Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (27 page)

In the hotel we deposited our hand luggage then raced back to the lobby to look at the Africans. It took less than five minutes to discover that the bellhops, porters, doormen and busboys were black and brown and beige, and that the desk clerk, head waiters, bartenders and hotel manager were white. As far as we knew, they might have all been African, but the distribution of jobs by skin color was not lost on us. The sweetness of our arrival in Africa was diluted, but not totally spoiled.

After all, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the President and every photograph showed him to be brown-skinned. Darker than Lena Horne, Billy Daniels and Dorothy Dandridge. Without a doubt, he was one of us.

We sat in the lounge and ordered drinks. Ned had thrown his cape rakishly across his shoulders and Joe Attles had donned a new and colorful ascot to protect his throat.

Ned asked, “Does anyone want to go with us? We're going to look at The Dark Continent and bring back a sphinx.”

We all laughed and clapped our hands. Servants ran out into the lounge and bowed, waiting. We looked at them and each other. If we wore the same clothing no one would be able to say we were not members of the same family, yet
we couldn't hold a conversation. (Europeans and white Americans are not surprised to see their look-alikes speaking foreign languages; but except for meeting a few African students in Europe, we had never seen a large group of Black people whose culture, language and life styles were different from our own.)

Martha asked in French if they wanted something. One man answered in French that when he heard us clap our hands, he thought we wanted something. We learned that day, although we slipped up now and then, not to clap our hands at a joke, and that if we wanted to talk across the centuries that separated us from our brothers in Egypt, we had to use French, a language that was beautiful but more attuned to the thin lips of Europeans—it lacked the rhythms of Ned Wright popping his fingers and Martha Flowers swinging her hips. The knowledge made me sullen and I excused myself and went to my room.

The cast assembled for the evening meal. The large dining room was decorated with palm trees and paper ribbons swinging from slow-moving ceiling fans. Alexandria's playboys were present in evening finery, sending champagne to the women and occasionally to a man who caught their fancy. They introduced themselves from table to table, kissed hands, bowed and offered their calling cards. A few women in low-cut satin dresses ogled the male singers; when they netted a man's attention, their red lips split in a smile to welcome a pharaoh. It was sexually stimulating to be the object of such desire, even if the desire was general and the object collective.

I was so busy flirting and watching my friends that I had forgotten about my date with the doctor. He appeared out of nowhere and stood before me.

“Mrs. Angelos, may I present my cousin and cousin-in-law? They live in Alexandria.”

I shook hands with a tall, attractive woman and her short, pudgy husband. Maki asked me to join their table. When I excused myself from my friends, they raised their eyes.

We made small talk in a mixture of French and Greek. The tables were cleared, and a small band arranged itself at the back of the room. The men played Greek and Arabic music on instruments I had never seen before. When the belly dancer appeared, tasseled and sequined, our company exploded in approval.

“Yeah, baby. Shake that thing!” And she did. Her hips quivered and trembled and her breasts threatened to jiggle out of the skimpy satin-cup restraints. She bumped so hard she had to be cautioned, “Throw it, but don't throw it away, baby.” Her skin was pale brown and her hair straight, and we were all flabbergasted; no white woman we'd ever seen could move that way.

“Shake it, but don't break it.”

“It must be jelly 'cause jam don't shake that way.”

Later the orchestra played popular songs for dancing and Maki invited me to dance. He held me close and whispered heavily accented words. I gave the appearance of listening, but in fact I was looking around the dance floor for my friends. As busy as they were with their own flirtations they still kept me within sight. I had posed too long as Goody Two-shoes and they weren't going to let me slip without a detailed inspection of my fall. Unity and friendship when needed is reassuring, but sometimes can become an obtrusive and nosy intrusion.

I asked Maki if he knew somewhere else where we
might dance. He said he would drop his relatives at their home and we could go to his hotel. “There is an accordion player who specializes in romantic Greek songs. I would like you to hear him.”

