The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

by Maya Angelou

  “I’m taking you to meet someone. Someone you should know.” He looked at me without smiling. He was tall, Black, tough and brusque.

  “You need to have someone, a woman, talk to you. Let’s go.” I withdrew from his proprietary air, but lack of energy prevented me from telling him that he wasn’t my brother, he wasn’t even a close friend. For want of resistance, I followed him to his car.

  “Somebody needs to tell you that you have to give up this self-pity. You’re letting yourself go. Look at your clothes. Look at your hair. Hell, it’s Guy whose neck was broken. Not yours.”

  Anger jumped up in my mouth, but I held back the scorching words and turned to look at him. He was watching the road, but the side of his face visible to me was tense, his eyes were unblinking, and he had pushed his full lips out in a pout.

  “Everybody understands … as much as anyone can understand another’s pain … but you’ve … you’ve forgotten to be polite. Hell, girl, everybody feels sorry for you, but nobody owes you a damn thing. You know that. Don’t forget your background. Your mother didn’t raise you in a dog house.”

  Blacks concede that hurrawing, jibing, jiving, signifying, disrespecting, cursing, even outright insults might be acceptable under particular conditions, but aspersions cast against one’s family call for immediate attack.

  I said, “How do you know my business so well? Was that my daddy visiting your mother all those times he left our home?”

  I expected an explosion from Julian. Yet his response shocked me. Laughter burst out of him, loud and raucous. The car wobbled and slowed while he held tenuously to the steering wheel. I caught his laughter, and it made me pull his jacket, and slap my own knee. Miraculously we stayed on the road. We were still laughing when he pulled into a driveway and let the engine die.

  “Girl, you’re going to be all right. You haven’t forgotten the essentials. You know about defending yourself. All you have to do now is remember … sometimes you have to defend yourself from yourself.”

  When we got out of the car Julian hugged me and we walked together toward The National Theatre of Ghana, a round, white building set in an embrace of green-black trees.

  Efua Sutherland could have posed for the original bust of Nefertiti. She was long, lean, Black and lovely, and spoke so softly I had to lean forward to catch her words. She wore an impervious air as obvious as a strong perfume, and an austere white floor-length gown.

  She sat motionless as Julian recounted my dreadful tale and ended saying that my only child was, even as we spoke, in the Military Hospital. When Julian stopped talking and looked at her pointedly, I was pleased that Efua’s serene face did not crumble into pity. She was silent and Julian continued. “Maya is a writer. We knew each other at home. She worked for Martin Luther King. She’s pretty much alone here, so I have to be a brother to her, but she needs to talk to a woman, and pretty soon she’ll need a job.” Efua said nothing, but finally turned to me and I had the feeling that all of myself was being absorbed. The moment was long.

  “Maya,” she stood and walked to me. “Sister Maya, we will see about a job, but now you have need of a Sister friend.” I had not cried since the accident. I had helped to lift Guy’s inert body onto the x-ray table at the first hospital, had assisted in carrying his stretcher to an ambulance for transfer to another hospital. I had slept, awakened, walked, and lived in a thick atmosphere, which only allowed shallow breathing and routine motor behavior.

  Efua put her hand on my cheek and repeated, “Sister, you have need of a Sister friend because you need to weep, and you need someone to watch you while you weep.” Her gestures and voice were mesmerizing. I began to cry. She stroked my face for a minute then returned to her chair. She began speaking to Julian about other matters. I continued crying and was embarrassed when I couldn’t stop the tears. When I was a child, my grandmother would observe me weeping and say, “Be careful, Sister. The more you cry, the less you’ll pee, and peeing is more important.” But the faucet, once opened, had to drain itself. I had no power over its flow.

  Efua sent Julian away with assurances that she would return me to the hospital. I looked at her, but she had settled into herself sweetly, and I was freed to cry out all the bitterness and self-pity of the past days.

  When I had finished, she stood again, offering me a handkerchief. “Now, Sister, you must eat. Eat and drink. Replenish yourself.” She called her chauffeur, and we were taken to her home.

