by Maya Angelou
San Francisco’s South of Market area was a mystery land where homeless drunks loitered before the dirty windows of liquor stores. Pawnshops’ glaring signs promised to exchange money out of proportion for goods. People I knew only went South of Market to reach the S.P. railway station or to pay bills at some of the location’s loan offices.
L.D. guided his car down the dark streets and I, snuggled at his side, wished the ride would never end. On the highway he had said I was the sweetest little thing he’d ever seen and praised me for wearing the high school clothes that he preferred. I was his Bobby Sock Baby, and he was going to make me so happy I’d cry.
I held precariously to the grateful tears that gathered behind my lids.
When he stopped the car and kissed me gently, long and loving my body pressed to be rid of the prison of skin.
Skid Row’s broken glass might have been rose petals, and the arid smell of secondhand alcohol was India’s most hypnotizing incense.
L.D. rang the bell at a grille door and called out his name. The door opened automatically and I followed him up dim, carpeted stairs. When he nodded to me I heeled in the shadows. He walked down the hall where a light gleamed over a half door. I heard whispers, then he came back to me jangling a key. The energy of passion carried me over the room’s threshold and threw me across the bed.
L.D. sat patiently beside me and spoke quietly.
“You know I’m much older than you. I’m an old man, so don’t expect the same things from me that you get from your young beaus.”
Beaus? R.L.? I couldn’t matt my allure by telling him there were no beaus, or scream at him to undress or I’d tear his clothes in shreds. I forced my eyes closed and waited.
He kissed me and the tears I had held in the car came unfastened.
L.D. held me as if I were made of feather.
“Daddy’s baby is scared, huh? Well, Daddy won’t hurt his baby. Get undressed and wash up so we can lie down.”
“I had a bath before we left Stockton.”
He whispered, “Wash over there in that face bowl. Daddy’s going to love his baby.”
—
I spent the next month metamorphosizing from Miss Insecure to Bobby Sock Baby. Being loved by an older married man gave me a youth I’d never known. I giggled into my Kleenex, fluttered my eyelashes and fairly gamboled over the greensward. At midnight when I doffed the cook’s apron and washed my face and arms, I flew, anklets sparking white, into the arms of my garbardined lover. We went to chicken suppers in San Francisco, where I hoped and feared the stubble-bearded gamblers in the back room would recognize me as Vivian’s daughter, who made good.
The grass I’d brought from San Francisco was holding out. I disciplined myself. One joint on Sunday and one on the morning of my day off. The weed always had an intense and immediate effect. Before the cigarette was smoked down to roach length, I had to smother my giggles. Just to see the falling folds of the curtains or the sway of a chair was enough to bring me to audible laughter. After an hour the hysteria of the high would abate and I could trust myself in public.
One day off, L.D. took me and my son for a picnic in the country. He had arrived early at my house, but I got ready quickly and we went to pick up the baby.
From the car windows I watched the farm rows. They ran toward the road as if to intercept it. It amused me that the neat lines marched up and fell away, to be replaced by others which in turn were themselves replaced. They had the show business precision of a drill team on parade. The thought of cotton rows practicing routines at night when everyone was asleep tickled my funny bone. A small blob of laughter curdled in the back of my throat and rolled over my tongue. I wanted to explain the joke to L.D., but there was no time. The chuckle was out. My laughter triggered the baby’s and he joined me. The whole thing was getting funnier. I tried to control myself, but each time I looked at L.D.’s disapproving face I climbed to a new height of hilarity. When he stopped the car, the contractions were beginning to ease.
We unloaded the car silently and spread a blanket I’d taken from my bed.
When we settled, he said, “You’ve been smoking gauge, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
“How long have you been smoking?”
“About a year.”
He took my hand and held it tightly. “Do you know that junk can kill your nature?”
I had never heard that. “No.”
