And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long.
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
You do not hear
My inner cry
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing
You do not know
I die.
When a larger society would have us believe that we have made no contribution of consequence to the Western world—other than manual labor, of course—the healing, the sustaining and the supporting roles of art were alive and well in the black community.
An incident that occurred years ago informed me of the power of African American contributions. I was a member of the opera company performing Porgy and Bess. I was the first dancer, very young, blitheringly ignorant. I never called myself first dancer, but, rather, referred to myself as première danseuse or prima ballerina. I sang the role of Ruby, but I sang it by heart. I had trained as a dancer, not as a singer, but I had sung in church, and so I had learned to sing, somewhat. But I was no threat to the singers, of whom there were forty-five and who among themselves had 120 degrees in music. There were so few places for black singers trained in classical music to work that the company could afford to get a person who had one degree from Curtis and another from Juilliard just for the chorus.
We traveled throughout Europe and arrived in Morocco while the company sent the sets on to Spain. Black opera singers, white opera singers, Native American opera singers, Spanish-speaking opera singers, Aleut opera singers, Asian … all opera singers are one people, much like New York taxi drivers. They’re all cut from the same cloth.
The singers were informed by the conductor that since the sets had been sent on to Spain, they were obliged to perform in a concert. They were ready. They had their portfolios, I am sure, on microfiche, jammed up in the heels of their shoes. They were ab-so-lutely ready.
I said to the conductor, “I’m sorry, I have no aria. That is not my field.” He was Russian with masses of Russian artistic temperament. He fell back two whole steps and clutched his hair and said in a heavy Russian accent, “But don’t you at least know one spiritual?”
I didn’t say this to him, but I thought to myself, Is grits groceries? Do I know a spiritual? I grew up in church. Sunday, all day, and every evening of the week found me and my family in church, and at all those gatherings we sang. So, of course I could sing a spiritual. I looked at him and said, “I will try to think of something.”
The other singers went out that evening and delivered beautifully the important arias in the canon of European classical music, and they were very well received. Near the end of the concert the conductor beckoned me onto the stage.
I thought of a song my grandmother sang in that little town in Arkansas. Every Sunday for ten years, I had gone through the same ritual: We would gather in church. Fifteen minutes after the service began the preacher would say, “And now we’ll be privileged with a song from Sister Henderson.” Each Sunday, my grandmother would respond, “Me?” Then she would take her time, look up at the ceiling as if she was considering: What on earth could I possibly sing? And every Sunday she sang the same song.
In Morocco, all alone on the stage, I sang her song:
I’m a poor pilgrim of sorrow.
I’m lost in this wide world alone.
I sang the whole song through, and when I finished, forty-five hundred Arabs jumped up, hit the floor and started to shout. I was young and ignorant. I had no idea of the power of this, my inherited art. I didn’t know what to do. I looked stage right and stage left at the singers who had always treated me as if I were a mascot because I offered them no competition as a singer. Every night, one or another of them would come out and almost pat my head and say, “Maya, sorry to tell you, you flatted the E,” or “Oh, Maya, mmmm, you sharped that G!”
But I looked at them now. I looked stage left and stage right, where they were crowded together glowering at me. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I have the glory …” They had sung Respighi, Rossini, Bach, Bloch, Beethoven, lovely lieder and lovely Britten art songs, and they had been well received. And I had sung what Dr. Du Bois called a sorrow song, not written by the free and easy, not written by anyone credited with being creative, and forty-five hundred people had leaped into the palm of my hand.
“Why?” I walked alone that night in Morocco, my first time in North Africa. I thought, Oh, it’s because they feel sorry for the poignancy of my slave history. I later learned that the people in the audience had no idea of my slave history. Why, then?
Great art belongs to all people, all the time—indeed it is made for the people by the people.
I have written of the black American experience, which I know intimately. I am always talking about the human condition in general and about society in particular. What it is like to be human, and American, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness—that darkness carpeted with figures of fear and the hounds behind and the hunters behind and one more river to cross, and oh, my God, will I ever reach that somewhere, that safe getting-up morning. I submit to you that it is art that allows us to stand erect.
In that little town in Arkansas, whenever my grandmother saw me reading poetry she would say, “Sister, Mama loves to see you read the poetry because that will put starch in your backbone.” When people who were enslaved, whose wrists were bound and whose ankles were tied, sang,
I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be …
I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be …
the singer and the audience were made to understand that, however we had arrived here, under whatever bludgeoning of chance, we were the stuff out of which nations and dreams were made and that we had come here to stay.
