The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (96 page)

I was sitting, mulling over the experience, when Hazel and Millie walked in smiling.

“Caught you that time, didn’t we?”

I asked her if she had set up the surprise. She had not. She said when Martin came in he asked to meet me. He was told that I was due
back from lunch and that I was fanatically punctual. He offered to play a joke by waiting alone in my office.

Millie chuckled. “He’s got a sense of humor. You never hear about that, do you?”

Hazel said, “It makes him more human somehow. I like a serious man to be able to laugh. Rounds out the personality.”

Martin King had been a hero and a leader to me since the time when Godfrey and I heard him speak and had been carried to glory on his wings of hope. However, the personal sadness he showed when I spoke of my brother put my heart in his keeping forever, and made me thrust away the small constant worry which my mother had given me as a part of an early parting gift: Black folks can’t change because white folks won’t change.

During the next months, Mother’s warning dwindled further from my thoughts. The spirit in Harlem was new and old and dynamic. Black children and white children thronged the streets, en route to protest marches or to liberation offices, where they did small but important chores. Black Nationalists spoke on street corners, demanding freedom now. Black Muslims charged the white community with genocide and insisted on immediate and total segregation from the murdering blue-eyed devils. Wells Restaurant and the Red Rooster served the best soul food and offered great music at evening sessions to parties of blacks and whites and visiting African diplomats. The Baby Grand, where Nipsy Russell had played for years, had closed, but the Palm Café was a haven for hard drinkers and serious players. The
Amsterdam News
was vigilant in its weekly attack against the “forces of evil,” and G. Norwood, one of its social and political columnists, kept the community informed on who was doing what, to whom and with how much success.

The national mood was one of action, and the older groups, such as the NAACP and the Urban League, were losing ground to progressive organizations. Young blacks had begun calling Roy Wilkins a sellout Uncle Tom and Whitney Young, a dangerous spy. Only Martin and Malcolm commanded respect, and they were not without detractors.

—

The Harlem Writers Guild meeting at Sarah Wright’s house was ending. As we were saying goodbye, Sarah’s phone rang. She motioned us to wait and answered it. When she hung up, she said excitedly that the Cuban delegation to the United Nations, led by President Castro, had been turned out of a midtown hotel. The group was accused of having brought live chickens to their rooms, where they were to use them in voodoo rites. The entire delegation had been invited to the Teresa Hotel in Harlem.

We all shouted. Those few writers and would-be writers who were not members of Fair Play for Cuba nonetheless took delight in Fidel Castro’s plucky resistance to the United States.

In moments, we were on the street in the rain, finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways. We were going to welcome the Cubans to Harlem.

To our amazement, at eleven o’clock on a Monday evening, we were unable to get close to the hotel. Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and intersections, and police had cordoned off the main and side streets.

I hovered with my friends on the edges of the crowd, enjoying the Spanish songs, the screams of “
Viva
Castro,” and the sounds of conga drums being played nearby in the damp night air.

It was an
olé and
hallelujah time for the people of Harlem.

Two days later, Khrushchev came to visit Castro at the Teresa. The police, white and nervous, still guarded the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, which even in normal times was accepted as the most popular and possibly most dangerous crossroad in black America.

Hazel, Millie and I walked down a block from the office, pushing through the jubilant crowd. We watched as Castro and Khrushchev embraced on 125th Street, as the Cubans applauded and the Russians smiled broadly, showing metal teeth. Black people joined the applause. Some white folks weren’t bad at all. The Russians were O.K. Of course, Castro never had called himself white, so he was O.K. from the
git. Anyhow, America hated Russians, and as black people often said, “Wasn’t no Communist country that put my grandpappa in slavery. Wasn’t no Communist lynched my poppa or raped my mamma.”

“Hey, Khrushchev. Go on, with your bad self.”

Guy left school, without permission, to come to Harlem with a passel of his schoolmates.

They trooped into the SCLC office after the Russian and Cuban delegations had left the neighborhood for the United Nations building.

