A Song Flung Up to Heaven (8 page)

Eighteen

I knew there would be no peace for me until I visited the Audubon Ballroom. Until I let the grisly scene play out in front of me.

The dance hall and theater had been famous for decades. When I had gone visiting in the fifties, I often imagined Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston dancing the Charleston to the big-band music of Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

Time passed and took away the popularity of orchestra music, the big bands and public dancing. When I went on my nostalgic walk to the ballroom in 1967, New York City had begun the process of condemning the Audubon. Its meager reserve was realized from renting the premises to organizations, conventions, councils and committees.

On February 21, 1965, the Organization of African-American Unity had rented the ballroom for a fund-raiser. Malcolm X had been the speaker.

I approached the building slowly. The windows were dusty and the doors barred. As I tried to peer into the vast emptiness, the questions that crouched just beyond my conscious mind came full force.

Had I stayed in New York when I returned from Ghana, would I have been sitting with Betty Shabazz and her children?

Would I have heard the final words of Malcolm X?

Would I have heard the shots puncture the air?

Would I have seen the killers’ faces and had them etched in my mind eternally?

I could see no shadow inside; no chimera arose and danced.

I walked away.

Nineteen

I had sung in Jerry Purcell’s swank supper club once, and although I was not looking for nightclub work, I telephoned him. He invited me for dinner. We had been good friends, and I thought he might have some idea where I could find work. We met at his Italian restaurant, the Paparazzi.

He was still a big, movie-star-handsome man who walked as if he were heavier from his waist down than from his waist up. We greeted each other as old friends. I told him I was staying with a friend and that I was still writing poetry, but I longed to write plays and my money was disappearing faster than I had expected.

At that moment Jerry began to grow angel’s wings. He said, “I’m in management now, and I am doing well.”

He rose often from the table to greet customers and to speak to his staff, but he always returned, smiling. He was more affable than I remembered.

I said good-bye after lunch, and he handed me an envelope, saying that his office number and the name of his personal secretary were enclosed. He said I should find my own apartment and that if I needed anything, I should phone his secretary. He said, “Bring your friends here. Whenever. Just take the bill, add your tip and sign it.”

He sent a waiter with me to hail a taxi. I sat back in the seat and opened the envelope. The number and the secretary’s name were there, along with a large amount of cash.

For the next two years Purcell treated me like a valued employee. Save for the odd temporary office job and the money I made writing radio spots for Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, I depended upon his largesse. He didn’t once ask anything and seemed totally satisfied with a simple thanks. I did write a ballad based on
Portnoy’s Complaint
for a singer Jerry managed. And I wrote twelve astrological liner notes for a series of long-playing albums he was planning to release.

When I tried to explain how his generosity afforded me the opportunity to improve my writing skills, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I manage artists who make more in one night than you have ever made in a year. Yet I know no one more talented than you.”

His patronage was a gift as welcome as found money bearing no type of identification.

Twenty

New York was vigorous, and its inhabitants moved quickly. Everyone was always going somewhere determinedly. There seemed to be no question or doubt about their destination. New Yorkers knew they were going to arrive, and no one had better get in the way.

In order to join New York’s ebb and flow, I had to spend some time listening to the sounds, watching the streams of people coursing east and west and north and south. When I thought I had my balance, I dared to look for an apartment.

There are only so many times in life when our good fortunes and bad fortunes intersect. At such junctions, it is wise to pray, and failing that, keep the passport up-to-date and have some cash available.

The first few days, the city seemed an ice rink, and I was a novice wobbling on weak ankles. I continued going out each day to follow up on tips and hunt down newspaper listings.

I had wanted a flat in a brownstone, or at least a large apartment in one of the older buildings on Riverside Drive. Life offered me a one-bedroom apartment in a brand-new building on Central Park West. It was painted white, and its best feature was a long living room with big windows and a view of the park.

The place was clinical and so different from what I wanted that I thought bad fortune had caught me and I would be forced to live, at least for a while, in a cold and sterile environment. But life proved itself right and me wrong. Friends began giving me fine things for the apartment.

I was having dinner in a Harlem restaurant when a good-looking amber-colored man introduced himself. That is how I met the handsome Sam Floyd, who had the airs of a meticulous fop and the mind of an analytical scientist. He was one of James Baldwin’s closest friends and, after a few months, became a close friend to me. His quick but never cruel wit lifted my spirits on many lean and mean days. I invited him to my empty apartment. He said, “People think New Yorkers are cold, but that is only when they are prevented from helping people who really don’t need help. I have a small rug for you.” We laughed. After we discovered that we really liked each other, we spent time together at least once a week.

