Maya Angelou - All Gods children need traveling shoes

OTHER WORKS BY MAYA ANGELOU

And Still I Rise
Gather Together in My Name
The Heart of a Woman
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I Shall Not Be Moved
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water fore I Diiie
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
Shaker, Why Dont You Sing?
Singin and Swingin and Gettin Merry Like Christmas

This book is dedicated to
Julian and Malcolm and all the fallen ones
who were passionately and earnestly
looking for a home.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

A special thank you to Ruben Medina and Alan Palmer for their brotherly love and laughter through many years. Thanks to Jean and Roger Genoud for their camaraderie during our strange and rich years, to Seymour Lazar for belief in my youthful ambition, and to Shana Alexander for talking to me about the mystery of return. Thanks to Anna Budu-Arthur for being a constant Sister.

The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness. Daylight was equally insistent, but much more bold and thoughtless. It dazzled, muddling the sight. It forced through my closed eyelids, bringing me up and out of a borrowed bed and into brand new streets.

After living nearly two years in Cairo, I had brought my son Guy to enter the University of Ghana in Accra. I planned staying for two weeks with a friend of a colleague, settling Guy into his dormitory, then continuing to Liberia to a job with the Department of Information.

Guy was seventeen and quick. I was thirty-three and determined. We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal.

Guy had finished high school in Egypt, his Arabic was good and his health excellent. He assured me that he would quickly learn a Ghanaian language, and he certainly could look after himself. I had worked successfully as a journalist in Cairo, and failed sadly at a marriage which I ended with false public dignity and copious secret tears. But with all crying in the past, I was on my way to another adventure. The future was plump with promise.

For two days Guy and I laughed. We looked at the Ghanaian streets and laughed. We listened to the melodious languages and laughed. We looked at each other and laughed out loud.

On the third day, Guy, on a pleasure outing, was injured in an automobile accident. One arm and one leg were fractured and his neck was broken.

July and August of 1962 stretched out like fat men yawning after a sumptuous dinner. They had every right to gloat, for they had eaten me up. Gobbled me down. Consumed my spirit, not in a wild rush, but slowly, with the obscene patience of certain victors. I became a shadow walking in the white hot streets, and a dark spectre in the hospital.

There was no solace in knowing that the doctors and nurses hovering around Guy were African, nor in the company of the Black American expatriates who, hearing of our misfortune, came to share some of the slow hours. Racial loyalties and cultural attachments had become meaningless.

Trying utterly, I could not match Guys stoicism. He lay calm, week after week, in a prison of plaster from which only his face and one leg and arm were visible. His assurances that he would heal and be better than new drove me into a faithless silence. Had I been less timid, I would have cursed God. Had I come from a different background, I would have gone further and denied His very existence. Having neither the courage nor the historical precedent, I raged inside myself like a blinded bull in a metal stall.

Admittedly, Guy lived with the knowledge that an unexpected and very hard sneeze could force the fractured vertebrae against his spinal cord, and he would be paralyzed or die immediately, but he had only an infatuation with life. He hadnt lived long enough to fall in love with this brutally delicious experience. He could lightly waft away to another place, if there really was another place, where his youthful innocence would assure him a crown, wings, a harp, ambrosia, free milk and an absence of nostalgic yearning. (I was raised on the spirituals which ached to See my old mother in glory or Meet with my dear children in heaven, but even the most fanciful lyricists never dared to suggest that those cavorting souls gave one thought to those of us left to moil in the world.) My wretchedness reminded me that, on the other hand, I would be rudderless.

I had lived with family until my son was born in my sixteenth year. When he was two months old and perched on my left hip, we left my mothers house and together, save for one year when I was touring, we had been each others home and center for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.

The man who caused the accident stood swaying at the foot of the bed. Drunk again, or, two months later, still drunk. He, the host of the motor trip and the owner of the car, had passed out on the back seat leaving Guy behind the Steering wheel trying to start the stalled engine. A truck had careened off a steep hill and plowed into Richards car, and he had walked away unhurt.

Now he dangled loosely in the room, looking shyly at me. Hello, Sister Maya. The slurred words made me hate him more. My whole body yearned for his scrawny neck. I turned my face from the scoundrel and looked at my son. The once white plaster that encased his body and curved around his face was yellowing and had begun to crumble.

I spoke softly, as people do to the very old, the very young, and the sick. Darling, how are you today?

Mother, Richard spoke to you. His already deep voice growled with disapproval.

Hello, Richard, I mumbled, hoping he couldnt hear me.

My greeting penetrated the alcoholic fog, and the man lumbered into an apologetic monologue that tested my control. Im sorry, Sister Maya. So sorry. If only it could be me, there on that bed Oh, if only it could be me

I agreed with him.

At last he had done with his regrets, and saying goodbye to Guy, took my hand. Although his touch was repulsive, Guy was watching me, so I placed a silly grin on my face and said, Good-bye, Richard. After he left, I began quickly to unload the basket of food I had brought. (The teenage appetite is not thwarted by bruises or even broken bones.)

Guys voice stopped me.

Mother, come so I can see you. The cast prevented him from turning, so visitors had to stand directly in his vision. I put the basket down and went to stand at the foot of the bed.

His face was clouded with anger.

Mother, I know Im your only child, but you must remember, this is my life, not yours. The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned, pricks most deeply and draws more blood. I waited in agony as he continued, eyes scornful and lips curled, If I can see Richard and understand that he has been more hurt than I, what about you? Didnt you mean all those sermons about tolerance? All that stuff about understanding? About before you criticize a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes?

Of course I meant it in theory, in conversation about the underprivileged, misunderstood and oppressed miscreants, but not about a brute who had endangered my sons life.