After Sam’s death, I’d dropped out, but the circle of friends and friendships continued. Feeling like a sexual pariah through no fault of my own, I remained firmly on the edge, leaving it all behind. Two years later, I bought a house in Brooklyn, left the West Village, and embarked on another part of my own life. It was over, or so I thought. It now seems logical that Dolly McPherson would have been the glue that held it all together for me.
A native of New Orleans, McPherson had, like Sam and the members of the group who erred on the academic side of the equation, grown up in the old-school world of HBCUs. When I met her, she was teaching at Hunter College. Not only was Dolly Maya’s litmus test at Wake Forest, she would later become her Boswell as well, writing an analysis of her growing autobiographical oeuvre. Dolly was a true southern belle, always gracious and a bit formal, but she also had a wicked sense of humor and could hold her own with any of the crowd. Dolly also had a kindness and an openness with me that may have stemmed from the fact that Sam was a friend and not a former lover, and we became fast, if irregular, friends. I suspect, as she had with students over the years, Dolly was quietly mentoring me.
Like Sam, and indeed like me, Dolly was a spendthrift, and the joke ran that she would take the subway to Sam’s apartment to borrow some money and then return home in a taxi once the transaction was completed. McPherson’s apartment was appropriately professorial, filled with the bulging bookshelves that seemed to be a prerequisite for entrance into the group of friends.
Dolly was Maya’s conscience in many ways: her kinder and gentler side. Dolly was one of the few people who could and would disagree with Maya and hold her own. It was a valuable role as Maya’s fame increased and fewer and fewer people would disagree with her.
Dolly kept up with folks and knit her friendships closely; Dolly kept in touch. After Sam’s death, Dolly stayed in touch with me and with my mother, gently supporting endeavors, savoring triumphs, marking book publications, and generally keeping up with news. It was logical, then, that she was the one I turned to when my mother died in 2000. It happened so suddenly that I found myself at sea. Although eighty-seven years old, my mother had been resistant to any thoughts of death, and so when she died, there were no plans for anything, only a very full house that we’d lived in for almost fifty years and a lifetime of happy memories. When my father had died fifteen years earlier, Mom and I had each other, but this time I was truly alone, and I had no idea where to turn. As I had no significantly older female relatives, I could only look to those elders whom I’d known with Sam. Dolly, who had been a friend to my mother and me, was one of my first calls.
Somehow I knew that Dolly’s positive voice and elder sister wisdom was what I needed, so I called her, finding her number in one of my mother’s telephone books. She answered and was the calm, nurturing soul that I needed. She suggested that I might want Maya to speak at Mom’s memorial. I’d never considered that she might and certainly had not dared to think of asking for such a favor, but Dolly felt that she would and was more than willing to make the call. Shortly after, I heard the familiar voice on the phone comforting me and saying that she would come to New York to speak. I was floored but grateful and went about making the other plans and organizing a memorial. (We don’t do funerals in my immediate family.)
As is often the case with bereavements, there were and still are holes in my memory about those days, and my scattershot organizing of things meant that there were also many changes of plan. As an only child, this one was completely on me, and I had no idea where to begin. I can only claim that I was guided from beyond, because a voice reminded me of my mother’s family’s undertaker, who agreed to take on all of the arrangements for cremation and the sad tasks of getting the death certificate and other requisites. My parents had been charter members of the church I grew up in, and I’d in fact been the first baby christened in the congregation, so the venue was taken care of. Slowly, it all came together. Friends flocked from around the world, and somehow arrangements for the memorial service, a repast, and all of the other things from program printing to lodgings for out-of-town guests were taken care of. I still don’t know how, but will always be grateful to all of my friends who surrounded me then. It all went off without a hitch, until in the middle of the repast following the memorial that had to change the original date because the church had a prior commitment, the phone rang and someone said, “Jessica, it’s for you; it’s someone who says she’s Maya Angelou.” I’d completely forgotten my request and had never felt that she would have made such a trek from North Carolina for me. Mortified, I went to the phone, my embarrassment trumping my grief, and explained my horror at my mistake and my not informing her of the date change. There was quiet; then that calm and soothing voice said, “I understand.” In truth, a part of me hadn’t believed that she would travel to New York for me! For me!
The next day, I journeyed to where she was staying in Manhattan to beg pardon and take the licks that I certainly deserved. There were none. I don’t remember where we met; I do remember overflowing bookcases and comfortable chairs and sitting at Maya’s feet and giving her the unfinished caged bird cloisonné pendant that my mother had begun for Dolly but had not been able to finish. I remember little else from that meeting but the caring familial warmth with which I was enveloped.
It was the beginning of a new chapter between Maya and me, one where Sam remained the unmentioned glue that united us, but where we met as, if not equals (I was still very much the younger sister), then adults: adults who had weathered some storms together and shared memories of a past that few others knew.
