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The audience jumped to their feet, shouting “Bravo” and clapping their hands, and the company bowed ensemble. Then the chorus members began to peel off the long double lines, leaving a neat arrangement of principal actors, and the audience thundered its approval.

Backstage after the final curtain, singers, stage hands, administrators acted as if the play had never been. The moods they had created, the tears they had wept so copiously and the joy they had reveled in were forgotten.

I wondered if I would make any real friendships or, to be more precise, I doubted that people who could be so emotionally casual had the ability, desire or need to make friendships.

Billy Johnson told me I was expected at the theater the next afternoon for rehearsal. He asked if I could sight-sing and I answered no. Wilkie had encouraged me to study solfeggio so that I would be able to pick up a piece of sheet music and read it as naturally as one reads a newspaper, but I hadn't had the time. Johnson, a prematurely balding white man from Oklahoma, said we'd work it out. That I didn't really have much to learn.

I was assigned to the hotel where Martha and Lillian stayed and we sat late into the night telling our life stories. Martha was the daughter of a preacher in North Carolina. Lillian was choir director of a large church in Jamaica, Long Island. My grandmother had been Mother of the CM.E. Church in Stamps, Arkansas, so we shared a common religious background.

Rehearsal wasn't as frightening as I had expected. Once Billy Johnson was convinced that the company administrators had actually hired a singer who couldn't read music, he took the situation in hand.

He sat at the piano and with one hand played my part. Having been surrounded by the group of highly trained, talented singers, it would be understandable if he had come to believe that not only could all Negroes sing, but they could all sing opera and had perfect pitch. He barely covered his shock at finding that I didn't have a good ear.

His accent was Southern and as refined as oil of winter-green.

“Well, no, Maya, that's not quite it. Close, but not quite.” He played the air again, his fingers stroking the keys daintily. “It's more like this.”

After an hour, during which I sang the same tune over and over again, he surrendered gracefully.

“I think you're going to have to put in some work on this before you open with us in Venice.”

In the dance sequence I was all right. The rhythm was complex, but I seemed to hear it easily and I danced it freely. Robert Breen had explained that he didn't want the piece to look choreographed. The dancer had to appear so bewitched by the music that she abandoned herself in a glory of dance. I surrendered to the music and allowed it to fashion my performance.

CHAPTER 17

For three days I rehearsed in the afternoons and observed the company from the wings at night. But mornings I spent walking the clean streets of Montreal and listening to the foreign accents and looking at the people.

Among the many perversities in American race relations is the fact that Blacks do not relish looking closely at whites. After hundreds of years of being the invisible people ourselves, as soon as many of us have achieved economic security we try to force whites into nonexistence by ignoring them.

Montreal provided me with my first experience of looking freely at whites. The underground railroad had had Canada as its final destination, and slaves had created a powerful liturgy praising Canada which was sung all over the world. Spirituals abounded with references to the Biblical body of water, the river Jordan. I had been told that Jordan, in our music, meant the Mississippi or the Arkansas or the Ohio River and the stated aim to get to Canaan land was the slave's way of saying he longed to go to Canada, and freedom.

Therefore, Canadians were exempt from many Blacks' rejection of whites. They were another people. I observed their clean streets