The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (106 page)

Sidney Bernstein, the producer, was a frail little man, who sat smiling timidly, his eyes wandering the room unfocused. The energetic and intense director, Gene Frankel, snapped his head from right to left and back again in small jerks, reminding me of a predatory bird, perched on a high bluff. The stage manager, Max Glanville, a tall sturdy black man, was at ease in the room. He sat composed while his two colleagues twitched. When Frankel said he was ready to hear the music, there was impatience in his voice.

Sidney smiled and said there was plenty of time.

Abbey and I sat opposite each other holding copies of the marked script. We divided the roles evenly and when the music began, we read, sometimes against the music, over it, or waited in intervals as the notes took center stage. Neither of us was familiar with the play, and since its structure was extremely complex, and its language convoluted,
we read in monotones, not even trying to make dramatic sense. Finally, we reached the last notes. The evening had seemed to be endless. Gene Frankel was the first to stand. He rushed up to Max, took his hand, looked deep into his eyes, “Great. Great. Just great. We’ve got to be going. O.K. Thank you, ladies. Thank you. Great reading.” Frankel turned around like a kitten trying to catch its tail. “O.K., Sidney? Let’s go. Glanville.” He turned again. “Musicians? Oh yeah, thanks, guys. Great.”

In a second he was at the door, his hand on the knob. Sidney went to the musicians, shaking hands, giving each a bit of a wispy grin. He thanked Max and Abbey and me. “The music was perfect.” Glanville looked at his white partners slyly and smiled at us. His leer said he was leaving with them only because he had to, and we would understand.

“O.K., folks. Thanks. Thanks, Max. We’ll be talking to you.” When the door closed behind them I laughed, partly out of relief. Max asked what was funny. I said the play and the producers.

“You mean you didn’t understand it.” All of a sudden he was angry and he began to shout at me. He said
The Blacks
was not only a good play, it was a great play. It was written by a white Frenchman who had done a lot of time in prison. Genet understood the nature of imperialism and colonialism and how those two evils erode the natural good in people. It was important that our people see the play. Every black in the United States should see it. Furthermore, as a black woman married to a South African and raising a black boy, I should damn well understand the play before I started laughing at it. And as for ridiculing the white men, at least they were going to put the play on, and all I could do was laugh at them. I ought to have better sense.

The musicians made a lot of noise packing up their instruments. Abbey sat quiet, looking at Max; I got up and gathered my purse. I wanted at least to reach the door before the tears fell.

“Good night.”

Abbey called, “Thanks, Maya. Thanks for reading.” I was nearly at the elevator before I heard a door and Max’s voice at the same time.

“Maya, wait.” He walked toward me. I thought that he was sorry to have spoken so harshly. “Take this.” He handed me a wrapped package.
“Read it.” He was nearly barking. “Read it, understand it. Then see if you’ll laugh.” I took the manuscript and he spun around and went back into his apartment.

Vus studied political releases, Guy did schoolwork and I read
The Blacks
. During the third reading, I began to see through the tortuous and mythical language, and the play’s meaning became clear. Genet suggested that colonialism would crumble from the weight of its ignorance, its arrogance and greed, and that the oppressed would take over the positions of their former masters. They would be no better, no more courageous and no more merciful.

I disagreed. Black people could never be like whites. We were different. More respectful, more merciful, more spiritual. Whites irresponsibly sent their own aged parents to institutions to be cared for by strangers and to die alone. We generously kept old aunts and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents at home, feeble but needed, senile but accepted as natural parts of natural families.

Our mercy was well known. During the thirties Depression, white hobos left freight trains and looked for black neighborhoods. They would appear hungry at the homes of the last hired and the first fired, and were never turned away. The migrants were given cold biscuits, leftover beans, grits and whatever black folks could spare. For centuries we tended, and nursed, often at our breasts, the children of people who despised us. We had cooked the food of a nation of racists, and despite the many opportunities, there were few stories of black servants poisoning white families. If that didn’t show mercy, then I misunderstood the word.

