A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [3]
Rosa Guy listened to my explanation and understood. Our conversation was brief.
I thought of calling James Baldwin, who had become a close friend. We met in Paris in the 1950s when he was writing and I was the principal dancer in the opera Porgy and Bess. We became closer in 1960 when I lived in New York. Jimmy was familiar with the work of Jean Genet, and when I played the White Queen in the Genet drama The Blacks, he spent long evenings helping me with the role. I didn’t telephone him because I knew he could persuade me to stay in New York for at least a day. His physical smallness, his sense of humor and his love for me reminded me so much of my brother, Bailey, that I could never completely resist him.
Two
My mother met me at the San Francisco airport. She was smaller and prettier than she had been in my memory. She kissed me and said, “Describe your luggage to the skycaps, they will bring your bags to the car.” The porters had eyes only for my mother. They danced attendance to her, like a male corps de ballet around the première danseuse, and she didn’t even seem to notice. Mother rushed us to the car and my heart leaped to find Bailey sitting in the backseat. He had flown in from Hawaii to meet me and at once began talking and asking questions.
Mother said, “She grew prettier. You’re a good-looking woman, baby.”
Bailey said, “Yeah, but good looks run in this family. She didn’t have anything to do with that. Tell me about Guy.”
Mother said, “I read in the papers that you were coming back to work with Malcolm X in some new organization. I hope not. I really hope not.” She paused and then continued, “If you feel you have to do that—work for no money—go back to Martin Luther King. He’s really trying to help our people. Malcolm X is a rabble-rouser.”
My breath left me and I couldn’t seem to get it back. Just as suddenly, I had enough air, and as I opened my mouth to respond, Bailey touched my shoulder and I turned to him. His face was solemn as he wagged his head. I closed my mouth.
Although less than two years older than I and barely five feet four, my brother had been my counselor and protector for as long as I could remember. When we were just three and five, our parents separated. They sent us, unaccompanied, from California to our paternal grandmother and uncle, who lived in Stamps, a small Arkansas hamlet. Since the adults were strangers to us, Bailey became head of a family that consisted of just us two. He was quicker to learn than I, and he took over teaching me what to do and how to do it.
When I was seven, our handsome, dapper California father arrived in the dusty town. After dazzling the country folk, including his mother, his brother and his children, he took Bailey and me to St. Louis to live with our mother, who had moved back to Missouri after their divorce. He wasn’t concerned with offering us a better life, but rather, with curtailing the life my mother was living as a pretty woman who was single again.
My grandmother bundled us and a shoe box of fried chicken into my father’s car and cried as she waved good-bye. My father drove, hardly stopping until he delivered us to my mother in St. Louis.
For the first few months we were enraptured with the exotic Northern family. Our maternal grandmother looked white and had a German accent. Our grandfather was black and spoke with a Trinidadian accent. Their four sons swaggered into and out of their house like movie toughs.
Their food astonished us. They ate liverwurst and salami, which we had never seen. Their sliced bread was white and came in greasy, slick waxed paper, and after eating only homemade ice cream, we thought there could be nothing greater than enjoying slices of multicolored cold slabs cut from a brick of frozen dessert. We delighted in being big-city kids until my mother’s boyfriend raped me. After much persuasion (the man had warned me that if I told anyone, he would kill my brother), I told Bailey, who told the family. The man was arrested, spent one night in jail, was released