Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [48]
Yanko greeted me warmly, but without surprise, allowing me to feel not only welcome but expected. Mitch came forward smiling, followed by Victor. They both embraced me and complimented George on his good luck. The three men fell into a private exchange and I wandered away to observe the gathering.
The party was in lingual swing. European classical music provided a background for tidbits of conversation that drifted clear from the general noise. In one corner Annette and Cyril spoke French to a wild-haired woman who never allowed one sentence to end before she interrupted. A thin, professorial man stroked his goatee and spoke to Yanko in Greek. Bob Anshen waved me over and I stayed a while listening to him discourse on the merits of solar heating systems. Victor joined the group who warbled in Italian as melodious as a concerto.
Other languages I could not recognize spattered and rattled around the room. One handsome Negro was talking to a group around the long table. When he saw me his face spread in a broad smile and he stood up. If he had started speaking to me in an African language, I would not have been surprised.
“Hello there. How are you?” Straight, university, Urban League, colored, NAACP middle-class Negro accent.
“Fine, thank you.”
“My name is Jim, join us.”
I had never been found attractive by middle-class Negro men, since I was neither pretty nor fair-skinned, well-off or educated, and since most were firmly struggling up Striver's Row they needed women who could either actually help them or at least improve their visual image.
I sat down and found myself in the middle of a discussion on the recent Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that had banned racial segregation in education. Jim and I and a pretty blond woman on the other side of the table argued that not only was the ruling just, it was very late in coming. Our opponents contended for the legitimacy of states' rights. As voices were raised and the selection of words became keener, I noticed that I was less angry than interested. I knew many whites were displeased by the ruling, but I had never heard them discuss it.
One debater was called away; another, bored with the display of passion, said, “You people are too serious,” and left to kibbitz a chess game.
Jim impressed me. Hearing his formal accent, I had not expected such resolve. “Where do you live?” Maybe I could invite him to Mother's for dinner.
“We live in Mill Valley. What about you?”
I heard the “we” and restrained myself from a new examination of the room. The place was so crowded I must have overlooked his wife.
“I live in San Francisco.”
The blonde who had been on our side in the argument and had made perceptive points in the controversy edged forward on the bench. She leaned toward me.
“San Francisco's not far from Mill Valley. Why don't you come over for dinner?”
Jim said, “And meet our kids.” He laughed a little self-consciously. “Jenny is learning how to cook greens and she bakes a mean pan of cornbread.”
Jenny blushed prettily.
I said, “Thank you, but I work nights.” I had not quite accepted that white women were as serious in interracial marriages as white men.
A statement that had great currency in the Negro neighborhood warned: “Be careful of white women with colored men. They might marry and bear children, but when they get what they want out of the men, they leave their children and go back to their own people.” We are all so cruelly and comprehensively educated by our tribal myths that it did not occur to me to question what it was that white women wanted out of the men. Since few Negro men in the interracial marriages I had seen had a substantial amount of money, and since the women could have had the sex without the marriage, and since mothers leave their children so rarely that an incident of child abandonment is cause for a newspaper story, it followed that the logic of the warning did not hold.
I excused myself from