Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [23]
I don't know how I continued walking to the cab. Her threat and the sound of her screech had stabbed me to the quick as surely as it had pierced the night. The wretch would put the cops on my trail and I'd lose my car, go to jail and be put out of Mother Cleo's. I was sitting in the back of the taxi when a numbing thought sidled across my brain like a poisonous snake. I might be declared an unfit mother and my son would be made a ward of the court. There were cases like that. In the cool early-morning air I began to sweat. The tiny glands in my armpits opened and closed to the pricking of a thousand straight pins.
“Please take me home, and I'm sorry for that terrible outburst.” Fear still rode the front seat with the driver and he lost no time depositing me at my destination. I paid him, tipped him grandly and inundated him with praise for his reliability and courtesy, and lack of familiarity. I don't think he heard a word, and before I reached the front door, his tail lights had turned winking around the corner.
During the exotic buying sprees I hadn't thought to get luggage to hold my new acquisitions. I heaped piles of my clothes and my son's into the suitcases Bailey had given me in San Francisco. I had made up my mind that come daybreak, my son and I were going to make a run for it. If the police caught me, they'd catch me at the railway station or on the train, not a sitting duck waiting passively to be arrested. When I had finished cramming as many things as possible into the bags, I sat down to read until daybreak.
Since childhood I had often read until the gray light entered my room, but on that tense night it seemed sleep had allied itself with my enemies, and along with them was determined to overpower me, do me down. I tried sitting in a chair and sitting cross-legged on the bed. A knock awoke me. It was Mother Cleo.
“Rita, you left your light on again. You going to start helping me with the electricity. You don't know how much it cost …” She was moving away from the door, and her words reached down the hall.
I came to full attention and checked my luggage, my money and my story again.
“Mother Cleo, my mother is sick in San Francisco. She telephoned me at the club last night, so I have to go home.” I had followed her into the kitchen. She put down her cup and looked at me with such sympathy I almost wished I wasn't lying.
“Oh, you poor thing. She ain't bad off, is she?”
“Oh no, nothing serious.” I wanted to calm her fears.
“Well then, you won't be long. You'll leave the baby?”
“Oh no. She wants to see him. And I'll tell you the truth”—as if I could—“I'm not coming back soon.”
“Aw, Don't tell me that. I've come to look on you as family.”
“Mother Cleo, I appreciate everything you've done for us. And I want you to have this.” I laid fifty dollars on the table. “My boyfriend sent it to you as a present.”
She beamed and I saw the tears start to form.
“Now, don't cry. We'll come back sometime. I wish you'd bathe the baby while I'm taking a bath, and then we'll hit the highway.”
Her last words to me as she and Mr. Henry helped me to the car were attributes to my acting and successful deceit.
“You're just what I wanted for a daughter. You smart and mannerable and truthful. That's what I like most. You living a Christian life. Keep up the good work. God bless you and the child. And your mother.”
I tore down the morning streets as if the hounds of hell were coming to collect my soul. The baby responded to the two-wheel