Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

  I said, “I'd like to buy a mandolin.”

  He interested me as much as I interested him. It was fantastic that he thought he ceased to exist for me when he removed his attention.

  “A mandolin? Certainly.” His eyes fled toward the back room. I grabbed his attention: “Here. How much is this one?”

  While he removed a mandolin, beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, children began to tumble through the rear door and into the store. They were followed by a heavy woman with a large, florid face. When they saw me they stopped as if they had rehearsed the scene.

  The woman directed a question to the man. He looked at her and answered but I couldn't catch the language. They all began to talk at once, the children's voices stabbing in and out of the deeper sounds. I continued examining the mandolin, strumming on it, turning it over in my hands to appreciate its fine woodwork. I ignored them and said to the man that I would like to buy the instrument.

  He interrupted the family dialogue and told me the price; I gave him the money. The family had advanced on me. The mother was holding back as many of the children as she could reach while she inched closer to me.

  I spoke to her. “Good morning, madame.”

  She smiled tentatively, but the incredulous look on her face remained.

  “Good morning, madame,” I repeated, looking directly in her eyes. If they thought I was a talking bear, then they would have to admit that at least I spoke Serbo-Croatian.

  Her husband was wrapping my package, so I continued, “How are you, madame?”

  Finally, her lips relaxed and opened and I saw the bar of metal that substituted for teeth. She placed herself between me and the children, then said, “Paul Robeson.”

  It was my turn to be stunned. The familiar name did not belong in Byzantium. The woman repeated, “Paul Robeson,” and then began one of the strangest scenes I had ever seen.

  She began to sing, “Deep River.” Her husky voice was suddenly joined by the children's piping “My home is over Jordan.” Then the husband teamed with his wife and offspring, “Deep River, Lord.” They knew every word.

  I stood in the dusty store and considered my people, our history and Mr. Paul Robeson. Somehow, the music fashioned by men and women out of an anguish they could describe only in dirges was to be a passport for me and their other descendants into far and strange lands and long unsure futures.

  “Oh don't you want to go

  To that gospel feast?”

  I added my voice to the melody:

  “That promised land

  Where all is peace?”

  I made no attempt to wipe away the tears. I could not claim a forefather who came to America on the Mayflower. Nor did any ancestor of mine amass riches to leave me free from toil. My great-grandparents were illiterate when their fellow men were signing the Declaration of Independence, and the first families of my people were bought separately and sold apart, nameless and without traces—yet there was this:

  “Deep River

  My home is over Jordan.”

  I had a heritage, rich and nearer than the tongue which gives it voice. My mind resounded with the words and my blood raced to the rhythms.

  “Deep River

  I want to cross over into campground.”

  The storekeeper and his wife embraced me. My Serbo-Croatian was too weak to carry what I wanted to say. I hugged them again and took up my mandolin and left the store.

  Porgy and Bess received the expected kudos from sold-out houses in Zagreb, and after a few days we moved on to Belgrade. We had been told that Belgrade was a city that was reasonably cosmopolitan, and we were all eager for the bright lights.

  The Moskva Hotel in Red Square was considered a large hotel but it could hardly accommodate our singers, administration and conductors. Bob Dustin, cheery as usual, announced that we would have to triple up, and that if we didn't want to be assigned bed space arbitrarily, we should choose roommates and let him know.

  Martha, Ethel Ayler and I agreed to share one of the large high-ceilinged rooms. Ethel had made fast friends with Martha and was an excellent foil for Martha's always sharp, often acid comments. Ethel would smile calmly and say, “Martha Flowers, you are a disgrace. Charming, talented, but a disgrace.” Martha would giggle and be coaxed out of her ill-humor.

  We had expected three cots in our room, but found one large lumpy bed, a very worn carpet and a single overhead light.

  “You mean this is what these people got out of their revolution?” Martha daintily picked her way around the room. “Someone should tell them that they're about due for another.” She wrinkled her pretty face in distaste.

