The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (58 page)

At my table, immersed in self-pity, I saw my now dying marriage as a union made in heaven, officiated over by St. Peter and sanctioned by God. It wasn’t just that my husband was leaving me, I was losing a state of perfection, of grace.

My people would nod knowingly. Again a white man had taken a Black woman’s body and left her hopeless, helpless and alone. But I couldn’t expect their sympathy. I hadn’t been ambushed on a dark country lane or raped by a group of randy white toughs. I had sworn to obey the man and had accepted his name. Anger, first at injustice,
then at Tosh, stopped my tears. The same words I had used to voice my anguish I now used to fan the fires of rage. I had been a good wife, kind and compliant. And that wasn’t enough for him? It was better than he deserved. More than he could reasonably have expected had he married within his own race. Anyway, had he planned to leave me from the first? Had he intended in the beginning to lure me into trust, then break up our marriage and break my heart? Maybe he was a sadist, scheming to inflict pain on poor, unsuspecting me. Well, he didn’t know me. I would show him. I was no helpless biddy to be beckoned, then belittled. He was tired of marriage; all right, then I would leave him.

I got up from the table and cooked dinner, placed the food in the refrigerator and dressed in my best clothes. I left the dinner pots dirty and my bed unmade and hit the streets.

The noontime bar in the popular hotel on Eddy Street was filled with just-awakened petty gamblers and drowsy whores. Pimps not yet clad in their evening air of exquisite brutality spent the whores’ earnings on their fellow parasites. I was recognized by a few drinkers, because I was Clydell and Vivian’s daughter, because I had worked at the popular record shop or because I was that girl who had married the white man. I knew nothing about strong liquor except the names of some cocktails. I sat down and ordered a Zombie.

I clung to the long, cold drink and examined my predicament. My marriage was over, since I believed the legal bonds were only as good as the emotional desire to make them good. If a person didn’t want you, he didn’t want you. I could have thrown myself and my son on Tosh’s mercy; he was a kind man, and he might have tolerated us in his home and on the edges of his life. But begging had always stuck, resisting, in my throat. I thought women who accepted their husbands’ inattention and sacrificed all their sovereignty for a humiliating marriage more unsavory than the prostitutes who were drinking themselves awake in the noisy bar.

A short, thickset man sat down beside me and asked if he could pay for my second Zombie. He was old enough to be my father and reminded
me of a kindly old country doctor from sepia-colored B movies. He asked my name and where I lived. I told his soft, near-feminine face that my name was Clara. When I said “No, I’m not married,” he grinned and said, “I don’t know what these young men are waiting for. If I was a few years younger, I’d give them a run for they money. Yes siree bob.” He made me feel comfortable. His Southern accent was as familiar to me as the smell of baking cornbread and the taste of wild persimmons. He asked if I was “a, uh, a ah a fancy lady?”

I said, “No.” Desperate, maybe. Fanciful, maybe. Fancy? No.

He told me he was a merchant marine and was staying in the hotel and asked would I like to come upstairs and have a drink with him.

I would.

I sat on the bed in the close room, sipping the bourbon diluted with tap water. He talked about Newport News and his family as I thought about mine. He had a son and daughter near my age and they were “some kinda good children” and the girl was “some kinda pretty.”

He noticed that I was responding to the whiskey, and came near the bed. “Why don’t you just stretch out and rest a little while? You’ll feel better. I’ll rest myself. Just take off your shoes and your clothes. To keep them from wrinkling up on you.”

My troubles and memories swam around, then floated out the window when I laid my head on the single pillow.

When I awakened, the dark room didn’t smell familiar and my head throbbed. Confusion panicked me. I could have been picked up by an extraterrestrial being and teleported into some funky rocket ship. I jumped out of bed and fumbled along the walls, bumping until I found the light switch. My clothes were folded neatly and my shoes peeked their tidy toes from under the chair. I remembered the room and the merchant marine. I had no idea what had happened since I passed out. I examined myself and found no evidence that the old man had misused my drunkenness.

