by Maya Angelou
The audience was bewitched. They began to shout, “Chantez, Bess. Chantez, chantez, Bess.”
Martha suddenly became demure, and shaking her head in refusal, draped her small body in her seat. Her action incited the crowd and their clamor rose in volume. At exactly the correct moment, Martha stood up and shyly went to the piano. She leaned and whispered to Bobby. He struck one note and took his hands from the keys.
“O they so fresh and fine
And they right off'n the vine.”
She was singing the vendor's song a cappella and her voice floated free in the quiet room:
“Strawberries, strawberries!”
I looked around-everyone was beguiled, including our fellow singers. Martha ballooned her voice, then narrowed it, dipping down into a rough contralto, and then swung it high beyond the lyric soprano into the rarefied air that was usually the domain of divine coloraturas.
For a second after she finished there was no sound. Then people applauded her and began to crowd around her table. She coyly accepted the attention as if she hadn't worked hard for years to earn it.
One of the lessons I learned from Porgy and Bess was that jealousy is conceived only in insecurity and must be nourished in fear. Each individual in our cast had the certainty of excellence.
After the din over Martha's singing diminished, I asked Lillian to please sing.
She stood up without reluctance and sang,
“Go way from my window
Go way from my door
Go way way way from my bedside
And bother me no more
And bother me no more.”
Her voice was as colorful as Martha's was pure, and the customers were again enchanted. Ned Wright sang a medley of popular songs beginning with “I Can't Give You Anything but Love,” which the French people recognized and loved. Joe Attles gave the audience “St. James Infirmary” and they literally stood in the aisles.
Maya Angelou was a crazy success. A smash hit! The audience thought they had never been better entertained. Ben was certain I would improve business; the bartender and waiters smiled gratefully at me. If I hadn't memorized a story my grandmother told me when I was a knee-high child, I might have become conceited and begun to believe the compliments I did not totally deserve.
The old story came to mind:
Mrs. Scott, a woman well past middle age, fancied young men. She was a great churchgoer and used each religious gathering to search for the objects of her choice. All the young men in her town were aware of her predilections, and she was unsuccessful in snaring them.
One day a new man appeared at the meeting house. He was handsome and although he was adult, he was still young enough to be gullible.
The woman caught him directly after service and invited him to her home for late Sunday afternoon dinner. He accepted gratefully.
She rushed home, killed a chicken and put it on to fry. While the chicken cooked, Mrs. Scott took a small needle from her sewing kit, and putting on her bifocals, picked her way down the lane from her front door. When she reached a tree a hundred yards away, she stuck the needle in the bark and returned to the kitchen to finish preparing the meal.
When the young man arrived, they sat down to a tasty dinner (for Mrs. Scott was an excellent cook), and after they finished, Mrs. Scott invited the man to sit on the porch in the swing, to let his dinner digest. She brought out lemonade and sat with him. Dusk was falling and the shapes of things were blurred.
Mrs. Scott sat bolt upright and turned to the young man. “What on earth is that I see sticking in that tree?” She pointed down the lane to the oak, which was barely a shadow in the darkness.
The young man asked, “What tree, Mrs. Scott?”
“Why, that oak tree at the bottom of the lane.” She squinted and bent her neck. “I do believe that's a pin.”
The young man, squinting, tried to pierce the gloom.
“Mrs. Scott, I can't hardly see the tree. And you can see something sticking in it?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Scott had relaxed her scrutiny. “At first I thought it was a pin, but when I looked for the head it wasn't there—I saw instead a hole. So it's got to be a needle.”
The young man turned and looked at Mrs. Scott with admiration.
“You know, ma'am, when you left church this morning, some folks told me to be careful. That you were an old woman who loved young men. But I must say, if you can see the hole in a needle a hundred yards away after the sun has gone down, you're not nearly as old as they say you are.”
Mrs. Scott, proud of her compliments and forgetful of her subterfuge, said, “Well, thank you for that. I'll just go and get the needle and show it to you.”
She flounced up out of the swing and stepped jauntily down the stairs. When she reached the bottom step she turned to smile at the appreciative young man, and then continuing, she walked two steps and tripped over a cow sitting in the lane.
Yes, I was a success in Paris at the Mars Club. I would have been a fool to have thought the praise was all mine. Ben liked me because I was good enough, but appreciated me because the members from Porgy and Bess were likely to drop in and sing for free. Bobby liked me because I was good enough, and he had a chance to play music for which he seldom received requests. The audience liked me because I was good enough, and I was different-not African, but nearly; not American, but nearly. And I liked myself because, simply, I was lucky.
I gave thanks to Porgy and Bess, my good fortune and to God. I wasn't about to trip over a cow.
CHAPTER 21
Paris was changing the rhythm of that old gang of mine. Martha took a two-week leave from the company to give a Town Hall recital in New York City. Lillian had said to me often, “I'm so glad I wasn't born here, because I'd never have learned to speak this language,” but she had found new French friends and I seldom saw her after the theater. Barbara Ann's husband flew from the United States to be with her, and since they were newly married, they could spare little time for anyone beyond their tight circle of romance. Ned Wright and Joe Attles were bent on a ferocious discovery of Paris. After the final bow they raced from the theater as if an emergency call awaited them. They unearthed little-known restaurants and bars in obscure corners of the city.