At once the object of my life was to be in Maki's arms and beyond the scrutiny of my colleagues. I told him I would meet him in front of the hotel. I shook hands with him and his relatives and they rose to go.

Someone at the table said, “Going to let him slide, huh, Maya?”

I said I was going to bed—all the noise had given me a headache. They watched me leave, bemused.

Maki had a taxi waiting, and after we dropped his relatives at their house, near my hotel, we rode in silence for what seemed to be hours. Finally he ushered me into a mean little pension, which would have fitted well on San Francisco's skid row. An unshaven desk clerk handed a key to Maki, who said, “I had forgotten. The accordion player is off tonight. But let us go to my room. I will sing for you.”

I considered my options. I didn't know where I was. I didn't speak the language. I was attracted to him. I wasn't married or being unfaithful, for I had no lover. He wouldn't hurt me—after all, he was a doctor, Hippocratic oath and all.

I followed him to the room and his songs were glorious. Early the next morning he said we were only a few blocks from my hotel and he would take a cab and drop me, then return to his ship. I wanted to walk and look at the city. The frivolous night was over; I had enjoyed it. But I needed to think great thoughts about myself and Africa and slavery and Islam; I didn't want a white man at my side—in fact, I didn't want anyone distracting me.

Maki was reluctant to let me go alone. I said, “It's daybreak. And, after all, I am home.”

“You do not know this country, Maya.”

“I come from this country. I am only returning home.”

He said we would meet in two weeks, since his ship was to pick us up again in Alexandria after we finished our run at the Cairo Opera House. He said he loved me and I should think about that; he was married, but would get a divorce and come back to the United States with me; doctors made very good money in the United States and it was difficult to get a visa, but if he was married to an American citizen…

I walked out into a beautiful morning and struggled with a bitter thought. The very country that denied Negroes equality at home provided them with documents that made them attractive abroad. Mr. Julian and Maki, in my case, and hundreds of European men and women who tagged the coattails of Black servicemen and singers and musicians might have found them much less appealing if they claimed West Indian or African citizenship, but since they hailed from “God's country,” the “home of democracy” and the richest nation on earth, men were ready to leave their wives and women their husbands for entry into the land of plenty. Avarice cripples virtue and lies in ambush for honesty.

My footsteps disturbed a group of people wrapped in filthy rags and huddled in a doorway. Two small brown children awakened first; they punched and probed in the bundle of clothing until a man's head emerged. When he saw me he began bellowing and a woman sat upright. I was rooted to the pavement, watching the unfolding scene. The two children, joined by two smaller tykes, made their
way to me; the mother and father followed, dragging the tatters of cloth that had once covered them. They encircled me, their hands outstretched. The man and woman clutched their fingers together and brought them to their mouths in a jabbing motion, then they stabbed the bunched hands at their stomachs. They were hungry, but I wasn't sure if it was safe to open my purse. Suppose they grabbed it from me, what could I do?

My inaction called for drama from the adults. The mother grabbed the smallest boy and wedged him between her knees facing me. The father took the child's chin roughly and forced it away from the chest. I looked at the baby's face in the soft morning sunlight. It was a biscuit topped with dusty black hair and, like a clean dinner plate, devoid of meaning except for a thick white substance which seeped from the closed eyes and slowly descended the cheeks. The parents held the boy's head for my view as if I had caused the condition, as if I had poked out the eyes with a nail and now I must pay for my deed.

I fished out my advance from my purse and peeled off a bill. When I offered it to the child the man snatched it, and the woman flung her blind offspring behind her dirty skirts and grabbed another boy. They showed me his severed arm. The stump looked as blind and final as the diseased eyes. I gave them another bill. When they began to line up the whole family, I said in French, “I have no more money,” and turned to walk toward my hotel.

They followed, running beside and behind me. I opened up my stride, and the man ran in front, talking loudly, gesturing and screaming, as if I had just evicted them from their home.

