The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [1]
I had to move on. I could go back to singing and make enough money to support myself and my son.
I had to trust life, since I was young enough to believe that life loved the person who dared to live it.
I packed our bags, said goodbye and got on the road.
Laurel Canyon was the official residential area of Hollywood, just ten minutes from Schwab's drugstore and fifteen minutes from the Sunset Strip.
Its most notable feature was its sensuality. Red-roofed, Moorish-style houses nestled seductively among madrone trees. The odor of eucalyptus was layered in the moist air. Flowers bloomed in a riot of crimsons, carnelian, pinks, fuchsia and sunburst gold. Jays and whippoorwills, swallows and bluebirds, squeaked, whistled and sang on branches which faded from ominous dark green to a brackish yellow. Movie stars, movie starlets, producers and directors who lived in the neighborhood were as voluptuous as their natural and unnatural environment.
The few black people who lived in Laurel Canyon, including Billy Eckstein, Billy Daniels and Herb Jeffries, were rich, famous and light-skinned enough to pass, at least for Portuguese. I, on the other hand, was a little-known night-club singer, who was said to have more determination than talent. I wanted desperately to live in the glamorous surroundings. I accepted as fictitious the tales of amateurs being discovered at lunch counters, yet I did believe it was important to be in the right place at the right time, and no place seemed so right to me in 1958 as Laurel Canyon.
When I answered a “For Rent” ad, the landlord told me the house had been taken that very morning. I asked Atara and Joe Morheim, a sympathetic white couple, to try to rent the house for me. They succeeded in doing so.
On moving day, the Morheims, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, my friend and voice coach, Guy, and I appeared on the steps of a modest, overpriced two-bedroom bungalow.
The landlord shook hands with Joe, welcomed him, then looked over Joe's shoulder and recognized me. Shock and revulsion made him recoil. He snatched his hand away from Joe. “You bastard. I know what you're doing. I ought to sue you.”
Joe, who always seemed casual to the point of being totally disinterested, surprised me with his emotional response. “You fascist, you'd better not mention suing anybody. This lady here should sue you. If she wants to, I'll testify in court for her. Now, get the hell out of the way so we can move in.”
The landlord brushed past us, throwing his anger into the perfumed air. “I should have known. You dirty Jew. You bastard, you.”
We laughed nervously and carried my furniture into the house.
Weeks later I had painted the small house a sparkling white, enrolled Guy into the local school, received only a few threatening telephone calls, and bought myself a handsome dated automobile. The car, a sea-green, ten-year-old Chrysler, had a parquet dashboard, and splintery wooden doors. It could not compete with the new chrome of my neighbors' Cadillacs and Buicks, but it had an elderly elegance, and driving in it with the top down, I felt more like an eccentric artist than a poor black woman who was living above her means, out of her element, and removed from her people.
One June morning, Wilkie walked into my house and asked, “Do you want to meet Billie Holiday?”
“Of course. Who wouldn't? Is she working in town?”
“No, just passing through from Honolulu. I'm going down to her hotel. I'll bring her back here if you think you can handle it.”
“What's to handle? She's a woman. I'm a woman.”
Wilkie laughed, the chuckle rolling inside his chest and out of his mouth in billows of sound. “Pooh, you're sassy. Billie may like you. In that case, it'll be all right. She might not, and then that's your ass.”
“That could work the other way around.