The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [98]
I grinned because I didn't know what else to do. When we reached the empty kitchen, a little sense returned to me.
A soot-encrusted lamp sat on a ledge with stacked plates, a pile of cheap cutlery and thick glasses.
Vus coughed, embarrassed. “They use this”—indicating the lamp—“to cook on. It's a Sterno stove. Uh … I didn't get around to fixing up the kitchen yet. Anyway regular stoves are very, very expensive. I thought I'd wait until you arrived.”
“You mean, we own all that crap?” I must have shouted because Guy, who was crowded into the small room with us, frowned at me, and Vus gave me a haughty, angry look.
“I have tried to make a beautiful house for you, even to the point of ignoring my own work. Yes, I've postponed important PAC affairs to decorate this apartment, and you call it crap?” He turned and walked through the door. Guy shook his head, disgusted with my lack of gratitude and grace, and followed Vus out of the kitchen. Their silent departure succeeded in humbling me. Vus was a generous man. Indeed, I had only seen that kind of furniture in slick magazine advertisements, or in the homes of white movie stars. My husband was lifting me and my son into a rarified atmosphere, and instead of thanking him for the elevation, I had been sour and unappreciative.
A profound sense of worthlessness had made me pull away from owning good things, expensive furniture, rare rugs. That was exactly how white folks wanted me to feel. I was black, so obviously I didn't deserve to have armoires, shiny with good French veneer, or tapestries, where mounted warriors waged their ancient battles in silk thread. No, I decided to crush that feeling of unworthiness. I deserved everything beautiful and I merited putting my long black feet on Oriental carpets as much as Lady Astor. If Vus thought he wanted his wife to live beautifully, he was no less a man (and I had to get that under the layers of inferiority in my brain) than a Rockefeller or a Kennedy.
The luggage had been placed in the middle of the floor of the first living room. I heard Vus's and Guy's voices from the balcony, so I went to join them with a smile warm enough to melt the snows on Mount Everest.
“This is the most gorgeous house I've ever seen.” Vus nodded and smiled at me as if I were a recalcitrant child who had recovered her good manners following a foolish tantrum. Guy grinned. He had known his mother would come through. We stood looking down on the back of a man who was bent weeding what Vus said was our private garden. We had a doorman and our own gardener. That information was a fair-sized lump, but I swallowed it.
The first weeks in Cairo were occupied with introductions to freedom fighters from Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, North and South Rhodesia, Basutoland and Swaziland. Diplomats from already-independent African countries dropped by our apartment to meet Vus Make's American wife, who was trying to be all things to everybody.
Jarra Mesfin, from the Ethiopian Embassy, and his wife, Kebidetch Erdatchew, came early and stayed late. Joseph Williamson, the Chargé d'Affaires from Liberia, and his wife, A. B., invited us to the Residency.
I was the heroine in a novel teeming with bejeweled women, handsome men, intrigue, international spies and danger. Opulent fabrics, exotic perfumes and the service of personal servants threatened to tear from my mind every memory of growing up in America as a second-class citizen.
Vus, Guy and I had lunch near the pyramid of Giza, where we watched camel riders lope around the bottom of the Sphinx. Car radios, nearly turned to their highest pitch, released the moaning Arabic music into the dusty air.
I had hired Omanadia, a short stubby older woman from Sudan, as cook-housekeeper after Vus said my reluctance to have a servant in the house was not proof of a democratic spirit, but rather of a bourgeois snobbism, which kept a good job from a needy worker. Anyway, she was a cook