Sam was only partially right. As soon as it became known that I had an empty apartment, I began to receive good and even great furniture. A desk came from Sylvia Boone, who had just returned from Ghana. The composer Irving Burgee, who had written calypso songs for Harry Belafonte, was the most financially successful member of the Harlem Writers Guild, and when he heard that I had a new apartment, he gave me a sleek table and an upholstered chair.

Twenty-one

Dolly McPherson and I were becoming good friends. Obviously we never revealed to anyone how we met. Either or both of us could have taken umbrage, and perhaps we did privately. But there was no reason to be angry with each other. Dolly had no way of knowing that when the man was with me, he acted as if he were my husband. And I couldn’t know that when he wasn’t with me, I aged about forty years and became an old black American lady who let rooms.

Dolly and I liked each other’s ability to laugh at a circumstance that neither of us could undo. I met her family. Dolly’s youngest brother, Stephen, looked so much like Bailey that I could hardly speak when we met.

Stephen was my brother’s height and skin color, and was a brilliant research scientist. Like Bailey, Stephen had the wit to make me laugh at the most inane jokes and even at inappropriate times.

I wrote to Mother, “You didn’t give me a sister but I found one for myself. As soon as possible I want you to come to New York and meet her.”

Dolly and I started spending time in an antique shop on the Upper West Side.

Bea Grimes had the only black-owned secondhand store on Broadway. I liked that she was a big country woman with a colorful vocabulary and her own business. She thought of me as being a lot like her, except I had a little more learning and owned practically nothing.

She and Dolly and I often sat talking in the musty crowded back of her shop. She found out that I hardly knew the difference between a Meissen cup and a Mason jar, but she did, and sitting in the gloom, often with a drink in a paper cup, she schooled me on what to look for in ceramics, china, and silver.

“What kind of silver you got?”

I told her that I had no silver.

“No silver? No silver?”

“My mother has silver. I’ll be forty on my next birthday. It’s too early for me.”

Bea clucked her tongue and shook her head. “You ought to have bought yourself something silver on your thirtieth birthday. Even a silver spoon. You can’t be a lady with no silver.” She asked, “What you got sitting on your buffet?”

I hesitated.

Dolly said, “Oh, Bea, she doesn’t have a buffet.”

“Child, I’d better come around and see your place. I’m going to get you set up. You need some help.”

Bea sold me an Eames chair for thirty dollars and a nineteenth-century Empire sofa for a hundred.

Bea needed to be needed and in fact liked the needing. She sat in that miasmic atmosphere surrounded by goods that had belonged to someone else who must have found pleasure in preserving them, might have even doted on them. Now they were abandoned to the often careless fingers of customers whose greatest interest was in haggling with the store owner to get a bargain price.

“These young white kids nearly give away their parents’ and grandparents’ things. You want to see something? Someday I’ll take you to an estate sale. The heirs act like they don’t care how much money they get. Main thing to them is get rid of this old stuff. Make you think seriously about dying, don’t it?”

Thanks to Bea Grimes in particular and a host of friends in general, I was able to turn the clinical-looking apartment into a lush experience. Pale lilac silk drapes at the window, a purple wool sofa, one new pale green Karastan rug from Stern’s, a reputable record player and I was ready to show off my home.

The Harlem Writers Guild members, along with Sam Floyd, James Baldwin, Connie Sutton and her husband, Sam, and the artist Joan Sandler, came to party. In fact, Jimmy’s whole family came to party.

When I looked around, there were over fifty people in my suddenly small apartment, and they were having a New York good time. James Baldwin and Julian Mayfield and Paule Marshall were discussing the political responsibilities of writers. John Killens, the founder of the Harlem Writers Workshop, waded in with Alexander Pushkin. Ivan Dixon, the screen actor, on a visit from California, and M. J. Hewitt were sitting on the floor near the piano in deep conversation while Patty Bone, who had been Billie Holiday’s accompanist, played a Thelonious Monk tune.

Sam Floyd and Helen Baldwin, Jimmy’s sister-in-law, helped me in the kitchen. I used the make-do tip that my mother had taught me: “If more people come than expected, just put a little more water in the soup.” She believed it was all right to turn away people for cocktails but bad luck to turn anyone away from a dinner party.

The party finally wound down and released its hold on the revelers. The food had been enjoyed and the drink had been served generously, yet there were leftovers sufficient for the next day’s dinner and no one faced the grayness of dawn totally besotted.

