Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (12 page)

I found standing still the most difficult of all his instructions. During rehearsal when I was introduced my nerves shivered and the swallows in my stomach did nose dives. I
would hear “… and now Miss Maya Angelou,” and I would race from the dressing room, down the narrow aisle to the stage and, immediately, without waiting for the music, begin: “Moe and Joe ran a candy store.”

“No, my dear. Still. Be totally still. Think of a deep pool.”

Again and again I tried until I was able to walk on stage, and, thinking of nothing at all—neither deep pools nor sailing ships—stand absolutely still.

Lloyd said I had to learn at least twelve songs before opening night. I plundered the memories of every acquaintance. Mornings found me in the sheet music shops and record stores, ferreting for material. By midday, I hurried to the pianist's apartment, where we practiced songs over and over until they began to have less meaning than words in a children's game. Afternoons I worked with Lloyd in my house. When he left, I selected some songs to practice in front of Clyde. Although I sang the cute, the humorous songs for his enjoyment and would prance around this way and that, he always watched me with a seriousness that would have impressed a judge. When I finished he would remove his horn-rimmed glasses and look at me speculatively and ask, “Gee, Mom, how can you remember all those words?”

Clyde had become a talker. He talked to me, to the family, to strangers and had long, involved conversations with himself. His discourses ranged over the subjects of his life. He had become a voracious reader, consuming books whole at nearly one sitting, then reliving the plot in his conversations. He read science fiction (he loved Ray Bradbury) and western pulp, his Sunday School lessons, Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems and animal stories and explained to all who would listen that he, Red Ryder and
Fluke were going to ride their horses to the moon and talk to God, who was an old Black man who played the guitar. Red Ryder was a Western character from books and Fluke was Clyde's invisible miscreant friend. Fluke made him laugh aloud with his mischievousness. He was able to do things Clyde could not do, and Fluke did them with impunity. If a lamp was overturned and broken, it was because Fluke was walking around on the lampshade. When the bathtub ran over and turned the tiled floor into a shallow pool, Fluke had gone to the bathroom after Clyde left and turned the spigot on.

Vainly I tried to explain the difference between lying and making up a story, but decided it was more important that Clyde keep his nonexistent buddy to lessen the loneliness of an only child. I liked to listen from the kitchen when he told Fluke good-night stories and when, in his morning bath, he laughed outright as he warned his friend against indulging in some troublemaking antic.

Francis, the dressmaker, took Gerry's (with a G) ideas and fashioned long, snug dresses out of bolts of raw silk and white corduroy. The gowns were slit on both sides from floor to hip, and underneath I wore one-legged pants of gay batik. When I stood still, the dress material fell gracefully giving an impression of sober elegance, but when I moved the panels would fly up and it seemed as if one leg was bare and the other tattooed. I wore no shoes. The total effect was more sensational than attractive, but having no illusions about my ability to sing, I reasoned that if I could startle the audience with my costumes and my personality, they might be so diverted that they wouldn't notice.

Opening night, I longed for one of two things. To be dead—dead and forgotten—or to have my brother beside
me. Life had made some strenuous demands on me, and although I had never ruled out suicide, no experience so far had shattered me enough to make me consider it seriously. And my brother, Bailey, who could make me laugh at terror or allow me the freedom to cry over sentimental things, was in New York State, grappling with his own bitter reality. So, despite my wishes, I was alive and I was alone.

I watched through a peephole as Barry Drew walked to the stage. He claimed that he was descended from two great theatrical families and had to live up to his heritage.

“And now, ladies and gentleman”—he rubbed his hands together—“this evening, making her debut at the Purple Onion”—he turned his best side to the light and opened his arms for the world—“Miss Maya Angelou!”

There was some applause, not enough to hearten but not so little I could deny that people were waiting for me.

I counted three and walked slowly down the aisle and onto the stage. I stood still as I had at rehearsal, and a dead calm surrounded me. One second later fear plummeted to my stomach and made my knees weak. I realized that I could not see the people. No one had warned me that a combination of spotlights and nerves would cause blindness. The aisle down which I had walked still lay open and unobstructed. I looked at it once, longingly, then turned to the pianist and nodded. And although I did not know it, another career for me had begun.

