Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (18 page)

That first night the chatter in the dressing room wound down and there was a knock at the door.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“O.K.,” Lillian shouted.

I had heard the announcement of “Half-hour” earlier, but none of the women responded. Now Martha turned away from the mirror and her eyes glazed, began to sing “Do re me fa sol la ti do.” I didn't know whether I was expected to say something, then Lillian also dropped her interest in our conversation and an unseeing look came into her eyes, she stretched her lips in a taut, false smile and holding her teeth closed, yelped “Ye, ya, yo, you.” Barbara Ann stood and began to sway slowly from side to side. She started to lower and raise her jaw and then sang “Woooo Woooooo.”

They took no notice of me, but I couldn't do the same with them. I had never been so close to trained singers and the reverberations shook in my ears. I left the room and walked down the corridor to find my place in the wings. Sounds came out of each door I passed. One baritone
roared like a wounded moose, another wailed like a freight train on a stormy night. The tenors yelped in high screeches. There were whines and growls and the siren of an engine on its way to a four-alarm fire. Grunts overlapped the high-pitched “ha ha ho ho's” and the total cacophony tickled me; I could have laughed outright. These exquisite singers who would soon stand on the stage delivering the most lovely and liquid tones had first to creak like rusty scissors and wail like banshees. I remembered that before I could lift my torso and allow my arms to wave as if suspended in water, I had to bend up and down, sticking my behind in the air, plié and relevé until my muscles ached, arch-roll and contract and release until my body begged for deliverance. The singers were not funny They were working. Preparation is rarely easy and never beautiful. That was the first of many lessons
Porgy and Bess
taught me.

I sat on a stool in the wings and watched the singers respond to the stage manager's shouted “Places, please. Places.” They moved directly to their positions in
Porgy's
world. There were a few whispers as the lights began their slow descent to black.

There was applause from in front of the curtain and the lively overture of Gershwin's opera swelled onto the stage. The curtain began sliding open and pastel lights illuminated the set. A group of men, downstage left, were involved in a crap game; some knelt, others mimed throwing dice. Then Ned Wright, as Robbins, threw the dice and sang “Nine to Make, Come Nine.” The pure tenor line lifted and held in the air for a second, and in a rush the pageant began.

The sopranos and tenors, bassos and baritones, acted as
if they were indeed the poverty-stricken Southern Negroes whose lives revolved around the dirt road encampment of Catfish Row. They sang and listened, then harmonized with each other's tones so closely that the stage became a wall of music without a single opening unfilled.

Their self-hypnotism affected the audience and overwhelmed me. I cried for Robbins' poor widow, Serena, who sang the mournful aria “My Man's Gone Now.” Helen Thigpen, a neat little quail of a woman, sang the role with a conviction that burdened the soul. Irene Williams sang Bess, sassily tossing her hips as effortlessly as she flung the notes into the music of the orchestra. Leslie Scott, handsome and as private as an African mask, sang Porgy and in a full, rich baritone. When the first act was over, the audience applauded long and loudly, and I found myself drenched with perspiration and exhausted.

The singers, on the other hand, seemed to step out of the roles as easily as one kicks off too large slippers. They passed me in the wings on their way to the dressing rooms chattering about packing and whether they ought to buy more clothes in Montreal for the European trip.

I didn't like their frivolity. It seemed as if they were being disloyal to the great emotions they had sung about and aroused in me. It wasn't pleasant to discover they were only playing parts. I wanted them to walk offstage wrapped in drama, trailing wisps of tragedy. Instead, Martha came through a parting in the backdrop curtain. Her dark face split in a smile.

“Hey, girl. How do you like it?”

She would not have understood had I said I loved the singing but felt betrayed by the singers.

I said, “I love it.”

“Is this the first time you've watched an opera from backstage?” I told her it was.

The final act was more astounding than the first. I knew now that the actors were not wholly involved in their roles because I had seen the alacrity with which they shuffled off their characters, and yet they caught me again and wove me deftly into the pattern of the play.

