The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [62]
She began to speak quietly, near a moan. Her tempo and volume increased into a certain chant. She walked around in rhythm and dribbled beer in the four corners of the room. The women, watching, accompanied her in their languages, urging her on, and she complied. The Somali women's voices were united into the vocal encouragement. I added “amens” and “hallelujahs,” knowing that despite the distances represented and the Babel-like sound of languages, we were all calling on God to move and move right now. Stop the bloodshed. Feed the children. Free the imprisoned and uplift the downtrodden.
I told about black American organizations, remembering the Daughter Elks and Eastern Stars, Daughters of Isis and the Pythians. Secret female organizations with strict moral codes. All the women in my family were or had been members. My mother and grandmothers had been Daughter Rulers and High Potentates. Oaths were taken and lifelong promises made to uphold the tenets and stand by each sister even unto death.
The African women responded with tales of queens and princesses, young girls and market women who outwitted the British or French or Boers. I countered with the history of Harriet Tubman, called Moses, a physically small woman, slave, and how she escaped. How she stood on free ground, above a free sky, hundreds of miles from the chains and lashes of slavery, and said, “I must go back. With the help of God I will bring others to freedom,” and how, although suffering brain damage from a slaver's blow, she walked back and forth through the lands of bondage time after time and brought hundreds of her people to freedom.
The African women sat enraptured as I spoke of Sojourner Truth. I related the story of the six-foot-tall ex-slave speaking at an equal rights meeting of white women in the 1800s. That evening a group of white men in the hall, already incensed that their own women were protesting sexism, were livid when a black woman rose to speak. One of the town's male leaders shouted from the audience: “I see the stature of the person speaking and remark the ferocious gestures. I hear the lowness and timbre of the speaker's voice. Gentlemen, I am not convinced that we are being addressed by a woman. Indeed, before I will condone further speech by that person, I must insist that some of the white ladies take the speaker into the inner chamber and examine her and then I will forbear to listen.”
The other men yelled agreement, but the white women refused to be a party to such humiliation.
Sojourner Truth, however, from the stage took the situation in hand. In a booming voice, which reached the farthest row in the large hall, she said:
“Yoked like an ox, I have plowed your land. And ain't I a woman? With axes and hatchets, I have cut your forests and ain't I a woman? I gave birth to thirteen children and you have sold them away from me to be the property of strangers and to labor in strange lands. Ain't I a woman? I have suckled your babes at this breast.” Here she put her large hands on her bodice. Grabbing the cloth she pulled. The threads gave way, the blouse and her undergarments parted and her huge tits hung, pendulously free. She continued, her face unchanging and her voice never faltering, “And ain't I a woman?”
When I finished the story, my hands tugging at the buttons of my blouse, the African women stood applauding, stamping their feet and crying. Proud of their sister, whom they had not known, a hundred years before.
We agreed to meet often during the conference and share our stories so that when we returned to our native lands we could take back more than descriptions of white skins, paved streets, flushing toilets, tall buildings and ice-cold rain.
A year would pass before I actually went to Africa, but that afternoon in Oliver Tambo's English apartment, I was in Africa surrounded by her gods and in league with her daughters.
The conference ended and Vus had to go to Cairo on PAC business. He took me to London's Heathrow Airport