Maya Angelou (18 page)

Maya's fragmentation can be observed in any number of her relationships: with her mother, with the prostitutes she tries to control, with her grandmother, with her lovers. Vivian Baxter, the absent mother of
Caged Bird
, is restored to importance in the second volume.
Gather Together
begins and ends with Maya's mother. At the start, Maya and her child are living with Vivian and Daddy Clidell, Maya's stepfather. When the book ends, Maya and Guy intend to return to the protection of Vivian Baxter
following Angelou's glimpse at the horrors of heroin addiction. In its promised reunion of mother, child, and grandmother, the concluding paragraph directly parallels the ending of
Caged Bird
: Vivian turns out the lights of her house as Maya and her baby fall asleep.

Fragmentation is also a component of her relationships with other women. In
Caged Bird
Maya has one girlfriend, Louise Kendricks. A lonely girl, Louise has the kind of imagination that appeals to Maya. They hold hands, close their eyes, and pretend to be dropping from the sky. Together Maya and Louise “challenge the unknown” (119). The semi-erotic description of Louise, along with Maya's concern about being a lesbian, takes a much sharper focus in
Gather Together
. Here there is no sweet Louise. Maya becomes a madam and the women who work for her, Beatrice and Johnnie Mae, are lesbians and prostitutes. The relationship between Maya and her whores is fragmented, built on distrust, controlled by Maya's desire for money.

Maya is quite aggressive in securing the services of Beatrice and Johnnie Mae. She promotes herself as a madam and persuades the lesbian couple to work as prostitutes in their own small home. Maya does well enough to buy a car and some clothes, but the arrangement disintegrates when Maya arrives late one night and finds the girls working after hours, in flagrant violation of Maya's orders. Johnnie Mae threatens to turn Maya over to the police, where she will be jailed for owning an automobile purchased with money earned illegally.

Following the shakedown with Johnnie Mae and Beatrice, Maya gathers Guy and her suitcase, abandons her car at the train station, and goes by rail to Stamps, in search of the “protective embrace” of Momma Henderson (61). For a while she works at Momma's store, although customers are constantly wondering why any woman who left for San Francisco would come back to Stamps. She gets drunk at the Dew Drop Inn with her high school friends. Guy is happy to receive the attention of Momma and Uncle Willie.

During her stay, Maya goes into the white area of town to purchase a Simplicity sewing pattern at the Stamps General Merchandise Store, only to find that the pattern has to be special-ordered. The day she returns to pick it up is a hot, hot Southern day, so hot that Maya's “thighs scudded like wet rubber” (75). At the store she gets into trouble for talking brazenly to a saleswoman who has blocked her entry. Maya realizes that she has become too racially liberated to accept the restrictions of the white community. In a parallel manner, Momma Henderson has remained fearful of white intolerance and continues to adhere to the unspoken rules concerning whites. In a memorable scene, Momma slaps her rebellious grandchild again and again, ordering her to leave Stamps for her own protection and the baby's. It is the last moment of contact between them.

Although Maya's outspoken attitudes lead to a termination of their relationship, her grandmother continues to be a reminder of morality and Christian values. In San Francisco one evening, Maya, working as a prostitute, notices a cook on the premises, a woman who so reminds her of Annie Henderson that she has to lower her gaze when the cook puts dinner on the table. The woman in the whorehouse represents Momma Henderson's continuing spiritual influence and reminds the reader of how far Maya has strayed from the teachings of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church of Stamps, Arkansas.

Perhaps Maya's major source of fragmentation comes from her relationships with men. She often misinterprets the behavior of men with whom she is infatuated. Because she becomes involved too quickly, she is “repeatedly hurt by men who are far more experienced than she, who are far more able to see her neediness and exploit it before she is able to see it in herself” (Ramsey 1984–1985, 149).

Angelou's male companions are rarely constructive. While the adult males in
Caged Bird
are crippled, absent, or abusive, the men in
Gather Together
are manipulative, unfaithful, or damaged. Early in the second autobiography she meets Curly, who gives Maya her first “love party” (18). Overjoyed with the lovemaking, Maya senses maturity and pleasure for the first time. They take Guy to parks and playgrounds. Maya buys Curly an expensive ring on Daddy Clidell's charge account. Then one night he tells her that his girlfriend has come back from San Diego where she had been working in a shipyard.