I gradually came back into the now-expanded fold. Jimmy was no longer the sun at the center of this circle of friends; rather, Maya had become the reigning monarch. She had bought a Harlem brownstone that soon became the hub of her New York universe. Gloriously renovated, as can happen when funds are seemingly endless, it was designed for entertaining, with bold colors and comfortable seating. One could enter either from the basement kitchen level or climb the brownstone’s steps and be received more formally at the front door. It was clearly divided into public spaces and private ones, and there was little crossing of them. An elevator had been installed so that Maya could slip in and out of the room without climbing the steps, which had become increasingly difficult for her to navigate with age.
The public spaces consisted of the living room, where Maya is reputed to have asked the decorator to give her a fruit bowl. The strawberry, watermelon, and banana colors were vivid and welcoming and very much like falling into a vibrant fruit bowl. This was a public room—one for grand pronouncements and posed photographs, for holiday festivities and bold-faced moments.
The dining area was a bit more sober. Decorative painting of a cloud-filled brilliant-blue sky made the ceiling a cry thrown up to heaven. Crimson chairs surrounded a circular dining table at which all were on equal footing, as though we were in King Arthur’s court at the Round Table. At her festivities, the elders from the circle that I had known convened when they were in attendance. Rosa, who was beginning to show signs of the Alzheimer’s that would eventually afflict her, Louise Meriwether, and Joan Sandler camped out in the cushy chairs surrounding the dining room. It was here that Maya often sat, and here that she said grace before we ate, beginning with her usual invocation, “Mother, Father, God . . .” One New Year’s Day, the conversation and the energy around that table were so vital and vibrant that the glass that topped the table cracked right down the middle. All stopped for a minute. Then the ancestors were saluted and acknowledged and everything went on as before, making allowances, of course, for the glass with a big crack down the middle.
The basement kitchen/sitting room was a more intimate space where the plush cushions were dented with butt prints from intimate conversations, and there was a cozy comfort that signaled home and hearth, not house beautiful. It was a sort of neutral ground between the public space of the upstairs reception rooms and the very private bedroom spaces above where few others than family ventured. The kitchen was designed with an island that could serve as a buffet serving space for large gatherings. It did double duty as delineator of space when Maya cooked, and looking at it the first time, I vividly recalled the culinary performance so many years before in Sonoma. Now, though, when I was in the kitchen, I was no longer simply a spectator; we’d cook together, bonding for real this time over our shared passion for food and our common love for entertaining. Maya loved people, reveled in good company, and adored entertaining. She gave parties: small dinners and lavish y’all-come gatherings to which all of her known world was invited. These parties had gone on all along in other venues and at other times, but after my return to the group, I became aware of them through Maya’s New Year’s Day party.
The party was a New York humdinger of a gathering. I began attending it annually, returning from New Orleans, where I’d begun to spend the Christmas holidays and the end-of-the-year festivities. All ages mixed and mingled at the New Year’s Day gatherings: family, friends old and new, business associates, and acquaintances who seemed to be interesting. Ironically, I too had thrown New Year’s Day parties and had hosted as many as sixty people in my home in Brooklyn; they were similar in many other ways as well, reminding me just how I’d been formed by that circle of friends more than thirty years earlier. Mine, though, were small things compared to Maya’s, which were huge, splendid, and helmed by her more-than-able personal assistant, Lydia Stuckey, to whom I took an immediate liking. Maya did all of the cooking for the New Year’s Day parties, reveling in the chance to show off her culinary skills and delighting in creating a lavish spread of all of the traditional foods that make up New Year’s Day in an African American household. There were black-eyed peas and rice (served separately, not together) and made with and without pork, greens, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, and several types of turkey, along with roast ham—all prepared in what a West African girlfriend of mine would have called “industrial quantities.” This lavish spread was accompanied by rivers of red wine and scotch and a bounty of desserts. After dinner, there was often caroling with professional voices singing traditional songs while Valerie Simpson accompanied folks on the piano. Presents were exchanged with intimates, and I knew that Maya and I had passed another milestone on the friendship trail when one year she made sure that I received a small something, a token of our enduring connection. I treasure my Indian pillboxes.
I found myself one of the crowd and saw folks I’d known from my early years of theater reviewing and career as a fledgling journalist. George Faison and his partner, T, were regulars. George was a dancer extraordinaire who years ago had choreographed The Wiz and garnered awards including a Tony and an Emmy, before becoming an impresario at the Faison Firehouse Theatre in Harlem. Marcia Gillespie had been editor in chief of Essence when I began there and then moved on to helm Ms. magazine and continue to influence a generation. Howard Dodson, with his ever-present cowrie shell pin decorating his lapel, was head of the Schomburg Center and another regular. Most important, there were Louise Meriwether and Rosa Guy and Helen Brodie Baldwin, Jimmy’s sister-in-law and Lover’s widow. It was like old home week the first time I went and refound acquaintances I hadn’t seen since my Sam Floyd years. There were new faces as well: Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, whose music had been the background music for much of my youth, were stalwarts and among Maya’s adopted extended family, as were numerous other notables. I found that I savored the jaunts; they became my way of beginning the year Janus-like, looking backward to look forward.
