by Maya Angelou
—
For two and a half months I operated at the points of a stylistic triangle, braggadocio (in front of the women) and modest servitude (at the club), and kept wondering what to do with all the cash.
I bought a car which was a model of Detroit genius. A pale-green Chrysler, ’39 vintage, convertible. It sported wooden doors and highly polished wooden dashboards. Knobs and buttons were a yellow material like the handles of old-fashioned flatware. I fashioned a sling made out of belts and secured my son, who had begun to walk. We drove around the monotonous streets of San Diego in my beautiful chariot. I had paid cash for it from a dresser drawer of money.
Mother Cleo asked charily, “And where in the world …?”
I had my answer molded. “My boyfriend gave it to me!”
“What’d he do? Steal it?”
“Oh no. He paid cash.”
“How come he don’t come around?”
“He’s going to. I invited him.” In fact, I had thought of palming Hank off as the hard-working boyfriend but decided he’d never be able to carry it off.
“Listen here. He ain’t a married man, is he?” She began to draw away from me as if I might be a carrier of a loathsome disease.
“No, ma’am. He’s not even divorced. I mean, he’s never been married.”
She calmed down gradually, then her face hardened. “He ain’t a white man, is he? I don’t ’low white men.”
I had to laugh. Of all the tricks who came and went in my establishment, I hadn’t even seen one. “No, Mother Cleo, he’s not even light-skinned.”
Reluctantly she smiled. “One thing I don’t hold with is women messing ’round with married mens. The other is messing ’round with white men. First one the Bible don’t like, second one the law don’t like.”
She could have put her time to greater use concerning herself with my lack of morals rather than with my sexual involvements. Since coming to San Diego I let no attraction penetrate the invisible widow’s weeds I had donned. My love was dead, my love was gone, married to some stupid shipfitter and living in the mosquito-ridden swamps of Louisiana. Long die, and stay dead, my love.
CHAPTER 15
During this time when my life hinged melodramatically on intrigue and deceit, I discovered the Russian writers. One title caught my eye. Not because I felt guilty raking in money from the doings of prostitutes but because of the title’s perfect balance. Life, as far as I had deduced it, was a series of opposites: black/white, up/down, life/death, rich/poor, love/hate, happy/sad, and no mitigating areas in between. It followed Crime/Punishment.
The heavy opulence of Dostoevsky’s world was where I had lived forever. The gloomy, lightless interiors, the complex ratiocinations of the characters, and their burdensome humors, were as familiar to me as loneliness.
I walked the sunny California streets shrouded in Russian mists. I fell in love with the Karamazov brothers and longed to drink from a samovar with the lecherous old father. Then Gorki became my favorite. He was the blackest, most dear, most despairing. The books couldn’t last long enough for me. I wished the writers all alive, turning out manuscripts for my addiction. I took to the Chekov plays and Turgenev, but always returned in the late nights, after I had collected my boodle, to the Maxim Gorki and his murky, unjust world.
My dance teacher, who took no personal interest, wore the most outlandish clothes. Her long dark skirt, gathered, fell to just above her ankles. The blouses were of Mexican persuasion and were worn off her thin shoulders. Ropes of colorful beads and thong sandals completed her costume. She looked odd enough for admiration. I copied her clothes, and when not dressed in the white-blouse, black-skirt waitress uniform, I could be seen haunting the libraries, a tall thin black girl in too-long skirts and señorita blouses, which might have been sexy had I had the figure and/or attitude to complement them. Alas, I didn’t.
Upon reflection, I marvel that no one saw through me enough to bundle me off to the nearest mental institution. The fact that it didn’t happen depended less on my being a good actress than the fact that I was surrounded, as I had been all my life, by strangers. The world of waitress, dreamer, madam and mother might have continued indefinitely, except for another of life’s unexpected surprises.
I didn’t insist on any rules in my little whorehouse by the side of the road, except one: no all-night dates, no matter what the temptation. I wanted the money without name, the ease without strain. I never wanted any tricks to be in the house after I arrived, hence the signal with Hank.
One evening I sat in a taxi on the darkened street (I never took my automobile to the whorehouse) and waited for the light to go off on the porch. The driver, who also brought trade, and I walked into the house.
hI stood in the center of the tiny living room, which smelled of Lysol and smoke and incense, hemmed in by the driver, the women and Hank, and by the furniture, which threatened to oust us all at any moment. Beatrice and Johnnie Mae erased any budding aspirations I had for owning things. Now that they had money, their acquisitive natures came into their own. The total filling up of the living room was so gradual that it was as if the existing furniture gave birth nightly to smaller and even larger images of itself.
Hank passed me the cigar box of money.
“Damn. Turn the damned radio off till we get business settled. You can’t hear a shitting thing.” I had taken to cursing to round out my image. The two women no longer took any interest in me, except possibly to hate my arrogance and envy my authority. I couldn’t care less.