The audience jumped to their feet, shouting “Bravo” and clapping their hands, and the company bowed ensemble. Then the chorus members began to peel off the long double lines, leaving a neat arrangement of principal actors, and the audience thundered its approval.

Backstage after the final curtain, singers, stage hands, administrators acted as if the play had never been. The moods they had created, the tears they had wept so copiously and the joy they had reveled in were forgotten.

I wondered if I would make any real friendships or, to be more precise, I doubted that people who could be so emotionally casual had the ability, desire or need to make friendships.

Billy Johnson told me I was expected at the theater the next afternoon for rehearsal. He asked if I could sight-sing and I answered no. Wilkie had encouraged me to study solfeggio so that I would be able to pick up a piece of sheet music and read it as naturally as one reads a newspaper, but I hadn't had the time. Johnson, a prematurely balding white man from Oklahoma, said we'd work it out. That I didn't really have much to learn.

I was assigned to the hotel where Martha and Lillian stayed and we sat late into the night telling our life stories. Martha was the daughter of a preacher in North Carolina. Lillian was choir director of a large church in Jamaica, Long
Island. My grandmother had been Mother of the CM.E. Church in Stamps, Arkansas, so we shared a common religious background.

Rehearsal wasn't as frightening as I had expected. Once Billy Johnson was convinced that the company administrators had actually hired a singer who couldn't read music, he took the situation in hand.

He sat at the piano and with one hand played my part. Having been surrounded by the group of highly trained, talented singers, it would be understandable if he had come to believe that not only could all Negroes sing, but they could all sing opera and had perfect pitch. He barely covered his shock at finding that I didn't have a good ear.

His accent was Southern and as refined as oil of winter-green.

“Well, no, Maya, that's not quite it. Close, but not quite.” He played the air again, his fingers stroking the keys daintily. “It's more like this.”

After an hour, during which I sang the same tune over and over again, he surrendered gracefully.

“I think you're going to have to put in some work on this before you open with us in Venice.”

In the dance sequence I was all right. The rhythm was complex, but I seemed to hear it easily and I danced it freely. Robert Breen had explained that he didn't want the piece to look choreographed. The dancer had to appear so bewitched by the music that she abandoned herself in a glory of dance. I surrendered to the music and allowed it to fashion my performance.

For three days I rehearsed in the afternoons and observed the company from the wings at night. But mornings I spent walking the clean streets of Montreal and listening to the foreign accents and looking at the people.

Among the many perversities in American race relations is the fact that Blacks do not relish looking closely at whites. After hundreds of years of being the invisible people ourselves, as soon as many of us have achieved economic security we try to force whites into nonexistence by ignoring them.

Montreal provided me with my first experience of looking freely at whites. The underground railroad had had Canada as its final destination, and slaves had created a powerful liturgy praising Canada which was sung all over the world. Spirituals abounded with references to the Biblical body of water, the river Jordan. I had been told that Jordan, in our music, meant the Mississippi or the Arkansas or the Ohio River and the stated aim to get to Canaan land was the slave's way of saying he longed to go to Canada, and freedom.

Therefore, Canadians were exempt from many Blacks' rejection of whites. They were another people. I observed their clean streets and the fact that their faces did not tighten when they saw me. The atmosphere was comfortable
enough to allow me to try my recently learned French words. Sometimes I was understood.

The hotel lobby looked like a train station. Two children, sixty adults with their suitcases, coats, umbrellas, hats and other paraphernalia were trying to check out and board the two buses that were to take them to the airport.

A scene was played out which I was to see repeated in the capitals of Europe and North Africa. Remaining hotel guests were astounded by the horde of colorful people queuing up to windows, shouting across lines to each other, laughing at the joy of travel and the promise of Europe.

