by Maya Angelou
Now, with the new developments about to take place, I felt a little sympathy for the Boers, and congratulated myself and all African-Americans for our courage. The passion my people would exhibit under Malcolm’s leadership was going to help us rid our country of racism once and for all. The Africans in South Africa often said they had been inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1958. Well, we were going to give them something new, something visionary, to look up to. After we had cleansed ourselves and our country of hate, they would be able to study our methods, take heart from our example and let freedom ring in their country as it would ring in ours.
Sweet dreams of the future blunted the sharp pain of leaving both my son and the other important man in my life. Given enough time, Guy would eventually grow up and be a fine man, but my romantic other could never fit into my world, nor I into his.
He was a powerful West African who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane. He uprooted my well-planted ideas and blew down all my firmly held beliefs about decorum.
I had been in love many times before I met him, but I had never surrendered myself to anyone. I had given my word and my body, but I had never given my soul. The African had the habit of being obeyed, and he insisted on having all of me. The pleasure I found with him made me unable, or at least unwilling, to refuse.
Within a month of conceding my authority over myself and my life to another, I realized the enormity of my mistake. If I wanted chicken, he said he wanted lamb, and I quickly agreed. If I wanted rice, he wanted yams, and I quickly agreed. He said that I was to go along with whatever he wanted, and I agreed. If I wanted to visit with my friends and he wanted to be alone but not without me, I agreed.
I began to feel the pinch of his close embrace the first time I wanted to sit up and read and he wanted to go to bed.
And, he added, I was needed.
I agreed.
But I thought, “Needed?” Needed like an extra blanket? Like air-conditioning? Like more pepper in the soup? I resented being thought of as a thing, but I had to admit that I allowed the situation myself and had no reason to be displeased with anyone save myself.
Each time I gave up my chicken for his lamb, I ate less. When I gave up a visit with friends to stay home with him, I enjoyed him less. And when I joined him, leaving my book abandoned on the desk, I found I had less appetite for the bedroom.
“You Americans can be bullheaded, stupid and crazy. Why would you kill President Kennedy?” He didn’t hear me say, “I didn’t kill the president.”
My return to the United States came at the most opportune time. I could leave my son to his manly development hurdles; I would leave my great, all-consuming love to his obedient subjects; and I would return to work with Malcolm X on building the Organization of African-American Unity.
By the time we arrived in New York, I had discarded my vilification of the white racists on the plane and had even begun to feel a little more sorry for them.
I was saddened by their infantile, puerile minds. They could be assured that as soon as we American blacks got our country straight, the Xhosas, Zulus, Matabeles, Shonas and others in southern Africa would lead their whites from the gloom of ignorance into the dazzling light of understanding.
The sound in the airport was startling. The open air in Africa was often loud, with many languages being spoken at once, children crying, drums pounding—that had been noise, but at New York’s Idlewild Airport, the din that aggressively penetrated the air, insisting on being heard, was clamor. There were shouts and orders, screams, implorings and demands, horns blaring and voices booming. I found a place beside a wall and leaned against it. I had been away from the cacophony for four years, but now I was home.
After I gathered my senses, I found a telephone booth.
I knew I was not ready for New York’s strenuous energy, but I needed to explain that to my New York friends. I had written Rosa Guy, my supportive sister-friend, and she was expecting me. I also needed to call Abbey Lincoln, the jazz singer, and her husband, Max Roach, the jazz drummer, who had offered me a room in their Columbus Avenue apartment that I had refused. But most especially, I had to speak to Malcolm.
His telephone voice caught me off guard. I realized I had never spoken to him on the telephone.
“Maya, so you finally got here. How was the trip?” His voice was higher-pitched than I expected.
“Fine.”
“You stay at the airport, I’ll be there to pick you up. I’ll leave right now.”
I interrupted. “I’m going straight to San Francisco. My plane leaves soon.”
“I thought you were coming to work with us in New York.”
“I’ll be back in a month …” I explained that I needed to be with my mother and my brother, Bailey, just to get used to being back in the United States.
Malcolm said, “I had to leave my car in the Holland Tunnel. Somebody was trying to get me. I jumped in a white man’s car. He panicked. I told him who I was, and he said, ‘Get down low, I’ll get you out of this.’ You believe that, Maya?”
I said yes, but I found it hard to do so. “I’ll call you next week when I get my bearings.”
Malcolm said, “Well, let me tell you about Betty and the girls.” I immediately remembered the long nights in Ghana when our group sat and listened to him talk about the struggle, racism, political strategies and social unrest. Then he would speak of Betty. His voice would soften and take on a new melody. We would be told of her great intelligence, of her beauty, of her wit. How funny she was and how faithful. We would hear that she was an adoring mother and a brave and loving wife.
Malcolm said, “She is here now and making a wonderful dinner. You know she is pretty and pregnant. Pretty pregnant.” He laughed at his own joke.
I said, “Please give her my regards. I must run for my plane. I’ll call you next week.”
“Do that. Safe trip.”
I hurriedly telephoned Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln to say that I was home. They also offered to pick me up from the airport, but I told them I would phone them next week from San Francisco.