Popularity was an intoxicant and I swayed drunkenly for months. Newspaper reporters began to ask for interviews and I gave them in an ersatz accent, which was a mélange of the speech of Ricardo Montalban, Jorie Remus and Akim
Tamiroff. I was invited to talk on radio and sing on television. Fans began to recognize me in the street and one well-to-do woman organized a ten-member Maya Angelou fan club.

Later I met people who said, “I saw you dance at the Purple Onion.” I graciously withheld the information that in fact I was hired at the club as a singer, but the songs had many refrains and such complex rhythms that often I got lost in the plot and forgot the lyrics. So, when the words eluded me, I would admit my poor memory and add that if the audience would bear with me I would dance. The first few times I owned up to a weak memory, Lloyd Clark and Barry Drew frowned disapprovingly, but after the audiences applauded loudly Barry accepted it and Lloyd said, “Wonderful, dear, wonderful. Keep it in. In fact, you should dance more.”

I shared the bill with a strange and talented couple. Jane Connell sang scatterbrained ditties, while her sober-side husband Gordon dryly played piano. Their patter was sharp and displayed their Berkeley university background. When they left to join Jorie in New York's Blue Angel, a frowzy blond housewife from Alameda auditioned and was accepted at the club. She brought a wardrobe of silly flowered hats and moth-eaten boas which she flung around her thin neck. Her laugh, which she shared often, was a cross between a donkey's braying and a foghorn. She said she would not change her name because when she became successful she wanted everyone to know it was, indeed, her herself. The name was painted in large white letters outside the club: Phyllis Diller.

Without a father in the house and no other male authority figure in his world, Clyde fell under the spell of uniforms. He began to adore policemen and daydream about becoming a bomber pilot.

“I'll zoom down like this, Mom, brrr and blow their heads off. Boom, boom, boom.” He marched and clumped around the house in a poor parody of Gestapo goose-stepping He saluted walls and chairs and ordered doors to be “at rest, Sergeant Door.” He had become enamored of the Air Force and every evening at bedtime he waited in his room for me to hear his prayers and then to sing (he would join in):

Each evening as I left for work, the baby-sitter would say, “Our little soldier is bedded down in his bunk, huh?” I wished I could have cashiered her out of my service with dishonorable discharge.

I was dismayed, but I left him alone until I could decide on the best way to counter his sudden affection for violence. I hoped for divine intercession and bided my time. As his birthday approached he began spending time after school in the local five-and-dime store. He wanted a machine
gun or a tank or a pistol that shot real plastic bullets or a BB gun. I took him to the local S.P.C.A. pound and told him he could have an animal. A small dog or any cat he wanted. He wandered around the cages, choosing one dog and then rejecting it when he saw a lonelier-looking cat. He finally settled on a small black kitten with rheumy eyes and a dull, dusty coat. I asked the attendant if the cat was healthy. He said it was, but that it had been taken from its mother too early and abandoned. It needed personal care or the pound would have to destroy it. Clyde was shocked. I could barely get him and his ragged cat out of the building before rage broke through. “Mom, did he mean he would have to kill my cat?”

He was clutching the small animal so tightly I thought he himself might put an end to its miserable life.

“Yes, if no one wanted it, they'd do away with it.”

“But Mom, isn't that place called a place for the protection of animals?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He thought for a few minutes. “Wow! What sort of person would have a job like that? Going around killing animals all the time.”

I saw my opening. “Of course, some people have jobs that order them to go around killing human beings.”

The earlier shock was nothing to the sensation that caught and held him. He nearly squeezed the breath out of the kitten. “What? Who? Who kills human beings?”

“Oh, soldiers, sailors. Pilots who use machine guns and bombs. You know. That's mainly what they're hired for.”

He leaned back in the car, stroking the kitten. Silent, thinking.

I never mentioned killing again and he never asked for another weapon.

