The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [72]
The waiting crowd, enlarged by latecomers and more police, had changed its mood. Insiders had told outsiders that we had rioted, and now an extravagant disorder was what the blacks wanted, while the law officers yearned for vindication.
“Let's go back in.” “Let's go in and show them bastards we mean business.” “This ain't no United Nations. This is just united white folks. Let's go back in.”
A cadre of police stood on the steps, their eyes glittering. By law, they were forbidden inside the U.N. building, but they were eager to prevent our reentry.
Some folks screamed at the silent seething police.
“You killed Lumumba too. You shit.”
“I wish I had your ass on 125th Street.”
“Take off your pistol. I'll whip your ass.”
Carlos rushed to me.
“We're going to the Belgian Consulate. Walk together.” Rosa's voice was loud. “Forty-sixth Street. The Associated Press Building. Let us go. Let's go.”
The crowd began to move between a corridor of police which stretched to the street. Up front, someone had started to sing.
“And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave …”
The song rippled, now high, now low. Picked up by voices and dropped but never discarded.
“And go home to my God and be free.”
Mounted police, sitting tall on hot horses, looked down as we crossed First Avenue, singing.
Rosa and I were walking side by side in the last group as we turned into 43rd Street. I said, “That scream started it. Wonder who screamed.”
She frowned and laughed at the same time. “Amece, and she almost killed Jean.”
The marchers around us were singing
“No more slavery,
No more slavery,
No more slavery over me.”
Rosa continued, “Amece said she looked down and saw Stevenson and thought about Lumumba. She reached to caress her daughter, but Jean jumped and Amece screamed. Unfortunately, she had her arm around Jean's neck. So when Jean jerked, Amece tightened her grip and kept screaming. Nobody was going to hurt her baby. So she screamed.” Rosa laughed. “Nobody but Amece. She nearly choked Jean to death.”
The crowd was trooping and chanting.
Six mounted police climbed the sidewalk and rode through the stragglers. People jumped out of the way as the horses bore down on them.
A wiry black man unable to escape was being pressed against the wall of a building. I flung myself toward him slapping horses, jutting my elbows into their flanks.
“Get away. Move, dammit.”
The man was flat against the wall, ignoring the horses, staring up at the policemen. I reached him and took his hand.
“Come on, brother. Come on, brother.”
We walked between the shifting horses and back to Rosa, who had halted the group.
Rosa was grinning, her face filled with disbelief. “Maya Angelou, I thought you were scared of animals. You went into those horses, kicking ass!”
She was right. I had never owned a pet. I didn't understand the intelligent idiocy of dogs or cats; in fact, all animals terrorized me. The day's action had taken away my usual self and made me uncommon. I was literally intoxicated with adventure.
We approached the corner of 46th and Sixth Avenue, and the intersection reminded me of a South American news telecast. For the moment, heavily armed police and angry people seemed to neutralize the scene. Bright sunlight left no face in shadow and the two groups watched each other warily, moving dreamily this way and then that. That way and this. Policemen's hands were never far from their pistols, and plain-clothes officers spoke into the static of walkie-talkies. Black demonstrators edged along the sidewalk, rumbling and carrying battered and torn placards.
Police cars were parked double in the street and a captain walked among his men, talking and looking obliquely at the crowd, trying to evaluate its mood and its intention.
When Rosa dashed away from me and into the shuffling crowd, a beribboned officer came over.
“You're one of the leaders?” His pink face was splotched with red anger.
Following the Southern black advice “If a white man asks you where you're going, you tell him where you've been,” I answered, “I'm