Maya Angelou & the Invention of a FriendShip, 1970’s-Style
A Hook Up Haiku
Nineteen Seventy:
“Brother be, I’ll sister thee,”
Maya sang to me.
She was 41. I was 32. It was the fall of
1970. Sacramento (ca) City College.
(We’d exchanged glances and nods at
“cause”-inflected rallies, arts events
and sundry moments in the late Sixties.
But whether in New York or Los
Angeles, no other “moment” would be
like this one.)
6
Her exact words were:
“Eugene, be my brother forever!”
A tall order from a tall woman, it came
during our first full contact. Right after
Maya Angelou had slung her songified
language at — and plie’d to — an sro
throng for more than an hour. Initially
I was smacked aback by this uncaged
bird, this leggy goddess, this poet,
actress, dancer, and former cast member
of Porgy and Bess and — with James
Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely
Tyson, et al — the New York production
of Genet’s The Blacks. But I quickly
readied for her request-into-perpetuity,
thinking, “brother?” “forever?” …
Shiddddd … nuttin but sumpn to do.
After all, hadn’t I just done time —
60’s-style — in East St. Louis (aka
“East Boogie”), Illinois? Followed by a
EUGENE B.
REDMOND
So our Ship of Friends set sail in the
Soular System in a state named after a
fictional Black Amazon and warrior
queen, Califia. (According to Spanish
writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
who first introduced her in his popular
novel Las sergas de Esplandián [circa
1500], Califia and her army of amazons
inhabited a namesake island off the
southwest coast of California.) During
the Seventies, Maya and I frequently
and vigorously traversed the near-90miles of Northern California, from
Sacramento, where I lived, to the San
Francisco Bay Area, where she resided.
p
Maya Angelou
(The Loss is Huge, Huger than the
Leap of Fate she took to co-invent her
place on the planet. But that’s a whole
nother chapter for a whole nother tome.
It suffices to say, simply & Hugely:
Maya’s gone.)
By
year’s stop-off at Oberlin College
(Ohio) as writer-in-residence, where I’d
met poets Russell Atkins, Norman
Jordan and James Kilgore in nearby
Cleveland? And Calvin Hernton —
who would replace me at Oberlin, and
later date Angelou in the 1980s? Hadn’t
I, among other Black Arts Movement
(bam) self-assignments, spent the last
years of the ‘60s frequently delivering
elegiac/eulogistic poems and polemics
for fallen warriors, many felled under
questionable circumstances? (And
when there was even a fraction of an
iota of a suspicion about causes of the
“fall” of one of our comrades — e.g.,
Henry Dumas (1934-1968) — hadn’t we
chalked it up to “healthy paranoia”?)
Hadn’t I — as a faculty member at
Southern Illinois University’s Experiment
in Higher Education in East St. Louis —
worked with colleagues, artists
and students like Dumas, Katherine
Dunham, Edward Crosby, Julius
Hemphill, Oliver Jackson, Joyce
Ladner and Sherman Fowler to help
conceptualize and implement the
new Black/African American Studies
Movement? (And wouldn’t this same
Sacramento City College — the one
where Maya had just delivered her
mixed-genre, hig