In her distress over losing Curly, Maya turns to her brother, who is again her defender, as he had been in
Caged Bird
. Bailey works for decent pay on an ammunition boat out of San Diego. Promising her two hundred dollars, he persuades her to leave San Francisco and make a new start in San Diego. Meanwhile, Bailey marries a high school chum named Eunice who, much to his despair, contracts tuberculosis and dies. Fragmented and incomplete after her death, Bailey has a breakdown and then turns to drugs to ease the emptiness.

Of the men who take advantage of Maya, L. D. Tolbrook is the worst offender. A married man, he lures Maya into becoming a prostitute for his sake. Professing that he owes money to some hardened criminals, Tolbrook convinces the “innocent” Maya to turn tricks. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whorehouse scenes is the dialogue. Maya's coworkers are intelligent women who know the trade. Clara, Maya's boss, advises further on how to talk and act when she's with a man. Clara promises that if she's good, L.D. will get her a “little white girl,” meaning cocaine. Maya
is beginning to suspect, from the way the whores talk, that L.D. is really a pimp, someone who is hiring her out for his own profit. When Maya tells Bailey how she is earning a living, he is furious. Once again Maya's savior, Bailey forces her to quit the whorehouse and orders her to warn Tolbrook that her brother Bailey is after him.

The climax of
Gather Together in My Name
occurs when an unexpectedly compassionate boyfriend, Troubador Martin, takes Maya, now smoking a lot of marijuana, on an unnerving tour of the underworld of heroin addiction. Troub makes her watch while he shoots up, makes her watch as the needle punctures a scab and “rich yellow pus” runs down his arm (180). Maya's refusal, at Troub's advice, to do hard drugs marks the end of her irresponsibility and the inauguration of new standards that help safeguard her and her son's survival.

The end of
Gather Together
gives little indication that someday Maya will be a successful performer, wife, or mother. Deserted by her dancing partner, R. L. Poole, and betrayed by her pimp, L. D. Tolbrook, the best break she receives by the end of the narrative is to have narrowly escaped heroin addiction. The book closes with an experienced Maya preparing to return to her mother's protection: “I had no idea what I was going to make of my life, but I had given a promise and found my innocence. I swore I'd never lose it again” (181).

Although the reader may feel jolted by the suddenness of the ending, this sort of high-speed projection into the future is a common element in Angelou's conclusions. Sondra O'Neale comments on the “abrupt suspense” and drama with which the central character draws together her story: “In this way dramatic technique not only centralizes each work, it also makes the series narrative a collective whole” (1984, 33).

The Maya of
Gather Together in My Name
is a person of potential strength and moral integrity, perhaps even “innocence,” who is struggling against the temptations that the fast world of California is holding before her: sex, money, getting high. Through it all, the narrator is determined to present Maya as honestly as possible, in a way that readers will believe: “Young people feel safe with me,” she claims, “because they know I'm not going to lie and I won't fudge. I'm not going to tell them everything I know, but I will try to make sure that what I say is the truth” (“Icon” 1997).

With the exception of a return visit to Stamps, the setting in
Gather Together
is confined to the state of California. The setting includes the
various dwellings where Maya and her son are forced to live, sometimes separately; the job sites where she feels threatened or demeaned; the places that offer her temporary contentment, like Vivian's house in San Francisco and Annie Henderson's store in Stamps, Arkansas.

The narrative opens in a smooth and leisurely manner, at the San Francisco residence of Vivian Baxter and Daddy Clidell. When Maya leaves on her quest for independence, the setting changes swiftly: one day she works in a hospital cafeteria, the next as a cook in a Creole restaurant. She moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles, to San Diego then Stockton, and back, trying to provide for her son. Always in motion, always changing, Maya circles her surroundings as she looks for work, for love, for contentment.

