Mom & Me & Mom (10 page)

After the separation we moved into a small two-bedroom apartment. My son cried himself to sleep so often and so piteously that I, too, wept alone in my bedroom.

I reported our situation to my mother, who never reminded me that she had said it wouldn’t work out.

“It is normal,” she said. “And although it is painful, imagine if you had allowed Tosh to take the sense of your person away. Guy would have lost the person he needs the most, his mother. For the sake of yourself, you must preserve yourself and for the sake of Guy, you must preserve his mother.”

I looked for work, resumed dance class, and reestablished my friendships at the Melrose Record Shop. My life was still teetering, and I was still searching for an even balance.

Nina (pronounced NINE-nah) was a strip-tease dancer I had met in the dance class. She told me that she wanted to be a serious dancer. In the meantime, she made $300 a week stripping in a nightclub. She heard that my marriage had ended and that I was job hunting. She suggested that I try out at the club where she worked. I sat in the dark rear of the Bonne Nuit Dance Club and watched the women one after another enter the stage and glide across the floor, taking off pieces of apparel and making suggestive movements with their hips and breasts. They stopped after the brassieres were removed, leaving the nipples covered with sequins. They patted their sequined g-strings. They bowed to the loud and mostly male audience and left the stage.

Because doing the strip-tease for me would be as easy as chewing gum, I thought I should not refuse an offer for a job out of hand. I knew I didn’t want to be
known as a strip-tease dancer, but the prospect of three hundred dollars per week was also tantalizing. I called my mother and told her my dilemma.

She came to my new apartment. She said, “Let me make you a costume and you choreograph a dance. If you take a theme like Scheherazade, the Sultan’s wife, you can use the music of Duke Ellington, ‘Night in Morocco.’ Understand if you are not going to take off your costume, what you wear will have to be so skimpy that the audience will be satisfied since they will be seeing nearly all of you. And there is this: You will not be posing onstage as you disrobe. You have to really be dancing.”

Mother and I went to a theatrical costume shop. I bought g-strings and gauzy brassieres. We bought coke feathers, sequins, and bugle beads. My mother knew only a little more than I about sewing. We crowded the sequins, beads, and feathers onto the g-string and the brassiere.

I hired a conga drummer named Roy who played for the dance classes at the community center. I prepared for an audience at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. Backstage I stripped and lathered my body with Max Factor #9 body makeup. I had no scars but the makeup made me feel theatrical. I put on the skimpy costume. Roy sat on a stool on the stage and at a cue, he began to play the conga drums.

Barefoot and nearly naked, I shouted, “Caravan!” and hit the floor. I began to dance sensuously, sultrily, and slowly. I allowed the music to pull me across the floor. I picked up the tempo and danced faster. Again I shouted, “Caravan!” I danced faster, shimmying and shaking and quivering. I slowed down. I had danced about ten minutes and slowed down again and again and returned to the slow, sensuous shimmer. In a large stage whisper, I said, “Caravan,” and walked off the stage.

The owner gave me the job. He asked, “What is your name?”

I said, “Rita, the Dancing Señorita.”

When I reported the outcome to my mother, she was pleased. She said, “I am not surprised. You are going far in this world, baby, because you dare to risk everything. That’s what you have to do. You are prepared to do the best you know to do. And if you don’t succeed, you also know all you have to do is try it again.”

A few popular San Francisco columnists wrote about my performances at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. The articles revealed my tactic with the customers. Strip-tease dancers and shake dancers were expected to coerce the customers into buying them drinks,
pretending the drinks they ordered contained real alcohol. But I told the customers that if they bought me a single drink, I would be served quinine water or ginger ale and that I would also be given a portion or a fraction of the money they spent, but if they bought a bottle of poor champagne, a twenty-dollar bottle, I would be given five dollars for each bottle. The columnist added that I was also unique in another way—I could really dance.

San Franciscans started to drop in to the Bonne Nuit Dance Club. They crowded the place for the fifteen minutes of my set and would offer to buy me drinks. They would order the cheap champagne and turn their backs to the strip dancers. I had neither the sophistication nor the worldliness to make them think that I was clever. A group of men with one woman became regulars. The woman had long blond hair and smoked with a cigarette holder. She spoke as I thought Tallulah Bankhead would speak and the men wore expensive but casual clothes.

They were witty and easy to talk to. It is true that they laughed at me but they laughed at themselves as well. They invited me on my night off to visit the Purple Onion, which they owned and where Jorie Remus, the blond cigarette smoker in their group, was the star.

I told them I had a seven-year-old son and I spent my night off with him. Barry Drew and Don Curry, two of the owners, said I could bring Guy along. They would seat us in a corner. I began a routine once a week. Guy and I would go to dinner in a nice restaurant, catch the show at the Purple Onion, and then go home.

San Francisco was a center for entertainers who would become world-famous. People like Mort Sahl, Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, the Kingston Trio, Josh White, Ketty Lester, and Odetta were among the singers and comedians who filled the bohemian nightclubs.

One evening I had been invited to dinner at Barry Drew’s apartment. The conversation was heavy with sarcasm about folk singers.

I asked if they had heard calypso music and if they had, did they know that calypso was folk music. I reminded them that blues, spirituals, and gospel songs were all folk music. I sang a few bars of a calypso song I knew and they began to clap.

Jorie asked, “How many of those songs do you know?”

I said, “Lots.”

She asked Barry, “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

Don, Barry, and all the rest shouted, “When you go to New York City, Maya should take your place at the Purple Onion!”

They told me I would be a stunning success and to begin planning for my debut.

I talked it over with my mother.

She asked how I felt about singing.

I admitted that I was nervous and that I had only sung in church.

