The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (122 page)

I would count out the paper money, loving the Black president’s picture. Thirty pounds for rent; thirty for my son’s tuition, being paid on the installment plan; ten for beer, cigarettes, food. Another five for the houseman who my friends and I paid fifteen pounds per month to clean the bungalow.

A grown man could live on fifteen pounds, and there I was being a simpering ass. I was my mother’s daughter. When I left her house at seventeen, she had said, “I’m not worried about you. You’ll do your best, and you might succeed. And remember, as long as you’re making a living for yourself you can take care of your baby. It’s no trouble to pack double.” All I had to do was find extra work.

The editor’s office of the
Ghanaian Times
had all the excitement of a busy city intersection. People came, left, talked, shouted, laid down papers, picked up packages, spoke English, Fanti, Twi, Ga and Pidgin on the telephone or to each other.

T. D. Kwesi Bafoo perched behind his desk as if it was the starting mark for a one hundred yard sprint. At a signal he would leap up and hurl himself past me, through the crowded room and out of the door.

His cheeks, brows, eyes and hands moved even before he talked.

I said, “I am a journalist. I’ve brought some examples of my work. These are from the
Arab Observer
in Cairo.” He waved away my folder and said, “We know who you are. A good writer, and that you are a Nkrumaist.” I was certainly the latter and not yet the former.

As he stuffed papers into a briefcase he asked, “Can you write a piece on America today?”

“Today? Do you mean right now?”

He looked at me and grinned, “No. America today. America, capitalism and racial prejudice.”

“In one article?” I didn’t want him to know the request was implausible.

He said, “A sort of overview. You understand?”

I asked, seriously, “How many words, three thousand?”

He answered without looking at me, “Three hundred. Just the high points.”

The seething energy would no longer be contained. Bafoo was on his feet and around the desk before I could rise.

“We’ll pay you the standard fee. Have it here by Friday. I have another meeting. Pleasure meeting you. Good-bye.”

He passed and disappeared through the door before I had gathered my purse and briefcase. I imagined him running up to the next appointment, arriving there in a heat, simmering during the meeting,
then racing away to the next, and on and on. The picture of Mr. Bafoo so entertained me that I was outside on the street before the realization came to me that I had another job which paid “the standard fee.” I was earning that at the university. In order to afford luxuries I had to look further.

The Ghana Broadcasting office was as to the
Times
newspaper office what a drawing room was to a dance hall. The lobby was large, well furnished and quiet. A receptionist, pretty and dressed in western clothes, looked at me so quizzically, I thought perhaps she knew something I needed to know.

She frowned, wrinkling her careful loveliness. “Yes? You want to talk to someone about writing?” Her voice was as crisp as a freshly starched and ironed doily.

I said, “Yes. I am a writer.”

She shook her head, “But who? Who do you want to talk to?” She couldn’t believe in my ignorance.

I said, “I don’t know. I suppose the person who hires writers.”

“But what is his name?” She had begun to smile, and I heard her sarcasm.

“I don’t know his name. Don’t you know it?” I knew that hostility would gain me nothing but the front door, so I tried to charm her. “I mean, surely you know who I should see.” I gave her a little submissive smile and knew that if I got a job I’d never speak to her again.

She dismissed my attempt at flattery by saying curtly, “I am the receptionist. It is my job to know everyone in the building,” and picked up the morning paper.

I persisted, “Well, who should I see?”

She looked up from the page and smiled patronizingly. “You should see who you want to see. Who do you want to see?” She knew herself to be a cat and I was a wounded bird. I decided to remove myself from her grasp. I leaned forward and imitating her accent. I said, “You silly ass, you can take a flying leap and go straight to hell.”

Her smile never changed. “American Negroes are always crude.”

I stood nailed to the floor. Her knowledge of my people could only have been garnered from hearsay, and the few old American movies
which tacked on Black characters as awkwardly as the blinded attach paper tails to donkey caricatures.

We were variably excited, exciting, jovial, organic, paranoid, hearty, lusty, loud, raucous, grave, sad, forlorn, silly and forceful. We had all the rights and wrongs human flesh and spirit are heir to. On behalf of my people, I should have spoken. I needed to open my mouth and give lie to her statement, but as usual my thoughts were too many and muddled to be formed into sentences. I turned and left the office.

