by Maya Angelou
I denied any annoyance and said I’d like to see the children alone.
He agreed, then ordered the driver in one shout and modulated to continue speaking to me. “You will hear from me when an appointment is arranged.” He offered me his hand, and I was tempted to kiss it, but checked myself just in time. I grasped his hand and shook it firmly.
“Thank you, Nana.”
“Don’t thank me, but when you go to Kaneshie let them know that your heart and head are concentrated on Africa and not, like most Americans, on Coca Cola and Cadillacs.” Nana added, “And Maya, take your C.V.”
The driver had come in. I asked, “C.V.?”
He said, “Curriculum vitae. Your schools, degrees and work history. Good night. Kwesi will see you to the car.”
Kwesi was at my side being solicitous, the driver was standing beside the car, and I was laughing weakly. Kwesi noticed me trembling when he embraced me and probably credited my nervous response to meeting the great man.
“Sister, we must talk. You must come to me and my wife Molly. We will feed you and definitely no fish. Ha, ha.”
If everyone knew my dietary restrictions, why didn’t Nana know that I had not been to college? I should have said so on the spot. During the drive home, I berated myself for the show of cowardice. Obviously the temptation of a good job, large salary and European-style benefits were enough to send my much vaunted morality scurrying. It wasn’t pleasant to admit that I was no more moral than the commercial bandits upon whom I heaped every crime from slavery to Hiroshima.
As soon as I reached my house, I decided that when Nana telephoned I would tell him to offer the job to Alice or Vicki. Then I pillowed myself in goodness and slept righteously.
When our grinning faces appeared at Julian’s door, he tried waving his arms to distract us, but only succeeded in agitating the tell-tale odors of sage, oregano and fried pork. He had received another package of sausage from Washington, D.C. The Revolutionist Returnees had gotten wind of its arrival and converged on the Mayfield home in private cars, taxis and on foot. Julian, who was no more or less generous than the next person, put on a gruff face and said he was working and we had to leave, but when he saw we wouldn’t be run off, he gave in and laughed. “Which one of you nuts was spying on the airport?”
Ana Livia brought a platter of sausage patties to the porch, and we fell upon it with a savor unrelated to hunger. Homesickness was never mentioned in our crowd. Who would dare admit a longing for a White nation so full of hate that it drove its citizens of color to madness, to death or to exile? How to confess even to one’s ownself, that our eyes, historically customed to granite buildings, wide paved avenues, chromed cars, and brown, black, beige, pink and white-skinned people, often ached for those familiar sights?
We chewed the well spiced pork of America, but in fact, we were ravenously devouring Houston and Macon, Little Rock and St. Louis. Our faces eased with sweet delight as we swallowed Harlem and Chicago’s south side.
“All we need now is a plate of grits.” That from Lesley Lacy who had probably never eaten grits in his life.
Julian brought out a bundle of week-old dailies from the States and dealt parcels out to us as if they were large floppy cards. He saved a magazine and held it above his head. “Here’s my article on Baldwin in Freedomways.”
Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin’s book, had passed through so many hands its pages were as fluffy as Kleenex and had caused fierce arguments. Some detractors denounced Baldwin as a creation of White America, adding that he had been constructed by the establishment for the establishment. His supporters argued that if White America had been smart enough to make a James Baldwin, obviously there would have been no need to create one. In New York City, Sylvester Leaks had disappointed some of his fans by attacking Baldwin. We in Ghana knew that Julian had written an article in support of the controversial author.
Julian, in his most roguish tone, said, “I’ll put the magazine here. No tearing, scratching or biting, first come and all that shit.” Alice moved like a whip, snatched up the magazine, which meant that she would take it home and that Vicki or I would be next in command.
Ana Livia spoke and took our total attention by announcing, “Dr. Du Bois is sick. Lucid, but very sick. He said he has stopped learning and it is time for him to go.” Our small crowd made a large noise of protest. Du Bois was ninety-six years old, and frail, but we wanted him to live forever. He had no right to his desire for death. We argued that great men and women should be forced to live as long as possible. The reverence they enjoyed was a life sentence, which they could neither revoke nor modify.
When the discussion reached a noise level that prohibited all understanding, Julian said he had read about a march to Washington, D.C., to be led by Martin Luther King, Jr. The news of Dr. Du Bois’ deteriorating health was driven away by an immediate buzzing of sarcastic questions.
“King leading a march. Who is he going to pray to this time, the statue of Abe Lincoln?”
“Give us our freedom again, please suh.”
“King has been in jail so much he’s got a liking for those iron bars and jailhouse food.”
The ridicule fitted our consciousness. We were brave revolutionaries, not pussyfooting nonviolent cowards. We scorned the idea of being spat upon, kicked, and then turning our cheeks for more abuse. Of course, none of us, save Julian, had even been close to bloody violence, and not one of us had spent an hour in jail for our political beliefs.
