The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

by Maya Angelou

  “I came back because I think I have something to do.”

  She said, “These Negroes are crazy here. I mean, really crazy. Otherwise, why would they have just killed that man in New York?”

  I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it. I cradled it in my hands, looking at its dull black surface; then I laid it down on the hall table. Instead of returning to the dining room, I walked into a bedroom and locked the door.

  I didn’t have to ask. I knew “that man in New York” was Malcolm X and that someone had just killed him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bailey’s anxious voice awakened me.

  “My. My. Open this door. Open it now.”

  At times when my life has been ripped apart, when my feet forget their purpose and my tongue is no longer familiar with the inside of my mouth, a touch of narcolepsy has befriended me. I have fallen asleep as an adored lover told me that his fancy had flown. When my son was severely injured in the automobile crash, I couldn’t eat and could barely talk, but I could fall asleep sitting on the straight-back metal hospital chairs beside his door.

  This time I woke up in a strange room knowing everything. I was still in Aunt Lottie’s house, and Malcolm was dead. I had returned from Africa to give my energies and wit to the OAAU, and Malcolm was dead.

  “Open this door, My. Wake up and open the damn door or I’ll break it down.”

  He would. I turned the lock.

  He looked at my face. “I’m sorry, baby. Go in the bathroom and wash up. I’m taking you somewhere. Somewhere important. Go on.”

  My bloated face and swollen eyes told me I had cried, but I didn’t remember and didn’t want to remember.

  Bailey waited in the hall, holding my purse and jacket.

  “Here, take this. Put this on. Say good-bye to Aunt Lottie.”

  She took me in her arms. “So sorry, baby. So sorry.”

  My eyesight and my equilibrium failed me, so Bailey guided me down the hills. He always knew when and when not to talk. He remained silent as we walked out of the residential district and on to the Fillmore area. There, all the people who had been absent from the streets earlier were now very much present, but in ordinary ways. Shouts, conversation and laughter seemed to cascade out of every door. Customers left and entered grocery stores, absorbed in conversation. Men stood in front of saloons engaged in dialogue so private it needed to be whispered. I was shocked to see life going on as usual.

  I said to Bailey, “They don’t know.”

  Bailey grunted. “They know. They don’t care.”

  “What do you mean they don’t care? I can’t accept that. When they know that Malcolm has been killed, the people will riot. They’ll explode.”

  Bailey deftly steered me through the open door of the smoky Havana Bar, where the jukebox music vied with customers’ voices.

  I looked into the grinning faces and was stumped. In Ghana, I had read that the mood of unrest here was so great that the black community was like a powder keg that would take very little to detonate. But only hours after their champion had been killed, black men and women were flirting and drinking and reveling as if nothing had happened. Bailey ordered two drinks, and when the bartender slid them in front of us, my brother touched me with his elbow and asked the bartender, “Hey, man, you hear what happened to Malcolm X?”

  The bartender made a swiping gesture with the bill Bailey had laid down.

  “Well, hell, man. They shot him. You know they say, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”

  He added ignorance to ignorance by pronouncing the “sw” in sword like the “sw” in the word “swear.”

  “How dare you … don’t you know what Malcolm X has done?”

  Bailey took my arm. “Thanks, man. Keep the change.”

  In seconds I was outside in the clear air, and Bailey was propelling me along Fillmore Street.

  “Come on. We’re going to Jack’s Tavern.”

  That historic saloon had been my mother’s hangout for years. The clientele tended to be older, more established, more professional. They would know the importance of Malcolm’s life and most certainly the importance of his death. I needed to be there quickly, so I began to walk a little faster.

  Bailey said, “Don’t set yourself up to be knocked down. Keep your expectations in control.”

  The night before, I had told him of my disappointment with Mother. She didn’t appreciate or even understand Malcolm and the struggle of black people for equality.

  I asked, “Does she think she’s liberated?”