I’m gonna run on,
See what the end is gonna be …
Had the blues been censored, we might have had no way of knowing that our looks were not only acceptable but even desirable. The larger society informed us all the time—and still does—that its idea of beauty can be contained in the cruel, limiting, ignorant and still current statement that suggests you can’t be too thin, or too rich, or too white. But we had the nineteenth-century blues in which a black man informed us, talking about the woman that he loved,
The woman I love is fat
And chocolate to the bone,
And every time she shakes,
Some skinny woman loses her home.
Some white people actually stand looking out of windows at serious snow falling like cotton rain, covering the tops of cars and streets and fire hydrants and say, “My God, it sure is a black day.”
So black people had to find ways in which to assert their own beauty. In this song the black woman sang:
He’s blacker than midnight,
Teeth like flags of truth.
He’s the finest thing in the whole St. Louis.
They say the blacker the berry,
Sweeter is the juice.…
That is living art, created to encourage people to hang on, stand up, forbear, continue.
I suggest that we must be suspicious of censors who say they mean to prohibit our art for our own welfare. I suggest that we have to question their motives and tend assiduously to our own personal and national health and our general welfare. We must replace fear and chauvinism, hate, timidity and apathy, which flow in our national spinal column, with courage, sensitivity, perseverance and, I even dare say, “love.” And by “love” I mean that condition in the human spirit so profound it encourages us to develop courage. It is said that courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue with consistency.
We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use our taxes to su
pport street theater in order to oppose street gangs. We should have a well-supported regional theater in order to oppose regionalism and differences that keep us apart. We need nationally to support small, medium and large art museums that show us images of ourselves, those we like and those we dislike. In some way that is very important to us we need to see those we dislike even more than those we like because somehow we need at least glancing visions of how we look “as in a mirror darkly.”
Our singers, composers and musicians must be encouraged to sing the song of struggle, the song of resistance, resistance to degradation, resistance to our humiliation, resistance to the eradication of all our values that would keep us going as a country. Our actors and sculptors and painters and writers and poets must be made to know that we appreciate them, that in fact it is their work that puts starch in our backbones.
We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures are without promise and our present without grace.
They don’t know beans. Not even beans about beans.” Vivian’s face wrinkled with pity, anger and disgust. “Didn’t they have mothers? Aunties? Grandmothers? Were they raised in barns?”
She didn’t attempt to lower her voice, and I knew it was useless to try to interest her in another area of the supermarket. Near the butcher’s counter, where we were standing, the dark, cold air smelled of old blood.
“Here it is, payday. She’s got her or her man’s check, and she’s buying two T-bone steaks and a few pounds of hamburger, and the Lord knows what’s ground up in that mess.”
A young black woman who was the target of my mother’s tirade looked up and, raking us with a withering stare, abruptly turned her back. I could have hugged her. I understood her reaction completely.
Older black women can scrape the skin from one’s body by the artful use of particular words and a certain cadence in the speech. The process is called signifying, and has an African origin. Since the victim of the tirade is never spoken to directly or called by a name, there is no rejoinder possible except to roll one’s eyes, purse one’s lips and shrug the shoulders in a way to suggest Shoo fly, don’t bother me.
“That’s why I want to open a cooking school—she could be my first student. I would show her that it’s better to buy a whole roast, cut it into steaks and sprinkle that meat with tenderizer and garlic powder. Huh, she’d save money and have food so good her husband would want to go to work on Sunday.” Mother directed her speech to me, but I watched the woman and caught her smiling.
“I could show her how to turn turkey wings into a dish so good it would make a rabbit hug a hound and make a preacher lay his Bible down.”
The woman turned, looked at my mother and grinned broadly. She said, “Well, I sure want to know how to do that.”
My mother had the gall to look surprised. “I beg your pardon.” The woman said nothing, but continued smiling. Mother said, “Oh, you must have overheard me talking to my daughter. This is my daughter, Maya. What’s your name?”
“Ophelia.” She offered her hand. “Yes, ma’am, I heard you talking about steak and turkey wings. I love turkey, but I’ve never learned how to cook turkey wings.”
Mother was still holding the woman’s hand when she turned to me. “Baby, you get the sausage and a nice plump roaster. I’m going to buy this young woman a cup of coffee over at that counter.”
She smiled at me, at the woman, at the world and at life, and said, “Come on, Ophelia, I’m going to tell you some home truths.”
I watched as Ophelia trailed after my mother, who was still holding her hand.
Many people are graduated from teacher-training academies, but one has to have a calling to become a true teacher. And above all things, one needs a bounty of courage.
The calling informs the teacher that her knowledge is needed in new uncharted areas, and the courage makes the teacher dare the journey. My mother had both.
