Читать книгу The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou - Linda Wagner-Martin - Страница 11

Parked on their road, a gray DeSoto with California plates appeared – without preamble, without warning. The exuberance of Bailey, Sr., the well-dressed veteran returned to his hometown, was the first surprise: their daddy was not the taciturn figure they remembered from years before. He was talkative, even jovial. He followed them around during their day. He paid them compliments. He praised his mother’s cooking. He talked with Uncle Willie. Whenever Ritzie heard his speech, however, she thought she was listening to a white man: his phrasing was full of “er”s and “hem”s and supposedly thoughtful pauses. He did not sound as if he had grown up in Stamps. He drove around to visit people from his Arkansas years. The store became a gathering place, and for once it was filled with lively conversation.

The days of Bailey’s visit sped past: Bailey, Jr. and Ritzie had never driven in cars at all; now they became seasoned travelers. If they missed supper as they drove places with their dad, Annie would scold. That was the only visible sign that she was not convinced this visit was all to the good. While her son seemed to have money for gasoline, and seemed to be happier than she had seen him during his early years, she felt suspicious. Why had he come? What was he up to? It was during the third week of his visit to Stamps that he began talking about his plan – to drive back to St. Louis, where Vivian now lived again with the Baxter family, and take the children with him. They might enjoy being city children again. They might enjoy the comforts the Baxters could provide. (What he asked Bailey, Jr. and Marguerite, however, was whether they wanted to go to California and live with him. That was a very different question.)

Annie disagreed about his removing the children, but it was already Bailey’s conviction that his children should leave Stamps and move to St. Louis (he could see the advantages of their benefiting from the Baxter family’s prominence in Missouri). So Annie got clothes ready, without saying much about the journey ahead. She sat up nights sewing, new shirts and pants for Bailey, Jr. and made-over dresses and outfits for Ritzie. The new clothes filled box after box.

In the car, Ritzie sat between her father’s luggage and those boxes. Bailey, in contrast, shared the front seat with Bailey, Sr. They joked and laughed. Ritzie could barely hear them over the noise from the open windows: there was nothing for her to do between the boxes and the suitcases. But she could see that sometimes her father let Bailey, Jr. put his left hand on the steering wheel in order to help drive.

After the first day’s drive, however, the fun slowed. Bailey, Sr., began talking about how much they would like St. Louis. It was so progressive; it had large train stations and bus depots – not to mention auto sales and repair facilities. It was an up and coming city. He asked them, repeatedly, if they were eager to see their mother whom they barely remembered. Both children recoiled, feeling that they had been tricked: when would they ever see California? When would they see their father again? All they wished for at that time was a return to the known, a return to Momma and Uncle Willie, the people they knew truly loved them. Bailey, Jr. was still pleased with his front-seat window on the changing worlds, but Ritzie came to her reality with a shock: of course, this was the man who had once sent them his photograph as a Christmas present, their only Christmas present. This stranger who said he was their father might truly be someone from another world.

She understood now why Momma was tight-lipped about the trip. It was clear that Annie Henderson would have preferred the children stay with her in Stamps. But their father was their father, Ritzie understood, and whatever he chose to do was a kind of law. Marguerite behaved. She did not cry. Neither did Annie, but Uncle Willie went back inside almost too quickly. The trip seemed to be open-ended: how long would it be before she and Bailey saw Stamps again?

Bailey’s thoughts were rushing ahead … he remembered how pretty “Mother Dear” was, how cheerful, how small and contained. He was eager to see her again. But neither of the children was eager to see sharp-tongued Grandmother Baxter, who rode herd over her six children – and the neighborhood – as if it were her own private posse. Reflective of the “meanness” her husband often praised, she too vaunted things the “Bad Baxters” might do. Who could win the most fights? Who could be the most audacious? Would it be Tommy or Billy, or perhaps Vivian? Leah was an acknowledged ladylike girl, but Vivian was what her father called “a girl-boy.” The black part of St. Louis was a gold-rush kind of place, filled with gambling, drinking, and lottery and numbers runners. The Baxters not only enjoyed the city; they welcomed all its activities.