As for spirituality, we were Christians. We demonstrated the teachings of Christ. We turned other cheeks so often our heads seemed to revolve on the end of our necks, like old stop-and-go signs. How many times should we forgive? Jesus said seven times seventy. We forgave as if forgiving was our talent. Our church music showed that we believed there was something greater than we, something beyond our physical selves, and that that something, that God, and His Son, Jesus, were always present and could be called “in the midnight hour” and talked to when the “sun raised itself to walk across the morning sky.” We could
sing the angels out of heaven and bring them to stand thousands thronged on the head of a pin. We could ask Jesus to be on hand to “walk around” our deathbeds and gather us into “the bosom of Abraham.” We told Him all about our sorrows and relished the time when we would be counted among numbers of those who would go marching in. We would walk the golden streets of heaven, eat of the milk and honey, wear the promised shoes and rest in the arms of Jesus, who would rock us and say, “You have labored in my vineyard. You are tired. You are home now, child. Well done.” Oh, there was no doubt that we were spiritual.

The Blacks
was a white foreigner’s idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man’s burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions.

Max Glanville called two days later.

“Maya, we want you in the play.” The play? I had jettisoned Genet and his ill-thought-out drama.

Glanville’s voice reached through the telephone. “There are two roles and we’re just not sure which one would suit you best. So we’d like you to come down and read for us.”

I thanked him but I said I didn’t think so and hung up. I reported the call to Vus only because it gave me a subject to introduce into dinner conversation. However, he jarred me by laughing. “Americans are either quite slow or terribly arrogant. They do not know or care that there is a world beyond their world, where tradition dictates action. No wife of an African leader can go on the stage.” He laughed again. “Can you imagine the wife of Martin King or Sobukwe or Malcolm X standing on a stage being examined by white men?” The unlikely picture made him shake his head. “No. No, you do not perform in public.”

I had already refused Glanville’s invitation, but Vus’s reaction sizzled in my thoughts. I was a good actress, not great but certainly competent.
For years before I met Vus, my rent had been paid and my son and I had eaten and been clothed by money I made working on stages. When I gave Vus my body and loyalty I hadn’t included all the rights to my life. I felt no loyalty to
The Blacks
, since it had not earned my approval, yet I chafed under Vus’ attitude of total control. I said nothing.

Abbey had been asked to take a role in the play. I told her that Vus had said he wouldn’t allow me to. She said Max thought the play was important, and since Vus respected Max, maybe they ought to talk. Abbey hung up and in moments Max called, asking for my husband.

I heard Vus hang up the telephone in the living room. He walked into the kitchen. “I’m meeting Max for a conference.” Every meeting was a conference and each conversation a discussion of pith. I nodded, and kept on washing dishes.

Vus came home and asked for the manuscript. I recovered the play from the back of the closet and gave it to him. Guy and I played Scrabble on the dining-room table while Vus sat under a lamp in the living room. He would rise from time to time and pass through to the kitchen getting a fresh drink. Then he would return silently to the sofa and
The Blacks
.

Guy went off to bed. Vus still read. I knew he was going back and forth through the script. He hardly looked up when I said good night.

I was in a deep sleep when he shook me awake. “Maya. Wake up. I have to talk to you.” He sat on the side of the bed. The crumpled pages were spread out beside him.

“This play is great. If they still want you, you must do this play.” I came awake like my mother—immediately and entirely aware.

I said, “I don’t agree with the conclusion. Black people are not going to become like whites. Never.”

“Maya, you are so young, so, so young.” He patronized me as if I were the little shepherd girl and he the old man of Kilimanjaro.

“Dear Wife, that is a reverse racism. Black people are human. No more, no less. Our backgrounds, our history make us act differently.”

I grabbed a cigarette from the night stand, ready to jump into the discussion. I listed our respectfulness, our mercy, our spirituality. His
rejoinder stopped me. “We are people. The root cause of racism and its primary result is that whites refuse to see us simply as people.”

I argued, “But the play says given the chance, black people will act as cruel as whites. I don’t believe it.”

