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

As the five-hundred-mile trip seemed to be coming to an end, Bailey, Sr., became more focused. He needed to find the Baxter house; he needed to appear to be in charge. Even though Annie had sent along a basket of food for the long journey, he forgot to offer it to the children. They grew more and more tired of the car’s movement, and more and more hungry. The car seldom stopped. Their father remembered to look for gas stations only when the needle pointed to E. And he sometimes failed to stop when they needed to relieve themselves.

Arriving at the Baxter house, Marguerite felt again how isolated her life was going to be. Everybody praised Bailey, Jr. He looked like the Baxter family: his skin was dark, his body was compact. But his “little sister” was taller than he, and her height seemed ungainly. She was awkward in many things. She was not pretty. And even though Uncle Tommy praised her for her mind and her ability to learn, he also admitted she was not a pretty girl, and probably never would be. Her brown skin was the only one of her features that seemed to please the Baxter family and since they were not readers themselves, her brain was of little interest to them.

The plan, such as it was, was that Bailey and Marguerite were to live in Grandmother Baxter’s house at first. They were close to the Toussaint L’Ouverture Grammar School, and there would be plenty of people around to oversee them. Because the two of them were good at reading and arithmetic, they were moved ahead a grade soon after they entered school. They got up, dressed, ate breakfast and walked to school. Then they came home, did homework, ate supper, and went to bed. They seldom saw their mother.

She was living in a different house with her companion, Mr. Freeman, who was a supervisor at the railroad yard. Occasionally she would ask them to meet her after school at Louie’s, where she dealt cards and danced to the jukebox. There she taught them both how to do the “Time Step,” and in order to please her and her friends, they both practiced and became good dancers.

It was much more stressful than either of them had imagined it would be. Bailey developed a stutter; Marguerite had horrible nightmares and occasionally wet her bed. The two had gone from sleeping with an adult whose job was to care for them – Bailey with Uncle Willie and Ritzie with Annie – without any deviation from that pattern. For several years they had slept in this way, never going anywhere for an overnight stay, never questioning the arrangement or the comfort it provided. Then, suddenly, without explanation, each child was placed into a bedroom that was completely remote from any other person. For the first time in their lives they were sleeping alone, with doors shut so that the rest of the household would not awaken them. Marguerite had little choice but to either shut her eyes tightly or let those fearful eyes roam around the vacant room. What would she see in the middle of the night? It was a thought she had never had in Stamps when she slept night after night in the same bed with Momma.

That so little was ever spoken in the Stamps household had given both the children a keen sense of intuition. Their lives with Momma and Uncle Willie were in some ways an extension of the frequent church services: people went to church for the purpose of praising their Creator. They experienced boundless joy in His presence and they expressed that joy in their verbal responses to the sermon, and in their singing. Nobody instructed them to repeat a catechism; nobody demanded any obedience. Instead, the circumstances of what going to church meant gave them instruction.

When they were growing up in Annie Henderson’s household, the same kinds of laws were operative. Annie and Uncle Willie wanted only the best for the children. The children felt that aura of comfortable identity: they would learn from them, they would be obedient to the laws of society and church at least in part because those were the laws that Annie and Willie obeyed. Uncle Willie might threaten a child who did not learn the times tables fast enough, but he did so as part of an ages-old formula that adults taught children. Unspoken rules replaced spoken ones, but neither was new nor strange.

The Baxter household had no rules that either Bailey or Ritzie could understand. They were not from this house or from this family. They did not know that meanness was meant to be valued; they had been raised to avoid being mean. The only question Grandmother Baxter ever put to them was whether or not they had behaved … the only answer they could give was that they had behaved. Even when the terms of that question and answer remained unknown, there was only one answer. Yes, they had behaved.

So they sat, little mutes awaiting rescue by the mother they had been told was going to live with them, day after day and night after night. Months passed. They did well enough in the school which, somewhat strangely, seemed terribly easy for them; they waited for a word – from Annie, from their father, from Vivian. Finally, following one of their meetings with their mother at Louie’s, she asked if they would like to move into her house. It was a house she shared with Mr. Freeman. She said that they would be welcome to live in that house. They did not think twice before they told her “Yes.”

Again, Bailey and Ritzie found themselves in separate bedrooms, with Bailey’s room across the hall from his sister’s. The house was large, though not so large as their grandmother’s; and the children were often alone. The pattern was that they walked home from school, did their homework, ate the supper that had been prepared, washed their dishes, continued the homework or, if that was finished, listened to the radio or read. Then they went to bed. Usually Vivian had gone to work as a dealer in one of the gambling houses: she had cooked their meal before she left. Mr. Freeman came home from the yard, but said little or nothing to them. He ate his supper alone. When Vivian came home, his life became energized and he made them drinks, played some jazz, and watched Vivian dance. (Mr. Freeman was not a dancer.) By that time the children were usually in bed so they might see their mother before eating breakfast the next day. Mr. Freeman made it clear that he was not given to child care.

As Marguerite grew more and more lonely, her nightmares increased. In her mother’s house, one means of caring for the child was to allow Ritzie to come into her mother’s bed – a bed she shared with Mr. Freeman. The child was seven years old but she was tall. And she was surrounded by people who had no knowledge of what children did , or even of who children were . Of all the family that Ritzie and Bailey could call their own, only Annie Henderson had lived with small children, only Annie knew the depths of emotion, the needs, the unspoken responses that a child was capable of experiencing. And Annie was five hundred miles away.

The pattern of Marguerite’s going to her mother’s bed was a natural one, one that gave no reasonable adult any cause for concern. But after some weeks of such experiences, Vivian left home early for an important meeting. She left her daughter in the bed with Mr. Freeman. This was the first incident of his masturbating beside Ritzie, and after he had ejaculated, he held her as if to cuddle her. Innocent as she was, she suspected his lie when he pointed out that she had wet the bed – and her suspicion increased when he brought a glass of water from the bathroom to pour onto the wet sheet she lay upon. But when he warned her never to tell what they had done, or else he would kill Bailey, she knew the enormity of her loss of any power to stand against him. As the father figure in her life, Mr. Freeman had not only ignored and disliked her: he now was threatening to kill her beloved brother. And she could tell no one.