A Song Flung Up to Heaven Read online

  If a group of racists had waylaid Malcolm, killed him in the dark and left his body as a mockery to all black people, I might have accepted his death more easily. But he was killed by black people as he spoke to black people about a better future for black people and in the presence of his family.

  Bailey rescued me. He had returned to Hawaii and found a nightclub that was offering me a job singing. He had lined up a rhythm section and had talked Aunt Leah into letting me stay with her until I could find a place.

  Mother admitted, “Yes, I phoned your brother. You were prowling around the streets and the house like a lame leopard. Time for you to straighten up and get back into the whirl of life.”

  She lived life as if it had been created just for her. She thought the only people who didn’t feel the same were laggards and layabouts.

  One would have to be a determined malcontent to resist her sincere good humor. She played music, cooked wonderful menus of my favorite foods and told me bawdy jokes, partly to entertain and partly to shock me out of my lethargy. Her tactics worked.

  We packed for Hawaii with great joviality. Mother bought me beautiful expensive Western clothes. I began to look forward to the trip. With her powerful personality, she had pulled me out of the drowning depths and onto a safe shore. I had not forgotten Malcolm, nor was I totally at ease about Guy, but some of my own good humor had returned, and I was ready to search for a path back into life.

  Six

  The exterior of Aunt Leah’s house was middle-class Southern California ranch-style stucco. The inside was working-class anywhere. A large, light beige sofa and matching chair were dressed in fitted, heavy plastic covers; a curved blond cocktail table bore up a crouching ceramic black panther. The drapes, which remained closed during my entire stay, were a strong defense against the persistent Hawaiian sunlight. Well-worn Bibles lay on all surfaces, and pictures of Jesus hung on all the walls. Some images were of the Saviour looking benignly out of the drawing, and others were the tortured visages of Him upon the cross.

  Having spent a month in my mother’s tuneful and colorful house, I felt that I had left reality and entered surreality.

  My aunt was religious, and she lived her religion. Her response to “Good morning, how are you?” was “Blessed in the Lord, and Him dead and crucified.”

  Her husband, named Al but called “Brother”—tradition dictated that I call him “Uncle Brother”—was a big, good-looking country man who adored his wife. He had come from the Arkansas Ozarks with the strength of John Henry, a sunny disposition and very little education. He was working as a laborer when he and my aunt met. She encouraged him to return to school and helped him with his books. By the time they moved to Hawaii, he had become a general contractor who could read a sextant and was building high-rise hotels.

  His presence made the house bearable because he didn’t take anything too seriously, even my aunt. There was always a shimmer in his eyes when he looked at her: “Yes, baby. Yes, baby, I thanked the Lord, too, but I know the Lord is not going to lay one brick for me. He is not going to plaster one wall. He’s counting on me to do that for Him. So I got to go.”

  Seven

  There is reliable verity in the assurance that once one has learned to ride a bicycle, the knowledge never disappears. I could add that this is also true for nightclub singing.

  Rehearsing with a rhythm section, putting on a fancy, shiny dress and makeup and stepping up to the microphone was as familiar to me as combing my hair. To my surprise, I remembered how to step gracefully out of a song after I had blundered into it in the wrong key, and how to keep an audience interested even when the tune was a folk song with thirty-nine verses.

  Within a few weeks at the Encore in Hawaii, I was drawing a good crowd that was eager to hear my style of singing calypso songs in a pseudo-African accent.

  The love songs of the Gershwins and Duke Ellington and the clever calypso lyrics were my reliable repertoire. I sang to drum, bass and piano accompaniment, and in each set I included one African song that I translated so loosely the original composer would not have recognized it.

  The club orchestra played Hawaiian music, which pleased sailors, businessmen and families. They not only enjoyed the music, they joined in on the audience-participation numbers and would sally forth to the dance floor and treat themselves and the establishment to a hula, samba, rumba, jitterbug, cha-cha or even a tap dance.

  I would go home to Aunt Leah’s around three A.M., and the sensation was as if I had just left Times Square and stepped onto the dock of the bay at the back of the moon.

  Auntie didn’t believe in much volume, so music from her radios was hardly audible; every now and again the name of Jesus could be heard from a broadcast sermon. Nor did she approve of air-conditioning. Uncle Brother had installed first-rate units in the house, but Aunt Leah was Calvinistic. She was certain that too many physical comforts in this life would cut down on benefits for the Christians lucky enough to get into heaven, or might even make it too difficult to get in at all. The house was dark, and the air was heavy and stayed in one place. With its sluggish mood, it should have been an ideal location in which to indulge a hearty dose of self-pity. But somehow, piety had claimed every inch of air in that house.

  Gloom definitely could not find a niche at the nightclub. It was impossible to think about the life Guy might be living, or Malcolm’s death, or the end of yet another of my marriages made in heaven while I was onstage singing “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” or the Andrews Sisters’ irresistible song “Drinking Rum and Coca-Cola.”

  Offstage, the other entertainers were so busy flirting outrageously, fondling one another or carrying arguments to high-pitched and bitter ends that there was no room in which I could consider my present and my past.

