A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [22]
The motor turned over, and the car slid off the tracks seconds before the train sped behind us.
The two passengers in the backseat with me cursed Phil roundly, but I couldn’t speak. I had been frightened mute again, just like twenty-five years earlier, when I had been so terrorized that I had chosen to become mute.
This time I had no choice. Words simply would not come. Phil stopped the car on the corner by my house.
“You want to get out here?”
I nodded.
The woman sitting next to him awakened grouchy. “What’s going on?” She frowned and leaned forward. I crawled out around her. When I was standing beside the car, I realized that I had urinated. My clothes were wet and crumpled.
When Phil waited for me to walk away, I decided he must have known I had been scared enough to pee on myself. I could not stand there all day, so I crossed the street in front of the car to give him a good chance to see me.
His laughter did not surprise me. “I scared the piss out of her. Look. Yes, I did...Maya, come back and clean up my car. Come back, I won’t do it again.”
I continued walking to my house. He drove slowly beside me, laughing, urging me to get back in the car. His taunting did not embarrass me. The level of my fear totally outweighed everything he said.
He didn’t drive off until I walked up the steps to my house.
As I showered, the terror released me. In clean, dry clothes, I sat down and thought about the horrible incident. I remembered Phil’s self-description when I first met him, and I realized that I had learned at least one important lesson. Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you. The racial pejorative might not have applied to him. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was or wasn’t a liar, but I found out he was certainly mean and he was ornery.
Twelve
The telephone voice startled me.
“Hello, is this my Maya?”
Shock closed my throat.
“Hello, Maya, speak to me. This is your husband.”
He wasn’t my husband, but he was my great love and my greatest fear, and I had left him in Africa. “Hello,” I answered, reluctantly.
“I am here.” He couldn’t be. I looked at the door. “I am in New York City. I have come to the States to collect you. God gave you to me. Remember?”
I couldn’t speak.
He was the man I felt had taken the heart out of my body and worn it boldly on his shoulder like an epaulette, and I had adored him.
He said, “Do you still love me?”
I finally asked, “Are you really in New York City?”
He continued, as was his way. “Of course you love me. I am coming to California to collect you and take you back to Africa.”
I told him that I had made a life for myself in Los Angeles and I was not going anywhere.
We had both worked on trying to establish a relationship in Ghana. He was loud, bombastic and autocratic. But he loved me and found me funny and sexy, and he said I was brilliant. He was astonishingly handsome, and his upbringing as a young royal gave him an assurance that I had found irresistible. We might have succeeded at being together, but I had no precedent for being who he wanted me to be. I did love him, but that had not been enough. He needed to be worshiped. Being an American, a black American woman, being Vivian Baxter’s daughter, Bailey Johnson’s sister and Guy Johnson’s mother, I was totally unprepared to worship any mortal.
We had argued loudly and reconciled feverishly so many times that I knew our lives would always follow that pattern. I had come to that realization at the same time that my son had found “mother” to be a useless word, so I was often addressed as “Yeah.”
I had left Africa to him and to my African love. And now my lover was on the same continent, and I had no place to run.
I called my mother for her strength and guidance. Her voice was warm and loving.
“Baby, it’s a big world, and Los Angeles is a big city. He can come. Los Angeles can hold both of you.”
She hadn’t heard him roaring at me, or me screaming back at him.
“Oh yes,” she went on, “I spoke to