Over time, I got comfortable enough (or consumed enough red wine) to compare rings with Nick Ashford, who admired my antique black cameo collection. I shared the name of my antique jewelry dealer; he could afford the habit more than I. I brought guests with permission, sharing my very famous friend with some of my other friends and letting her know how my life had expanded. Haroldo and Mary Costa from Brazil attended one year, and Haroldo, who had been the original Orfeu in the play that would go on to become the film Orfeu and Eurydice, was so impressed with Maya that he still speaks of it years later. At one party, I was bold enough to sit on the piano bench alongside Valerie Simpson and caterwaul a few of what I hoped were on-key notes. I enjoyed the time I spent at the house on 120th Street.
On occasion, it seemed that nothing had changed and as though Jimmy might be around the corner in another room enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, his hands fluttering like hummingbirds while he explained the ways of the world to some young votary, or Sam might dance in waving a beaker of Johnnie Walker and wafting a cloud of Chanel Pour Homme. But the crowd had changed and the focus had shifted. Angelou was now firmly the center of the orbit. Paule had moved on, but Louise and Rosa were still there (until 2012 when Rosa died). At times it almost seemed that despite Maya’s worldwide fame and considerably increased fortune, little had changed in the pecking order. We had all aged, but we had all aged in sequence; I remained twenty years younger than Maya and younger than Louise, Rosa, and Paule by exactly the same distance that had existed in the 1970s. I was still the kid, the youngest of that bunch despite my gray hair and widening waist.
• • •
After our initial reconnection and my attendance at the New Year’s Day festivities, other offers of hospitality were proffered. There was one Super Bowl party Maya gave where she had purchased souvenir jerseys of the teams for her guests and we sat around discussing everything but football. The television was playing downstairs, in another part of the house, but most folks could have cared less about the game.
I especially enjoyed going in the evenings when there was no one else there so that I basically spent time with Maya and Ms. Stuckey, whom Maya unfailingly introduced as Ms. Stuckey with her insistence on formality. She’s always made a point of presenting people and especially anyone who might be conceived of as being in a subordinate position—housekeepers, cooks, companions, secretaries, drivers, and others—as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. I suspected that it was more than southern formality. It was a very real reaction to having grown up in the South and watched so many of her elders being called “out of their names” and disrespectfully by their first names for so many years. Through that, I also understood just why she insisted on being called Dr. Angelou and why she bridled when people she did not know well called her Maya. The honorific was always required and always used even by her closest friends. I, somehow, called her Maya, and I believe I was allowed to do so in acknowledgment of when I had entered her life those four decades prior, when she was still just Maya.
On our solo evenings, we talked about all manner of things. I savored the company, our developing closeness, and the connection to the past and began to visit when she was in town and share thoughts with her. We were still guarded and tentative with a respect for each other’s feelings. There remained something unspoken between us—a fragile thread that was our different links to Sam and our unspoken and yet shared knowledge of things that had transpired all those decades prior.
In truth, Maya was still Maya, and I was still stubborn. On one of our evenings, Maya discovered my continuing grief over my mother’s death. I retained Mom’s voice on my answering machine at my office; I’d discovered the message after her death. I’d call in every two weeks from wherever I was (often at great expense if I was in West Africa or the Caribbean) just to hear her voice and her sign-off of the conversation, “God be with you!” Deciding that it was excessive and wanting to help me through the grief, Maya offered to stay with me while I deleted the message. I demurred and kept it, allowing it to fade organically from my life several years later.
Another evening she surprised me by saying out of the blue, “You know, Jessica, it is all right to have loved a gay man!” Gay man? Sam? You, my elder sister, knew and you didn’t tell me? You didn’t shepherd me through the danger-water time that occurred after he died from AIDS? There were too many dragons in that closet to even think of opening the door, and that conversation never continued, changing rapidly to some banal subject that was safer ground for us both. I always wonder what the outcome would have been if we’d been brave enough to have had a longer conversation. Confession? Apology? Commiseration? We did cross a line that evening, one that brought us closer despite the lack of intimate conversation.
