The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (152 page)

I decided to give a party and invite all the men who had advised and/or cautioned me when Guy was a rambunctious teenager. Since I was a single woman raising a black boy in the United States, I had asked a group of male friends to tell me when they thought I was treating Guy in a way that might endanger his sense of himself.

Many times after gatherings, I would receive phone calls. “Hey, Maya, Guy was playing chess and you made him leave the game. That wasn’t hip.”

“But it was just a game, and we had someplace to go.”

“When a boy is playing a man, it’s never just a game. It is about his manhood. He’s always testing it.”

Or: “You made Guy get up and give his seat to a woman. That wasn’t hip.”

“But it was courteous. I have to teach him courtesy.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t give him a chance to do the right thing on his own. You have to trust his upbringing.”

I had listened and learned, and despite the past three or four rocky years, Guy had grown into a very nice young man. I wanted to show him off to my friends.

Coming from the supermarket I met Hercules, a freedom fighter from Rhodesia whom Guy and I had known in Cairo.

My mind was so filled with Guy’s arrival that I didn’t remember that in Cairo Hercules had tried to be Guy’s buddy, and although I was married, he had attempted to seduce me.

Hercules asked how I was and how Guy was.

I told him Guy was in New York for just one day and that I was giving a party for him that night. I gave Hercules the address and told him he would be welcome.

When I entered the apartment, Guy had a wall-size map spread on the floor.

“Here, Mom, here’s where I want to go.”

It was the Sahara Desert.

I thought he was going back to Ghana, where we had friends.

“No, I’m going to have a photographic safari service from Mauritania back to Morocco.”

My only child? My beloved son with whom I was now well pleased? My heart fell in my chest, but I said nothing. The red and green lines on the map seemed to be moving.

“I’ve planned it out with friends. We’re going to meet up in Spain so we can run with the bulls in Pamplona, then we’ll take this road to the Mediterranean and ferry over to Morocco.”

He looked at me very quickly, as if he had been thinking aloud and suddenly remembered that I was present.

“Mom, you’re afraid.” It was not a question, he had read fear on my face.

“Yes. I am.”

He said, “I understand, but you needn’t be. I am free, and I have you to thank for that.”

I didn’t dare question; nor did I dare let him see my fear again. I asked him to help me put away the groceries and to second my cooking.

We fell into a rhythm that we had begun to develop when he was ten, except now he was adept. No onions went scooting across the floor, no fingers had to be washed, kissed and bandaged.

I admired the man, but I did miss the boy.

The party was merrily rolling along. Friends who hadn’t seen one another in too long a time were having a reunion. I didn’t know any young girls to invite as company for Guy, but Dolly asked over a new teacher who was on her first job. Guy came to the kitchen. “Mom.” He was displeased. “Mom, Hercules is here.”

The look on his face shook my memory loose. Of course, all the hosts in and around Cairo had stopped inviting Hercules. Housekeepers’ young daughters were claiming they had been raped or impregnated by him, and since he had taken up drink, his language was often foul.

I shook my head and said to Guy, “I forgot. I was thinking about you and forgot.”

He wagged his head and pitied his old doddering mother. I was thirty-nine.

I listened to the discussion between Jimmy Baldwin and Max Roach. They were talking about South Africa.

Hercules came up to me. “Sister Maya, thank you for inviting me.”

I said “Yes” coolly.

He said, “I brought my girlfriend. Let me introduce her.”

He introduced me to a woman standing at his side. I admit that my displeasure with myself, and the memory of Hercules’s behavior in Egypt, kept me from acknowledging the guest warmly. I said a perfunctory hello and went to join another small group.

I was looking for a way to get into the heated discussion among John Killens and Julian Mayfield and Rosa Guy when Hercules’s woman tugged my sleeve.

“Is it my whiteness that makes you uncomfortable?” She could not have startled me more if she had poured her drink on the rug.

I collected myself sufficiently. “Of course not. Look around, there are Sam and Connie Sutton, and Roger and Jean Genoud. You are no more white than they, and they are at home here. Please, help yourself to a drink.”

