The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (87 page)

“The key, please.” Again using slow motion, the clerk slid the key to Mother.

“Two ten. Second floor. Thank you. Come on, baby.” The hotel’s color bar had been lifted only a month earlier, yet she acted as if she had been a guest there for years. There was a winding staircase to the right of the desk and a small group of open-mouthed conventioneers standing by the elevator.

I said, “Let’s take the stairs, Mother.”

She said, “We’re taking the elevator,” and pushed the “up” button. The waiting people looked at us as if our very presence had stripped everything of value from their lives.

When we got out of the elevator, mother took a moment, then turned and walked left to 210. She unlocked the door and when we entered, she threw her purse on the bed and walked to the window.

“Sit down, baby. I’m going to tell you something you must never forget.”

I sat on the first chair as she opened the drapes. The sunlight framed her figure, and her face was indistinct.

“Animals can sense fear. They feel it. Well, you know that human beings are animals, too. Never, never let a person know you’re frightened. And a group of them … absolutely never. Fear brings out the worst thing in everybody. Now, in that lobby you were as scared as a rabbit. I knew it and all those white folks knew it. If I hadn’t been there, they might have turned into a mob. But something about me told them, if they mess with either of us, they’d better start looking for some new asses, ’cause I’d blow away what their mammas gave them.”

She laughed like a young girl. “Look in my purse.” I opened her purse.

“The Desert Hotel better be ready for integration, ’cause if it’s not, I’m ready for the Desert Hotel.”

Under her wallet, half hidden by her cosmetic case, lay a dark-blue German Luger.

“Room service? This is two ten. I’d like a pitcher of ice, two glasses, and a bottle of Teachers Scotch. Thank you.”

The bellboy had brought our bags, and we had showered and changed.

“We’ll have a cocktail and go down for dinner. But now, let’s talk.
Why New York? You were there in ’52 and had to be sent home. What makes you think it has changed?”

“I met a writer, John Killens. I told him I wanted to write and he invited me to New York.”

“He’s colored, isn’t he?” Since my first marriage to a Greek had dissolved, Mother had been hoping for a black son-in-law.

“He’s married, Mother. It’s not like that.”

“That’s terrible. First ninety-nine married men out of a hundred never divorce their wives for their girl friends, and the one that does will probably divorce the new wife for a newer girl friend.”

“But really, it’s not that way. I’ve met his wife and children. I’ll go to New York, stay with them for a couple of weeks, get an apartment and send for Guy.”

“And where will he stay for two weeks? Not alone in that big house. He’s only fourteen.”

She would explode if I told her I planned for him to stay with the man I was leaving. Vivian Baxter had survived by being healthily suspicious. She would never trust a rejected lover to treat her grandson fairly.

“I’ve made arrangements with a friend. And after all, it’s only two weeks.”

We both knew that she had left me and my brother for ten years to be raised by our paternal grandmother. We looked at each other and she spoke first.

“You’re right. It is only two weeks. Well, let me tell you about me. I’m going to sea.”

“To see. See what?”

“I’m going to become a merchant marine.”

I had never heard of a female merchant seaman.

“A member of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union.”

“Why?” Disbelief raised my voice. “Why?” She was a surgical nurse, a realtor, had a barber’s license and owned a hotel. Why did she want to go to sea and live the rough unglamorous life of a seaman?

“Because they told me Negro women couldn’t get in the union. You know what I told them?”

I shook my head, although I nearly knew.

“I told them, ‘You want to bet?’ I’ll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea.” There was a knock at the door. “Come in.”

A uniformed black man opened the door and halted in surprise at seeing us.

“Good evening. Just put the tray over there. Thank you.”

The bellboy deposited the tray and turned.

“Good evening, you all surprised me. Sure did. Didn’t expect to see you. Sure didn’t.”

Mother walked toward him holding money in her hand.

“Who did you expect? Queen Victoria?”

“No. No, ma’am. I mean … Our people … in here … It’s kinda new seeing us … and everything.”

“This is for you.” She gave him the tip. “We are just ordinary guests in the hotel. Thank you and good night.” She opened the door and waited. When he walked out mumbling good night, she closed the door with finality.

“Mom, you were almost rude.”

“Well, baby, I figure like this. He’s colored and I’m colored, but we are not cousins. Let’s have a drink.” She smiled.

During the next two days, Mother showed me off to some old card-playing friends she had known twenty years earlier.

“This is my baby. She’s been to Egypt, all around Milan, Italy, and Spain and Yugoslavia. She’s a singer and dancer, you know.” When her friends were satisfactorily impressed with my accomplishments, Mother made certain of their wonder by adding, “Of course, I’ll be shipping out myself in a few days.”

We hugged in the empty lobby of the Desert Hotel; the convention had ended the day before our departure.

“Take care of yourself. Take care of your son, and remember New York City is just like Fresno. Just more of the same people in bigger buildings. Black folks can’t change because white folks won’t change. Ask for what you want and be prepared to pay for what you get.” She
kissed me and her voice softened to a whisper. “Let me leave first, baby. I hate to see the back of someone I love.”

We embraced again and I watched her walk, hips swaying, into the bright street.

—

Back at home I collected myself and called Guy, who responded by coming into the living room and then walking back to lean against the doorjamb.

“Guy, I want to talk to you. Please sit down.” At this stage, he never sat if he could stand, towering above the boredom of life. He sat, obviously to pacify me.

“Guy, we’re going to move.” Aha, a flicker of interest in his eyes, which he quickly controlled.

“Again? Okay. I can pack in twenty minutes. I’ve timed myself.” I held on to the natural wince that struggled to surface.