From my third-floor (which the French perversely called second-floor) room, I assayed my value to Paris and its promise for me. I had accepted the Rose Rouge offer and become a typical Parisian entertainer. I sang a midnight show at the Mars Club, threw a coat over my sparkly dress, hailed a cab and rode across the Seine to do a second show at the Rose Rouge. My songs were well enough received and fans were beginning to remember me. Some sent notes and occasionally flowers to my dressing room. A few expatriates and two Senegalese students I had met advised me to leave Porgy and Bess and make my mark in Paris. The Africans said that in France I would never hear of lynchings and riots. And I would not be refused service in any restaurant or hotel in the country. The people were civilized. And, anyway the French people loved Negroes. Look at Sid Bechet. Lil Armstrong, a former wife of Satchmo, played piano at Le Jazz Hot and had an avid following. Bambi, a tall, deliciously thin model, could hardly walk the streets in Paris without men following her and raving over her Black beauty. Nancy Holloway and Inez, who owned Chez Inez, sang American songs as well as popular French melodies and were welcomed with hyperbolic Gallic admiration. And, of course, Josephine Baker was a national institution.
I considered the advice seriously. I could find an apartment and send for Clyde. He was bright and would learn the language quickly. He would be freed from growing up under the cloud of racial prejudice that occasionally made every Black childhood sunless. He would be obliged to be good for his own sake rather than to prove to a disbelieving society that he was not a brute. The French students wore short pants and blazers and caps, and I knew my son would look beautiful in his uniform. The prospect looked glorious.
A woman asked me to join her table after my show at the Rose Rouge. She welcomed me and intro
duced me to her friends.
Her voice was tiny but piercing, and a baby-doll smile never left her pink-and-white face, and her eyelids fluttered only a little faster than her hands. She reminded me of Billie Burke and very small door chimes.
“Mademoiselle, do you know who is Pierre Mendès-France?” Smile, blink, rustle.
I said, “Yes, madame. I read the papers.”
“I want an affair for him to give.” Her English was not broken, it was crippled.
I said in French, “Madame, let us speak French.”
She bubbled and gurgled. “Non. Non. I love this English for practice to speak.”
Alors. She limped along verbally, explaining that she wanted me to sing at a reception which she planned to host. It would be a fund-raising event and they would gladly pay me for my services. I would be expected to sing two songs. Something plaintive that would move the heart, I thought, and loosen the purse strings.
“The blues.” Madame said, “Oh, how the blues I love. Will you sing ‘St. Louie Blues’?” She started singing the first line: “I hate to see, that evening sun go down.”
Her shoulders hunched up to her ear lobes and she made her eyes small and lascivious. Her lips pushed out and I saw the red underlining of her mouth.
“‘I hate to see that evening sun go down.’”
She shook herself and her breasts wobbled. She was imitating her idea of a négresse.
I stopped her. “Madame, I know the song. I will sing it at the reception.”
She was not fazed by the interruption, but clapped her hands and told her friends to clap theirs. We agreed on a price, and she said, “You are with Porgy and Bess. The great opera. If Bess or Porgy or your friends desire to come with you at the reception, they will not be made to pay.”
She smiled, laughed, waved her hands and generally jangled like a bunch of keys. I thanked her and left the table.
Since my friends in Porgy and Bess were otherwise engaged, I asked the two Senegalese men to escort me to the reception. They were pleased to do so and appeared at the theater's backstage door in tuxedos, starched shirts and highly polished shoes. Their general elegance put me in a party mood. I walked into the salon with a handsome, attentive man on each side, and as we stopped inside the door, I felt that the three of us must have made an arresting tableau.
Madame was informed of my arrival and she floated over in wisps of chiffon, smiling her cheeks into small pink balloons.
“Oh, mademoiselle. How it is kind of you to come.” She offered me her hand, but gave her eyes to my escorts. They bowed smartly. “And your friends you brought. Who of you is the Porgy? I do love ‘Summertime.’” She had wafted into singing “‘And the living is easy.’”
I said, “No, madame.” It was hard to wrest her attention from the two men. “No, madame, they are not with Porgy and Bess. These are friends from Africa.”
When the import of my statement struck her, the smile involuntarily slid off her face and she recovered her hand from my grasp.
“D'Afrique? D'Afrique?” Suddenly there were no bubbles in her voice.
M'Ba bowed formally and said in French, “Yes, madame. We are from Senegal.”
She looked at me as if I had betrayed her. “But, mademoiselle—” She changed her mind and stood straight. She spoke in French, “Please wait here. I will have someone take you to the musicians. Bon soir.” She turned and left.
After I sang, a young woman gave me an envelope with my pay and thanked me warmly. I never saw Madame again.
