The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (29 page)

Bailey was leaving home. At one o’clock in the morning, my little brother, who in my lonely days of inferno dwelling had protected me from goblins, gnomes, gremlins and devils, was leaving home.

I had known all along the inevitable outcome and that I dared not poke into his knapsack of misery, even with the offer to help him carry it.

I went to his room, against my judgment, and found him throwing his carefully tended clothes into a pillowcase. His maturity embarrassed me. In his little face, balled up like a fist, I found no vestige of my brother, and when, not knowing what to say, I asked if I could help, he answered, “Leave me the shit alone.”

I leaned on the doorjamb, lending him my physical presence but said no more.

“She wants me out, does she? Well, I’ll get out of here so fast I’ll leave the air on fire. She calls herself a mother? Huh! I’ll be damned. She’s seen the last of me. I can make it. I’ll always make it.”

At some point he noticed me still in the doorway, and his consciousness stretched to remember our relationship.

“Maya, if you want to leave now, come on. I’ll take care of you.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but as quickly went back to speaking to his soul. “She won’t miss me, and I sure as hell won’t miss her. To hell with her and everybody else.”

He had finished jamming his shoes on top of his shirts and ties, and socks were wadded into the pillowcase. He remembered me again.

“Maya, you can have my books.”

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then?

Bailey grabbed up the lumpy pillowcase and pushed by me for the stairs. As the front door slammed, the record player downstairs mastered the house and Nat King Cole warned the world to “straighten up and fly right.” As if they could, as if human beings could make a choice.

Mother’s eyes were red, and her face puffy, the next morning, but she smiled her “everything is everything” smile and turned in tight little moons, making breakfast, talking business and brightening the corner where she was. No one mentioned Bailey’s absence as if things were as they should be and always were.

The house was smudged with unspoken thoughts and it was necessary to go to my room to breathe. I believed I knew where he headed the night before, and made up my mind to find him and offer him my
support. In the afternoon I went to a bay-windowed house which boasted
ROOMS
, in green and orange letters, through the glass. A woman of any age past thirty answered my ring and said Bailey Johnson was at the top of the stairs.

His eyes were as red as Mother’s had been, but his face had loosened a little from the tightness of the night before. In an almost formal manner I was invited into a room with a clean chenille-covered bed, an easy chair, a gas fireplace and a table.

He began to talk, covering up the unusual situation that we found ourselves in.

“Nice room, isn’t it? You know it’s very hard to find rooms now. The war and all … Betty lives here [she was the white prostitute] and she got this place for me … Maya, you know, it’s better this way … I mean, I’m a man, and I have to be on my own …”

I was furious that he didn’t curse and abuse the Fates or Mother or at least act put upon.

“Well”—I thought to start it—“If Mother was really a mother, she wouldn’t have——”

He stopped me, his little black hand held up as if I were to read his palm. “Wait, Maya, she was right. There is a tide and time in every man’s life——”

“Bailey, you’re sixteen.”

“Chronologically, yes, but I haven’t been sixteen for years. Anyway, there comes a time when a man must cut the apron strings and face life on his own … As I was saying to Mother Dear, I’ve come to—”

“When were you talking to Mother …?”

“This morning, I said to Mother Dear—”

“Did you phone her?”

“Yes. And she came by here. We had a very fruitful discussion”—he chose his words with the precision of a Sunday school teacher—“She understands completely. There is a time in every man’s life when he must push off from the wharf of safety into the sea of chance … Anyway, she is arranging with a friend of hers in Oakland to get me on the Southern Pacific. Maya, it’s just a start. I’ll begin as a dining-car waiter and then a steward, and when I know all there is to know about that,
I’ll branch out … The future looks good. The Black man hasn’t even begun to storm the battlefronts. I’m going for broke myself.”

His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol and age, but his face believed the freshness of his words, and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times.

Whores were lying down first and getting up last in the room next door. Chicken suppers and gambling games were rioting on a twenty-four-hour basis downstairs. Sailors and soldiers on their doom-lined road to war cracked windows and broke locks for blocks around, hoping to leave their imprint on a building or in the memory of a victim. A chance to be perpetrated. Bailey sat wrapped in his decision and anesthetized by youth. If I’d had any suggestion to make I couldn’t have penetrated his unlucky armor. And, most regrettable, I had no suggestion to make.

“I’m your sister, and whatever I can do, I’ll do it.”

“Maya, don’t worry about me. That’s all I want you to do. Don’t worry. I’ll be okey-dokey.”

I left his room because, and only because, we had said all we could say. The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and crowded the room to uneasiness.

Later, my room had all the cheeriness of a dungeon and the appeal of a tomb. It was going to be impossible to stay there, but leaving held no attraction for me, either. Running away from home would be anticlimactic after Mexico, and a dull story after my month in the car lot. But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

I had it. The answer came to me with the suddenness of a collision. I would go to work. Mother wouldn’t be difficult to convince; after all, in school I was a year ahead of my grade and Mother was a firm believer
in self-sufficiency. In fact, she’d be pleased to think that I had that much gumption, that much of her in my character. (She liked to speak of herself as the original “do-it-yourself girl.”)

Once I had settled on getting a job, all that remained was to decide which kind of job I was most fitted for. My intellectual pride had kept me from selecting typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school, so office work was ruled out. War plants and shipyards demanded birth certificates, and mine would reveal me to be fifteen, and ineligible for work. So the well-paying defense jobs were also out. Women had replaced men on the streetcars as conductors and motormen, and the thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark-blue uniform, with a money changer at my belt, caught my fancy.