Rosa Guy listened to my explanation and understood. Our conversation was brief.
I thought of calling James Baldwin, who had become a close friend. We met in Paris in the 1950s when he was writing and I was the principal dancer in the opera Porgy and Bess. We became closer in 1960 when I lived in New York. Jimmy was familiar with the work of Jean Genet, and when I played the White Queen in the Genet drama The Blacks, he spent long evenings helping me with the role. I didn’t telephone him because I knew he could persuade me to stay in New York for at least a day. His physical smallness, his sense of humor and his love for me reminded me so much of my brother, Bailey, that I could never completely resist him.
CHAPTER 2
My mother met me at the San Francisco airport. She was smaller and prettier than she had been in my memory. She kissed me and said, “Describe your luggage to the skycaps, they will bring your bags to the car.” The porters had eyes only for my mother. They danced attendance to her, like a male corps de ballet around the première danseuse, and she didn’t even seem to notice. Mother rushed us to the car and my heart leaped to find Bailey sitting in the backseat. He had flown in from Hawaii to meet me and at once began talking and asking questions.
Mother said, “She grew prettier. You’re a good-looking woman, baby.”
Bailey said, “Yeah, but good looks run in this family. She didn’t have anything to do with that. Tell me about Guy.”
Mother said, “I read in the papers that you were coming back to work with Malcolm X in some new organization. I hope not. I really hope not.” She paused and then continued, “If you feel you have to do that—work for no money—go back to Martin Luther King. He’s really trying to help our people. Malcolm X is a rabble-rouser.”
My breath left me and I couldn’t seem to get it back. Just as suddenly, I had enough air, and as I opened my mouth to respond,
Bailey touched my shoulder and I turned to him. His face was solemn as he wagged his head. I closed my mouth.
Although less than two years older than I and barely five feet four, my brother had been my counselor and protector for as long as I could remember. When we were just three and four, our parents separated. They sent us, unaccompanied, from California to our paternal grandmother and uncle, who lived in Stamps, a small Arkansas hamlet. Since the adults were strangers to us, Bailey became head of a family that consisted of just us two. He was quicker to learn than I, and he took over teaching me what to do and how to do it.
When I was seven, our handsome, dapper California father arrived in the dusty town. After dazzling the country folk, including his mother, his brother and his children, he took Bailey and me to St. Louis to live with our mother, who had moved back to Missouri after their divorce. He wasn’t concerned with offering us a better life, but rather, with curtailing the life my mother was living as a pretty woman who was single again.
My grandmother bundled us and a shoe box of fried chicken into my father’s car and cried as she waved good-bye. My father drove, hardly stopping until he delivered us to my mother in St. Louis.
For the first few months we were enraptured with the exotic Northern family. Our maternal grandmother looked white and had a German accent. Our grandfather was black and spoke with a Trinidadian accent. Their four sons swaggered into and out of their house like movie toughs.
Their food astonished us. They ate liverwurst and salami, which we had never seen. Their sliced bread was white and came in greasy, slick waxed paper, and after eating only homemade ice cream, we thought there could be nothing greater than enjoying slices of multicolored cold slabs cut from a brick of frozen dessert. We delighted in being big-city kids until my mother’s boyfriend raped me. After much persuasion (the man had warned me that if I told anyone, he would kill my brother), I told Bailey, who told the family. The man was arrested, spent one night in jail, was released and found dead three days later.
The police who informed my grandmother of the man’s death, in front of me, said it seemed he had been kicked to death.
The account staggered me. I thought my voice had killed the man, so I stopped speaking and Bailey became my shadow, as if he and I were playing a game. If I turned left, he turned left; if I sat, he sat. He hardly let me out of his sight. The large, rambunctious big-city family tried to woo me out of my stolid silence, but when I stubbornly refused to talk, Bailey and I were both sent back to Arkansas. For the next six years, my brother was the only person for whom I would bring my voice out of concealment. I thought my voice was such poison that it could kill anyone. I spoke to him only rarely and sometimes incomprehensibly, but I felt that because I loved him so much, my voice might not harm him.
In our early teens we returned to our mother, who had moved back to California. Our lives began to differ. Just as Bailey had shadowed me earlier, he now seemed set on opposing each move I made. If I went to school, he cut class. If I refused narcotics, he wanted to experiment. If I stayed home, he became a merchant marine. Yet despite our dissimilar routes and practices, I never lost my complete trust in Bailey.
And now, as I sat in my mother’s car being bombarded by the metropolitan flash and my mother’s attack on Malcolm, I held my peace; Bailey encouraged me to do so, and I knew he would be proven right.
My mother’s Victorian house on Fulton Street was exactly as it had been when I left four years earlier. She had bought new rugs and added or changed some furniture, but the light still entered the tall windows boldly, and the air still held the dual scent of Tweed perfume and a slight hint of gas escaping from a very small aperture.
I was encouraged to put my bags in my old bedroom and then to join Mother and Bailey in the vast kitchen for a sumptuous welcome-home.
