by Maya Angelou
Because he had not lied, I was forbidden anger. Because he had patiently and tenderly taught me love, I could not use hate to ease the pain. I had to bear it.
I am certain, with the passage of time, that he loved me. Maybe for the loveless waif I was. Maybe he felt pity for the young mother and fatherless child, and so decided to give us what we both needed for two months. I don’t know. I’m only certain that for some reason he loved me and that he was a good man.
The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.
I even embarrassed myself. Weeks after Charles left, I stumbled around San Francisco operating in the familiar. The lovely city disappeared in my fog. Nothing I did to food made it interesting to me. Music became a particular aggravation, for every emotional lyric had obviously been written for me alone.
Gonna take a sentimental journey
gonna set my heart at ease …
Charles had taken that journey and left me all alone. I was one emotional runny sore. To be buffeted about emotionally was not new, only the intensity and reason were. The new pain and discomfort was physical. My body had been awakened and fed, and suddenly I discovered I had a ravenous appetite. My natural reticence and habit of restraint prevented me from seeking other satisfaction even if it could be found.
I began to lose weight, which, with my height and thinness, I could ill afford to do. The burst of energy which had propelled me into beauty salons and dress shops was now as absent as my gone lover. I longed and pined, sighed and yearned, cried and generally slouched around feeling dismal and bereaved. By eighteen I managed to look run down if not actually run over.
My brother Bailey again was my savior, a role he fulfilled most of my early years.
He returned to the city after some months on an ammunition ship, and came to the restaurant to see me.
“My. What the hell’s happened to you?” The way I looked seemed to anger rather than worry him. I introduced him to my employer. She said, “Your brother. He awful little, ain’t he? I mean, to be your brother?”
Bailey thanked her smoothly, allowing just the tail of his sarcasm to flick in her face. She never noticed.
“I said, what’s the matter with you? Have you been sick?” I held in the tears that wanted to pour into my brother’s hands.
“No. I’m okay.”
I thought at the time that it was noble to bear the ills one had silently. But not so silently that others didn’t know one was bearing them.
“What time do you get off?”
“One o’clock. I’m off tomorrow, so I’m going out to get the baby.”
“I’ll be back and take you. Then we can talk.”
He turned to Mrs. Dupree. “And a good day to you, too, madam.” Bailey did little things with such a flourish. He might have been the Count of Monte Cristo, or Cyrano saying farewell to fair Roxanne.
After he had gone, Mrs. Dupree grinned her lips into a pucker. “He’s as cute as a little bug.”
I busied myself amid the pots. If she thought likening my big brother to an insect would please me, she had another think coming.
—
The baby crawled around the floor of my room as I told Bailey of my great love affair. Of the pain of discovery of pain. He nodded understanding and said nothing.
I thought that while I had his attention I might as well throw in my other sadness. I told him that because my old schoolmates laughed at me, I felt more isolated than I had in Stamps, Arkansas.
He said, “He sounds like a nice guy” and “I think its time for you to leave San Francisco. You could try Los Angeles or San Diego.”
“But I don’t know where I’d live. Or get a job.” Although I was miserable in San Francisco, the idea of any other place frightened me. I thought of Los Angeles and it was a gray vast sea without ship or lighthouse.
“I can’t just tear Guy away. He’s used to the woman who looks after him.”
“But she’s not his mother.”
“I’ve got a good job here.”
“But surely you don’t mean to make cooking Creole food your life’s work.”
I hadn’t thought about it. “I have a nice room here. Don’t you think it’s nice?”
He looked at me squarely, forcing me to face my fears. “Now, My, if you’re happy being miserable, enjoy it, but don’t ask me to feel sorry for you. Just get all down in it and wallow around. Take your time to savor all its subtleties, but don’t come to me expecting sympathy.”
He knew me too well. It was true. I was loving the role of jilted lover. Deserted, yet carrying on. I saw myself as the heroine, solitary, standing under a streetlight’s soft yellow glow. Waiting. Waiting. As the fog comes in, a gentle rain falls but doesn’t drench her. It is just enough to make her shiver in her white raincoat (collar turned up). Oh, he knew me too well.
“If you want to stay around here looking like death eating a soda cracker, that’s your business. There are some rights no one has the right to take from you. That’s one. Now, what do you want to do?”
That evening I decided to go to Los Angeles. At first I thought I’d work another month, saving every possible penny. But Bailey said, “When you make up your mind to make a change you have to follow through on the wave of decision.” He promised me two hundred dollars when his ship paid off and suggested that I tell my boss that I’d be leaving in a week.
I had never had two hundred dollars of my own. It sounded like enough to live on for a year.
The prospect of a trip to Los Angeles returned my youth to me.
My mother heard my plans without surprise. “You’re a woman. You can make up your own mind.” She hadn’t the slightest idea that not only was I not a woman, but what passed for my mind was animal instinct. Like a tree or a river, I merely responded to the winds and the tides.
She might have seen that, but her own mind was misted with the knowledge of a failing marriage, and the slipping away of the huge sums of money which she had enjoyed and thought her due. Her fingers still glittered with diamonds and she was a weekly customer at the most expensive shoe store in town, but her pretty face had lost its carefree adornment and her smile no longer made me think of day breaking.
“Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it’s your life. Be a damn good one. Don’t chippy at anything. Anything worth having is worth working for.”
It was her version of Polonius’ speech to Laertes. With that wisdom in my pouch, I was to go out and buy my future.
CHAPTER 8
The Los Angeles Union Railway Terminal was a marvel of Moorish Spanish glamour. The main waiting room was vast and the ceiling domed its way up to the clouds. Long curved benches sat in dark wooden splendor, and outside its arched doors, palm trees waved in lovely walks. Inlaid blue and yellow tiles were to be found on every wall, arranged in gay and exotic design.
It was easy to distinguish San Franciscans detraining amid the crowd. San Franciscan women always, but always, wore gloves. Short white snappy ones in the day, and long black or white kid leather ones at night. The Southern Californians and other tourists were much more casual. Men sported flowered shirts, and women ambled around or lounged on the imposing seats in cotton dresses which could have passed for brunch coats in San Francisco.
Being from The City, I had dressed for the trip. A black crepe number which pulled and pleated, tucked and shirred, in a warp all its own. It was expensive by my standards and dressy enough for a wedding reception. My short white gloves had lost their early-morning crispness during the ten-hour coach trip, and Guy, whose immensity matched his energy, had mashed and creased and bungled the dress into a very new symmetry. Less than a year old, he had opinions. He definitely wanted to get down and go to that smiling stranger across the aisle, and immediately wanted to be in my lap pulling on the rhinestone brooch which captured and brought light to the collar of my dress.
In spite of the wrinkled dress and in spite of the cosmetic case full to reeking with
dirty diapers, I left the train with my son a picture of controlled dignity. I had over two hundred dollars rolled in scratchy ten-dollar bills in my brassiere, another seventy in my purse, and two bags of seriously selected clothes. Los Angeles was going to know I was there.
—
My aunt answered my telephone call.
“Ritie, where are you?”
“We’re at the station.”
“What we?”
Like all the family she had heard about my pregnancy, but she hadn’t seen the result.
“My son and I.”
A tiny hesitation, then: “Get a taxi and come out here. I’ll pay the cab fare.” Her voice didn’t ooze happiness at hearing from me, but then, the Baxters were not known to show any emotions. Except violent ones.
Wilshire Boulevard was wide and glossy. Large buildings sat back on tiny little lawns in a privacy that projected money and quiet voices and white folks.
The house on Federal Avenue had a no-nonsense air about it. It was a model of middle-class decorum. A single-story, solidly made building with three bedrooms, good meant-to-last furniture, and samplers on the wall which exhorted someone to “Bless This Home” and warned that “Pride Goeth before a Fall.”
The clan had met, obviously called by my aunt, to check out my new addition to the family and give me the benefit of their conglomerate wisdom. My Uncle Tommy sat, wide-spraddled as usual, and grumbled. “Hey, Ritie. Got a baby, I see.”
Guy was in my arms and talking, pointing, laughing, so the meaning in his statement was not in the words. He was simply greeting me and saying that although I had a child without benefit of marriage, he for one was not going to ignore either me or the baby.
My family spoke its own mysterious language. The wives and husbands of my blood relatives handed my son around as if they were thinking of adding him to their collection. They removed his bootees and pulled his toes.
“Got good feet.”
“Uh huh. High arches.”
One aunt ran her hand around his head and was satisfied. “His head is round.”
“Got a round head, huh?”
“Sure does.”
“That’s good.”
“Uh huh.”
This feature was more than a symbol of beauty. It was an indication of the strength of the bloodline. Every Baxter had a round head.
“Look a lot like Bibbi, doesn’t he?” “Bibbi” was the family name for my mother. Guy was handed around the circle again.
“Sure does.”
“Yes. I see Bibbi right here.”
“Well … but he’s mighty fair, isn’t he?”
“Sure is.”
They all spoke without emotion, except for my Aunt Leah. Her baby voice rose and fell like music played on a slender reed.
“Reetie, you’re a woman now. A mother and all that. You’ll have two to think of from now on. You’ll have to get a job—”
“I’ve been working as a cook.” She shouldn’t think I had come to be taken care of.
“—and learn to save your money.”
Tommy’s wife, Sarah, wrapped my son carefully in his blanket and handed him to me. Aunt Leah stood, a signal that the inspection was over. “What time is your train? Charlie can drive you to the station.”
My brain reeled. Had I given the impression that I was going on? Did they say something I missed? “In a few hours. I should be getting back.”
We were all shaking hands. Their relief was palpable. I was, after all, a Baxter and playing the game. Being independent. Expecting nothing and if asked, not giving a cripple crab a crutch.
Tom asked, “Need some money, Reet?”
“No thanks. I’ve got money.” All I needed was to get away from that airless house.
My uncles and aunts were childless, except for my late Uncle Tuttie, and they were not equipped to understand that an eighteen-year-old mother is also an eighteen-year-old girl. They were a close-knit group of fighters who had no patience with weakness and only contempt for losers.