Marguerite sat in a fog of fear. What she remembered about Grandmother Baxter frightened her. She didn’t remember Grandfather Baxter at all. The boys were simply one big blur of hostility. Bumping along the unpaved roads, the car seemed to be taking her and Bailey to a horrible end, a place not far from the mansions that turned out to be haunted in their ten-cent comics. She did remember the paved streets and those large houses; she did remember feeling lost in the grand houses that were built of many rooms, stairways, and outside porches. She was not eager to see those houses again.

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.

Marguerite turned more and more inward. She stopped expressing herself even to Bailey. Disastrously cut off from the human world, still feeling that she had some kind of bond with Mr. Freeman, one evening before her mother’s return, she walked to him and sat on his lap. It was something she had seen her mother do numerous times; in her mind, she was trying to make an overture of friendship. At that time he once again used her body for masturbation, leaving her in the chair as he went into the downstairs bathroom. Again, Ritzie knew she could not tell.

On a spring Saturday, following a night when Vivian had not returned home, Mr. Freeman raped Ritzie. Perhaps what Mr. Freeman had read as foreplay came to its inevitable conclusion. Perhaps in his anger at Vivian, he aimed to hurt both the child and her mother. Whatever the cause of the evil, he acted. That he tried to wash away the evidence did nothing to exonerate him. The threats were repeated; the child was in great pain. She experienced divided consciousness; she was completely bewildered. The blood frightened her. This time she told Bailey. Mr. Freeman was arrested; the Baxters were scandalized. But at the back of Ritzie’s mind, and echoed in the responses of the Baxters, was the question of the child’s own possible responsibility: had she encouraged Mr. Freeman? Had she brought this pain on herself?

If this rape had happened in the 21st century, a psychologist might have been found. Medical evaluations would not have been the only care: therapy would have been more important than vaginal healing. But it is 1930s Missouri, and even in cities such as St. Louis, few people consulted psychologists – especially in the case of a child’s having been abused. What our age knows about trauma does not reach backward in time: trauma is that which injures. Repeatedly. Trauma is the unreconcilable injury, the wresting of the power of sanity from a person otherwise viable. Elaine Scarry once said that “physical pain is not only resistant to language but also actively destroys language, deconstructing it into cries and groans. To hear those groans is to witness the shattering of language.” The sheer pain of rape was hardly the end point of the child’s experience. In a definition of trauma, one psychologist says that “trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Psychoanalytic theory and neurobiological studies explore the difficulty of the recovery process…” Psychiatrist Judith Herman, too, sees any traumatic state as staining a broad swath through an individual’s consciousness. All people, says Herman, depend on their belief that certain people can be trusted. Just as Marguerite trusted Mr. Freeman, she was inordinately betrayed – and, through association, his betrayal was also the betrayal of her mother, her mother in her absence, her mother who had brought the man into their family and their home. How was Ritzie to rebuild that confidence?

One common response to trauma is dissociation. Self-protective, a wounded person, whether wounded psychologically or physically, cannot fixate on the injury. At least part of that person’s reaction must be avoidance. This psychiatrist insists on the need for dissociation, claiming that traumatic experience “can produce lasting alterations to the endocrine, autonomic, and central nervous system… [In compensation, the wounded person creates a mechanism] by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory.”

Traumatic events, Herman notes, “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others” and “cast the victim into a state of existential crisis.” There is a long-lasting process of grieving, not only for the immediate loss but for “what was never theirs to lose.” Anyone so traumatized by loss may experience “recurrent and intrusive recollections or recurrent distressing dreams.” She then draws from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to add the other symptoms of “social withdrawal, shame, despair, hopelessness.”

Cathy Caruth provides an even wider perspective as she defines trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event often occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled, repetition of … intrusive phenomena…” Caruth adds that, perhaps more permanently, trauma is “a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time.”

