A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [19]
Who would answer all the questions, fulfill all the requests? Would anyone? Could anyone? History had taught the citizens of Watts to hope for the best and expect nothing, but be prepared for the worst.
A shaft of sunlight penetrated the gloom of cynicism when Budd Schulberg, an award-winning writer, went to Watts and founded the Watts Writers Workshop. People who didn’t know his name would bless him forevermore.
“He’s a Hollywood writer, you say?”
“And he’s coming to Watts?”
“Here’s one white man who’s putting his body where his mouth is. I like that. I sure do.”
Some women, mostly white, largely the wives of film moguls, banded together to form an organization, Neighbors of Watts. They went to the area to ask the women how they could be of help.
Mrs. Violetta Robinson, often called the Mother of Watts, told them what the women of Watts needed—an accredited, well-funded child-care center so that they could leave their children and go to work with clear minds. Something of slavery lurked in the shadows of that request. Slave mothers, up before sunrise and sleeping after dark, went to the canebrakes and cotton fields with minds less clouded with concern because they knew a woman, Aunt Susie, Aunty Mae, Aunt Carrie, would be looking after all the children. They took satisfaction in the fact that “Aunt Susie loves children.” The children “just love Aunty Mae.” “Aunt Carrie won’t stand for no foolishness from the children, but she would feed them herself. She won’t let them eat from a trough like hogs as some did on other plantations.” Sometimes the children’s plates were corn husks or cabbage leaves; still, each child ate with clean fingers and from a clean surface.
One hundred and fifty years later, black women still needed that same assurance.
My landlady, who knew everything, said the Neighbors of Watts were going to provide a child-care center. She also said a medical institute was going to be built in Watts, and that it would be named for Charles Drew, a great African-American doctor who developed a technique to separate out plasma from whole blood.
A French journalist telephoned me and said James Baldwin had given him my name and number. I agreed to an interview. He sat, contained, on my studio bed-cum-sofa.
“We French, we have never, never, never had slavery, so we feel we don’t understand the American racism.”
Maybe it was that third “never” that made me pick him up and dust him off.
“What did you call Haiti? A resort?”
Suddenly his English failed him. “Haiti? Est-ce que tu a dit Haiti?”
I said, “Oui.”
He said, “I meant in France. Nous have jamais had esclavage on the land of France.”
I said, “You were the rulers of Haiti and Martinique—and Guadeloupe. None of the Africans went there on the Ile de France. They were taken there on slave ships.”
He said he was beginning to understand the rage a little. If people like me were so angry, how much angrier were those who had less than I?
I looked at the man, his beret, his neat little dancing hands, and looked at my studio apartment with its furniture from Goodwill and its prints from Woolworth’s. I had less than many others I knew, but if he thought I was well-off, then nothing I could say would help him understand Watts. If he had visited the area one day before it exploded, if he had gone to the right bar or pool hall or community center, he could have met someone who heard his accent and, realizing he was a stranger, might have invited him home.
He could have been sitting in a well-furnished house dining on great chicken and greens, receiving all the kindnesses. Then he really would have been befuddled if, on the following day, he heard of the conflagration and had seen his host of the day before struggling with the heavily armed police.
But I could not needle him. He was not going to comprehend the anger and disappointment in Watts, and further provoking him was not going to make me feel better. Like many of my ancestors, I settled back to tell him some of what he wanted to hear and some of what I