Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  In February, Miriam asked me to escort her to the Grammy Awards, held that year at the Hotel Astor in New York City. It was a big night for the Beatles, who won Best Performance by a Vocal Group, and Barbra Streisand, who won Best Vocal Performance, Female for “People.” Miriam spotted Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lucille. Armstrong had won Best Male Vocal Performance for “Hello Dolly.” She introduced me to the couple. I finally had a chance to meet one of the people who had first sparked my passion for music. I must have talked him to death about how his trumpet made the Huddleston Jazz Band the envy of South African musicians because of the news coverage. Satchmo kept smiling. Here I was standing with the man whose banning from South Africa when he visited the continent had angered me so deeply because I had lost a chance to shake his hand in person and thank him for the trumpet. I had envied so much all those people I saw shaking his hand in press photographs. But now here I was, alone with the great Satchmo. It was more than a dream come true. The only thing I’ve always regretted is that I didn’t have my picture taken with him right then.

  He eventually got in a few words. “Well, lemme tell you sumtin. Lucille packed that horn and took it personally to the post office to make sure you got it.” I thanked him again. Armstrong just kept on smiling. I was so glad he didn’t ask if I was still playing his trumpet, although I suspected he knew the truth. Miriam also introduced me to Sam Cooke, Phyllis Diller, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Dick Gregory, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gorme, among others—once again, I was struck dumb in awe.

  I had come to New York as a bebop musician, hoping to one day become a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers or Horace Silver’s Quintet, or to play in Les McAnn’s group, but when I broached the subject with any one of them, the answer was always, “Hughie, why don’t you form your own group?” This frustration was lightened by Belafonte, who said to me, “Why don’t you play music from your home? Look at what it’s done for Miriam.” Dizzy Gillespie told me the same thing, and Miles Davis always said to me, “Hughie, there are thousands of us jazz musicians in this country. You’re just gonna be a statistic. But if you play some of that shit from South Africa and mix it with the shit you know from here, you gonna come up with something that none of us can do. Fuck jazz, man. You don’t wanna do that shit, ma’fucker. You know what I’m sayin’?” Bebop was at a crossroads, and Dizzy and Miles were both already experimenting with new styles. Their encouragement was a turning point for me.

  For the six months after my return to New York, Miriam and I were inseparable. We had candlelit dinners in New York’s finest restaurants, took walks hand-in-hand through dimly lit Greenwich Village streets. We went to movies, plays, concerts, awards shows, and banquets. One spring evening, while we were out having dinner, Miriam said, “Hughie, why don’t we get married?” I was stumped. We had a beautiful romance, but marriage however never entered my mind—I had not been expecting that as I thought that at any time Miriam might start to drift away from me as she had before. But somehow, this time, we seemed to need each other more than before—it felt urgent that we hold each other up at a time when we were both vulnerable. I was so desperately homesick, I’d nearly walked back into the jaws of apartheid, and Miriam’s near-fatal illness had shaken us both. Most of all, Bongi had never been happier than when we were together. The prospect of a family never felt more natural. I told Miriam I would be honored.

  I moved back into Miriam’s Park West Village apartment, and we made wedding plans immediately. But before exchanging vows, we had to purge the skeletons from our closets. I spent the next few weeks trying to break off my relationships, but I overlooked telling Susan Belink, with whom I had carried on a torrid love affair when we were both students at the Manhattan School of Music. Our relationship had rekindled in recent months. She was a fiery opera singer, and I knew she wouldn’t take my impending marriage lightly.

  I told Belafonte about our upcoming marriage. He didn’t say a word, but became visibly upset. He looked straight into my eyes with a big question mark on his face. I had always considered Belafonte a father, and was deeply grateful to him for having given me my first opportunities in America. As I was telling him about our marriage plans, I couldn’t help remembering the time he’d chastised me after catching me smoking pot with a group of musicians. Belafonte lectured me with the gentleness of Father Huddleston, but with the firmness and concern of a parent. He was right. Had I got caught smoking pot, I could have been deported and my future would have been sidetracked. But I felt that it wasn’t his place to advise me this time.

