stage being examined by white men?” The unlikely picture made him shake his head. “No. No, you do not perform in public.”
I had already refused Glanville’s invitation, but Vus’s reaction sizzled in my thoughts. I was a good actress, not great but certainly competent. For years before I met Vus, my rent had been paid and my son and I had eaten and been clothed by money I made working on stages. When I gave Vus my body and loyalty I hadn’t included all the rights to my life. I felt no loyalty to The Blacks, since it had not earned my approval, yet I chafed under Vus’ attitude of total control. I said nothing.
Abbey had been asked to take a role in the play. I told her that Vus had said he wouldn’t allow me to. She said Max thought the play was important, and since Vus respected Max, maybe they ought to talk. Abbey hung up and in moments Max called, asking for my husband.
I heard Vus hang up the telephone in the living room. He walked into the kitchen. “I’m meeting Max for a conference.” Every meeting was a conference and each conversation a discussion of pith. I nodded, and kept on washing dishes.
Vus came home and asked for the manuscript. I recovered the play from the back of the closet and gave it to him. Guy and I played Scrabble on the dining-room table while Vus sat under a lamp in the living room. He would rise from time to time and pass through to the kitchen getting a fresh drink. Then he would return silently to the sofa and The Blacks.
Guy went off to bed. Vus still read. I knew he was going back and forth through the script. He hardly looked up when I said good night.
I was in a deep sleep when he shook me awake. “Maya. Wake up. I have to talk to you.” He sat on the side of the bed. The crumpled pages were spread out beside him.
“This play is great. If they still want you, you must do this play.” I came awake like my mother—immediately and entirely aware.
I said, “I don’t agree with the conclusion. Black people are not going to become like whites. Never.”
“Maya, you are so young, so, so young.” He patronized me as if I were the little shepherd girl and he the old man of Kilimanjaro.
“Dear Wife, that is a reverse racism. Black people are human. No more, no less. Our backgrounds, our history make us act differently.”
I grabbed a cigarette from the night stand, ready to jump into the discussion. I listed our respectfulness, our mercy, our spirituality. His rejoinder stopped me. “We are people. The root cause of racism and its primary result is that whites refuse to see us simply as people.”
I argued, “But the play says given the chance, black people will act as cruel as whites. I don’t believe it.”
“Maya, that is a very real possibility and one we must vigilantly guard against. You see, my dear wife”—he spoke slowly, leaning his big body toward me—“my dear wife, most black revolutionaries, most black radicals, most black activists, do not really want change. They want exchange. This play points to that likelihood. And our people need to face the temptation. You must act in The Blacks.”
He continued talking in the bed and I fell asleep in his arms.
The next morning Abbey and I went down to the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue. Actors sat quietly in the dimly lit seats, and Gene Frankel paced on the stage. Max Glanville had seen us enter. He nodded in recognition and walked to the edge of the stage. He stopped Gene in mid-step and whispered. Frankel lifted his head and looked out.
“Maya Make. Maya Angelou Make. Abbey Lincoln. Come down front, please.” We found seats in the front row.
Glanville came back and sat down. “Abbey, we want you to read the role of Snow. But, Maya, we’ve not decided whether you should do the Black Queen or the White Queen.”
I said, “Of course the Black Queen.”
“Just read a little of both roles.” He got up and went away, returning with an open manuscript.
“Read this section.” He flipped pages. “And then read this underlined part.”
I stepped up on the low stage and without raising my head to look at the audience began to read. The section was short and I turned the script to the next underlined pages and recited another monologue without adding vocal inflection.
There was scattered applause when I finished and a familiar husky voice shouted, “You’ve got all the parts, baby.” Another voice said, “Yes, but let’s see your legs.”
Godfrey Cambridge flopped all over a seat in the third row and Flash Riley sat next to him.
I joined them and we talked about Cabaret for Freedom, while Frankel, Bernstein and Glanville stood together on the stage muttering.
Frankel shouted, “Lights” and the house lights came on. He walked to the edge of the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to each other, and please mark your scripts. Godfrey Cambridge is Diouf. Roscoe Lee Browne is Archibald. James Earl Jones is Village. Cicely Tyson is Virtue. Jay Riley is the Governor, Raymond St. Jacques is the Judge. Cynthia Belgrave is Adelaide. Maya Angelou Make is the White Queen. Helen Martin is Felicity, or the Black Queen. Lou Gossett is Newport News. Lex Monson is the Missionary. Abbey Lincoln is Snow and Charles Gordone is the Valet. Max Roach is composer, Talley Beatty is choreographer and Patricia Zipprodt is costume designer. Ethel Ayler is understudying Abbey and Cicely. Roxanne Roker understudies Maya and Helen.”
