The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
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, and 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.
CHAPTER 8
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.”
“What questions?”
“What cereal does your family prefer? What soap powder do you use? What peanut butter do you buy? Like that.”
The salary was pitifully low, but the job was blissfully simple. I had started working on my stage play. Random Research would allow me time to develop my characters and plot. I would ask questions of the housewives, but between houses and women and questions and answers, I would let my characters play out plot possibilities. They would find their own voices and design their own personalities.
Watts was my assigned locale, and I was disappointed to find it had lost its air of studied grace. I had known the area when it had a kind of staid decorum, a sort of church-ladies-display-at-a-Sunday-afternoon-tea feeling. The houses were all of the proper size, none so large as to cause envy, none so small as to elicit pity.
Years earlier, the lawns were immaculate, grass was trimmed to an evenness and flowers were carefully placed and lovingly tended. There had not been many people on the street. A drive through residential Watts was like driving through a small town in a 1940s Hollywood movie. There were always the odd teenagers pumping themselves up on Schwinns, but they could have been extras in the film, save that these bikers were black, as were the women who called them home for supper: “Henry, Henry …”
The Watts I visited in 1965 was very different. The houses were still uniform and similarly painted, and the lawns still precise, but there were people everywhere.
On my visit to Watts to orient myself for the new job, I passed groups of men in T-shirts or undershirts, lounging on front porches and steps. Their talk was just a little louder than usual, and they didn’t stop their conversation or lower their voices when I came into view.
Although I was never pretty, my youth, a good figure and well-chosen clothes would usually earn a clearing of the throat, or at least a veiled sound of approval. But the men in this Watts didn’t respond to my presence.
“Good morning, I am working for a company that wants to improve the quality of the goods you buy. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Your answers will ensure that you will find better foods in your supermarket and probably at a reduced price.”
The person who wrote those lines, for interviewers to use with black women, knew nothing of black women. If I had dared utter such claptrap, at best I would have been laughed off the porch or at worst told to get the hell away from the woman’s door.
Black females, for the most part, know by the time they are ten years old that the world is not much concerned with the quality of their lives or even their lives at all. When politicians and salespeople start being kind to black women, seeking them out, offering them largesse, the women accept the soft voices, the simpering statements, the often idle promises, because those are likely to be the only flattering behavior directed to them that day. Behind the women’s eyes, however, there is a wisdom that does not pretend to be unaware; nor does it permit gullibility.
Martin Luther King, Jr., once related a story that demonstrated just how accurate the black woman was at assessing her location in the scheme of things and knowing how to handle herself wherever she was.
He told us about an older black woman who had worked for a white woman in Alabama, first as her laundress, then as her maid, then as her cook and finally as her housekeeper. After forty years, the black woman retired, but she would go to visit her former employer occasionally.
On one visit, her employer had friends over for lunch. When the employer was told that Lillian Taylor was in the kitchen, she sent for her. Lillian went into the living room and greeted all the women, some of whom she had known since their childhoods.
The white woman said, “Lillian, I know you’ve heard of the bus boycott.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, I want to know, what do you think of it? Are you supporting it?”
“No, ma’am. Not one bit. Not one little iota. And I won’t let none of mine support it, either.”
“I knew you’d be sensible, Lillian, I just knew it in my bones.”
“Yes, ma’am, I won’t touch that bus boycott. You know my son took me to live with him and his family (he won’t let me even lift a finger), and he works for the power company way ’cross town from our house. I told him, ‘Charles, don’t you have anything to do with that bus boycott. You walk to work. Stay all the way out of that bus boycott.’ And my grandchildren, they go to school way over on the east side, I told them the same thing: ‘Don’t have anything to
do with that boycott. You walk to school.’ And even today, when I wanted to come over and visit you, I got a lady from my church to bring me. I wasn’t going to touch that boycott. Sure wasn’t.”
The room had become quiet, and Lillian Taylor said, “I know you have plenty help now, but do you want me to bring you all more coffee?”
She went to the kitchen and was followed by the white woman’s daughter.
“Lillian, why do you treat my mother like that? Why not just come out and say you support the boycott?”
Lillian said, “Honey, when you have your head in a lion’s mouth, you don’t snatch it out. You reach up and tickle him behind his ears and you draw your head out gradually. Every black woman in this country has her head in a lion’s mouth.”
I knew that a straight back and straight talk would get the black woman’s attention every time.
“Good morning. I have a job asking questions.”
At first there would be wariness. “What questions? Why me?”
“There are some companies that want to know which products are popular in the black community and which are not.”
“Why do they care?”
“They care because if you don’t like what they are selling, you won’t buy, and they want to fix it so you will.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Come on in.”
I was never turned away, although most times the women were abstracted. Few gave me their total attention. Some complained that their husbands were around all day.
“I work nights, and usually I come home and sleep a few hours, then get up and have time to fix up my house. But with him not working, he’s home all day, bringing his friends in and all that.”
Or they complained that the men weren’t around.
“I don’t know where he’s spending his time. He’s not working, he’s not at the job and he’s not at home … makes me a little suspicious.”