I moved to a less troublesome area and caught up on the laughter that was loud in the room.

Later, Dolly, Guy and I laid out the food on the buffet and the dining table. I stood with serving spoons in hand and said in a loud voice, “Grub est servi.”

The line was taut and furiously fast at first, then, when it slackened, some people who had eaten jumped back in line for seconds.

I said, “Please, let everybody get served once before seconds are handed out.”

Hercules’s lady friend, who was back in line, said, “This is not the democratic way. First come, first served. Can you really hold a place in line for someone who is not here?”

I said, “Yes, I can. Because this is my house. I wouldn’t tell you how to run it at your house.”

Hercules said, in support of his lady, “She is right. This is not the democratic way.”

My patience with them and with myself was as brittle as melba toast. I said, “You, who have needed a passbook to move from one district in Johannesburg to another, are to tell me about democracy?”

She said, “You people, you kill me. You don’t realize that English is not his first language.”

I was ready to evict her at “you people,” but I was serving a plate. When I finished dishing up food, I said to Hercules, “Take her out of my house. She may be indulged and famous as a rude guest in other people’s home, but she gets put out of mine.”

Suddenly the laughter had stopped, and all was quiet. I had not raised my voice, but I knew everyone present had heard me.

I couldn’t take back a single word, and in that moment I hated myself and the woman. I sounded like a bully, and I truly abhorred bullies.

“Out.” It was too late. “Out.”

The woman’s departing statement cut me more deeply than she could have ever imagined. “People think you’re so kind. They should see you as you are. A great bully.”

I said nothing, and in a few minutes, noise returned and the party pitch reestablished itself.

Guy left early to see the teacher home. Some friends said, “You showed wonderful restraint. She came out to be trouble.”

Others didn’t mention the incident. When I was totally alone, I sat down and wondered how else I could have handled that awful situation. I found no answer, so I started to clean the apartment. I emptied ashtrays and washed glasses. I took trash to the garbage chute. Little by little, I cleaned and polished my house till it glistened.

As I finished, Guy rang the bell. He entered and stood at the door, observing the clean apartment.

“I meant to be back in time to help you.”

“Oh no, as you see …”

“Mom, I’m going to make us both a drink.” I sat down to await the service.

He brought two filled glasses into the living room. He lifted his to me, I lifted mine to him.

“Mom, if you ever speak to a woman I bring to your house as you spoke to that woman, I will sever our relationship.”

I looked at my son sitting aloof like a high-ranking judge on a lofty seat. His words alone constituted a body blow, and his posture added weight to the statement. I thought of carrying him on my hip all over the world, of sleeping in hotel rooms separated by a sheet hanging across the middle of the room to give each of us privacy. I thought of how I had raised him and saw that he was right.

I said, “Of course, you are absolutely correct. You are obliged to protect anyone you bring out anywhere. If the person is under your umbrella, you are supposed to defend her or him. It would kill me if you severed our relationship. But let me tell you this. If you bring someone to my house that stupid, it is likely that I will speak to her as I spoke to that woman. And severing our relationship will be your next job.”

He looked at me for a long minute, then got up and came to the sofa to sit beside me.

He opened his long arms. “I love you, Mom, you’re a gas. I truly love you.”

John Patterson was my across-the-hall neighbor, and we shared the same birthday.

I spent the morning cooking for my party. He was planning to celebrate with his fiancée, a beautiful fawnlike girl half his age.

When I could safely leave my pots for a few minutes, I went to his apartment for a glass of wine and for our opportunity to congratulate each other.

I cheered him for his impending marriage, and he saluted me for taking on a thirty-day job that would give me the chance to visit the major American cities. I always added “and churches.”

I didn’t have my itinerary, but I told John that I thought I had to go to Atlanta first for meetings with Reverend King and the leaders of the SCLC.

I admitted to Dolly that I had trepidation about the trip, and even some fear over how the ministers in the different churches would take to me and to Reverend King’s plans. So much depended upon my doing well.

