The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [83]
Sidney's small frame shook with eagerness. “Dismiss the cast. Let them have the theater.”
Frankel nodded.
Ethel and I sat close on the piano stool. The old Porgy and Bess companionship was still good between us. We agreed that the key of C, with no flats or sharps, would be easier for nonsinging actors to learn. Ethel played a melody in the upper register and I added notes. We spoke the lyrics and adjusted the melody to fit. Within an hour, we had composed two tunes. The cast returned from the break. They stood around the piano and listened to our melodies. I turned at the first laughter, ready to defend our work, but when I looked at the actors I saw that their laughter was with me and themselves. Ethel Ayler and I had not done anything out of the ordinary. We had simply proved that black people had to be slick, smart and damned quick.
That night the play began on a pitch of high scorn. The theater became a sardonic sanctuary where we sneered at white saints and spit on white gods. Most blacks in the audience reacted with amusement at our blasphemous disclosures, although there were a few who coughed or grunted disapproval. They were embarrassed at our blatancy preferring that our people keep our anger behind masks, and as usual under control.
However, whites loved The Blacks. At the end of the play, the audience stood clapping riotously and bellowing, “Bravo,” “Bravo.” The cast had agreed not to bow or smile. We looked out at the pale faces, no longer actors playing roles written by a Frenchman thousands of miles distant. We were courageous black people, looking directly into enemy eyes. Our impudence further excited the audience. Loud applause continued long after we left the stage.
We howled in our dressing rooms. If the audience missed the play's obtrusive intent, then the crackers were numbly insensitive. On the other hand, if they understood, and still liked the drama, they were psychically sick, which we suspected anyway.
We were a hit, and we were happy.
Blacks understood and enjoyed the play, but each night in the theater whites outnumbered my people four to one, and that fact was befuddling Whites didn't come to the Lower East Side of New York to learn that they were unkind, unjust and unfair. Black orators, more eloquent than Genet, had informed white Americans for three centuries that our living conditions were intolerable. David Walker in 1830 and Frederick Douglass in 1850 had revealed the anguish and pain of life for blacks in the United States. Martin Delaney and Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Dr. DuBois, and Martin King and Malcolm X had explained with anger, passion and persuasion that we were living precariously on the ledge of life, and that if we fell, the entire structure, which had prohibited us living room, might crumble as well.
So in 1960, white Americans should have known all they needed to know about black Americans.
Why, then, did they crowd into the St. Mark's Playhouse and sit gaping as black actors flung filthy words and even filthier meanings into their faces? The question continued to stay with me like a grain of sand wedged between my teeth. Not painful but a constant irritant.
At last, a month after we had opened, I was given an answer. That evening the cast had changed into street clothes and gathered in the lobby to meet friends. A young white woman of about thirty, expensively dressed and well cared for, grabbed my hand.
“Maya? Mrs. Make?” Her face was moist with tears. Her nose and the area around it, were red. Immediately, I felt sorry for her.
“Yes?”
“Oh, Mrs. Make.” She started to sob. I asked her if she'd like to come to my dressing room. My invitation was like cold water on her emotion.
She shook her head, “Oh no. Nothing like that. Of course not, I'm all right.”
The rush of blood was disappearing from her face, and when she spoke again her voice was clearer.
“I just wanted you to know … I just wanted to say that I've seen the play five times.” She waited.
“Five times? We've only been playing four weeks.”
“Yes, but