The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (39 page)

“Aw. Don’t tell me that. I’ve come to look on you as family.”

“Mother Cleo, I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. And I
want you to have this.” I laid fifty dollars on the table. “My boyfriend sent it to you as a present.”

She beamed and I saw the tears start to form.

“Now, don’t cry. We’ll come back sometime. I wish you’d bathe the baby while I’m taking a bath, and then we’ll hit the highway.”

Her last words to me as she and Mr. Henry helped me to the car were attributes to my acting and successful deceit.

“You’re just what I wanted for a daughter. You smart and mannerable and truthful. That’s what I like most. You living a Christian life. Keep up the good work. God bless you and the child. And your mother.”

I tore down the morning streets as if the hounds of hell were coming to collect my soul. The baby responded to the two-wheel curve-taking by giving out air-splitting screams. My “Hush, baby” and “It’s all right, baby” could have been unheard whispers. He felt my panic and seemed to want the world to know that he was just as afraid as his mother.

At the train station I wiped the steering wheel and unstrapped the baby. I left the car parked in a No Parking zone, and as far as I know, it is there to this day.

—

I was racing away with my son on my hip and sheer fright in my heart. My general destination was the little village in Arkansas where I had grown up. But the particular goal of the journey was the protective embrace of Mrs. Annie Henderson, the grandmother who had raised me. Momma, as we called her, was a deliberately slow-speaking, right-thinking woman. And above all, she had what I lacked most at the moment. Courage.

There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with
soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes.

The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor. Stamps, Arkansas, a small hamlet, had subsisted for hundreds of years on the returns from cotton plantations, and until World War I, a creaking lumbermill. The town was halved by railroad tracks, the swift Red River and racial prejudice. Whites lived on the town’s small rise (it couldn’t be called a hill), while blacks lived in what had been known since slavery as “the Quarters.”

After our parents’ divorce in California, our father took us from Mother, put identification and destination tags on our wrists, and sent us alone, by train, to his mother in the South. I was three and my brother four when we first arrived in Stamps. Grandmother Henderson accepted us, asked God for help, then set about raising us in His way. She had established a country store around the turn of the century, and we spent the Depression years minding the store, learning Bible verses and church songs, and receiving her undemonstrative love.

We lived a good life. We had some food, some laughter and Momma’s quiet strength to lean against. During World War II the armed services drew the town’s youth, black and white, and Northern war plants lured the remaining hale and hearty. Few, if any, blacks or poor whites returned to claim their heritage of terror and poverty. Old men and women and young children stayed behind to tend the gardens, the one paved block of stores and the long-accepted way of life.

In my memory, Stamps is a place of light, shadow, sounds and entrancing odors. The earth smell was pungent, spiced with the odor of cattle manure, the yellowish acid of the ponds and rivers, the deep pots of greens and beans cooking for hours with smoked or cured pork. Flowers added their heavy aroma. And above all, the atmosphere was pressed down with the smell of old fears, and hates, and guilt.

On this hot and moist landscape, passions clanged with the ferocity of armored knights colliding. Until I moved to California at thirteen I had known the town, and there had been no need to examine it. I took
its being for granted and now, five years later, I was returning, expecting to find the shield of anonymity I had known as a child.

Along with other black children in small Southern villages, I had accepted the total polarization of the races as a psychological comfort. Whites existed, as no one denied, but they were not present in my everyday life. In fact, months often passed in my childhood when I only caught sight of the thin hungry po’ white trash (sharecroppers), who lived sadder and meaner lives than the blacks I knew. I had no idea that I had outgrown childhood’s protection until I arrived back in Stamps.

Momma took my son in one arm and folded the other around me. She held us for one sweet crushing moment. “Praise God Almighty you’re home safe.”

She was already moving away to keep her crying private.

“Turned into a little lady. Sure did.” My Uncle Willie examined me with his quiet eyes and reached for the baby. “Let’s see what you’ve got there.”

He had been crippled in early childhood, and his affliction was never mentioned. The right side of his body had undergone severe paralysis, but his left arm and hand were huge and powerful. I laid the baby in the bend of his good arm.

“Hello, baby. Hello. Ain’t he sweet?” The words slurred over his tongue and out of the numb lips. “Here, take him.” His healthy muscles were too strong for a year-old wriggler.

Momma called from the kitchen, “Sister, I made you a little something to eat.”

We were in the Store; I had grown up in its stronghold. Just seeing the shelves loaded with weenie sausages and Brown Plug chewing tobacco, salmon and mackerel and sardines all in their old places softened my heart and tears stood at the ready just behind my lids. But the kitchen, where Momma with her great height bent to pull cakes from the wood-burning stove and arrange the familiar food on well-known plates, erased my control and the tears slipped out and down my face to plop onto the baby’s blanket.

The hills of San Francisco, the palm trees of San Diego, prostitution and lesbians and the throat hurting of Curly’s departure disappeared into a never-could-have-happened land. I was home.

“Now what you crying for?” Momma wouldn’t look at me for fear my tears might occasion her own. “Give the baby to me, and you go wash your hands. I’m going to make him a sugar tit. You can set the table. Reckon you remember where everything is.”

The baby went to her without a struggle and she talked to him without the cooing most people use with small children. “Man. Just a little man, ain’t you? I’m going to call you Man and that’s that.”

Momma and Uncle Willie hadn’t changed. She still spoke softly and her voice had a little song in it.

“Bless my soul, Sister, you come stepping up here looking like your daddy for the world.”

Christ and Church were still the pillars of her life.

“The Lord my God is a rock in a weary land. He is a great God. Brought you home, all in one piece. Praise His name.”

She was, as ever, the matriarch. “I never did want you children to go to California. Too fast that life up yonder. But then, you all’s their children, and I didn’t want nothing to happen to you, while you’re in my care. Jew was getting a little too big for his britches.”

