The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (101 page)

Laughter from behind the door brought me back to reality. Guy had accepted Vus, which meant I was as good as married and on my way to live in Africa.

They emerged from the room, broad grins stretched their faces. Guy’s high-yellow color was reddened with excitement and Vus looked satisfied.

“Congratulations, Mom.” This time Guy opened his arms offering me safe sanctuary. “I hope this will make you very happy.”

I stood in Guy’s arms and Vus laughed. “Now you’ll have two strong men to take care of. We three will be the only invaders Mother Africa will willingly take to her breast.”

The evening filled with laughter and plans. When Vus left for Manhattan, Guy spoke candidly.

“You would never have been happy with Mr. Allen.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Yes, but how? Because he’s a bail bondsman?”

“No, because he didn’t love you.”

“And Mr. Make does?”

“He respects you. And maybe for an African, that’s better than love.”

“You know a lot, huh?” I didn’t try to conceal my pride.

“Yeah. I’m a man.”

—

The next few days glittered, as friends, recovered from shock at my hasty decision, strung out a Mardi Gras of parties. Rosa threw a Caribbean fete, where her African, black American and white liberal friends argued and laughed over plates of her famous rice and beans. Connie and Sam Sutton, an unpretentious intellectual couple, invited academic colleagues to a quiet dinner, which in time turned into a boisterous gathering. All over New York City strangers hugged me, patted my cheeks and praised my courage. Old friends told me I was crazy while struggling to control their admiration and envy.

At the end of the string of parties, Vus and I left for England, leaving Guy in the home of Pete and T. Beveridge, who lived a few blocks from my Brooklyn house.

We sat on the plane holding hands, kissing, seeing our future as a realm of struggle and eternal victory. Vus said we would marry in Oxford, such a pretty little town.

I explained that I wanted to have my mother and son present at my wedding and asked if we could wait. He patted my cheek and said, “Of course. In London we will say we married in America. When we return to New York we will say we married in England. We will have our wedding according to your wishes and whenever you say. I am marrying you this minute. Will you say yes?”

I said yes.

“Then we are married.”

We never mentioned the word marriage again.

London air was damp, its stone buildings old and grey. Colorfully dressed African women on the streets reminded me of tropical birds appearing suddenly in a forest of black trees. Vus and I moved into a one-room apartment which the PAC kept near Finsbury Park.

For the first few days, I was happy to stay in bed after Vus left for the conference. I read, rested and gloated over how well fortune was finally treating me. I had a brilliant and satisfying man, and I was living the high life in London, a mighty long way from Harlem or San Francisco’s Fillmore District. Evenings, Vus entertained me with a concert of stories. His musical accent, his persuasive hands and the musk of his aftershave lotion, hypnotized me into believing I lived beside the Nile and its waters sang my evensong. I stood with Masai shepherds in the Ngorongoro crater, shooing lions away from my sheep with a wave of an elephant hair whisk. Morning love-making and evening recitals lost none of their magic, but the time between the two events began to lengthen. When I told Vus that I was not used to having so much time on my hands, he said he would arrange for me to meet some of the other wives of freedom fighters attending the conference.

Mrs. Oliver Tambo, the wife of the head of the African National Congress, invited me to lunch. The house in Maida Vale was neat and bright, but the sensation of impermanence in the large rooms was so strong that even the cut flowers might have been rented. She welcomed me and the other guests cordially but with only a part of her attention. I didn’t know then that all wives of freedom fighters lived their lives on the edge of screaming desperation.

As we sat down at the table, the telephone rang constantly, interrupting the conversation we were trying to establish. Mrs. Tambo would lower one side of her head and listen and most often allow the rings to wear themselves to silence. A few times she got up, and I could hear the one-sided sound of a telephone conversation.

Lunch was slow-cooked beef and a stiff corn-meal porridge called mealy. She told me that she had gone to the trouble of preparing South African traditional food so that I would not be shocked when I met it again. I didn’t tell her that in the United States we ate the same thing and called it baked short ribs and corn-meal mush.