My policy was to keep quiet when Reverend King’s name was mentioned. I didn’t want to remind my radical friends of my association with the peacemaker. It was difficult, but I managed to dispose of the idea that my silence was a betrayal. After all, when I worked for him, I had been deluded into agreeing with Reverend King that love would cure America of its pathological illnesses, that indeed our struggle for equal rights would redeem the country’s baleful history. But all the prayers, sit-ins, sacrifices, jail sentences, humiliation, insults and jibes had not borne out Reverend King’s vision. When maddened White citizens and elected political leaders vowed to die before they would see segregation come to an end, I became more resolute in rejecting nonviolence and more adamant in denying Martin Luther King.
Someone made the suggestions that although we were radicals, as Black Americans we should support our people in the States and form a march sympathetic to the Washington march. As products of a picketing, protesting era, we unanimously and immediately agreed. Of course, we would march on the American Embassy with placards and some appropriate shouts. Julian would investigate Ghana’s policy on marches and secure permits if needed. Lesley would inform the Ghanaian students at the university who might like to join. Each of us excitedly chose assignments, feeling ourselves back on familiar ground. When it came to action we were in the church where we had been baptized. We knew when to moan, when to shout and when to start speaking in tongues.
Since Dr. Du Bois was too old and ill to accompany us, Julian would ask Dr. Alphaeus Hunton. Dr. Hunton was co-director with Dr. Du Bois of the Encyclopedia Africana, and would represent the older, more sober, more thoughtful segment of the Black American residents. We also decided to do more than march. Hundreds of thousands were expected at the Washington gathering and Mahalia Jackson was to sing and Dr. King would speak. Our community couldn’t even count on one hundred people, so we decided to write a stinging protest declaration and form a committee which would present it to the American ambassador inside the embassy. Our arrangements were made and agreed upon, and we broke up our meeting, our heads filled with a new and exciting charge and our fingers still smelling of spicy pork sausage.
The Washington March was to begin at 7:00 A.M. on August 27. Because of the seven-hour time difference, we planned to begin our supportive march at midnight on the twenty-sixth in the park across from the embassy.
The crowd, much larger than any of us expected, stumbled around in the dark greeting and embracing. I heard American voices which were new to
me, and saw Guy arrive laughing with a group of young Ghanaian friends. At eighteen, he had a long history of marches, having participated in political protests since he was fourteen.
Alice and her Rhodesian friend appeared carrying sticks which had oiled rags wrapped tightly at one end. They would be lighted as we began our vigil.
Farmers and junior high school teachers, Black Americans on holiday in Accra, and some Peace Corps volunteers swelled the ranks. We had begun to wonder about Julian, who was late. Those of us close to him knew that was unusual, since he was always punctual in political matters.
The general atmosphere was festive, with little bursts of laughter exploding in the humid darkness. We had lighted some fire sticks when Julian arrived. He called a few of us away from the crowd.
“Dr. Du Bois is dead.” His face in the flickering light was grey-black and his voice was flat. “I don’t think we should inform everyone, but you all should know.”
Alice, pragmatic and direct, said, “Well, what timing. He had a full and useful life and I think we should tell everybody. They’ll feel more like marching.”
We agreed and fanned out carrying the important news to the congregation. Sound became muffled as if Dr. Du Bois himself had appeared and ordered immediate quiet from the group. Suddenly someone whose voice I didn’t recognize began singing, “Oh, oh, Freedom, oh, oh, Freedom, oh, oh, Freedom over me.
And before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave
And go home to my God
And be free.”
There were a few mumbles of opposition in the crowd. “This is a political demonstration. Why are they singing that Ole’ Time Religion stuff?”
The detractor was drowned out as voices joined the soloist. We were singing for Dr. Du Bois’ spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage. To many of us he was the first American Negro intellectual. We knew about Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. We were proud of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. We memorized the verses of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen, but they were athletes, musicians and poets, and White folks thought all those talents came naturally to Negroes. So, while we survived because of those contributors and their contributions, the powerful White world didn’t stand in awe of them. Sadly, we also tended to take those brilliances for granted. But W.E.B. Du Bois and of course Paul Robeson were different, held on a higher or at least on a different plateau than the others.
We marched and sang thinking of home and the thousands who were marching in Washington, D.C., and many of us held in our minds a picture of the dapper little man, sporting a Vandyke beard, perfectly groomed, who earned a Harvard doctorate before the end of the 1800’s and who said in 1904, “The problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line.”
Dawn drifted in on a ragged file of damp and worn out marchers. During the early morning hours, a West African tropical downpour had drenched us and sent us scurrying to cars and trees and doorways. The African marchers said they could have forewarned us. They knew that a driving rain always followed the death of a great soul.
I asked, “God weeps?”
“Of course not. It is the way the spirits welcome a great soul to the land of the dead. They wash it first.”
We had walked in the dark, through the flickering light of oil sticks, protesting American racism and extolling the indomitability of the human spirit.
But daylight brought a hard reality. We were in fact marching against the American Embassy. It was a large impressive building made more impressive by the marines who lay belly down on its rooftop pointing shining guns in our direction.
