by Maya Angelou
Efuah phoned before the week was out. I had a job at the University of Ghana as administrative assistant. Since I had no academic degrees, I couldn’t be processed through the usual channels. Which meant that I could not expect to receive the salary other foreigners were paid. I would be paid as a Ghanaian, which was a little more than half the foreign wage. (I was later informed that non-Ghanaians received more money because they had to pay twice as much as nationals for everything.)
I tried to speak, but Efuah continued. “An instructor we know is on leave for six months. We have arranged for you to have his house.”
I cried out gratefully and Efuah’s cool voice brushed my ear. “Sister, I am a mother, too.” She hung up.
I collected the trunk which I had left at Walter’s, the suitcases I had stowed in the YWCA’s storeroom and the bag I had been living out of, and moved into a nicely furnished house on campus.
When I picked up Guy from the hospital, he reminded me of a big tree about to fall. He had grown another inch and put on a few pounds from inactivity. The cast, which covered his head and spread out over his shoulders like a monk’s cowl, was grey with dirt, but he had to wear it another three months.
We celebrated his homecoming with roast chicken and dressing, our favorite food. He was in high spirits. He had lived. Anna Livia said he was mending well. He’d made a few friends in the hospital and soon he’d be enrolled in the university. The next day I took his diploma and report cards to the Registrar’s office and was told bluntly that my son could not enter the university. He was not qualified. The University of Ghana had been modeled on the British system. Students had to have completed the sixth form—or as Americans call it, junior college. I was dismissed peremptorily.
That was unacceptable. Guy had been through as much as I could handle.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was vice-chancellor of the University, and Nana Kobina Nketsia IV, a paramount chief, was former vice-chancellor. I made an appointment to see Dr. O’Brien, and Efuah introduced me to the Nana.
I pleaded and talked, moaned and whined, said I wasn’t asking for a scholarship or any financial aid. I would pay tuition and for his books. After weeks of haunting the offices, collaring the men in halls, catching up with them on the campus paths, I was finally told that they had decided it was not fair to penalize students coming from American schools.
They had arranged a three-part test. Guy would be expected to take the examination on Monday at nine o’clock.
I took Guy the news, and since I hadn’t told him of the trouble, he took it casually. “O.K., Mom. I’ll be ready.”
Monday morning my desk felt like sponge and the papers on it were unintelligible. I looked at my watch every five minutes. Efuah passed and stopped to chat, but I was too distracted to keep up my end of the conversation.
At last, Guy came loping across the campus, his cast helmet looking almost white under the noonday sun. I forced myself to remain seated. He entered my tiny office, taking up its spare room.
“Finished.” His complexion looked healthy, and his eyes were free of worry.
“How did you do?”
“Great. I won’t get the results for a couple of days. But I did great. Mom, do you know that Conor Cruise O’Brien is the same man who headed the U.N. Congo project?”
I knew.
“Well, one of my questions was ‘What role has the European in African development?’ ” He chuckled with pleasure. “Well, I’ll tell you. I ate Dr. O’Brien up in little pieces. I read his book To Katanga and Back in Cairo.”
He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I’m going to meet some guys in the Junior Common Room.”
Speechless, I watched him bound away. I had tommed, mewled and begged to get him registered, and in an attempt to show how manly he was, the smartass had bungled everything. I allowed myself to relish the fury.
After an hour, when I could walk without my knees wobbling and speak without yelling, I crossed the campus and found Dr. O’Brien in the Senior Common Room. I grinned for him and was prepared to shuffle and scratch. My people had written the book on dealing with white men.
I spoke out of a mealy mouth. “Dr. O’Brien, Guy told me how he answered one of those questions. You haven’t had a chance to see his exam yet …”
“Oh, but I have, Miss Angelou. His answers are fine. His registration papers will be sent to your office. We want minds like that in the university.”
I grinned again and backed away.
Sooner or later, I was going to have to admit that I didn’t understand black men or black boys and certainly not all white men.
Guy was moving into Mensa Sarba Hall. I had seen his room in the dormitory and it looked too small and too dark, but he loved it. For the first time in his life, he was going to live alone, away from my persistent commands. Responsible to himself and for himself. My reaction was in direct contrast with his excitement. I was going to be alone, also, for the first time. I was in my mother’s house at his birth, and we had been together ever since. Sometimes we lived with others or they lived with us, but he had always been the powerful axle of my life.
He dragged the old trunk toward the door, but I stopped him.
“Don’t lift heavy things like that. You could hurt yourself. I want you to be careful. Remember your neck.”
He put the trunk down and turned. “Mom, I know I’m your only child and you love me.” His face was quiet and his voice calm. “But there’s something for you to remember. It is my neck and my life. I will live it whole or not at all.”
He pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me. “I love you, Mom. Maybe now you’ll have a chance to grow up.”
A car horn honked outside. Guy opened the door and called. “Come on in. I’m ready.” Two Ghanaian young men leaped on the porch, shouting, and blustered into the room. When they saw me, they composed themselves.
