The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [9]
I began to write. At first I limited myself to short sketches, then to song lyrics, then I dared short stories. When I met John Killens he had just come to Hollywood to write the screenplay for his novel Youngblood, and he agreed to read some of what he called my “work in progress.” I had written and recorded six songs for Liberty Records, but I didn't seriously think of writing until John gave me his critique. After that I thought of little else. John was the first published black author I had really talked with. (I'd met James Baldwin in Paris in the early fifties, but I didn't really know him.) John said, “Most of your work needs polishing. In fact, most of everybody's work could stand rewriting. But you have undeniable talent.” He added, “You ought to come to New York. You need to be in the Harlem Writers Guild.” The invitation was oblique but definitely alluring.
I had met singer Abbey Lincoln. We met years earlier and we became friends during the time I stayed in the Westlake district. But she had moved to New York City. Whenever I spoke to her on the telephone, after she stopped praising Max Roach, her love and romantic ideal, she lauded New York City. It was the hub, the absolute middle of the world. The only place for an intelligent person to be, and to grow.
Just possibly if I went to New York, I thought, I could find my own niche, settle down in it and become a success.
There was another reason for wanting to leave Los Angeles. Guy, once so amusing, was growing into a tall aloof stranger. Our warm evenings of Scrabble and charades were, for him, a part of the long ago. He said the childhood games simply did not hold his attention. When he obeyed my house rules, he did so with the attitude that he was just too bored to contest them.
I didn't understand, at the time, that adolescence had invaded him and deposited its usual hefty burden of insecurity and apprehension. My wispy sometimes-lover, who lived nearby, was too tediously pious to help me comprehend what was happening to my son. Indeed, his reverence for Eastern religions, a vegetarian diet and sexual abstinence rendered him almost, but not quite, incapable of everything except deep conversations on the meaning of life.
I called my mother and she answered after the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Lady?”
“Oh hello, baby.” She spoke as crisply as a white woman.
I said, “I'd like to see you. I'm going to move to New York and I don't know when I'll come back to California. Maybe we could meet somewhere and spend a couple of days together. I could drive north, part of the way—”
She didn't pause. “Of course, we can meet, of course, I want to see you, baby.” Six feet tall, with a fourteen-year-old son, and I was still called baby. “How about Fresno? That's halfway. We could stay at that hotel. I know you read about it.”
“Yes. But not if there's going to be trouble. I just want to be with you.”
“Trouble? Trouble?” The familiar knife edge had slipped into her voice. “But, baby you know that's my middle name. Anyway the law says that hotel has to accept Negro guests. I'll swear before God and five other responsible men that my daughter and I are Negroes. After that, if they refuse us, well …”—she laughed hopefully and high-pitched—“well, we'll have a board to fit their butts.”
That part of the conversation was finished. Vivian Baxter sensed the possibility of confrontation and there would be no chance of talking her out of it. I realized too late that I should simply have taken the Southern Pacific train from Los Angeles to San Francisco and spent the two days in her Fulton Street house, then returned to pack for my continental move.
Her voice softened again as she relayed family gossip and set a date for our meeting in the middle of the state.
In 1959, Fresno was a middling town with palm trees and a decidedly Southern accent. Most of its white inhabitants seemed to be descendants of Steinbeck's