Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [92]
Maki was reluctant to let me go alone. I said, “It's daybreak. And, after all, I am home.”
“You do not know this country, Maya.”
“I come from this country. I am only returning home.”
He said we would meet in two weeks, since his ship was to pick us up again in Alexandria after we finished our run at the Cairo Opera House. He said he loved me and I should think about that; he was married, but would get a divorce and come back to the United States with me; doctors made very good money in the United States and it was difficult to get a visa, but if he was married to an American citizen…
I walked out into a beautiful morning and struggled with a bitter thought. The very country that denied Negroes equality at home provided them with documents that made them attractive abroad. Mr. Julian and Maki, in my case, and hundreds of European men and women who tagged the coattails of Black servicemen and singers and musicians might have found them much less appealing if they claimed West Indian or African citizenship, but since they hailed from “God's country,” the “home of democracy” and the richest nation on earth, men were ready to leave their wives and women their husbands for entry into the land of plenty. Avarice cripples virtue and lies in ambush for honesty.
My footsteps disturbed a group of people wrapped in filthy rags and huddled in a doorway. Two small brown children awakened first; they punched and probed in the bundle of clothing until a man's head emerged. When he saw me he began bellowing and a woman sat upright. I was rooted to the pavement, watching the unfolding scene. The two children, joined by two smaller tykes, made their way to me; the mother and father followed, dragging the tatters of cloth that had once covered them. They encircled me, their hands outstretched. The man and woman clutched their fingers together and brought them to their mouths in a jabbing motion, then they stabbed the bunched hands at their stomachs. They were hungry, but I wasn't sure if it was safe to open my purse. Suppose they grabbed it from me, what could I do?
My inaction called for drama from the adults. The mother grabbed the smallest boy and wedged him between her knees facing me. The father took the child's chin roughly and forced it away from the chest. I looked at the baby's face in the soft morning sunlight. It was a biscuit topped with dusty black hair and, like a clean dinner plate, devoid of meaning except for a thick white substance which seeped from the closed eyes and slowly descended the cheeks. The parents held the boy's head for my view as if I had caused the condition, as if I had poked out the eyes with a nail and now I must pay for my deed.
I fished out my advance from my purse and peeled off a bill. When I offered it to the child the man snatched it, and the woman flung her blind offspring behind her dirty skirts and grabbed another boy. They showed me his severed arm. The stump looked as blind and final as the diseased eyes. I gave them another bill. When they began to line up the whole family, I said in French, “I have no more money,” and turned to walk toward my hotel.
They followed, running beside and behind me. I opened up my stride, and the man ran in front, talking loudly, gesturing and screaming, as if I had just evicted them from their home.
Their noise awakened other beggars who had found sleeping accommodations in doorways, on porches and next to roofless buildings. Their supplications, loud and cacophonous, merged; the adults wept and pushed crippled children in my path, ripping the filthy clothes to show the extent of the horror.
Egypt had stumbled under the imperialist and colonial yokes for two thousand years, and finally in 1953 achieved true independence as a republic. But success