A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [38]
“The African man is more faithful than the European, not because he loves his woman more than the European loves his woman but because he loves himself more than the European man loves himself.”
Dolly walked in the door. Only a few heads turned.
“You see, the African man is supposed to know where he is at all times. If he is in the wrong place, he knows that, and he has to leave...”
Dolly walked up to his chair and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Hello there.”
He turned and looked up. It took him a second to register her face and another to remember where he was. He looked at me. The first question was, Did I see her, too? The second was, Did I know who she was? Really? The third was, How did she get here?
Dolly said coyly, “Won’t you stand for me?”
He bounded out of his chair like a man half his age.
“Miss McPherson? Of course it’s Miss McPherson.”
Dolly said, “You can still call me Dolly.”
“Of course, Dolly.” Although her appearance benumbed him, he was able to operate in the familiar. He made small, small talk until he could recover.
“How have you been? Of course you’ve heard about what is going on in my country.”
The joke had gone on long enough. From Dolly’s face, I learned that she, too, had lost her taste for it.
I said, “Dolly, come to the kitchen, please.” To the African, I said, “If you will rejoin the guests, we’ll be right back.”
In the kitchen, Dolly laughed and said, “He didn’t know what to do.”
I said, “Or who to do it to.” We both laughed.
She asked, “Do you think anyone had any idea?”
“Certainly not. You were a pretty woman greeting a handsome man you had known somewhere else.” I added, “Known in the biblical sense.”
She laughed. “Girl, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
We had given the African at least five moments of unease, which satisfied our appetites, and no one but he had been the wiser.
“He’s lucky you’re not mean,” Dolly said.
“I think I’m lucky he found you and not some easy lady in the local bucket of blood.”
She asked, “Who’s to say he didn’t find her, too?”
“Girl, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Back in the living room, the African had finished regaling his subjects with stories of current goings-on in Africa. He was standing.
“Maya, I must be going. My host needs to go to an appointment, and I shall accompany him. Tomorrow I shall continue my journey to Connecticut. Thank you for this brief respite at your place. Miss McPherson, oh, Dolly, you must tell me how you met. I’ll come back to New York if Miss Angelou invites me.”
He pointed to my bedroom and said to me, “I shall need just a second of your time. May we go in here?”
We walked in and I closed the door.
“Maya, you are in danger.”
“What?”
“You have become someone else in New York. Someone I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did I ever try to make you a laughingstock in my country?”
“No, but most of the time you treated me as if I were an empty-headed flunky.”
“I may have been wrong, but at least I was being myself. This setup here is beneath you. You have tried to belittle me. That is beneath the Maya I know and still love.”
He turned and walked back into the living room, saying, just loud enough for me to hear, “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.”
I had told him once that if I ever became so angry with him that I wouldn’t speak, he could whisper that line of poetry written by Laurence Hope and I would melt into the palm of his hand.
In the living room he spoke in Fanti to the people: “Let us leave these ladies and go attend to our business.”
He turned to me and said in English, “I am going now, Maya, God bless you.”
I saw hurt and embarrassment in his face. I had meant to prick him, not to pierce him.
I responded with the Fanti departure phrase, “Ko ne bra,” which means “Go and come,” but I knew he would never come back again.
I looked at Dolly, who was looking as crestfallen as I felt.
“Well, sister, we couldn’t swallow the big cat easily. He seems