“Well, let me tell you something. It’s gauge that’s breaking up my marriage.” He stroked my hand. “My silly dilly wife stopped letting me have any and she goes around laughing and giggling all the time. I’ve told her that I can’t go on much longer. I’d hate to lose you too, Rita. Just after I’ve found you.” I thought he was sincere and I was sorry I’d upset him.
I didn’t need to think long. The pot had been important when I was alone and lonely, when my present was dull and the future uncertain. Now I had a man, who talked sweet to me, made excruciatingly good love to me, considered my baby, and was going to make me his wife.
“L.D., when you take me home, I’ll throw the rest in the toilet.”
He grinned and touched my face. “You’re my Bobby Sock Baby. Now let’s see what we have to eat.”
As we picnicked he continued talking about his wife (I hadn’t expected to find My Prince without encumbrances). “She’s a millstone around my neck. Sometimes I stay all night in the gambling house just to keep away from her evil mind and sharp tongue.”
“Why do you stay with her, L.D.?”
“She’s older than I am, and she was good to me once. I never once forget a favor. Can’t afford to. Now she’s sickly. When I get on my feet, I’m going to send her back home to her folks.” He waited a minute, then took my face in his hands. “You’re such a sweet baby, Rita. Let’s don’t talk about it any more.” I admired his restraint.
—
The naturally lonely person does not look for comfort in love, but accepts the variables as due course.
I thought I was making him happy. In any case I would have done anything to win a smile or hear him laugh and pat my cheek. The job had become so very tiresome. If I didn’t have to work, we could spend more time together. I loved the movies and we’d never been; also I wanted to get into a dance class so I wouldn’t get rusty. I knew it was a matter of time before he’d catch on to my hints about the job and order me to quit. I would get an apartment and furnish it with the ragingly popular blond furniture. My bedroom was to tremble with pink frills and lacy ruffles. My son’s would be painted yellow and white, with decals of happy animals climbing the walls, expensive toys stacked neatly in a corner, and he would sit at a cute little table learning from clever educative books. Home-baked breads would give the kitchen a solid country air, and after my family had eaten and the baby was fast asleep, I would lie on my scented bed as L.D. loved his baby in the darkness.
Three days passed and L.D. didn’t come to the restaurant. I was jittery with worry. He told me where he lived when he told me how hateful and lacking in understanding his wife was, but I didn’t know the telephone number. Gamblers protect themselves from borrowers by having unlisted telephones. Before and after work I walked by the gambling joints looking for his car, then past his two-story house, which sat back in a yard of tended rose bushes. Ideas of all sizes and degrees of madness plagued me. He might have had an accident, fatal. Or he might have had a heart attack. Fatal. He might have tired of me and found someone else. I hastily discarded that one. It was better to picture him in a lovely coffin, “his small face narrowed by death and his thin lips at peace.”
“Baby, Daddy didn’t mean to worry you.” Although his face was lined with exhaustion and he hadn’t shaved, he looked beautiful. He had driven up just as I walked out of the café, and told me to get in the car.
“Things have been going badly for me. Very badly.”
I had no idea how a juvenile bride was to console her man. Should I pinch him and giggle or
stroke him like a sister?
“I’ve been gambling for three days and I lost everything.”
Now I could say it. “You’ve got me, L.D.”
He didn’t hear me.
“I lost over five thousand dollars.”
I nearly screamed. There wasn’t that much money anywhere except in banks. He could have bought me a house with five thousand dollars.
“And I’m up to my neck. I was trying to win enough money”—he turned away—“to divorce that old hag I’m married to and send her back to Louisiana. Then you and I could be together forever.”
I knew it. He did want to marry me. I put my hand on his cheek and pulled him back to face me.
“I don’t mind waiting, darling.” I had to reassure him, to erase his deep worry. “As long as I know you care.”
“But, you see, I may have to go away. I owe the big boys over two thousand dollars. And they don’t play.”
My God. The mob. I read the papers and had seen enough movies to know they’d take him for a ride and blow his brains out.