Millie called and told me my son was in the back, stamping envelopes.

Surprise and a lack of sensitivity made me confront him before his friends.

“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in school.”

He dropped the papers and said in a voice cold and despising, “Do you want to speak to me privately, Mother?”

Why couldn’t I know the moment before I had spoken what I knew as soon as my question hit the air. I turned without apology and he followed.

We stopped and faced each other in the hallway.

“Mother, I guess you’ll never understand. To me, a black man, the meeting of Cuba and the Soviet Union in Harlem is the most important thing that could happen. It means that, in my time, I am seeing powerful forces get together to oppose capitalism. I don’t know how it was in your time, the olden days, but in modern America this was something I had to see. It will influence my future.”

I looked at him and found nothing to say. He had an uncanny sense of himself. When I was young I often wondered how I appeared to people around me, but I never thought to see myself in relation to the entire world. I nodded and walked past him back to my office.

Abbey, Rosa and I decided what was needed was one more organization. A group of talented black women who would make themselves available to all the other groups. We would be on call to perform, give fashion shows, read poetry, sing, write for any organization from the SCLC to the Urban League that wanted to put on a fund-raising affair.

For six months I had been coordinator of the SCLC. I knew how to contact reliable philanthropists, the first names of their secretaries, and which restaurants the donors used for lunches. I carried a briefcase, and sat on subways, sternly studying legal papers. I was called Miss Angelou in my office and took copious notes in business conferences with Stan Levison and Jack Murray. Martin Luther King was sacred and fund-raising was my calling. Days were crammed with phone calls, taxi rides and serious letters reminding the mailing list that freedom was costly and that a donation of any amount was a direct blow against the citadel of oppression which held a helpless people enthralled.

After a day of such heart-stirring acts, I would travel back to my apartment. Somewhere after sunset and before I reached Brooklyn, the glorious magic disappeared. When I stepped off the subway at Park, I was no longer the bright young woman executive dedicated to Justice, Fair Play for Cuba and a member of the Harlem Writers Guild. I was an unmarried woman with the rent to pay and a fifteen-year-old son, who had decided that anything was better than another dull evening at home with Mother. Secretly, I agreed with him.

Tony’s Restaurant and Bar on nearby Sterling Place became a sanctuary. It was not so dull that it attracted churchgoing families exclusively, nor so boisterous as to promise company combined with danger to unescorted women.

The first time I went into Tony’s, I chose a barstool and ordered a drink, offering my largest bill, and invited the bartender to take out enough for one for himself. (Vivian Baxter told me when I was seventeen and on my own that a strange woman alone in a bar could always count on protection if she had treated the bartender right.)

He poured out my second drink loosely, allowing the gin to spill over the measuring jigger, then he told me his name.

Teddy was a small, neat man, his light toast-colored skin pulled tight across his face. He had large, slow eyes, which raked the bar while his little hands snapped at bottles, glasses and ice, and he talked with everyone along the counter, stepping into and out of conversations without losing a name or mixing up a drink.

“New in the neighborhood?” He carried drinks to the end of the bar, collected money, rang the register and asked, “Where’re you from?”

“Are you a working girl or do you have a job?”

The softness of his voice belied the fact that he was asking if I was a prostitute. I knew better than to act either ignorant or offended. I said my name was Maya. I was from California and I had a job in Manhattan, lived alone with my teenage son three blocks away.

He returned from the other end of the bar carrying a drink.

“This one’s on me, Maya. I want you to feel at home. Come in anytime.”

I left a good tip, thanked him and decided to return the next evening.

Within a month, Teddy and I had a sly joking relationship, and the regulars nodded to me coolly but without hostility.

