Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [74]
I said, “No, madame.” It was hard to wrest her attention from the two men. “No, madame, they are not with Porgy and Bess. These are friends from Africa.”
When the import of my statement struck her, the smile involuntarily slid off her face and she recovered her hand from my grasp.
“D'Afrique? D'Afrique?” Suddenly there were no bubbles in her voice.
M'Ba bowed formally and said in French, “Yes, madame. We are from Senegal.”
She looked at me as if I had betrayed her. “But, mademoiselle—” She changed her mind and stood straight. She spoke in French, “Please wait here. I will have someone take you to the musicians. Bon soir.” She turned and left.
After I sang, a young woman gave me an envelope with my pay and thanked me warmly. I never saw Madame again.
Paris was not the place for me or my son. The French could entertain the idea of me because they were not immersed in guilt about a mutual history—just as white Americans found it easier to accept Africans, Cubans, or South American Blacks than the Blacks who had lived with them foot to neck for two hundred years. I saw no benefit in exchanging one kind of prejudice for another. Also, I was only adequate as an entertainer, and I would never set Paris afire. Honesty made me admit that I was neither a new Josephine Baker or an old Eartha Kitt.
When the Porgy and Bess administration informed us that we were moving on to Yugoslavia, I found a woman to give me lessons in Serbo-Croatian and bought myself a dictionary.
Adieu, Paris.
CHAPTER 22
In Zagreb the company was called together to be told that the Yugoslav government and the American State Department wished us to be discreet; we were, after all, guests of the country and the first American singers to be invited behind the iron curtain. We would be driven from the hotel to the theater and back again. We could walk only within a radius of four square blocks of the hotel. We were not to accept invitations from any Yugoslavians, nor were we to initiate fraternization.
The hotel corridors smelled of cabbage and the dust of ages. I found the maid on my floor and asked her in Serbo-Croatian if there was anything interesting to see near the hotel. I had little hope that she would understand me, but she readily answered, “Yes, there's the railroad station.” I was elated that the money I had spent on language lessons had not been spent in vain.
I said excitedly, “Madame, I can speak Serbo-Croatian.”
She looked at me without curiosity and said, “Yes?” She waited for me to go on.
I repeated, “I learned to speak Serbo-Croatian two weeks ago.”
She nodded and waited heavily. No smile warmed her features. I couldn't think of anything to add. We stood in the hall like characters from different plays by different authors suddenly thrust upon the same stage. I grinned. She didn't.
I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “You're welcome.”
I went to my room taking my confusion along. Why hadn't the woman been amazed to find an American Negro woman speaking Serbo-Croatian? Why hadn't she congratulated me? I knew we were the first Blacks that had stayed in the hotel and possibly the first that had ever visited the town.
At first I concluded that because the maid had never been out of her country and everyone she knew spoke her language, she thought Yugoslavia was the world and the world Yugoslavia. Then I realized that the staff must have undergone intensive indoctrination before our arrival. In the lobby no one stared at us; obviously, we were being studiously and politely ignored. The desk clerks and porters, waiters and bartenders, acted as if the sixty Black American opera singers roamed the halls and filled their lobby every other week. I was certain that we were the only authentic guests in the establishment. The others, who averted their eyes at our approach and buried their heads in their newspapers, seemed less innocent than Peter Lorre in an Eric Ambler movie.
Outside,