I looked around. Ethel and I exchanged grins. We had been friends years before during the European tour of Porgy and Bess.
Frankel continued, “We’ve got a great play and we’re going to work our asses off.”
Rehearsals began with a playground joviality and in days accelerated into the seriousness of a full-scale war. Friendships and cliques were formed quickly. The central character was played by Roscoe Lee Browne, and within a week he became the chief figure off stage as well. His exquisite diction and fastidious manners were fortunately matched with wit. He was unflappable.
James Earl Jones, a beige handsome bull of a man watched Frankel with fierce stares, reading his lips, scanning his hairline and chin, ear lobes and neck. Then suddenly James Earl would withdraw into himself with a slammed-door finality.
Lou Gossett, lean and young, skyrocketed on and off the stage, innocent and interested. For all his boyish bounding he had developed listening into an art. Cocking an ear at the speaker, his soft eyes caring and his entire body taut with attention.
Godfrey and Jay “Flash” Riley competed for company comedian. When Flash won, Godfrey changed. The clowning began to disappear and he sobered daily into a drab, studious actor.
Cicely, delicate and black-rose beautiful, was serious and aloof. She sat in the rear of the theater, her small head bent into the manuscript, saving her warmth for the character and her smiles for the stage. Raymond, looking like a matinee idol, and Lex were old-time friends. They studied their roles together, breaking each other up with camp
ed-up readings. Helen and Cynthia were professionals; just watching them, I knew that they would have their lines, remember the director’s blocking and follow the steps of Talley’s choreography without mistakes in a shorter time than anyone else. Charles Gordone, a finely fashioned, small yellow man, made slight fun of everything and everyone, including himself as another target for sarcasm.
There was some resistance to Frankel’s direction on the grounds that, being white, he was unable to understand black motivation. In other quarters there was a submission which bordered on obsequiousness and which brought to mind characterizations of Stepin Fetchit.
Each day, tension met us as we walked into the theater and lay like low morning fog in the aisles.
Abbey and I, with the solidarity of a tried friendship, read and studied together, or joined by Roscoe, lunched at a nearby restaurant where we discussed the day’s political upheavals. We three would not have called ourselves solely actors. Abbey was a jazz singer, I was an activist, and although Roscoe had played Shakespearean roles and taught drama, he had also been a sprinting champion and an executive with a large liquor company. Early on, we agreed that The Blacks was an important play but “the play” was not the only thing in our lives.
My marriage was only a few months old, Vus was still an enigma I hadn’t solved and the mystery was sexually titillating. I was in love. Guy’s grades had improved but he was seldom home. When I offered to invite the parents of his new friends over for dinner, he laughed at me.
“Mom, that’s old-timey. This isn’t Los Angeles, this is New York City. People don’t do that.” He laughed again when I said people in N.Y.C. have parents and parents eat too.
“I haven’t even met most of those guys’ folks. Look, Mom, some of them are seventeen and eighteen. How would I look if I said, ‘My mom wants to meet your mom’? Foolish.”
The Harlem Writers Guild accepted that most of my time would be spent at the theater, but that did not release me from my obligation to attend meetings and continue writing.
By the first week’s end, Frankel had completed the staging and Talley was teaching the actors his choreography. The set was being constructed and I was laboring over lines.
Raymond, Lex, Flash, Charles and I played the “whites.”
We wore exaggerated masks and performed from a platform nine feet above the stage. Below us, the “Negroes” (the rest of the company) enacted for our benefit a rape-murder by a black man (played by Jones) of a white woman (a masked Godfrey Cambridge). In retaliation we, the colonial power—royalty (the White Queen), the church (Lex Monson), the law (Raymond St. Jacques) the military (Flash Riley) and the equivocating liberal (Charles Gordone)—descended into Africa to make the blacks pay for the crime. After a duel between the two queens, the blacks triumphed and killed the whites one by one. Then in sarcastic imitation of the vanquished “whites,” the black victors ascended the ramp and occupied the platform of their former masters.
The play was delicious to our taste. We were only acting, but we were black actors in 1960. On that small New York stage, we reflected the real-life confrontations that were occurring daily in America’s streets. Whites did live above us, hating and fearing and threatening our existence. Blacks did sneer behind their masks at the rulers they both loathed and envied. We would throw off the white yoke which dragged us down into an eternal genuflection.
