by Maya Angelou
She dismissed my attempt at flattery by saying curtly, “I am the receptionist. It is my job to know everyone in the building,” and picked up the morning paper.
I persisted, “Well, who should I see?”
She looked up from the page and smiled patronizingly. “You should see who you want to see. Who do you want to see?” She knew herself to be a cat and I was a wounded bird. I decided to remove myself from her grasp. I leaned forward and imitating her accent. I said, “You silly ass, you can take a flying leap and go straight to hell.”
Her smile never changed. “American Negroes are always crude.”
I stood nailed to the floor. Her knowledge of my people could only have been garnered from hearsay, and the few old American movies which tacked on Black characters as awkwardly as the blinded attach paper tails to donkey caricatures.
We were variably excited, exciting, jovial, organic, paranoid, hearty, lusty, loud, raucous, grave, sad, forlorn, silly and forceful. We had all the rights and wrongs human flesh and spirit are heir to. On behalf of my people, I should have spoken. I needed to open my mouth and give lie to her statement, but as usual my thoughts were too many and muddled to be formed into sentences. I turned and left the office.
The incident brought me close to another facet of Ghana, Africa, and of my own mania.
The woman’s cruelty activated a response which I had developed under the exacting tutelage of masters. Her brown skin, curly hair, full lips, wide flanged nostrils notwithstanding, I had responded to her as if she was a rude White salesclerk in an American department store.
Was it possible that I and all American Blacks had been wrong on other occasions? Could the cutting treatment we often experienced have been stimulated by something other than our features, our hair and color? Was the odor of old slavery so obvious that people were offended and lashed out at us automatically? Had what we judged as racial prejudice less to do with race and more to do with our particular ancestors’ bad luck at having been caught, sold and driven like beasts?
The receptionist and I could have been sisters, or in fact, might be cousins far removed. Yet her scorn was no different from the supercilious rejections of Whites in the United States. In Harlem and in Tulsa, in San Francisco and in Atlanta, in all the hamlets and cities of America, Black people maimed, brutalized, abused and murdered each other daily and particularly on bloody Saturday nights. Were we only and vainly trying to kill that portion of our history which we could neither accept nor deny? The questions temporarily sobered my intoxication with Africa. For a few days, I examined whether in looking for a home I, and all the émigrés, were running from a bitter truth that rode lightly but forever at home on our shoulders.
The company of my companions, Guy’s returning robust health, and Efua’s friendship weened me away from my unease and the questions. I would not admit that if I couldn’t be comfortable in Africa, I had no place else to go.
I turned my back to the niggling insecurities and opened my arms again to Ghana.
I wanted my hair fixed Ghanaian fashion and didn’t want to spend time in a hot beauty shop. I made an appointment for a home visitor.
The laughing Comfort Adday was a stenographer as well as a beautician. She told me “Sistah, I don’t work. My fingers work. Work is for farmers. As for my part, I try hard to stay away from farms.” She pulled patches of my hair and wound them with coarse black thread. “I have to save myself for later. For children. Then when I get ready, for a husband.”
Peals rang over my head as she seemed to wrench my hair out of its roots. “You only have the one boy, eh?” I tried to nod, but my head was in a vise. I mumbled, “Yes.” She said, “But my deah,” laughter … “You know they say ‘one child is no child.’ ”
I had heard the saying but couldn’t nod and chose not to mumble again. Comfort continued, making her voice low and suggestive, “And they say, too, ‘if you don’t use it you’ll lose it.’ ” Here her laughter rose and her hands pulled, jerking me nearly to a standing position. “You’re not a chicken, you know, Sistah.” I was over thirty. “Not to say you are too old to lay eggs.” She tugged a scrap of hair and luckily left my head attached to my neck. “But you keep waiting, your egg maker will grow grey.” Her laughter exceeded all earlier efforts, “and any chicks that come,” tug, wrestle, jerk, “will walk out fully dressed, playing the drums.” Jubilation at her own wit and wisdom bent her body in half, but her fingers never ceased pulling my hair or coiling the black thread against my scalp.
