The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [14]
I fretted at the unrelenting diatribe, not because I disagreed but because I didn't think whites interesting enough to consume all my thoughts, nor powerful enough to control all my movements.
I found an apartment in the Killenses' neighborhood. I spent the days painting the two bedrooms and sprucing up the furniture I bought in secondhand stores, and returned each night to sleep at the Killenses' house.
One evening after the rest of the family had gone to bed, I sat up having a nightcap with John. I asked why he was so angry all the time. I told him that while I agreed with Alabama blacks who boycotted bus companies and pro tested against segregation, California blacks were thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from those Southern plagues.
“Girl, don't you believe it. Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation. You have to deal with masters. There might be some argument over whether they are vicious masters, but be assured that they all think they are masters … And if they think that, then you'd better believe they think you are the slave. Maybe a smart slave, a pretty slave, a good slave, but a slave just the same.”
I reminded John that I had spent a year in New York, but he countered, “You were a dancer. Dancers don't see anything except other dancers. They don't see; they exist to be seen. This time you should look at New York with a writer's eyes, ears and nose. Then you'll really see New York.”
John was right. Seven years earlier, when I studied in New York, my attention was unequally distributed between the dance studio where I was studying on scholarship, my son and my first, disintegrating marriage. Truly I had had neither the time nor mind to learn New York.
John's eyes were blazing, and although I was his only audience, he was as intense as if he were speaking to a filled room.
“I tell you what to do. Go to Manhattan tomorrow. Go first to Times Square. You'll see the same people you used to see in Arkansas. Their accents might be different, their dress might be different, but if they are American whites, they're all Southern crackers. Then go to Harlem. Harlem is the largest plantation in this country. You'll see lawyers in three-piece suits, real estate brokers in mink coats, pimps in white Cadillacs, but they're all sharecropping. Share-cropping on a mean plantation.”
I intended to see Harlem with John's advice in mind, but Guy arrived before I had the opportunity. I picked him up at the airport, and when he walked into the house I saw that he was already too large for the living room. We had been separated a month and he seemed to have grown two inches taller and years away from me. He looked at the hastily painted white walls and the Van Gogh prints I had chosen and matted.
“It's O.K. It looks like every other house we've lived in.”
I wanted to slap him. “Well, it's a little better than the street.”
“Oh, Mother, come now. That wasn't necessary.” The superiority in his voice was an indication of how he had been hurt by our separation.
I grinned. “O.K. Sorry. How about the desk? You always said you wanted a big office desk. Do you like it?”
“Oh sure, but you know I wanted a desk when I was a little kid. Now …”
The air between us was burdened with his aloof scorn. I understood him too well.
When I was three my parents divorced in Long Beach, California, and sent me and my four-year-old brother, unescorted, to our paternal grandmother. We wore wrist tags which informed anyone concerned that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, en route to Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas.
Except for disastrous and mercifully brief encounters with each of them when I was seven, we didn't see our parents again until I was thirteen.
Our reunion with Mother in California was a joyous festival, studded with tears, hugs and lipsticked kisses. Under and after the high spirits was my aching knowledge