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

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


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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.

      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.”

      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.

      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,


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