“Sistah, look at yourself.” She released me. Her face, the color of ancient bricks, was groomed with a proud smile. I went to the mirror. Long, black spikes jutted from my head in every direction, and long strings hung to my shoulders. It was a fashion worn by the pickaninnies whose photographs I had seen and hated in old books. I was aghast. No wonder she had laughed so heartily. I quickly searched her face for ridicule, but respect for her work was all I found.
I stuttered. “But, I wanted,… I didn’t want …” I could neither go in the street with that hairdo, nor was I capable of unwinding the cord that now shone on my hair with an evil gleam. For some unknown reason the beautician had chosen to teach me a lesson on the foolishness of trying to “go native.”
“Sistah, now sit down, let me finish.”
“I thought you were finished.” My voice came weakly and was drowned out by her great laughter. “Oh sistah, oh my deah.” She had to hold her stomach which threatened to shake itself loose from her body. “Oh Sistah. I just told you that I knew you weren’t a spring chick. If I let you go out like that, they’d catch both of us and put us in the silly folks hospital.”
The agony of laughter left her face slowly. “No sistah, my deah, only young girls whose time has not come can wear their hair like that.”
She gathered the dangling strings and pulled them tightly together. Her fingers moved quickly over my head. After a few minutes she picked up scissors from a stool and with a few snips, removed the last hanging strings.
“Now look. See yourself, and tell me.”
I looked in the mirror and was relieved that I looked like every other Ghanaian woman. My hair was pulled tightly into small neat patches and the triangular designs of tan scalp and black hair was as exact as the design in tweed cloth.
“Sistah, you have given me such a good laugh, I shouldn’t charge you.” Comfort was washing her combs and rolling her scissors and thread in a cotton white cloth. I knew that last statement was only for show.
In just six months I learned that Ghanaian women might take in orphans, give generously to the poor, and feed every person who came to their houses. They could allow their men certain sexual freedom, but they were very strict in money matters. When it came to finances “Ghana women no play, oh,” had been said to or around me hundreds of times.
I paid Comfort.
She said, “I will come again in two weeks. Oh, how I like to laugh with you.”
I didn’t want to wonder whether she was sincere, but I noticed that I hadn’t laughed even once.
A Black couple who had just arrived in Africa sat in our living room explaining their presence on the Continent.
“Because of Nkrumah” (The man pronounced the President’s name NeeKrumah) “and Sékou Touré, we decided it was either Ghana or Guinea. We have come to Mother Africa to suckle from her breasts.” The man spoke so vigorously his Afro trembled and his long neck carried his head from side to side. He wore a brightly colored African shirt and reminded me of a large exotic bird.
Alice spoke angrily, “Hell man, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Talking about sucking from Africa’s breasts. When you were born Black in America, you were born weaned.”
I said, “Africa doesn’t need anybody as big as you pulling on her tits.”
Vicki said, “And that’s an ugly metaphor.”
The man was sparring quickly. “The Zulus use it.”
“But you’re a Black American,” I reminded him.
“Ye
ah. Well, who is to say my ancestors weren’t Zulus?”
In just a few months our living room had begun to compete with the Mayfield side porch for popularity. Late nights found us drinking beer and fastidious over even the smallest points in a conversation.
Alice earned her reputation as the most formidable disputant. Having spent her working hours answering telephone calls and receiving embassy visitors, she looked eagerly toward the evenings and weekends. Then she could exercise her sharp mind and quick tongue on anyone within hearing range.
The wise Vicki said, “What Africa needs is help. After centuries of slavers taking her strongest sons and daughters, after years of colonialism, Africa needs her progeny to bring something to her.”
Alice grinned, warming up. She said, “I’ve never seen Africa as a woman, and somewhere I resent the use of any sexual pronoun to describe this complex continent. It’s not he or she. It is more an it.”
The visitors looked disapprovingly at us all. The need to believe in Africa’s maternal welcome was painfully obvious. They didn’t want to know that they had not come home, but had left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place with none.