“Maya, that is a very real possibility and one we must vigilantly guard against. You see, my dear wife”—he spoke slowly, leaning his big body toward me—“my dear wife, most black revolutionaries, most black radicals, most black activists, do not really want change. They want exchange. This play points to that likelihood. And our people need to face the temptation. You must act in
The Blacks.”

He continued talking in the bed and I fell asleep in his arms.

The next morning Abbey and I went down to the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue. Actors sat quietly in the dimly lit seats, and Gene Frankel paced on the stage. Max Glanville had seen us enter. He nodded in recognition and walked to the edge of the stage. He stopped Gene in mid-step and whispered. Frankel lifted his head and looked out.

“Maya Make. Maya Angelou Make. Abbey Lincoln. Come down front, please.” We found seats in the front row.

Glanville came back and sat down. “Abbey, we want you to read the role of Snow. But, Maya, we’ve not decided whether you should do the Black Queen or the White Queen.”

I said, “Of course the Black Queen.”

“Just read a little of both roles.” He got up and went away, returning with an open manuscript.

“Read this section.” He flipped pages. “And then read this underlined part.”

I stepped up on the low stage and without raising my head to look at the audience began to read. The section was short and I turned the script to the next underlined pages and recited another monologue without adding vocal inflection.

There was scattered applause when I finished and a familiar husky voice shouted, “You’ve got all the parts, baby.” Another voice said, “Yes, but let’s see your legs.”

Godfrey Cambridge flopped all over a seat in the third row and Flash Riley sat next to him.

I joined them and we talked about Cabaret for Freedom, while Frankel, Bernstein and Glanville stood together on the stage muttering.

Frankel shouted, “Lights” and the house lights came on. He walked to the edge of the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to each other, and please mark your scripts. Godfrey Cambridge is Diouf. Roscoe Lee Browne is Archibald. James Earl Jones is Village. Cicely Tyson is Virtue. Jay Riley is the Governor, Raymond St. Jacques is the Judge. Cynthia Belgrave is Adelaide. Maya Angelou Make is the White Queen. Helen Martin is Felicity, or the Black Queen. Lou Gossett is Newport News. Lex Monson is the Missionary. Abbey Lincoln is Snow and Charles Gordone is the Valet. Max Roach is composer, Talley Beatty is choreographer and Patricia Zipprodt is costume designer. Ethel Ayler is understudying Abbey and Cicely. Roxanne Roker understudies Maya and Helen.”

I looked around. Ethel and I exchanged grins. We had been friends years before during the European tour of
Porgy and Bess
.

Frankel continued, “We’ve got a great play and we’re going to work our asses off.”

Rehearsals began with a playground joviality and in days accelerated into the seriousness of a full-scale war. Friendships and cliques were formed quickly. The central character was played by Roscoe Lee Browne, and within a week he became the chief figure off stage as well. His exquisite diction and fastidious manners were fortunately matched with wit. He was unflappable.

James Earl Jones, a beige handsome bull of a man watched Frankel with fierce stares, reading his lips, scanning his hairline and chin, ear lobes and neck. Then suddenly James Earl would withdraw into himself with a slammed-door finality.

Lou Gossett, lean and young, skyrocketed on and off the stage, innocent and interested. For all his boyish bounding he had developed listening into an art. Cocking an ear at the speaker, his soft eyes caring and his entire body taut with attention.

Godfrey and Jay “Flash” Riley competed for company comedian.
When Flash won, Godfrey changed. The clowning began to disappear and he sobered daily into a drab, studious actor.

Cicely, delicate and black-rose beautiful, was serious and aloof. She sat in the rear of the theater, her small head bent into the manuscript, saving her warmth for the character and her smiles for the stage. Raymond, looking like a matinee idol, and Lex were old-time friends. They studied their roles together, breaking each other up with camped-up readings. Helen and Cynthia were professionals; just watching them, I knew that they would have their lines, remember the director’s blocking and follow the steps of Talley’s choreography without mistakes in a shorter time than anyone else. Charles Gordone, a finely fashioned, small yellow man, made slight fun of everything and everyone, including himself as another target for sarcasm.