The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [81]
Abbey and I, with the solidarity of a tried friendship, read and studied together, or joined by Roscoe, lunched at a nearby restaurant where we discussed the day's political upheavals. We three would not have called ourselves solely actors. Abbey was a jazz singer, I was an activist, and although Roscoe had played Shakespearean roles and taught drama, he had also been a sprinting champion and an executive with a large liquor company. Early on, we agreed that The Blacks was an important play but “the play” was not the only thing in our lives.
My marriage was only a few months old, Vus was still an enigma I hadn't solved and the mystery was sexually titillating. I was in love. Guy's grades had improved but he was seldom home. When I offered to invite the parents of his new friends over for dinner, he laughed at me.
“Mom, that's old-timey This isn't Los Angeles, this is New York City. People don't do that.” He laughed again when I said people in N.Y.C. have parents and parents eat too.
“I haven't even met most of those guys' folks. Look, Mom, some of them are seventeen and eighteen. How would I look if I said, ‘My mom wants to meet your mom’? Foolish.”
The Harlem Writers Guild accepted that most of my time would be spent at the theater, but that did not release me from my obligation to attend meetings and continue writing.
By the first week's end, Frankel had completed the staging and Talley was teaching the actors his choreography. The set was being constructed and I was laboring over lines.
Raymond, Lex, Flash, Charles and I played the “whites.”
We wore exaggerated masks and performed from a platform nine feet above the stage. Below us, the “Negroes” (the rest of the company) enacted for our benefit a rape-murder by a black man (played by Jones) of a white woman (a masked Godfrey Cambridge). In retaliation we, the colonial power—royalty (the White Queen), the church (Lex Mon-son), the law (Raymond St. Jacques) the military (Flash Riley) and the equivocating liberal (Charles Gordone)— descended into Africa to make the blacks pay for the crime. After a duel between the two queens, the blacks triumphed and killed the whites one by one. Then in sarcastic imitation of the vanquished “whites,” the black victors ascended the ramp and occupied the platform of their former masters.
The play was delicious to our taste. We were only acting, but we were black actors in 1960. On that small New York stage, we reflected the real-life confrontations that were occurring daily in America's streets. Whites did live above us, hating and fearing and threatening our existence. Blacks did sneer behind their masks at the rulers they both loathed and envied. We would throw off the white yoke which dragged us down into an eternal genuflection.
I started enjoying my role. I used the White Queen to ridicule mean white women and brutal white men who had too often injured me and mine. Every inane posture and haughty attitude I had ever seen found its place in my White Queen.
Genet had been right at least about one thing. Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices and even their odors. Often our survival had depended upon the accurate reading of a white man's chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman's hand. Whites, on the other hand, always knew that no serious penalty threatened them if they misunderstood blacks. Whites were safely isolated from our concerns. When they chose, they could lift the racial curtain which separated us. They could indulge in sexual escapades, increase our families with mulatto bastards, make fortunes out of our music and eunuchs out of our men, then in seconds they could step away, and return unscarred to their pristine security. The cliché of whites being ignorant of blacks was not only true, but understandable. Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon's scalpel.
I dressed myself in the hated gestures and made the White Queen gaze down in loathing at the rotten stinking stupid blacks, who, although