The woman, whose large natural matched her husband’s, sat like a broken doll. Her brown face was still, her dark eyes flat and staring. I would not have been too surprised had she cried, “Maa Maa, Maa Maa” in a tiny toy voice.
Alice said, “The Sahara continues to eat up arable land at a frightening rate, and nomadic people continue to herd cattle which eat every blade of grass that pops up. What the continent needs is about five hundred artesian well diggers and about five hundred agronomists. That would have been a gift to bring.”
“I belong here. My ancestors were taken from this land.” The visitor was fighting back.
“Of course, you’re right.” Vicki’s voice was soothing. “And under ideal conditions you could return and even lay claim to an ancestral inheritance. But Alice has a good point. The continent is poor, and while Ghanaians have wonderful spirits, thanks to themselves and Kwame Nkrumah, they are desperate.”
I asked, “What did you do at home? What is your work?”
The man was still silent, and I had spoken only to put sound into the sad silence.
Vicki offered advice, “Ghana would be easier than Guinea, unless you speak French.”
The woman’s voice was a surprisingly rich contralto. “He worked in the Chicago stockyards, and I was a Bunny.”
She got our total and immediate attention. Although she wore no makeup and a sleeved dress of a demure cut, it was easy to imagine her in a bunny costume. She muttered just above a whisper, “We’ve been saving for two years.”
Her husband stood up scowling, “Don’t tell them anything, Hon. It’s just like Negroes. They are here, in their own place, and they don’t want us in. Just like crabs in a bucket. Pulling the other one down. When will you people learn? Let’s go.”
They would have been surprised to learn that we were no less annoyed with them than they with us. They were just two more people in an unceasing parade of naïve travelers who thought that an airline ticket to Africa would erase the past and open wide the gates to a perfect future. Possibly we saw our now seldom expressed hopes in the ingenuous faces of the new arrivals.
Vicki waved her small hands. “Wait a minute. You don’t understand.”
“Come on, Hon. The taxi driver was wrong.”
I asked, “What taxi driver?”
The woman answered, “We don’t know his name. He was driving us around and when he found out we were Americans, he said he was going to take us to a Black American home. That’s how we got here.”
We looked at each other knowing the danger of getting a reputation of inhospitability in this country, where we were striving for welcome.
Alice lit a fresh cigarette from an old one. “I guess because we talk so much, folks have the idea that we know something, so Black Americans come here or to Julian Mayfield’s house. We weren’t trying to discourage you from staying in Ghana. We just wanted to prepare you for what you might, no, what you will encounter so you won’t be disappointed.”
Vicki added, “Sort of immunizing you before you get the disease.”
I added, “We’re trying to explain that if you expect Africans to open their arms and homes to you, you’ll be in for a terrible shock. Not that they will be unkind. Never unkind, but most of them will be distant. One problem, of course, is our inability to speak the language. Without a language it is very difficult to communicate.” The man’s anger had propelled him to the door. I touched his sleeve and said, “Don’t rush off. Have dinner with us.”
All people use food for more reasons than mere nutrition, and I was hoping that in the present case it would work to calm our visitors’ ruffled feathers.
The husband acted as if he still wanted to leave, but was persuaded by his wife to stay.
As I had hoped, they relaxed during dinner and allowed themselves to be charmed by Alice, who worked at being her clever best. She made them laugh at her Chicago stories, Vicki related tales of Paul Robeson, and I talked about my years in show business.
We stood at the door saying good-bye when the man, all seriousness again, shook Alice’s hand. “I think we’ll go to Guinea. If we have to learn a foreign language to be accepted in Africa, we may as well learn French.”
The woman waved. “We certainly appreciate the dinner and your advice. Hope we meet again.”
That they had missed our clearly made points boded well for them. They just might succeed in their search for the illusive Africa, which secreted itself when approached directly, like a rain forest on a moonless night. Africa might just deliver itself into their hands because they matched its obliqueness.