  She was a poet, playwright, teacher, and the head of Ghana’s National Theatre. We talked in the car of Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Alexander Pope and Sheridan. We agreed that art was the flower of life and despite the years of ill-treatment Black artists were among its most glorious blossoms.

  She knew the president and called him familiarly “Kwame.”

  She said, “Kwame has said that Ghana must use its own legends to heal itself. I have written the old tales in new ways to teach the children that their history is rich and noble.”

  Her house, white as chalk and stark, had rounded walls which enclosed a green lawn. Her three children came laughing to greet me, and her servant brought me food. Efua spoke in Fanti to the maid, and a mixture of Fanti and English to the children.

  “This is your Auntie Maya. She shall be coming frequently. Her son is ill, but you shall meet him, for he will soon be released from the hospital.”

  Esi Rieter, the oldest, a girl of ten, Ralph, seven, and the five-year-old, Amowi, immediately wanted to know how old my son was, what was his illness, did I have other children, what did I do. Efua sent them away assuring them that time would answer all questions.

  I ate as I had cried, generously. After the meal, Efua walked me to the car.

  “Sister, you are not alone. I, myself, will be at the hospital tomorrow. Your son is now my son. He has two mothers in this place.” She put her hand on my face again. “Sister, exercise patience. Try.”

  When the driver stopped at the hospital, I felt cool and refreshed as if I had just gone swimming in Bethesda’s pool, and many of my cares had been washed away in its healing water.

  The hospital acquired color, there was laughter in its halls and Guy’s good humor stopped being contrived. He and the doctors, surprisingly, had been right. Recovery was evident in the ways of his hands and in his lumbering, cast-top-heavy lurching up and down the corridors.

  Outside, the sun, which had pounced, penetrating and hostile, now covered me with beneficial rays, hoisting me out of depression and back on my feet, where my new mood told me I deserved to be.

  I smiled at strangers and took notice of buildings and streets. Weeks passed before I was conscious that I had let go of misery.

  The visit to Efua, and Julian’s reluctant but sincere offer to be my brother had been very strong medicine.

  I was impatient to get my life in order. Obviously, I wouldn’t go to Liberia, so … I had to find a job, a car and a house for Guy to come to while he continued recuperating. I needed to get my hair cut, a manicure, a pedicure. My clothes were disgraceful.

  Flashes of panic occurred and recurred. Was it possible that during the two-month depression, I had damaged my determination? The only power I had ever claimed was that I had over myself. Obviously, I had come perilously close to giving it away to self-pity.

  I thought about Julian’s hard words, “Your mother didn’t raise you in a dog house.” His intuition had come understated.

  My mother, that pretty little woman with a steel chest, had taught me and my brother Bailey that each person was expected to “paddle his own canoe, stand on his own feet, put his own shoulder to the wheel, and work like hell.” She always added, “Hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. You may not always get what you pay for, but you will definitely pay for what you get.” Vivian Baxter had axioms for every situation, and if one didn’t come to mind when she needed it, she would create a better one on the moment.

  I had been a pretty good student, ingesting and internalizing her advice, so now I
pushed away the gnawing fear that I might have lost some of my vital willfulness.

  I looked at the disheveled mess I had been living in and at my nearby neighbors. To my surprise, many of the women who had been at that first-night party and who had faithfully attended Guy’s hospital room, lived down the hall from me. I was also amazed to learn that mops, brooms, pails and other cleaning implements were available for the free use of the center’s guests.

  Alice and Vicki watched me emerge from the bonds of my chrysalis and accepted me with no comment, save an easy teasing. While I swabbed my small floor and washed my clothes Alice said, “I would offer to help you Maya, but somehow I didn’t inherit any of the race’s domestic talents.”

  Vicki offered, but I knew the work was cathartic, so I washed walls, polished door knobs and the tiny window. The scales and stench of defeat floated into the pail’s dirty water.

