Wednesday Mornings

Before Maya Angelou spoke to the world, Mrs. Flowers spoke to her.

As a child, Maya Angelou stopped speaking. After she told of the abuse she had suffered, the man responsible was killed. Maya came to believe that her words had caused his death.

So for years, she withdrew into silence.

Then came Mrs. Flowers.

She didn’t insist that Maya talk. She didn’t rush to fill the silence. She put Dickens and Shakespeare and poetry into her hands. No pressure. No demands. Just the quiet faith that words, when ready, would find their way back.

One day, Mrs. Flowers read aloud to her.

Maya would later remember discovering something she hadn’t understood before: words on a page were not enough. They needed a human voice.

Mrs. Flowers gave her poems to learn and asked her to come back and recite them.

And eventually, Maya did.

I was twenty-one when I arrived in New York.

My English was still translated from Spanish, sentence by sentence, before it left my mouth. Out of embarrassment, I rarely spoke in group settings. It was easier to be silent than to be found out.

I had made my parents a promise. If I couldn’t make it here, I told myself, I couldn’t make it anywhere.

But I had Wednesday mornings.

I’d get to the cafeteria early, before class, and he’d already be there. Waiting for me.

Neil Fujita.

He spent his life giving other people’s voices a face. Album covers, book covers, visual identities. If you’ve ever seen the original cover of The Godfather, you’ve seen his work.

Most people never knew the name behind it.

I'd walk straight to where he was sitting, two coffees in hand, one for him and one for me. Both black, one sugar. He paid for both.

He’d ask me questions. Not about work. About what I read, what I thought, what I noticed.

He waited for my answers, even when the wait was long. I never did the homework he assigned. Not once.

What I brought instead was everything else I was working on—my drawings, my ideas, pages that had nothing to do with his syllabus. Every Wednesday morning, I brought him the work no one had asked for.

He looked at it. Really looked.

Like it mattered as much as the assignment I never turned in.

He gave me an A anyway.

Somewhere between Wednesday mornings and cups of cafeteria coffee, I started hearing the poetry inside my own language again.

We remember the voice. We rarely remember the person who made it possible.

Mrs. Flowers never became Maya Angelou.

I never became Neil Fujita.

But without him, I would not have made it.