Five years before, my brother had seen the body of a black man pulled from the river. The cause of death had not been broadcast, but Bailey (Jew was short for Junior) had seen that the man’s genitals had been cut away. The shock caused him to ask questions that were dangerous for a black boy in 1940 Arkansas. Momma decided we’d both be better off in California where lynchings were unheard of and a bright young Negro boy could go places. And even his sister might find a niche for herself.

Despite the sarcastic remarks of Northerners, who don’t know the region (read Easterners, Westerners, North Easterners, North Westerners, Midwesterners), the South of the United States can be so impellingly beautiful that sophisticated creature comforts diminish in importance.

For four days I waited on the curious in the Store, and let them look
me over. I was that rarity, a Stamps girl who had gone to the fabled California and returned. I could be forgiven a few siditty airs. In fact, a pretension to worldliness was expected of me, and I was too happy to disappoint.

When Momma wasn’t around, I stood with one hand on my hip and my head cocked to one side and spoke of the wonders of the West and the joy of being free. Any listener could have asked me: if things were so grand in San Francisco, what had brought me back to a dusty mote of Arkansas? No one asked, because they all needed to believe that a land existed somewhere, even beyond the Northern Star, where Negroes were treated as people and whites were not the all-powerful ogres of their experience.

For the first time the farmers acknowledged my maturity. They didn’t order me back and forth along the shelves but found subtler ways to make their wants known.

“You all have any long-grain rice, Sister?”

The hundred-pound sack of rice sat squidged down in full view.

“Yes, ma’am, I believe we do.”

“Well then, I’ll thank you for two pounds.”

“Two pounds? Yes, ma’am.”

I had seen the formality of black adult equals all my youth but had never considered that a time would come when I, too, could participate. The customs are as formalized as an eighteenth-century minuet, and a child at the race’s knee learns the moves and twirls by osmosis and observation.

Values among Southern rural blacks are not quite the same as those existing elsewhere. Age has more worth than wealth, and religious piety more value than beauty.

There were no sly looks over my fatherless child. No cutting insinuations kept me shut away from the community. Knowing how closely my grandmother’s friends hewed to the Bible, I was surprised not to be asked to confess my evil ways and repent. Instead, I was seen in the sad light which had been shared and was to be shared by black girls in every state in the country. I was young, yes, unmarried, yes—but I was a mother, and that placed me nearer to the people.

I was flattered to receive such acceptance from my betters (seniors) and strove mightily to show myself worthy.

Momma and Uncle Willie noted my inclusion into the adult stratum, and on my fourth day they put up no resistance when I said I was going for a night on the town. Since they knew Stamps, they knew that any carousing I chose to do would be severely limited. There was only one “joint” and the owner was a friend of theirs.

Age and travel had certainly broadened me and obviously made me more attractive. A few girls and boys with whom I’d had only generalities in common, all my life, asked me along for an evening at Willie Williams’ café. The girls were going off soon to Arkansas Mechanical and Technical College to study Home Economics and the boys would be leaving for Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to learn how to farm. Although I had no education, my California past and having a baby made me equal to an evening with them.

When my escorts walked into the darkened Store, Momma came from the kitchen, still wearing her apron, and joined Uncle Willie behind the counter.

“Evening, Mrs. Henderson. Evening, Mr. Willie.”

“Good evening, children.” Momma gathered herself into immobility.

Uncle Willie leaned against the wall. “Evening, Philomena, and Harriet and Johnny Boy and Louis. How you all this evening?”

Just by placing their big still bodies in the Store at that precise time, my grandmother and uncle were saying, “Be good. Be very very good. Somebody is watching you.”

We squirmed and grinned and understood.

The music reached out for us when we approached the halfway point. A dark throbbing bass line whonked on the air lanes, and our bodies moved to tempo. The steel guitar urged the singer to complain

The Dew Drop In café was a dark square outline, and on its wooden exterior, tin posters of grinning white women divinely suggested Coca-Cola, R.C. Cola and Dr Pepper for complete happiness. Inside the one-room building, blue bulbs hung down precariously close to dancing couples, and the air moved heavily like stagnant water.

Our entrance was noted but no one came rushing over to welcome me or ask questions. That would come, I knew, but certain formalities had first to be observed. We all ordered Coca-Cola, and a pint bottle of sloe gin appeared by magic. The music entered my body and raced along my veins with the third syrupy drink. Hurray, I was having a good time. I had never had the chance to learn the delicate art of flirtation, so now I mimicked the other girls at the table. Fluttering one hand over my mouth, while laughing as hard as I could. The other hand waved somewhere up and to my left as if I and it had nothing to do with each other.

“Marguerite?”

I looked around the table and was surprised that everyone was gone. I had no idea how long I had sat there laughing and smirking behind my hand. I decided they had joined the dancing throng and looked up to search for my, by now, close but missing friends.

“Marguerite.” L. C. Smith’s face hung above me like the head of a bodyless brown ghost.

“L.C., how are you?” I hadn’t seen him since my return, and as I waited for his answer a wave of memory crashed in my brain. He was the boy who had lived on the hill behind the school who rode his own horse and at fifteen picked as much cotton as the grown men. Despite his good looks he was never popular. He didn’t talk unless forced. His mother had died when he was a baby, and his father drank moonshine even during the week. The girls said he was womanish, and the boys that he was funny that way.

I commenced to giggle and flutter and he took my hand.

“Come on. Let’s dance.”

I agreed and caught the edge of the table to stand. Half erect, I noticed that the building moved. It rippled and buckled as if a nest of snakes were mating beneath the floors. I was concerned, but the sloe
gin had numbed my brain and I couldn’t panic. I held on to the table and L.C.’s hand, and tried to straighten myself up.