  The YWCA residents forgave me my drunken spree with hopelessness and we began to spend time together in the building’s cafeteria and on the streets filled with views I had not seen. Alice took me to Black Star Square to see the monumental arch, named in part for the newspaper founded in the United States by the ex-slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.

  Vicki and Sylvia Boone rode with me to Flagstaff House, the seat of government. Seeing Africans enter and leave the formal building made me tremble with an awe I had never known. Their authority on the marble steps again proved that Whites had been wrong all along. Black and brown skin did not herald debasement and a divinely created inferiority. We were capable of controlling our cities, our selves and our lives with elegance and success. Whites were not needed to explain the working of the world, nor the mysteries of the mind.

  My visits to the hospital diminished to one daily appearance and Guy’s gladness made me young again.

  Efua introduced me to the chairman of the Institute of African Studies at the university and pleaded with him to hire me. She had told him that I had been on my way to a job in Liberia until my seventeen-year-old son had been involved in an accident, adding that I had to stay in Ghana until he fully recovered. She smiled at him and said I was already trying to hear Fanti, and would make a good Ghanaian.

  Professor J. H. Nketia, one of Ghana’s leading scholars, was so unpretentious as to be unsettling. He listened with patience to Efua, then asked me, “Can you type?” When I said only a little, but that I could file and write, he gathered his chin in a stubby brown hand and smiled. “Can you start on Monday?” He told me I would be paid on the Ghanaian scale and he would arrange for me to get a small car. I knew that the proffered job spoke more of his own compassion and his affection for Efua than of a need for my services.

  Foreign employees at the university earned high salaries, compared to the national average wage, and very liberal compensations. They were given housing allowances, tuition or aid for their offspring’s education, transportation allowances and a perk charmingly referred to as dislocation allowance. They had been recruited in their own countries, and hired for their academic credentials and experience. Save for two youthful years at night school, I had only a high school education.

  I challenged myself to do whatever job assigned to me with intense commitment and a good cheerfulness.

  A professor went on leave and I moved into his house for three months. When Guy was released from the hospital he settled into our furnished, if temporary, home.

  The community of Black immigrants opened and fitted me into their lives as if they had been saving my place.

  The group’s leader, if such a collection of eccentric egos could be led, was Julian. He had three books published in the United States, had acted in a Broadway play, and was a respected American-based intellectual before an encounter with the CIA and the FBI caused him to flee his country for Africa. He was accompanied in flight and supported, in fact, by Ana Livia, who was at least as politically volatile as he.

  Sylvia Boone, a young sociologist, had come to Africa first on a church affiliated tour, then returned with sophistication, a second Master’s degree and fluent French to find her place on the Continent. Ted Pointiflet was a painter who argued gently, but persistently that Africa was the inevitable destination of all Black Americans. Lesley Lacy, a sleek graduate student, was an expert on Marxism and Garveyism, while Jim and Annette Lacy, no relation to Lesley, were grade school teachers and quite rare among our group because they listened more than they talked. The somber faced Frank Robinson, a plumber, had a contagious laughter, and a fierce devotion to Nkrumah. Vicki Garvin had been a union organizer, Alice Windom had been trained in sociology. I called the group “Revolutionist Returnees.”

  Each person had brought to Africa varying talents, energies, vigor, youth and terrible yearnings to be accepted. On Julian’s side porch during warm black nights, our voices were raised in attempts to best each other in lambasting America and extolling Africa.

  We drank gin and ginger ale when we could afford it, and Club beer when our money was short. We did not discuss the open gutters along the streets of Accra, the shacks of corrugated iron in certain neighborhoods, dirty beaches and voracious mosquitoes. And under no circumstances did we mention our disillusionment at being overlooked by the Ghanaians.

  We had come home, and if home was not what we had expected, never mind, our need for belonging allowed us to ignore the obvious and to create real places or even illusory places, befitting our imagination.

