A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [8]
“I hope you’ll enjoy Hawaii, Mom. I was sorry about Malcolm.” Then he said, “I am very well. I’m doing fine, and school is fine.”
What else could or would he say?
“I’ve been back to the hospital, and I can play football now.”
In the automobile crash years earlier, Guy had broken his neck and spent six months in a torso cast. He healed, but I doubted seriously that he had been given medical clearance to play any full-contact sport.
“Yes, Mother, of course I miss you.”
He didn’t.
“Mom.” His voice began to fade, but for the first time I heard my son’s true voice. “Mom, I’m really sorry about Malcolm. We held a vigil in Accra...Really, really sorry.”
Thousands of air miles and millions of Atlantic waves sandwiched my son’s voice, and I could no longer hear him, but I was satisfied. We had lived so close together that through his normal teenage bravado and his newly learned air of male superiority, I could translate him into my mother language fluently. Despite the static and the pauses when the line went dead, despite the faintness of his voice and the loud buzzing that never stopped, the call was, for me, a huge success.
I learned from what he said and what he didn’t say that he was living the high life, the very high life. In fact, he was glad that he had been invited to the world party and that there was no mother around to give him curfew hours. He was going to school and enjoying the competition and the open forum for debate, because he was always eager for argument. He missed me, but not in the sense that he wished me back in Ghana. He missed me just because I had left a vacuum. He was glad for the opportunity to furnish the vacuum with his own chosen baubles.
Generally, he was happy in his fortified city of youth. And if a cold breeze blew over the ramparts, he had his bravado to keep him warm.
He was sincerely sorry about Malcolm. He was so near the sacred and fearful grail of black manhood that any man of color who faced the threat of life with courage, and intellect, and wit, was his hero. He included among his paladins Mahatma Gandhi, Paul Robeson, Nelson Mandela, Mao Tse-tung, Hannibal, Robert Sobukwe and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Malcolm X topped the list. Guy himself had lost an ideal, so he felt sincere sympathy for me. He knew I had lost a friend.
Five
The San Francisco streets bore out Bailey’s predictions. Life was so mundane that I was plunged into despair.
Why were black people so indifferent? Were we unfeeling? Or were we so timid that we were afraid to honor our dead? I thought what a pathetic people we were.
American blacks were acting as if they believed “A man lived, a man loved, a man tried, a man died,” and that was all there was to that.
Papers ran pictures of the handsome Malcolm before the assassination alongside the photo of his bloody body, with his wife, Betty, leaning over her beloved on her knees, frozen in shock.
If a group of racists had waylaid Malcolm, killed him in the dark and left his body as a mockery to all black people, I might have accepted his death more easily. But he was killed by black people as he spoke to black people about a better future for black people and in the presence of his family.
Bailey rescued me. He had returned to Hawaii and found a nightclub that was offering me a job singing. He had lined up a rhythm section and had talked Aunt Leah into letting me stay with her until I could find a place.
Mother admitted, “Yes, I phoned your brother. You were prowling around the streets and the house like a lame leopard. Time for you to straighten up and get back into the whirl of life.”
She lived life as if it had been created just for her. She thought the only people who didn’t feel the same were laggards and layabouts.
One would have to be a determined malcontent to resist her sincere good humor. She played music, cooked wonderful menus of my favorite foods and told me bawdy jokes, partly to entertain and partly to shock me out of my lethargy. Her tactics worked.
We packed for Hawaii with great joviality. Mother bought me beautiful expensive