Twenty-two

Jimmy Baldwin was a whirlwind who stirred everything and everybody. He lived at a dizzying pace and I loved spinning with him. Once, after we had spent an afternoon talking and drinking with a group of white writers in a downtown bar, he said he liked that I could hold my liquor and my positions. He was pleased that I could defend Edgar Allan Poe and ask serious questions about Willa Cather.

The car let us out on Seventy-first Street and Columbus Avenue, but I lived on Ninety-seventh and Central Park West. I said, “I thought you were taking me home.” He said, “I am, to my home.”

He started calling as he unlocked the front door. “Momma, Paula, Gloria, Momma?”

“James, stop that hollering. Here I am.” The little lady with an extremely soft voice appeared, smiling. She looked amazingly like Jimmy. He embraced her.

“Momma. I’m bringing you something you really don’t need, another daughter. This is Maya.”

Berdis Baldwin had nine children, yet she smiled at me as if she had been eagerly awaiting the tenth.

“You’re a precious thing, yes you are. Are you hungry? Let Mother fix you something.”

Jimmy said, “I’ll make us a drink. We won’t be staying long.”

Mother said, “You never stay long anywhere.”

Their love for each other was like a throb in the air. Jimmy was her first child, and he and his brothers and sisters kept their mother in an adoring family embrace.

When we reached the door, I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Baldwin.”

She asked, “Didn’t you hear your brother? He gave you to me. I am your mother Baldwin.”

“Yes, Mother Baldwin, thank you.” I had to bend nearly half my height to kiss her cheek.

Twenty-three

I was job hunting persistently. Gloria, Jimmy Baldwin’s sister, had told me that Andrea Bullard, an editor at
Redbook
, had learned that a job was going to become available at the
Saturday Review
and the administrators would be looking for a black woman.

I applied for a position in editing. Norman Cousins talked to me, and on a Friday afternoon, he asked that I write précis on five major articles taken from international journals and bring them to him on Monday by noon.

I said I would, but I was so angry that Dolly’s office could hardly hold me.

“Obviously he doesn’t want me for the job. If in fact there’s a job at all.”

Dolly said, “But you have had an interview with Cousins. There must have been something.”

I told her, “Maybe there was something about me he didn’t like. Maybe I was too tall or too colored or too young or old—”

Dolly interrupted, “Suppose it’s none of those things?”

“Dolly, when an employer sets an impossible task for a want-to-be employee, he does it so that he is freed from hiring that particular employee and yet can say he did try. ‘I did...but I couldn’t find anyone capable of doing the work.’”

Dolly said, “You can do it, I know, and I’m going to help. Decide on the five journals and I’ll ask my secretary to help over the weekend. We can’t let this chance get away.” She went on, “He’s going to have to tell you to your face you are not what he wants.” She began to move rapidly around her office, gathering papers.

I could hardly refute her statement. I knew I should never ask anyone to fight my battles more passionately than I. So I agreed to write the précis.

“International journals?” She called her secretary. “Mrs. Ford, I need five journals. Miss Angelou is going to do some research and writing tonight and tomorrow. I will also need your help on Sunday.”

The secretary stood in the room, somber and contained.

“Intellectual journals from five countries. Thank you.” Mrs. Ford left and returned with her arms filled. I was given
The Paris Review, The Bodleian, The Kenyan,
an Australian magazine and a German magazine.

The weekend was a flurry of encyclopedias and yellow pads. I sat on the floor with
Roget’s Thesaurus,
the King James Bible and several dictionaries.

On Sunday, Mrs. Ford came to Dolly’s apartment and typed my handwritten summaries. Dolly read them and declared, “This is as good as or better than anything they print in the darn magazine.”

For Dolly, that was strong talk.

There are some people who are fastidious about the language they use, possibly because of their upbringing. Dolly and I could be alone in an empty apartment, yet if Dolly said “hell,” she always spelled it.

Now she was still irate. She said, “If the editor had enough damned nerve to ask you for that much work in two days, you have enough damned nerve to write the pieces and deliver them in person before noon on Monday.”

On Monday morning I stepped crisply into the office of the
Saturday Review.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Cousins.”

The receptionist said, hardly looking up, “He’s not here.”

“But I’m supposed to give him some digests. May I see his secretary?”

“She’s not here, either. You can just leave them there.”

She never once really looked at me, but I had the sensation that she had looked and seen right through me. At first glance, I appeared a nice-looking woman in her late thirties, well dressed, carefully coiffed, with more than enough confidence.

But the receptionist knew that I didn’t belong there and she did. To her I was just another colored girl out of my place. Dangerously, her knowledge almost became my knowledge. I laid the pages on the desk and somehow got to the elevator as quickly as possible.