Linda Wagner-Martin - The Life of the Author - Maya Angelou

Especially after the porter left them, her sobs grew louder. It was as if she were trying to drown out the muffled clacking sounds that rose through the tawdry covering under their feet. Bailey handed her a sandwich and she chewed into the bread. Dry as the food was, she knew that when nightfall came again, she and Bailey would be alone, and she could not stop the rising fear. She belatedly asked her brother, “Who is moving it, Bailey?” He knew these kinds of answers; that was what five-year-olds were capable of understanding. “There is always an engine, Ritzi,” came the answer. “I met one of the engineers who drive it.”

Chewing solemnly, Marguerite began to calm down, even as the car darkened. Bailey’s knowledge impressed her. She had relied on him for all the care her parents sometimes forgot to give their children. As she scrutinized her “To Whom It May Concern” tag, still chewing, she knew that they would reach their destination the next morning, and that she was – until then – in her brother’s care. She was ready to sleep.

Sending their children back to Bailey’s mother and brother – Annie Henderson and Willie Johnson – was a last resort for Vivian and Bailey, Sr. Annie owned a store, after all, so she would be able to at least feed Ritzi and Bailey, Jr. She would also be able to keep track of them, out there in the country of modestly cared for houses, sheds, and farms. The black side of Stamps hardly ever saw strangers: blacks lived with blacks, and there were no predatory passers-through as there were in St. Louis or Long Beach. The enclave in which Bailey, Sr. had grown up, there in the corner of Lafayette County, the place he had been so eager to leave that he had joined the Navy as soon as he could, was a relatively safe space. In the community of cotton-pickers, handymen, housemaids, farmers, and the unemployed, people depended on each other. Everybody had to get along.

Bailey also knew that Willie, his handicapped younger brother, would watch out for the small ones. Willie could barely walk on his own, even with his cane, nor could he drive. His pious demeanor set Bailey’s teeth on edge. Willie was always going to church, praising the God who had crippled him in childhood, singing those hymns joyously. Willie was the source of their belief that Marguerite and Bailey would be safe in Arkansas, away from any city temptations, or perhaps more likely from city people always on the lookout for money. Even the KKK knew that the African American side of Stamps was supposed to be a safe place for blacks.

Of course, Annie herself was the kindly benefactor who kept half the town from trouble: standing over six feet tall, earning the trust of the African American townspeople through both her prominence in the AME church and her even more visible prominence as the only storekeeper for the black neighborhood. First married to a man of God, Annie gave birth to her two sons and cared for them in the one-room house – even taking on the difficult care of the crippled Willie after the accident that paralyzed him. But when William Johnson, her husband, left her and his boys to earn his preaching status in Enid, Oklahoma, she decided to find her own way of supporting her family. Secretly, doing most of the work at night, Annie Johnson made meat pies that she fried and sold the next day at noon. Carrying her coals, the food, and a bucket, she trekked the three miles to the cotton gin where working men would think her hot lunch and cool lemonade worth the nickel she charged. Walking the two miles back to the sawmill, selling the pies for three cents there rather than five, she continued her earnings for the day. Her walk back home was five miles. The next day she reversed the order, selling the sawmill pies for a nickel and taking the left-overs to the cotton gin, selling those pies for three cents. After months of this work, she put together a rough shacklike place, positioned between the two sites, and many of her buyers walked at noon to buy her good sensible food. It was from that site – and her savings of $1000 – that she later could buy the “store” which then became Annie’s livelihood for the coming decades.

The whole sales scheme was a gamble. It was nothing a black woman should have taken on. Annie Johnson, by rights, should have gone humbly into the white part of Stamps and asked, again humbly, for cleaning jobs. Tall and strong as she was, cleaning work would have been easy to get.

For Annie, however, the usual route that women followed offered no challenges. In fact, she found such a direction less than interesting. In contrast, her scheme of earning money that she would not quickly have to spend whetted her appetite. In her mind, earning money erased her subservience. As she later said, “I looked up the road I was going and back the way I come, and since I wasn’t satisfied, I decided to step off the road and cut myself a new path.” 1

The nighttime hours when her daily work began quickly came to be her comfort. When Johnson had gone to Oklahoma, he left her the one-room house. For his journey, he took every bit of cash and property that existed. Annie had then promised herself she would never again be penniless. Accordingly, her cache of nickels and pennies grew slowly, but the accumulation satisfied her. She had worked out arrangements to trade her labor for the flour, lard, sugar, chickens, beef, and lemons – she did not often have to spend money to buy ingredients. Friends traded her their vegetables for the cold meat pies; others babysat her boys. Months passed. Annie’s cash money gave her the right to buy lumber, nails, and fittings from the white businesses in Stamps; she paid the full price, she did not ask for favors. She came to be respected as the hard-working businesswoman she was. She built the shed for the noon lunch buyers to visit and the hungry men – at least many of them – made their way to her.

Everything about Annie Johnson was practical. Unlike some of her African American friends, known throughout the area for their delicious cooking, Annie was as practical a cook as she was a builder. By her own admission, she knew that she could “mix groceries well enough to scare hungry away and from starving a man.” 2

In a later marriage, she became Annie Henderson; she left that marriage and later found a third partner. But to the African American population of Stamps, Annie Henderson was the rock-solid storekeeper, the devout participant in the black church, the mother of the disabled Willie, and the person who could help anyone she thought a good friend. That identity sufficed for her, even without Bailey, her older son. But by the time of the arrival of her only grandchildren, Bailey, Jr. and Marguerite Annie Johnson, she was willing to open her small living quarters behind the newly-built store, and make her daily life a testimony of God’s care for their young and eager eyes. Annie Henderson, with Willie Johnson at her side, would become mother and father to the little ones they had unexpectedly inherited.

Bailey, Sr., was comforted by the fact that his mother would take on rearing his children. But those children had no idea where they were, or why they were leaving their parents. Glib as Bailey appeared to be – his articulate speaking was one of the reasons he had succeeded in the military – he was never given to explaining anything for the minds of youngsters. Had he described Annie Henderson to Bailey, Jr. and Marguerite, they might have been more comfortable meeting her, and traveling from the train station by cart, and finally by their sturdy legs, until they reached the store, with its living spaces at the rear. But there was no verbal description. It was as if Bailey, Sr., thought it would not matter to “just children.” Going to live with a community paragon, a woman considered important to her entire community, was less than reassuring to children, especially to children who had never met, or even seen, this grandmother. Annie Henderson was often accompanied by her older son, the sometimes helpless Uncle Willie. (These children had early learned to give Grandmother Baxter a wide berth – her officious, curt behavior never endeared her to either Bailey, Jr. or to Marguerite.)