Mother told racy stories, and Bailey regaled me with Hawaiian songs and then gave me his interpretation of an island man’s hula. Mother brought out a recipe for Jollof rice that I had sent her from Ghana. She unfolded the letter and read, “Cook about a pound of rice, sauté a couple or three onions in not too much cooking oil for a while, then put in three or four or five right-sized tomatoes …”
At this point in her recitation, Bailey began laughing. He was a professional chef in a swank Hawaiian hotel. The approximation of ingredients and cooking time amused him.
“Dice some cooked ham in fairly large-sized pieces,” my mother continued, “and include with salt and cayenne pepper any leftover fried chicken into the tomato sauce. Heat through, then mix in with rice. Then heat quite a while.”
We all laughed when Mother said she had followed the recipe exactly and that the dish was a smashing success.
Bailey then told us stories about the tourists and their dining orders at his Waikiki hotel: “I’d like fried chicken and biscuits.”
“Y’all have any short ribs and corn bread?”
Mother telephoned friends, who dropped by to look at me and Bailey. Many spoke of us as if we weren’t in the room.
“Vivian, she looks so good. I know you’re proud.” And “Well, Bailey didn’t grow any more, but he sure is a pretty little black thing.”
The entire weekend was a riot of laughter, stories, memories awakened and relished in the bright sunlight. The specter of my distant son cast the only shadow. His arrogance and intractability were discussed, and my family put his behavior in its proper place.
My mother said, “He’s a boy.”
I said, “He thinks he is a man.” Mother said, “That’s the nature of the group. When they are boys, they want to be treated like men, but when they are gray-haired old coots, they go around acting like boys.” No one could argue with that. “Don’t worry about him. You have raised him with love. The fruit won’t fall too far from the tree.”
The finality in her tone told me she was finished with the subject, but I wondered—what if the fruit fell and was picked up by a hungry bird? Wasn’t it possible that it could end up on a dung heap far away from the mother tree?
These were the bleak moments in my homecoming that could not be brightened by Bailey’s quick wit or my mother’s hilarious homilies.
I had been a journalist in Cairo, and Guy had finished high school there. We moved to Ghana, and when he recovered from a devastating automobile accident, he entered the university. Classrooms were not large enough to hold all of him. When I talked to him about the importance of grades, he patted my head and said, “I understand your interest, little Mother, but those are my concerns and my business. I’ll take care of them.”
For two years, Guy weaned himself away from my nurture. He broke dates with me, and when I surprised him with an unannounced visit, he firmly let me know that I was not welcome.
When I chose to return to the U.S. to work with Malcolm, I paid Guy’s tuition through his graduating year. I told him he could have all the freedom he required. In fact, I said I would give him Ghana.
The paramount chief Nana Nketsi IV assured me that he would pay sharp attention to Guy; and the Genouds, who were childless, assured me that Guy would be like a son to them. They promised to give me a monthly report on how he was faring, so I should feel at ease.
Of course I didn’t. From the moment I bought my ticket, guilt called out my name.
Guy was nineteen, and I, who had been his shade since he was born, was leaving him under the broiling African sun. Each time I would try to speak with him about his future, he would cut me off. When I tried to talk about my departure, he curtly told me that indeed I should go home, to go and work with Malcolm. Guy was a man who was trying to live his own life.
CHAPTER 3
The golden morning was definitely a San Francisco Sunday. I dressed quickly and left the house. I had been home less than forty-eight hours, and already I had a creeping sensation that I should be moving on. My mother was comfortably encircled by her ring of friends and Bailey, who had shown me on Friday night how Hawaiian men enjoyed themselves, and on Saturday night how S
an Franciscans still did their weekend partying, was planning to return the next week to the Hawaiian Islands.
The streets were empty. San Franciscans who hadn’t gone to church were sleeping off Saturday-night parties. I walked through parks and trudged up hills. At every peak, I was struck by the beauty that lay invitingly at the foot of the hill.
I had not consciously considered a destination, but I found myself at the end of Golden Gate Park’s panhandle, and I realized that my mother’s close friend lived nearby.
Aunt Lottie Wells had come to San Francisco from Los Angeles ten years earlier. She joined the family, became my friend and helped me to raise Guy. Her house was a smaller version of Mother’s home. Fresh-cut flowers were everywhere, reposing on highly polished tables beneath glistening mirrors.
She said she knew I would visit her, so she hadn’t gone to church. She had a pan of biscuits in the oven and was ready to fold over one of her light-as-air omelettes. Lottie smiled, and I was glad that the spirit of wanderers, which lived with me, had brought me to her home.
Her telephone rang as we were sitting down to the table. She answered it in the hall.
She returned. “It’s Ivonne for you,” she said, grinning. “She called your house and your mother told her you would probably stop by here.”
Ivonne was my first adult friend, and I knew we would spend some delicious hours talking about ourselves, the men we loved and the ones who got away. We had never been slow to give each other advice, although I didn’t remember either of us being quick to hearken to the other’s counsel.
I picked up the phone. “Hey, girl. Where are you? How are you doing?”
“Maya, girl, why did you come home? Why did you come back to this crazy place?”
There was no cheer in her voice.