Badass women in history series
The Turmoil of Maya Angelou
Exploration into the Life of Maya Angelou, Part 1
Of all of the subjects for the Badass Women series, Maya Angelou would be the most interesting and in-depth. Given the scope and wildly diverse range of subject matter regarding her lived experiences, I knew I couldn’t possibly cover everything even though I really want to. How does one decide to cover one part of her life and not another? How do you focus on the one while disregarding the other while knowing that they are interlinked? To do her justice, I had to restrict myself to the ones that jumped out at me. Finding one’s place in this world is how I could best describe this piece. She didn’t change her first name to Maya until the late 50s, but I will be referring to her as Maya throughout this series.
Girl in Turmoil
How is one to develop as a human being when you have little to no connection with the people you see and interact with on a day-to-day basis? Growing up down south as a Black girl left her feeling displaced and wondering about her place in the world. She struggled with relating to those around her. It seemed as though the adults in her life were disinterested in her and could not or would not bring themselves to understand her.
Maya was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Their parents divorced and sent Maya, age three, and Bailey, four, from St. Louis Missouri to live with her grandmother and uncle who owned Wm Johnson General Merchandise Store in Stamps Arkansas. Dad would later relocate to Long Beach California.
Grandmother would get up every morning at four a.m. without an alarm clock and would start her day with a prayer of thanks for keeping her alive through the night, and after that would prepare meat pies and lemonade for the lumberyard Seamen and Seedmen who struggled in on their way to the cotton gin.
The store was the gathering place; a place where you could hear the latest gossip, the latest tragedy or the loudest boasts.
The wages were so low, the laborers struggled to pay their bill at the Store. Laborers worked seasonal jobs with working conditions that were just barely above slavery. Their only hope was a successful planting and harvesting season just enough to pay last year’s bill and then repeat the process to do it all over again.
Growing into her appreciation for literature, she found that she was enraptured by William Shakespeare whom she called her “first white love”. She often felt conflicted by this because it was expected that she gravitate towards black authors like Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and the great W. E. B. Bois. Since Shakespeare had been dead for so long, maybe people wouldn’t mind that he was white, she reasoned.
At age 13, she experienced firsthand the ugly racism of a small town. A Black man was accused of “messing with” a white woman. That’s all it took to mobilize a frothing white mob. The family was warned of a planned Klan ride-through and to warn Uncle Willie to “lie low” until things settled down. Uncle Willie had been partially paralyzed from age three when his babysitter accidentally dropped him which caused him to struggle with getting around, but even so. It did not matter to the sociopaths who longed for blood and wanted to take out their revenge for their pitiful existence. He was considered so much of a threat that he would have been lynched if found. Grandma and the kids took Willie to the store and half-buried him in onions and potatoes for the night.
The Ugly Faces of Racism
In Stamps Arkansas, the segregation was so severe that black kids hardly knew what white people looked like. They seemed like characters and monsters one hears of in fairy tales. To Maya, the very thought of them filled her with dread.
The only exposure to white people was limited to the “powhitetrash kids” that lived with their families on farmland behind the school. The dirty ragged kids would come in groups into their family-owned store climbing on top of shelves and into the onion and potato bins. Their behavior was quite shocking to Maya and Bailey who watched them boss and order Granny and Uncle Willie around.
On one despicable hateful day, a group of white girls marched toward the general store as Maya and Granny were cleaning and raking the front yard. Granny folded her arms and started singing a low-key hymn and then told Maya to get into the store. The girls cackled and laughed as they reached the ground to stand in front of Gran. One of them decided it was a good idea to hook one of her arms around Gran’s and start mimicking her stance and singing and making a general nuisance of herself. Gran never flinched or moved a muscle except to keep right on singing her hymn.
“Naw, Helen. You ain’t standing like her. This here’s it.”
Another girl joined in on the act while another crossed her eyes and hooked her thumbs in the sides of her mouth.
“Naw, you can’t do it. Your mouth ain’t pooched out enough. It’s like this.”
And on and on and on the disrespect went while Granny kept on singing low as Maya watched in horror through the screen door.