  Bailey said, as if he had always known it, “Some folks say they want change. They just want exchange. They only want to have what the haves have, so they won’t have it anymore. Now, Mom is not like that. She just wants to be left alone. She thinks if no one gets in her way, she can get her freedom by herself. She doesn’t want even Martin Luther King to tell her where her liberation lies—and certainly not Malcolm X.”

  When we walked into Jack’s Tavern, we were greeted by Mother’s friends.

  “Well, Vivian’s children came from the ends of the earth to see about their old mother.”

  Another voice came from near the bar: “Better not let Vivian hear you call her old.”

  Someone answered, “If anybody tells her I said it, I’ll deny it to my dying day.”

  “How are you all doing?”

  One of the oldest regulars told the bartender, “Set them up. Their money’s no good in here.”

  I was relieved to find Trumpet still tending bar. He had been a pal of mine during the lean days when I was studying and teaching dance, trying to raise my son, keep my love affairs intact and live on one grain of rice and a drop of water. We had spent long hours as buddies, talking about the ways of the world.

  I said, “Trumpet, I know you heard about Malcolm.”

  “Naw, baby. When did you come home? Good-looking old tall long-legged girl.”

  “Trumpet, Malcolm is dead. Somebody shot him.”

  Trumpet stood up straight. “Really? No, that’s awful. Awful news. Sorry to hear that. When did you get home? How was Africa?”

  Bailey said to me, “Get your drink. Let’s sit down at a table.”

  I followed him. He must have seen that at the moment, I was quite soberly going mad.

  “You know, of course, that you can’t go back to New York. With Malcolm dead, there is no OAAU, and you can’t start one or restart his on your own. You wouldn’t know who to trust. Accusations are going to be flying thick as grits, and that is no place for you.”

  Bleakness and grief welled up in me, and I started to cry.

  Bailey said, “Stop that. What happened to you in Africa? Did you forget? You can’t let people see you cry in public. That’s like laying your head down on a chopping block in the presence of an executioner.

  “Now, you want the black people to rise up and riot. Don’t count on it. Nothing’s going to happen right away. I mean nothing. But after a while, a white man is going to step on a black woman’s toe, and we’ll have a civil war again.”

  I asked, “What can I do? I don’t want to go back to Africa. You say don’t go to New York. I hate San Francisco right now.”

  “Come back to Honolulu with me. Aunt Leah is there. You can stay with her for a while.”

  My mother’s only sister was an evangelist in Oahu, and I didn’t take much comfort in Bailey’s invitation.

  “You can go back to singing in nightclubs. A lot of new places have opened since you were last there.”

  He continued talking, but I stopped listening and began concentrating on regaining my self-control.

  “Maya. Maya.” He spoke softly, and for the first time his voice was heavy with sympathy. “Baby, let me tell you what’s going to happen. In a few years, there are going to be beautiful posters of Malcolm X, and his photographs will be everywhere. The same people who don’t give a damn now will lie and say they always supported him. And that very bartender, the one with the sword”—Bailey
mispronounced the word as the bartender had done—“he will say, ‘Malcolm was a great man. I always knew he was a great man. A race man. A man who loved his people.’ ”

  I looked at my brother, who was always the wisest person I knew, and wondered if he could possibly be wrong this time.

  When we returned home Mother had the grace to give me her sympathy.

  “I didn’t care for his tactics, but nobody should be shot down like a yard dog. I know he was your friend, baby, and I’m sorry. I want you to know I’m sorry he was killed.”

  It took me two days to reach Ghana by telephone, and when I did, Guy’s voice was hardly audible. He spoke through the crackle of international static.

  “I hope you’ll enjoy Hawaii, Mom. I was sorry about Malcolm.” Then he said, “I am very well. I’m doing fine, and school is fine.”

  What else could or would he say?

  “I’ve been back to the hospital, and I can play football now.”

  In the automobile crash years earlier, Guy had broken his neck and spent six months in a torso cast. He healed, but I doubted seriously that he had been given medical clearance to play any full-contact sport.

