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