The Heart of a Woman Read online

  He stood in the middle of the youthful energy like a dull drake among a brood of white ducklings.

  I called in the volunteer captains and introduced them. Hazel and I sat through lunch in my office. We chuckled over the white youngsters who were scrubbing the steps and sweeping the floor and doing the jobs for us which were being done in their homes and in their streets by black women and men. We knew that what we were seeing was a one-time phenomenon, so were determined to enjoy it.

  The children and their counselor filed in to say goodbye. They accepted my thanks and the thanks of the SCLC. I made a little speech about the oneness of life and the responsibility we all had to make the world livable for everyone. They left and we turned up the volume on the news station. Martin was still in jail. The police had dragged the blacks out of the diner. The North Caro­lina black community was angry, but nothing had happened yet. The office was drifting back to normal when Hazel buzzed my phone.

  "Hey, Maya. Got something else for you. Are you ready?"

  "Yes."

  "Two groups of whites are coming tomorrow and a high school class from an integrated school. Have we got work for them?"

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  I listened, speechless.

  Hazel laughed, "I asked you if you were ready."

  The weeks ran together, the days raced. White and black people were changing as Martin Luther King traveled to and from jail and across the United States, his route covered by the national media. Malcolm X could be seen stripping white television report­ers of their noise on the evening news. In Harlem, the Universal Negro Improvement Association formed in the twenties by Mar­cus Garvey was being revived, and the Ethiopian Association was coming back to life.

  White movie stars attracted by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were lending their names to the struggle, and their sincer­ity stood up against the most suspicious scrutiny. One evening at Belafonte's house, Shelley Winters explained why she was glad to contribute her money and her time to the SCLC.

  "It's not that I love Reverend King or all black people or even Harry Belafonte. I have a daughter. She's white and she's young now, but when she grows up and finds that most of the people in the world are black or brown or yellow, and have been op­pressed for centuries by people who look like her, she's going to ask me what I did about it. I want to be able to say, "The best I could.' " I was still suspicious of most white liberals, but Shelley Winters sounded practical and I trusted her immediately. After all, she was a mother just like me, looking after her child.

  At home Guy talked about the movement. I was pleased that he and Chuck had joined a youth group of the Society Against Nuclear Energy, and I gave him permission to participate in a march protesting nuclear war.

  Avoiding the evening subway rush, I always stopped in a bar near the 125th Street stop of the A train. The place was rough because its bartender and regulars were living lives of little gentle­ness.

  The ice would slide away in my glass while street-wise men and world-wise women marveled over the nation's excitement.

  "You see them Negroes in North Carolina. They mean busi­ness."

  "Charlie better straighten up. We're tired of this shit."

  "Man, that Martin Luther King. He's not a man made of blood."

  "He's a fool. Love your enemies? Jesus Christ did that and you saw what happened to him."

  "Yeah, they lynched him."

  "Black people ought to be listening to Malcolm X. He's got it right. Crackers are blue-eyed devils."

  "I don't go for that hate talk. Negroes ain't got time to be hating anybody. We got to get together."

  I returned from lunch. In the outer office Millie Jordan was working over a table of papers. Hazel was busy on the telephone. I walked into my office and a man sitting at my desk, with his back turned, spun around, stood up and smiled. Martin King said, "Good afternoon, Miss Angelou. You are right on time."

  The surprise was so total that it took me a moment to react to his outstretched hand.

  I had worked two months for the SCLC, sent out tens of thousands of letters and invitations signed by Rev. King, made hundreds of statements in his name, but I had never seen him up close. He was shorter than I expected and so young. He had an easy friendliness, which was unsettling. Looking at him in my office, alone, was like seeing a lion sitting down at my dining-room table eating a plate of mustard greens.

  "We're so grateful for the job you all are doing up here. It's a confirmation for us down on the firing line."

  I was finally able to say how glad I was to meet him.

  "Come on, take your seat back and tell me about yourself."

  I settled gratefully into the chair and he sat on the arm of the old sofa across the room.

  "Stanley says you're a Southern girl. Where are you from?" His voice had lost the church way of talking and he had become just

  a young man asking a question of a young woman. I looked at him and thought about the good-looking sexy school athlete, who was invariably the boyfriend of the high-yellow cheerleader.

  I said, "Stamps, Arkansas. Twenty-five miles from Texarkana."

  He knew Texarkana and Pine Bluff, and, of course, Little Rock. He asked me the size and population of Stamps and if my people were farmers. I said no and started to explain about Mamma and my crippled uncle who raised me. As I talked he nodded as if he knew them personally. When I described the dirt roads and shanties and the little schoolhouse on top of the hill, he smiled in recognition. When I mentioned my brother Bailey, he asked what he was doing now.

