Letter to My Daughter (6 page)

In Self-Defense

Recently I had an appointment with four television producers who wanted my permission to produce a short story I had written.

As often happens, the leader of the group showed herself immediately. There was no question as to who was the boss. The woman was small, with a quick smile and a high-pitched voice. She met each statement I made with a sarcastic rejoinder. Not caustic enough for me to call her down but pointed enough for me to realize she meant to put me in my place, which was obviously somewhere beneath her.

I said, “I’m glad we are meeting in this restaurant, it is one of my favorites.”

She said, “I have not been here for years but I remember the last time the atmosphere was so boring we could have been in an old lady’s home.”

She looked around, smirked, and said, “It does not seem as if it has gotten any better.”

After she had responded sarcastically to my statements three times, I asked, “Why are you doing that?”

She answered in a sweet innocent voice, “What, what am I doing?”

I said, “You are timidly attacking me.”

She laughed and said, “Oh no, I was just showing you that you cannot be right about everything all the time. Anyway I like to have a little word warfare going on. It sharpens the wit, and I am brutally frank.”

I kept my hands in my lap and brought my chin to my chest. I ordered myself to be kind.

I asked the producer, “Word warfare? Do you really want to call me out into the arena for word warfare?”

And she said boldly, “Yes, I do, yes, I do, yes, I do.”

“No, I do not, but let us speak about the business which brought us together. Your corporation wanted my permission to explore my short story as a vehicle for television. I must tell you ‘No,’ I will not agree.”

She said, “We have not even made our offer to you.”

I told her, “That does not matter. I know very well that you would not furnish me a peaceful or pleasant environment in which to work. That is not how you work, so I am obliged to refuse any offer you might make.”

I thought I could have added, “I promise you, you do not want me as your adversary because, once I feel myself under threat, I fight to win, and in that case I will forget that I am thirty years older than you, with a reputation for being passionate. Then after the fray, if I see I have vanquished you I would be embarrassed that I have brought all the pain, brought all the joy, brought all the fear, and the glory that I have lived through, to triumph over a single woman who did not know that she should be careful of who she calls out and I would not like myself very much. And if you bested me I would be devastated and might start to throw things.”

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet, I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves, that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.

Mrs. Coretta Scott King

Over the last few years, and even in the last few months, I have said reluctant goodbyes to friends I have known over forty years. Friends I miss, with whom I learned many of life’s sweetest and most painful lessons.

I still miss James Baldwin and Alex Haley and the loud talking, shouting, laughing, crying weekends that we shared. Betty Shabazz is near enough for me to remember what she was wearing when I last cooked dinner for her. Tom Feelings and I produced a book together and he drew a portrait of my late mother, which hangs in my bedroom. I spoke to Ossie Davis a few days before he died and agreed to stand in for him and his wife Ruby Dee at an engagement they could not cover in Washington, D.C.

And recently, I waved farewell to Coretta Scott King, a chosen sister. As I approach my birthday every year, I am reminded that Martin Luther King was assassinated on my birthday and each year for the last thirty years, Coretta Scott King and I have sent flowers or cards to each other or shared telephone calls on April 4.

I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, “Death, where is thy sting?” with “It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.”

I am besieged with painful awe at the vacuum left by the dead. Where did she go? Where is he now? Are they, as the poet James Weldon Johnson said, “resting in the bosom of Jesus”? If so, what about my Jewish loves, my Japanese dears, and my Muslim darlings. Into whose bosom are they cuddled?

I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.

When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

Did I learn to be kinder,

To be more patient,

And more generous,

More loving,

More ready to laugh,

And more easy to accept honest tears?

If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives.

Condolences

For a too brief moment in the universe the veil was lifted. The mysterious became known. Questions met answers somewhere behind the stars. Furrowed brows were smoothed and eyelids closed over long unblinking stares.

Your beloved occupied the cosmos. You awoke to sunrays and nestled down to sleep in moonlight. All life was a gift open to you and burgeoning for you. Choirs sang to harps and your feet moved to ancestral drumbeats.
For you were sustaining and being sustained by the arms of your beloved.

