A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [32]
“What kind of silver you got?”
I told her that I had no silver.
“No silver? No silver?”
“My mother has silver. I’ll be forty on my next birthday. It’s too early for me.”
Bea clucked her tongue and shook her head. “You ought to have bought yourself something silver on your thirtieth birthday. Even a silver spoon. You can’t be a lady with no silver.” She asked, “What you got sitting on your buffet?”
I hesitated.
Dolly said, “Oh, Bea, she doesn’t have a buffet.”
“Child, I’d better come around and see your place. I’m going to get you set up. You need some help.”
Bea sold me an Eames chair for thirty dollars and a nineteenth-century Empire sofa for a hundred.
Bea needed to be needed and in fact liked the needing. She sat in that miasmic atmosphere surrounded by goods that had belonged to someone else who must have found pleasure in preserving them, might have even doted on them. Now they were abandoned to the often careless fingers of customers whose greatest interest was in haggling with the store owner to get a bargain price.
“These young white kids nearly give away their parents’ and grandparents’ things. You want to see something? Someday I’ll take you to an estate sale. The heirs act like they don’t care how much money they get. Main thing to them is get rid of this old stuff. Make you think seriously about dying, don’t it?”
Thanks to Bea Grimes in particular and a host of friends in general, I was able to turn the clinical-looking apartment into a lush experience. Pale lilac silk drapes at the window, a purple wool sofa, one new pale green Karastan rug from Stern’s, a reputable record player and I was ready to show off my home.
The Harlem Writers Guild members, along with Sam Floyd, James Baldwin, Connie Sutton and her husband, Sam, and the artist Joan Sandler, came to party. In fact, Jimmy’s whole family came to party.
When I looked around, there were over fifty people in my suddenly small apartment, and they were having a New York good time. James Baldwin and Julian Mayfield and Paule Marshall were discussing the political responsibilities of writers. John Killens, the founder of the Harlem Writers Workshop, waded in with Alexander Pushkin. Ivan Dixon, the screen actor, on a visit from California, and M. J. Hewitt were sitting on the floor near the piano in deep conversation while Patty Bone, who had been Billie Holiday’s accompanist, played a Thelonious Monk tune.
Sam Floyd and Helen Baldwin, Jimmy’s sister-in-law, helped me in the kitchen. I used the make-do tip that my mother had taught me: “If more people come than expected, just put a little more water in the soup.” She believed it was all right to turn away people for cocktails but bad luck to turn anyone away from a dinner party.
The party finally wound down and released its hold on the revelers. The food had been enjoyed and the drink had been served generously, yet there were leftovers sufficient for the next day’s dinner and no one faced the grayness of dawn totally besotted.
Twenty-two
Jimmy Baldwin was a whirlwind who stirred everything and everybody. He lived at a dizzying pace and I loved spinning with him. Once, after we had spent an afternoon talking and drinking with a group of white writers in a downtown bar, he said he liked that I could hold my liquor and my positions. He was pleased that I could defend Edgar Allan Poe and ask serious questions about Willa Cather.
The car let us out on Seventy-first Street and Columbus Avenue, but I lived on Ninety-seventh and Central Park West. I said, “I thought you were taking me home.” He said, “I am, to my home.”
He started calling as he unlocked the front door. “Momma, Paula, Gloria, Momma?”
“James, stop that hollering. Here I am.” The little lady with an extremely soft voice appeared, smiling. She looked amazingly like Jimmy. He embraced her.
“Momma. I’m bringing you something