Our lines had diminished through the night. People who had jobs or children or appointments or reservations had slipped away. Although there had been an agreement that we would march in relays, I was happy that none of the Revolutionist Returnees had left. Julian was still trudging along like Sisyphus on his unending climb. Bobby and Sarah Lee walked together chatting in the way of old marrieds, calm as if out for a morning stroll. Lesley and Jim Lacy remained, their faces still showing youthful anger. Vicki, Alice, Kofi Bailey, Guy, a few Black Americans I didn’t know and some Ghanaians continued walking. Everyone stopped, as if on signal, when two soldiers came out of the embassy door carrying a folded American flag. They stepped smartly to the flag pole, ignoring us, and began the routine movements of raising the banner.
Someone in our group shouted, “This isn’t Iwo Jima, guys.” Another screamed, “You haven’t taken Bunker Hill, you know. This is Africa.”
The incident fed energy to our tired bodies and we began to laugh. One of the soldiers was Black and during the ceremony, no doubt nervous, the soldiers fumbled and the flag began to sag toward the ground. It was the Black man who hurriedly caught the cloth and folded it lovingly into the White soldier’s arms.
Some of us jeered, “Why you, brother? What has that flag done for you?”
“Brother, why don’t you come over here and join us?”
“That flag won’t cover you in Alabama.”
The soldiers finished attaching the flag and began drawing the ropes. As the flag ascended, our jeering increased. A careful listener could have heard new vehemence of our shouts. We were scorning the symbol of hypocrisy and hope. Many of us had only begun to realize in Africa that the Stars and Stripes was our flag and our only flag, and that knowledge was almost too painful to bear. We could physically return to Africa, find jobs, learn languages, even marry and remain on African soil all our lives, but we were born in the United States and it was the United States which had rejected, enslaved, exploited, then denied us. It was the United States which held the graves of our grandmothers and grandfathers. It was in the United States, under conditions too bizarre to detail, that those same ancestors had worked and dreamed of “a better day, by and by.” There we had learned to live on the head of burnt matches, and sleep in holes in the ground. In Arkansas and Kansas and Chattanooga, Tennessee, we had decided to be no man’s creature. In Dallas we put our shoulders to the wheel, and our hands in God’s hand in Tulsa. We had learned the power of power in Chicago, and met in Detroit insatiable greed. We had our first loves in the corn brakes of Mississippi, in the cotton fields of Georgia we experienced the thundering pleasure of sex, and on 125th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem the Holy Spirit called us to be His own.
I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged into the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted it pristine, its white stripes, summer cloud white. Watching it wave in the breeze of a distance made us nearly choke with emotion. It lifted us up with its promise and broke our hearts with its denial.
We hurled invectives against the soldiers’ retreating backs, knowing that the two young men were not our enemies and that our sneers did not hide our longing for full citizenship under that now undulating flag.
In the early afternoon, Julian, Alice, Jean Pierre, Dr. Hunton and I walked past the nervous eyes of guards and into the embassy. The calm first secretary, standing in for the absent ambassador, accepted our written protest and told us he would see that it got into the hands of the proper authorities. He smiled and said a chummy, “My wife is marching in Washington with Reverend King. I wish I could be there.”
The ceremony was unsatisfactory. We joined the once again large crowd of marchers and explained what we had done, and the march was over.
I went home alone, emptied of passion and too exhausted to cry.
Malcolm had arrived at midday in Accra, and by evening the May-fields’ house was filled with expatriates eager to meet and listen to him. We sat on chairs, stools, tables and hunched on the floor, excited into a trembling silence.
“I am still a Muslim. I am still a minister and I am still Black.” The golden man laughed, and lamplight entangled itself in his sandy beard.
“My trip to Mecca has changed many other things about me. That is w
hat the Hadj is supposed to do, and when I return to America I will make some statements which will shock everybody.” He rubbed his beard and his eyes were quick with humor. “Of course, I suppose people would be really shocked, if Malcolm X wasn’t shocking.”
The crowd responded in quick unison like a laugh track for a television comedy. Those who knew him were surprised at Malcolm’s light-heartedness.
When I met him two years earlier, he had been the bombastic spokesman for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Clean shaven and dark-suited, he sizzled proudly on street corners and from television screens, as he called Whites “Blue-eyed devils” and accused America of totalitarian genocide.
Just as Jomo Kenyatta was Kenya’s “Burning Spear,” so Malcolm X was America’s Molotov cocktail, thrown upon the White hope that all Black Americans would follow the nonviolent tenets of Dr. Martin Luther King. “Freedom at any cost” had been his rallying cry. He had been the stalking horse for the timid who openly denied him but took him, like a forbidden god, into their most secret hearts, there to adore him.
The living room and side porch were filled with an attentive and shocked audience, as Malcolm, still at ease, sat describing his recent pilgrimage to Mecca.
“Brothers and Sisters, I am pleased to see you all here in the homeland and bring you news which won’t come as news to you from that place you left. The situation has not lightened up. Black people are still marching, sitting in, praying in and even swimming in.”
We all knew that the Muslims had shown disgust with the Black American integrationists.
He continued, “And White Americans are still saying that they don’t want Blacks in their restaurants, churches, swimming pools and voting booths. I thought I’d bring you familiar news first. Now this is new news.” Those of us on the floor and those who had found chairs leaned eagerly toward Malcolm.