  I wanted a place where I could languish. I found a furnished flat, moved in, seated myself, laced my fingers and put my hands in my lap and waited. I expected a litany of pitiful accounts to come to mind, a series of sad tales. I was a woman alone, unable to get a man, and if I got one, I could not hold on to him; I had only one child (West Africans say one child is no child, for if a tragedy befalls him, there is nothing left), and he was beyond my reach in too many ways. I expected a face full of sorry and a lap full of if-you-please. Nothing happened. I didn’t get a catch in my throat, and there was no moisture around my eyes.

  Didn’t I care that I had been a bad mother, abandoning my son, leaving him with a meager bank account and up to his own silly teenage devices? He’d go through that money like Grant went through Richmond, and then what? I thought I should be crying. Not one tear fell.

  A kind of stoicism had to have been in my inheritance. My inability to feel enough self-pity to break down and cry did not come from an insensitivity to the situation but rather, from the knowledge that as bad as things are now, they could have been worse and might become worser and even worserer. As had happened so many times in my life, I had to follow my grandmother’s teaching.

  “Sister, change everything you don’t like about your life. But when you come to a thing you can’t change, then change the way you think about it. You’ll see it new, and maybe a new way to change it.”

  The African-American leaves the womb with the burden of her color and a race memory chockablock with horrific folk tales. Frequently there are songs, toe-tapping, finger-popping, hand-slapping, dancing songs that say, in effect, “I’m laughing to keep from crying.” Gospel, blues, and love songs often suggest that birthing is hard, dying is difficult and there isn’t much ease in between.

  Bailey brought some paintings to my new apartment. Certainly I couldn’t change history; however, I could trust Bailey to have thought out some of my future.

  “Remember what I told you about Malcolm? These same people who didn’t appreciate him will revere him in ten years, and you will get in deep trouble if you try to remind them of their earlier attitude.

  “Guy is a man-boy. Bright and opinionated. You raised him to think for himself, an
d now he’s doing just that. That’s what you asked for, and that’s what you’ve got. When he gets his stuff together, he’s going to be a man of principle. Don’t worry, he’s your son.

  “As for you, you’ll make a living singing. But that’s about all. Nobody knows what you’re going to do or who you’re going to be. But everybody thinks you’re going to do wonderful things. So let’s have a drink, and you get busy doing whatever you’re s’posed to do.”

  He was right. I would only eke out a living as a singer. The limited success I had, which Bailey recognized, stemmed from the fact that I didn’t love singing. My voice was fair and interesting; my ear was not great, or even good, but my rhythm was reliable. Still, I could never become a great singer, since I would not sacrifice for it. To become wondrously successful and to sustain that success in any profession, one must be willing to relinquish many pleasures and be ready to postpone gratification. I didn’t care enough for my own singing to make other people appreciate it.

  After six months, the audiences, whose sizes had been respectful, became smaller. A musician told me where my customers had gone.

  “There’s a real singer down at the Aloha Club, and she’s packing them in every night.”

  On my break I went to the rival club to see my competition. The singer rocked me back in my chair. She was as tall as I, good-looking and very strong. But mainly, she could sing. She had a huge, deep voice, and when she walked on the stage, she owned it. When she nodded to her musicians to start, she reminded me of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho.

  “Then the lamb, ram, sheep horns began to blow

  The trumpets began to sound

  Joshua commanded the children to shout

  And the walls came tumblin’ down.”

  The singer stepped up to the microphone unsmiling, wagged her head once to the right and then to the left, the orchestra blared and so did she. Her big dramatic voice windsurfed in that room and walls came tumbling down.

  The protective walls I had built around myself as a singer, those that allowed me to sing for convenience, to sing because I could and to sing without rejoicing in the art, all caved in as if obeying the urgency of a load of dynamite.

  Listening to Della Reese, I knew I would never call myself a singer again, and that I was going to give up Hawaii and my job at the Encore. I would return to the mainland and search until I found something I loved doing. I might get a job as a waitress and try to finish a stage play I had begun in Accra. I had notebooks full of poems; maybe I’d try to finish them, polish them up, make them presentable and introduce them to a publisher and then pray a lot.

  When I thanked Della Reese, I did not mention exactly what she had done for me. I should have said “You’ve changed my life” or “Your singing made the crooked way straight and the rough road smooth.” All I said was “I needed your music, and thank you for giving it so generously.” Miss Reese gave me a cool but gracious reply.

  The next day I had a meeting with the family in Hawaii and called my mother in San Francisco to tell her that I was moving to Los Angeles. Some former gaping wounds had healed and I was eager. The time had come to return to the mainland, to get a job—to reenter real life.

  Uncle Brother gave me the keys to an old Dodge he and Aunt Leah had left in Los Angeles. “It runs when it wants to and goes where it likes, but it ought to serve you till you can do better.”

  He and Bailey and Aunt Leah, against her better judgment, came down to closing night. My aunt sat primly throughout the whole show, her arms wrapped around her body, or she laid her hands in her lap and kept her gaze upon them.

