The American Spectator

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The American Way of Decca

By Florence King on 7.20.07 @ 12:05AM

(Page 2 of 2)

A MAJOR CATALYST FOR HER racial conflicts was her friendship with Maya Angelou, the garrulous, gravel-voiced Poetess Laureate and non-stop autobiographer of the you-go-girl school of intellectual reparations. Decca's letters to Angelou are virtually unrecognizable as the words of one of the greatest wits of our time. One in particular, in praise of Angelou's third autobiography (Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas) is a gushing fan letter that opens with "Dear Miss Absolutely Amazing Thing," and descends to girlish superlatives... "a lovely breath of life... most tremendous lift... totally fascinating."

Angelou realized that she had a peer's daughter for a whipping boy and behaved accordingly, as when she blew up at another white woman at a party and left Decca to plead for all whites. The woman asked, "But what can we DO about racism?" and Angelou exploded, "YOU are asking ME?" Decca's letter is a danse macabre of how to walk on eggs, a Euclidian treatise on how many hands will go into on-the-other-hand, all followed by a P.S. almost as long as the letter itself.

The friendship broke up when Angelou did something unforgivably white. She came out in favor of Clarence Thomas in a New York Times op-ed, saying that the hysterics calling for his head should calm down and listen to his side of the story, if only because a black man who had come that far was too precious to sacrifice. This time it was Decca who exploded, concocting the bizarre theory that "Maya has completely cast her lot with right-wing Republican blacks, all Bush toadies."

It goes without saying that Decca supported Jesse Jackson for president in 1984, but what boggles the mind is her take on the O.J. Simpson case. "We were pleased with the verdict but thought he was probably guilty," she wrote in one letter. In another she said, "We welcomed the verdict as Benj [the Treuhafts' son] did, serves the cops right. A thought: sort of an Affirmative Action type of vote? Redressing centuries of injustice in our law courts."

It also comes as a surprise, though a rather pleasant, nostalgic one in view of today's approaching moral collapse, that the Hon. Jessica Mitford, for all her rebellious eccentricities, was just that: Honorable, in ways beyond her title. Nowhere in this mountain of letters is there the slightest hint of lovers, lesbians, abortions, radical feminism, or any of the lubricious confusion our world takes for granted. Whatever else she stood for, she was an old-fashioned girl who slept with only two men and was married to both of them.

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