A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [35]
He looked up into the intruder’s face. “You’ve been looking after her for me, haven’t you?”
Before Buck could answer, Jimmy said, “Thank you, you son of a bitch. Now you are dismissed.”
Jimmy’s ferocity shocked me, and my jaw dropped. It dropped farther when the man turned, unspeaking, and walked away.
Jimmy sipped his drink. “Well, baby, I’m going to California. I’ve decided that I should help Eldridge Cleaver.”
Hearing his plans kept me speechless.
“I know you say you hate him, but he is a thinking black man, and he is in trouble because he is thinking and is talking about what he thinks. He needs our help.”
I said, “Well, I thought about it, and what he wrote about your homosexuality in his stupid book was so vulgar that I’d rather hang him than help him.”
“Soul on Ice is a very important book, and you have to remember, the son always kills the father.”
The statement was intriguing. I mulled it over as Jimmy gathered his thoughts.
“I met Richard Wright in Paris and got to know him sufficiently,” he said. “Everything about Wright that I disliked I wrote about in my essay ‘Alas, Poor Richard.’ Many Wright devotees were as angry with me then as you are now with Eldridge.”
“I’m not a devotee.” I hastened to put myself in a clearer light. “I love you, true, but I’m not a damned devotee. I am a careful reader, and I know the difference between your critical evaluation of Wright’s post–Black Boy work and the hatchet job Cleaver did on you. Not on your work but on you, on your character.”
“Maybe he couldn’t find enough about my work to attack. Sometimes people assail the homosexual because they think that by flailing the gay boy, they can reduce that same tendency they suspect in themselves. It’s difficult being different.”
“Well, do you suppose if I know that, it will make it easier for me to see you go to California to help Cleaver?”
“Baby, understand when I say I am going to help Eldridge, and I hope I do, that I am really going for myself. Because it is the right thing for me to do. Understand?”
My own obstinacy would not allow me to concede quickly and admit that I did understand, and that I even hoped that if I found myself in the same or a similar circumstance, I would behave as wisely.
“Understand?”
More at that moment than ever before, he reminded me of Bailey. They were two small black men who were my big brothers.
I said, “I’m just afraid for you out there with those roughnecks.”
“I am a roughneck, too. Grow up. Being black and my size on the streets of Harlem will make a choirboy a roughneck. But do you understand why I’m going?”
I said, “Yes.”
Twenty-five
Jerry Purcell’s East Side apartment was the epitome of elegance. I was invited to dinner, and I took Rosa with me. She marveled at the luxury and whispered, “And he’s a bachelor?”
I told her, “Yes.” Years earlier he had fallen for and married a movie starlet, but the marriage didn’t last.
Jerry’s partner, Paul Robinson, who was always at his side, was great company and could have been a professional comedian. Because he reproduced so accurately any accents relevant to his hilarious stories, he was irresistible.
I was pleased that Jerry was there to meet my friend and even more pleased that they seemed to like each other.
Jerry had sent out for food, and his housekeeper served us in the dining room.
Rosa came back from a trip to the bathroom. She whispered to me, “Girl, the faucets are gold.”
I said, “Probably gold plate.”
She lifted her shoulders and asked, “So?”
I saw her point. Anybody wealthy enough to have gold-plated bathroom fixtures was wealthy.
Jerry had asked me to bring some poems.
After I read them and received compliments, we played backgammon with much merriment. Jerry nodded at me. “Let me speak to you.”
I followed him into a small sitting room.
“You’re a good poet, and you might become great. You could become bigger than you imagine. Don’t sell out, if I ever hear of you selling out...”
“How could I sell out? To