Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [66]
Big Mary leaned against the rickety kitchen table. “I didn't mean no harm. I just love him. I take good care of him. You know that.”
Her big face crumbled like pastry dough and she trembled. “Why don't you let him stay with me awhile?”
She looked at Guy in my arms and her voice pinched into baby talk. “Pretty don't you want to stay with Big Mary? Tell your momma you want to stay.”
His arms scissored around my neck.
“I'm taking him, Mary.”
She couldn't control the tears. “Can't you all stay one night—just one?”
“I have a taxi waiting.” I started to the door.
“Well, wait and I'll get his things together.”
“No, that's all right, we have to leave.”
She made a lunge but stopped before she reached me.
“You don't hate me, do you, Rita? I pray God you don't hate me.”
“I don't hate you, Mary.”
“He was the prettiest of them all. And you was always going somewhere.”
“I understand, Mary. Good-bye. Say good-bye, Guy.”
“Good-bye.”
Buddy took us to the bus station and my muddy baby and I headed for San Francisco again.
CHAPTER 30
At home, life stumbled on. Mother was again in residence. The record player spun disks ceaselessly, cooking odors wafted through every room, and ice jiggled in glasses like snow bells.
Bailey had given up his apartment and had moved his belongings back into his old room. He told Mother he was job hunting, and paid her room rent “out of savings.” He now wore one-button roll suits in dun and charcoal-gray; the modified pegged pants and colorful jerkins were given away. And his smiles were less frequent and different. When Papa Ford said something too ribald or old-fashioned, Bailey seemed not to notice. He never lifted his eyes to check with me, and the teasings about my height and arrogance had stopped.
Since I was job hunting too, I asked where he was looking and for what.
“In the streets. I'm looking for a bank roll, then I'm heading for New York City.”
What could he do except wait tables and sing for the family's enjoyment?
“I can use my brain. I've told you ‘all knowledge is spendable currency depending upon the market.’ There's money to be had, and I intend to have some.”
“Bailey, you're not going to pimp, are you?”
“Let me straighten you out. Pimps are men who hate women or fear them. I respect women, and how can I fear a woman when the baddest one I've ever heard of is my mother?”
He looked at me sharply. “And let me tell you another thing, a whore is the saddest and silliest broad walking. All she hopes is to beat somebody out of something, by lying down first and getting up last.”
I didn't want to be included in that company, yet I had lived at Clara's.
“I'm not talking about you. There is such a thing as a whore mentality. You can find it in a housewife who will only go to bed with her husband if he buys a new washing machine. Or a secretary who'll sleep with the boss for a raise. Hell, you're both too smart and not smart enough to be a whore. Never. But I don't want you trying it again.”
He was seven inches shorter and one year older than I, but as always, he had the last and loudest word. Afterward, as I thought about him, he became even larger in my mind.
He had endured the death of his love and was still going on. Certainly he was limping and using a crutch I didn't approve of, but he hadn't atrophied. He had plans for his future. I reasoned that hard drugs might not be as bad as the people who used them. It was possible that the dirty, ragged, smelly hypes, who were so frightening and repulsive, were naturally slouchy and low-class. There were probably many people who took drugs and never lowered their living standards. I knew from experience that weed wasn't dangerous, so it could follow that heroin and cocaine were victims of rumors spread by the self-righteous. Anyway, man had always needed something to help him though this vale of tears. Fermented berries, corn, rice and potatoes. Scotch or magic mushrooms. Why not the residue of poppies?
The maids and doormen, factory workers and janitors who were able to leave their ghetto