Now the days stretch before you with the dryness and sameness of desert dunes. And in this season of grief we who love you have become invisible to you. Our words worry the empty air around you and you can sense no meaning in our speech.

Yet, we are here. We are still here. Our hearts ache to support you.

We are always loving you.

You are not alone.

In the Valley of Humility

In the early seventies I was invited to speak at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. The school had only recently been integrated.

I told my husband that the visit interested me. He was a master builder and had just signed a large contract so he could not accompany me. I called my close friend in New York. Dolly McPherson said she would meet me in Washington, D.C., and we could travel south together.

My lecture was well received at the school and before I could leave the building, the students came up to me and asked me to meet with them.

I went with Dolly to the student lounge where there, the students crowded in on every sofa, chair, stool, and pillow on the floor. They were pointedly separate with the black students seated down front in a group.

There was no hesitation in offering questions. One young white male said, “I am nineteen, I am going to be a man, but strictly speaking, I’m still a boy. But that guy there,” he pointed to the black student, “gets mad if I call him boy and we’re the same age. Why is that?” I waved at the black student, “There he is, why not ask him?”

A black female student said, “I went to a good high school where I graduated valedictorian. I speak good English. Why do they,” she nodded to the white students, “think I need them to speak to me in accents so thick I can hardly understand?”

I asked her to tell me how she was spoken to. She said, “They say, ‘Hey y’all, how y’all doin’? Y’all okay?’” She spoke with such an extreme exaggerated southern accent that everyone laughed.

I said, “They are right there, why don’t you ask them?” As they began talking to one another, I realized that I was being used as a bridge. The parents of those students had never had a language, which allowed them to speak to one another as equals, and now their children were creating a way which would allow them to have a dialogue. I sat with them until midnight, encouraging, abetting, and urging them to speak.

When I stood, exhausted, Tom Mullin, the Dean of Wake Forest College came to me with an offer, “Dr. Angelou, if ever you want to retire, we welcome you to Wake Forest University. We will gladly make a place for you.” I thanked him politely knowing that I would never come to the South to live.

The next morning, Dolly and I were taken to the airport early enough to have breakfast in the cafe. We were given a table and ordered breakfast. We sat unserved for more than thirty minutes. I noticed that she and I were the only black customers in the restaurant.

I told Dolly, “Sister, prepare to go to jail, because if these people don’t want to serve us I am going to turn the place out.”

She said calmly, “All right, Sis.”

I called the waitress over, a white lanky young woman. I said, “My sister ordered a cheese omelet and I ordered bacon and eggs, thirty minutes ago. If you don’t want to serve us, I advise you to tell me so, and then call the police.”

The young woman was immediately solicitous. Speaking in her soft North Carolina accent, she said, “No ma’am, it’s not that, it’s just that the chef run out of grits. He can’t serve breakfast without grits. See, half of the people on this side are not eating. The grits will be ready in about ten minutes and then I will serve you.” She pronounced the word “grits” as if it had two syllables—“gri-its.”

I felt the ninny of all times. My face became hot and my neck burned. I apologized to the waitress somehow, and Dolly McPherson controlled herself, and did not mention my stupidity. When I returned to my sturdy home and steady husband, I told everyone about the school, the students and the offer. I did not mention the airport drama.

I was married to Paul DuFeu, a master builder, a writer, and a popular cartoonist in England. Within two days of our meeting we knew we were in love together and had to be in life together.

For ten years we surprised, amused, angered, and supported each other. Unexpectedly a storm cloud roared into that sunny climate of love. My queries annoyed him, my husband admitted that he had grown weary of monogamy and needed more provocation in his life.

We separated just as I was to begin a national lecture tour. Since my husband was a builder and his business was based in northern California, I decided to make him a gift of San Francisco and the bridges and the hills, and the gourmet restaurants and the beautiful bay view.

Divorce like every other rite of passage introduces new landscapes, new rhythms, new faces and places, and sometimes races.