She envisioned herself running out of the store throwing black pepper and lye in their faces while screaming that they were a bunch of unwashed dirty scummy peckerwoods.
What right did these dirty clothes wearing dirty faced, greasy uncombed haired Karens have to mistreat her so? The final show of desecration was when the oldest one decided to do a handstand in front of Gran which caused her dirty dress to drop to her shoulders and expose herself. Her friends laughed, clapped whooped, and hollered as they left and had the gall to turn back around and wave goodbye to Gran as if she had been a willing participant in their fun.
Granny stopped singing to bid them all farewell one by one by name and then resumed her singing. Now, I want to throw black pepper and lye at the unwashed dirty scummy peckerwoods.
As bad as these kids were, you can imagine the parents being ten times worse. They weren’t taught to respect others, is it any wonder they had no respect for themselves? They took no pride in their appearance, their speech, or how they were perceived by strangers much less their peers they spent the most time with.
This was Maya’s first exposure to white people in her formative years. The silent suffering that had to be endured to keep white feelings from being hurt.
As I sit reading this account, I wondered why Granny didn’t just walk back into the store to avoid these lice-ridden vermin. And then it dawned on me why.
They would have just followed her into her store and probably trashed it if one word of consternation was spoken. She chose to endure that humiliation to appease them and sent Maya in to avoid her retaliating which may have ended up in an angry white mob at her door. Just familiarly talking to them was to risk your life.
Granny taught her grandchildren the art of cleanliness and self-respect which made them stand apart from the other white children who ran ragged. Granny owned land, houses, and a business.
By the time the Great Depression came to Stamps, she figured out how to keep the Store open through barter and trade when her customers had no money to spend.
The welfare agencies would give out gallons of lard, flour, salt, powdered eggs, and powdered milk. Recipients would then take those items and dropped them off at the Store for trade with welfare items used as money.
One five lb. can of powdered milk would be worth fifty cents.
One five lb. can of powdered eggs would be worth one dollar.
10 cans of mackerel would be worth one dollar and so on.
Some customers would just drop off their welfare items and set up in-store credit for later.
Both Maya and Bailey would live on welfare food but soon grew to hate the taste of powdered eggs and milk. Having once lived on powdered milk as a child, I can attest that there isn’t enough sugar in the world to make that milk any more drinkable.
I can’t help but think that Granny’s ingenuity, business acumen, and success made her superior to her white neighbors which they could hardly stand and made their disdain quite clear. They made it so clear that their children picked up on it and felt bold enough to act out on it.
A Young Girl Uprooted
Maya’s sanguine country living came to an abrupt end when her father showed up unannounced and decided it was a good idea to take her and Bailey to St. Louis to live with her mother and stepfather. A man they had hardly ever known was now taking them for a long car ride from the rural south to live in a bustling city. Life in St. Louis might as well have been life on the moon. She found it hard to identify with the locals and even her own father who spoke in very clear and distinct pronunciations.
The hustle and bustle of the city were equally unnerving. Her mother worked as a nurse by day and a card cutter for poker games at night. Eventually, she quit being a nurse because it wasn’t colorful and exciting enough for her. Maya and her brother were left with stepfather Freeman for much of the time who barely spoke to them but seemed to dote heavily on mom.
Young girl assaulted
The sounds of St Louis seemed to flood her senses. The outside traffic of cars trains and busses, the flushing toilets, and doorbells made her long for the quiet serenity of Arkansas with Granny. With her mother gone long hours, Maya and Bailey would solace themselves with dark tales from serial paperbacks of The Shadow, Crime Busters, The Lone Ranger, and other assorted tales.
Her overactive imagination would keep her up some nights so her mother would let her sleep with her and Freeman.
Her mother had risen early one morning to go to work and Maya was in and out of sleep when she noticed that her stepfather’s penis was up against her leg.
He softly and creepily told her that he wasn’t going to hurt her and then proceeded to sexually assault her.
I’m not going into more disturbing details. The effect this would have on a young child who experienced early separation from parents to live in a horrifyingly segregated southern state to witnessing her grandmother being harassed and relatives threatened with lynching…she wasn’t even ten years old and yet had already lived a life of an adult.
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