Читать книгу The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou - Linda Wagner-Martin - Страница 13

Being silent in Stamps was nobody’s business. Momma saw to it that whatever Ritzie did was acceptable. The girl spoke occasionally through Bailey; she sometimes sang in church; she “taught” her friends new songs she had written through Bailey’s helping them; she found ways to communicate non-verbally. But by and large Ritzie was a different child than she had been the year before.

She remained dutiful. She slept each night with Momma. Then she got up and ate breakfast. She dressed neatly. Then, with Bailey, she walked up the path to school. For the first time, she and Bailey were in the same room, since one teacher taught three grades simultaneously. The rivalry that had always bound the brother and sister still existed, but Ritzie was surprised how often she could beat her brother.

People came by the store to see the “travelers.” They asked about paved streets, elevators, and the tall buildings in St. Louis. Bailey told stories about indoor toilets, Frigidaires, and snow ice cream. Annie Henderson’s “California grandchildren” had become relatively famous during the year of their absence. With Bailey holding court as he often did, the fact that Ritzie seldom said anything bothered nobody. Some people may have thought she was just having a disappointing year after the high life she had learned to know in St. Louis.

Marguerite was more Annie Henderson’s shadow than she had ever been. While Bailey hung out after school, she came directly home and tried to help Momma. Frying apples became her regular kitchen chore. So too were slicing and frying the cornmeal mush – a quick breakfast when people woke late; it could be eaten cold. She became adept at doing dishes and organizing the small kitchen. She learned to bake sugar cookies that were crispier than Momma’s: they became Uncle Willie’s favorites. When Annie found an issue of the local paper, she and Ritzie would read through the recipe section together. (Annie subscribed only to the Chicago Defender, for its African American news. It had few household pages.) One of the recipes they found together was for mincemeat. Ritzie begged Momma that they try it, but Annie was not enthusiastic: the two pounds of roast beef would be dear, and the pint of brandy (something she did not allow in either her store or her home) would be out of the question. She gave in when her granddaughter explained that the cider would substitute for the brandy. She did have plenty of cider, apples, currants, suet, sweet potatoes, and spices. So they made a plan and invited some of the quilting friends over – one brought peach juice, another pulverized cherries, a third nutmeg. The “boil” seemed successful. A day after the ingredients had been cooked, they divided the spicy mincemeat and got out their rolling pins to make the pie crusts for the baking that would ensue. It was a memorable day in Stamps.

Annie didn’t cotton to the mincemeat idea because she was already well known for both her pineapple upside-down cake and her holiday fruitcakes, almost black with their rich stuffing of fruit in the base of pineapple juice. Of all the grocery treats that Marguerite and Bailey craved, it was pineapple: Angelou later wrote about the way she could make one slice of the fruit last all afternoon as she ate it shred by shred.

Much as Ritzie liked being included in the women’s activities, even the sewing and tatting, it was clear to everyone that she would rather read than play. She systematically brought home every book housed on the school library shelves. Some she had read before. Others had never seemed interesting, but now she devoured whatever the shelves provided. She found W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks that way. She found a collection of Shakespeare’s history plays that were not written down for younger readers. She found Poems by Negroes. She read over and over a smallish collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She found a tattered book of American Poems and learned to love the quatrains of Emily Dickinson. (In her mind she called Dickinson’s poems “miniatures.”) She found scraps of paper and shiny envelopes that she wrote lines of her poems on, as if to inscribe them for future reading. Every night she read from the Bible. Later, she read that good book straight through, from Genesis through Revelations. And still later, she repeated that endeavor.

When she wasn’t in the kitchen or finding a place to read – inside or out – Ritzie stayed in the store. She loved being there, and she loved it even more since having been away in St. Louis. In a later interview, she still expressed the magic that it seemed to create:

It was a glorious place. I remember the wonderful smells; the aroma of the pickle barrel, the bulging sacks of corn, the luscious, ripe fruit. You could pick up a can of snuff from North Carolina, a box of matches from Ohio, a yard of ribbon from New York. All of those places seemed terribly exotic to me.