  The night before our wedding, Miriam and I had a terrible argument that almost derailed everything. She had waited until the last minute to tell actor Pernell Roberts their relationship had to end. She went to his hotel the night before our wedding to break the news, and didn’t come home until after midnight. I flew into a jealous rage. She said all they did was have dinner, but I couldn’t imagine it took that long to tell the motherfucker she was getting married. I was pretty sure they were having one last bang. We both ended up screaming at each other into the night, but the next morning our tempers cooled and all was right in our world again. That day, a few weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, I wore a black suit and my bride wore a white two-piece ensemble. The ceremony was held at Priscilla and Bob Bollard’s home in Stamford, Connecticut, with just a few close friends. We didn’t go on a honeymoon, but eased into New York’s social scene as newlyweds. Miriam gracefully saluted us one evening while she was performing at the Village Gate. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is my husband, Hugh Masekela.” Resounding applause, mixed with screams of joy, shook the club. The staff were especially thrilled because they had been there when I first started performing at the Gate, where Miriam had also performed early in her career. I stood up and blew my wife kisses.

  Miriam and I were settling into a nice family rhythm when one evening, a week later, the telephone rang. Miriam answered the phone. It was Susan Belink. Their conversation was far from pleasant. Almost immediately, Miriam started screaming. It was obvious that Susan was goading Miriam into an argument. I stood by her as she kept screaming at my ex-lover. When she finally hung up the phone, I asked what was going on.

  “Fuck you, motherfucker,” Miriam replied. “Don’t fucking ask me what’s going on. You have the nerve to tell me not to see or talk to any of my ex-boyfriends and then have the nerve to have one of the whores you used to fuck call our house and insult me? Put on your fucking coat. You are taking me to her house. I am going to beat the shit out of that white bitch.”

  I replied, “Zenzi, I don’t even know how she got our number. I don’t even know hers, or where she lives. I haven’t talked to her in months.” This was a lie.

  “Damn you, man,” Miriam continued. “The fucking slut gave me her goddam number and fucking address. She even said she was waiting for my ass. You call that bitch and tell her never to call my house again, you hear me? You keep your stinking dogs from my door.”

  Miriam dialed Susan’s number and, before the first ring, shoved the receiver in my face. “Here, you tell that bitch I’ll kill her if I ever lay my hands on her.”

  With a dry mouth, I whispered to Susan, “Why are you calling my house and insulting my wife?”

  “Fuck you and your wife, Hugh,” Susan said. “I was calling to congratulate you, and she goes off on me! I can cuss too, you know.”

  Miriam started crying and hyperventilating. Bongi came out of her room, asking what was going on. “Go back to your fucking room,” Miriam snapped.

  Susan continued, “You think you can just fuck me over and then abruptly go off and marry this bitch who has the nerve to insult me?”

  Before I could respond, Miriam yanked the phone from my ear. “Fuck you, you white slut. I’m coming over there and beat the shit out of you.”

  Before she hung up, I heard Susan scream, “Fuck you too, you black whore. I’ll be waiting for your ass.”

 
Miriam banged the phone down and screamed, “Come on, Hughie, you’re coming with me. I want you to see what I’m going to do to all of your fucking bitches who don’t want to accept the fact that you’re my husband.”

  I tried to calm her down, but Miriam had the door to the hallway open and was screaming so all our neighbors could hear. “Come on, motherfucker, let’s go.”

  I followed her meekly down the hallway into the elevator and out onto 97th Street. We were walking so fast, we looked like a couple of Olympic race-walkers heading down the Upper West Side.

  “I am Zenzi of Makeba, Ka Qgwashu,” she ranted. “We are the demolishers of anything that stands in our way. When we finish eating, we just kick the dishes away. She’ll find out who I really am today, this dirt of yours. I’m gonna beat her till she shits.”

  I was walking a few strides behind Miriam, and she would occasionally yell, “Come on!” while people gawked in amazement at the great Miriam Makeba. I was thinking to myself, We’ve been married for only a week, and we’re already on our third major fight.