I had not finished recovering their chits and was about to turn to the cabdriver when a drunk, half-dressed white sailor stumbled through the bedroom door. He had nothing on below the blue middy. There was a moment’s hush when the women and Hank looked at me. I was hypnotized at the man’s nudity and couldn’t take my eye’s from his white, soft, dangling penis.
Beatrice ran to him. “Honey. I told you to stay—”
“What’s going on? Who are all these folks?” His accent was lower Mississippi, and he looked as naked and white and ugly and drunk and nasty as anything I could think of.
Beatrice herded him back to the room.
In those seconds I became a child again. Unreasoning rage consumed me. The low-down sneaky bitches—I had told them to have the place cleared before I got there. They had probably had tricks there every night and I hadn’t even questioned them. I could have gone to jail or worse. After all I’d done for them, their whorish hearts were so ungrateful that I had been subjugated to looking at the sickening aspect of a white man’s penis.
I turned to Hank, and lumbering toward me, he said, “Rita, swear to God, I thought they was all gone.”
Johnnie Mae allowed a little of her jealousy to show. “I don’t see nothing wrong myself. You come over here every night collecting money, acting like you somebody’s pimp. But you too good to turn a trick. And you keep this big rough sonofabitch watching us all the time. Well, you can kiss my black ass.”
Her rudeness didn’t surprise me. I would not have moved an eyebrow at anything any more. The drivers stood mesmerized by the event.
I gave the cigar box to Hank. “Hank. Do you want a whorehouse, complete with whores? You’ve just been given one.” I turned to the women, gathering all my injured dignity. “And, ladies, you decided in the beginning that you were going to screw me one way or the other. Look at us now. Who did the screwing?”
Beatrice’s voice keened, sharpened and moved through the room like a swinging razor. “If it hadn’t been for you, we’d be living like we always did.”
“Yes, in the street, or back in some white woman’s kitchen.”
Johnnie Mae swelled up as if she had taken in more air than it was possible to release. “Be goddam careful how you talk to her, you big-nose bitch.”
It was time to go. These lying heathens were not above attacking me. And after all I’d done for them.
“Hank, if you want this place, it’s all yours.” And one parting shot to the tra
itors: “At least I’m leaving you better off than I found you. You’ve got enough secondhand furniture to start you own Goodwill store.” And to the cabdriver: “Will you please take me home.”
I stood straighter, separating myself from the stench of my present environment, and started out. Johnnie Mae’s rage propelled her after me. I reached the door just as she stretched her hand for me. I put on a little speed, not wanting to appear to be running, and escaped down the steps as she and the cabdriver collided in the doorway. He extricated himself in a hurry, more than a little terrified of getting caught between two restless tribes. Johnnie Mae, thwarted, for I had gained the sidewalk, screamed out into the quiet darkness, “You bitch! You think the police don’t want to know how you bought that car. You better not drive it again. I’ll have the vice squad on your ass.”
I don’t know how I continued walking to the cab. Her threat and the sound of her screech had stabbed me to the quick as surely as it had pierced the night. The wretch would put the cops on my trail and I’d lose my car, go to jail and be put out of Mother Cleo’s. I was sitting in the back of the taxi when a numbing thought sidled across my brain like a poisonous snake. I might be declared an unfit mother and my son would be made a ward of the court. There were cases like that. In the cool early-morning air I began to sweat. The tiny glands in my armpits opened and closed to the pricking of a thousand straight pins.
“Please take me home, and I’m sorry for that terrible outburst.” Fear still rode the front seat with the driver and he lost no time depositing me at my destination. I paid him, tipped him grandly and inundated him with praise for his reliability and courtesy, and lack of familiarity. I don’t think he heard a word, and before I reached the front door, his tail lights had turned winking around the corner.
During the exotic buying sprees I hadn’t thought to get luggage to hold my new acquisitions. I heaped piles of my clothes and my son’s into the suitcases Bailey had given me in San Francisco. I had made up my mind that come daybreak, my son and I were going to make a run for it. If the police caught me, they’d catch me at the railway station or on the train, not a sitting duck waiting passively to be arrested. When I had finished cramming as many things as possible into the bags, I sat down to read until daybreak.
Since childhood I had often read until the gray light entered my room, but on that tense night it seemed sleep had allied itself with my enemies, and along with them was determined to overpower me, do me down. I tried sitting in a chair and sitting cross-legged on the bed. A knock awoke me. It was Mother Cleo.
“Rita, you left your light on again. You going to start helping me with the electricity. You don’t know how much it cost …” She was moving away from the door, and her words reached down the hall.
I came to full attention and checked my luggage, my money and my story again.
“Mother Cleo, my mother is sick in San Francisco. She telephoned me at the club last night, so I have to go home.” I had followed her into the kitchen. She put down her cup and looked at me with such sympathy I almost wished I wasn’t lying.
“Oh, you poor thing. She ain’t bad off, is she?”
“Oh no, nothing serious.” I wanted to calm her fears.
“Well then, you won’t be long. You’ll leave the baby?”
“Oh no. She wants to see him. And I’ll tell you the truth”—as if I could—“I’m not coming back soon.”
“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.
CHAPTER 16
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.”