A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [41]
He looked at me very quickly, as if he had been thinking aloud and suddenly remembered that I was present.
“Mom, you’re afraid.” It was not a question, he had read fear on my face.
“Yes. I am.”
He said, “I understand, but you needn’t be. I am free, and I have you to thank for that.”
I didn’t dare question; nor did I dare let him see my fear again. I asked him to help me put away the groceries and to second my cooking.
We fell into a rhythm that we had begun to develop when he was ten, except now he was adept. No onions went scooting across the floor, no fingers had to be washed, kissed and bandaged.
I admired the man, but I did miss the boy.
The party was merrily rolling along. Friends who hadn’t seen one another in too long a time were having a reunion. I didn’t know any young girls to invite as company for Guy, but Dolly asked over a new teacher who was on her first job. Guy came to the kitchen. “Mom.” He was displeased. “Mom, Hercules is here.”
The look on his face shook my memory loose. Of course, all the hosts in and around Cairo had stopped inviting Hercules. Housekeepers’ young daughters were claiming they had been raped or impregnated by him, and since he had taken up drink, his language was often foul.
I shook my head and said to Guy, “I forgot. I was thinking about you and forgot.”
He wagged his head and pitied his old doddering mother. I was thirty-nine.
I listened to the discussion between Jimmy Baldwin and Max Roach. They were talking about South Africa.
Hercules came up to me. “Sister Maya, thank you for inviting me.”
I said “Yes” coolly.
He said, “I brought my girlfriend. Let me introduce her.”
He introduced me to a woman standing at his side. I admit that my displeasure with myself, and the memory of Hercules’s behavior in Egypt, kept me from acknowledging the guest warmly. I said a perfunctory hello and went to join another small group.
I was looking for a way to get into the heated discussion among John Killens and Julian Mayfield and Rosa Guy when Hercules’s woman tugged my sleeve.
“Is it my whiteness that makes you uncomfortable?” She could not have startled me more if she had poured her drink on the rug.
I collected myself sufficiently. “Of course not. Look around, there are Sam and Connie Sutton, and Roger and Jean Genoud. You are no more white than they, and they are at home here. Please, help yourself to a drink.”
I moved to a less troublesome area and caught up on the laughter that was loud in the room.
Later, Dolly, Guy and I laid out the food on the buffet and the dining table. I stood with serving spoons in hand and said in a loud voice, “Grub est servi.”
The line was taut and furiously fast at first, then, when it slackened, some people who had eaten jumped back in line for seconds.
I said, “Please, let everybody get served once before seconds are handed out.”
Hercules’s lady friend, who was back in line, said, “This is not the democratic way. First come, first served. Can you really hold a place in line for someone who is not here?”
I said, “Yes, I can. Because this is my house. I wouldn’t tell you how to run it at your house.”
Hercules said, in support of his lady, “She is right. This is not the democratic way.”
My patience with them and with myself was as brittle as melba toast. I said, “You, who have needed a passbook to move from one district in Johannesburg to another, are to tell me about democracy?”
She said, “You people, you kill me. You don’t realize that English is not his first language.”
I was ready to evict her at “you people,” but I was serving a plate. When I finished dishing up food, I said to Hercules, “Take her out of my house. She may be indulged and famous as a rude guest in other people’s home, but she gets put out of mine.”
Suddenly the laughter had stopped, and all was quiet. I had not raised my voice, but I knew everyone present had heard me.
I couldn’t take back a single word, and in that moment I hated myself and the woman. I sounded