A startlingly beautiful woman spoke to me. Her skin was blue-black and smooth as glass. She had brushed her hair severely, and it lay in tiny ripples back from a clean, shining forehead. Her long eyes were lifted above high cheekbones and her lips formed themselves in a large black bow. When she smiled, displaying white even upper teeth but bare lower gums, I knew she was from Kenya. I had read that the women of that country’s Luo tribe have their bottom four teeth extracted to enhance their beauty. She was bright and tough, describing Europe’s evil presence in Africa.

Mrs. Okalala from Uganda, a squat tugboat of a woman, said she found it ironic, if not downright stupid, to hold a meeting where people discussed how to get colonialism’s foot off the neck of Africa in the capital of colonialism. It reminded her of an African saying: Only a fool asks a leopard to look after a lamb.

Two Somali women wrapped in flowing pink robes smiled and ate daintily. They spoke no English and had attended the lunch for form’s sake. Occasionally they whispered to each other in their own language and smiled.

Ruth Thompson, a West Indian journalist, led the conversation, as soon as lunch was finished.

“What are we here for? Why are African women sitting eating, trying to act cute while African men are discussing serious questions and African children are starving? Have we come to London just to convenience our husbands? Have we been brought here only as portable pussy?”

I was the only person shocked by the language, so I kept my reaction private.

The Luo woman laughed. “Sister, you have asked, completely, my question. We, in Kenya, are women, not just wombs. We have shown during Mau Mau that we have ideas as well as babies.”

Mrs. Okalala agreed and added, “At home we fight. Some women have died in the struggle.”

A tall wiry lawyer from Sierra Leone stood. “In all of Africa, women have suffered.” She picked at the cloth of her dress, caught it and dragged it above her knees. “I have been jailed and beaten. Look, my sisters. Because I would not tell the whereabouts of my friends, they also shot me.” She wore a garter belt and the white elastic straps on her left leg evenly divided a deep-gouged scar as slick and black as wet pavement. “Because I fought against imperialism.”

We gathered around her, clucking sympathy, gingerly touching the tight skin.

“They shot me and said my fighting days were over, but if I am paralyzed and can only lift my eyelids, I will stare the white oppressors out of Africa.”

The spirit of overcoming was familiar to me, also. In my Arkansas church we sang,

Nineteenth-century slaves who wrote the song believed that they would have freedom and that not only would souls cross over Jordan to march into glory with the other saints, but the grave itself would be unable to restrict the movement of their bodies.

When the lawyer dropped the hem of her dress all the women wrapped her ’round with arms, bodies and soft voices.

“Sister, Mother Africa is proud of you.”

“A true daughter of a true mother.”

The Somali women had also touched the scar. They spoke unintelligible words of sorrow and stroked the Sierra Leonian woman’s back and shoulders.

Mrs. Tambo brought out a large bottle of beer. “This is all there is in the house.”

The lawyer took the bottle with both hands and raised it to the sky. “The mother will understand.” She turned and handed the beer to Mrs. Okalala. “Auntie, as the elder, you must do the honor.”

I followed the general movement and found myself with the women bunched together in the center of the small living room. The woman faced us, solemnly.

“To talk to God I must speak Lingala.” Except for the Somali women and me, all the women nodded.

She began to speak quietly, near a moan. Her tempo and volume increased into a certain chant. She walked around in rhythm and dribbled beer in the four corners of the room. The women, watching, accompanied her in their languages, urging her on, and she complied. The Somali women’s voices were united into the vocal encouragement. I added “amens” and “hallelujahs,” knowing that despite the distances represented and the Babel-like sound of languages, we were all calling on God to move and move right now. Stop the bloodshed. Feed the children. Free the imprisoned and uplift the downtrodden.

I told about black American organizations, remembering the Daughter Elks and Eastern Stars, Daughters of Isis and the Pythians. Secret female organizations with strict moral codes. All the women in my family were or had been members. My mother and grandmothers had been Daughter Rulers and High Potentates. Oaths were taken and lifelong promises made to uphold the tenets and stand by each sister even unto death.

