Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [31]
Momma stood on the porch facing the road. Her arms hung at her sides and she made no motions with her head. Yet something was wrong. Tension had distorted the statue straightness and caused her to lean leftward. I stopped patting myself on the back and ran to the Store.
When I reached the one-step porch, I looked up in her face. “Momma, what's the matter?”
Worry had forced a deep line down either side of her nostrils past her stiffly held lips.
“What's wrong?”
“Mr. Coleman's granddaughter, Miss June, just called from the General Merchandise Store.” Her voice quaked a little. “She said you was downtown showing out.”
So that's how they described my triumph to her. I decided to explain and let her share in the glory. I began, “It was the principle of the thing, Momma—”
I didn't even see the hand rising, and suddenly it had swung down hard against my cheek.
“Here's your principle, young miss.”
I felt the sting on my skin and the deep ache in my head. The greatest hurt was that she didn't ask to hear my side.
“Momma, it was a principle.” My left ear was clogged, but I heard my own voice fuzzily.
The hand didn't surprise me the second time, but the same logic which told me I was right at the white store told me I was no less right in front of Momma. I couldn't allow myself to duck the blow. The backhand swing came down on my right cheek.
“Here's your principle.” Her voice had a far-away-tunnel sound.
“It was a principle, Momma.” Tears poured down my burning face, and ache backed up in my throat.
The hand came again and again each time I mumbled “principle,” and I found myself in the soft dust in front of the porch. I didn't want to move. I never wanted to get up again.
She stepped off the porch and caught my arms. “Get up. Stand up, I say.”
Her voice never allowed disobedience. I stood, and looked at her face. It glistened as if she had just dashed a pan of water over her head.
“You think 'cause you've been to California these crazy people won't kill you? You think them lunatic cracker boys won't try to catch you in the road and violate you? You think because of your all-fired principle some of the men won't feel like putting their white sheets on and riding over here to stir up trouble? You do, you're wrong. Ain't nothing to protect you and us except the good Lord and some miles. I packed you and the baby's things, and Brother Wilson is coming to drive you to Louisville.”
That afternoon I climbed into a horse-drawn wagon, and took my baby from Momma's arms. The baby cried as we pulled away, and Momma and Uncle Wilson stood waving and crying good-bye.
CHAPTER 18
Momma's intent to protect me had caused her to hit me in the face, a thing she had never done, and to send me away to where she thought I'd be safe. So again, the South and I had parted and again I was headed for the cool gray hills of San Francisco. I raged on the train that white stupidity could so dictate my movements and looked unsheathed daggers at every white face I saw.
If the tables could have turned at that instant, I would gladly have consigned every white person living and the millions dead to a hell where the devil was blacker than their fears of blackness and more cruel than forced starvation. But, powerless, I spent the time on the train entertaining the baby when I thought of it, and wondering if I would be met by a warrant for my arrest when I returned to California.
The city didn't even know I had been away, and Mother took me and the baby to a room in her new fourteen-room house as if I had just returned from a long-intended holiday.
I found a job as a short-order cook in a tiny greasy spoon. The men who ate there were defeated leftovers from the now-closed war plants. They slouched into the fifth-rate dingy diner hugging their distress.
The job paid very little and the atmosphere of despair that never lifted depressed me. I left the restaurant each afternoon feeling that the rancid cooking oil and the old men's sadness had seeped into my pores and were crawling through my body.
One afternoon I went into a record