  Ethel said reprovingly, “Martha, control yourself. Unless you want the NKVD to take you to Siberia. How could you sing with salt in your throat?”

  Martha laughed, “Miss Fine Thing can sing anywhere, darling. Even on the steppes of Byelorussia.”

  Our bags were brought to the room by a porter who didn't raise his eyes. We tried to tip him, but he rushed away as if afraid.

  Martha said, “Regardez &cciddle;a. Maya, you speak his lingo, why didn't you tell him we wouldn't bite? Of course; only because he's not cute enough.” With the mention of men, Martha and Ethel and I fell into an old conversation which had never concluded and was interrupted only by sleep, performances and forced separation on journeys. The value of men. Their beauty. Their power. Their worth, excitement and attractiveness. Were American Negro men better than Africans? Better companions, better lovers? Yes. No. Whoever had a story to substantiate her point of view told it in detail. Were white American men sexier than French or Italian? Yes. No. We told secrets to each other on trains, ships, in hotel rooms and backstage. I was never loath to exaggerate a tale to make my point, and I'm certain that some of the accounts that were told to me were as fictitious as my own. We were all in our mid-twenties, and given that my two friends had spent ten years cloistered in vocal studios and secreted in institutes of music and I had had fewer romantic experiences than most college coeds, our imaginations got more exercise than our libidos.

  Ethel slept in the middle and Martha beside the night table. She jumped when the telephone rang.

  “Who on earth, what time is it?” The telephone and Martha's outrage awakened Ethel and me. Something must have happened and Bob Dustin or Ella Gerber wanted the company together at once.

  Martha sweetened her voice. “Good morning.” She sang the greeting.

  “Mistress who?” We were all sitting upright in bed. “Mistress Maya Angelou?” Her voice revealed her disbelief. “And you are Mr. Julian? Hold on.”

  She put her hand over the receiver. “Mr. Julian wants to speak to Mistress Maya Angelou. At eight o'clock in the damned morning. Now, ain't that something?” The phone wire wouldn't extend across the bed. I had to get up in the cold and pad around to the other side.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Mistress Maya Angelou?” The question was asked by a voice I had never heard.

  “Yes. I am Maya Angelou.” I answered to a background of disgruntled noises and curious looks from my roommates.

  “Mistress Maya, I am being Mr. Julian. It's that last night I am seeing you dance. I am watching you leap across the stage and looking at your legs jumping through the air and, Mistress Maya, I am loving you.” The words ran together like dyes, and it was difficult for me to separate them into comprehension.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Martha groaned. “Oh, my goodness, can't he call you after the sun rises? Or does the sun never rise in Yugoslavia?”

  “It's I am loving you, Mistress Maya. It's that if you are hearing a man is throwing his body into the Danube today, and dying in the icy water, Mistress Maya, that man is being me. Drowning for the love of you. You and your lovely legs jumping.”

  “Just a minute. Uh, what is your name?”

  “I am being Mr. Julian, and I am loving you.”

  “Yes, well, Mr. Julian, why do you want to drown? Why would loving me make you w
ant to die? I don't think that's very nice.”

  Ethel and Martha were both leaning on their elbows watching me.

  Martha said, “Would he promise to die before sundown? Do you think he'll do it in time for us to get a little sleep?”

  Ethel said serenely, “Now Maya sees what her saintly lifesaving attitude has brought.”

  “Look, mister.”

  “It's being Mr. Julian.”

  “Yes, well, Mr. Julian, thanks for the telephone call—”

  “May I please be seeing you? May I please be taking you to one expensive café and watching your lovely lips drinking down coffee with cream?”

  “No, thank you. I am sorry, but I have to hang up now.”

  Martha grumbled, “Hang up, or down. Just let me go back to sleep.”

  “Miss Maya, if you're not seeing me, if you're not letting me see your lips drinking down coffee with cream, then today, I am sending you my heart.”