Their noise awakened other beggars who had found
sleeping accommodations in doorways, on porches and next to roofless buildings. Their supplications, loud and cacophonous, merged; the adults wept and pushed crippled children in my path, ripping the filthy clothes to show the extent of the horror.

Egypt had stumbled under the imperialist and colonial yokes for two thousand years, and finally in 1953 achieved true independence as a republic. But success in gaining self-rule had not yet affected the lives of the poor. Much remained to be done.

I knew that and journalists in the local newspapers knew it, too. I had read magazine articles analyzing the depth of the problems of the country and I was distressed. But sympathy did not lessen my sense of guilt. I was healthy and, compared to the horde of beggars, rich. I was young, talented, well-dressed, and whether I would take pride in the fact publicly or not, I was an American.

The crowd followed me to the hotel where a large uniformed doorman spied me. He rushed to meet me halfway down the block. Then he began screaming and hitting out at the beggars. Occasionally his heavy fists connected and there was a thud of flesh on bone or bone on bone. I called to the man to stop, but he kept flailing his fists and arms until the beggars took to their heels, their shreds of clothing floating behind them like dirty smoke.

“Never mind, mademoiselle. Never mind.” His composure was so complete it seemed as if it had never been ruffled. My father had been a doorman in Long Beach, California, during the great depression. I wondered if he had ever had to chase beggars and hobos from the door. Were they Black? Did he feel no more for them than the Savoy doorman felt for his fellow Egyptians?

Martha was sitting in the lobby when I entered. She still wore the dress from the night before. It was impossible to tell whether she had just come in seconds before me or had sat in the same chair all night.

“Good morning, Miss Thing. First night in Africa take the headache away?”

I told her to take a flying leap and went to bed.

We stayed in Alexandria two days before moving on to Cairo, but I would not leave the hotel again and refused to explain my seclusion. My close friends thought I had fallen in love with the doctor and I accepted their teasing without comment.

We were driven to Cairo, and thrown into another world. More black-skinned people held positions of authority. The desk clerk at the Continental Hotel was the color of cinnamon; the manager was beige but had tight crinkly hair. The woman who supervised the running of the house was small and energetic and her complexion would never have allowed her to pass for white.

Beggars still hounded our footsteps and the audiences which shouted bravos at our performances were largely European, but I felt I was at last in Africa—in a continent at the moment reeling yet rising, released from the weight of colonialism, which had ridden its back for generations.

We toured the city and went en masse to the pyramids. We rode camels and had our photographs taken in front of the Sphinx, but I couldn't satisfy my longing to breathe in the entire country.

I went again to the pyramids, alone. I used the few Arabic words I had picked up to tell the camel drivers and guides that I wanted to be alone. I took off my shoes and dug my feet into the hot sand.

A Pharaonic tomb rose above my head and I shivered. Israelites and Nubians and slaves from Carthage and Mesopotamia had built it, sweating, bleeding, and finally dying for the mass of stones which would become in the twentieth century no more than the focus for tourists' cameras.

My grandmother had been a member of a secret Black American female society, and my mother and father were both active participants in the Masons and Eastern Star organizations. Their symbols, which I found hidden in linen closets and night stands, were drawings of the Pyramid at Giza, or Cheops' tomb.

I tried to think of a prayer or at least some dramatic words to say to the spirits of long-dead ancestors. But nothing apt came to mind. When the sun became unbearable, I took a taxi back to town.

North Africa made me more reflective. Other members of the cast reacted similarly to the Egyptian experience.

Ethel and Martha were invited to a private party and they asked Lillian and me to come along. A well-to-do Arab came to the hotel and when he saw that his original invitation had expanded to include four women, he ordered a second horse-drawn carriage. We were driven to a large, lighted villa in Heliopolis, and when we started to climb out of the buggies, he stopped us and shouted at two men who stood by the wide wrought-iron gates. They emerged from the shadows bowing, touching their foreheads and chests like extras in a bad Hollywood film. They were as black as the night which closed in on us.