I offered them a drink, a beer, some food. I wanted to delay the departure. All refused. They had to return the car to their uncle, and Guy had to begin his new life.
They shared Guy’s possessions, trundling the boxes, grips and trunk into a new Mercedes Benz. Guy gave me one more squeeze, then they piled into the car and drove away.
I closed the door and held my breath. Waiting for the wave of emotion to surge over me, knock me down, take my breath away. Nothing happened. I didn’t feel bereft or desolate. I didn’t feel lonely or abandoned.
I sat down, still waiting. The first thought that came to me, perfectly formed and promising, was “At last, I’ll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself.”
ALL GOD’S CHILDREN NEED
TRAVELING SHOES
This book is dedicated to
Julian and Malcolm and all the fallen ones
who were passionately and earnestly
looking for a home.
SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT,
COMING FOR TO CARRY ME HOME.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thank you to RUBEN MEDINA and ALAN PALMER for their brotherly love and laughter through many years. Thanks to JEAN AND ROGER GENOUD for their camaraderie during our strange and rich years, to SEYMOUR LAZAR for belief in my youthful ambition, and to Shana Alexander for talking to me about the mystery of return. Thanks to ANNA BUDU-ARTHUR for being a constant Sister.
The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness. Daylight was equally insistent, but much more bold and thoughtless. It dazzled, muddling the sight. It forced through my closed eyelids, bringing me up and out of a borrowed bed and into brand new streets.
After living nearly two years in Cairo, I had brought my son Guy to enter the University of Ghana in Accra. I planned staying for two weeks with a friend of a colleague, settling Guy into his dormitory, then continuing to Liberia to a job with the Department of Information.
Guy was seventeen and quick. I was thirty-three and determ
ined. We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal.
Guy had finished high school in Egypt, his Arabic was good and his health excellent. He assured me that he would quickly learn a Ghanaian language, and he certainly could look after himself. I had worked successfully as a journalist in Cairo, and failed sadly at a marriage which I ended with false public dignity and copious secret tears. But with all crying in the past, I was on my way to another adventure. The future was plump with promise.
For two days Guy and I laughed. We looked at the Ghanaian streets and laughed. We listened to the melodious languages and laughed. We looked at each other and laughed out loud.
On the third day, Guy, on a pleasure outing, was injured in an automobile accident. One arm and one leg were fractured and his neck was broken.
July and August of 1962 stretched out like fat men yawning after a sumptuous dinner. They had every right to gloat, for they had eaten me up. Gobbled me down. Consumed my spirit, not in a wild rush, but slowly, with the obscene patience of certain victors. I became a shadow walking in the white hot streets, and a dark spectre in the hospital.
There was no solace in knowing that the doctors and nurses hovering around Guy were African, nor in the company of the Black American expatriates who, hearing of our misfortune, came to share some of the slow hours. Racial loyalties and cultural attachments had become meaningless.
Trying utterly, I could not match Guy’s stoicism. He lay calm, week after week, in a prison of plaster from which only his face and one leg and arm were visible. His assurances that he would heal and be better than new drove me into a faithless silence. Had I been less timid, I would have cursed God. Had I come from a different background, I would have gone further and denied His very existence. Having neither the courage nor the historical precedent, I raged inside myself like a blinded bull in a metal stall.
Admittedly, Guy lived with the knowledge that an unexpected and very hard sneeze could force the fractured vertebrae against his spinal cord, and he would be paralyzed or die immediately, but he had only an infatuation with life. He hadn’t lived long enough to fall in love with this brutally delicious experience. He could lightly waft away to another place, if there really was another place, where his youthful innocence would assure him a crown, wings, a harp, ambrosia, free milk and an absence of nostalgic yearning. (I was raised on the spirituals which ached to “See my old mother in glory” or “Meet with my dear children in heaven,” but even the most fanciful lyricists never dared to suggest that those cavorting souls gave one thought to those of us left to moil in the world.) My wretchedness reminded me that, on the other hand, I would be rudderless.
I had lived with family until my son was born in my sixteenth year. When he was two months old and perched on my left hip, we left my mother’s house and together, save for one year when I was touring, we had been each other’s home and center for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.
The man who caused the accident stood swaying at the foot of the bed. Drunk again, or, two months later, still drunk. He, the host of the motor trip and the owner of the car, had passed out on the back seat leaving Guy behind the steering wheel trying to start the stalled engine. A truck had careened off a steep hill and plowed into Richard’s car, and he had walked away unhurt.
Now he dangled loosely in the room, looking shyly at me. “Hello, Sister Maya.” The slurred words made me hate him more. My whole body yearned for his scrawny neck. I turned my face from the scoundrel and looked at my son. The once white plaster that encased his body and curved around his face was yellowing and had begun to crumble.
I spoke softly, as people do to the very old, the very young, and the sick. “Darling, how are you today?”
