Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (19 page)

The first part of the bus trip from Milan to Venice gave me and my colleagues no time to contemplate the Italian countryside. The driver was determined to show that not only did he know his vehicle and the roads, he was an artist at keeping the two in conjunction even under the most hair-raising circumstances. The bus—extra long and loaded with the entire company and all our baggage, and a guide who thought the language he spoke was English— skidded into curves, screeching like a stuck factory whistle; aimed itself at smaller vehicles as, growling, it leaped and bucked and swung around hills, holding on to the road by two wheels, one wheel, and then simply by sheer memory.

The guide shouted and gesticulated, held his upturned hands away from his body and moved them up and down as if he were weighing two large grapefruit, his head rolling from side to side.

When the bus finally entered a small town, children and dogs became feathers blown out of its path; adults screamed at the driver, who, keeping his foot on the accelerator,
turned his head and answered them shout for shout. We stopped at a square in the center of town and relief prevented us from cursing the driver, who stood by the open door, pride in his skill written on his face.

The guide led us to a restaurant and said, “blah, blah, Verona, blah blah.” The word “Verona” hit my ears like a clap of remembered thunder. Here was Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet. The home of the Montagues and Capulets. I walked away from the crowd and looked at the buildings and up at the stone balconies. I placed Juliet above me, imagined her asking “Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” I put her lover in a shadow across the square and allowed him to praise Juliet's beauty and to wish: “O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!”

I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood.

I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys, of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, into the bright sun of Italy, into a town made famous by one of the world's greatest writers. I ran to find Martha and Lillian.

They had saved a chair for me inside the café.

“Martha, did you know this is Verona?”

She looked up from the menu she was studying. “Yes, and it's only twenty miles to Venice.”

Lillian said, “My God, if we don't get a different driver, we may never get there.”

“Or if we keep this one we'll be there in five minutes.” Martha laughed.

I said, “But I mean, this is Verona. Where the— This is the setting of Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet.”

“We all heard it on the bus, Maya.” Lillian smiled at me as if I were an excited child. “The guide told us. Weren't you listening?”

Martha pursed her lips. “The Everyman Opera Company goes to the tremendous expense of hiring a guide who speaks an unheard-of language and moves his arms like a semaphore in a strong wind, and our prima ballerina doesn't even listen to him. Alas.” She went back to the menu.

Lillian looked at me and shook her head. “Maya, in the next year you'll probably be in the place where Hamlet died, where Othello killed Desdemona or where Cleopatra did herself in with an asp. You're not going to get this excited each time, are you?”

Martha said, “Dear, do let her have her day. After all, this is her first time in Europe.” They had both traveled with Gertrude Stein's
Four Saints in Three Acts
, and they acted as if they had chalets in Switzerland and villas in Spain where they took weekend visits. Martha continued, “Let me help you with the menu.”

I decided that day never again to let them know how I really felt. If they wanted to play it cool, then I'd show them how to play it cool. I asked for the menu and with my heart beating loud enough for them to hear it, gazed at the list of foods, written in Italian and in a script I'd never seen before. I recognized
uova
as eggs on the basis of my high school Latin and ordered. I knew that I must buy a dictionary
the next day and start to teach myself Italian. I would speak the language of every country we visited; I would study nights and mornings until I spoke foreign languages, if not perfectly at least coherently.

Neither books nor films had prepared me for Venice. I had seen
Blood and Sand
, the Tyrone Power movie, and felt I could walk easily among bullfighters and the beautiful señoritas of Spain.
The Bicycle Thief
and
Open City
gave clear if painful images of Italy after World War II. The Ali Baba and Aladdin's lamp stories, although portrayed by actors with heavy Central European accents, gave me some sense of the Moslem world. But Venice was a fantasia I had not experienced even secondhand. Our bus drove through narrow streets walled by tall buildings. Erratically we burst away from enclosures and saw open water where gondoliers plied their boats with as much élan as our driver conducted his vehicle. Balconies thrust above our heads; vegetable stalls and small shops jutted out beyond the pavement.