  Miriam walked straight past the doorman and into the elevator with me on her heels. Before the man could say a word, the elevator doors closed in his face and we were hurtling up to the fourth floor. Miriam went to Susan’s apartment door and began banging with both fists. “Open the door, you fucking bitch,” she screamed. “I’m gonna show you. Come on out and talk that fucking shit you were talking on the phone. Come on!”

  I guess Susan hadn’t expected that Miriam would come to her building. A muffled voice shot back from behind the door, “Go away. I’m calling the police.” By now the doorman and Susan’s neighbors had gathered. The doorman pleaded with Miriam to leave. She finally relented.

  Walking back to our apartment, Miriam began to cry. When we got home, she became eerily quiet. All she did was play some Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington records. A mournful air descended on the house. Sitting on the living room carpet, Miriam began writing me a long letter. I went to bed with Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday still singing in the living room, “Am I Blue.”

  The next morning, Miriam was still quiet. She washed, dressed, and left the house. I said good-bye to Bongi, who was leaving for school, and watched her walk to the subway from our balcony. I went to rehearsals with my band, wondering where it was all going. That afternoon I read Miriam’s letter. She complained about her generosity and how she was always trampled on, my cruelty, her ill health, her late mother, and how she only had Bongi left as family; how everyone took advantage of her, and on and on and on. I really regretted not having leveled with Susan, but this was now water under the bridge. I braced myself to weather the storm.

  When I came back from rehearsals, Miriam was cooking up a storm, playing happy songs on the phonograph and friendly as ever—as if nothing had happened. Jean joined us for supper and stayed to babysit Bongi while we went out to a movie. All was well—or at least that’s what I thought. This would become the pattern of our marriage when we were together for more than a week at a time.

  When Miriam was happy, no one in the world could match her generosity, affection, sympathy, goodwill, charity, warmth, and humor. Her laughter would ring through the house, the gossip delicious and delightful, her impersonations and miming flawless, and her loving the sweetest a man could ever wish for. But when she lost her temper or was in a bad mood, she had the fury of an erupting volcano accompanied by an earthquake and a hurricane. Sweet as she can be, when Miriam is pissed off, the most advisable thing is to simply run for the hills and not come back until the storm has subsided and she is humming again, telling her funny stories and singing her happy songs.

  Dizzy Gillespie had just moved to Englewood, New Jersey, a short drive from the George Washington Bridge. This was after he had spent almost all of his New York days in Flushing, Queens. Dizzy was like a foster father to us, and I relied on him for all kinds of advice from music to every facet of life. Dizzy always had a solution to my problems, no matter how complex—he always had the shortest and simplest answer, embellished with crazy jokes and unbelievable anecdotes.

  Miriam, Bongi, and I were outgrowing our New York apartment. The African community, especially the diplomatic and exile population, was growing in leaps and bounds, and our place had become a home away from home for many people from these groups. Students, ambassadors, musicians, actors, writers, dancers, and activists, all felt a deep affection and love for Miriam. The civil rights and African-American communities held a special place in their hearts for her. More than that, people of all nationalities and every ethnic group worldwide recognized and loved her with a sincerity I have seen reserved only for a few very special people in the world. Miriam was extraordinarily special then, and always will be. But it didn’t make for a peaceful apartment.

  In February 1965, Miriam won a Grammy Award for the album An Evening with Belafonte & Makeba. Jonas Gwangwa mostly produced this project. In only her sixth album and just six years out of South Africa, Miriam had made it to the top of the music world, becoming the first South African to win a Grammy.

  A few weeks later, on Sunday afternoon, February 21, word spread like wildfire throughout New York City that Malcolm X had just been assassinated. He was giving a speech arranged by his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, when three black gunmen shot him in front of his wife and children. There was an outpouring of grief and anger by many blacks. The first thing I did was call Mburumba Kerina, because he had introduced me to Malcolm. He had already heard the news, and was staggered. All the African liberation movements had embraced Malcolm X even before he made his pilgrimage to Mecca. I never forgot the prophetic words he had spoken to me when we met, foreseeing the liberation of all African people.