She would still spend time with Bailey, though he seemed intent on planning his week so that he could see whatever Saturday’s movie was. (After their year in St. Louis, Momma began giving them allowances – ten cents weekly – and Ritzie often gave her dime to Bailey for his movie excursions. When she spent the cash for herself, it probably went for paperback cowboy books.) Together, she and Bailey memorized scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and one of the more brutal history plays. They raced to see who could remember more verses from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems. They read to each other. And they became best friends every Sunday, when the hours of listening to sermons, singing hymns, and staying quiet in the pew with Momma while Uncle Willie helped with the Sunday School children dragged on. Private jokes stayed hidden from Momma’s eyes. As they had grown taller, they were no longer allowed to nudge each other, or wink, or make faces. They were grown-up parishioners. (In contrast to their home church, where they had spent every Sunday of their lives, Grandmother Baxter’s Baptist Church in St. Louis was somber. The Baxters went to church occasionally. All four of the Baxter uncles were good singers, and their mother had trained them to participate. But the service was short, the sermons were forbidding; and no one seemed to notice that the Baxter family had increased by two. Nobody seemed to care.)

Both good singers, Marguerite and Bailey could carry tunes even if the rest of the congregation faltered. In fact, it seemed to them – especially after their exposure to the Baptist service – that singing was the more important part of the Colored Methodist Episcopalian Church service. The morning opened with a series of hymns and humming refrains. There was music after the Bible readings, each of them. There were spirituals at intervals – songs that seemed more important than the words spoken as a sermon. And if a minister was absent, the congregation simply sang – one hymn after another, a nearly spontaneous outpouring of music that turned the church as meeting place into the church as Sunday service. In Angelou’s later recollections, she said that what she remembered about her church was that she could both listen to and participate in whatever occurred. She knew she was welcome.

Actually, the first poetry I knew was the poetry of the gospel songs and the spirituals. I knew that blacks had written that music. I thought it was marvelous stuff. I loved the songs. I also loved the sermons. However, that God with the long hair, the one who sat on the throne in Heaven, he scared me to pieces… I believe in God. I believe in whatever people call God. I believe in life. I believe in will. I believe that right wins out.

Gathered in by the community she knew so well – the store, the school, the church, Marguerite saw her real existence as returning to normal. She could put the horrors of St. Louis, not the least of them the cold Baxter family, into a memory base that seldom bothered her. But she still chose not to speak.

One new teacher was troubled by the fact that Marguerite seemed to think she was above discipline. When the girl would not speak in class, this teacher berated her. One afternoon, in fact, she slapped Marguerite. Stunned, the girl ran out of the classroom and went to find Annie. Bailey followed, confirming her story to his grandmother. Annie Henderson thought quietly for a time. Then she told Ritzie to come with her, back across the yard to the path. Inside the classroom, after some low-voiced questioning, Annie slapped the new teacher. The premise was that this young teacher was herself somebody’s grandbaby. If Marguerite Johnson, Annie’s grandbaby, could be slapped, so could the teacher. Again Marguerite found herself stunned. Her grandmother was not a violent person; she followed the Lord’s teachings in all things. The provocation might well have been that Annie now saw herself as the person charged with protecting Ritzie. Keeping her granddaughter safe, particularly after the trouble she had experienced in St. Louis, had become Annie Henderson’s primary task.

Later that afternoon, when Marguerite returned from play, Annie had baked her favorite dessert – caramel cake. Uncle Willie pointed out that he and his mother loved her so much that this small gift was a reminder of her place in the family.

It was not unusual for Momma to show her love through food. On the second day after their return from St. Louis, for instance, she had cooked Bailey’s favorite supper – pork chops and sauerkraut, seasoned with ginger. And several times each year she insisted that her grandchildren should have fried liver to help their bones grow strong. Walking through the white part of Stamps until they reached the butcher shop was frightening for both children, but Annie’s smoke house could not keep liver. So the journey had to be made, even though it meant waiting all afternoon till the other, more important, customers had been served. (It became clear that neither Uncle Willie nor Annie liked liver themselves because they ate very little of it. But they seemed to think it was their duty to provide it for the children.)

Annie not only cooked. In some cases, stories went along with certain recipes. Much as Bailey loved her lemon meringue pie, he dreaded hearing the lengthy story that was sure to accompany it. In this case, a very old woman used her magnificent pie to attract young men to her kitchen – and, supposedly, her bedroom. Even if other people warned the men, they would accept – and they would enjoy all the woman’s cooking. But she tricked them after their second, or third, piece of pie to think she was younger than she was. Sitting on her porch in the darkness, she would pretend to see a needle or a pin in a tree trunk far distant. Usually the young man would find a way to escape her clutches, but not always. While Annie laughed at the woman’s sexual plot, both Bailey and Ritzie thought the story too long to endure. Annie’s lemon pie was, however, excellent.

