The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (40 page)

BOOK: The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
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“Sit down. I’ll be right back.” He took his hand away and I plopped back into the chair. Sometime later he was back with a glass of water.

“Come on. Get up.” His voice was raspy like old corn shucks. I set my intention on getting up and pressed against the iron which had settled in my thighs.

“We’re going to dance?” My words were thick and cumbersome and didn’t want to leave my mouth.

“Come on.” He gave me his hand and I stumbled up and against him and he guided me to the door.

Outside, the air was only a little darker and a little cooler, but it cleared one corner of my brain. We were walking in the moist dirt along the pond, and the café was again a distant outline. With soberness came a concern for my virtue. Maybe he wasn’t what they said.

“What are you going to do?” I stopped and faced him, readying myself for his appeal.

“It’s not me. It’s you. You’re going to throw up.” He spoke slowly. “You’re going to put your finger down your throat and tickle, then you can puke.”

With his intentions clear, I regained my poise.

“But I don’t want to throw up. I’m not in the least—”

He closed a hand on my shoulder and shook me a little. “I say, put your finger in your throat and get that mess out of your stomach.”

I became indignant. How could he, a peasant, a nobody, presume to lecture me? I snatched my shoulder away.

“Really, I’m fine. I think I’ll join my friends,” I said and turned toward the café.

“Marguerite.” It was no louder than his earlier tone but had more force than his hand.

“Yes?” I had been stopped.

“They’re not your friends. They’re laughing at you.” He had misjudged. They couldn’t be laughing at me. Not with my sophistication and city ways.

“Are you crazy?” I sounded like a San Francisco-born debutante.

“No. You’re funny to them. You got away. And then you came back. What for? And with what to show for your travels?” His tone was as soft as the Southern night and the pond lapping. “You come back swaggering and bragging that you’ve just been to paradise and you’re wearing the very clothes everybody here wants to get rid of.”

I hadn’t stopped to think that while loud-flowered skirts and embroidered white blouses caused a few eyebrows to be raised in San Diego, in Stamps they formed the bulk of most girls’ wardrobes.

L.C. went on, “They’re saying you must be crazy. Even people in Texarkana dress better than you do. And you’ve been all the way to California. They want to see you show your butt outright. So they gave you extra drinks of sloe gin.”

He stopped for a second, then asked, “You don’t drink, do you?”

“No.” He had sobered me.

“Go on, throw up. I brought some water so you can rinse your mouth after.”

He stepped away as I began to gag. The bitter strong fluid gurgled out of my throat, burning my tongue. And the thought of nausea brought on new and stronger contractions.

After the cool water we walked back past the joint, and the music, still heavy, throbbed like gongs in my head. He left the glass by the porch and steered me in the direction of the Store.

His analysis had confused me and I couldn’t understand why I should be the scapegoat.

He said, “They want to be free, free from this town, and crackers, and farming, and yes-sirring and no-sirring. You never were very friendly, so if you hadn’t gone anywhere, they wouldn’t have liked you any more. I was born here, and will die here, and they’ve never liked me.” He was resigned and without obvious sorrow.

“But, L.C., why don’t you get away?”

“And what would my poppa do? I’m all he’s got.” He stopped me before I could answer, and went on, “Sometimes I bring home my salary and he drinks it up before I can buy food for the week. Your grandmother knows. She lets me have credit all the time.”

We were nearing the Store and he kept talking as if I weren’t there.
I knew for sure that he was going to continue talking to himself after I was safely in my bed.

“I’ve thought about going to New Orleans or Dallas, but all I know is how to chop cotton, pick cotton and hoe potatoes. Even if I could save the money to take Poppa with me, where would I get work in the city? That’s what happened to him, you know? After my mother died he wanted to leave the house, but where could he go? Sometimes when he’s drunk two bottles of White Lightning, he talks to her. ‘Reenie, I can see you standing there. How come you didn’t take me with you, Reenie? I ain’t got no place to go, Reenie. I want to be with you, Reenie.’ And I act like I don’t even hear him.”

We had reached the back door of the Store. He held out his hand.

“Here, chew these Sen-sen. Sister Henderson ought not know you’ve been drinking. Good night, Marguerite. Take it easy.”