I was hurt because they didn’t take me and my child to their bosom, and because I was a product of Hollywood upbringing and my own romanticism. On the silver screen they would have vied for me. The winner would have set me up in a cute little cottage with frangipani and roses growing in the front yard. I would always wear pretty aprons and my son would play in the Little League. My husband would come home (he looked like Curly) and smoke his pipe in the den as I made cookies for the Boy Scouts meeting.
I was hurt because none of this would come true. But only in part. I was also proud of them. I congratulated myself on having absolutely the meanest, coldest, craziest family in the world.
Uncle Charlie, Aunt Leah’s husband, never talked much, and on the way back to that station he broke the silence only a few times.
“You sure got yourself a cute baby.”
“Thank you.”
“Going on to San Diego, huh?”
I guessed so.
“Well, your father’s down there. You won’t be by yourself.”
My father, who spent his time drinking tequila in Mexico and putting on high-toned airs in San Diego, would give me a colder reception than the one I’d just received.
I would be by myself. I thought how nice it would be.
I decided that one day I would be included in the family legend. Someday, as they sat around in the closed circle recounting the fights and feuds, the prides and prejudices of the Baxters, my name would be among the most illustrious. I would become a hermit. I would seal myself off from the world, just my son and I.
I had written a juicy melodrama in which I was to be the star. Pathetic, poignant, isolated. I planned to drift out of the wings, a little girl martyr. It just so happened that life took my script away and upstaged me.
CHAPTER 9
“Are you in the life?”
The big black woman could have been speaking Russian. She sat with her back to the window and the sunlight slid over her shoulders, making a pool in her lap.
“I beg pardon?”
“The life. You turn tricks?”
The maid at the hotel had given me the woman’s address and said she took care of children. “Just ask for Mother Cleo.”
She hadn’t asked me to sit, so I just stood in the center of the cluttered room, the baby resting on my shoulder.
“No. I do not.” How could she ask me such a question?
“Well, you surely look like a trickster. Your face and everything.”
“Well, I assure you, I’m not a whore. I have worked as a chef.” How the lowly have become mighty. Ole Creole Kitchen would hitch up its shoulders to know that it once had had a chef—not just a garden-variety cook.
“Well.” She looked at me as if she’d soon be able to tell if I was lying.
“How come you got so much powder and lipstick?” That morning I had bought a complete cosmetic kit and spent over an hour pasting my face into a mask with Max Factor’s Pancake No. 31. I didn’t really feel I had to explain to Mother Cleo, but on the other hand I couldn’t very well be rude. I did need a baby-sitter.
“Maybe I put on too much.”
“Where do you work?”
It was an interrogation. She had her nerve. Did she think that being called Mother Cleo gave her maternal privileges?
“The Hi Hat Club needs a waitress. I’m going to apply.” The makeup was supposed to make me look older. Maybe it only succeeded in making me look cheap.
“That’s a good job. Tips can make it a real good job. Let me see the baby.”
She got up with more ease than I had expected. When she stretched out her hands a cloud of talcum powder was released. She took the baby and adjusted him down in the crook of her arm. “He’s pretty. Still sleeping, huh?”
Mother Cleo metamorphosed in front of me. She was no longer the ugly fat ogre who threatened from her deep chair. Looking down on the infant, she had become the prototype of mother. Her face softened and her voice blurred. She ran stubbly fat
fingers around his cap and slid it off.
“I don’t usually take them this young. Too much trouble. But he’s cute as can be, ain’t he?”
“Well, you know—”
“Don’t do for you to say so, but still it’s true. And you’re almost too young to have a baby. I guess your folks put you out, huh?”
She had noticed I wore no wedding ring. I decided to let her think I was homeless. Then I thought, “Let her think nothing. I was homeless.”
“Well, I’m going to give you a hand. I’ll keep him and I’m going to charge you less than the white ones.” I was shocked that she kept white babies. “Lots of white women trust their babies with me rather than they own mothers. There lot of them from the South and they like the idea that they still got a mammy for they children. Can’t you just see them? Snotty-nosed little things growing up talking about ‘I had a colored mammy.’ Huh?” She uglied her face with wrinkles. “But I naturally like children and I make they mommas pay. They pay me good. Don’t care how much I like they young ’uns, they don’t pay they have to go.”
I agreed to her terms and paid her for the first week. Before I left, the baby struggled awake in her arms. She began a rocking motion which didn’t lull him. His large black eyes took in the strange face and he began to look around for me. A small cry found its way to the surface before I came into his vision. Once he had assured himself that indeed I was there, he hollered in earnest, angry that I had allowed him to be held by this unknown person, and maybe even a little afraid that I’d given him away. I moved to take him.
“Let him cry.” Mother Cleo increased her rocking and bouncing. “He got to get used to it.”
“Just let me hold him a second.” I couldn’t bear his loneliness. I took his softness and kissed him and patted his back and he quieted immediately, as a downpour of rain cuts off.
“You too soft. They all do that till they get used to me.” She stood near me and held out her arms. “Give him to me and you go on and get your job. I’ll feed him. You bring diapers?”