So was her fudge. So was her baking, which she undertook once a week. She didn’t sell her baked goods; they were for her family only. She provided her family the best from her garden as well. Again, those vegetables and fruits were not for sale in the store. She believed in nourishing her family rather than making money. She made tomato preserves from her several kinds of tomatoes – often planted from seed during the winter. And Annie’s back yard was the site of butchering cows and hogs, a community venture, to which everybody brought their animals, parts of other meats, and their energy. Annie used to remind the children that when people are so poor, all parts of a pig or a cow are good eating.

Marguerite admired the way Annie and her friends would sort out the good pieces of pork, grind them up and then squeeze the mass with their arms up to the elbows, mixing it with sage, salt, and red pepper. While the women prepared the sausage, cooking some up for the children to taste, the men slabbed the meat and lay it in the smokehouse, applying coarse salt to bring the blood to the surface. Most eventful weekend days were given to sharing the goods, and the products, people made collectively, with the meats divided once they were cured. It is these days that Bailey and Marguerite remembered for the rest of their lives.

The summer fish fries were another holiday-type event, particularly the Juneteenth celebrations. All church members came, as did the Masons, Eastern Star members, Elks, Knights of Columbus, Daughters of Pythias, teachers and other professionals – and they all brought their children. They also brought food, more food than Bailey and Marguerite remembered ever seeing. Deep covered pans of fried chicken and washtubs of yellow potato salad, ribs and other meat for barbecuing, juicy hams with pineapple and brown sugar, greens, greens, greens … and every dessert that was somebody’s specialty. And of course the fish that people caught in the pond nearby, properly cleaned and fried, were the centerpiece of the meal.

Hiding away as she often did, Marguerite found a friend beside the pond and they played together in the grotto hidden from most people’s eyes. Music played, people sang, Annie worked: she felt responsible since much of the food came from her store, or she contributed it.

Church revival meetings were similar events, though they were planned for summer evenings. Marguerite loved that fact that all kinds of people came – “the Holy Rollers, CME’s, everybody’s poor.” All denominational barriers are down. “The people who having worked all day would still get up to go to church, and then on the way home their dissatisfaction, their questioning about life … how long will we be on the bottom and in the church itself … not in the church but in that tent. You see in this tent where the minister uses the sermon to talk against all Whites and the congregation is a mixture of cotton pickers, housemaids, handymen, farmers, unemployed, and everybody agrees that the Whites have no charity and will not go to heaven… And everybody is there. Everybody agrees – people get happy with the idea that God hates the White people for their treatment of the Blacks and the chorus of amens is unanimous.”¹

There were the continuous Saturday get-togethers at Annie’s store. Occasionally there were movies at special low rates. Congregating at a central place with a radio, in order to listen to such sporting events as a Joe Louis fight: the African American part of Stamps did not want for entertainment. As Bailey grew older, he spent time with his various girlfriends, much to Marguerite’s pique. But he still often joined in games with the other children from school, especially since the store was a central meeting place for such activity.

Even then, however, Ritzie was not speaking. She had discovered a source of pleasure within herself that she did not feel the need to explain. On the one hand, her muteness kept her away from quarrels or controversy. On the other, she was allowing herself to respond to those confused memories that stayed with her from the horrible time in St. Louis. She later described her state of mind after she was back home in Stamps:

Sounds came to me dully, as if people were speaking through their handkerchief or with their hands over their mouths. Colors weren’t true either, but, rather, a vague assortment of shaded pastels that indicated not so much color as faded familiarities. People’s names escaped me and I began to worry over my sanity. After all, we had been away less than a year, and customers whose accounts I had formerly remembered without consulting the ledger were now complete strangers.²

No one knew how desperate Marguerite was in this post-traumatic condition. As her description of aphasia and clouded hearing suggest, her body knew what trauma could do, and had done. Even as Annie and Uncle Willie understood that the child needed to be silent, needed to live as she thought best, they were so quietly placid that their intentional lack of emotion was little help. Shut away from most media, unable to find information that might prove useful on the radio, Marguerite faced a daily existence in Stamps that was non-threatening. But it was also unstable. Decades later, when Angelou was asked about those years of her voluntary muteness, she replied, “From the age of seven-and-a-half till twelve, my whole body became one big ear.”