On occasion Maya would reach out to me, calling to ask for a recipe (ginger beer was one special request). We even did one of her Sirius radio shows together and spent an hour gleefully sharing our love of food and cooking like two best friends talking over a back fence. We shared a love for New Orleans, but she visited infrequently because of her allergy to fish, which kept her in fear of the restaurants in the city, where virtually everything is prepared with crabmeat, crawfish, or shrimp. As one who is allergic to shellfish, I could sympathize and empathize and became deputized to find some places where she would be able to sample the other side of the city’s food. When we both happened to be in New Orleans at the same time—she’d always let me know when she was going to be in town—I’d try to be there and she’d call. Often it was with a small request like asking me to search for a book of her poems that she wished to read from or join her for dinner or recommend a restaurant where she might be able to get a meal that was not cooked near seafood. It was her way of staying in touch.
It was in New Orleans after a meal that she told me in confidence about the aches and pains of her dancer’s knees. They plagued her but were inoperable because of a lung condition that meant it was unwise for her to consider anesthesia. This was confided on a walk to the ladies’ room at a hotel in New Orleans prior to a lecture she’d be giving. At a later point, again in New Orleans, she let me know she’d be heading out immediately after the lecture because her lung issue had become so difficult, she could not be without her oxygen machine for more than one hour. Her lectures were timed to the nanosecond. Following her last word, despite lavish applause and standing ovations, she would be escorted off the stage and immediately return to her breathing apparatus. Hindsight lets me know that she was increasingly allowing me into her confidence and reattaching me to her and through her to that circle of friends.
On the last trip to New Orleans where I joined her, she arrived in town in splendor, riding on the bus that Oprah had given her. It made things much easier, and the lavish accommodations were as comfortable as any hotel could have possibly been. She graciously allowed me to bring a guest, this time Danille Taylor, then dean of humanities at Dillard University, where I was the inaugural scholar in the Ray Charles Chair in African American Material Culture (a position that I knew Sam, with his love of HBCUs, would have been proud to see me accept). We shared drinks and marveled at the bus’s comfort: bathtub, bedrooms, sleeping area for two drivers so that they could spell each other and never have to stop. It was a setting fit for the empress of popular literature that she’d become. I brought along cheese straws prepared for her by a friend’s daughter in fish-free surroundings, and we shared our usual conviviality.
Along with New Year’s festivities in New York, Maya also gave a magnificent Thanksgiving celebration in Winston-Salem, where her main house was located. There, she’d entertain as many as two hundred people at dinner, pulling out all of the stops and creating an event that turned into a weekend extravaganza, complete with organized manicures and facials for the women, church services on Sunday for all attendees, and, of course, a lavish Thanksgiving dinner for all. Although I was invited on several occasions, tangential seemed to be the best place for me. I do not like hordes of people, and my relationship with Maya seemed to flourish best on a one-on-one basis. I’d been invited to Winston-Salem at other times of the year, but I’d always demurred, knowing that there was still unspoken conversation between us and things that needed straightening out. Finally, I also knew that Maya still drank with the same quiet, ferocious determination that marked everything she did, and I didn’t want to be caught alone in the house with her if the liquor started to speak. So I continued to go to the New Year’s Day parties, becoming a bit of a regular. I even met Guy, Maya’s son; I’d not met him during the Sam Floyd years.
One year though, I’d arrived and timidly headed to my usual spot in the dining room on the perimeter of the round table where I could be near Maya and also Louise and Rosa. Guy, who was there as well and did not know me, was getting ready to say something about my presence at the table, when quietly, with her usual control and grace, Maya told him that I in fact did belong at the table. She informed him how long I’d known her and insisted that I join the crowd of elders at her large circular table, the focal point of her festivities. There, looking around at Rosa, Louise, and Maya and thinking of the years we’d known one another and the roads that had been taken, I marveled at the distance that we’d traveled separately together.
Gradually I came to feel myself to be a regular in Maya’s circle, but my illusions of being a real part of the crowd were squelched one year. Having journeyed from New Orleans in time to make what had become the annual party. Intuition kicked in, and I thought, or as Maya would have put it, “my Toby hunched me,” that before embarking on the fifty-dollar taxi ride that would take me to Harlem, I’d better call, as I’d heard from no one. I called and got no answer. Well, that just might mean that the house was full and no one heard the phone, but after three or four calls, I realized that something was up. I searched my phone and realized that I had George Faison’s number and called him. I was gob-smacked when he said they were not in Harlem at all but had decided that year to go to Florida and were basking beside the pool in Miami.
I spent that New Year’s Day by myself in New York and made my black-eyed peas, collards, and pork dinner from the just-in-case set of leftovers that I keep in my freezer. (I’d rather have stale frozen leftovers than challenge the gods by not having my Hoppin’ John, greens, and pig on New Year’s Day.) After that, I extended my New Orleans stay to include festivities with friends in that town and said good-bye to the New Year’s Day parties. It was now over for sure, or so I thought.