  I had planned to leave Hawaii the next day, so my last show was not only a farewell to the Encore but to my family and to the few acquaintances I had made on Waikiki Beach. As I prepared to go onstage, I thought about the haven Hawaii had been. I had arrived on the island in a fragile and unsteady condition. The shock of Malcolm’s murder had demoralized me. There seemed to be no center in the universe, and the known edges of the world had become dim and inscrutable.

  Leaving Guy in Africa had become a hair shirt that I could not dislodge. I worried that his newly found and desperate hold on his mannishness might cause him to say or do something to irritate the Ghanaian authorities.

  I had brought anxiety and guilt to Hawaii, but each month the worries had abated. Friends in New York informed me that Malcolm’s widow, Betty, had given birth to healthy twins, and although his dream of an organization of African-American unity would not be realized, his family was hale and his friends were true. The actors and writers Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, attorney Percy Sutton and Alex Haley, who had written Malcolm’s biography, were among the steady pillars holding the Shabazz family aloft.

  I heard from friends in Ghana that Guy began behaving much better after I left. Often people in general, and young people in particular, need the responsibility of having to depend upon themselves for their own lives.

  So I was leaving Hawaii a lighter and brighter person. I was going to Los Angeles, and although I did not know what I would do or whom I would find there, life was waiting on me and it wasn’t wise to test its patience.

  For that last show on the last night, I decided not to sing but to dance.

  I asked for the music, then invited it to enter my body and find the broken and sore places and restore them. That it would blow through my mind and dispel the fogs. I let the music move me around the dance floor.

  I danced for the African I had loved and lost in Africa, I danced for bad judgments and good fortune. For moonlight lying like rich white silk on the sand before the great pyramids in Egypt and for the sound on ceremonial fonton-fron drums waking the morning air in Takoradi.

  The dance was over, and the audience was standing and applauding. Even Aunt Leah finally looked up and smiled at me.

  Bailey hugged me and gave me a wad of money.

  “You’re good.” He pointed to my heart. “You’ll go far.” He said I had what I needed to face another unknown.

  I was off to California.

  Aloha.

  Eight

  There is about Los Angeles an air of expectation. Not on the surface, where the atmosphere is lazy, even somnolent, but below the city’s sleepy skin, there is a suggestion that something quite delightful might happen and happen soon.

  This quiet hope might be the detritus of so many dreams entertained by so many hopefuls as they struggled and pinched and dieted and preened for Hollywood cameras. Possibly those aspirations never really die but linger in the air long after the dreamers have ceased dreaming.

  The days in Los Angeles were beautiful. The soft, wavering sunlight gave a filtered golden tint to the streets.

  The inhabitants of the working-class neighborhood were obviously house-proud. Little bungalows were cradled confidently on patches of carefully tended lawn, and wind chimes seemed to wait for the breeze on every porch.

  I longed for one of those tidy and certain houses. If I could live in a house like that, its absolute rightness of place would spill over and the ragged edges of my life would become neat to match the house.

  Frances Williams was the very person I needed. I had known her a decade earlier, and she knew everyone else very well. She was active in Actors’ Equity and had connections in both black and white churches.

  Fran, as she was called, counseled on the mystery of the theater, on its power and beauty, and gave good advice to anyone smart enough to listen.

  She was a large woman with a lusty voice not unlike a cello, and she had a great love of the theater. She and her brother, Bill, lived in a large house at the rear of a corner lot. The house and all the grounds were often pressed into service when Fran directed experimental theater. She had acted in forty movies and had worked as an extra in over a hundred more. When I looked her up, she had exactly what I needed: a place to live and the possibility of a job.

  There were two vacant apartments. Each had one room that served as living room, bedroom and study, and each had a
large, commodious kitchen. I took one apartment, and Fran told me that the actress Beah Richards took the other.

  The apartment was small and dark and humid, so I bought gallons of white latex paint and a stack of rollers and brushes. I painted every inch of visible wall and the entire floor bone-white. I went over the floor with a few coats of adobe enamel. In the lean years before Guy encountered puberty, he and I learned by trial and error how to antique furniture from Salvation Army stores and even how to repair the odd chair or sofa that seemed destined for a junkyard.

  I had become such a regular in all Salvation Army and Goodwill stores that salespeople saved certain choice pieces for me. “Maya, how are you? Have I got a fabulous nightstand for you.” “Have I got a great dresser for you.”

  In Los Angeles I bought orange, rust and brown burlap and draped the material casually at windows. I made huge colorful floor pillows and piled them on the floor. Van Gogh and Matisse posters enlivened the walls.

  I stacked painted wood planks on bricks to form bookcases and burned cheap candles in Chianti and Mateus wine bottles. When the melted wax nearly covered the bottles, I put fresh candles in them and placed them around the room for light and esoteric effect.

  At little expense, and out of a crying need, I had a house; now I needed a job. The money I brought from Hawaii was sifting through my fingers like fine sand.

  Again Fran had the answer. Having lived in Los Angeles since the 1950s, she knew every corner where black people lived. Having worked on their campaigns, she called every elected official by his or her first name.

  “This job is called Random Research. You won’t be paid much, but you are on an honor system. No one will be going behind you to check on your honesty. You will be given a questionnaire and a district. You will go to every fourth house and ask the housewife the questions on your form.”