Leonard Sillman's Broadway hit
New Faces of 1953
came West in 1954. San Francisco, already the home of irreverent comedians, political folk singers, expensively dressed female impersonators, beat poets and popular cabaret singers, took the witty revue to its heart. Don Curry and I attended an early matinée. When Eartha Kitt sang “Monotonous” in her throaty vibrato and threw her sleek body on a sleek chaise longue, the audiences loved her. Alice Ghostly, with “Boston Beguine,” created a picture of a hilarious seduction scene in a seedy hotel lobby where “even the palms seemed to be potted.” Paul Lynde, as a missionary newly returned from a three-day tour of the African continent, and Robert Clary, as the cup-sized Frenchman rolling his saucer eyes, turned farce into a force that was irresistible. Ronnie Graham shared the writing and performed in skits with June Carrol.

I left the theater nearly numb. The quality of talent and quantity of energy had drained me of responses.

My family made plans to come to the Onion for an early show. Mother was coming with Aunt Lottie, and they were bringing a few old-time gamblers from the Fillmore district who never left the Negro neighborhood except to buy expensive suits from white tailors. Ivonne was bringing her daughter, Joyce, and Clyde. I reserved front-row seats and then spent a nervous thirty minutes waiting for them to arrive.

The adults had a loud, happy reunion in the front row. A stranger could easily have deduced that they had not seen each other in months or more probably years.

Mother's friends examined Clyde and complimented him on growing so fast. He beamed and threw back his already wide shoulders. Lottie praised Joyce for “turning into a fine young lady” and the conservatively dressed men who generally dealt the poker at the legally illegal gambling houses smiled at everyone and politely ordered drinks for the party. Ketty Lester, a great beauty who hailed from a small Arkansas town thirty miles north of my home, always opened the show. She sang good songs and sang them well. Phyllis Diller followed her and spread her aura of madness over the stage and onto the audience, and then I closed the round's entertainment. The older people were transfixed by Ketty's singing. She sang “Little Girl from Little Rock” and the Black people who all had Southern roots acted as if the song had been written expressly for Ketty to sing to them. From the rear of the club, I watched as they smiled and nodded to one another and didn't have to be in hearing distance to know they were exchanging “That's right” and “Sure is” and “Ain't that the truth?”

There was only a minute between the last notes of her encore and Phyllis Diller's introduction. Curiosity kept me standing against the back wall, for I wanted to see how my family would take to the frumpy comedienne. Black people rarely forgave whites for being ragged, unkempt and uncaring. There was a saying which explained the disapproval: “You been white all your life. Ain't got no further along than this? What ails you?”

When Phyllis came out onstage, Clyde almost fell off the chair and Joyce started giggling so she nearly knocked over her Shirley Temple. The comedienne, dressed outrageously and guffawing like a hiccoughing horse and a bell clapper, chose to play to the two children (she had four of her own).
They were charmed and so convulsed with laughter they gasped for breath, but being well-brought-up Negro youngsters who were told nice children do not laugh loudly they put their hands over their mouths.

I slipped into the dressing room, pleased that at last there was something in the show for everyone. Only Ivonne had appeared less than enchanted with the two acts. But then I knew she was waiting for me to sing.

I walked down the aisle to the stage, registering the applause and hoping that my family was not so busy clapping their hands that they were unable to note that other people were applauding as well. I stood quietly, looking out into the audience (I had enlarged on Lloyd's coaching and now took the time to select faces in the pale light). My breath caught audibly as I recognized Alice Ghostly and Paul Lynde at a table midway in the room. Their presence exhilarated me.

I nodded to the three musicians and began my song.

I heard the “shush” and “hush” from somewhere around my kneecaps, but kept on singing.

The “tsk's” and the “sh's” were coming from my family. I looked down and saw everyone leaning in toward Clyde.
His mouth was open and smiling, and then I heard his voice and knew why everyone was admonishing him. He was singing with me—after all, he had heard every song rehearsed a hundred times at home and now he decided to show me that he, too, could memorize the words. It might have been ignored if he had kept up with me, but his words lagged behind mine by at least one beat.