Dolly said, “If the Reverend King thinks you can do it, that’s enough for me. And don’t believe that the whole thing depends on you. You’re not the only fish in the sea. He’s got others. Anyway, you will do wonderfully.”

A sister always knows how to set you down, and a true sister lets you down easily.

My apartment smelled like I was readying for a Christmas feast. I was really putting on the dog. Stepping out. All the Harlem Writers
Guild members were coming. I invited Jerry Purcell and his partner, Paul Robinson, and some of the regulars from Terry’s Pub, the local bar.

I cooked Texas chili without the beans, baked ham and candied yams, rice and peas for the West Indian palate, macaroni and cheese and a pineapple upside-down cake.

I looked the apartment over and was proud. The food was prepared, ice buckets were filled, glasses were sparkling and the daffodils were as perky as their name.

The telephone ring surprised me.

“Maya?” It was Dolly.

“Yes?”

“Have you listened to the radio or television?” I said no.

“Maya, please don’t turn either of them on. And don’t answer the phone. Give me your word.”

“I give you my word.”

“I’m on my way.”

I made a drink and sat down, trying to guess what could have happened that could cause her such alarm.

Dolly stood at my door, her face ghastly with news.

I said, “Come in. Nothing could be that bad.”

It was that bad and worse.

She said, “Martin Luther King was shot. Maya, he’s dead.”

Some words are spoken and not heard. Because the ears cannot accept them, the eye seems to see them. I saw the letters DEAD. Who was dead? Who was dead now? Not Malcolm again. Not my grandmother again. Not my favorite uncle Tommy. Not again.

I didn’t realize I was talking, but Dolly grabbed me and held me.

“Maya, it’s Martin King. Reverend King.”

“Stop talking nonsense. Stop it.” When I really heard her, the world capsized. If King was dead, who was alive? Where would we go? What was next? Suddenly I had to get out.

I didn’t take my purse or keys or turn off the stove or the lights or tell Dolly where I was going.

John was locking his door. We looked at each other.

He asked, “Where are you going?”

I said, “Harlem.”

He said, “Me, too.”

He didn’t speak as we walked to Harlem. I turned my thoughts over as one turns pages in a book. In the silence I spoke to myself, using the time to comprehend the emptiness.

That great mind, which considered adversity and said, This too shall pass away, had itself passed away.

That mellifluous voice, which sang out of radios and televisions and over altars and pulpits, which intoned from picket lines and marches and through prison bars, was stilled. Forever stilled.

That strong heart which did beat with the insistence of a kettle drum was silent. Silenced.

—

Waves of noise of every kind flooded down 125th Street. There was an undulation of raw screams, followed by thuds like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time. I never discovered what or who caused that particular dissonance, but the sheer jangle of glass breaking was obvious.

When John ran into friends and they fell into a sobbing embrace, I walked on alone.

There were noticeable differences between this current turmoil and the Watts uprising. In Los Angeles, rage had ruled. There, the people acted out of a pent-up anger over past slights and historic cruelties. On the evening of April 4, 1968, a lamentation would rise and hold tremulously in the air, then slowly fall out of hearing range just as another would ascend.

Strangers stopped in front of strangers and asked, “Why? Why?”

“You know? You know.”

Then strangers hugged strangers and cried.

A television in the window of an appliance store played tapes of Martin King speaking. No sound accompanied the pictures, but people stood silent, five deep in front of the shop window, as the uproar
swirled unnoticed around them. I joined the watchers for a few moments and heard the moan behind me.

Rosa Guy emerged from the crowd. We stood looking at each other. We embraced and said nothing. When we released each other, we continued our separate ways.

A man, naked to the waist, walked out of a building with a conga drum strapped to his body. He waddled toward me, the head of the drum protruding from under his arm. He passed me shouting, not singing, unintelligible words.

I went into a lighted diner and sat at the far end of the counter. Only one other customer was in the place. He was leaning over so far his head was on the counter.

I waited for a few minutes for a waitress, and when none appeared, I called out, “Can I get some service?”