A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [33]
Berdis Baldwin had nine children, yet she smiled at me as if she had been eagerly awaiting the tenth.
“You’re a precious thing, yes you are. Are you hungry? Let Mother fix you something.”
Jimmy said, “I’ll make us a drink. We won’t be staying long.”
Mother said, “You never stay long anywhere.”
Their love for each other was like a throb in the air. Jimmy was her first child, and he and his brothers and sisters kept their mother in an adoring family embrace.
When we reached the door, I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Baldwin.”
She asked, “Didn’t you hear your brother? He gave you to me. I am your mother Baldwin.”
“Yes, Mother Baldwin, thank you.” I had to bend nearly half my height to kiss her cheek.
Twenty-three
I was job hunting persistently. Gloria, Jimmy Baldwin’s sister, had told me that Andrea Bullard, an editor at Redbook, had learned that a job was going to become available at the Saturday Review and the administrators would be looking for a black woman.
I applied for a position in editing. Norman Cousins talked to me, and on a Friday afternoon, he asked that I write précis on five major articles taken from international journals and bring them to him on Monday by noon.
I said I would, but I was so angry that Dolly’s office could hardly hold me.
“Obviously he doesn’t want me for the job. If in fact there’s a job at all.”
Dolly said, “But you have had an interview with Cousins. There must have been something.”
I told her, “Maybe there was something about me he didn’t like. Maybe I was too tall or too colored or too young or old—”
Dolly interrupted, “Suppose it’s none of those things?”
“Dolly, when an employer sets an impossible task for a want-to-be employee, he does it so that he is freed from hiring that particular employee and yet can say he did try. ‘I did...but I couldn’t find anyone capable of doing the work.’”
Dolly said, “You can do it, I know, and I’m going to help. Decide on the five journals and I’ll ask my secretary to help over the weekend. We can’t let this chance get away.” She went on, “He’s going to have to tell you to your face you are not what he wants.” She began to move rapidly around her office, gathering papers.
I could hardly refute her statement. I knew I should never ask anyone to fight my battles more passionately than I. So I agreed to write the précis.
“International journals?” She called her secretary. “Mrs. Ford, I need five journals. Miss Angelou is going to do some research and writing tonight and tomorrow. I will also need your help on Sunday.”
The secretary stood in the room, somber and contained.
“Intellectual journals from five countries. Thank you.” Mrs. Ford left and returned with her arms filled. I was given The Paris Review, The Bodleian, The Kenyan, an Australian magazine and a German magazine.
The weekend was a flurry of encyclopedias and yellow pads. I sat on the floor with Roget’s Thesaurus, the King James Bible and several dictionaries.
On Sunday, Mrs. Ford came to Dolly’s apartment and typed my handwritten summaries. Dolly read them and declared, “This is as good as or better than anything they print in the darn magazine.”
For Dolly, that was strong talk.
There are some people who are fastidious about the language they use, possibly because of their upbringing. Dolly and I could be alone in an empty apartment, yet if Dolly said “hell,” she always spelled it.
Now she was still irate. She said, “If the editor had enough damned nerve to ask you for that much work in two days, you have enough damned nerve to write the pieces and deliver them in person before noon on Monday.”
On Monday morning I stepped crisply into the office of the Saturday Review.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Cousins.”
The receptionist said, hardly looking up, “He’s not here.”
“But I’m supposed to give him some digests. May I see his secretary?”
“She’s not here, either. You can just leave them there.”
She never once really looked at me, but I had the sensation that she had looked and seen right through me. At first