“Mother, Richard spoke to you.” His already deep voice growled with disapproval.
“Hello, Richard,” I mumbled, hoping he couldn’t hear me.
My greeting penetrated the alcoholic fog, and the man lumbered into an apologetic monologue that tested my control. “I’m sorry, Sister Maya. So sorry. If only it could be me, there on that bed … Oh, if only it could be me …”
I agreed with him.
At last he had done with his regrets, and saying good-bye to Guy, took my hand. Although his touch was repulsive, Guy was watching me, so I placed a silly grin on my face and said, “Good-bye, Richard.” After he left, I began quickly to unload the basket of food I had brought. (The teenage appetite is not thwarted by bruises or even broken bones.)
Guy’s voice stopped me.
“Mother, come so I can see you.”
The cast prevented him from turning, so visitors had to stand directly in his vision. I put the basket down and went to stand at the foot of the bed.
His face was clouded with anger.
“Mother, I know I’m your only child, but you must remember, this is my life, not yours.” The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned, pricks most deeply and draws more blood. I waited in agony as he continued, eyes scornful and lips curled, “If I can see Richard and understand that he has been more hurt than I, what about you? Didn’t you mean all those sermons about tolerance? All that stuff about understanding? About before you criticize a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes?”
Of course I meant it in theory, in conversation about the underprivileged, misunderstood and oppressed miscreants, but not about a brute who had endangered my son’s life.
I lied and said, “Yes, I meant it.” Guy smiled and said, “I know you did, Mother. You’re just upset now.” His face framed by the cast was beautiful with forgiveness. “Don’t worry anymore. I’m going to get out of here soon, then you can go on to Liberia.”
I made bitterness into a wad and swallowed it.
I puckered and grinned and said, “You’re right, darling. I won’t be upset anymore.”
As always, we found something to laugh about. He fumbled, eating with his unbroken left hand and when he did have the food firmly in his grasp, he pretended not to know how to find his mouth. Crumbs littered his gown. “I’ll figure it out, Mom. I promise you I won’t starve to death.” We played word games, and the visiting hours went by quickly.
Too soon I was back on the bright street with an empty basket in my hands and my head swimming in the lonely air.
I did know some people who would receive me, but reluctantly, because I had nothing to offer company save a long face and a self-pitying heart, and I had no intention of changing either. Black Americans of my generation didn’t look kindly on public mournings except during or immediately after funerals. We were expected by others and by ourselves to lighten the burden by smiling, to deflect possible new assaults by laughter. Hadn’t it worked for us for centuries? Hadn’t it?
On our first night in Ghana, our host (who was only a friend of a friend) invited Black American and South American expatriates to meet us. Julian Mayfield and his beautiful wife Ana Livia, who was a medical doctor, were known to me from New York and the rest were not. But there is a kinship among wanderers, as operative as the bond between bishops or the tie between thieves: We knew each other instantly and exchanged anecdotes, contacts and even addresses within the first hour.
Alice Windom, a wit from St. Louis, and Vicki Garvin, a gentle woman from New York City, were among the Americans laughing and entertaining in the small living room. In the two years which had passed since Guy had been in the company of so many Black Americans, he had grown from a precocious adolescent into an adept young man. He bristled with pleasure, discovering that he could hold his own in the bantering company.
Each émigré praised Ghana and questioned my plans to settle in Liberia. There was no need to tell them that I hungered for security and would have accepted nearly any promised permanence in Africa. They knew, but kept up the teasing. One asked, “You remember that Ray Charles song where he says, ‘When you leave
New York, you ain’t going nowhere’?”
I remembered.
“Well, when you leave Ghana, going to Liberia, you ain’t going to Africa, in fact you ain’t going nowhere.”
Although I knew Liberians who were as African as Congo drums, I honored the traditional procedure and allowed the raillery to continue.
Alice advised, “Honey, you’d better stay here, get a job and settle down. It can’t get better than Ghana and it could be a lot worse.” Everyone laughed and agreed.
The fast talk and jokes were packages from home and I was delighted to show the group that I still knew how to act in Black company. I laughed as hard as the teasers and enjoyed the camaraderie.
But Guy’s accident erased all traces of their names, their faces and conviviality. I felt as if I had met no one, knew no one, and had lived my entire life as the bereft mother of a seriously injured child.
Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress. I watched my host, so sympathetic at the outset, become increasingly less interested in me and my distress. After a few weeks in his house, his discomfort even penetrated my self-centeredness. When Julian and Ana Livia Mayfield allowed me to store my books and clothes at their house, I gave my host only perfunctory thanks, and moved into a tiny room at the local YWCA I focused my attention on myself, with occasional concentrations on Guy. If I thought about it I was relieved that no one anticipated my company, yet, I took the idea of rejection as one more ornament on my string of worry beads.
One sunny morning Julian stood waiting for me in the YWCA lobby. His good looks drew attention and giggles from the young women who sat on the vinyl chairs pretending to read.