She asked what would happen if I flopped.

“They will fire me.”

My mother said, “They wouldn’t be getting a cherry. You were looking for a job when you got the last one, and church is still there to sing in.”

My friends brought in a coach, Lloyd Clark, to select songs and to choreograph movement for me. I rehearsed with a three-piece band and brought Guy down to every rehearsal. After four months dancing the hootchy-kootchy at the Bonne Nuit Dance Club, I opened as the star, singing calypso songs at the Purple Onion. I went from making $300 a week to $750 a week.

The publicity from the Purple Onion announced that the star, Maya Angelou, was a Watusi, born in Cuba, who sang calypso. My mother laughed until
tears came down her cheeks. She said she never met a Watusi and had never been to Cuba, but she could swear that I was her daughter.

“I know what I’m talking about. I was there when you were born.”

On opening night my mother, Aunt Lottie, my brother, Yvonne, and some new friends were there with Guy. My nerves were shattered. My mother and I had designed my dresses and had them made by one of her friends.

Tosh had told me that his name was originally Enistasious Angelopoulos and that when Greeks shortened their names, they would give an
-os
ending to the boys and the females would get an
-ou
ending. Although Tosh and I were separated, I kept the name Angelou because I liked the sound of it.

The Purple Onion was filled. Barry Drew, in his dramatic voice, said, “And now, Miss Maya Angelou from Havana, Cuba, will sing calypso.”

Barefoot, in an exotic floor-length dress, I walked on the stage and began to sing “Run Joe.” I had sung only two lines when my son joined from the back of the room, singing off-key and loudly. My mother, brother, Yvonne, Barry, and Don all rushed to Guy. My mother put her hand over his mouth. The audience laughed and I laughed. I asked the musicians to start again.

Mother’s pride was evident. She brought her fellow members of the Women Elks Organization and the Order of the Eastern Star (African American secret women’s organizations). She brought the merchant marines with whom she sailed and they made over me as if I were Lena Horne or Pearl Bailey.

Mother said, “Now you will see some of the world and you will show the world what you are working with.” She laughed at her wit and I laughed at my imagined future.

A producer of
Porgy and Bess
telephoned me and offered me a job with the opera. He said the role of Ruby, the girlfriend of Sportin’ Life, was open and because I could sing and dance, they wanted me to play the role. I telephoned Mother and told her of the offer. The problem was that the musical was preparing to tour throughout Europe. I wanted to go but I didn’t want to leave Guy.

“You cannot turn down that chance to see Europe. Aunt Lottie and I will take care of Guy.”

But I was afraid Guy would think I had gone off and left him.

She said that sooner or later I would have to leave him and that I could not keep him on my hip forever. At least this time he would be left in good care.

I sat Guy down in the kitchen and explained I would be away for a few months but he would stay with his Grandma and Aunt Lottie, and I would send money every week so that he could have everything he needed. I told him he had to be grown-up like the little man he was.

“She was a raconteur and would entertain my friends as if they were her friends.”

(Vivian Baxter, Julio Finn [a writer of jazz and blues], Maya Angelou, Dolly McPherson [a very close sister-friend, and an English professor at Wake Forest], 1985)

A few weeks later, we both held back our tears as I gave my luggage to the taxi driver. I hugged Guy at the door. He then began to cry because he was already missing his mother.

I boarded the plane to New York with my luggage filled with my best clothes and enough guilt to last me a year.

Porgy and Bess
boasted a cast with the top African American operatic voices. Leontyne Price, William Warfield, and Cab Calloway had already been featured in the company when I joined. The friends I made in the cast taught me more about music in six months than I had learned during my whole life. I became adept in French and Spanish and I sang every evening in European nightclubs after the opera curtain fell. I taught dance during the day in Paris, at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, Israel, and at the Rome Opera House in Italy.

I enjoyed myself but I also bruised my psyche with self-flagellation. On one hand I had earned a secure place in the theater world, but on the other
hand, when I telephoned Guy in San Francisco, we would end our calls weeping and sobbing.

I knew that if I missed Guy as much as I did, he must be missing me more. I was old enough to know that I would be seeing him soon, but I knew he had to be thinking sometimes that he would never see his mother again. The years I had spent in Arkansas without my mother made me know how lost a child feels when a parent is missing.

Although I had flown over to join
Porgy and Bess
, guilt made me afraid to fly back. I thought how if the plane fell, my son would grow up saying, “I never knew my mother. She was an entertainer.”

I took a ship from Naples to New York (nine days), and a train from New York to San Francisco (three days and three nights), before I finally arrived at Fulton Street. The reunion was greater than the drama in Russian novels. I wrapped my arms around Guy and he sobbed on my chest.

“I swear to you, I’ll never leave you again. If I go, when I go, wherever I go, you’ll go with me or I won’t go.”

He fell asleep in my arms. I picked him up and lowered him into his own bed.

After one week of living in the uppermost floor of my mother’s big house, anxiety gripped me again. I became convinced it would be difficult if not impossible to raise a happy black boy in a racist society. One afternoon I was lying on the sofa in the upstairs living room when Guy walked through. “Hello, Mom.” I looked at him and had the impulse to pick him up, open the window, and jump. I raised my voice and said, “Get out. Get out now. Get out of the house this minute. Go out in the front yard and don’t come back, even if I call you.”

I telephoned for a taxi, walked down the steps, and looked at Guy. I said, “Now you may go in and please stay until I return.” I told the cabdriver to take me to Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic. When I walked into the office, the receptionist asked if I had an appointment. I said, “No.” She explained with a sad face, “We cannot see you unless you have an appointment.”
I said, “I must see someone. I am about to hurt myself and maybe someone else.”