A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou Page A

years later, black women still needed that same assurance.
    My landlady, who knew everything, said the Neighbors of Watts were going to provide a child-care center. She also said a medical institute was going to be built in Watts, and that it would be named for Charles Drew, a great African-American doctor who developed a technique to separate out plasma from whole blood.
    A French journalist telephoned me and said James Baldwin had given him my name and number. I agreed to an interview. He sat, contained, on my studio bed-cum-sofa.
    “We French, we have never, never, never had slavery, so we feel we don’t understand the American racism.”
    Maybe it was that third “never” that made me pick him up and dust him off.
    “What did you call Haiti? A resort?”
    Suddenly his English failed him. “Haiti?
Est-ce que tu a dit Haiti?
”
    I said,
“Oui.”
    He said, “I meant in France.
Nous
have
jamais
had
esclavage
on the land of France.”
    I said, “You were the rulers of Haiti and Martinique—and Guadeloupe. None of the Africans went there on the
Ile de France.
They were taken there on slave ships.”
    He said he was beginning to understand the rage a little. If people like me were so angry, how much angrier were those who had less than I?
    I looked at the man, his beret, his neat little dancing hands, and looked at my studio apartment with its furniture from Goodwill and its prints from Woolworth’s. I had less than many others I knew, but if he thought I was well-off, then nothing I could say would help him understand Watts. If he had visited the area one day before it exploded, if he had gone to the right bar or pool hall or community center, he could have met someone who heard his accent and, realizing he was a stranger, might have invited him home.
    He could have been sitting in a well-furnished house dining on great chicken and greens, receiving all the kindnesses. Then he really would have been befuddled if, on the following day, he heard of the conflagration and had seen his host of the day before struggling with the heavily armed police.
    But I could not needle him. He was not going to comprehend the anger and disappointment in Watts, and further provoking him was not going to make me feel better. Like many of my ancestors, I settled back to tell him some of what he wanted to hear and some of what I wanted to say.
    Surely he returned to Paris with some truth and some fiction. Surely he wrote an account of the Watts riot allowing his readers to hold on to the stereotypes that made them comfortable while congratulating themselves on being in possession of some news.

Ten
    Frank Silvera was exactly what is meant in South America by the word
mestizo
. His ancestors were African and Spanish, and he was a light-skinned black man who could play a Mexican father to Marlon Brando’s Zapata. A black man who could play an Italian father to Ben Gazzara in
A Hatful of Rain
on Broadway. A black man who could play the title role of Shakespeare’s
King Lear.
    Silvera had a theater company in Los Angeles that he named the Theatre of Being or, as the member actors called it, Tee Oh Bee. Beah Richards, my next-door neighbor, was the star of the company, with Vantile Whitfield and Dick Anthony Jones as resident leading men.
    Beah, with her success on and off Broadway and particularly in James Baldwin’s
The Amen Corner,
was a legend in the African-American community. At the time I met her, she was often called our greatest stage actress, vying only with Ruby Dee for that honor.
    Frank decided to stage
Medea
at his Theatre of Being. Naturally, Beah would take the title role. And just as naturally, she would take it beyond all real or imagined limits. When Frank announced the project, Beah and I and a few friends celebrated. In the middle of that evening’s festivities, problems were mentioned. Beah didn’t drive. I offered to take her to the theater each day, and she said she would pay for the gas.
    The role of the nurse had