The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [20]
A few musicians who understood English laughed. Many people could sing better than I, so Schiffman had told me nothing I didn't already know.
“Thanks for your advice. I'm going to sing it anyway.”
“It'll be a miracle if they don't laugh you off the stage.” He laughed again.
“Thank you.” I turned back to the orchestra. “I don't have sheet music, but the song goes like this …”
I didn't expect Schiffman to know that my life, like the lives of other black Americans, could be credited to miraculous experiences. But there was one other thing I was sure he didn't know. Black people in Harlem were changing, and the Apollo audience was black. The echo of African drums was less distant in 1959 than it had been for over a century.
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was to Harlem what the Mississippi was to the South, a long traveling river always going somewhere, carrying something. A furniture store offering gaudy sofas and fake leopard-skin chairs shouldered Mr. Micheaux's book shop, which prided itself on having or being able to get a copy of any book written by a black person since 1900. It was true that sportily dressed fops stood on 125th and Seventh Avenue saying, “Got horse for the course and coke for your hope,” but across the street, conservatively dressed men told concerned crowds of the satanic nature of whites and the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. Black women and men had begun to wear multicolored African prints. They moved through the Harlem streets like bright sails on a dark sea.
I also knew that fewer people giggled or poked the sides of their neighbors when they noticed my natural hair style.
Clever appliance-store owners left their TV sets on the channels broadcasting U.N. affairs. I had seen black people standing in front of the stores watching the faces of international diplomats. Although no sound escaped into the streets, the attentive crowds appeared. I had waited with a group of strangers one night near St. Nicholas Avenue. The mood was hopeful, as if a promise was soon to be kept. The crowd tightened, pulled itself closer together and toward the window, as a small dark figure appeared on all the screens at once. The figure was that of an African wearing a patterned toga, striding with theatrical dignity toward the camera. The sidewalk audience was quiet but tense. When the man's face was discernible and the part in his hair distinct, the crowd began to talk.
“Hey, Alex. Hey, brother.”
“He's a good-looking thing.”
“That African walk like God himself.”
“Humph. Ain't that something.”
The man's mouth moved and the crowd quieted, as if lip reading. Although it was impossible to understand his message, his air of disdain was not lost on the viewers.
One fat woman grinned and giggled, “I sure wish I knew what that pretty nigger was saying.”
A man near the back of the crowd grunted. “Hell. He's just telling all the crackers in the world to kiss his black ass.”
Laughter burst loudly in the street. Laughter immediate and self-congratulatory.
Schiffman had been in Harlem since the beginning of the Apollo. He had given first contracts to a number of black performers who went on to become internationally famous. Some people in the area said he was all right, and he had black friends. He understood who was running numbers, who was running games and who was square and respectable. But he wasn't black. And he was too mired in the Harlem he had helped to fashion to believe that the area was moving out of his control and even beyond his understanding.
“Uhuru” was definitely going to be my encore.
Fortunately my first show was at one o'clock on a Monday afternoon. About forty people sat staggered in an auditorium which could hold seven hundred. Tito Puente's big band echoed in the room with the volume of an enlarged