Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (17 page)

She half rose, crouched over the keyboard. There was a frantic determination in the position of her body, in the bend of her neck. She would get me back on pitch or there would just be splinters left on the piano.

Plunk plunk
—she was as loud as I—and I heard a low vocal grumble as she sought to overwhelm my voice into submission. I shouted, “Follow me and climb the stairs.” A thin but definite screech slid through my nose. I dropped my jaw to try to force the sound down into the back of my mouth where I could control it. The pianist was standing. Her brow was knit and her teeth bared. She was about to attack the piano for the final chord. I barged in, overtook her and in a second outdistanced her as I yelled “Love for sale.”

She flopped on the piano stool exhausted and in defeat.

I was just a little proud that I had gotten all the way through the song. Then I heard the sounds. There were gurgles and giggles from the theater and the muffled bubbling of outright disorderly laughter from backstage.

The flush of heat crawled up my face and spread through my body the instant I realized that I was the object
of derision. But I was, I told myself, the person who'd had flowers put at her feet. And I was the entertainer asked to take Eartha Kitt's role in
New Faces
. I was the dancer
Porgy and Bess
wanted to follow the fabulous Lizabeth Foster. And I was being laughed away just because I could not sing “Love for Sale.” Well, they need not.

“Excuse me,” I said, and looked over the rows of seats toward the indistinct shadows. “I understand that Mr. Capote doesn't like special material. And you've asked me to come out here to show you what I do. I am willing to sing calypso for you or I'd be just as happy to go home.”

Indeed, it would be nicer to go back to California. To my mother's big house and good food. To my son, who needed me, and Aunt Lottie, who loved me. Back to the wonderful Purple Onion where my friends would welcome me. The period between becoming a great Broadway star setting New York on its ear and returning to the family's bosom was shorter than the first intervals between the overheard laughter.

There was little sound from the audience. They clapped as if they were wearing furry gloves.

“Yes, Miss Angelou, sing whatever you like.”

I said, “I'm going to sing ‘Run Joe,’ and since I was discouraged from bringing my sheet music, I'll have to sing it a cappella.” Wilkie had told me that music sung without accompaniment was called “a cappella.”

If I was going home, I had to show them what they were missing, and that I had some place to go.

I gave them the special Saturday-night standing-room-only encore version. The one where I spun around, my body taut. The one where I yelped small noises and sighed like breaking ocean waves.

When I finished, the first applause came from the pianist. She was smiling and clapping so energetically that I surmised that I had rescued her recently endangered belief in the human voice. There was more applause from the audience, and this time it sounded fresh and sincere. I did not know what I was expected to do next. I stood still for a moment, then bowed and rather stiffly turned away.

“Will you wait backstage, Miss Angelou?” Tom's voice sprang through the void.

“Yes, thank you.”

Whenever I was embarrassed or felt myself endangered, I relied on my body's training to deliver me. Grandmother Henderson and Grandmother Baxter had drilled my brother and me in the posture of “shoulders back, head up, look the future in the eye,” and years of dance classes had compounded the education. I turned and walked to the wings like Cleopatra walking to the throne room (meanwhile clasping the asp in her bodice).

Backstage a few of the hopeful contenders tapped their hands together or snapped their fingers when they saw me. They grinned saucy compliments to me, probably as much for my own sassiness in standing up and talking back as for what they heard of my second song.

Saint Subber, Tom and Truman Capote came backstage and walked over to me.

Saint Subber said, “You've got a certain quality.”

Tom's praise was as generous as his manner.

Truman Capote spoke, and I thought for a desperate moment that he was pulling my leg. He said in a faint falsetto, “Miss Angelou, honey, ah love yoah work.” He sounded just like a rich old Southern white woman. He reminded me of a Countee Cullen poem:

Yet I could not detect a shred of superciliousness on his face or in his soft yielding manner. I thanked him. Tom said he would be in touch with me and I shook hands with the men and left the theater.