During the sixties an acquaintance of mine left her home in Mississippi. Left her family and church and social groups. Left her choir and suitors, assured by her uncommon good looks that she would find the truly high life in the big city.
She moved to Chicago, found a menial job and a very small room. To her dismay, no one took particular notice of her, because there were prettier girls who were also wittier and who dressed more smartly.
Instead of trying to re-create the ambiance she had left, instead of trying to build a circle of family friends, instead of trying to find a church and join the choir, she went to singles bars, and with a sad desperation searched and found company that she would take back to her pitiful room and keep overnight at any cost.
I met her at a Chicago club where she was a regular. I had a two-week contract to sing at Mr. Kelly’s, and despite my debut nerves, I noticed her on the first night.
Her clothes were too tight, her makeup too heavy, and she clapped too loudly, laughed too often, and there was a pathetic eagerness hanging about her. We met on the third night, and on the fourth night she told me her story. It sobered and saddened me. I asked why she didn’t go home. She said her relatives had died and no one else in town wanted her.
In the biblical story, the prodigal son risked and for a time lost everything he had because of an uncontrollable hunger for company. First, he asked for and received his inheritance, not caring that his father, from whom he would normally inherit, was still alive; not considering that by demanding his portion, he might be endangering the family’s financial position. The parable relates that after he took his fortune, he went off into a far country and there he found company. Wasteful living conquered his loneliness and riotous companions conquered his restlessness. For a while he was fulfilled, but he lost favor in the eyes of his friends. As his money began to disappear he began to slip down that steep road to social oblivion.
His condition became so reduced that he began to have to feed the hogs. Then it further worsened until he began to eat with the hogs. It is never lonesome in Babylon. Of course, one needs to examine who—or in the prodigal son’s case, what—he has for company.
Many people remind me of the journey of the prodigal son. Many believe that they need company at any cost, and certainly if a thing is desired at any cost, it will be obtained at all costs.
We need to remember and to teach our children that solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone, at times it is positively to be wished for.
It is in the interludes between being in company that we talk to ourselves. In the silence we listen to ourselves. Then we ask questions of ourselves. We describe ourselves to ourselves, and in the quietude we may even hear the voice of God.
These thoughts are dedicated to the children who will come to maturity in the twenty-first century.
Their charge will be to eliminate warfare, promote equality, exile disease, establish justice and increase joy. In fact, to make this a perfect world. A partial listing of those I know and love includes:
Elliott Jones Devin Williams
Latasha Payne Johnson Alandra Hawkins
Dori Colly Jurel Hawkins
Shannon Fulcher Kenya Christina Garris
Asia Simpson Christopher Johnson
Stevie Jones Sharpe Patrick Johnson
Brianna Elizabeth Lear Talisha Potts
Madeline Rose Lear Christopher MacRae
Tabari Mabon Sean MacRae
Devyn LaCamera Mark MacRae
Anthony Fulcher Akeem Jamal Johnson
Miles Loomis George Two Rogers
Dante Glenn The Shestack Children
Naima Muhammad Benjamin Lear
Travis Thompson Jasmin Andrews
Monique Kelley Jackie Robert Kelley, Jr.
Ashley McPherson Danielle McPherson
Andrea McPherson
AND ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD
BANTAM BOOKS BY MAYA ANGELOU
Ask your bookseller for those that you have missed
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
The Heart of a Woman
Maya Angelon: Poems
I Shall Not Be Moved
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maya Angelou, author of the bestselling Even the Stars Look Lonesome, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now and the Oprah Book Club selection The Heart of a Woman, has also written five collections of poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water fore I Diiie; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well; And Still I Rise; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? and I Shall Not Be Moved, as well as On the Pulse of Morning, which was read by her at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton on January 20, 1993. In theater, she produced, directed and starred in Cabaret for Freedom in collaboration with Godfrey Cambridge at New York’s Village Gate, starred in Genet’s The Blacks at the St. Mark’s Playhouse and adapted Sophocles’ Ajax, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1974. In film and television, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia and wrote and produced a ten-part TV series on African traditions in American life. In the sixties, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she became Northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1975 she received the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in communications. She has received numerous honorary degrees, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year and by President Gerald R. Ford to the American Revolution Bicentennial Advisory Council. She is on the board of trustees of the American Film Institute. One of the few female members of the Directors Guild, Angelou is the author of the television screenplays I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters. Most recently, she wrote lyrics for the musical King: Drum Major for Love and was both host and writer for the series of documentaries Maya Angelou’s America: A Journey of the Heart, along with Guy Johnson. Angelou is currently Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.