Dressing slowly, I wondered over the next move. Night had fallen on my affairs, but the sharp edges of rejection were not softened. There was a note on the dresser. I picked it up to read under the naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling; it said in effect:

I walked through the dark streets to Ivonne’s house. After I explained what had happened, she suggested I telephone home.

“Hello, Tosh?”

“Marguerite, where are you?” The strain in his voice made me smile.

He asked, “When are you coming home? Clyde hasn’t eaten.”

I knew that was a lie.

“Nor have I. I can’t eat,” he said. I wasn’t concerned about his appetite.

I said, “You’re tired of being married. Yes? Well, I’ll be home when I get there.” I hung up before he could say more.

Ivonne said, “Maya, you’re cold. Aren’t you worried about Clyde?”

“No. Tosh loves Clyde. He’ll look after him. He loves me too, but I gave up too much and gave in too much. Now we’ll see.”

The thought of his loneliness in the large apartment made my own less acute. I slept badly on Ivonne’s sofa.

I went home the next day and we resumed a sort of marriage, but the center of power had shifted. I was no longer the dutiful wife ready with floors waxed and rugs beaten, with my finger between the pages of a cookbook and my body poised over the stove or spread-eagled on the bed.

One day my back began to hurt with a sullen ache, the kind usually visited only on the arthritic aged. My head pulsed and my side was punished by short, hot stabs of pain. The doctor advised immediate hospitalization. A simple appendectomy developed complications and it was weeks before I was released. The house was weary with failure—I told my husband that I wanted to go to Arkansas. I would stay with my grandmother until I had fully recovered. I meant in mind, as well as body.

He came close and in a hoarse whisper said, “Marguerite. Your grandmother died the day after your operation. You were too sick. I couldn’t tell you.”

Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair.

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people’s grief.

When our marriage ended completely, a year later, I was a saner, healthier person than the young, greedy girl who had wanted a man to belong to and a life based on a Hollywood film, circa 1940.

Clyde was heartbroken by the separation. He acted as if I were the culprit and he and Tosh the injured parties. His once cheerful face was a muddle of solemnity. He grumbled and whined, asked again and again, “Why did Dad leave us?”

My direct answer of “Because he and I didn’t love each other anymore” frightened him, and when he looked at me his eyes held the wonder: Will you stop loving me, too?

I tried to soothe him by explaining that he was my son, my child, my baby, my joy. But his good sense told him that Tosh had been my husband, my love and his father, and I had been able to sever those bonds. What safety was there for him?

A few months before the separation my mother and her close friend, Lottie Wells, returned to San Francisco from Los Angeles.
They opened a café with ten tables and a ten-stool counter where they shared soul-food cooking chores. Lottie was a strong, powerfully built woman the color of freshly made coffee. She spoke softly, hardly above a whisper and was so tender it was impossible to resist loving her. She folded Clyde and me into her care and became our beloved Aunt Lottie.

At first Mother had exhibited no change in her attitude to my marriage, but when she observed my faithful husband, the good provider, and Clyde’s love for Tosh, she had said, “O.K., so I was wrong. He’s good. I’m big enough to admit my mistake; are you big enough to understand that I only wanted the best for you?” When I told her later that the marriage was at an end, she only said, “Well, as I always say, ‘No matter how good a fellow seems on the outside, you have to take him home to know him.’ ”

Now that I was trying to mend the rift between me and Clyde I appreciated her indifference.

There are few barriers more difficult to breach or more pitiable to confront than that of a child’s distrust. I used every wile in the mother’s little homemaker kit to win my way back into my son’s good graces. I paid attention to his loss and sympathized with him. I taught myself to skate so that we could go to the rink together. At home, I cooked his favorite foods, in portions that would please a cowpuncher and surrendered my reading time to play scrabble and twenty questions and any other diversion he chose. In the street we skipped over cracks in the pavement in a sport he called “no stepping on the lines.”