Mother was as easy as I had anticipated. The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam, and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight. Life was cheap and death entirely free. How could she have the time to think about my academic career?

To her question of what I planned to do, I replied that I would get a job on the streetcars. She rejected the proposal with: “They don’t accept colored people on the streetcars.”

I would like to claim an immediate fury which was followed by the noble determination to break the restricting tradition. But the truth is, my first reaction was one of disappointment. I’d pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter.

From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog.

I would go to work on the streetcars and wear a blue serge suit. Mother gave me her support with one of her usual terse asides, “That’s what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you’ve got. I’ve told you many times, ‘Can’t do is like Don’t Care.’ Neither of them have a home.”

Translated, that meant there was nothing a person can’t do, and there should be nothing a human being didn’t care about. It was the most positive encouragement I could have hoped for.

—

In the offices of the Market Street Railway Company, the receptionist seemed as surprised to see me there as I was surprised to find the interior dingy and the décor drab. Somehow I had expected waxed surfaces and carpeted floors. If I had met no resistance, I might have decided against working for such a poor-mouth-looking concern. As it was, I explained that I had come to see about a job. She asked, was I sent by an agency, and when I replied that I was not, she told me they were only accepting applicants from agencies.

The classified pages of the morning papers had listed advertisements for motorettes and conductorettes and I reminded her of that. She gave me a face full of astonishment that my suspicious nature would not accept.

“I am applying for the job listed in this morning’s
Chronicle
and I’d like to be presented to your personnel manager.” While I spoke in supercilious accents, and looked at the room as if I had an oil well in my own backyard, my armpits were being pricked by millions of hot pointed needles. She saw her escape and dived into it.

“He’s out. He’s out for the day. You might call tomorrow and if he’s in, I’m sure you can see him.” Then she swiveled her chair around on its rusty screws and with that I was supposed to be dismissed.

“May I ask his name?”

She half turned, acting surprised to find me still there.

“His name? Whose name?”

“Your personnel manager.”

We were firmly joined in the hypocrisy to play out the scene.

“The personnel manager? Oh, he’s Mr. Cooper, but I’m not sure you’ll find him here tomorrow. He’s … Oh, but you can try.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

And I was out of the musty room and into the even mustier lobby. In the street I saw the receptionist and myself going faithfully through
paces that were stale with familiarity, although I had never encountered that kind of situation before and, probably, neither had she. We were like actors who, knowing the play by heart, were still able to cry afresh over the old tragedies and laugh spontaneously at the comic situations.

The miserable little encounter had nothing to do with me, the me of me, any more than it had to do with that silly clerk. The incident was a recurring dream, concocted years before by stupid whites and it eternally came back to haunt us all. The secretary and I were like Hamlet and Laertes in the final scene, where, because of harm done by one ancestor to another, we were bound to duel to the death. Also because the play must end somewhere.

I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer.

On the streetcar, I put my fare into the box and the conductorette looked at me with the usual hard eyes of white contempt. “Move into the car, please move on in the car.” She patted her money changer.

Her Southern nasal accent sliced my meditation and I looked deep into my thoughts. All lies, all comfortable lies. The receptionist was not innocent and neither was I. The whole charade we had played out in that crummy waiting room had directly to do with me, Black, and her, white.

I wouldn’t move into the streetcar but stood on the ledge over the conductor, glaring. My mind shouted so energetically that the announcement made my veins stand out, and my mouth tighten into a prune.

I WOULD HAVE THE JOB. I WOULD BE A CONDUCTORETTE AND SLING A FULL MONEY CHANGER FROM MY BELT. I WOULD.

The next three weeks were a honeycomb of determination with apertures for the days to go in and out. The Negro organizations to whom I appealed for support bounced me back and forth like a shuttlecock on a badminton court. Why did I insist on that particular job? Openings were going begging that paid nearly twice the money. The minor officials with whom I was able to win an audience thought me mad. Possibly I was.

Downtown San Francisco became alien and cold, and the streets I had loved in a personal familiarity were unknown lanes that twisted with malicious intent. Old buildings, whose gray rococo façades housed my memories of the Forty-Niners, and Diamond Lil, Robert Service, Sutter and Jack London, were then imposing structures viciously joined to keep me out. My trips to the streetcar office were of the frequency of a person on salary. The struggle expanded. I was no longer in conflict only with the Market Street Railway but with the marble lobby of the building which housed its offices, and elevators and their operators.

During this period of strain Mother and I began our first steps on the long path toward mutual adult admiration. She never asked for reports and I didn’t offer any details. But every morning she made breakfast, gave me carfare and lunch money, as if I were going to work. She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy. That I was no glory seeker was obvious to her, and that I had to exhaust every possibility before giving in was also clear.

On my way out of the house one morning she said, “Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.” Another time she reminded me that “God helps those who help themselves.” She had a store of aphorisms which she dished out as the occasion demanded. Strangely, as bored as I was with clichés, her inflection gave them something new, and set me thinking for a little while at least. Later when asked how I got my job, I was never able to say exactly. I only knew that one day, which was tiresomely like all the others before it, I sat in the Railway office, ostensibly waiting to be interviewed. The receptionist called me to her desk and shuffled a bundle of papers to me. They were job application forms. She said they had to be filled in triplicate. I had little time to wonder if I had won or not, for the standard questions reminded me of the necessity for dexterous lying. How old was I? List my previous jobs, starting from the last held and go backward to the first. How much money did I earn, and why did I leave the position? Give two references (not relatives).