Maya Part 2: "Things I didn't get to tell you..."

When did night turn to day? Breakfast did not beckon, only the one cup, not the usual three, of scalding hot café con leche sat getting lukewarm on the corner of my desk; not having the will to separate, run to the kitchen and reheat it. What’s happening to moi? Nearly buried alive in the mound of newspapers and clippings collected for my archives, I rummage for my copy of “Caged Bird”—frantic. 

“Things I didn’t get to tell you…”

Did YOU know how much you were loved here?  Mother Maya’s sudden exit saddening me so, I willed a cosmic connection just to holler, “Sister, Sister I didn’t get to tell you how the “Caged Bird” sings in Puerto Rico; a muzzle strangles its peak inside the cage of death.’’ 

I bowed my head, wept with longing as only a child does who’s lost a nurturing mother, missing my own Mami all over again.  She died only two years before on the island, at 92, bedridden with Alzheimer’s, by God’s mercy, lifted home in her sleep, as had been my literary idol, shared her beloved son Guy Johnson.  

Memories of the island loss of our family’s cinnamon-hue matriarch, images of her younger ebony sisters, my late aunties Tití Juana, Tití Tita, and Tití Fela brightened my mind’s eye.  Sassy, curvy, bodacious Afro-Puerto Rican women who in their prime mirrored the younger Maya’s joie de vivre; were not to be undone, not by machismo, not by poverty, nothing daring to hint their sultry blackness and spicy Latino flavoring colored them inferior.  I come from a proud stock of strong and stalwart migrant survivors or Luchadoras. 

My tears of grief dripping onto the tattered parakeet yellow and green “Caged Bird” paperback I hugged so tightly to my sobbing chest as if my life depended on that one book.  I knew once I delved into Maya Angelou’s coming-of-age memories again, I would flashback to my own--find relief for my novice writer’s angst. 

And, should you lose your natural voice in the midst of personal trials, the Creator commandeers your reclusive time and talents in other ways.  President Bill Clinton said so, praising his home girl from Little Rock Arkansas in his eulogy as one:

“…who taught us how dumb racism is (…) She was without a voice for five years [afraid to speak, raped by her mother’s consort at 8, in her childhood innocence, blaming herself for his subsequent retribution murder] then she developed the greatest voice on the planet” Clinton said.   “God loaned her His voice. She had the voice of God. And He decided he wanted it back (…) her great gift in her action-packed life was she was always paying attention.  And from the time she started writing her books and her poetry, what she was basically doing was calling our attention to the things she'd been paying attention to.  And she did it with a clarity and power that will wash over people as long as there is a written and spoken language (...)”

Something had washed over me home alone, the lonesome 24/7 caregiver for my dying parents; the voice inside my head screaming to be heard.   My vocal chords strangely afflicted—something similar to the King’s Speech—by a traumatic family event back on the island (too agonizing to speak of).  

“Writer with a Cause on Pause”

Flexing my writer’s muscles (in lieu of bending my elbow) in between caregiver duties—first bitten by the writer’s bug crafting sound bites for KCBS News Radio Editorial & Public Affairs, 1990s San Francisco—I rekindled my former social justice self. Writing for self-therapy, reading voraciously, sometimes juggling three books at a time, devouring Spanish newspapers, six of them, dailies and regionals, e-zines, opinion maker blogs, what have you.  One news junkie looking for a fix, I gobbled up words like the Pac-Man, hungry to fill the emotional void; and quell my island anxiety, writing anecdotes and crítica social to fine tune my voice so that I, too, could one day sing a song of freedom to the world for my people—Mi Gente:  

(Dateline 2011, Guayama, Nuyorican Chronicles) I have witnessed unspeakable horrors unsparing of the innocent, I dare not ignore.  The “Ides of Menace” have marched upon the island, like never seen before; bringing the ungodliness of INFANTICide, MATRICide, PATRICide, FEMICide and the systematic GENOCide of the collective mind of Mi Gente.  What will the world say to these inhumane atrocities, the seeming self-destruction?  I fretted. My soul is a witness to the “psychic lynching” of brown folks!? 

Stuck in the boonies of the rural South, town of Guayama, my newfound passion for writing became my salvation. A writer with a cause on pause, if not for the call for entries forwarded by my home girl Carole Brown MSW—“The Mother Teresa of Berkeley”—I might never have heard the calling to be an author. The East Bay Women’s Hall of Famer and award-winning poet/writer was MY Bertha Flowers; the Black aristocrat who sparked Sister’s childhood passion for poetry...ending her muteness.  “Enter this Writer’s Well Retreat Literary Competition,” Carole’s email instructed, I did…breaking my silence. 

Thus, on this Fateful morning, I was astonished to find I was not obtuse to the poets (imagining so).  That Mother Maya and I shared more things in common than I realized: our struggling single mother hardships, she raised a son, me a daughter performing the myriad occupations; the writer’s ear for the rhythm and flow or “music of language,” to quote the gifted poet.  Although married three times, she died a single woman, from the looks of it, I wasn’t promised a rose garden, either; enduring three “(in)significant others” (unequally yoked), living single, today, with my twenty-something Boricua-reborn daughter—

“it’s me  and you kid” is our two tough girls mantra.   

 

Back in the ‘80s, the civil rights activist, who spoke five languages, including Spanish, journeyed back to the motherland, too, a freedom journalist in Egypt and Ghana during Africa’s decolonization period.  And at 85, only one thing remained on her author’s bucket list she told Time: 

“I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‘you know, that’s the truth, I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.’”  

But you did…you did…fair lady. LOOK OVER HERE at Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Isles. Projecting my sincerity onto the luminous screen, her sunshine face began to irradiate mine with the same…je ne c'est quois? Leaning into my laptop “why that’s the warmth of beautiful, ageless wisdom!—her birthday gift to me. Only hours before her sudden passing, I’d reached the milestone #62 (May 27th); told myself then and there: “Step out of your obscurity, give back the only gift at your pleasure, now; the words inscribed in your grateful heart paying rightful homage to…Maya’s Truths. 

Continues to Part 3