In his nine years of schooling, we had lived in five areas of San Francisco, three townships in Los Angeles, New York City, Hawaii and Cleveland, Ohio. I followed the jobs, and against the advice of a pompous school psychologist, I had taken Guy along. The psychologist had been white, obviously educated and with those assets I knew he was also well-to-do. How could he know what a young Negro boy needed in a racist world?

When the money was plentiful, we lived in swank hotels and called room service. At other times we stayed in boardinghouses. I strung sheets as room dividers, and cooked our favorite food illegally on a two-burner hot plate. Because we moved so often, Guy had little chance to make or keep friends, but we were together and generally we had laughed a lot. Now that post-puberty had laid claim to him, our friendly badinage was gone and I was menacing him with one more move.

“This is the last time. Last time, I think.”

His face said he didn’t believe me.

“We’re going to New York City.” His eyes lit up again and just as quickly dulled.

“I want to leave Saturday. John and Grace Killens are looking for
an apartment for us. I’ll stay with them and in two weeks you’ll join me. Is that all right?” Parent power becomes so natural, only children notice it. I wasn’t really asking his permission. He knew it and didn’t answer.

“I thought I’d ask Ray if he’d like to stay in the house with you for two weeks. Just to be company for you. That O.K. with you?”

“That’s perfectly all right, Mother.” He stood up. He was so long, his legs seemed to start just at his arm sockets. “If you’ll excuse me.”

Thus he ended our unsatisfactory family chat. I still had to speak to my gentleman friend.

As we sat close in the morning’s sunshine, Ray’s handsome yellow face was as usual in benign repose.

“I’m leaving Saturday for New York.”

“Oh? Got a contract?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I don’t think that I’d like to face New York without a contract …”

Here it was.

“Just Guy and I are going. We’re going to stay.”

His whole body jumped, the muscles began to skitter around his face. For the first time I thought that maybe he cared for me. I watched him command his body. After long minutes his fists fell open, the long fingers relaxed and his lips lost their hardened ridges.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?”

He consented to stay in the house and send Guy to me in two weeks. After, he might take the house himself, otherwise he would close it. Of course, we would remain friends.

John and Grace Killens lived with their two children and his mother in a roomy brownstone in Brooklyn. They accepted me as if I were a friend returning from a long journey. John met me at the door. “Girl,
you finally got out of the country. Kick the mud off your shoes, come inside and make yourself at home.”

Grace was quieter. “Welcome to New York. I’m glad you came.”

Their hospitality was casual, without the large gestures that often discomfort a guest. The first days of my stay were filled with learning the house and studying the personalities of its inhabitants. John genuinely enjoyed being passionate. He was good-looking, and his dark-brown eyes in a light-brown face could alternately smolder or pierce. He talked animatedly, waving his hands as if offering them as gifts to his listeners.

Grace was pretty and petite, but she never allowed John’s success or the fact that she was his great love interfere with independent thought.

John’s mother, Mom Willie, who wore her Southern background like a magnolia corsage, eternally fresh, was robust and in her sixties. She was one of the group of black women who had raised their children, worked hard, fought for her principles and still retained some humor. She often entranced the family with graphic stories set in a sullen, racist South. The tales changed, the plots varied; her villains were always white and her heroes upstanding, courageous, clever blacks.

Barbara, the younger of the Killens children, was a bright tomboy who spoke fast and darted around the house like a cinnamon-colored wind. Her brother, Jon, larger and more gentle, moved slowly, spoke seldom and seemed to have been burdened with the responsibility of pondering the world’s imponderables.

Everyone except Jon, whose nickname was Chuck, talked incessantly, and although I enjoyed the exchange, I found the theme inexplicably irritating. They excoriated white men, white women, white children and white history, particularly as it applied to black people.

I had spent my life on city front steps, in country backyards, kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, joining in and listening to the conversations of black people, but I had never heard so much attention given to the subject of whites.

Of course, in Arkansas, when I was young, black children knowing that whites owned the cotton gin, the lumber mill, the fine houses and paved streets, had to find something which they thought whites did
not possess. This need to have something all one’s own coincided with the burgeoning interest in sex. The children sang, beyond the ears of adults and wistfully:

In the ensuing years in California the jokes came scarcer and the jobs grew meaner. Anger was always present whenever the subject of whites entered our conversations. We discussed the treatment of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the large humiliations and the petty snubs we all knew were meant to maim our spirits. I had heard white folks ridiculed, cursed and envied, but I had never heard them dominate the entire intimate conversation of a black family.

In the Killens’ home, if entertainment was mentioned, someone would point out that Harry Belafonte, a close family friend, was working with a South African singer, Miriam Makeba, and South Africa was really no different from South Philly. If the West Indies or religion or fashion entered the conversation, in minutes we were persistently examining the nature of racial oppression, racial progress and racial integration.

I fretted at the unrelenting diatribe, not because I disagreed but because I didn’t think whites interesting enough to consume all my thoughts, nor powerful enough to control all my movements.

I found an apartment in the Killens’ neighborhood. I spent the days painting the two bedrooms and sprucing up the furniture I bought in secondhand stores, and returned each night to sleep at the Killens’ house.

One evening after the rest of the family had gone to bed, I sat up having a nightcap with John. I asked why he was so angry all the time. I told him that while I agreed with Alabama blacks who boycotted bus companies and protested against segregation, California blacks were
thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from those Southern plagues.

“Girl, don’t you believe it. Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you’re black in this country, you’re on a plantation. You have to deal with masters. There might be some argument over whether they are vicious masters, but be assured that they all think they are masters … And if they think that, then you’d better believe they think you are the slave. Maybe a smart slave, a pretty slave, a good slave, but a slave just the same.”

I reminded John that I had spent a year in New York, but he countered, “You were a dancer. Dancers don’t see anything except other dancers. They don’t see; they exist to be seen. This time you should look at New York with a writer’s eyes, ears and nose. Then you’ll really see New York.”