And he melted into the darker darkness. The following year I heard that he had blown his brains out with a shotgun on the day of his father’s funeral.

CHAPTER 17

The midmorning sun was deceitfully mild and the wind had no weight on my skin. Arkansas summer mornings have a feathering effect on stone reality.

After five days in the South my quick speech had begun to drag, and the clipped California diction (clipped in comparison) had started to slur. I had to brace myself properly to “go downtown.” In San Francisco, women dressed particularly to shop in the Geary and Market streets’ big-windowed stores. Short white gloves were as essential a part of the shopping attire as girdles, which denied cleaved buttocks, and deodorant, which permitted odorless walkings up and down the steep hills.

I dressed San Francisco style for the nearly three-mile walk and
proceeded through the black part of town, past the Christian Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches and the proud little houses that sat above their rose bushes in grassless front yards, on toward the pond and the railroad tracks which separated white town from black town. My postwar Vinylite high heels, which were see-through plastic, crunched two inches into the resisting gravel, and I tugged my gloves all the way up to my wrist. I had won over the near-tropical inertia, and the sprightly walk, made a bit jerky by the small grabbing stones, the neat attire and the high headed position, was bound to teach the black women watching behind lace curtains how they should approach a day’s downtown shopping. It would prove to the idle white women, once I reached their territory, that I knew how things should be done. And if I knew, well, didn’t that mean that there were legions of Black women in other parts of the world who knew also? Up went the Black Status.

When I glided and pulled into White Town, there was a vacuum. The air had died and fallen down heavily. I looked at the white windows expecting to see curtains lose strained positions and resume their natural places. But the curtains on both sides of the street remained fixed. Then I realized that the white women were missing my halting but definitely elegant advance on their town. I then admitted my weariness, but urged my head higher and my shoulders squarer than before.

What Stamps’ General Merchandise Store missed in class it made up in variety. Cheap grades of thread and chicken feed, farming implements and hair ribbons, fertilizer, shampoo, women’s underwear, and B.V.D.s. Socks, face powder, school supplies and belly-wrenching laxatives were shoved on and under the shelves.

I pitied the poor storekeeper and the shop attendants. When I thought of the wide aisles of San Francisco’s Emporium and the nearly heard, quiet conversations in the expensive City of Paris, I gave the store a patronizing smile.

A young, very blond woman’s mournful countenance met me in the middle of a crowded aisle. I gave her, “Good morning,” and let a benign smile lift the corners of my lips.

“What can I do for you?” The thin face nodded at me like a sharp ax descending slowly. I thought, “The poor shabby dear.” She didn’t even form her words. Her question floated out like a hillbilly song, “Whakin I dew fer yew?”

“I’d like a Simplicity pattern, please.” I could afford to be courteous. I was the sophisticate. When I gave her the pattern number out of my head and saw her start at my Western accent, regained for the moment, I felt a rush of kindness for the sorrowful cracker girl. I added, “If you please.”

She walked behind a counter and riffled through a few aging sewing patterns, her shoulders rounding over the drawer as if its contents were in danger. Although she was twenty, or more likely eighteen, her stance and face spoke of an early surrender to the poverty of poor-white Southern life. There was no promise of sex in her hip span, nor flight in her thin short fingers.

“We ain’t got it here. But I can put in a order to Texarkana for it for you.”

She never looked up and spoke of the meager town twenty-five miles away as if she meant Istanbul.

“I would so much appreciate that.” I did feel grateful and even more magnanimous.

“It’ll be back in three days. You come in on Friday.”

I wrote my name, Marguerite A. Johnson, without flourishes on the small pad she handed me, smiled encouragement to her and walked back into the now-serious noon sunshine. The heat had rendered the roads empty of pedestrians, and it assaulted my shoulders and the top of my head as if it had been lying in wait for me.

The memory of the insensate clerk prodded me into exaggerated awareness and dignity. I had to walk home at the same sprightly clip, my arms were obliged to swing in their same rhythm, and I would not under any circumstances favor the shade trees which lined the road. My head blurred with deep pains, and the rocky path swam around me, but I kept my mind keen on the propriety of my position and finally gained the Store.

