The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (146 page)

But I could not needle him. He was not going to comprehend the anger and disappointment in Watts, and further provoking him was not going to make me feel better. Like many of my ancestors, I settled back to tell him some of what he wanted to hear and some of what I wanted to say.

Surely he returned to Paris with some truth and some fiction. Surely he wrote an account of the Watts riot allowing his readers to hold on to the stereotypes that made them comfortable while congratulating themselves on being in possession of some news.

Frank Silvera was exactly what is meant in South America by the word
mestizo
. His ancestors were African and Spanish, and he was a light-skinned
black man who could play a Mexican father to Marlon Brando’s Zapata. A black man who could play an Italian father to Ben Gazzara in
A Hatful of Rain
on Broadway. A black man who could play the title role of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
.

Silvera had a theater company in Los Angeles that he named the Theatre of Being or, as the member actors called it, Tee Oh Bee. Beah Richards, my next-door neighbor, was the star of the company, with Vantile Whitfield and Dick Anthony Jones as resident leading men.

Beah, with her success on and off Broadway and particularly in James Baldwin’s
The Amen Corner
, was a legend in the African-American community. At the time I met her, she was often called our greatest stage actress, vying only with Ruby Dee for that honor.

Frank decided to stage
Medea
at his Theatre of Being. Naturally, Beah would take the title role. And just as naturally, she would take it beyond all real or imagined limits. When Frank announced the project, Beah and I and a few friends celebrated. In the middle of that evening’s festivities, problems were mentioned. Beah didn’t drive. I offered to take her to the theater each day, and she said she would pay for the gas.

The role of the nurse had not been filled. I joined the line of actors auditioning, and, using a Langston Hughes poem and a Shakespearean sonnet, I was given the role of the nurse.

I knew I was adequate, but I was never sure if Frank hired me because of my talent or to ensure that Beah had a way to get to the theater.

Frank and Beah shared a profound mutual admiration. She would speak, and he would either laugh uproariously or stroke his chin and pace the floor, lost in a deep brown study.

Rehearsals further increased my insecurity. I would stand backstage as Frank consistently positioned Beah center stage under the bright beams. Of course she was the star, but the role of the nurse was not irrelevant, and he never called on me. I began to smart in the shadows. I went to a bookstore and bought Euripides’ version of
Medea
, as well as every book I could find about Medea, Jason, the
Argo
and the Golden Fleece.

There was a neighborhood bar next to the theater. I informed the stage manager that I could be found in the bar whenever I was wanted. Each day I would drop Beah off, greet folks in the theater, then go to sit at a table in the dimly lit bar. I worked out who the nurse was and why she was so loyal to Medea.

In my created version of the play’s history, Nurse had been the midwife at Medea’s birth. Nurse had a baby just after Medea was born, but Nurse’s baby died. Medea’s mother, not wanting the brother, persuaded Nurse to become a nurse cow and give to Medea the dead child’s milk.

In the bar, I built my character, her whims and her whimsy. I decided early on that Nurse thought of Medea as her own daughter and doted on the girl. As Medea grew into womanhood, Nurse cherished her, idolized her and followed her everywhere, walking as precisely as possible in her footsteps. When Medea married Jason, Nurse attended the ceremony. When Medea stole the fleece of pure gold from her father, the king, because Jason asked her to do so, Nurse helped her. Nurse later escaped the king’s rage by joining Medea on the Argonauts’ ship, the
Argo
. Nurse was crippled by arthritis because she often slept on the ground. She didn’t mind the discomfort as long as she was near Medea. She had grown old and dotty in service to Medea, who took Nurse’s worship as her due. Maddened by rage at Jason’s growing coldness toward her, Medea killed their two sons. Nurse knew of the murders but gave Medea no rebuke, saying, “She did what any woman would have done if provoked.”

I began taking license with the simply told story of passion and horror. Since I was not directed, I had to create situations that would explain why the character I was playing could condone even the most base actions of Medea. I did not propose to comprehend Medea’s mind, or how love and idolatry could lead to theft and murder, but I did find that Nurse had a fair voice, and singing was the only pleasure she had that didn’t stem from Medea.