Paris was not the place for me or my son. The French could entertain the idea of me because they were not immersed in guilt about a mutual history—just as white Americans found it easier to accept Africans, Cubans, or South American Blacks than the Blacks who had lived with them foot to neck for two hundred years. I saw no benefit in exchanging one kind of prejudice for another. Also, I was only adequate as an entertainer, and I would never set Paris afire. Honesty made me admit that I was neither a new Josephine Baker or an old Eartha Kitt.
When the Porgy and Bess administration informed us that we were moving on to Yugoslavia, I found a woman to give me lessons in Serbo-Croatian and bought myself a dictionary.
Adieu, Paris.
CHAPTER 22
In Zagreb the company was called together to be told that the Yugoslav government and the American State Department wished us to be discreet; we were, after all, guests of the country and the first American singers to be invited behind the iron curtain. We would be driven from the hotel to the theater and back again. We could walk only within a radius of four square blocks of the hotel. We were not to accept invitations from any Yugoslavians, nor were we to initiate fraternization.
The hotel corridors smelled of cabbage and the dust of ages. I found the maid on my floor and asked her in Serbo-Croatian if there was anything interesting to see near the hotel. I had little hope that she would understand me, but she readily answered, “Yes, there's the railroad station.” I was elated that the money I had spent on language lessons had not been spent in vain.
I said excitedly, “Madame, I can speak Serbo-Croatian.”
She looked at me without curiosity and said, “Yes?” She waited for me to go on.
I repeated, “I learned to speak Serbo-Croatian two weeks ago.”
She nodded and waited heavily. No smile warmed her features. I couldn't think of anything to add. We stood in the hall like characters from different plays by different authors suddenly thrust upon the same stage. I grinned. She didn't.
I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “You're welcome.”
I went to my room taking my confusion along. Why hadn't the woman been amazed to find an American Negro woman speaking Serbo-Croatian? Why hadn't she congratulated me? I knew we were the first Blacks that had stayed in the hotel and possibly the first that had ever visited the town.
At first I concluded that because the maid had never been out of her country and everyone she knew spoke her language, she thought Yugoslavia was the world and the world Yugoslavia. Then I realized that the staff must have undergone intensive indoctrination before our arrival. In the lobby no one stared at us; obviously, we were being studiously and politely ignored. The desk clerks and porters, waiters and bartenders, acted as if the sixty Black American opera singers roamed the halls and filled their lobby every other week. I was certain that we were the only authentic guests in the establishment. The others, who averted their eyes at our approach and buried their heads in their newspapers, seemed less innocent than Peter Lorre in an Eric Ambler movie.
Outside, however, it was a different story. Ordinary citizens crowded three deep to peer into the hotel windows. When one gawker could catch a glimpse of us, he or she nudged the persons nearby and all craned their necks, eyes bulging, and then laughed uproariously, revealing stainless-steel teeth that looked ominous. They had to be talked to sharply like obstreperous children at a summer fair.
Martha, who had rejoined the company, and Ethel Ayler, the new and glamorous Bess, refused my invitation to go for a walk.
Martha leaned back and looked up at me. “But Miss Thing, they think we're monkeys or something. Just look at them. No, my dear, I'm counting on Tito to keep his people outside and I swear Miss Fine Thing will stay inside.”
Ethel laughed and agreed with Martha. “They think we're in a cage. I wouldn't be surprised if they threw peanuts at us.”
Ned warned me, “I don't think that's the smartest thing you could do. Look at those silver teeth. Those people might start thinking you're a chocolate doll and eat you up. Stay here in the hotel. I'll play you some tonk and buy you a slivovitz.”
I hadn't taken Serbo-Croatian lessons just to try out the language on hotel staff who wouldn't even pass the time of day. I walked out of the hotel.
People crowded around me. Short, stocky peasants from the country wore pointed, knitted hats and had eyes that would have been at home in Oriental faces except for their blue color. I spoke to them
. “Good afternoon. Please excuse me. Thank you.”
It took a few seconds for those nearest me to realize that they could understand me, and then a hilarity exploded that would have been well received at a Fourth of July Shriners' picnic. They shouted and pushed in closer to me. A small surf of panic started to lap at my inner mind. I held it off. I couldn't afford terror to freeze me to the spot or force me to bolt. Hands began to reach for me. They clutched at my sleeve, at my face. I stretched as tall as possible and shouted, “Excuse me, I am going through.” I had followed Wilkie's teachings attentively, and if the quality of my singing did not show a marked improvement, the volume at least, had certainly increased.
I boomed again, “Excuse me. I am going through.” The noise abated and the country people's mouths gaped. The crowd parted and I strode through their moment of fluster and down the street. I didn't dare turn to see if any had chosen to follow me. Mobs of any color terrified me, and had I seen the mass behind me, without a doubt I would have taken flight and been lost in a second.
When passersby saw me, they stiffened in their tracks as if I were a fairy queen or an evil witch who had the power to suspend their mobility.
I walked into a small store which sold musical instruments. The salesman took one look at me and rushed back to a draped doorway. He shouted, “Come and see this!” Then, as if I had not heard and seen his action, he dressed his face in the universal sales-pitch smile and asked, “How are you? Good morning. May I help you?” He jerked his face away and toward the door again. “Come. Come now.” Then back to me with a courteous manner.
