Read Online The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou - Free Book Online

Bailey’s chores and do my own as well. Did I have the nerve to try life without Bailey? I couldn’t decide on any move, so I recited a few Bible verses, and went home.
    Momma cut down a few give-aways that had been traded to her by white women’s maids and sat long nights in the dining room sewing jumpers and skirts for me. She looked pretty sad, but each time I found her watching me she’d say, as if I had already disobeyed, “You be a good girl now. You hear? Don’t you make people think I didn’t raise you right. You hear?” She would have been more surprised than I had she taken me in her arms and wept at losing me. Her world was bordered on all sides with work, duty, religion and “her place.” I don’t think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched. In later years I asked her if she loved me and she brushed me off with: “God is love. Just worry about whether you’re being a good girl, then He will love you.”
    I sat in the back of the car, with Dad’s leather suitcases, and our cardboard boxes. Although the windows were rolled down, the smellof fried chicken and sweet potato pie lay unmoving, and there wasn’t enough room to stretch. Whenever he thought about it, Dad asked, “Are you comfortable back there, Daddy’s baby?” He never waited to hear my answer, which was “Yes, sir,” before he’d resume his conversation with Bailey. He and Bailey told jokes, and Bailey laughed all the time, put out Dad’s cigarettes and held one hand on the steering wheel when Dad said, “Come on, boy, help me drive this thing.”
    After I got tired of passing through the same towns over and over, and seeing the empty-looking houses, small and unfriendly, I closed myself off to everything but the kissing sounds of the tires on the pavement and the steady moan of the motor. I was certainly very vexed with Bailey. There was no doubt that he was trying to butter up Dad; he even started to laugh like him, a Santa Claus, Jr., with his “Ho, ho, ho.”
    “How are you going to feel seeing your mother? Going to be happy?” he was asking Bailey, but it penetrated the foam I had packed around my senses. Were we going to see Her? I thought we were going to California. I was suddenly terrified. Suppose she laughed at us the way he did? What if she had other children now, whom she kept with her? I said, “I want to go back to Stamps.” Dad laughed, “You mean Daddy’s baby doesn’t want to go to St. Louis to see her mother? She’s not going to eat you up, you know.”
    He turned to Bailey and I looked at the side of his face; he was so unreal to me I felt as if I were watching a doll talk. “Bailey, Junior, ask your sister why she wants to go back to Stamps.” He sounded more like a white man than a Negro. Maybe he was the only brown-skinned white man in the world. It would be just my luck that the only one would turn out to be my father. But Bailey was quiet for the first time since we left Stamps. I guess he was thinking too about seeing Mother. How could an eight-year-old contain that much fear? He swallows and holds it behind his tonsils, he tightens his feet and closes the fear between his toes, he contracts his buttock and pushes it up behind the prostate gland.
    “Junior, cat’s got your tongue? What do you think your mother will say, when I tell her her children didn’t want to see her?” The thoughtthat he
would
tell her shook me and Bailey at the same time. He leaned over the back of the seat—“My, it’s Mother Dear. You know you want to see Mother Dear. Don’t cry.” Dad laughed and pitched in his seat and asked himself, I guess, “What will she say to that?”
    I stopped crying since there was no chance to get back to Stamps and Momma. Bailey wasn’t going to back me up, I could tell, so I decided to shut up and dry up and wait for whatever seeing Mother Dear was going to bring.
    St. Louis was a new kind of hot and a new kind of dirty. My memory had no pictures