Momma had increased the time she spent with Ritzie. She taught her granddaughter how to do hand laundry carefully, how to rake the dirt yard into designs, and how to keep the fallen leaves in tidy piles. She kept the back yard mowed so that everyone could use the new croquet set, though even that did not seem to attract Marguerite. She slipped the child buttered bread sprinkled with white sugar if there was a moment that seemed appropriate; she kept herself open should Ritzie want to talk about school, or about St. Louis. In the words of psychiatrist Alice Miller, Marguerite was allowed to be herself, not just an extension of Annie Henderson. She was allowed to mourn, to express herself – or avoid expressing herself – but she was not repressed. She never thought of herself as a reflection of Annie’s care – she did not need to be the happy girl, the successful girl, if she preferred to be silent or even morose.

What Momma began to do, after the children had come back from St. Louis, was to call Marguerite her “little professor.” When friends were at the store, she would have Uncle Willie call out three-digit numbers for Ritzie to add. At other times, she would stretch out the girl’s arms and comment on both their strength and the color of their skin. Rather than allowing Marguerite to remain in the shadow of the activity, she brought the activity to the girl. Praising her mind and her skin was a simpler kind of attention than would have been praising her facial features, which were less attractive while she was in middle school than they would eventually be. She added to her order for store-bought clothing for Uncle Willie (who always wore starched white shirts and tailored trousers) some garments for Marguerite that the girl would not previously have had. She also tried to bring both the grandchildren lessons of life within the context of their working in the store. If a customer was a complainer, Annie said nothing until he or she had left: then she called the children to her and explained what was wrong with pettiness. People were blessed to be alive; they needed to be thankful for their lives. In her mind, Ritzie thought of Annie’s comments as “lessons.” She was able to understand the import of Annie’s sometimes limited uses of language. Fluency was less significant than the morality Annie saw in everything.

Both Annie and Willie, now resuming their roles as surrogate parents, never forgot that Bailey, Jr. and Marguerite were a pair of children. Young children when they had come to Stamps originally, they were still children – though growing taller than one might have expected, especially in Marguerite’s case. They both were generous and talented people; they both followed the rules of the Henderson house. They gave nobody any trouble. But Annie in particular knew that to separate them, with even the best intentions, was to do their great love for each other a disservice: they were the Johnson children, as they had always been.

Marguerite and Bailey were both the center and the periphery of the Henderson house. They had a snack before bedtime. They were allowed to wear what seemed suitable to them, even for church. They were treated together, as the same child, which reinforced their unity, a unity that was not wavering even as Bailey matured and spent great amounts of time with his “girlfriends.”

Perhaps as a compensatory move, Marguerite burrowed further and further into language. Not only reading but writing, composing songs, working out new stanzas of existing songs for the games the children played – Marguerite was finding her prowess with words to be a trait to cherish. In some ways, her return to silence was a kind of reflection of the life she had previously lived with Momma and Uncle Willie – the store was usually quiet, especially with Willie’s avoidance of talking. The church was interrupted by music but words were sometimes scarce, even if a minister was in charge of the service. Annie Henderson’s house was as quiet as she could make it, seeing her cooking and cleaning and serving as her way of maintaining order. Enforced silence was never, in Ritzie’s view, punishing.

Her choice to live in silence was more than self-soothing. It had little in common with self-protection (living with Momma and Uncle Willie, she did not need to protect herself from anyone or anything). Her behavior seemed to be a willing gravitation back to Annie’s careful, enclosed life. Living with Annie was safe. There was no question that returning to that life made Marguerite feel safe. No one had to reassure her. It enclosed her, the safeness. She slept well at night; she never woke. She never had nightmares.

For over a year, Marguerite lived with the calm of quiet and safety.