Outside I passed the line of people still waiting. They scanned my features intently trying to read the outcome of my ordeal and thereby prophesy their own. If I was triumphant it meant that success was in the air and might come to them. On the other hand, it could mean that I had just filled the vacancy that they themselves might have taken.

Theirs was a grievous lot. Ten or twenty jobs for two thousand or more trained, talented and anxious aspirants. Another Countee Cullen poem stated that God, should he choose, could explain why he gave the turtle such a strange yet lovely shell, why the spring follows winter, why the snake doffs its skin, “yet,” said the poet, “do I marvel at this curious thing, to make a poet Black and bid him sing.” And of all things, to bid him sing in New York City.

I thought of
Porgy and Bess
. Of the sixty people who sang and laughed and lived together, the camaraderie and the pride they had in one another's genius. Although I had not heard from the company administrators for three months, I had received cards from Martha Flowers and from Ned Wright. I waited around in my small hotel room and prowled my dingy lobby. I called Mother, who ordered me to keep my chin up, and Clyde, who missed me and gave
me news of Fluke's latest adventures. Wilkie reminded me that “In God I live and have my being.”

On a Thursday morning I received a note which read: “Miss Angelou, the
House of Flowers
company is happy to inform you that you have been chosen for the part in our production. Please come to the office Thursday afternoon at three to sign your contract.”

I shared the news with my family immediately and when I hung up, the telephone rang again. I thought it was probably Saint Subber calling to congratulate me.

It was Breen's Everyman's Opera Company. Bob Dustin said, “Maya Angelou?”

“Yes.”

“This is
Porgy and Bess
. We called your San Francisco number and were told you were in New York.”

“Yes.”

“We want you for the role of Ruby.”

How could there be so much of a good thing?

“But I've just got a part in a new show opening on Broadway.”

“Really? Oh, that's too bad. The company is in Montreal now and we leave for Italy in four days.”

There really was no contest. I wanted to travel, to try to speak other languages, to see the cities I had read about all my life, but most important, I wanted to be with a large, friendly group of Black people who sang so gloriously and lived with such passion.

“I don't have a passport.”

“We are being sponsored by the State Department.”

I thought about the school I had attended which was on the House Un-American Activities Committee list.

He said, “Don't worry about your passport. We can get a special dispensation. Do you want to join
Porgy and Bess?”

“Yes, yes.” Yes, indeed.

“Then come to the office and we'll get you straightened out. You'll leave tomorrow afternoon for Montreal.”

I telephoned Saint Subber and explained that I had been offered another job. He asked me if I would give up a new Broadway show for a chorus part in a touring company.

I said “Yes.”

My mind turned over and over like a flipped coin: Paris, then Clyde's motherless birthday party Rome and my son's evening prayers said to Fluke, Madrid and Clyde struggling alone with his schoolwork.

I telephoned home again. Mother was pleased and gave me a load of phrases to live by. “Treat everybody right, remember life is a two-way street. You might meet the same people on your way down that you met going up.” And “Look to the hills from whence cometh your help.” Lottie said she was proud of me and that I had it in me to become great. Wilkie told me to hum a lot, place my voice in the mask and always drop my jaw. And to keep in my heart the knowledge that there was no place where God was not.

I asked to speak with Clyde. Using a tack I loathed, I talked to him as if he was a small child with faulty English. He asked when I was coming home and when was I sending for him. His voice became faint after I said I was not coming the next week but soon. Very soon.

Yes, he'd be a good boy. Yes, he would mind Grandmother and Aunt Lottie. And yes, he knew I loved him. He hung up first.

When I called Ivonne she told me to stop crying, that Clyde had no father, so it was up to me to make a place for both of us, and that that was what I was doing. She said she would go over to the house as usual and see him and take
him out. After all, he was not with strangers but with his grandmother—why did I worry?

The past revisited. My mother had left me with my grandmother for years and I knew the pain of parting. My mother, like me, had had her motivations, her needs. I did not relish visiting the same anguish on my son, and she, years later, had told me how painful our separation was to her. But I had to work and I would be good. I would make it up to my son and one day would take him to all the places I was going to see.