  Around this time, the South African musical Sponono opened on Broadway to lukewarm reviews, and closed after a short run. About half the cast remained in New York and formed a group called the Zulus. They were hired by the New York World’s Fair as part of the African Pavilion. Caiphus Semenya and Douglas Xaba decided not to join the group, and with Miriam’s assistance they rented an apartment not far from our place.

  Caiphus never stopped lamenting over how much he dreamt of bringing his childhood sweetheart, Letta Mbulu, to America. Letta had been a member of the Swanky Spots, a teenage singing quintet that had captured the hearts of South Africa’s audiences in the Township Jazz concerts, and had gone on to play the parts of some of the children in the King Kong musical. During the run of the musical, Caiphus’s singing group, the Katzenjammer Kids, had featured parts in the play, and the couple became close to Miriam and me. After U.S. immigration granted her a work visa, Letta finally arrived in New York during the spring of 1965, and the couple moved in with us at Park West Village.

  Miriam agreed with me that we needed more living space. Dizzy introduced me to a real estate agent who found us a house across the street from the Gillespies, at 372 North Woodland Drive in Englewood, New Jersey, just across the bridge from New York. Shortly thereafter, the five of us—Letta, Miriam, Bongi, Caiphus, and I—moved out there and adopted a new suburban lifestyle.

  This was a wonderful period in my life, and is the source of wonderful memories. Caiphus and I worked on developing some of his compositions. At that time, his “Bo-Masekela” was a mainstay of my band’s playlist. It was a beautiful rhythmic ballad in the harmonic style common to the folk music of the Tsonga, Pedi, Venda, and Ndebele people, peppered with blues chordal progressions, a prominent contrapuntal bass line, and a sweet trumpet melody. There are very few recordings of mine that do not contain one or two of Caiphus’s compositions—I consider him one of Africa’s greatest composers. The basement became our music studio. We held all of our rehearsals down there and gave some jumpin’ parties that lasted into the early morning and helped keep the nighttime raids of the raccoons on our garbage cans down to a minimum. Often Caiphus and I would go for morning runs through the luxurious neighborhood and marvel at the palatial estates,
manicured lawns, and lush gardens that surrounded Englewood’s sprawling mansions. In the evening we gathered around the fireplace when Miriam was home, and the five of us would sing the songs she, Bongi, Caiphus and Letta taught us—ancestral classics that would have us chanting nostalgically through the night.

  I drove Bongi to school every morning. She was now attending the High School of Music and Art in north Manhattan. Letta started to rehearse for her debut engagement at the Village Gate. Dizzy, who had never learned to drive, would walk over from time to time, needing a ride. It gave us a chance to smoke a spliff, since Lorraine and Miriam were dead set against marijuana. Our rides were then naturally riotous, while Dizzy spun out an education for me in African-American music history, laced with his storehouse of hilarious band-on-the-road stories. He was a walking history book of black ghetto humor and lore, but his life also touched on the signature names and moments in his people’s musical history. His first band had featured Sarah Vaughan on piano, singing duets with Billy Eckstine. He told me that John Coltrane had just come out of his teens when he joined his band. He had stories about his State Department tours with a wonderful big band playing Quincy Jones arrangements all over Europe and Asia. In India he sat down with the snake charmers and got the cobras dancing to his trumpet playing. For me, his funniest story was how Cab Calloway claimed to have fired him for shooting a spitball in his direction, but according to Dizzy, he quit after refusing to continue babysitting little Chris Calloway. The little girl drove him crazy, and he couldn’t take any more. I would discover how right he was about Chris a little later. Strangely, Dizzy never talked about Charlie Parker. I once asked Lorraine about Bird. She detested him and never allowed Parker in her home. She thought he was morally bankrupt and a terrible influence on all the musicians around him. I suspected Lorraine’s venom might be the reason Dizzy eventually stopped playing with Bird. Lorraine was a staunch Catholic; Dizzy even had a private chapel built for her in their home. She had no time for diplomacy. She was a straight shooter, with the most hilarious guttural guffaw, as well as a fiery temper. And like Miriam, she also had an unbelievably generous disposition. We loved the Gillespies—I still miss them.