  Oh, my God. The woman who gave me Serbo-Croatian lessons in Paris was a Yugoslavian émigré. After my last class she told me solemnly, “Don't ever in the warmth of passion tell a Yugoslav that you can't live without him. You will find him, his trunks and his family at your door. Ready to move in and improve your life.” I had thought she was making a sarcastic joke, for she had said the best thing about Yugoslavia was that she couldn't return to it. When I chided her on exaggeration, she swore that what she said was absolute truth. That Slavs were passionate and so romantic they would gladly mutilate themselves to demonstrate their sincerity. And here this unknown man was threatening to send me his heart.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Julian. Please. I beg you. Don't send me your heart.”

  Martha said, “Tell him to send you his tongue so he'll shut up.”

  “Mistress Maya. It is that I am sending it to your theater, by hand, this morning. Good-bye, lovely legs leaping.” The line went dead.

  Martha flopped back on the bed. “Well, thank God for small favors.”

  Ethel looked at me, waiting to see if I wanted to talk about the phone call.

  I said, “I'm going to take a bath.”

  She said, “O.K. See you,” and wiggled down under the heavy quilts.

  I was tickled and frightened. “It's I am being Mr. Julian,” indeed. He sounded old and rusty—like aged garden furniture, pushed around on concrete. “It's that I'm loving you. I am sending you my heart.” Oh no, please.

  I walked down the hall to the communal bathroom, thinking about a gory heart wrapped in newspapers waiting in my dressing room.

  I stood in the drafty tub sudsing myself and imagined the blood congealed, clotted around the aorta, I dried with the thin towel and assured myself that no one in the world, even in fiction, had ever cut out his own heart. Then I remembered hara-kiri, or the ritual Japanese samurai suicide where the protagonist arranges for friends to help him perform his self-murder. Were the Yugoslavs as dramatic? I prayed not.

  Martha and Ethel woke as I was leaving to go downstairs for breakfast.

  “Going to meet Mr. Julian, Maya? Going to bring back his heart?”

  “I am going to breakfast, ladies. Just breakfast.”

  “Don't eat braised heart on toast, girl.” I could have wrung Martha's silver throat. My appetite fled on the heels of her remark. Downstairs I forced down tea and continually pushed away the bloody pictures which assailed my mind. I couldn't go to the theater early because we were under the same restriction in Belgrade that had obtained in Zagreb. We could walk only in the prescribed four-block area, and buses took us to and from the theater.

  I waited throughout the day. Drinking slivovitz and writing letters, forced happy letters, to my family.

  Finally, the cast assembled in the lobby and we trooped onto the buses and were driven to the theater.

  “Maya, there's something in the dressing room for you.”

  He did it. The poor bastard. Actually cut out his heart and had it sent to me. I kept my face serene, but my body trembled and the muscles in my stomach were in revolt.

  I opened the room door, half braced to see a bloody organ still thumping like a prop in the Bride of Frankenstein. A harmless-looking flat package wrapped in gay paper lay on my dressing table. If it was a heart, it had been sliced sliver-thin. I closed the door for privacy and picked up the box. It might have been a See's box of Valentine candies. The note read: “Mistress Maya, here is my heart. I am loving you. I am wishing to see you. Goodbye, my lovely legs. Mr. Julian.”

  He had to be alive. Otherwise how could he hope to see me? I unwrapped the paper carefully because I might need it again. I pulled the last layer away.

  Mr. Julian's heart was a cake. An inedible concoction of flour dough, water and probably concrete. It was a quarter of an inch thick and a little tanner than uncooked biscuit dough. A wisp of paper warned in Serbo-Croatian and French, “DO NOT EAT!” I inspected the thing and decided the warning was entirely unnecessary. Bits of plate glass and small squares of windows were punched down into the cake and there were shreds of paper doilies and tatters of lace which vied for space with dead leaves and dried flowers. The whole thing was sprinkled over with grains of rice, barley and wheat which were glued to the surface.