I got some stage gray hair and ghoulish makeup, and a week before opening, when I was invited to join rehearsal, I brought the gray-haired, limping, singing nurse onto the stage. Beah and Frank were
amazed, and neither was too pleased, but we were too close to opening for Frank to redirect me.

The play opened to baffling reviews. Some critics loved it, while others loathed it. Some thought it modern and wonderfully acted, and some thought it stagey and mannered. All lauded Beah Richards, and a few had kind words for the elderly actress whom no one knew but who played the nurse so well.

Sid’s Café and Bar was a popular hangout for people from New Orleans. The owner, Jase, and his wife, Marguerite, were highly respected cooks of Louisiana food, and the bar was always filled with bright laughter and loud talk. Jase and Marguerite liked and welcomed me, so Sid’s became my base.

One evening a group of four in the red booth at the front of the café were particularly interesting. The two women were as loud and fierce as the men, yet no one used profanity. They saw me watching, and one man beckoned me over.

“Hey, are you alone?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Well, join us.”

“Yes, come on.” I sat. “Are you from New Orleans?”

“No.”

“Well, we are. Where did you run away from?”

“I came here from Hawaii, and before that, San Francisco, and before that, Ghana in West Africa.”

“Hey, all right. You will fit right in with me. I am one crazy lying nigger, too. My name is Phil. What’s yours?”

“My name is Maya, and I am neither a nigger nor a liar.”

One woman said, “That’s right. Speak up for yourself. This fool
calls himself a nigger, and he’d put his fist through the face of the first white man using that word.”

“I can say it ’cause I am me. I don’t mean any harm.”

I said, “But you’re calling yourself a despicable word, and surely you are not despicable.”

Phil said, “I believe you were in Hawaii and Africa. You sound a little like a teacher I had in Baton Rouge.”

I said, “I thought you were from New Orleans.”

Phil said, “Told you I was a lying nigger. I can be ornery, too.”

I said, “Maybe I’d better go back to my table.”

Everyone spoke at once.

“No. Stay with us.”

“Tell us about Africa.”

“No, I want to hear about Hawaii.”

“Don’t mind Phil. He really doesn’t mean any harm, and we do laugh a lot.”

I enjoyed the group’s company, and after I had been around them a few weeks, Phil used the racial slur less. When he did slip, he would pop out his eyes and look straight at me.

One morning they came to my house. I offered them Mogen David and Mateus wine. We sat around the kitchen table drinking and telling stories.

Phil suggested that we go for a ride. We agreed, although we were all too old to be joyriding, since the youngest of us had to be at least thirty.

There were no dissenters. We all piled into Phil’s run-down car and said things like:

“Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.”

“Driver, follow that cab.”

“There’s a tenner in it for you if you keep him in sight.”

We were in high spirits as we crossed railroad tracks and heard a train whistle blow. We began to imitate the sound. After a second, Phil backed up until our car sat on the tracks. He turned off the motor.

I couldn’t see the train, but judging by the sound of the whistle, it was just around a curve in the tracks.

I shouted, “Move the car. Move the damn car.” I was sitting in the backseat. Phil turned his head to look at me and grinned.

I pushed on the back of the front passenger seat, but the woman in it had gone to sleep. Another voice joined mine as the train rounded into view. “Move, man, what the hell?” I had begun to scream. “You are going to get us killed.”

The motor turned over, and the car slid off the tracks seconds before the train sped behind us.

The two passengers in the backseat with me cursed Phil roundly, but I couldn’t speak. I had been frightened mute again, just like twenty-five years earlier, when I had been so terrorized that I had chosen to become mute.

This time I had no choice. Words simply would not come. Phil stopped the car on the corner by my house.

“You want to get out here?”

I nodded.

The woman sitting next to him awakened grouchy. “What’s going on?” She frowned and leaned forward. I crawled out around her. When I was standing beside the car, I realized that I had urinated. My clothes were wet and crumpled.

