The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (33 page)

“Can you start on Monday?”

“I’ll be glad to.”

“You know it’s six days a week. We’re closed on Sunday.”

“That’s fine with me. I like to go to church on Sunday.” It’s awful to think that the devil gave me that lie, but it came unexpectedly and worked like dollar bills. Suspicion and doubt raced from her face, and she smiled. Her teeth were all the same size, a small white picket fence semicircled in her mouth.

“Well, I know we’re going to get along. You a good Christian. I like that. Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”

My need for a job caught and held the denial.

“What time on Monday?” Bless the Lord!

“You get here at five.”

Five in the morning. Those mean streets before the thugs had gone to sleep, pillowing on someone else’s dreams. Before the streetcars began to rattle, their lighted insides like exclusive houses in the fog. Five!

“All right, I’ll be here at five, Monday morning.”

“You’ll cook the dinners and put them on the steam table. You don’t have to do short orders. I do that.”

Mrs. Dupree was a short plump woman of about fifty. Her hair was naturally straight and heavy. Probably Cajun Indian, African and white, and naturally, Negro.

“And what’s your name?”

“Rita.” Marguerite was too solemn, and Maya too rich-sounding. “Rita” sounded like dark flashing eyes, hot peppers and Creole evenings with strummed guitars. “Rita Johnson.”

“That’s a right nice name.” Then, like some people do to show their sense of familiarity, she immediately narrowed the name down. “I’ll call you Reet. Okay?”

Okay, of course. I had a job. Seventy-five dollars a week. So I was Reet. Reet, poteet and gone. All Reet. Now all I had to do was learn to cook.

I asked old Papa Ford to teach me how to cook. He had been a grown man when the twentieth century was born, and left a large family of brothers and sisters in Terre Haute, Indiana (always called the East Coast), to find what the world had in store for a “good-looking colored boy with no education in his head, but a pile of larceny in his heart.” He traveled with circuses “shoveling elephant shit.” He then shot dice in freight trains and played koch in back rooms and shanties all over the Northern states.

“I never went down to Hang’em High. Them crackers would have killed me. Pretty as I was, white women was always following me. The white boys never could stand a pretty nigger.”

By 1943, when I first saw him, his good looks were as delicate as an old man’s memory, and disappointment rode his face bareback. His hands had gone. Those gambler’s fingers had thickened during the Depression, and his only straight job, carpeting, had further toughened his “moneymakers.” Mother rescued him from a job as a sweeper in a pinochle parlor and brought him home to live with us.

He sorted and counted the linen when the laundry truck picked it up and returned it, then grudgingly handed out fresh sheets to the roomers. He cooked massive and delicious dinners when Mother was busy, and he sat in the tall-ceilinged kitchen drinking coffee by the pots.

Papa Ford loved my mother (as did nearly everyone) with a childlike devotion. He went so far as to control his profanity when she was around, knowing she couldn’t abide cursing unless she was the curser.

“Why the sheeit do you want to work in a goddam kitchen?”

“Papa, the job pays seventy-five dollars a week.”

“Busting some goddam suds.” Disgust wrinkled his face.

“Papa, I’ll be cooking and not washing dishes.”

“Colored women been cooking so long, thought you’d be tired of it by now.”

“If you’ll just tell me—”

“Got all that education. How come you don’t get a goddam job where you can go to work looking like something?”

I tried another tack. “I probably couldn’t learn to cook Creole food, anyway. It’s too complicated.”

“Sheeit. Ain’t nothing but onions, green peppers and garlic. Put that in everything and you got Creole food. You know how to cook rice, don’t you?”

“Yes.” I could cook it till each grain stood separately.

“That’s all, then. Them geechees can’t live without swamp seed.” He cackled at his joke, then recalled a frown. “Still don’t like you working as a goddam cook. Get married, then you don’t have to cook for nobody but your own family. Sheeit.”

The Creole Café steamed with onion vapor, garlic mists, tomato fogs and green-pepper sprays. I cooked and sweated among the cloying odors and loved being there. Finally I had the authority I had always longed for. Mrs. Dupree chose the daily menu, and left a note on the steam table informing me of her gastronomic decisions. But, I, Rita, the chef, decided how much garlic went into the baked short ribs à la Creole, how many bay leaves would flavor the steamed Shreveport tripe. For over a month I was embroiled in the mysteries of the kitchen with the expectancy of an alchemist about to discover the secret properties of gold.