I started enjoying my role. I used the White Queen to ridicule mean white women and brutal white men who had too often injured me and mine. Every inane posture and haughty attitude I had ever seen found its place in my White Queen.
Genet had been right at least about one thing. Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices and even their odors. Often our survival had depended upon the accurate reading of a white man’s chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman’s hand. Whites, on the other hand, always knew that no serious penalty threatened them if they misunderstood blacks. Whites were safely isolated from our concerns. When they chose, they could lift the racial curtain which separated us. They could indulge in sexual escapades, increase our families with mulatto bastards, make fortunes out of our music and eunuchs out of our men, then in seconds they could step away, and return unscarred to their pristine security. The cliché of whites being ignorant of blacks was not only true, but understandable. Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon’s scalpel.
I dressed myself in the hated gestures and made the White Queen gaze down in loathing at the rotten stinking stupid blacks, who, although innocent, like beasts were loathsome nonetheless.
It was obvious that the other actors also found effective motivation. The play became such a cruel parody of white society that I was certain it would flop. Whites were not so masochistic as to favor a play which ridiculed and insulted them, and black playgoers were scarce.
James Baldwin was a friend of Gene Frankel’s and he attended rehearsals frequently. He laughed loudly and approvingly at our performances and I talked with him often. When I introduced him to Vus they took to each other with enthusiasm.
At dress rehearsal, on the eve of opening night, black friends, family and investors who had been invited hooted and stamped their feet throughout the performance. But I reckoned their responses natural. They were bound to us, as fellow blacks, black sympathizers or investors.
Vus and Guy grinned and assured me that I was the best actor on the stage. I accepted their compliments easily.
On the morning of opening night, the cast gathered in the foyer, passing jitters from hand to hand, like so many raw eggs. I looked around for Abbey but she hadn’t arrived.
When we walked into the dark theater, Gene Frankel bellowed from the stage.
“Everybody down front. Everybody.”
He was having a more serious nervous attack than we who had to face the evening audience. I snickered. Roscoe Brown turned to me and made a face of arch innocence.
We filled the front rows, as Frankel paced out the length of the stage. He stopped and looked out at the actors.
His voice quivered. “We have no music. No music and Abbey Lincoln will not be opening tonight. Max Roach has taken his music out of the show.”
He threw out the information and waited, letting the words rest in our minds.
Anxious looks were exchanged in the front row.
“Abbey’s understudy is ready. She’s been rehearsing all morning.”
We turned and saw Ethel sitting poised stage left. Frankel added, “We can go on. We have to go on, but there is a song and the dance, for which we don’t have a damn note.”
Moans and groans lifted up in the air. We had endured the work, the late nights and early mornings of concentration, the long subway trips, the abandoned families, Talley Beatty’s complex choreography and the director’s demanding staging.
Max Roach was a genius, a responsible musician and my friend. I knew he had to have a reason.
I got up and went outside to the public telephone.
Max answered, sounding like a slide trombone. “The son of a bitches reneged. We had an agreement and the producers reneged on it.”
“And Abbey is out of the play?”
“You goddam right.”
“Well, Max, you won’t hate me if I stay?”
“Hell no. But my wife will not get up on that stage.”
Frankel had said we would open with or without the music.
I asked, “Max, would it be all right if I wrote the tunes? We can get along with two tunes.”
“I don’t give a damn. I just don’t want to have that bastard using my music.”
“I’ll still be your sister.”
Max was an attentive brother but he could be a violent enemy.
“Yeah. Yeah. You’re my sister.”
The telephone was slammed down.
If I stopped to think about my next move, I might convince myself out of it. Black folks said, “Follow your first mind
.”
I beckoned Ethel from the aisle. She rose and we walked into the lobby. Ethel had musical training and I had composed tunes for my album and for Guy. Together we could easily write the music for just two songs.
Ethel had the air of a woman born pretty. The years of familial adoration, the compliments of strangers, and the envy of plain women had given her a large share of confidence.
“Sure, Maya. We can do it. It’s just two songs, right? Let’s get to the piano.”
We walked down the stage to where Frankel was in conference with Talley and Glanville.
“We’ll write the music.”
“What?”
“We’ll write it this afternoon.”
I added, “And teach it to the cast.”
Frankel nearly jumped into Sidney Bernstein’s arms. “Did you hear that?”
Bernstein smiled and waggled his head happily.
“I heard. I heard. Let’s let them do it. If they say they can do it, let’s let them do it. Nice girls. Nice ladies. Let them do it.”
Sidney’s small frame shook with eagerness. “Dismiss the cast. Let them have the theater.”