The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [121]
“Where is my son, Ellen? I need to go there now.” I used the control I remembered in my grandmother's voice when she heard of a lynching.
Ellen was sobbing on Alice's shoulder. “He's in Korle Bu Hospital. But I swear, he was still breathing.”
When we got into the car I asked Ellen to stop whimpering. It was neither her life nor her son. We rode to the hospital quickly, and in a quiet broken only by Ellen's intermittent snuffles and snorts.
Korle Bu's emergency ward was painfully bright. I started down the corridor and found myself in a white tunnel, interrupted by a single loaded gurney resting against a distant wall. I walked up to the movable table and saw my son, stretched his full length under white sheets. His rich golden skin paled to ash-grey. His eyes closed and his head at an unusual angle.
I took my arm away from Alice's grasp and told Katie to stop her stupid snuffling. When they backed away, I looked at my son, my real life. He was born to me when I was seventeen. I had taken him away from my mother's house when he was two months old, and except for a year I spent in Europe without him, and a month when he was stolen by a deranged woman, we had spent our lives together. My grown life lay stretched before me, stiff as a pine board, in a strange country, blood caked on his face and clotted on his clothes.
Richard came up behind me and grabbed my shoulders. I turned and nearly suffocated in the breath of old whiskey and rotten teeth.
“Maya, it was not my fault.”
He slurred the words out of wet dripping lips. My control fled. I reached for him, for his throat, his eyes, his nose, but before I could get my hands on him, I felt hands stroking my back, holding my waist.
“Sister, please. Please. Exercise patience.”
I turned to see a strange couple, old and sweet-faced with wisdom.
They continued. “This is your son?” I nodded. “Sister, we found him on the side of the road. We brought him to Korle Bu.”
Their kindness cracked my armor. I screamed and they gathered me in their arms. “Sister, look at him. He's still breathing.”
They forced me to face the long body and I saw the chest rising and falling in calm rhythm.
“Sister, please say thanks to God.” The woman still held my waist and the man held my hands.
“He was hit by a truck. His car was stopped, the motor was off. If he had been moving, your son would be dead.”
“We arrived and the folks in the car had pulled him out and laid him beside the road.”
“We saw the wreck and picked him up and brought him to Korle Bu.”
“Now thank God that he's alive.”
I looked over at my unconscious son and said, “I thank God. And I thank you.”
The couple embraced me, and walked over to my baby. A nurse appeared. “Who is responsible here?”
I said, “I am responsible. I am his mother.”
She was efficient and without tenderness. “You both are black American?” I nodded, wondering if our place of birth would have as negative an impact in Ghana as our color had in our homeland. She rattled her spiel, “He must have X-rays. One of our X-ray technicians is also a black American. I will call him, but you must register down the hall and make payments at the cashier's desk.”
I didn't want to leave Guy unattended in the hall. I looked for the Ghanaian couple but they had disappeared.
“I'll stay with him, Maya.” Alice put her hand on my arm. Her face was just solemn enough to let me know she was serious, but not so gloomy as to add to my building hysteria.
I finished the registration and hastened after a line of people who paraded behind my son's gurney The X-ray technician and I exchanged names. He pointed the cart on which Guy lay toward a door.
We entered. The drunken Richard, his apologetic mousy wife, Alice and a few whose faces I didn't know, lounged against the wall. The technician dismissed all the visitors except Alice and me.
“I'll need someone to hold him and to position him. He's unconscious, but I've got to X-ray his whole body.”
Alice and I slid Guy's heavy body onto