  Doctors were in demand, so Ana Livia had been quickly placed in the Military Hospital and within a year, had set up a woman’s clinic where she and her platoon of nursing sisters treated up to two hundred women daily. Progressive journalists were sought after, so Julian, who wrote articles for American and African journals, also worked for the Ghana Evening News. Frank and his partner Carlos Allston from Los Angeles founded a plumbing and electric company. Their success gave heart to the rest. We had little doubt about our likability. After the Africans got to know us their liking would swiftly follow. We didn’t question if we would be useful. Our people for over three hundred years had been made so useful, a bloody war had been fought and lost, rather than have our usefulness brought to an end. Since we were descendants of African slaves torn from the land, we reasoned we wouldn’t have to earn the right to return, yet we wouldn’t be so arrogant as to take anything for granted. We would work and produce, then snuggle down into Africa as a baby nuzzles in a mother’s arms.

  I was soon swept into an adoration for Ghana as a young girl falls in love, heedless and with slight chance of finding the emotion requited.

  There was an obvious justification for my amorous feelings. Our people had always longed for home. For centuries we had sung about a place not built with hands, where the streets were paved with gold, and were washed with honey and milk. There the saints would march around wearing white robes and jeweled crowns. There, at last, we would study war no more and, more important, no one would wage war against us again.

  The old Black deacons, ushers, mothers of the church and junior choirs only partially meant heaven as that desired destination. In the yearning, heaven and Africa were inextricably combined.

  And now, less than one hundred years after slavery was abolished, some descendants of those early slaves taken from Africa, returned, weighted with a heavy hope, to a continent which they could not remember, to a home which had shamefully little memory of them.

  Which one of us could know that years of bondage, brutalities, the mixture of other bloods, customs and languages had transformed us into an unrecognizable tribe? Of course, we knew that we were mostly unwanted in the land of our birth and saw promise on our ancestral continent.

  I was in Ghana by accident, literally, but the other immigrants had chosen the country because of its progressive posture and its brilliant president, Kwame Nkrumah. He had let it be known that American Negroes would be welcome to Ghana. He offered havens for Southern and East African revolutionaries working to end colonialism in their countries.

 
I admitted that while Ghana’s domestic and foreign policy were stimulating, I was captured by the Ghanaian people. Their skins were the colors of my childhood cravings: peanut butter, licorice, chocolate and caramel. Theirs was the laughter of home, quick and without artifice. The erect and graceful walk of the women reminded me of my Arkansas grandmother, Sunday-hatted, on her way to church. I listened to men talk, and whether or not I understood their meaning, there was a melody as familiar as sweet potato pie, reminding me of my Uncle Tommy Baxter in Santa Monica, California. So I had finally come home. The prodigal child, having strayed, been stolen or sold from the land of her fathers, having squandered her mother’s gifts and having laid down in cruel gutters, had at last arisen and directed herself back to the welcoming arms of the family where she would be bathed, clothed with fine raiment and seated at the welcoming table.

  I was one of nearly two hundred Black Americans from St. Louis, New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas who hoped to live out the Biblical story.

  Some travelers had arrived at Ghana’s Accra Airport, expecting customs agents to embrace them, porters to shout—“welcome,” and the taxi drivers to ferry them, horns blaring, to the city square where smiling officials would cover them in ribbons and clasp them to their breasts with tearful sincerity. Our arrival had little impact on anyone but us. We ogled the Ghanaians and few of them even noticed. The newcomers hid disappointment in quick repartee, in jokes and clenched jaws.

  The citizens were engaged in their own concerns. They were busy adoring their flag, their five-year-old independence from Britain and their president. Journalists, using a beautiful language created by wedding English words to an African syntax, described their leader as “Kwame Nkrumah, man who surpasses man, iron which cuts iron.” Orators, sounding more like Baptist southern preachers than they knew, spoke of Ghana, the jewel of Africa leading the entire continent from colonialism to full independence by the grace of Nkrumah and God, in that order. When Nkrumah ordered the nation to detribalize, the Fanti, Twi, Ashanti, Ga and Ewe clans began busily dismantling formations which had been constructed centuries earlier by their forefathers. Having the responsibility of building a modern country, while worshipping traditional ways and gods, consumed enormous energies.