“Where would you go?” Anything but to see him killed.
“I used to work for some white folks in Shreveport. Rich ones. I telephoned them and asked for a loan. They said all right, but the wife said I’d have to come back to work for them. Old hot-tailed bitch. I know what she wants.”
“What does she want?” I knew and hated her immediately.
“She nearly got me lynched. Says she’s in love with me and don’t care who knows it. You know how Southern women are.”
I didn’t know about the women, but I knew L.D. was the greatest lover in the world and if white men were as sad as I’d heard, I could believe the old bitch was in love with him.
“How old is she?”
“Be about twenty-five now, I guess. I haven’t seen her for three years.”
Old? I thought he had meant wrinkled, yellow-fingernailed old. Why, that bitch probably tried to make him enjoy having sex with her. She probably wriggled and moaned under him just as I did.
“You can’t go back there, L.D. You might get killed.”
“I’ve got to do something. This is the time I need a good woman.” He had leaned back against the door.
“But I’m a woman, L.D.”
“You’re a little girl. Sweet as sugar, but a little girl. I mean somebody who can make some money, and in a hurry.”
My salary was sixty a week and I paid twenty for the baby-sitter, fifteen for my room, five extra for the baby’s milk and laundry. I had the right to take all my meals in the restaurant and that would save cutting into the twenty left. I had enough clothes, thanks to L.D. but what good was twenty dollars against five thousand?
“When Head Up had a little trouble with the Big Boys last month, his wife went to a house in Santa Barbara and made five hundred dollars the first week. In a month he was clear.”
“Doing what?”
He still thought I was a square. “But I don’t know if I could let anybody I love do that kind of business. I don’t think my life is worth a nice woman, my woman, giving up that much of herself.”
“L.D., if a woman loves a man, there is nothing too precious for her to sacrifice and nothing too much for him to ask.” I had to make him know that I was as capable of doing him a favor as his aging wife. He said nothing.
“Love is blind and hides a multitude of faults. I know what you’re talking about, and prostitution is like beauty. It is in the eye of the beholder. There are married women who are more whorish than a street prostitute because they have sold their bodies for marriage licenses, and there are some women who sleep with men for money who have great integrity because they are doing it for a purpose.”
“Do you really think that, baby?” His face was beginning to look better.
“Yes, and I’d do it to help you.”
He leaned forward and folded me in his arms.
“You sweet child. No, that’s wrong. Sweet woman.” He pulled away and saw the tears sliding down my face. “What’s that for? I didn’t ask you to do anything.”
“No, I’m just crying out of joy. That you’ll let me help you.”
“I heard of women like you, but I never thought I’d have one to call my own. My own.” He patted me and kissed away my tears.
“Clara. You remember Clara? I think she took to you. I would trust her with you. Clara runs a straight house. No three-way girls and no freak parties.” His voice ordered angrily, “I don’t want you to get in no freak parties, you understand?”
“Yes, Lou, I understand.”
“When this is all over, I want us to be able to get married and I don’t want you remembering nothing that I don’t do to you. I always want to be able to make you happy, I want you to keep on being my little Bobby Sock Baby.”
CHAPTER 27
“You sure are starting at a good time. The radio said rain today.”
I sat in an uncomfortable chair and watched the two women.
Clara looked up at me and explained, “Tricks walk in the rain.” She laughed. “I’m sure I don’t know why. If I was them, I’d rather stay in my own bed.” She laughed again. “By myself.” Chuckle.
Bea’s voice interrupted Clara’s amusement. “Goddam. Don’t say nothing like that, you’ll put the bad mouth on the day. I want to be in bed with ten tricks by noon. It’s already nine o’clock and I haven’t even broke luck yet.”
Carefully applied make-up did not disguise the woman’s hard features. When I met her the night before, I had decided she wasn’t nearly as nice as Clara, and although I would work with her, we’d never become friends.