The incident brought me close to another facet of Ghana, Africa, and of my own mania.

The woman’s cruelty activated a response which I had developed under the exacting tutelage of masters. Her brown skin, curly hair, full lips, wide flanged nostrils notwithstanding, I had responded to her as if she was a rude White salesclerk in an American department store.

Was it possible that I and all American Blacks had been wrong on other occasions? Could the cutting treatment we often experienced have been stimulated by something other than our features, our hair and color? Was the odor of old slavery so obvious that people were offended and lashed out at us automatically? Had what we judged as racial prejudice less to do with race and more to do with our particular ancestors’ bad luck at having been caught, sold and driven like beasts?

The receptionist and I could have been sisters, or in fact, might be cousins far removed. Yet her scorn was no different from the supercilious rejections of Whites in the United States. In Harlem and in Tulsa, in San Francisco and in Atlanta, in all the hamlets and cities of America, Black people maimed, brutalized, abused and murdered each other daily and particularly on bloody Saturday nights. Were we only and vainly trying to kill that portion of our history which we could neither accept nor deny? The questions temporarily sobered my intoxication with Africa. For a few days, I examined whether in looking for a home I, and all the émigrés, were running from a bitter truth that rode lightly but forever at home on our shoulders.

The company of my companions, Guy’s returning robust health, and Efua’s friendship weened me away from my unease and the questions.
I would not admit that if I couldn’t be comfortable in Africa, I had no place else to go.

I turned my back to the niggling insecurities and opened my arms again to Ghana.

I wanted my hair fixed Ghanaian fashion and didn’t want to spend time in a hot beauty shop. I made an appointment for a home visitor.

The laughing Comfort Adday was a stenographer as well as a beautician. She told me “Sistah, I don’t work. My fingers work. Work is for farmers. As for my part, I try hard to stay away from farms.” She pulled patches of my hair and wound them with coarse black thread. “I have to save myself for later. For children. Then when I get ready, for a husband.”

Peals rang over my head as she seemed to wrench my hair out of its roots. “You only have the one boy, eh?” I tried to nod, but my head was in a vise. I mumbled, “Yes.” She said, “But my deah,” laughter … “You know they say ‘one child is no child.’ ”

I had heard the saying but couldn’t nod and chose not to mumble again. Comfort continued, making her voice low and suggestive, “And they say, too, ‘if you don’t use it you’ll lose it.’ ” Here her laughter rose and her hands pulled, jerking me nearly to a standing position. “You’re not a chicken, you know, Sistah.” I was over thirty. “Not to say you are too old to lay eggs.” She tugged a scrap of hair and luckily left my head attached to my neck. “But you keep waiting, your egg maker will grow grey.” Her laughter exceeded all earlier efforts, “and any chicks that come,” tug, wrestle, jerk, “will walk out fully dressed, playing the drums.” Jubilation at her own wit and wisdom bent her body in half, but her fingers never ceased pulling my hair or coiling the black thread against my scalp.

“Sistah, look at yourself.” She released me. Her face, the color of
ancient bricks, was groomed with a proud smile. I went to the mirror. Long, black spikes jutted from my head in every direction, and long strings hung to my shoulders. It was a fashion worn by the pickaninnies whose photographs I had seen and hated in old books. I was aghast. No wonder she had laughed so heartily. I quickly searched her face for ridicule, but respect for her work was all I found.

I stuttered. “But, I wanted,… I didn’t want …” I could neither go in the street with that hairdo, nor was I capable of unwinding the cord that now shone on my hair with an evil gleam. For some unknown reason the beautician had chosen to teach me a lesson on the foolishness of trying to “go native.”

“Sistah, now sit down, let me finish.”

“I thought you were finished.” My voice came weakly and was drowned out by her great laughter. “Oh sistah, oh my deah.” She had to hold her stomach which threatened to shake itself loose from her body. “Oh Sistah. I just told you that I knew you weren’t a spring chick. If I let you go out like that, they’d catch both of us and put us in the silly folks hospital.”

