A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [31]
In order to join New York’s ebb and flow, I had to spend some time listening to the sounds, watching the streams of people coursing east and west and north and south. When I thought I had my balance, I dared to look for an apartment.
There are only so many times in life when our good fortunes and bad fortunes intersect. At such junctions, it is wise to pray, and failing that, keep the passport up-to-date and have some cash available.
The first few days, the city seemed an ice rink, and I was a novice wobbling on weak ankles. I continued going out each day to follow up on tips and hunt down newspaper listings.
I had wanted a flat in a brownstone, or at least a large apartment in one of the older buildings on Riverside Drive. Life offered me a one-bedroom apartment in a brand-new building on Central Park West. It was painted white, and its best feature was a long living room with big windows and a view of the park.
The place was clinical and so different from what I wanted that I thought bad fortune had caught me and I would be forced to live, at least for a while, in a cold and sterile environment. But life proved itself right and me wrong. Friends began giving me fine things for the apartment.
I was having dinner in a Harlem restaurant when a good-looking amber-colored man introduced himself. That is how I met the handsome Sam Floyd, who had the airs of a meticulous fop and the mind of an analytical scientist. He was one of James Baldwin’s closest friends and, after a few months, became a close friend to me. His quick but never cruel wit lifted my spirits on many lean and mean days. I invited him to my empty apartment. He said, “People think New Yorkers are cold, but that is only when they are prevented from helping people who really don’t need help. I have a small rug for you.” We laughed. After we discovered that we really liked each other, we spent time together at least once a week.
Sam was only partially right. As soon as it became known that I had an empty apartment, I began to receive good and even great furniture. A desk came from Sylvia Boone, who had just returned from Ghana. The composer Irving Burgee, who had written calypso songs for Harry Belafonte, was the most financially successful member of the Harlem Writers Guild, and when he heard that I had a new apartment, he gave me a sleek table and an upholstered chair.
Twenty-one
Dolly McPherson and I were becoming good friends. Obviously we never revealed to anyone how we met. Either or both of us could have taken umbrage, and perhaps we did privately. But there was no reason to be angry with each other. Dolly had no way of knowing that when the man was with me, he acted as if he were my husband. And I couldn’t know that when he wasn’t with me, I aged about forty years and became an old black American lady who let rooms.
Dolly and I liked each other’s ability to laugh at a circumstance that neither of us could undo. I met her family. Dolly’s youngest brother, Stephen, looked so much like Bailey that I could hardly speak when we met.
Stephen was my brother’s height and skin color, and was a brilliant research scientist. Like Bailey, Stephen had the wit to make me laugh at the most inane jokes and even at inappropriate times.
I wrote to Mother, “You didn’t give me a sister but I found one for myself. As soon as possible I want you to come to New York and meet her.”
Dolly and I started spending time in an antique shop on the Upper West Side.
Bea Grimes had the only black-owned secondhand store on Broadway. I liked that she was a big country woman with a colorful vocabulary and her own business. She thought of me as being a lot like her, except I had a little more learning and owned practically nothing.
She and Dolly and I often sat talking in the musty crowded back of her shop. She found out that I