Across the square we stopped in a small plaza where there was a hotel. Tables sat out in front of a restaurant. As the company piled out of the bus and began the routine of sorting themselves and their baggage into individual lots, I stood looking at the black-coated waiters who were covering the tables with red checkered cloths.

A few had seen and heard the singers identifying their belongings in loud voices and they had rushed to the restaurant door to call to their fellow workers and Venetian customers. Men and women flowed out of the restaurant and onto the square, their eyes on the crowd of colorful Negroes who hadn't the time or the inclination to give them the slightest thought.

The ogling crowd who waved their hands in a kind of balletic concert were the first large group of native Italians I observed carefully. In Verona I had been too busy coping with my memories and the ancient romance and my own image to really look at the waiters or the other customers. But now, as I stood apart and had the opportunity to take in the whole scene, the Italian faces were contorted with what I took to be revulsion; I concluded that they had never seen so many Black people before and were frightened and repelled.

A tall, tub-chested man in a white coat, who had been standing with the gawkers, said something which brought laughter from the crowd and walked toward the bus. I headed back to where the guide was ineffectually standing guard over a raggle-taggle mound of suitcases and offering his arms and head and torso and garbled tongue as a sacrifice to the god who reclaimed lost luggage. The white-coated man searched among the teeming, shouting singers and settled on John McCurry who was bent double talking to his wife.

The man stood as if at attention. He spoke to John in Italian, then shot his hand out from waist level. Understandably, John, who had grown up in New York, jumped. The man began to wave his arms, and John, like most of the group who knew Italian from singing Puccini, Rossini, Verdi and Bellini answered him in the poetic language of opera. The man beamed. He turned to the people who waited in the doorway of the restaurant and shouted. They clapped their hands and started toward the bus, talking loudly.

In general, Black Americans do not take kindly to being rushed by a crowd of strange white men. John McCurry
was still talking to the man who had acted as scout, but the other singers saw the crowd advancing across the square, and we reacted as if choreographed. We drew in closer to each other, our bags and the bus. The movement was subtle, but it was made with a fair amount of haste. The two small children stood nearer their fathers, who began talking earnestly with their wives. Ned Wright and Joe Attles chose that time to put their arms into the coats which they had always thrown cape-like over their shoulders.

As the group of Italians neared us, their smiles became evident; they were welcoming us to Venice. Our tight group relaxed and the old breezy attitudes returned. We mingled and mixed with the Italians, laughing and shaking hands.

They crowded around John McCurry and shouted, thinking he was the star of the opera. Leslie Scott and Laverne Hutchin son, who alternated in the lead role, were not pleased. John kept saying, “
No, no, io sono
Crown.” But because of his size, his wide smile, large bass-baritone voice and probably his impeccable Italian accent, the new fans were certain they were admiring the right person.

Rose Tobias, who handled public relations for
Porgy and Bess
, stepped in to clear up the matter. She was a bright, young New Yorker, confident and pretty. She took Leslie and Laverne by the arms and pulled them into the center of the fray. The Italians were pumping John's hand as if they were priming a well.

Rose, still holding on to her stars, wedged herself between the Italians and John. She shook her head rapidly, causing her heavy blond hair to swirl in the men's faces. She pointed her finger at Laverne and then at Leslie, saying
loudly, “Porgy, Porgy.” She repeated the action until she was sure that credit went where it was due. She was happy because she had accomplished the task set before her. Rose Tobias was a success as our publicist, even in Italy. It hardly mattered that she didn't speak a word of Italian.

After I registered at the hotel, handed over my passport to the desk clerk and was shown my room, I decided to see Venice on my own. The company manager advanced each singer a portion of salary in lira. I bought a map, a cheap guide to Italian which contained useful phrases and a small Italian-English dictionary, and began my exploration.