“New girl gets to break luck.” Clara laid on a little authority. “You know how it goes.”
The language was new but its meaning was clear, and I wanted above all things not to appear stupid and not to display my immobilizing nervousness. I tried to concentrate on what the women were doing. Their fingers darted making knots in long strings of heavy white twine.
Bea looked up at me, disdain a mist across her face. “You a cherry, ain’t you?”
“Yes.” Lying would get me nothing.
“Well, that’s a thirty-second business. When you turn the first trick, you’ll be a ’ho. A stone ’ho. I mean for life.” She grinned sourer than a rotten lemon, but her make-up and jewelry and air of abandoned sex gave her a glint of glamour.
Clara wedged in a peacemaker’s tone, “Well, that won’t be so bad will it? I mean you’re a whore.”
“Hell, yes, I’m a damn good one. I’m a mud kicker. In the streets I make more money by accident than most bitches make on purpose.” She rolled her head and twisted her body. “And it’s more action, too. I mean the lights and tricking all night till the sun comes up.”
I wondered why she left the streets.
“I just got too hot. I was getting busted two, three times a week. So my daddy brought me down to this crib. Let the heat get off. Then I’ll be back switching and bitching and getting merry like Christmas.”
They both stood up and shook out strings in their hands. Clara walked to the living-room door and attached two strings to tacks over the lintel. She took matches from her robe pocket and lighted the ends that swung lazily near the floor.
“You burn string in the morning for luck, Rita. When it reaches the first knot the tricks begin to walk.”
Bea had left the room to place string over the other doors.
Clara went back to her uneasy chair.
“Now, Rita, let’s have a little talk. You were so tired when L.D. brought you in last night, I thought I’d wait till morning to tell you how I run this place.” I pulled my attention from the little red mouths that were nibbling up the string.
“L.D. said your work name was Sugar. I think that goes with you. You so young and quiet. Now, here’s how it goes. In your room you have a tablet, and when you take a trick he pays me; and after, I sign your book. If you didn’t have a man of your own, I’d give you your money at the end of the day and you coul
d leave. But what’ll happen is, at the end of the week Lou will come and I’ll give it to him. He’ll straighten out your bills, room rent, board and liquor.” She caught herself. “ ’Course you don’t drink and soft drinks are free. Then you get your day off and get to stay all night with your man.
“All my tricks are Mexican. They’re fast but not too clean. Each girl has her own trick pan and towels. You wash them first and after. Then you take fresh water and wash yourself good. Since you’re a cherry, I have to tell you Mexicans aren’t built very large, but don’t open your legs wide. They are tricks, not your old man, so don’t try making love to them. That’s why they call them tricks.”
Clara’s superstition about the burning string had already disenchanted me, and her conversation on deception of customers erased any respect I had for her. The only way I could be in the business was to give due service for the money paid. I decided privately that I would make each trick (each man) happy and forget the unbearable loneliness that sent him out in the rain searching for love.
“They walk in here,” she continued, “and take their choice of you or Bea. L.D. said you shouldn’t use make-up and ought to keep on wearing those junie flip clothes. That’s all right with me. When you get regulars, Bea is not allowed to pull them, unless you’re busy and they can’t wait. That’s the same with her steadies. Anything you want to know, ask me.”
The doorbell rang.
See, Rita! Look at the string.” The red dot had reached a knot on one of the strings. “Trick time.”
Bea came running into the room, and the sound of her footsteps was a little more audible than my heartbeat. The moment of truth had gotten stuck in my throat and saliva refused to go around it.
Clara went to open the door.
“Hello, Papa, come in. I’ve got something special for you today.” She stage-whispered, “A school girl.”
My God, she was lying. I was already going to be a whore. Take this man’s hard-earned money, go to bed with him without love. Why add lying to it?
They came in view. Clara had her arm around the shoulders of a short little fat man who wore matching gray khaki pants and shirt. He looked Indian.