The agony of laughter left her face slowly. “No sistah, my deah, only young girls whose time has not come can wear their hair like that.”

She gathered the dangling strings and pulled them tightly together. Her fingers moved quickly over my head. After a few minutes she picked up scissors from a stool and with a few snips, removed the last hanging strings.

“Now look. See yourself, and tell me.”

I looked in the mirror and was relieved that I looked like every other Ghanaian woman. My hair was pulled tightly into small neat patches and the triangular designs of tan scalp and black hair was as exact as the design in tweed cloth.

“Sistah, you have given me such a good laugh, I shouldn’t charge you.” Comfort was washing her combs and rolling her scissors and thread in a cotton white cloth. I knew that last statement was only for show.

In just six months I learned that Ghanaian women might take in orphans, give generously to the poor, and feed every person who came to their houses. They could allow their men certain sexual freedom, but they were very strict in money matters. When it came to finances “Ghana women no play, oh,” had been said to or around me hundreds of times.

I paid Comfort.

She said, “I will come again in two weeks. Oh, how I like to laugh with you.”

I didn’t want to wonder whether she was sincere, but I noticed that I hadn’t laughed even once.

A Black couple who had just arrived in Africa sat in our living room explaining their presence on the Continent.

“Because of Nkrumah” (The man pronounced the President’s name NeeKrumah) “and Sékou Touré, we decided it was either Ghana or Guinea. We have come to Mother Africa to suckle from her breasts.” The man spoke so vigorously his Afro trembled and his long neck carried his head from side to side. He wore a brightly colored African shirt and reminded me of a large exotic bird.

Alice spoke angrily, “Hell man, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Talking about sucking from Africa’s breasts. When you were born Black in America, you were born weaned.”

I said, “Africa doesn’t need anybody as big as you pulling on her tits.”

Vicki said, “And that’s an ugly metaphor.”

The man was sparring quickly. “The Zulus use it.”

“But you’re a Black American,” I reminded him.

“Yeah. Well, who is to say my ancestors weren’t Zulus?”

In just a few months our living room had begun to compete with the Mayfield side porch for popularity. Late nights found us drinking beer and fastidious over even the smallest points in a conversation.

Alice earned her reputation as the most formidable disputant. Having spent her working hours answering telephone calls and receiving embassy visitors, she looked eagerly toward the evenings and weekends. Then she could exercise her sharp mind and quick tongue on anyone within hearing range.

The wise Vicki said, “What Africa needs is help. After centuries of slavers taking her strongest sons and daughters, after years of colonialism, Africa needs her progeny to bring something to her.”

Alice grinned, warming up. She said, “I’ve never seen Africa as a woman, and somewhere I resent the use of any sexual pronoun to describe this complex continent. It’s not he or she. It is more an it.”

The visitors looked disapprovingly at us all. The need to believe in Africa’s maternal welcome was painfully obvious. They didn’t want to know that they had not come home, but had left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place with none.

The woman, whose large natural matched her husband’s, sat like a broken doll. Her brown face was still, her dark eyes flat and staring. I would not have been too surprised had she cried, “Maa Maa, Maa Maa” in a tiny toy voice.

Alice said, “The Sahara continues to eat up arable land at a frightening rate, and nomadic people continue to herd cattle which eat every blade of grass that pops up. What the continent needs is about five hundred artesian well diggers and about five hundred agronomists. That would have been a gift to bring.”

“I belong here. My ancestors were taken from this land.” The visitor was fighting back.

“Of course, you’re right.” Vicki’s voice was soothing. “And under ideal conditions you could return and even lay claim to an ancestral inheritance. But Alice has a good point. The continent is poor, and while Ghanaians have wonderful spirits, thanks to themselves and Kwame Nkrumah, they are desperate.”

I asked, “What did you do at home? What is your work?”

The man was still silent, and I had spoken only to put sound into the sad silence.

Vicki offered advice, “Ghana would be easier than Guinea, unless you speak French.”

The woman’s voice was a surprisingly rich contralto. “He worked in the Chicago stockyards, and I was a Bunny.”