The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [13]
“Just Guy and I are going. We're going to stay.”
His whole body jumped, the muscles began to skitter around his face. For the first time I thought that maybe he cared for me. I watched him command his body. After long minutes his fists fell open, the long fingers relaxed and his lips lost their hardened ridges.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
He consented to stay in the house and send Guy to me in two weeks. After, he might take the house himself, otherwise he would close it. Of course, we would remain friends.
CHAPTER 2
John and Grace Killens lived with their two children and his mother in a roomy brownstone in Brooklyn. They accepted me as if I were a friend returning from a long journey. John met me at the door. “Girl, you finally got out of the country. Kick the mud off your shoes, come inside and make yourself at home.”
Grace was quieter. “Welcome to New York. I'm glad you came.”
Their hospitality was casual, without the large gestures that often discomfort a guest. The first days of my stay were filled with learning the house and studying the personalities of its inhabitants. John genuinely enjoyed being passionate. He was good-looking, and his dark-brown eyes in a light-brown face could alternately smolder or pierce. He talked animatedly, waving his hands as if offering them as gifts to his listeners.
Grace was pretty and petite, but she never allowed John's success or the fact that she was his great love interfere with independent thought.
John's mother, Mom Willie, who wore her Southern background like a magnolia corsage, eternally fresh, was robust and in her sixties. She was one of the group of black women who had raised their children, worked hard, fought for her principles and still retained some humor. She often entranced the family with graphic stories set in a sullen, racist South. The tales changed, the plots varied; her villains were always white and her heroes upstanding, courageous, clever blacks.
Barbara, the younger of the Killens children, was a bright tomboy who spoke fast and darted around the house like a cinnamon-colored wind. Her brother, Jon, larger and more gentle, moved slowly, spoke seldom and seemed to have been burdened with the responsibility of pondering the world's imponderables.
Everyone except Jon, whose nickname was Chuck, talked incessantly, and although I enjoyed the exchange, I found the theme inexplicably irritating. They excoriated white men, white women, white children and white history, particularly as it applied to black people.
I had spent my life on city front steps, in country backyards, kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, joining in and listening to the conversations of black people, but I had never heard so much attention given to the subject of whites.
Of course, in Arkansas, when I was young, black children, knowing that whites owned the cotton gin, the lumber mill, the fine houses and paved streets, had to find something which they thought whites did not possess. This need to have something all one's own coincided with the burgeoning interest in sex. The children sang, beyond the ears of adults and wistfully:
“Whites folks ain't got the hole …
And they ain't got the pole …
And they ain't got the soul …
To do it right … real right … All night.”
In the ensuing years in California the jokes came scarcer and the jobs grew meaner. Anger was always present whenever the subject of whites entered our conversations. We discussed the treatment of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the large humiliations and the petty snubs we all knew were meant to maim our spirits. I had heard white folks ridiculed, cursed and envied, but I had never heard them dominate the entire intimate conversation of a black family.
In the Killenses' home, if entertainment was mentioned, someone would point out that Harry Belafonte, a close family friend, was working with a South African singer, Miriam Makeba, and South Africa was really no different from South Philly If the West Indies or religion or fashion