The dizzy changes of setting culminate when Maya, fearing that Johnnie Mae will report her for having an illegal automobile, goes with Guy to Stamps on a desperate train ride that echoes the journey of the two children with name tags at the beginning of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. In the first volume, the small town in Arkansas represents a state of innocence, a place of refuge for two lonely and unwanted children. In
Gather Together
, Stamps cannot offer solace to Maya, whose knowledge of city life makes her challenge Momma Henderson's unbending rule that you just don't talk to white folks. When Maya, in violation of her grandmother's wishes, leaves the black community of Stamps and crosses the dusty road into the white section of Stamps, she initiates a confrontation with two white saleswomen that Momma Henderson hears about even before Maya gets back to the general store. Maya's violation of decorum results in a severe beating from Momma and a prompt return to California.

In creating an autobiography, the narrator depends on thematic issues to act as reflections on character and plot. A theme is a repeated motif that creates a pattern or design in the text. When it is skillfully handled, as it is in
Gather Together
, theme can enrich the plot, help organize the volume, and even determine how the plot begins and ends. Three major themes dominate
Gather Together
—motherhood, clothing, and work.

The theme of motherhood controls the plot of
Gather Together
. Maya makes decisions or forms relationships with the constant image of her son before her, as she tries to provide him with a stable environment or console herself when they are separated. Maya's motherhood is what keeps her connected to the world of responsibility. However, she often falls short in her duties as mother, due to complications in her work or the enticements of
her male friends, who also want time with her. This situation highlights the duality Maya feels throughout the series between mothering and working.

Recall the mother/mother/son still life—Vivian, Maya, and the baby in repose—with which Angelou ended
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. This tranquil scene is disrupted in
Gather Together
as the young mother roams the streets of San Francisco looking for a way to survive. In the second volume she inverts the motherhood theme of
Caged Bird
: the little girl who longed for Vivian's love is now a mother herself, a teenage girl responsible for the nurturing of her son. Maya's redemptive mother in
Gather Together
remains a character for the rest of the autobiographies, although Maya's responsibility toward her son recedes as an issue.

With the theme of motherhood Angelou engages the reader in a mother/child configuration that is of vital concern for the remaining autobiographies. As Marianne Hirsch argues in another context, African American women writers during the past three decades are one of the few groups who tell the mother's story and feature the mother in “complex and multiple ways” (1990, 414). In developing the theme of motherhood, Angelou applies the same quality of honesty to her role of mother as she does to her role of prostitute; in fact, the two tend to interconnect in their elements of pain, struggle, imperfection, and loss.

One of the problems any working mother faces is finding child care. Maya needs an adequate sitter to care for Guy while she is working, which means, at least in the case of being a prostitute, all-night assistance. She finds an excellent sitter in Mother Cleo, a fat woman who likes babies and even takes in white infants, although she charges more for them. Another sitter, acquired after the interlude in Stamps, is Big Mary Dalton, an affectionate woman who lives in Stockton, where Maya takes a job first as a fry cook and then as a prostitute. Big Mary arranges for Guy to live in her house, with Maya taking her son on her day off. After she meets L. D. Tolbrook, though, Maya occasionally forfeits her day off with Guy to be with her boyfriend.

In a powerful treatment of child loss in
Gather Together in My Name
, Maya goes to Big Mary's house and finds it deserted. A neighbor tells her that Big Mary had moved away three days earlier and that she probably went to her brother's in Bakersfield. After a desperate search and a long bus ride, Maya locates Big Mary Dalton and her angry son, whose feelings of abandonment echo her own unhappiness during childhood.

Of the numerous references in
Gather Together
that address Maya's feelings of inadequacy as a mother, the Big Mary episode is surely the most intense. Guy cries, pulls his mother's hair, and expresses his fury at being
deserted for so long a time. Maya sheds bitter tears and acknowledges her “first guilt” (163). Earlier in the autobiography Maya admits to having ignored her son to such an extent that Big Mary Dalton asked: “Ain't you got time for him?” (147). She also leaves him alone on the night that Troubadour Martin ushers her to the drug den near the San Francisco docks. These and other instances of maternal conflict or neglect give
Gather Together
a special tension. The tension does not vanish in the volume's affirmation of “innocence” but continues with lesser or greater gravity throughout the series.