Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [47]
CHAPTER 25
A friend of Mother's who had a restaurant in Stockton needed a fry cook. I packed the clothes I thought we might need and set out for the eighty-mile journey. I wasn't sure that I'd find pot in the little town, so I stashed a Prince Albert can full, and papers, in the bottom of my suitcase. I refused to cry all the way in the back seat of a Greyhound bus.
Stockton had an unusual atmosphere. Situated in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, it had long been a center for the itinerant workers. Southerners drawn from depleted farms, Mexicans and Filipinos from their poverty-stricken countries who had raised large families on meager incomes since the early 1900s. World War II had enriched the town's blood by attracting blacks from the South to work at the local dry dock, the shipyards and defense plants in nearby Pittsburg.
When I arrived, there was Wild West rhythm in the streets. Since some of the plants were still running and the police hadn't yet cracked down on crime, prostitutes and gamblers came from San Francisco and Los Angeles on weekends to fleece the willing local yokels.
The restaurant was large, seating seventy-five, and had a steady and regular clientele. But because it was two blocks from Center Street, we got little of the sophisticated walk-in trade. My shift began at four in the afternoon, and I fried hamburgers, pork chops and eggs and ham steaks until midnight. Then, to add juice to my dry life, I would wash up, exchange the sweaty uniform for a clinging one-shoulder deal and high-heeled shoes that hurt my already swollen feet. A slow saunter to Center Street, and a perch at the crowded bar gave me a chance to watch the fascinating city folks, and at the same time haughtily explain to any man fresh enough to approach me that I worked for a living. I wasn't a whore. I told myself that the fact that I might have been mistaken for one, because of my flagrant way of dressing or clinging to a bar alone in a small town at one in the morning, was simply evidence of men trying to read a book by its cover.
Big Mary was a large-boned, rough woman from Oklahoma whose husband had died in the tomato fields surrounding Stockton. She was the neighborhood's surrogate mother. She tended children on a daily basis, but when I explained that I needed a weekly arrangement because of my hours, she agreed to let my son live in her house; I could pick him up on my day off. The blood of Indian ancestors pushed her cheekbones up so high that her eyes appeared to be closed, and her skin was the black brown of old polished wood. Mary drank once a month and other arrangements had to be made for all children on that one day. She would dress herself in a clean, loose-fitting cotton dress, and her dead husband's shoes cut out to ease the strain. Sitting at the bar, she'd pull a coffee cup from her purse and order the bartender, “Fill it up!” After drinking the contents, she'd ask the bartender to wash the cup and fill it up again. She would sit, sipping, staring straight ahead, until she had drunk three cups of bourbon. Then she would pay, and without having passed the time of day with anyone, leave the bar as straight as she had entered it.
Her way with children was to feed them well and coddle them. She fell into baby talk whenever children were mentioned, even if none were present.
Her thick Oklahoma accent slurred and her tongue protruded through the evenly shaped, full black lips. I figured