While Marguerite defined her traumatic event as the rape by Mr. Freeman, it seems, judging from these definitions of trauma, that an even earlier traumatic event for her as a very young child was the abandonment by her parents. Traveling the 1,600 miles by train, only to reach the tiny Arkansas town where her grandmother and uncle lived, was itself a trauma – for both the Johnson children. It seems likely that only the completely welcoming response by both Annie Henderson and Uncle Willie allowed them to overcome their feelings of great, immeasurable, loss.

Angelou does not recall having the horrifying dreams when she slept with Momma in the small Stamps bedroom. Again, being moved into a new and strange situation after their distant father drove them the 500 miles to St. Louis, so that they could be cared for by their mother, triggered both Bailey’s stammering and Ritzie’s nightmares and bed-wetting. Two major life-changing events before either child turns ten replicates the stories of children abandoned by war, or immigration, or other forced displacements. In those cases, however, the child would be part of a company of other children so treated: in that companionship might lie comfort. Displacement, abandonment, fear of circumstances, mistrust of the adults who should be caring for them – these are the traumatic events that both Bailey and Marguerite lived through early in their young lives.

Facts do not give an entire story. Being driven five hundred miles by a father they felt betrayed by – When would they get to California? When would they live with him and not their mother? – does not reveal the surrounding of loneliness that marked being in St. Louis. The novelty of being driven in cars, or using an indoor toilet, or having ice from their own icebox was only that – a short-lived novelty. Living in Grandmother Baxter’s house did not mean that anyone else living there cared about them: occasionally, one of the uncles might pitch some balls to them, or their mother would visit, or Grandmother Baxter would give them meals. But they saw themselves as clear impositions on the people living in the busy household.

What followed Marguerite’s narrative of Mr. Freeman’s attack only added to these layers of trauma. Eventually there was a trial. Wearing her best outfit, even though it was now too short for her, Ritzie takes the witness stand, and it is her testimony that convicts Mr. Freeman. Jailed for one day in advance of his formal sentencing, Mr. Freeman is released – only to be discovered, dead from a brutal beating, rumored to have been administered by the Baxter boys. Years later, when Marguerite tells the story of Mr. Freeman in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she claims that her lingering withdrawal from life, expressed through her years of chosen muteness, results from her thinking that her testimony has killed her mother’s lover. And she admits that she finds herself complicit in the sexual events because she enjoyed his holding her – so she had lied as she testified in court.

I had sold myself to the Devil and there could be no escape. The only thing I could do was to stop talking to people other than Bailey. Instinctively, or somehow, I knew that because I loved him so much I’d never hurt him, but if I talked to anyone else, that person might die too. Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people and they’d all curl up and die like the black fat slugs that only pretended. I had to stop talking.¹

Psychiatrists today have paid much attention to the fact that traumatized people have to work diligently to construct their own narratives. Kali Tal insists that the kernel traumatic event is much less important than the way the victim rebuilds his or her psyche. Tal calls this process “mythologization” and finds that as a story is constructed, healing seems to occur. The story then becomes the “contained and predictable narrative.” The event itself has been ameliorated, if not erased. There is no need to compare the victim’s story with the actual event: all that matters is that the trauma victim feels in charge of whatever either happened or did not happen. She or he owns the process.

There is no question that trauma is trauma. But the health of the society – and of the traumatized person – depends on recovery. One of the complications in the retelling process is that there are several chronologies. The time frame of the event itself in real life might not parallel the time frame of the victim’s understanding of that event. Then the various tellings and re-tellings also occur at different stages in the victim’s life, and in the healing process. Some parts of the narrative appear immediately; others take years to surface. The victim is not necessarily repressing memory; she or he is unable to find it. Tal emphasizes that a traumatic event is not a normal happening. It exists somewhere in the victim’s liminal state so that the victim is, logically, “ungrounded.”

This is partly the reason Angelou recalls in her autobiography how frightened she was to be called to testify. Sitting before a courtroom filled with people, taking an oath on a Bible, swearing to tell the truth – these are not normal experiences for a seven-year-old child. Tal writes about the difficulty of “bearing witness.” She calls the act one of aggression, a starting point for a victim’s reclaiming of experience. “It is born out of a refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than conformity, to endure a lifetime of anger and pain rather than to submit to the seductive pull of revision and repression.” Angelou’s emphasis on how hard it was to look at Mr. Freeman is a kind of metaphor for how hard it was to be on the witness stand. She knew that the Baxters would have preferred she not testify. She knew that her doing so was yet another problem they would need to deal with themselves. She knew that being unable to speak in court would have been the easier way.

