Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [65]
A black man gave me a ride to Cottonwood Road.
“If her brother is farming, he got to be living around here somewhere. And you say you don't know his name?”
“No, but I'll find him.”
He stopped his old car in front of a café that claimed, “Home Cooking.”
“Well, I wish you Godspeed. Try in there. But be careful. These is some rough folks.”
I thanked him and he drove away.
The young waitress shouted over the noisy jukebox and talk, “Anybody here know Mary Dawson?”
Conversation dimmed but no one answered.
She went on, “This woman's looking for her baby.”
The faces became friendlier, but still there were no answers.
“Nobody knows her, honey. Try down at Buckets.” She directed me to a dirt-floor joint a couple of blocks away.
Old-timey blues whined in the artificial darkness, and one stout bartender walked up and down behind the bar setting up and taking away beer bottles. Every stool was taken by men and women who laughed and talked with the easy familiarity of regulars.
“Mary Dawson? Mary Dawson.” The bartender digested the name as he filed my face in his memory bank. “Naw, baby, I don't know no Mary Dawson.”
“They call her Big Mary.”
“Big Mary. Naw, I don't know no Big Mary.”
“She's got my baby. Took him away from Stockton.” I felt as if I were blowing my breath against a tornado.
His face softened as suspicion left it. “What she look like?”
“She's as tall as I. As me”—“as I” sounded too dickty—“but bigger, and she had a brother who farms around here. They're from Oklahoma.”
A little light winked in his eyes. “Does she drink?”
“Not often, but they say she drinks a lot when she does.”
“In a coffee cup?” The smile was abundant.
“Yes.” I wanted to hug him.
“That's old John Peterson's sister. Yeah, baby. He lives bout three miles from here.”
In the past, whenever I had slipped free of Fate's pressing heel, I gave thanks. This time I promised God a regular church attendance.
“Can you direct me?”
“Aw, you can't walk it. Wait a minute.”
He called to a man over at the jukebox. “Buddy.”
The man turned and came over to the bar.
“Little lady, Buddy runs a cab service … Buddy, you know where John Peterson's place is?”
Buddy nodded.
“Take her out there, will you?”
Buddy nodded again.
“He'll treat you right, little lady, good luck.”
I thanked the bartender and followed Buddy to a dilapidated car. He said nothing on the ride, but my heart beat so that I wouldn't have been able to answer in any case.
He stopped the car on a lonely road surrounded by overturned farmland. A graying clapboard house set deep in a plot of muddy ground.
Buddy nodded toward the house. “That's it. You want me to come back to get you?”
I looked at the house, which seemed left alone, and thought that maybe its occupants had gone to Oklahoma. Then I noticed some movement a few hundred yards from the house. I focused on the movement, trying to determine if the action was caused by a pet or farm animal rooting in the mud.
In a second, my heart squeezed and I screamed. “My baby! That's my baby.” One thought shot my legs out of the car and in two steps I was ankle-deep in muck, a new thought sluicing in my mind. Where does he think his mother is?
I picked him up and pressed him close. I felt his body throb and pound with excitement. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself away to see my face. He kissed me and then started crying The restraint which had held through the long night and the bus trip began to disintegrate. He took a fistful of my hair and twisted and pulled, crying all the time. I couldn't untangle the hair or pull my head away. I stood holding him while he raged at being abandoned. My sobs broke free on the waves of my first guilt. I had loved him and never considered that he was an entire person. Separate from my boundaries, I had not known before that he had and would have a life beyond being my son, my pretty baby, my cute doll, my charge. In the plowed farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him