The telephone call brought unsettling news. The secretary’s voice simply said, “You are wanted at the Ghanaian Times.” I sped to the office building, accompanied by nervous excitement. Had my article been accepted, or had the editor discovered what I already knew; that in order to write about the United States, capitalism and racial prejudice one needed a lifetime, three hundred thousand words, and a lot of luck?
T. D. Bafoo was on his feet when I arrived at his desk.
“Maya!” He waved my pages at me and as usual spoke in short explosions. “This is good, Sister! You Black Americans know a thing or two, don’t you?” He spoke too quickly for me to respond.
“We will have a new baby, you know?” I didn’t.
“And we will invite you to the outdooring, in the country.”
An outdooring is the first African rite of passage. It always begins at dawn, eight days after the child’s birth, and gives family and friends a chance to see and welcome the newest soul.
“I am asking Alice, Vicki, and Julian and others! Come! Black Americans must see how we salute life! Party! We have a great party for life!
“Come to my house, here tonight in Accra. Greet my wife. I will tell you how to come to us in Kanda.”
I thanked him, took his address, smiled and was again left standing as he hurried away.
The modesty of T. D.’s pretty bungalow was surprising. He was a Big Man, and even in Nkrumah’s best of all worlds, Big Men often lived in coarse ostentation. Some owned huge castle-like houses and were driven by chauffeurs through the streets of Ghana in Mercedes-Benzes and limousines. Although most cabinet ministers, members of Parliament, government administrators, and wealthy businessmen wore the common matching shirt and pants which had been popularized by the President, their wealth and power were not held in secret. Wives, mistresses, girlfriends, and female relatives were known to wear heavy gold necklaces and bracelets to market and to import expensive furniture from Europe. It was not unknown for some Big Men and their women to treat the servant class as slaves. They were generally unpopular, and in safe company they were ridiculed, but their power was threatening and little was said of them in public.
A smiling T. D. met me at the door. “Sister, come, come insid
e. You are finally here. You are at home, and meet my wife. Come, we will eat foo foo and garden eggs.” Although he still spoke as if he needed to cram everything into one sentence, he was a quieter man in his own house.
His wife was a tall, brown woman with an earnest face and a beautiful voice, and was very pregnant. She smiled and took my hand.
“Sister Maya. Akwaba. Welcome. I am making chicken for you, since you can’t eat fish.”
T. D. grinned, “Sister, news travels in Ghana. We know everything or nothing. Come, we will have beer. What do you like?”
Beer preferences were fiercely defended or opposed. The two vying brands were Star and Club.
“I’m a Club person myself.” I spoke as proudly as I had heard Ghanaians do.
“Ye! Ye! I knew you were okay. I am Club too. All Star drinkers are untrustworthy. Differences between good and bad beer drinkers are stronger than the imperialist introduced divisions between Africans. Don’t you think so, Sister?” T. D. laughed like a boy and took me into his study. “We will drink in here.” He spoke to his wife, “Join us when you can.”
We sat down in a room crowded with books and papers and magazines. Mrs. Bafoo spoke from the doorway, “Kwesi, are you going to give Sister Maya your famous speech? You would do better if you stand on the chair.” She entered carrying beer and laughing.
T. D. had the grace to drop his head. When he looked at me his eyes were sharp with mischief. “Sister, I am Fanti. This woman is a nurse, but she is also an Ewe. A terrible mixture. Nurses think they know the body and Ewes think they know the mind. Oh boy, what have I married?”
I spent the afternoon eating with my fingers and listening to T. D’s political discussions. I experimented with my Fanti, much to the amusement of my hosts, and found that while I had a reasonable vocabulary, my melody was not in tune. T. D. suggested I pick up Ewe, but when I heard Mrs. Bafoo sing-speak her language, I decided I would continue struggling to master Fanti.
The couple, throughout the evening, tenderly but relentlessly teased each other about their mixed marriage, laughing at their differences, each gibe a love pat, sweetly intimate.