I fulfilled my lecture engagements around the country, meanwhile looking for a safe and soft place to fall. As a writer I should be able to pick up my yellow pads, ballpoint pens, Random House dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, King James Bible, a deck of playing cards, and a bottle of good sherry and write anywhere. Denver, Colorado, was beautiful, but its air too raw, and while there were some black people, Latinos, and Native Americans, the city itself was not integrated. I looked at Chattanooga, Tennessee, but a large portion of its population was still actively arrayed on the Confederate side in the ongoing Civil War.

Other cities I visited were either too large and/or too small and insular. Cambridge, Massachusetts, seemed to have all I wanted, history, universities, a mixture of races, great bookstores, churches, and places to party on Saturday night. Only Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with all the same assets, vied with Cambridge. I visited both towns twice.

I finally released Cambridge because I am a southern woman who does not do snow with any grace, and each year Cambridge, Massachusetts, has more snow than would make me comfortable.

Once I was settled in Winston-Salem, Dr. Ed Wilson, provost of the university and Dr. Tom Mullin, who offered me a position a decade earlier, came to me and offered a Reynolds Professorship with a lifetime appointment. I thanked them and said I would take it for a year to see if I liked teaching, and indeed if I liked Winston-Salem.

Within three months of teaching, I had an enormous revelation; I realized I was not a writer who teaches, but a teacher who writes.

On earlier visits to North Carolina, I had made friends with the chairman of the English Department, Elizabeth Phillips, and other faculty members. On evenings after dinner and afternoons after lunch, I asked them questions, which had befuddled me. I needed to know how had they accepted the idea of segregation? Did they really believe that black people were inferior to whites? Did they think that black people were born with a contagious ailment, which made it dangerous to sit next to us on buses while allowing us to cook their meals and even breast-feed their babies?

I was heartened to hear my new colleagues answer me with candor, honesty, embarrassment, and some contrition. “Truly, I didn’t think about it. It had always been and it seemed it would always be.” “I did think about it but I didn’t think there was anything I could do to change the situation.” “When the black youngsters protested by sitting at the 5 & Dime store counter in Greensboro, I was so proud. I remember wishing that I was black and I could go join them.”

Whether I liked it or not I had to admit that I understood the sense of helplessness of my colleagues. Their responses confirmed my belief that courage is the most important of all the virtues. I thought, had I been white during the segregation era, I also might have taken the line of least resistance.

I began healing when I settled in Winston-Salem. The undulating landscape is replete with flowering dogwood, redbud, crepe myrtle trees, six-foot-tall rhododendron. Multicolored four-foot-wide azaleas grow wild and wonderful throughout the area.

Winston-Salem is in the Piedmont, it is literally at the foot of the mountains. The mountains that lean over us are the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge. I like the humor in North Carolina. The natives say that our state is the valley of humility, towered over by two towers of conceit, Virginia and South Carolina.

I was happy to find good museums, excellent churches with choirs to match, a first-class school of the arts, which supplied stars for Broadway plays and a violinist chair for the New York Symphony.

I fell for the soft singing accent of the natives and their creative ways with English. In the supermarket the checker asked me how did I like Winston-Salem? I replied, “I like it, but it gets so hot. I don’t know if I can bear it.”

The checker, not breaking her stride in totaling my items said to me, “Yes, Dr. Angelou, but it gone get gone.”

I found and joined Mt. Zion Baptist Church with its great choirs and devoted minister. There is nearby a principal and training hospital for the town. One of my colleagues focused her interest on Emily Dickinson and another on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European poetry, which meant I could find friends to discuss poetry, one of my most favorite subjects.

Winston-Salem is not without difficulties. Racism still rages behind many smiling faces, and women are still spoken of in some circles, as conveniently pretty vessels. My late friend John O. Killens once said to me, “Macon, Georgia, is down south, New York City is up south.”

Blithering ignorance can be found wherever you choose to live.

The late nineteenth- and twentieth-century great African American poet, Anne Spencer, loved Virginia and loved Robert Browning. She wrote a poem, “Life-Long, Poor Browning…”

“Heaven’s Virginia when the year’s at its Spring.”

That may be so of Virginia. I know it is so of North Carolina and of Winston-Salem in particular.