[好書分享] Even the stars look lonesome

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/ Maya Angelou (1997) New York : Random House



< Mother and Freedom >

She stood before me, a dolled-up, pretty yellow woman, seven inches shorter than my six-foot bony frame. Her eyes were soft and her voice was brittle. “You are determined to leave? Your mind’s made up?”

I was seventeen and burning with passionate rebelliousness. I was also her daughter, so whatever in dependent spirit I had inherited had been nurtured by living with her and observing her for the past four years.

“You are leaving my house?”

I collected myself inside myself and answered, “Yes. Yes, I’ve found a room.”

“And you are taking the baby?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a smile, half proud and half pitying.

“All right, you’re a woman. You don’t have a husband, but you’ve got a three-month old baby. I just want you to remember one thing. Form the moment you leave this house, don’t let anybody raise you. Every time you get into a relationship you will have to make concessions, compromises, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But keep in mind Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas and I have given you every law you need to live by. Follow what’s right. You’ve been raised.”

More than forty years have passed since Vivian Baxter liberated me and handed me over to life. During those years I have loved and lost, I have raised my son, set up a few households and walked away from many. Ui have taken life as my mother gave it to me on that strange graduation day all those decades ago.

In the intervening time when I have extended myself beyond my reach and come toppling Humpty-Dumpty-down on my face in full view of a scornful world, I have returned to my mother to be liberated by her one more time. To be reminded by her that although I had to compromise with life, even life had no right to beat me to the ground, to batter my teeth down my throat, to make me knuckle down and call it Uncle. My mother raised me, and then freed me.

And now, after so many eventful years of trials, successful and failures, my attention is drawn to a bedroom adjoining mine where my once feisty mother lies hooked by pale blue wires to an oxygen tank, fighting cancer for her life.

I think of Vivian Baxter, and I remember Frederick Douglass’s mother, enslaved on a plantation eleven miles from her infant son, yet who, after toiling a full day, would walk the distance to look at her child hoping that he would sense a mother’s love, then return to the plantation in time to begin another day of labor. She believed that a mother’s love brought freedom. Many African Americans know that the most moving song created during the centuries of slavery was and remains “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

As a mother and a daughter myself, I have chosen certain songs and poems to take to my mother’s room, and there we will laugh and cry together.

I pray I shall have the courage to liberate my mother when the time comes. She would expect that from me.





< Loving Learning >


There are smart alecks who feel comfortable speaking long and loudly about a multiplicity of subjects with no evidence that they know what they are talking about. Then there are those who do know a little about a lot of things and speak judiciously about what they know. And finally, that rarity, the polymath who knows a great deal about everything. I have met only three such persons in my life.

One was the late Isaac Asimov, the second is Dr. Richard Long, Atticus Porfessor at Emory University in Georgia, and the third is Vusumsi Linda Make, a South African freedom fighter and onetime representative of the Pan African Congress, which was a volatile rival of the then conservative African National Congress.

The active mind replete with encyclopedic knowledge has always excited me, and when that brain is in the possession of a man, no matter what he looks like, I have found myself stirred physically and romantically.

When I was young and when frequently to public gathering, I made certain to keep my ears and eyes alert form men of exceptional intelligence. Whenever I spotted such a man, my behavior was so uninhibited that women friends would admonish me in a stage whisper: “Maya, get to know him first.”

John and Grace Killens gave a party for two South African freedom fighters who were at the UN to petition that would body to press fro an end to apartheid. When I heard Vus Make’s soft voice, filtering through its Xhosa accent, I perked up and leaned in toward him. He spole to the entire gathering, but so far as I was concerned, he was talking just to me. He dazzled me with data and fractured me with facts. I sat erect, the very picture of rapt interest. Afterward he escorted me home. Two weeks later he proposed, and four weeks after we met we were honeymooning in London. Six months later I was questioning not only my judgment by my sanity.

True, he possessed every bit of information about the known world, how many square miles were arable in the Sahel, why the French were involved in Algeria’s Black Hand organization, how long King Chaka had occupied the Zulu throne, how long Sisyphus had been pushing the rock, even how long the train has been gone, but he had no idea how to make me happy. The same brain that retained reams of information, stacks of names, figures and dates, could not (I dare not think would not) deduce that I needed bedroom discourse, not boardroom dialogue, that our marriage was suffocating in the thin intellectual air that he breathed comfortable but that could not fill my lungs.

Because he was tender, I thought he was offering tenderness. He had startling intellect and an impressive accumulation of information, but was why a mile form romance.

I left the marriage after it become lifeless, and I’m still thankful for the early passion we both brought to the union. I am even more thankful for the lesson learned. Heed the African saying “Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt.”



< Poetic Passage >

An old blue describe this eager traveler:

I got keys to the Highway,
Booked down and I’m bound to go
I’m going to leave here running
’cause walkings most too slow.



Oprah’s passage, and stand in wonder at the awful inheritance that she had to either carry with her or jettison:

She was born poor and powerless in a land where
power is money and money is adored.

Born black in a land where might is white
And white is adored.

Born female in a land where decision are masculine
And masculinity controls.