Listening to the women brought me more squarely back to the U.S.A. The lilt of the language was so beautiful, and I was heartened that being away from the melody for a few years had not made one note foreign to me.
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, and 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.
CHAPTER 8
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
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.”
“What questions?”
“What cereal does your family prefer? What soap powder do you use? What peanut butter do you buy? Like that.”
The salary was pitifully low, but the job was blissfully simple. I had started working on my stage play. Random Research would allow me time to develop my characters and plot. I would ask questions of the housewives, but between houses and women and questions and answers, I would let my characters play out plot possibilities. They would find their own voices and design their own personalities.
Watts was my assigned locale, and I was disappointed to find it had lost its air of studied grace. I had known the area when it had a kind of staid decorum, a sort of church-ladies-display-at-a-Sunday-afternoon-tea feeling. The houses were all of the proper size, none so large as to cause envy, none so small as to elicit pity.
Years earlier, the lawns were immaculate, grass was trimmed to an evenness and flowers were carefully placed and lovingly tended. There had not been many people on the street. A drive through residential Watts was like driving through a small town in a 1940s Hollywood movie. There were always the odd teenagers pumping themselves up on Schwinns, but they could have been extras in the film, save that these bikers were black, as were the women who called them home for supper: “Henry, Henry …”
The Watts I visited in 1965 was very different. The houses were still uniform and similarly painted, and the lawns still precise, but there were people everywhere.
On my visit to Watts to orient myself for the new job, I passed groups of men in T-shirts or undershirts, lounging on front porches and steps. Their talk was just a little louder than usual, and they didn’t stop their conversation or lower their voices when I came into view.
Although I was never pretty, my youth, a good figure and well-chosen clothes would usually earn a clearing of the throat, or at least a veiled sound of approval. But the men in this Watts didn’t respond to my presence.
“Good morning, I am working for a company that wants to improve the quality of the goods you buy. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Your answers will ensure that you will find better foods in your supermarket and probably at a reduced price.”
The person who wrote those lines, for interviewers to use with black women, knew nothing of black women. If I had dared utter such claptrap, at best I would have been laughed off the porch or at worst told to get the hell away from the woman’s door.
Black females, for the most part, know by the time they are ten years old that the world is not much concerned with the quality of their lives or even their lives at all. When politicians and salespeople start being kind to black women, seeking them out, offering them largesse, the women accept the soft voices, the simpering statements, the often idle promises, because those are likely to be the only flattering behavior directed to them that day. Behind the women’s eyes, however, there is a wisdom that does not pretend to be unaware; nor does it permit gullibility.
Martin Luther King, Jr., once related a story that demonstrated just how accurate the black woman was at assessing her location in the scheme of things and knowing how to handle herself wherever she was.
He told us about an older black woman who had worked for a white woman in Alabama, first as her laundress, then as her maid, then as her cook and finally as her housekeeper. After forty years, the black woman retired, but she would go to visit her former employer occasionally.
On one visit, her employer had friends over for lunch. When the employer was told that Lillian Taylor was in the kitchen, she sent for her. Lillian went into the living room and greeted all the women, some of whom she had known since their childhoods.
The white woman said, “Lillian, I know you’ve heard of the bus boycott.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, I want to know, what do you think of it? Are you supporting it?”
“No, ma’am. Not one bit. Not one little iota. And I won’t let none of mine support it, either.”
“I knew you’d be sensible, Lillian, I just knew it in my bones.”
“Yes, ma’am, I won’t touch that bus boycott. You know my son took me to live with him and his family (he won’t let me even lift a finger), and he works for the power company way ’cross town from our house. I told him, ‘Charles, don’t you have anything to do with that bus boycott. You walk to work. Stay all the way out of that bus boycott.’ And my grandchildren, they go to school way over on the east side, I told them the same thing: ‘Don’t have anything to
The room had become quiet, and Lillian Taylor said, “I know you have plenty help now, but do you want me to bring you all more coffee?”
She went to the kitchen and was followed by the white woman’s daughter.
“Lillian, why do you treat my mother like that? Why not just come out and say you support the boycott?”
Lillian said, “Honey, when you have your head in a lion’s mouth, you don’t snatch it out. You reach up and tickle him behind his ears and you draw your head out gradually. Every black woman in this country has her head in a lion’s mouth.”
I knew that a straight back and straight talk would get the black woman’s attention every time.
“Good morning. I have a job asking questions.”
At first there would be wariness. “What questions? Why me?”
“There are some companies that want to know which products are popular in the black community and which are not.”
“Why do they care?”
“They care because if you don’t like what they are selling, you won’t buy, and they want to fix it so you will.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Come on in.”
I was never turned away, although most times the women were abstracted. Few gave me their total attention. Some complained that their husbands were around all day.
“I work nights, and usually I come home and sleep a few hours, then get up and have time to fix up my house. But with him not working, he’s home all day, bringing his friends in and all that.”
Or they complained that the men weren’t around.
“I don’t know where he’s spending his time. He’s not working, he’s not at the job and he’s not at home … makes me a little suspicious.”
Listening to the women brought me more squarely back to the U.S.A. The lilt of the language was so beautiful, and I was heartened that being away from the melody for a few years had not made one note foreign to me.