Читать книгу The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou - Linda Wagner-Martin - Страница 8

Any person’s birthday is an inviolable part of that person. On April 4, 1928, when Vivian Baxter Johnson gave birth to her second child and first daughter, she was still a happy woman. Married to her charismatic husband Bailey Johnson, an ex-Navy sweet talker, a man proud of having escaped the humbling poverty of his Arkansas childhood, Vivian had tried to accept the roles of wife and mother. After their first baby, Bailey, Junior, had been born in the winter of 1926, she was discovering that playing such roles was harder than she had imagined – she was tired, cranky, deprived of the fun she had envisioned after marriage. She had traded being Vivian Baxter, older daughter of the imposing woman who ran her family and her St. Louis neighborhood filled with numbers runners and whiskey sellers – as its precinct captain – and the older sister to four younger brothers and a sister, to become Vivian Johnson, a woman who needed household help and baby care. The independent existence she had known as Vivian Baxter was fading fast.

It looked to their friends, however, as if Vivian and Bailey had the world in their grasp. A cook and self-styled dietician in the Navy, Bailey had learned a number of skills that made him employable. Vivian herself had trained for pediatric nursing though she had soon discovered that becoming a dealer (“cutting poker games”) in her neighborhood’s gambling world was more exciting. Both of them were outgoing people; both of them were socially adept. If the postwar world was not their oyster, it at least seemed to welcome their ambition and their energy. The relatively prosperous world of the late 1920s, however, was gradually changing.

During the troubled early 1930s, work for any African American was growing scarce. As Vivian and Bailey moved further and further away from their families and friends – finally ending in Long Beach, California – they experienced the loneliness of what decades later would be called the “nuclear family.” Alone in their small family unit, they needed the protective relatives that were hundreds of miles away, and their marriage suffered. They had lived in many places within the South, always closer to the Baxters in St. Louis than to the Henderson/Johnsons of Arkansas. By the time they had reached California in search of better work, however, their marriage was worn threadbare. Sometime in 1931, heading for divorce, Bailey realized that his children were being damaged by their parents’ continuous fighting, and he made arrangements for Bailey, Jr. and his little sister, Marguerite, to travel by train to live with his mother, Annie Henderson, the store owner and pillar of the African American church in Stamps, Arkansas. As the crow flew, the distance was 1,600 miles; going by train would take several days and nights. It was becoming all too common: removed from disintegrating households, children were being put on trains to reach more stable family situations.