Then, perhaps at the request of Annie Henderson, the beautifully groomed and dressed Bertha Flowers appeared, as if casually, in Ritzie’s peaceful life. Mrs. Flowers provided what psychiatrist Judith Herman called “a lifeline.” This is Herman, saying that recovery might not occur if the trauma victim is – and remains – isolated. She points out, however, that “a single, caring, comforting person may be a lifeline… The reward of mourning is realized as the survivor sheds her or his stigmatized … identity.” Survivors need whatever help they can find.

Gently compelling, Mrs. Flowers came to visit Marguerite, and invited her to become a special child, a special sister, in her household. She had new and different books, she too loved poetry and poets, and she had strong beliefs that language should be heard as well as read silently. As a friend – not a teacher per se, or a tutor or any person with authority – Mrs. Flowers wanted to spend time with Ritzie, whose mind, and ability with language, interested her.

Being singled out was a new experience for Marguerite, who thought of herself – reasonably – as Momma’s child. She and Bailey, Jr. felt that their place in the Henderson/Johnson household was a gift, not a sinecure. They were respectful of the rules that governed the house; they also respected the place both Momma and Uncle Willie held in the black community. But they had had few experiences that identified them as Bailey Johnson, Jr. or Marguerite Annie Johnson. Given that Mrs. Flowers did not go to their church, that she was as mysterious as if she had been a white-skinned resident of Stamps, her attention was not only unexpected; it was a rare gift.

On the first day of their “talk,” Mrs. Flowers had made tea cookies and lemonade for Marguerite. She had chosen to read to her the opening scenes of A Tale of Two Cities. She had laid out a volume of poems that, with the Mark Twain book, was to be taken back to the store with Marguerite. Most exciting of all, another day of “talk” lay ahead. This was to be a regular event, then, a time of reading and listening, a time of sharing language. And, as Mrs. Flowers had pointed out, language only improved when it was heard as well as seen.

The caveat for Marguerite’s borrowing Mrs. Flowers’ books was that she read them aloud.

In retrospect, Angelou remembered Mrs. Flowers as the elegant, educated black woman who behaved and spoke like she imagined white women did: courteously, without grammatical errors, without loudness; always mindful of the propriety that governed the best societies. She saw her as a woman who existed a step above Momma, and she wondered at their friendship. Even as the young Marguerite scolded Momma for her poor grammar, she realized that the social power of her grandmother protected her and Bailey from all manner of assaults, and insults, but it took her decades to understand what being grandchildren of Annie Henderson really meant.

The work that Ritzie came to do with Mrs. Flowers stood her in excellent shape as her education progressed. She learned to tell others what she found moving in a poem or story; she did not hesitate to form – and express – opinions. She knew that her judgment was good. Listening to the way Mrs. Flowers explained things gave her an effective vocabulary. She often played teacher when she and Bailey talked about their reading. Her writing for homework assignments also sharpened. Taken from a scrapbook she kept during her 1936–37 school year is this descriptive paragraph that shows her command of words, as well as her ability to use dashes and other punctuation that might have been unusual in the work of a middle-school pupil.

Such jolting, rumbling, squeaking, and creaking! Such ringing of cow bells as the cattle plodded along. And dust – dust – so thick that your mouth was full of grit; your eyes were – oh, so very dirty; and your hair was powdered with the reddish Arkansas dust. The sun was hot and the sweat was streaming down your face, streaking through the grime. But you were happy for you were on a great adventure with your father and mother, brothers and sisters, and many of your neighbors were moving from your old home in the East. You were going to settle on some rich land in Arkansas. And you were going there not on a train of railroad cars – for there were none – but in a train of covered wagons pulled by strong oxen.

Throughout Marguerite’s middle-school years, she became the writer, the poet, the song writer, the essayist. And eventually she began to speak to friends, in class and on the playground. Perhaps most significant, she seemed to accept her role as writer without apology.

On one of the rare occasions when Momma could not bend others to her way of thinking – in the case of her taking Ritzie to a white dentist who owed money to Annie, Marguerite learned a clear lesson about racial inferiority. This dentist refused to treat her, even though the pain of her decaying tooth was visible. When Momma then took Ritzie to a black dentist, knowing that relief trumped pride, Ritzie saw that as her grandmother’s giving up, giving in to the inevitable. She created a fantasy story that made her grandmother the successful warrior in the race battle, but her fiction remained only that. Prejudice had bested even the strongest of Annie Henderson’s wishes.