Momma asked from the cool, dark kitchen, “What’d you buy, Sister?”

I swallowed the heat-induced nausea and answered, “Nothing, Momma.”


The days eased themselves around our lives like visitors in a sickroom. I hardly noticed their coming and going. Momma was as engrossed as she’d allow herself in the wonder of my son. Patting, stroking, she talked to him and never introduced in her deep voice the false humor adults tend to offer babies. He, in turn, surrendered to her. Following her from kitchen to porch to store to the backyard.

Their togetherness came to be expected. The tall and large dark-brown woman (whose movement never seemed to start or stop) was trailed one step by the pudgy little butter-yellow baby lurching, falling, now getting himself up, at moments rocking on bowed legs, then off again in the wave of Momma. I never saw her turn or stop to right him, but she would slow her march and resume when he was steady again.


My pattern had arrived from old exotic Texarkana. And I dressed for the trek downtown, and checked my hair, which was straightened to within an inch of its life and greased to desperation. From within the Store, I felt the threat of the sun but walked out into the road impelled by missionary zeal.

By the time I reached the pond and Mr. Willie Williams’ Dew Drop In, the plastic seemed to have melted to the exact shape of my feet, and sweat had popped through the quarter inch of Arrid in my armpits.

Mr. Williams served me a cold drink. “What you trying to do? Fry your brains?”

“I’m on my way to the General Merchandise Store. To pick up an order.”

His smile was a two-line checkerboard of white and gold. “Be careful they don’t pick you up. This sun ain’t playing.”

Arrogance and stupidity nudged me out of the little café and back on the white hot clay. I drifted under the shade trees, my face a mask of indifference. The skin of my thighs scudded like wet rubber as I walked deliberately by the alien white houses and on to my destination.

In the store the air lay heavily on the blades of two sluggish overhead
fans, and a sweet, thick odor enveloped me at the cosmetic counter. Still, I was prepared to wander the aisles until the sun forgave our sins and withdrew its vengeance.

A tall saleswoman wearing a clerk’s smock confronted me. I tried to make room for her in the narrow corridor. I moved to my left, she moved to her right. I right, she left, we jockeyed a moment’s embarrassment and I smiled. Her long face answered with a smile. “You stand still and I’ll pass you.” It was not a request for cooperation. The hard mountain voice gave me an order.

To whom did she think she was speaking? Couldn’t she see from my still-white though dusty gloves, my starched clothes, that I wasn’t a servant to be ordered around? I had walked nearly three miles under a sun on fire and was neither gasping nor panting, but standing with the cool decorum of a great lady in the tacky, putrid store. She should have considered that.

“No, you stand still and I’ll pass around you,” I commanded.

The amazement which leaped upon her face was quickly pushed aside by anger. “What’s your name? Where you from?”

A repetition of “You stand still and I’ll pass around you” was ready on my tongue, when the pale woman who had taken my order slack-butted down the aisle toward us. The familiar face brought back the sympathy I had felt for her and I explained the tall woman into limbo with “Excuse me, here comes my salesgirl.”

The dark-haired woman turned quickly and saw her colleague approach. She put herself between us, and her voice rasped out in the quiet store: “Who is this?”

Her head jerked back to indicate me. “Is this that sassy Ruby Lee you was telling me about?”

The clerk lifted her chin and glanced at me, then swirled to the older woman. “Naw, this ain’t her.” She flipped the pages of a pad in her hand and continued, “This one’s Margaret or Marjorie or something like that.”

Her head eased up again and she looked across centuries at me. “How do you pronounce your name, gal? Speak up.”

In that moment I became rootless, nameless, pastless. The two white blurs buoyed before me.

“Speak up,” she said. “What’s your name?”

I clenched my reason and forced their faces into focus. “My name”—here I drew myself up through the unrevenged slavery—“is Miss Johnson. If you have occasion to use my name, which I seriously doubt, I advise you to address me as Miss Johnson. For if I need to allude to your pitiful selves, I shall call you Miss Idiot, Miss Stupid, Miss Fool or whatever name a luckless fate has dumped upon you.”

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