The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (107 page)

There was some resistance to Frankel’s direction on the grounds that, being white, he was unable to understand black motivation. In other quarters there was a submission which bordered on obsequiousness and which brought to mind characterizations of Stepin Fetchit.

Each day, tension met us as we walked into the theater and lay like low morning fog in the aisles.

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 Monson), 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 innocent, like beasts were loathsome nonetheless.

It was obvious that the other actors also found effective motivation. The play became such a cruel parody of white society that I was certain it would flop. Whites were not so masochistic as to favor a play which ridiculed and insulted them, and black playgoers were scarce.

James Baldwin was a friend of Gene Frankel’s and he attended rehearsals frequently. He laughed loudly and approvingly at our performances and I talked with him often. When I introduced him to Vus they took to each other with enthusiasm.

At dress rehearsal, on the eve of opening night, black friends, family and investors who had been invited hooted and stamped their feet throughout the performance. But I reckoned their responses natural. They were bound to us, as fellow blacks, black sympathizers or investors.

Vus and Guy grinned and assured me that I was the best actor on the stage. I accepted their compliments easily.

On the morning of opening night, the cast gathered in the foyer, passing jitters from hand to hand, like so many raw eggs. I looked around for Abbey but she hadn’t arrived.

When we walked into the dark theater, Gene Frankel bellowed from the stage.

“Everybody down front. Everybody.”

He was having a more serious nervous attack than we who had to face the evening audience. I snickered. Roscoe Brown turned to me and made a face of arch innocence.

We filled the front rows, as Frankel paced out the length of the stage. He stopped and looked out at the actors.

His voice quivered. “We have no music. No music and Abbey Lincoln will not be opening tonight. Max Roach has taken his music out of the show.”

He threw out the information and waited, letting the words rest in our minds.

Anxious looks were exchanged in the front row.

“Abbey’s understudy is ready. She’s been rehearsing all morning.”

We turned and saw Ethel sitting poised stage left. Frankel added, “We can go on. We have to go on, but there is a song and the dance, for which we don’t have a damn note.”

Moans and groans lifted up in the air. We had endured the work, the late nights and early mornings of concentration, the long subway trips, the abandoned families, Talley Beatty’s complex choreography and the director’s demanding staging.

Max Roach was a genius, a responsible musician and my friend. I knew he had to have a reason.

I got up and went outside to the public telephone.

Max answered, sounding like a slide trombone. “The son of a bitches reneged. We had an agreement and the producers reneged on it.”

“And Abbey is out of the play?”

“You goddam right.”

“Well, Max, you won’t hate me if I stay?”

“Hell no. But my wife will not get up on that stage.”

Frankel had said we would open with or without the music.

I asked, “Max, would it be all right if I wrote the tunes? We can get along with two tunes.”

“I don’t give a damn. I just don’t want to have that bastard using my music.”

“I’ll still be your sister.”

Max was an attentive brother but he could be a violent enemy.

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re my sister.”

The telephone was slammed down.

If I stopped to think about my next move, I might convince myself out of it. Black folks said, “Follow your first mind.”

I beckoned Ethel from the aisle. She rose and we walked into the lobby. Ethel had musical training and I had composed tunes for my album and for Guy. Together we could easily write the music for just two songs.

Ethel had the air of a woman born pretty. The years of familial adoration, the compliments of strangers, and the envy of plain women had given her a large share of confidence.

“Sure, Maya. We can do it. It’s just two songs, right? Let’s get to the piano.”

We walked down the stage to where Frankel was in conference with Talley and Glanville.

“We’ll write the music.”

“What?”

“We’ll write it this afternoon.”

I added, “And teach it to the cast.”

Frankel nearly jumped into Sidney Bernstein’s arms. “Did you hear that?”

Bernstein smiled and waggled his head happily.

“I heard. I heard. Let’s let them do it. If they say they can do it, let’s let them do it. Nice girls. Nice ladies. Let them do it.”

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 a lot of my friends …”—now she was in control of herself again—“a lot of us have seen the play more than once. A woman in my building comes twice a week.”

“Why? Why do you come back?”

“Well”—she drew herself up—“well, we support you. I mean, we understand what you are saying.”

The blur of noise drifted around us, but we were an isolated inset, a picture of American society. White and black talking at each other.

“How many blacks live in your building?”

“Why, none. But that doesn’t mean …”

“How many black friends do you have? I mean, not counting your maid?”

“Oh,” she took a couple of steps backward. “You’re trying to insult me.”

I followed her. “You can accept the insults if I am a character on stage, but not in person, is that it?”

She looked at me with enough hate to shrivel my heart. I put my hand out.

“Don’t touch me.” Her voice was so sharp it caught the attention of some bystanders. Roscoe appeared abruptly. Still in character, giving me a little bow, “Hello, Queen.”

The woman turned to leave, but I caught her sleeve. “Would you take me home with you? Would you become my friend?”

She snatched her arm away, and spat out, “You people. You people.” And walked away.

Roscoe asked, “And pray, what was that?”

“She’s one of our fans. She comes to the theater and allows us to curse and berate her, and that’s her contribution to our struggle.”

Roscoe shook his head slowly. “Oh dear. One of those.”