The African women responded with tales of queens and princesses, young girls and market women who outwitted the British or French or Boers. I countered with the history of Harriet Tubman, called Moses, a physically small woman, slave, and how she escaped. How she stood on free ground, above a free sky, hundreds of miles from the chains and lashes of slavery and said, “I must go back. With the help of God I will bring others to freedom,” and how, although suffering brain damage from a slaver’s blow, she walked back and forth through the lands of bondage time after time and brought hundreds of her people to freedom.

The African women sat enraptured as I spoke of Sojourner Truth. I related the story of the six-foot-tall ex-slave speaking at an equal rights meeting of white women in the 1800s. That evening a group of white men in the hall, already incensed that their own women were protesting sexism, were livid when a black woman rose to speak. One of the town’s male leaders shouted from the audience: “I see the stature of the person speaking and remark the ferocious gestures. I hear the lowness and timbre of the speaker’s voice. Gentlemen, I am not convinced that we are being addressed by a woman. Indeed, before I will condone further speech by that person, I must insist that some of the white ladies take the speaker into the inner chamber and examine her and then I will forbear to listen.”

The other men yelled agreement, but the white women refused to be a party to such humiliation.

Sojourner Truth, however, from the stage took the situation in hand. In a booming voice, which reached the farthest row in the large hall, she said:

“Yoked like an ox, I have plowed your land. And ain’t I a woman? With axes and hatchets, I have cut your forests and ain’t I a woman? I gave birth to thirteen children and you have sold them away from me to be the property of strangers and to labor in strange lands. Ain’t I a woman? I have suckled your babes at this breast.” Here she put her large hands on her bodice. Grabbing the cloth she pulled. The threads gave way, the blouse and her undergarments parted and her huge tits hung, pendulously free. She continued, her face unchanging and her voice never faltering, “And ain’t I a woman?”

When I finished the story, my hands tugging at the buttons of my blouse, the African women stood applauding, stamping their feet and crying. Proud of their sister, whom they had not known a hundred years before.

We agreed to meet often during the conference and share our stories so that when we returned to our native lands we could take back more than descriptions of white skins, paved streets, flushing toilets, tall buildings and ice-cold rain.

A year would pass before I actually went to Africa, but that afternoon in Oliver Tambo’s English apartment, I was in Africa surrounded by her gods and in league with her daughters.

The conference ended and Vus had to go to Cairo on PAC business. He took me to London’s Heathrow airport and handed me a pile of English pounds.

“Find a good apartment, in Manhattan, and furnish it well. It must be large and central.” I was unhappy at the prospect of going back to New York alone, but he assured me that he would return in two weeks or at most a month. After he concluded his business in Egypt he might have to go to Kenya. The thought of his exotic destinations cheered my spirit and strengthened my resolve. I was happy to return to New York and the task of finding an apartment which would fit his exquisite taste.

In one week I found an apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West, packed books and hired a mover. On our moving day, Guy and I sat among the boxes in the Brooklyn living room. He wanted me to tell him about London again. I described the speakers talking in the rain at Hyde Park Corner and the solemn guards at Buckingham Palace, but he wanted to hear about the Africans.

“Tell me how they looked. How did they walk? What were they called?”

The names were beautiful. “There was Kozonguizi and Make Wane, Molotsi, Mahomo.”

Guy sat quietly. I knew he was running the sounds through his mind. After a moment he said, “You know, Mom, I’ve been thinking of changing my name. What do you think?”

What I thought was that my marriage to Vus had affected him deeply, but I said nothing.

“Johnson is a slave name. It was the name of some white man who owned my great-great-grandfather. Am I right?”

I nodded and felt ashamed.

“Have you chosen a name?”

He smiled, “Not yet. But I’m thinking about it. All the time.”

Guy spent the next few weeks adjusting to his new school, and I used the time seeing my friends and trying to beautify the apartment.