Free A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou Page B

decision to return to me and Africa. So, at his suggestion, I am leaving you some space. He really loves you. You are lucky. But he understands me, and that’s more important. He has retained more of the African spirit than you or your mother.”
    I could have kicked him. He was doing the very thing that had run me away from him in Africa. He so routinely disparaged other people’s importance that he didn’t notice he was degrading me.
    “You can come to Mexico or I’ll come back here. I mean to take you back.”
    Bailey said he would telephone about the reservation. I wished my love a safe journey and asked to be remembered to Kwesi and Molly Brew.
    He was gone.
    Bailey and Mother left that same day, but not before ragging me about the inane predicament I had created for myself.
    “It’s time for the troubleshooters to move on. You must not think you can call out the troops at each rumor of war.”
    I didn’t call them to come. Or perhaps I did. Desperation may have been in my voice, must have been there, but I did not ask outright that they come to Los Angeles to rescue me. I was a woman, not a child. My name was spelled double-you oh em a en.
    No, I didn’t ask, but I was extremely glad they had come.

Fourteen
    Despite acres of ravaged city blocks and hulks of burned-out cars, Los Angeles seemed to have settled back into a satisfied-with-itself air. The cauldron still simmered in a few quarters, but the energy was spent and it would not boil over again anytime soon.
    I had finished writing my play, and I asked Frank Silvera for advice. “Find a producer and give it to him. It will be his job to find the money, the theater, a director and a cast.”
    I said to him that he had not had to use those tactics; he had done everything himself.
    He reminded me that he was the owner, producer and director of Tee Oh Bee.
    I searched diligently for a producer, but there was a dearth of them interested in a new play by an unknown playwright who also happened to be black and female. Few would even read the manuscript. Coming out of the shadow of the Watts revolt, they thought the plot would lean heavily on racial unrest.
    My plot in “All Day Long,” admittedly slight, was based on one day in the life of a poor thirteen-year-old black boy who was relocated to the North. Among his many travails were the difficulty of understanding the Northern accent and comprehending how a sofa could secretly contain a bed larger than any he had ever seen.
    In my play, the boy worked through his befuddlement at flushing toilets (where did it all go?), the mystery of a refrigerator that stayed cold without a block of ice in it and the gift of fresh water that came through hardened silver tubes. A slim idea, but I remembered my own stupefaction when Bailey and I returned to California as teenagers after ten years in the rural South. In Arkansas we had drawn water from a well, and for baths we had heated it on a wood-burning stove. We slept on mattresses stuffed with feathers from chickens we raised and killed and ate, and used a shack away from the house as a toilet.
    So a foldout sofa and an indoor toilet had been miracles of modernity to me. I found no one interested enough to produce “All Day Long.”
    Back to the library. I had to learn how to produce. All I discovered there was that producing meant having money, and most of the people I knew had very little; the few who were well-off weren’t interested in my play.
    Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana, was deposed while on a visit to China. It appeared that the time was out of joint, which meant that even if I wanted to return to Africa, Ghana was out of the question for me. I had been a devout Nkrumaist.
    In just two years, Malcolm had been murdered and the Watts conflagration had left a roster of arrestees, hundreds homeless and many hurt. My once great love affair hadn’t worked out the second time, and now a person I had supported and admired was in exile from his country. I