A leathered old white woman, whom Mother found, took care of my baby while I worked. I had been rather reluctant to leave him in her
charge, but Mother reminded me that she tended her white, black and Filipino children equally well. I reasoned that her great age had shoved her beyond the pale of any racial differences. Certainly anyone who lived that long had to spend any unused moments thinking about death and the life to come. She simply couldn’t afford the precious time to think of prejudices. The greatest compensation for youth’s illness is the utter ignorance of the seriousness of the affliction.

Only after the mystery was worn down to a layer of commonness did I begin to notice the customers. They consisted largely of light-skinned, slick-haired Creoles from Louisiana, who spoke a French patois only a little less complicated than the contents of my pots and equally spicy. I thought it fitting and not at all unusual that they enjoyed my cooking. I was following Papa Ford’s instructions loosely and adding artistic touches of my own.

Our customers never ate, paid and left. They sat on the long backless stools and exchanged gossip or shared the patient philosophy of the black South.

“Take it easy, Greasy, you got a long way to slide.”

With the tolerance of ages they gave and accepted advice.

“Take it easy, but take it.”

One large ruddy man, whose name I never knew, allowed his elbows to support him at the twelve-stool counter, and told tales of the San Francisco waterfront: “They got wharf rats who fight a man flat-footed.”

“No?” A voice wanted to believe.

“Saw one of those suckers the other night backed a cracker up ’gainst a cargo crate. Hadn’t been for me and two other guys, colored guys”—naturally—“he’d of run down his throat and walked on his liver.”

Near the steam counter, the soft sounds of black talk, the sharp reports of laughter, and the shuffling feet on tiled floors mixed themselves in odorous vapors and I was content.

I had rented a room (with cooking privileges) in a tall, imposing San Francisco Victorian and had bought my first furniture and a white chenille bedspread. God, but it looked like a field of tiny snow roses. I had a beautiful child, who laughed to see me, a job that I did well, a baby-sitter whom I trusted, and I was young and crazy as a road lizard. Surely this was making it.

One foggy evening on my day off, I had picked up my son and was carrying him home along the familiar streets with the casual ease of an old mother. He snoozed in the angle of my arm, and I thought of dinner, and the radio and a night of reading. Two ex-schoolmates came up the hill toward me. They were of that rare breed, black born San Franciscans. I, cushioned in my maturity, didn’t think to further arm myself. I had the arrowproof vest of adult confidence, so I let them approach—easy.

“Let us look at the baby … I hear he’s cute.” She was fat with small covetous eyes and was known for having a tiny but pugnacious wit. Her friend, Lily, even as a teen-ager, was old beyond knowing and bored beyond wisdom.

“Yes. They say you made a pretty baby.”

I lifted the flap of light blanket from my son’s face and shifted myself so that they might see my glory.

“My God, you did that?” The fat one’s face broke open into a wounded grin.

Her somber friend intoned, “Jesus, he looks like he’s white. He could pass.” Her words floated into my air on admiration and wonder. I shriveled that she could say such a terrible thing about my baby, but I had no nerve to cover my prize and walk away. I stood dumbfounded, founded in dumbness.

The short one laughed a crackly laugh and pushed the point between my ribs. “He’s got a little nose and thin lips.” Her surprise was
maddening. “As long as you live and troubles rise, you ought to pay the man for giving you that baby, huh. A crow gives birth to a dove. The bird kingdom must be petrified.”

There’s a point in fury when one becomes abject. Motionless. I froze, as Lot’s wife must have done, having caught a last glimpse of concentrated evil.

“And what did you name him? ‘Thank God A-mighty’?”

I could have laid him down there, bunting and all, and left him for someone who had more grace, more style and beauty. My own pride of control would not allow me to show the girls what I was feeling, so I covered my baby and headed home. No good-byes—I left them as if I were planning to walk off the edge of the world. In my room I lay my five months of belongingness on the chenilled bed and sat beside him to look over his perfection. His little head was exactly round and the soft hair curled up in black ripples. His arms and legs were plump marvels, and his torso as straight as a look between lovers. But it was his face with which I had to do.

