A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [12]
So I was leaving Hawaii a lighter and brighter person. I was going to Los Angeles, and although I did not know what I would do or whom I would find there, life was waiting on me and it wasn’t wise to test its patience.
For that last show on the last night, I decided not to sing but to dance.
I asked for the music, then invited it to enter my body and find the broken and sore places and restore them. That it would blow through my mind and dispel the fogs. I let the music move me around the dance floor.
I danced for the African I had loved and lost in Africa, I danced for bad judgments and good fortune. For moonlight lying like rich white silk on the sand before the great pyramids in Egypt and for the sound on ceremonial fonton-fron drums waking the morning air in Takoradi.
The dance was over, and the audience was standing and applauding. Even Aunt Leah finally looked up and smiled at me.
Bailey hugged me and gave me a wad of money.
“You’re good.” He pointed to my heart. “You’ll go far.” He said I had what I needed to face another unknown.
I was off to California.
Aloha.
Eight
There is about Los Angeles an air of expectation. Not on the surface, where the atmosphere is lazy, even somnolent, but below the city’s sleepy skin, there is a suggestion that something quite delightful might happen and happen soon.
This quiet hope might be the detritus of so many dreams entertained by so many hopefuls as they struggled and pinched and dieted and preened for Hollywood cameras. Possibly those aspirations never really die but linger in the air long after the dreamers have ceased dreaming.
The days in Los Angeles were beautiful. The soft, wavering sunlight gave a filtered golden tint to the streets.
The inhabitants of the working-class neighborhood were obviously house-proud. Little bungalows were cradled confidently on patches of carefully tended lawn, and wind chimes seemed to wait for the breeze on every porch.
I longed for one of those tidy and certain houses. If I could live in a house like that, its absolute rightness of place would spill over and the ragged edges of my life would become neat to match the house.
Frances Williams was the very person I needed. I had known her a decade earlier, and she knew everyone else very well. She was active in Actors’ Equity and had connections in both black and white churches.
Fran, as she was called, counseled on the mystery of the theater, on its power and beauty, and gave good advice to anyone smart enough to listen.
She was a large woman with a lusty voice not unlike a cello, and she had a great love of the theater. She and her brother, Bill, lived in a large house at the rear of a corner lot. The house and all the grounds were often pressed into service when Fran directed experimental theater. She had acted in forty movies and had worked as an extra in over a hundred more. When I looked her up, she had exactly what I needed: a place to live and the possibility of a job.
There were two vacant apartments. Each had one room that served as living room, bedroom and study, and each had a large, commodious kitchen. I took one apartment, and Fran told me that the actress Beah Richards took the other.
The apartment was small and dark and humid, so I bought gallons of white latex paint and a stack of rollers and brushes. I painted every inch of visible wall and the entire floor bone-white. I went over the floor with a few coats of adobe enamel. In the lean years before Guy encountered puberty, he and I learned by trial and error how to antique furniture from Salvation Army stores and even how to repair the odd chair or sofa that seemed destined for a junkyard.
I had become such a regular in all Salvation Army and Goodwill stores that salespeople saved certain choice pieces for me. “Maya, how are you? Have I got a fabulous nightstand for you.” “Have I got a great dresser for you.”
In Los Angeles I bought orange, rust and brown burlap and draped the material casually at windows. I made huge colorful floor pillows and piled them