Gradually we rebuilt our friendship.

As that emotional worry diminished, a practical one assumed importance. My pride had not allowed me to ask Tosh for money, but he had left me the small bank account and it was dwindling fast. I had to get a job and one that paid enough so I could afford a baby-sitter. I started looking.

—

Four dingy strip joints squatted cheek by jowl in San Francisco’s International Settlement. The exteriors of the Garden of Allah and the Casbah were adorned with amateur drawings of veiled women, their
dark eyes sultry with promise and their navels crammed with gems. The Pirates Cave and Captain’s Table advertised lusty wenches and busy serving girls with hitched-up skirts and crowded cleavages, all sketched by the same wishful artist.

I stood on the pavement across from the Garden of Allah. A papier-mâché sultan with a lecherous grin winked atop the one-floor building. Around the doorway old photographs of near-nude women curled under a dirty glass façade. Large letters proclaimed
BEAUTIFUL GIRLS! CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT
! The advertisement had read: “Female Dancers Wanted. Good take-home pay.”

The interior was dimly lighted and smelled of beer and disinfectant. A large man behind the bar asked if I had come to audition. Most of his attention was centered on checking the bottles.

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Dressing rooms downstairs. Go that way.”

I followed the path of his arm and descended a narrow stairwell. Women’s voices floated up to meet me.

“Eddie’s a nice Joe. I used to work here before.”

“Yeah. He don’t hassle the girls.”

“Hey, Babe, who made that costume?”

“Francis.”

“Frances?”

“Nah,
Francis
. He male, but he’s more twat than you.”

I allowed the light and sound from an open doorway to direct me. A floor-to-ceiling mirror made the four women seem like forty. They were older than I expected and all white. They were taken aback by my presence. I said hello and received hi’s and hello’s and then a heavy silence.

They busied themselves professionally, gluing on eyelashes and adjusting wigs and attaching little sequined cones to their nipples. Their costumes were exotic, complicated and expensive. Rhinestones twinkled, sequins shone, nets and feathers and chiffon wafted at each movement. I had brought a full leotard, which left only my hands, head and feet exposed. Obviously I couldn’t compete with these
voluptuous women in their glamorous clothes. I turned to go. Wrong place, wrong time.

“Hey, where ya going? This is the only dressing room.”

I turned back to see a short redhead looking at me.

She said, “My name’s Babe, what’s yours?”

I stammered. I ran through all my names, Marguerite, Maya, Ritie, Sugar, Rita. The first three were too personal and the others too pretentious, but since I felt least like Rita, I said “Rita.”

Babe said, “You’d better get changed. The band will start soon. What’s your routine?”

I had no routine. When I read the ad I had expected to audition for a revue and thought a choreographer would give me steps to do, rather like a teacher asking questions in an examination. I said defiantly, “I do modern, rhythm, tap and flash.”

Babe looked at me as if I had answered in Latin.

“I mean what’s your routine? I’m little Red Riding Hood, see?” She posed, offering her costume for my observation. She wore a red gathered see-through net skirt with folds of the same material draped across her shoulders. Clearly visible beneath the yards of cloth were a red brassiere and a red sequined belt low on her hips; panels of red satin hung from the belt to cover her crotch and the cleavage of her buttocks. A precious little poke bonnet sat on her red curls and at her feet was a cute wicker basket.

I said, “I see.” And did.

She pointed to an older blonde, whose breasts hung heavy and uncovered.

“That’s Rusty. She’s Salome” (she pronounced it “salami”). “She does the Dance of the Seven Veils. That’s Jody, she’s the Merry Widow. See? Kate is the only one who’s not somebody. She does acrobatics. You know? Flips and splits and things like that. So you gotta have a routine.”

None of the women looked up.

I said, “Well, I don’t have one, so I’d better go home.”

She said, “Let me see your costume. Maybe we can make one up.”