Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [25]
He had been crippled in early childhood, and his affliction was never mentioned. The right side of his body had undergone severe paralysis, but his left arm and hand were huge and powerful. I laid the baby in the bend of his good arm.
“Hello, baby. Hello. Ain't he sweet?” The words slurred over his tongue and out of the numb lips. “Here, take him.” His healthy muscles were too strong for a year-old wriggler.
Momma called from the kitchen, “Sister, I made you a little something to eat.”
We were in the Store; I had grown up in its stronghold. Just seeing the shelves loaded with weenie sausages and Brown Plug chewing tobacco, salmon and mackerel and sardines all in their old places softened my heart and tears stood at the ready just behind my lids. But the kitchen, where Momma with her great height bent to pull cakes from the wood-burning stove and arrange the familiar food on well-known plates, erased my control and the tears slipped out and down my face to plop onto the baby's blanket.
The hills of San Francisco, the palm trees of San Diego, prostitution and lesbians and the throat hurting of Curly's departure disappeared into a never-could-have-happened land. I was home.
“Now what you crying for?” Momma wouldn't look at me for fear my tears might occasion her own. “Give the baby to me, and you go wash your hands. I'm going to make him a sugar tit. You can set the table. Reckon you remember where everything is.”
The baby went to her without a struggle and she talked to him without the cooing most people use with small children. “Man. Just a little man, ain't you? I'm going to call you Man and that's that.”
Momma and Uncle Willie hadn't changed. She still spoke softly and her voice had a little song in it.
“Bless my soul, Sister, you come stepping up here looking like your daddy for the world.”
Christ and Church were still the pillars of her life.
“The Lord my God is a rock in a weary land. He is a great God. Brought you home, all in one piece. Praise His name.”
She was, as ever, the matriarch. “I never did want you children to go to California. Too fast that life up yonder. But then, you all's their children, and I didn't want nothing to happen to you, while you're in my care. Jew was getting a little too big for his britches.”
Five years before, my brother had seen the body of a black man pulled from the river. The cause of death had not been broadcast, but Bailey (Jew was short for Junior) had seen that the man's genitals had been cut away. The shock caused him to ask questions that were dangerous for a black boy in 1940 Arkansas. Momma decided we'd both be better off in California where lynchings were unheard of and a bright young Negro boy could go places. And even his sister might find a niche for herself.
Despite the sarcastic remarks of Northerners, who don't know the region (read Easterners, Westerners, North Easterners, North Westerners, Midwesterners), the South of the United States can be so impellingly beautiful that sophisticated creature comforts diminish in importance.
For four days I waited on the curious in the Store, and let them look me over. I was that rarity, a Stamps girl who had gone to the fabled California and returned. I could be forgiven a few siditty airs. In fact, a pretension to worldliness was expected of me, and I was too happy to disappoint.
When Momma wasn't around, I stood with one hand on my hip and my head cocked to one side and spoke of the wonders of the West and the joy of being free. Any listener could have asked me: if things were so grand in San Francisco, what had brought me back to a dusty mote of Arkansas? No one asked, because they all needed to believe that a land existed somewhere, even beyond the Northern Star, where Negroes were treated as people and whites were not the all-powerful ogres of their experience.
For the first time the farmers acknowledged my maturity. They didn't order me back and forth along the shelves but found subtler ways