When Phil waited for me to walk away, I decided he must have known I had been scared enough to pee on myself. I could not stand there all day, so I crossed the street in front of the car to give him a good chance to see me.

His laughter did not surprise me. “I scared the piss out of her. Look. Yes, I did … Maya, come back and clean up my car. Come back, I won’t do it again.”

I continued walking to my house. He drove slowly beside me, laughing, urging me to get back in the car. His taunting did not embarrass me. The level of my fear totally outweighed everything he said.

He didn’t drive off until I walked up the steps to my house.

As I showered, the terror released me. In clean, dry clothes, I sat down and thought about the horrible incident. I remembered Phil’s self-description when I first met him, and I realized that I had learned at least one important lesson. Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you. The racial pejorative might not have applied to him. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was or wasn’t a liar, but I found out he was certainly mean and he was ornery.

The telephone voice startled me.

“Hello, is this my Maya?”

Shock closed my throat.

“Hello, Maya, speak to me. This is your husband.”

He wasn’t my husband, but he was my great love and my greatest fear, and I had left him in Africa. “Hello,” I answered, reluctantly.

“I am here.” He couldn’t be. I looked at the door. “I am in New York City. I have come to the States to collect you. God gave you to me. Remember?”

I couldn’t speak.

He was the man I felt had taken the heart out of my body and worn it boldly on his shoulder like an epaulette, and I had adored him.

He said, “Do you still love me?”

I finally asked, “Are you really in New York City?”

He continued, as was his way. “Of course you love me. I am coming to California to collect you and take you back to Africa.”

I told him that I had made a life for myself in Los Angeles and I was not going anywhere.

We had both worked on trying to establish a relationship in Ghana. He was loud, bombastic and autocratic. But he loved me and found me
funny and sexy, and he said I was brilliant. He was astonishingly handsome, and his upbringing as a young royal gave him an assurance that I had found irresistible. We might have succeeded at being together, but I had no precedent for being who he wanted me to be. I did love him, but that had not been enough. He needed to be worshiped. Being an American, a black American woman, being Vivian Baxter’s daughter, Bailey Johnson’s sister and Guy Johnson’s mother, I was totally unprepared to worship any mortal.

We had argued loudly and reconciled feverishly so many times that I knew our lives would always follow that pattern. I had come to that realization at the same time that my son had found “mother” to be a useless word, so I was often addressed as “Yeah.”

I had left Africa to him and to my African love. And now my lover was on the same continent, and I had no place to run.

I called my mother for her strength and guidance. Her voice was warm and loving.

“Baby, it’s a big world, and Los Angeles is a big city. He can come. Los Angeles can hold both of you.”

She hadn’t heard him roaring at me, or me screaming back at him.

“Oh yes,” she went on, “I spoke to Guy the other day. He’s about finished at school, and I think I hear homecoming in his talk.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, he’ll want to come home when he finishes. But he’s out of money.”

“Mom, I left him enough to live on, so if he’s squandered—”

She said, “He’s my grandson. I won’t see him needy.”

“That’s between you and your grandson, but when he is ready to come home, I’ll give you the money for his fare. Just don’t let him know.”

Mother said, “I understand,” and she did.

—

The African arrived and filled my little studio apartment with his loud voice and his maleness. His sexuality was so evident that I thought everyone could perceive it.

He charmed my landlady and my neighbor. When he told them that he had come to take me back to Africa, they both offered to help me pack.

My body was in a state of utter bliss, but I could not mask my displeasure that he wanted to be waited upon as if he were an invalid: “Get this.”

“Fetch that.”

“Make food for me.”

I knew English was not his first language; still, I had to tell him that “fetch” was an old-fashioned word used during slavery and I would not respond favorably to it.

On some evenings I wondered what I would do without him. On some evenings we talked about my concerns and he listened. On some evenings he held me and let me cry about Malcolm.

I would moan and say, “Black men shot him, what’s the matter with us?”