  The question stopped me. He was friendly and understanding, but if I told him my brother was in prison, I couldn't be sure how long his understanding would last. I could lose my job. Even more important, I might lose his respect. Birds of a feather and all that, but I took a chance and told him Bailey was in Sing Sing.

  He dropped his head and looked at his hands.

  "It wasn't a crime against a human being." I had to explain. I loved my brother and although he was in jail, I wanted Martin Luther King to think he was an uncommon criminal. "He was a fence. Selling stolen goods. That's all."

  He looked up. "How old is he?"

  "Thirty-three and very bright. Bailey is not a bad person. Really."

  "I understand. Disappointment drives our young men to some desperate lengths." Sympathy and sadness kept his voice low. "That's why we must fight and win. We must save the Baileys of the world. And Maya, never stop loving him. Never give up on him. Never deny him. And remember, he is freer than those who hold him behind bars."

  Redemptive suffering had always been the part of Martin's argument which I found difficult to accept. I had seen distress fester souls and bend peoples' bodies out of shape, but I had yet to see anyone redeemed from pain, by pain.

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  There was a knock at the door and Stanley Levison entered.

  "Good afternoon, Maya. Hello, Martin. We're about ready."

  Martin stood and the personal tenderness disappeared. He became the righting preacher, armed and ready for the public fray.

  He came over to my desk. "Please accept my thanks. And remember, we are not alone. There are a lot of good people in this nation. White people who love right and are willing to stand up and be counted." His voice had changed back to the mellifluous Baptist cadence raised for the common good.

  We shook hands and I wondered if his statement on the exis­tence of good whites had been made for Stanley's benefit.

  At the door, he turned. "But we cannot relax, because for every fair-minded white American, there is a Bull Connor waiting with his shotgun and attack dogs."

  I was sitting, mulling over the experience, when Hazel and Millie walked in smiling.

  "Caught you that time, didn't we?"

  I asked her if she had set up the surprise. She had not. She said when Martin came in he asked to meet me. He was told that I was due back from lunch and that I was fanatically punctual. He offered to play a joke by waiting alone in my office.

 
Millie chuckled. "He's got a sense of humor. You never hear about that, do you?"

  Hazel said, "It makes him more human somehow. I like a serious man to be able to laugh. Rounds out the personality."

  Martin King had been a hero and a leader to me since the time when Godfrey and I heard him speak and had been carried to glory on his wings of hope. However, the personal sadness he showed when I spoke of my brother put my heart in his keeping forever, and made me thrust away the small constant worry which my mother had given me as a part of an early parting gift: Black folks can't change because white folks won't change.

  During the next months, Mother's warning dwindled further from my thoughts. The spirit in Harlem was new and old and dynamic. Black children and white children thronged the streets,

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  en route to protest marches or to liberation offices, where they did small but important chores. Black Nationalists spoke on street corners, demanding freedom now. Black Muslims charged the white community with genocide and insisted on immediate and total segregation from the murdering blue-eyed devils. Wells Res­taurant and the Red Rooster served the best soul food and offered great music at evening sessions to parties of blacks and whites and visiting African diplomats. The Baby Grand, where Nipsy Russell had played for years, had closed, but the Palm Cafe was a haven for hard drinkers and serious players. The Amsterdam News was vigilant in its weekly attack against the "forces of evil," and G. Norwood, one of its social and political columnists, kept the community informed on who was doing what, to whom and with how much success.

  The national mood was one of action, and the older groups, such as the NAACP and the Urban League, were losing ground to progressive organizations. Young blacks had begun calling Roy Wilkins a sellout Uncle Tom and Whitney Young, a dangerous spy. Only Martin and Malcolm commanded respect, and they were not without detractors.

  The Harlem Writers Guild meeting at Sarah Wright's house was ending. As we were saying goodbye, Sarah's phone rang. She motioned us to wait and answered it. When she hung up, she said excitedly that the Cuban delegation to the United Nations, led by President Castro, had been turned out of a midtown hotel. The group was accused of having brought live chickens to their rooms, where they were to use them in voodoo rites. The entire delega­tion had been invited to the Teresa Hotel in Harlem.

  We all shouted. Those few writers and would-be writers who were not members of Fair Play for Cuba nonetheless took delight in Fidel Castro's plucky resistance to the United States.

  In moments, we were on the street in the rain, finding cabs or private cars or heading for subways. We were going to welcome the Cubans to Harlem.

  To our amazement, at eleven o'clock on a Monday evening, we

  were unable to get close to the hotel. Thousands of people filled the sidewalks and intersections, and police had cordoned off the main and side streets.

  I hovered with my friends on the edges of the crowd, enjoying the Spanish songs, the screams of "Viva Castro," and the sounds of conga drums being played nearby in the damp night air.

