The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [43]
We all shouted. Those few writers and would-be writers who were not members of Fair Play for Cuba nonetheless took delight in Fidel Castro's plucky resistance to the United States.
In moments, we were on the street in the rain, finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways. We were going to welcome the Cubans to Harlem.
To our amazement, at eleven o'clock on a Monday evening, we were unable to get close to the hotel. Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and intersections, and police had cordoned off the main and side streets.
I hovered with my friends on the edges of the crowd, enjoying the Spanish songs, the screams of “Viva Castro,” and the sounds of conga drums being played nearby in the damp night air.
It was an olé and hallelujah time for the people of Harlem.
Two days later, Khrushchev came to visit Castro at the Teresa. The police, white and nervous, still guarded the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, which even in normal times was accepted as the most popular and possibly most dangerous crossroad in black America.
Hazel, Millie and I walked down a block from the office, pushing through the jubilant crowd. We watched as Castro and Khrushchev embraced on 125th Street, as the Cubans applauded and the Russians smiled broadly, showing metal teeth. Black people joined the applause. Some white folks weren't bad at all. The Russians were O.K. Of course, Castro never had called himself white, so he was O.K. from the git. Anyhow, America hated Russians, and as black people often said, “Wasn't no Communist country that put my grandpappa in slavery. Wasn't no Communist lynched my poppa or raped my mamma.”
“Hey, Khrushchev. Go on, with your bad self.”
Guy left school, without permission, to come to Harlem with a passel of his schoolmates.
They trooped into the SCLC office after the Russian and Cuban delegations had left the neighborhood for the United Nations building.
Millie called and told me my son was in the back, stamping envelopes.
Surprise and a lack of sensitivity made me confront him before his friends.
“What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in school.”
He dropped the papers and said in a voice cold and despising, “Do you want to speak to me privately Mother?”
Why couldn't I know the moment before I had spoken what I knew as soon as my question hit the air. I turned without apology and he followed.
We stopped and faced each other in the hallway.
“Mother, I guess you'll never understand. To me, a black man, the meeting of Cuba and the Soviet Union in Harlem is the most important thing that could happen. It means that, in my time, I am seeing powerful forces get together to oppose capitalism. I don't know how it was in your time, the olden days, but in modern America this was something I had to see. It will influence my future.”
I looked at him and found nothing to say. He had an uncanny sense of himself. When I was young I often wondered how I appeared to people around me, but I never thought to see myself in relation to the entire world. I nodded and walked past him back to my office.
Abbey, Rosa and I decided what was needed was one more organization. A group of talented black women who would make themselves available to all the other groups. We would be on call to perform, give fashion shows, read poetry, sing, write for any organization from the SCLC to the Urban League that wanted to put on a fund-raising affair.
CHAPTER 7
For six months I had been coordinator of the SCLC. I knew how to contact reliable philanthropists, the first names of their secretaries, and which restaurants