  “Yes, Mother, of course I miss you.”

  He didn’t.

  “Mom.” His voice began to fade, but for the first time I heard my son’s true voice. “Mom, I’m really sorry about Malcolm. We held a vigil in Accra … Really, really sorry.”

  Thousands of air miles and millions of Atlantic waves sandwiched my son’s voice, and I could no longer hear him, but I was satisfied. We had lived so close together that through his normal teenage bravado and his newly learned air of male superiority, I could translate him into my mother language fluently. Despite the static and the pauses when the line went dead, despite the faintness of his voice and the loud buzzing that never stopped, the call was, for me, a huge success.

  I learned from what he said and what he didn’t say that he was living the high life, the very high life. In fact, he was glad that he had been invited to the world party and that there was no mother around to give him curfew hours. He was going to school and enjoying the competition and the open forum for debate, because he was always eager for argument. He missed me, but not in the sense that he wished me back in Ghana. He missed me just because I had left a vacuum. He was glad for the opportunity to furnish the vacuum with his own chosen baubles.

  Generally, he was happy in his fortified city of youth. And if a cold breeze blew over the ramparts, he had his bravado to keep him warm.

  He was sincerely sorry about Malcolm. He was so near the sacred and fearful grail of black manhood that any man of color who faced the threat of life with courage, and intellect, and wit, was his hero. He included among his paladins Mahatma Gandhi, Paul Robeson, Nelson Mandela, Mao Tse-tung, Hannibal, Robert Sobukwe and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Malcolm X topped the list. Guy himself had lost an ideal, so he felt sincere sympathy for me. He knew I had lost a friend.

  CHAPTER 5

  The San Francisco streets bore out Bailey’s predictions. Life was so mundane that I was plunged into despair.

  Why were black people so indifferent? Were we unfeeling? Or were we so timid that we were afraid to honor our dead? I thought what a pathetic people we were.

  American blacks were acting as if they believed “A man lived, a man loved, a man tried, a man died,” and that was all there was to that.

  Papers ran pictures of the handsome Malcolm before the assassination alongside the photo of his bloody body, with his wife, Betty, leaning over her beloved on her knees, frozen in shock.

  If a group of racists had waylaid Malcolm, killed him in the dark and left his body as a mockery to all black people, I might have accepted his death more easily. But he was killed by black people as he spoke to black people about a better future for black people and in the presence of his family.

  Bailey rescued me. He had returned to Hawaii and found a nightclub that was offering me a job singing. He had lined up a rhythm section and had talked Aunt Leah into letting me stay with her until I could find a place.

  Mother admitted, “Yes, I phoned your brother. You were prowling around the streets and the house like a lame leopard. Time for you to straighten up and get back into the whirl of life.”

  She lived life as if it had been created just for her. She thought the only people who didn’t feel the same were laggards and layabouts.

  One would have to be a determined malcontent to resist her sincere good humor. She played music, cooked wonderful menus of my favorite foods and told me bawdy jokes, partly to entertain and partly to shock me out of my lethargy. Her tactics worked.

  We packed for Hawaii with great joviality. Mother bought me beautiful expensive Western clothes. I began to look forward to the trip. With her powerful personality, she had pulled me out of the drowning depths and onto a safe shore. I had not forgotten Malcolm, nor was I totally at ease about Guy, but some of my own good humor had returned, and I was ready to search for a path back into life.

  CHAPTER 6

  The exterior of Aunt Leah’s house was middle-class Southern California ranch-style stucco. The inside was working-class anywhere. A large, light beige sofa and matching chair were dressed in fitted, heavy plastic covers; a curved blond cocktail table bore up a crouching ceramic black panther. The drapes, which remained closed during my entire stay, were a strong defense against the persistent Hawaiian sunlight. Well-worn Bibles lay on all surfaces, and pictures of Jesus hung on all the walls. Some images were of the Saviour looking benignly out of the drawing, and others were the tortured visages of Him upon the cross.