I had been given a précis of the DuBose Heyward book on which George and Ira Gershwin had based their opera:

Porgy, a crippled beggar, lives in the Negro hamlet of Catfish Row, North Carolina. He is loved by the town's inhabitants, who eke out their meager living by fishing and selling local produce.

When Crown, a tough stevedore, kills Robbins, Serena's husband, in a crap game, the white police descend upon the hamlet to find the culprit. Sportin' Life, who runs the gambling and other nefarious money-making schemes, escapes into Ruby's house, but Bess, Crown's beautiful and worldly woman, is rejected by the community's women and is nearly captured in the raid. Just as the police dragnet is about to close in on her, Porgy opens the door of his hut and Bess finds safety. Porgy falls in love with Bess and she accepts his love and protection, swearing that she will stay with him forever. Crown escapes from jail and comes to claim Bess at a picnic which Porgy does not attend. Bess is sexually attracted to her old lover and goes away with him for three days. Porgy goes to look for her. When she returns to Catfish Row, Porgy is away and the local women scorn her. Sportin' Life courts her, gives her cocaine and
begs her to leave the small town and accompany him to New York, where “I'll give you the finest diamonds on upper Fifth Avenue.

She cannot resist his entreaty, his style and the drugs. She leaves with him.

Porgy returns and is told of Bess's journey, and against the pleas of his neighbors, calls for his goat, hitches the cart to the animal and sets out to travel to New York to find his Bess.

The naïve story is given dramatic pace by the birth of a longed-for child, a hurricane in which a member of the community is killed and a picnic where Sportin' Life tries to tempt the religious people away from their beliefs.

On Friday, breathless, excited and afraid, I arrived at dusk in Montreal.

I was met at the airport, and although it was too early for the cast to assemble, taken directly to the theater. Backstage, men shouted to one another in French and English and hustled around, pulling ropes and adjusting pieces of scenery. When I walked onto the empty set, all the shards of the last two days' tensions fell away. I was suddenly in the papier-mâché world of great love, passion and poignancy.

I was examining Porgy's cabin and the house where Robbins' widow, Serena, sings her mournful aria when the singers began to trickle into the back of the theater.

Ella Gerber saw me slouching upstage in the shadows.

“Oh, Maya, you've arrived!” She came forward. “Here's your script, your hotel and room number. A schedule for rehearsals. I suggest you watch this performance carefully and study your script tonight. You'll be rehearsing tomorrow.”

She said I had no dressing room because I would not be performing until we arrived in Italy, but she would tell the cast that I had arrived.

My fears that I had been forgotten turned out to be baseless. When Ella led me down the dressing room corridor, she called out, “Maya's here!”

Martha Flowers ran out into the hall.
“La première danseuse, elle est ici!”

Lillian Hayman followed smiling, saying “Welcome.”

Barbara Ann Webb grinned, spread her arms and made “Hey, girl” sound like “Where have you been so long?” and “Why weren't you here sooner?”

The three women shared a cluttered dressing room and I sat amid the costumes and the disarray of make-up, watching them prepare for the show. Martha was as delicately made as a Stradivarius. Her complexion was the rich brown of polished mahogany and her hands fine and small. She had large bright eyes. Her lips, full and open, revealed even white teeth in the dark face. She called herself, and was called by her friends, “Miss Fine Thing.” Rightly.

If Martha was a violin, Lillian Hayman was a cello. She was a medium-brown woman of heavy curves and deep arches. Her dignified posture caused her to be regarded as stout rather than fat, and she moved lightly as if her weight might be only in the eye of the beholder. She had a handsome
face softened by a ready warm smile. She was a dramatic soprano and the description was apt.

Barbara Ann Webb, a lyric soprano, was the innocent when I joined the company, and so she remained until I left. She was nearly as large as Lillian, but her curves were younger and more conventionally arranged. A Texan, she had an openness that reminded me of sunshine in movies by Technicolor. Her skin was a shade lighter than a ripe peach, and had she been white, she could have been a stand-in for Linda Darnell. Throughout ten countries and fifteen cities, those three women became and remained my closest friends.