She self-disguises all this knowledge in her memoir, by seeing herself as disappointing God. She talks about damnation and the Devil. She does not acknowledge that it is the Baxter clan, which includes her mother, that she is disappointing. For a child who has no power, not to mention no place to live, such an act is beyond bravery. The resonance of Ritzie’s testimony echoes in her written expression of what she found so difficult in that hostile courtroom.

One can only speculate on what the Baxter family had decided about this grandchild. Her own intuition told her that she needed to preserve the relationship that kept her safe in St. Louis. There was no way Annie Henderson had the resources to come to St. Louis to find and retrieve her; there was no way her characteristically negligent father would be of any help. To stay alive, Marguerite had to tell a story that kept her (as much as possible) from any blame. The consequences of her giving her mother and her family reason to suspect that she herself had any guilt would be so horrific she would not be able to live.

In comparison with what Marguerite imagined would happen to her, the rape and recovery she had just experienced were nearly insignificant. She knew the Bible stories: she could imagine herself stoned to death as a “harlot.” She knew that, somehow and someway, she had disappointed her entire family. And if society disowned her, that family – including her beloved Bailey – would follow suit.

Having lived through the threats that Mr. Freeman would somehow kill her brother, threats that intensified with the actual rape, when he promised he would kill her, Marguerite was living in a wasteland of hopelessness. Never before in her life had anyone so much as punished her for doing anything. Now, in the sprawling city so far from Stamps and Momma, the threat of death was convincing. Ritzie’s imagination was not creating scenarios: it was working from the panorama of killings Mr. Freeman had warned her about. It was the first time in her life she had even heard such words.

To watchful eyes, Marguerite seemed to be living normally. The visiting nurse pronounced her healed. Back in Grandmother Baxter’s house, she gave in to her fearful need to be silent. At no time in her later autobiographies does she describe her behavior then from any external perspective. People cajoled her to speak, to talk to them. Nobody seemed to understand that her silence was a strategy of recovery. She herself was not sure she was recovering. What she knew was that she did not want to kill anyone, not even Mr. Freeman.

According to Angelou’s narrative about the rape, the trial, and the death of Mr. Freeman, the unkindest behavior of all came from Grandmother Baxter. The day after the trial, when the immense white sheriff brought the news of Mr. Freeman’s murder to the house, Grandmother Baxter murmured through the story “Poor man.” Sympathizing with the fate that had befallen him, she kept a tight rein on her emotions, knowing well that Bailey and Ritzie could hear the conversation. After the door closed, she announced to them that they should go to their rooms, saying “You didn’t hear a thing. I never want to hear this situation or that evil man’s name mentioned in my house again. I mean that.”²

So much for working through trauma. So much for finding the words to reconstruct a story. So much for understanding that trauma was never a single debilitating act. As Marguerite lived her silent life in St. Louis, the Baxter family grew more and more upset with her behavior: they told her to be “normal.” They threatened her. Finally, their patience shredded with the town’s attention, the Baxters began physically punishing her. Angelou writes only one sentence about the various “thrashings” she is given by numerous family members. She does not elaborate further on what her life in Grandmother Baxter’s house has become.

Whether or not Annie Henderson suggested that the children come back to Stamps, or whether Grandmother Baxter thought the two were just plain difficult and not worth her attention, Bailey, Jr. and Ritzie found themselves on a train headed to Arkansas. This time they were less fearful, though Bailey cried surreptitiously for the loss of his beloved “Mother Dear.” They were generally pleased to be returning to what now seemed an entirely safe place – both geographically and emotionally – and a useful harbor for their lives as they grew through elementary and middle school. As it all turned out, they would not leave Stamps again until Marguerite had graduated from the eighth grade.