Admittedly, the lips were thin and traced themselves sparely under a small nose. But he was a baby, and as he grew, these abnormalities would flesh out, become real, imitate the regularity of my features. His eyes, even closed, slanted up toward his throbbing temples. He looked like a baby Buddha. And then I examined his hairline. It followed mine in every detail. And that would not grow away or change, and it proved that he was undeniably mine.

Butter-colored, honey-brown, lemon- and olive-skinned. Chocolate and plum-blue, peaches-and-cream. Cream. Nutmeg. Cinnamon. I wondered why my people described our colors in terms of something good to eat. Then God’s prettiest man became a customer at my restaurant.

He sat beside the light-skinned Creoles, and they thinned and paled and disappeared. His dark-brown skin glistened, and the reflected light made it hard to look into my mysterious pots. His voice to the waitress was a thumb poking in my armpits. I hated his being there because his presence made me jittery, but I loathed his leaving and could hardly bear waiting for him to return.

The waitress and Mrs. Dupree called him “Curly,” but I thought whoever named him little used their imagination. When he opened the steamy door to the restaurant, surely it was the second coming of Christ.

His table manners pleased me. He ate daintily and slowly as if he cared what he put in his mouth. He smiled at me, but the nervous grimaces I gave him in return couldn’t even loosely be called smiles. He was friendly with the customers, the waitress and me, since he always came alone. I wondered why he didn’t have girl friends. Any woman would give a pretty to go out with him or rush to sit and talk to him. I never thought he would find me interesting, and if he did, it would be just to tease me.

“Reet.” There it was. I acted as if I hadn’t heard him.

“Reet. You hear me. Come here.”

I have seen bitch dogs in heat sidle sinuously along the ground, tempting, luring. I would like to be able to say I went to him so naturally. Unfortunately not. I draped myself in studied indifference and inched out my voice in disdainful measures.

“Were you speaking to me?”

“Come here, I won’t bite.” Looking down upon his request, I conceded. If he was beautiful from a distance, up close he was perfection. His eyes were deep-black and slow-lidded. His upper lip arched and fell over white teeth held together in the middle by the merest hint of yellow gold.

“How long you been knowing to cook like that?”

“All my life.” I could hardly make the lie leave my tongue.

“You married?”

“No.”

“You be careful, somebody’s gonna come here and kidnap you.”

“Thank you.” Why didn’t he? Of course he would have had to knock me down, bind and gag me, but I would have liked nothing better.

“You want a soda?”

“No thanks.” I turned and went back to the steam table, sweat nibbling above my top lip and under my arms. I wished him away but could feel his gaze on my back. I had spent so many years being people other than myself that I continued to stir and mix, raise and lower burners as if every nerve in my body were not attached to the third stool of the lunch counter.

The door opened and closed and I turned to watch his retreating back, only to find that another customer had left. Automatically I looked for him and met his eyes, solemn on me. I burned at giving myself away.

He nodded me over.

“What time you get off?”

“One o’clock.”

“Want me to take you home?”

“I usually go out to see my baby.”

“You’ve got a baby? Somebody must of give it to you for Christmas. A doll baby. How old are you?”

“Nineteen.” Sometimes I was twenty, or eighteen. It depended on my mood.

“Nineteen going on seventeen.” His smile held no ridicule. Just a smidgen of indulgence.

“Okay. I’ll take you to see your baby.”

—

He drove his 1941 Pontiac without seeming to think about it. I sat in the corner pushed against the door trying desperately not to watch him.

“Where’s the baby’s Daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“He wouldn’t marry you, huh?” His voice hardened in the question.

“I didn’t want to marry him.” Partly true.

“Well, he’s a low-down bastard in my book and needs his ass kicked.” I began to love him at that moment.

I shifted to look at him. My avenging angel. Mother and my brother
had been so busy being positive and supportive, neither had given any thought to the possibility that I might want revenge. I don’t think I had even thought about it before. Now anger was an injection that flooded my body, making me warm and excited.