The stars of the company sparkled and attracted. Earl Jackson, our second Sportin' Life, had just joined the troupe when I arrived in Montreal. His wardrobe was as new to the old members as it was to me. He was not a trained singer and the gossip was that he had been hired from the streets of Chicago because he had firsthand information of the role he was to play. He wore a snappy, flashy suit and his hair was as black and slick as his pointy shoes. He knew he was handsome, and because he did not yet belong to any clique, he stood aloof and haughty, as if he were the absolute center of the universe and we were inconsequential people on the periphery.

Leslie Scott dressed expensively and behaved like a classic baritone. His fitted coat had a Persian lamb collar, which was accented by a cashmere scarf. He was a star and made no attempt to play it down.

The women who sang Bess were unfailingly and dramatically attractive. Martha was perfectly made-up and dressed in her dainty coat of many colors; Gloria Davy, tall and Black, held her strangely Oriental beauty contained in
distant impassivity. Irene Williams, golden and cheerful, looked as much like Bess in a hotel lobby as she did on the stage. John McCurry, who sang the role of Crown, was six foot six, two hundred and fifty pounds—a booming bass-baritone and the color of a ripe Satsuma plum. His wife was little and as white as he was black. She spoke softly and seldom. Because of the disparity in size, and color, they were called secretly Jack and Jane Sprat.

Most of the tenors who had visited Europe on an earlier tour and had the temperament of their vocal range, wore their coats over their shoulders with a studied indifference and carried walking sticks.

Eloise Uggams and Ruby Green were among the quiet, self-effacing women who looked and acted more like pillars of a religious order than singing members of a flamboyant opera company. Their male counterparts, Joe Jones, Merritt Smith, could have been church deacons, small business owners or solid insurance collectors. They not only didn't seem to belong to the dramatic group but appeared a little ill-at-ease with them in public. The sober members always managed to stand a little apart from the vociferous group as if they were waiting for another train going to a different destination.

The company descended on the airport like an invading horde of Goths on ancient Rome. Some people hummed little airs from
Madame Butterfly
or
Cavalleria Rusticana
. Others continued the conversations they had started on the buses in loud voices to override the general noise. At least five bags were lost, searched for, bemoaned and then found with cries of welcome. After processing about only twenty passports and fifty suitcases, looks passed between the Canadian officials as if they had rehearsed the scene: they
raised their eyebrows, shrugged, looked in another direction and waved
Porgy and Bess
company through the turnstile and out of their sight.

The airplane stewardesses found that their aloof manner designed to keep obstreperous passengers in check did not work with their cargo of singers. The sopranos complained that the plane was too cold; the baritones were certain that the overheating was detrimental to their vocal cords; the tenors asked for rock and rye, and said generously they would settle for clover honey and fresh lemon juice. Panic increased among the stewardesses in direct relation to the requests made by their passengers.

When the pilot informed us we were passing over Newfoundland, which meant one hour from Montreal and eight whole hours from Milan, our final destination, the cabin attendants looked dazedly wild-eyed. They withdrew to the front of the plane and remained there, refusing to answer the persistent demands for attention.

Ruby Green was terrified of flying, so I had asked to be her seat companion. I knew that I was always at my best when I was near someone in a worse condition than I. When the plane took off she grabbed the seat arms, tensed her body and, by will alone, lifted the carrier safely in the air. I spoke to her of California, and thinking of Wilkie, reminded her (and myself) that “there was no place God was not.” After a few hours she relaxed enough to join the conversation. She said that she had no doubts about God but had no previous knowledge of the pilot, and that throughout three years of traveling with
Porgy and Bess
her serious misgivings about airplane captains had not diminished in the least.

The stewardesses appeared near the front seats. They
began hauling out tablecloths and silverware from right to left as fast as possible. Once all our tray tables were down and dressed, they raced back to the minute kitchen stand and grabbed the meals. They handed them rapidly from right to left as quickly and deftly as a Las Vegas gambler deals a deck of cards. When we were all served they returned to their retreat without a single backward glance.

The Milan airport hustle differed only in language from the cacophonous noise of other airports I had known. I busied myself gathering my luggage and staying as close to my friends as possible without appearing to do exactly what I was doing—that is, clinging to their coattails for safety's sake.