  It was an ole and hallelujah time for the people of Harlem.

  Two days later, Khrushchev came to visit Castro at the Teresa. The police, white and nervous, still guarded the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, which even in normal times was accepted as the most popular and possibly most dangerous crossroad in black America.

  Hazel, Millie and I walked down a block from the office, push­ing through the jubilant crowd. We watched as Castro and Khrushchev embraced on 125th Street, as the Cubans applauded and the Russians smiled broadly, showing metal teeth. Black people joined the applause. Some white folks weren't bad at all. The Russians were O.K. Of course, Castro never had called him­self white, so he was O.K. from the git. Anyhow, America hated Russians, and as black people often said, "Wasn't no Communist country that put my grandpappa in slavery. Wasn't no Commu­nist lynched my poppa or raped my mamma."

  "Hey, Khrushchev. Go on, with your bad self."

  Guy left school, without permission, to come to Harlem with a passel of his schoolmates.

  They trooped into the SCLC office after the Russian and Cuban delegations had left the neighborhood for the United Nations building.

  Millie called and told me my son was in the back, stamping envelopes.

  Surprise and a lack of sensitivity made me confront him before his friends.

  "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in school."

  He dropped the papers and said in a voice cold and despising, "Do you want to speak to me privately, Mother?"

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  Why couldn't I know the moment before I had spoken what I knew as soon as my question hit the air. I turned without apology and he followed.

  We stopped and faced each other in the hallway.

  "Mother, I guess you'll never understand. To me, a black man, the meeting of Cuba and the Soviet Union in Harlem is the most important thing that could happen. It means that, in my time, I am seeing powerful forces get together to oppose capitalism. I don't know how it was in your time, the olden days, but in modern America this was something I had to see. It will influence my future."

  I looked at him and found nothing to say. He had an uncanny sense of himself. When I was young I often wondered how I appeared to people around me, but I never thought to see myself in relation to the entire world. I nodded and walked past him back to my office.

  Abbey, Rosa and I decided what was needed was one more organization. A group of talented black women who would make themselves available to all the other groups. We would be on call to perform, give fashion shows, read poetry, sing, write for any organization from the SCLC to the Urban League that wanted to put on a fund-raising affair.

  For six months I had been coordinator of the SCLC. I knew how to contact reliable philanthropists, the first names of their secre­taries, and which restaurants the donors used for lunches. I carried a brief case, and sat on subways, sternly studying legal papers. I was called Miss Angelou in my office and took copious notes in business conferences with Stan Levison and Jack Murray. Martin Luther King was sacred and fund-raising was my calling. Days were crammed with phone calls, taxi rides and serious letters

  reminding the mailing list that freedom was costly and that a donation of any amount was a direct blow against the citadel of oppression which held a helpless people enthralled.

  After a day of such heart-stirring acts, I would travel back to my apartment. Somewhere after sunset and before I reached Brooklyn, the glorious magic disappeared. When I stepped off the subway at Park, I was no longer the bright young woman execu­tive dedicated to Justice, Fair Play for Cuba and a member of the Harlem Writers Guild. I was an unmarried woman with the rent to pay and a fifteen-year-old son, who had decided that anything was better than another dull evening at home with Mother. Secretly, I agreed with him.

  Tony's Restaurant and Bar on nearby Sterling Place became a sanctuary. It was not so dull that it attracted churchgoing families exclusively, nor so boisterous as to promise company combined with danger to unescorted women.

  The first time I went into Tony's, I chose a barstool and ordered a drink, offering my largest bill, and invited the bartender to take out enough for one for himself. (Vivian Baxter told me when I was seventeen and on my own that a strange woman alone in a bar could always count on protection if she had treated the bartender right.)

  He poured out my second drink loosely, allowing the gin to spill over the measuring jigger, then he told me his name.

  Teddy was a small, neat man, his light toast-colored skin pulled tight across his face. He had large, slow eyes, which raked the bar while his little hands snapped at bottles, glasses and ice, and he talked with everyone along the counter, stepping into and out of conversations without losing a name or mixing up a drink.

  "New in the neighborhood?" He carried drinks to the end of the bar, collected money, rang the register and asked, "Where're you from?"

  "Are you a working girl or do you
have a job?"

  The softness of his voice belied the fact that he was asking if I was a prostitute. I knew better than to act either ignorant or

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  offended. I said my name was Maya. I was from California and I had a job in Manhattan, lived alone with my teenage son three blocks away.

  He returned from the other end of the bar carrying a drink.

  "This one's on me, Maya. I want you to feel at home. Come in anytime."

  I left a good tip, thanked him and decided to return the next evening.