When she was 11, Ritzie wanted to earn some real money so she asked to work for the Virginia lady, Mrs. Viola Cullinan. Genteel in her niceness, this woman had little understanding about ways of treating the African American children of Stamps. She began her relationship with Ritzie by giving her no instructions about the cleaning she wanted done – how did a person even start a vacuum cleaner? And secondly, she never learned Ritzie’s name – called her “Mary” throughout her service. Marguerite is not so different from Mary, but it is different and from the days of slavery into the 20th century, claiming one’s own name was essential for any proud person. The phrase of insult was “called out of his/her name.” Not using a person’s name was a grave act. After she consulted with Bailey on a pay-back action, Ritzie shattered three of Mrs. Cullinan’s dishes from Virginia. Then she ran out the door, never to return.

Segregation in Stamps was fully operative. It made no difference to either part of the town that Marguerite was always at the top of her class. It made no difference to either part if she were polite to older people, or if she tried to take on the white girls who sometimes were impudent to Annie Henderson. Although Bailey and Ritzie were made to operate under a severe code of politeness, they did so not out of fear but out of their love for Momma and Uncle Willie. Even decades later, Marguerite would remember – and recite – Momma’s morning prayer, which she had heard every day of her life in Stamps as Momma prayed on her knees by the side of her bed, even before thinking about the day of work ahead.

Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day. Thank you that you didn’t allow the bed I lay on last night to become my cooling board, nor my blanket my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house and everybody in it. Thank you, in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

A prayer of thanks and supplication, Annie’s traditional opening of the day set everybody’s spirit in its best posture. She prayed this way even on Sunday when her first act, after preparing breakfast, would be to spend hours in church, serving her God as best she could.

Annie Henderson’s pride in Marguerite’s steady accomplishments never lagged. Her pride, however, had long been tempered by her fears about Bailey’s visibility. Just as she had for decades protected Uncle Willie from Stamps’ white culture, particularly its intermittent Ku Klux Klan rides, so she saw the smart-mouthed Bailey, Jr. becoming the teenaged black youngster who behaved as if he were white himself. Proud of his own talents, admitting his intelligence and his good looks, Bailey, Jr. had long been spending his Saturdays at the movie theater – often alone. Most of his friends did not have cash; others were afraid to go so regularly into white Stamps. A few thought it strange that Bailey often spent the day in town, paying twice to see the same show.

When Bailey was late returning home, Momma was visibly worried. A few times, she took Ritzie with her to walk briskly into town. On other occasions she told neighbors about the boy’s tardiness.

One time when Bailey was about to graduate from eighth grade, he got the idea that he could hop a freight to California, where his mother had recently moved. Ritzie worried whenever he was near the tracks. Even though his longing to see Vivian was palpable, no one in Stamps thought he would try to go by freight train. Ritzie was with him on the day he made the attempt: she was sure he would be killed as they stood close beside the layers of tracks. But he made it onto the car and she knew Momma and Uncle Willie would be horrified that he was gone. As she was.

Bailey made it only as far as Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Worse, it took him several weeks to figure out how to get back to Stamps. Missing school those weeks put his graduation in jeopardy: he had to do extra homework every night. Grateful that he had returned, Momma did not add to his chores; she even did some of them herself.

The reality was that Bailey, Jr. seemed not to believe that he was in danger because of his skin color. A year or so earlier, he had seen the vivid distinction between white men and black. Coming home from a movie, he witnessed white men dragging the mutilated body of a black, his testicles gone, after he had been pulled from the river. Fascinated, Bailey had stopped to watch. What seemed to have appalled him was not so much the dead man’s body itself but the behavior of the white men, who were laughing and making hateful comments about the dead man. When he talked to Momma about what he had seen, he asked her why those men had been so disrespectful of death.

Momma, in turn, often scolded Bailey about his behavior when he was in town. In a scene Angelou writes late in her life about the patterns Momma and Bailey, Jr. had created, she has Annie Henderson saying to her grandson,

“You been downtown showing out? Don’t you know these white folks will kill you for poking fun of them?” “Momma, all I do is get off the street they are walking on. That’s what they want, isn’t it?” “Junior, don’t play smart with me. I knew the time would come when you would grow too old for the South. I just didn’t expect it so soon…”³

And in a later coda, Angelou adds her personal lament for the mothers of these boys and men: “The black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heart strings tied to a hanging noose.”