The ancient buildings sat closed and remote, holding dead glories within their walls. The canals fanned in every direction from the pavement edge, while red and black gondolas slid along on the water's surface like toy boats sailing on ice. The gondoliers whose crafts were empty sang to amuse themselves or to attract customers. They chanted bits of arias and popular music and their voices pranced over the water, young and irresistible. I wandered, following the map, to the Grand Canal, which in the dusk looked black and oily, and with the lighted gondolas skimming along, it could have been the San Francisco Bay burdened with an array of Chinese junks.

I found the Piazza San Marco, and sat at a small table facing the square. I ordered coffee in my tourist-book Italian and sat watching the people in the grand square and the lights playing on the façade of the Basilica of Saint Mark and dreaming of the age of the doges and the city states of Italy which I had read about. The table I had chosen
was in a fairly empty area of the restaurant, but the space was filled rapidly. Voices, suddenly closer, burst through my reverie. I looked around and discovered myself hemmed in by strange faces. I was the focus of at least thirty pairs of eyes. They all seemed to be searching my face—my mouth and nose, hairline and ears—for something precious that had been lost. There was a bizarre sense of being caught in a nightmare dreamed by a stranger.

I looked at my book for the necessary phrase. The waiter came over. “I would like more coffee.” He chattered something back to me and nodded toward a group of men among the crowd staring at me. I repeated my request and he may have repeated his answer, because he nodded again toward the men. This time I followed his nod and saw three glasses lifted and smiles directed to me. They were toasting me. Surprise did not prevent me from returning their smile with a cool, restrained one of my own. I inclined my head and the crowd burst into laughter.

One woman asked, “‘St. Louis Blues’?”

One man sitting near me stood up and came very near my table. His black eyes were shining.

“Americano?”
He leaned toward me unnecessarily—his voice carried around the restaurant and out into the plaza.

I answered as quietly as my grandmother would have replied if she was trying to show a loudmouth how to behave. “Yes.”

His smile widened. “Harlem?”

I nodded again, because I knew what he meant.

He bent his knees and put up his hands in a professional boxer's pose. He jabbed at the air. Everybody laughed. The man withdrew from the position, and looking at me again, asked, “Joe Louis?”

I didn't know how to tell him I knew who Joe Louis was but I didn't know him personally. He repeated, “Joe Louis?”

I put both hands together and raised them over my head in a winner's gesture, and the crowd laughed and raised their glasses again.

It was amazing that the people were all so handsome. Those at one table motioned that I should join them. I only thought about it a second, then went over and sat down in a chair that had been pulled out for me.

Again there was a general noise of approval. As soon as I sat down, men and women at other tables pulled up their chairs. I put my booklet on the table, pointed to it and smiled. A waiter brought a glass and I had a sweet and bitter Campari, which I'd never tasted before. When I grimaced the people wagged their heads and clucked. I looked through the dictionary for the word “bitter;” it wasn't there. A man took the book and began to look for something, but his search was in vain. A woman held her hand out for the book, and when it was passed to her she riffled through the pages and also failed to find what she was looking for. I was given another Campari. As the book traveled from hand to hand we all smiled at each other and the customers talked among themselves. I was having a lovely time and didn't understand a word that was said except
“Americano”
and
“bellissima.”

It was time to go. I smiled and stood up. About thirty people rose and smiled. I shook hands with the people at my table and said
“Grazie.”
The others leaned forward, offering their hands and their beaming faces. I shook hands with each one, and walked out onto the square. When I looked back at the lighted café the people were still waving.

The year was 1954, only a decade since their country had been defeated by my country in a war fought for racial reasons as well as economic ones. And, after all, Joe Louis, whom the man seemed so proud to mention, had beaten an Italian, Primo Carnera. I thought my acceptance in the restaurant had been a telling show of the great heart of the Italian people. I hadn't been in Europe long enough to know that Europeans often made as clear a distinction between Black and white Americans as did the most confirmed Southern bigot. The difference, I was to discover, was that more often than not, Blacks were liked, whereas white Americans were not.