The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (131 page)

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.

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 what 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.

“I have had to rethink a number of things.” He said that though his basic premise that the United States was a racist country held true, he no longer believed that all Whites were devils, nor that any human being was inherently cruel at birth. “On this journey to Mecca, I met White men with blue eyes, who I can call brother with conviction. That means that I am forced to reconsider statements I have made in the past and I must have the courage to speak up and out about those reconsiderations.”

His possession of language had not diminished, nor had his magnetic aura lessened. We sat enthralled at what he said and how he said it.

“I am not in favor among the followers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and this new statement will anger them more, but our people are in need of truth and I have tried and will continue to try to speak only truth to the people. The teaching of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad enabled me to break the noose that ignorance and racism put around my neck, and I will always thank Allah and the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad for that. But a person must make the effort to learn, and growing is the inevitable reward of learning.”

He never mentioned the Islamic leader’s name without the salutary designation, and although he was speaking to a very informal gathering in a homey living room, save for the lowered volume of his voice, he might well have been addressing an audience of thousands in Harlem.

Julian asked him to tell us why he came to Ghana.

Malcolm set his tea cup on a nearby table and, lacing his long fingers, began a sawing motion with them which was his only physical indication of tension.

After Mecca he had stopped in Cairo and met Egyptian government officials and David Du Bois, and had gone to Nigeria to confer with other African politicians. He needed as many governmental contacts as possible so that when he took the case of the Black American before the General Assembly of the United Nations, he could be sure at least of some African and maybe other nationals’ support.

Every complexion of political persuasion was present in Julian’s house that evening. There were true revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, petit bourgeois, capitalists, communists, hedonists, socialists, humanitarians and aging beatniks. When Malcolm mentioned arguing for our people before the United Nations, we shouted spontaneously and with one voice of approval. He said, “If our cause was debated by all the world’s nations, it would mean that finally, we would be taken seriously. We could stop courting the ‘fair-minded white people in the U.S.’ as Martin Luther King called some of his constituents. America would be forced to face up to its discriminatory policies. Street protests and sit-ins would be as passé as auction blocks and as unnecessary as manumission papers. If South African Blacks can petition the U.N. against their country’s policy of apartheid, then America should be shown on the world’s stage as a repressionist and bestial racist nation.”

A single question arose from that diverse group, and Alice put it into words. “Do you want us to arrange for you to meet Ghanaian officials and to see President Nkrumah?”

The serious scowl left Malcolm’s brow. He looked around at the company, spending a few seconds on each face. Then he smiled.

“Black Americans! You all are really something.” He laughed aloud. “You people just got here and already you know the President.”

His laughter rang high, giving us license to join him and forget that of the forty or so people gathered, only Julian had actually met President Nkrumah and, although we all sported posters and drawings of the handsome leader, most of us had never even seen him in the flesh.

In the now relaxed atmosphere, Malcolm furnished us stories of his journey. Some were just funny and others were funny and bitter.

“I was waiting at the Nigerian Airport when a White man came up and spoke to me. He offered his hand so I shook it. Then he grinned and said, ‘I’ve admired you, Mr. X, truly admired you.’ I asked him, ‘Would you have shaken my hand in New York?’ He went red as a fire engine and said, ‘I don’t suppose so.’ So I asked why he felt it was all right to do so in Africa, and that man had the nerve to get indignant. He said, ‘Well, we’re both Americans!’ ”

Our merry response was totally lacking in merriment. We laughed, as usual, because of the truth in the incident and because there was nothing else to do about it.