A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [11]
After six months, the audiences, whose sizes had been respectful, became smaller. A musician told me where my customers had gone.
“There’s a real singer down at the Aloha Club, and she’s packing them in every night.”
On my break I went to the rival club to see my competition. The singer rocked me back in my chair. She was as tall as I, good-looking and very strong. But mainly, she could sing. She had a huge, deep voice, and when she walked on the stage, she owned it. When she nodded to her musicians to start, she reminded me of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho.
“Then the lamb, ram, sheep horns began to blow
The trumpets began to sound
Joshua commanded the children to shout
And the walls came tumblin’ down.”
The singer stepped up to the microphone unsmiling, wagged her head once to the right and then to the left, the orchestra blared and so did she. Her big dramatic voice windsurfed in that room and walls came tumbling down.
The protective walls I had built around myself as a singer, those that allowed me to sing for convenience, to sing because I could and to sing without rejoicing in the art, all caved in as if obeying the urgency of a load of dynamite.
Listening to Della Reese, I knew I would never call myself a singer again, and that I was going to give up Hawaii and my job at the Encore. I would return to the mainland and search until I found something I loved doing. I might get a job as a waitress and try to finish a stage play I had begun in Accra. I had notebooks full of poems; maybe I’d try to finish them, polish them up, make them presentable and introduce them to a publisher and then pray a lot.
When I thanked Della Reese, I did not mention exactly what she had done for me. I should have said “You’ve changed my life” or “Your singing made the crooked way straight and the rough road smooth.” All I said was “I needed your music, and thank you for giving it so generously.” Miss Reese gave me a cool but gracious reply.
The next day I had a meeting with the family in Hawaii and called my mother in San Francisco to tell her that I was moving to Los Angeles. Some former gaping wounds had healed and I was eager. The time had come to return to the mainland, to get a job—to reenter real life.
Uncle Brother gave me the keys to an old Dodge he and Aunt Leah had left in Los Angeles. “It runs when it wants to and goes where it likes, but it ought to serve you till you can do better.”
He and Bailey and Aunt Leah, against her better judgment, came down to closing night. My aunt sat primly throughout the whole show, her arms wrapped around her body, or she laid her hands in her lap and kept her gaze upon them.
I had planned to leave Hawaii the next day, so my last show was not only a farewell to the Encore but to my family and to the few acquaintances I had made on Waikiki Beach. As I prepared to go onstage, I thought about the haven Hawaii had been. I had arrived on the island in a fragile and unsteady condition. The shock of Malcolm’s murder had demoralized me. There seemed to be no center in the universe, and the known edges of the world had become dim and inscrutable.
Leaving Guy in Africa had become a hair shirt that I could not dislodge. I worried that his newly found and desperate hold on his mannishness might cause him to say or do something to irritate the Ghanaian authorities.
I had brought anxiety and guilt to Hawaii, but each month the worries had abated. Friends in New York informed me that Malcolm’s widow, Betty, had given birth to healthy twins, and although his dream of an organization of African-American unity would not be realized, his family was hale and his friends were true. The actors and writers Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, attorney Percy Sutton and Alex Haley, who had written Malcolm’s biography, were among the steady pillars holding the Shabazz family aloft.
I heard from friends in Ghana that Guy began behaving much better after I left. Often people in general, and young people in particular, need the responsibility of having to