Appearances to the contrary, there is a code of social behavior among Southern blacks (and almost all of us fall into that category, willingly or not) which is as severe and distinct as a seventeenth-century minuet or an African initiation ritual. There is a moment to speak, a tone of voice to be used, words to be carefully chosen, a time to drop one’s eyes, and a split-second when a stranger can be touched on the shoulder or arm or even knee without conveying anything more than respectful friendliness. A lone woman in a new situation knows it is correct to smile slightly at the other women, never grin (a grin is proper only between friends or people making friendship), and nod to unknown men. This behavior tells the company that the new woman is ready to be friendly but is not thirsting after another woman’s mate. She should be sensual, caring for her appearance, but taking special care to minimize her sexuality.

The big man and I had noticed each other several times, but, although he was always alone, he had never spoken to me. One evening I walked into the bar and settled myself on a corner stool. Teddy
served me my first drink and called me the Harlem Girl Friday. Then the man called from his stool at the bar’s extreme end.

“Hey, Bar, that one’s on me.”

Teddy looked at the man, then at me. I shook my head. Teddy didn’t move, but his eyes swung back to the man, who nodded, accepting my refusal.

Accepting the first drink from a strange man is very much like a nice girl having sex on a first date. I sat waiting for the second offer.

“My name is Tom, Maya, why won’t you have a drink with me?”

I hadn’t seen him move and suddenly he was close enough for me to feel his body heat. He spoke just above a whisper.

“I didn’t know you, I didn’t know your name. A lady can’t drink with a nameless man.” I smiled, pressing my cheek muscle down to show the hint of a dimple.

He was a reddish-tan color which Southern blacks called mariney. His face was freckled and his smile a blur of white.

“Well, I’m Thomas Allen. I live on Clark off Eastern Parkway. I’m forty-three and unmarried. I work in Queens and I work hard and I make pretty good money. Now you know me.” He raised his voice, “Bar, give us another one like that other one,” then dropped his voice. “Tell me, why are you all alone? Have the men gone blind?”

Although I knew it was an expected move in the courting game, flirting made me uncomfortable. Each coy remark made me feel like a liar. I wiggled on the stool and giggled and said, “Oh, stop.”

Thomas was smooth. He led, I followed; at the proper time he withdrew and I pulled forward; by the end of our introductory ceremony, I had given him my address and accepted an invitation to dinner.

We had two dinner dates, where I learned that he was a bail bondsman and divorced. I went to his house and received lavish satisfaction. After a few nights of pleasure I took him home to meet my son.

He was Tom to his friends, but to establish myself as a type different from the people he knew, I called him Thomas. He was kind to me, always speaking gently, and generous to Guy. We were a handsome trio at the movies, at the zoo, and at Coney Island. His family treated me with courtesy, but the looks they traded with each other spoke of
deep questions and distrust. What did I want with their brother? A grown woman, who had been in show business and the Good Lord knew what else. Her teenage son, whose sentences were threaded with big words, who talked radical politics and went on protest marches. What was Tommy going to do with them? And for goodness’ sake, she wasn’t even pretty, so what did he see in her?

If they had asked me, instead of each other, I could have informed them with two words: sex and food.

At first, my eagerness in the bedroom shocked him, but when he realized that I wasn’t a freak, just a healthy woman with a healthy appetite, he was proud to please me. And I introduced him to Mexican and French menus, spreading glories of food on my dining-room table. We enjoyed each other’s gifts and felt easy together. I had only one regret. We didn’t talk. He never introduced a subject into our evenings and answered with monosyllables to any questions asked.

After the most commonplace greetings, our conversations were mostly limited to my shouting in his bedroom and his grunts at my dining-room table. He treated my work at the SCLC as just another job.

A large donation or a successful money drive would send me away from the office sparkling. Thomas would accept the news with a solemn nod, then thump the newspaper, so that I would know he was really busy reading. His replies to questions about the quality of his workday were generally given in a monotone.

“It was O.K.”

Were any interesting people arrested?

“No. Just the same old whores and pimps and murderers.”

Aren’t some of those criminals dangerous?

“Walking down the street is dangerous.”

Wasn’t he ever afraid of gun-toting criminals?