  I swayed somewhere between relief and indignation. At least I didn't have the onus of trying to explain to the Yugoslavian government and the U.S. State Department how a Communist citizen's heart came to be found in my dressing room. On the other hand, what could I do with the putty heart? My luggage was already overweight. I had bought sweaters in Venice for myself and a few presents for my family in Paris. I wanted a few pieces of pottery in Greece and it had been hinted that we were going to Egypt. Certainly I'd find something there to take home. And here I was, saddled with something I did not want or could not give away. There wasn't a soul in the world I disliked enough to give the ugly thing. There was a small catch in the back of the heart which indicated it was meant to hang on the wall. I placed it under my dressing table behind the shoe rack. There would be time enough to deal with it when I had to pack to leave Yugoslavia.

  Mr. Julian telephoned every morning at eight o'clock. When I spoke to him sharply, ordering him to cease and desist, he answered, “It's that I'm loving you. It's that I am dying because of you. It's that I'm falling in front of a train.”

  I asked the desk clerk to stop putting his calls through to our room. The clerk said, “In Yugoslavia, we answer the telephone.” Martha refused to answer the ring any longer, for when she told him on the second morning that I was out, he responded with: “In Belgrade? There is no place for her to go. Maybe she is going to the bathroom. I will telephone later.” Ten minutes later he said to her, “This is being Mr. Julian. I am wanting to speaking with Mistress Maya Angelou.”

  Ordinary courtesy bade me to exchange places with Martha so that I could at least answer the telephone.

  “Mistress Maya, it's that I am dying.”

  “All right, Mr. Julian. I can't help that. Only please, don't send me any other parts of your anatomy.”

  Harsh words did not deter him, nor did kind words give him solace. I answered the telephone each morning and unemotionally, fuzzily and sleepily told him to get lost.

  Other members in the cast reported similar conquests. Women fairly hung on the coattails of the bachelor singers, and one evening when Martha was taken to a ballet by an admirer, I left Ethel in the room manicuring her nails and went down to the bath.

  When I returned, she was sitting yoga fashion on the bed and a strange man was spread-eagled, face down, on the floor at the foot of her bed.

  I stood in the door in mild shock.

  Ethel said, “Maya, I've been waiting for you. Help me to get this fool out of the room.”

  I threw down my towel and soap.

  “Mister, mister. Get up.” I turned to Ethel who had risen from her lotus position and was standing at the man's feet. “Is he drunk?”

  “No, girl, he's crazy.”

  “O.K. Mister, we're going to put you
out in the hall.”

  His cheek was on the carpet and his eyes wide open. “It is not that I am being drunk. It is that I am loving Mistress Ethel. It is that her love is killing me. It is burning in my heart like a fire.”

  I said, “O.K. I understand.”

  Ethel said, “Here, Maya, you take the left foot. I'll take the right. We'll drag him.”

  The man made no resistance and allowed his body to be scudded across the room. I opened the door and we deposited him, still flat on his stomach, in the hall. Throughout the action, he had continued his litany.

  “I am loving Mistress Ethel. I am dying out of love for Mistress Ethel.”

  We closed the door.

  “Ethel, how in the hell did he get in here?”

  “There was a knock at the door, and I thought it was you. So I said ‘Come in,’ and in comes this fool. He takes one look at me and falls flat on the floor. I thought maybe he had died or something so I went around and bent over him. To take his pulse. That's when I saw his eyes were open and he started chanting, ‘Mistress Ethel, I am loving you. Dying! Killing myself’ And all that stuff.”

  “Why didn't you call the desk?”

  “I figured you'd be back soon, and he seemed harmless.”

  We were laughing when we heard Martha's voice at the door and a series of quick raps.

  “Hey open the door. Open up, will you?”

  Ethel went to the door and opened it. She called, “Maya, come quick.” I raced to Ethel and looked over her shoulder. Martha was trying to disentangle herself from her escort, whose arms were octopusing all over her body.

  “Get this fool off me, will you?” Ethel and I grabbed the man and untwined his arms.

  “Hey, mister. What do you think you're doing?”

  He struggled to regain his hold on Martha. “It's that I am loving Mistress Martha. Mistress Martha, I drink your eyes. I drink your nose.”