  Having spent a month in my mother’s tuneful and colorful house, I felt that I had left reality and entered surreality.

  My aunt was religious, and she lived her religion. Her response to “Good morning, how are you?” was “Blessed in the Lord, and Him dead and crucified.”

  Her husband, named Al but called “Brother”—tradition dictated that I call him “Uncle Brother”—was a big, good-looking country man who adored his wife. He had come from the Arkansas Ozarks with the strength of John Henry, a sunny disposition and very little education. He was working as a laborer when he and my aunt met. She encouraged him to return to school and helped him with his books. By the time they moved to Hawaii, he had become a general contractor who could read a sextant and was building high-rise hotels.

  His presence made the house bearable because he didn’t take anything too seriously, even my aunt. There was always a shimmer in his eyes when he looked at her: “Yes, baby. Yes, baby, I thanked the Lord, too, but I know the Lord is not going to lay one brick for me. He is not going to plaster one wall. He’s counting on me to do that for Him. So I got to go.”

  CHAPTER 7

  There is reliable verity in the assurance that once one has learned to ride a bicycle, the knowledge never disappears. I could add that this is also true for nightclub singing.

  Rehearsing with a rhythm section, putting on a fancy, shiny dress and makeup and stepping up to the microphone was as familiar to me as combing my hair. To my surprise, I remembered how to step gracefully out of a song after I had blundered into it in the wrong key, and how to keep an audience interested even when the tune was a folk song with thirty-nine verses.

  Within a few weeks at the Encore in Hawaii, I was drawing a good crowd that was eager to hear my style of singing calypso songs in a pseudo-African accent.

  The love songs of the Gershwins and Duke Ellington and the clever calypso lyrics were my reliable repertoire. I sang to drum, bass and piano accompaniment, and in each set I included one African song that I translated so loosely the original composer would not have recognized it.

  The club orchestra played Hawaiian music, which pleased sailors, businessmen and families. They not only enjoyed the music, they joined in on the audience-participation numbers and would sally forth to the dance floor and treat themselves and the establishment to a hula, samba, rumba, jitterbug, cha-cha or even a tap da
nce.

  I would go home to Aunt Leah’s around three A.M., and the sensation was as if I had just left Times Square and stepped onto the dock of the bay at the back of the moon.

  Auntie didn’t believe in much volume, so music from her radios was hardly audible; every now and again the name of Jesus could be heard from a broadcast sermon. Nor did she approve of air-conditioning. Uncle Brother had installed first-rate units in the house, but Aunt Leah was Calvinistic. She was certain that too many physical comforts in this life would cut down on benefits for the Christians lucky enough to get into heaven, or might even make it too difficult to get in at all. The house was dark, and the air was heavy and stayed in one place. With its sluggish mood, it should have been an ideal location in which to indulge a hearty dose of self-pity. But somehow, piety had claimed every inch of air in that house.

  Gloom definitely could not find a niche at the nightclub. It was impossible to think about the life Guy might be living, or Malcolm’s death, or the end of yet another of my marriages made in heaven while I was onstage singing “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” or the Andrews Sisters’ irresistible song “Drinking Rum and Coca-Cola.”

  Offstage, the other entertainers were so busy flirting outrageously, fondling one another or carrying arguments to high-pitched and bitter ends that there was no room in which I could consider my present and my past.

  I wanted a place where I could languish. I found a furnished flat, moved in, seated myself, laced my fingers and put my hands in my lap and waited. I expected a litany of pitiful accounts to come to mind, a series of sad tales. I was a woman alone, unable to get a man, and if I got one, I could not hold on to him; I had only one child (West Africans say one child is no child, for if a tragedy befalls him, there is nothing left), and he was beyond my reach in too many ways. I expected a face full of sorry and a lap full of if-you-please. Nothing happened. I didn’t get a catch in my throat, and there was no moisture around my eyes.