The Life of the Author: Maya Angelou. Linda Wagner-Martin

spend time with Bailey, though he seemed intent on planning his week so that he could see whatever Saturday’s movie was. (After their year in St. Louis, Momma began giving them allowances – ten cents weekly – and Ritzie often gave her dime to Bailey for his movie excursions. When she spent the cash for herself, it probably went for paperback cowboy books.) Together, she and Bailey memorized scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and one of the more brutal history plays. They raced to see who could remember more verses from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems. They read to each other. And they became best friends every Sunday, when the hours of listening to sermons, singing hymns, and staying quiet in the pew with Momma while Uncle Willie helped with the Sunday School children dragged on. Private jokes stayed hidden from Momma’s eyes. As they had grown taller, they were no longer allowed to nudge each other, or wink, or make faces. They were grown-up parishioners. (In contrast to their home church, where they had spent every Sunday of their lives, Grandmother Baxter’s Baptist Church in St. Louis was somber. The Baxters went to church occasionally. All four of the Baxter uncles were good singers, and their mother had trained them to participate. But the service was short, the sermons were forbidding; and no one seemed to notice that the Baxter family had increased by two. Nobody seemed to care.)

      Both good singers, Marguerite and Bailey could carry tunes even if the rest of the congregation faltered. In fact, it seemed to them – especially after their exposure to the Baptist service – that singing was the more important part of the Colored Methodist Episcopalian Church service. The morning opened with a series of hymns and humming refrains. There was music after the Bible readings, each of them. There were spirituals at intervals – songs that seemed more important than the words spoken as a sermon. And if a minister was absent, the congregation simply sang – one hymn after another, a nearly spontaneous outpouring of music that turned the church as meeting place into the church as Sunday service. In Angelou’s later recollections, she said that what she remembered about her church was that she could both listen to and participate in whatever occurred. She knew she was welcome.

      Actually, the first poetry I knew was the poetry of the gospel songs and the spirituals. I knew that blacks had written that music. I thought it was marvelous stuff. I loved the songs. I also loved the sermons. However, that God with the long hair, the one who sat on the throne in Heaven, he scared me to pieces… I believe in God. I believe in whatever people call God. I believe in life. I believe in will. I believe that right wins out.

      Gathered in by the community she knew so well – the store, the school, the church, Marguerite saw her real existence as returning to normal. She could put the horrors of St. Louis, not the least of them the cold Baxter family, into a memory base that seldom bothered her. But she still chose not to speak.

One new teacher was troubled by the fact that Marguerite seemed to think she was above discipline. When the girl would not speak in class, this teacher berated her. One afternoon, in fact, she slapped Marguerite. Stunned, the girl ran out of the classroom and went to find Annie. Bailey followed, confirming her story to his grandmother. Annie Henderson thought quietly for a time. Then she told Ritzie to come with her, back across the yard to the path. Inside the classroom, after some low-voiced questioning, Annie slapped the new teacher. The premise was that this young teacher was herself somebody’s grandbaby. If Marguerite Johnson, Annie’s grandbaby, could be slapped, so could the teacher. Again Marguerite found herself stunned. Her grandmother was not a violent person; she followed the Lord’s teachings in all things. The provocation might well have been that Annie now saw herself as the person charged with protecting Ritzie. Keeping her granddaughter safe, particularly after the trouble she had experienced in St. Louis, had become Annie Henderson’s primary task.

      Later that afternoon, when Marguerite returned from play, Annie had baked her favorite dessert – caramel cake. Uncle Willie pointed out that he and his mother loved her so much that this small gift was a reminder of her place in the family.

      It was not unusual for Momma to show her love through food. On the second day after their return from St. Louis, for instance, she had cooked Bailey’s favorite supper – pork chops and sauerkraut, seasoned with ginger. And several times each year she insisted that her grandchildren should have fried liver to help their bones grow strong. Walking through the white part of Stamps until they reached the butcher shop was frightening for both children, but Annie’s smoke house could not keep liver. So the journey had to be made, even though it meant waiting all afternoon till the other, more important, customers had been served. (It became clear that neither Uncle Willie nor Annie liked liver themselves because they ate very little of it. But they seemed to think it was their duty to provide it for the children.)

      Annie not only cooked. In some cases, stories went along with certain recipes. Much as Bailey loved her lemon meringue pie, he dreaded hearing the lengthy story that was sure to accompany it. In this case, a very old woman used her magnificent pie to attract young men to her kitchen – and, supposedly, her bedroom. Even if other people warned the men, they would accept – and they would enjoy all the woman’s cooking. But she tricked them after their second, or third, piece of pie to think she was younger than she was. Sitting on her porch in the darkness, she would pretend to see a needle or a pin in a tree trunk far distant. Usually the young man would find a way to escape her clutches, but not always. While Annie laughed at the woman’s sexual plot, both Bailey and Ritzie thought the story too long to endure. Annie’s lemon pie was, however, excellent.

So was her fudge. So was her baking, which she undertook once a week. She didn’t sell her baked goods; they were for her family only. She provided her family the best from her garden as well. Again, those vegetables and fruits were not for sale in the store. She believed in nourishing her family rather than making money. She made tomato preserves from her several kinds of tomatoes – often planted from seed during the winter. And Annie’s back yard was the site of butchering cows and hogs, a community venture, to which everybody brought their animals, parts of other meats, and their energy. Annie used to remind the children that when people are so poor, all parts of a pig or a cow are good eating.

      Marguerite admired the way Annie and her friends would sort out the good pieces of pork, grind them up and then squeeze the mass with their arms up to the elbows, mixing it with sage, salt, and red pepper. While the women prepared the sausage, cooking some up for the children to taste, the men slabbed the meat and lay it in the smokehouse, applying coarse salt to bring the blood to the surface. Most eventful weekend days were given to sharing the goods, and the products, people made collectively, with the meats divided once they were cured. It is these days that Bailey and Marguerite remembered for the rest of their lives.

      The summer fish fries were another holiday-type event, particularly the Juneteenth celebrations. All church members came, as did the Masons, Eastern Star members, Elks, Knights of Columbus, Daughters of Pythias, teachers and other professionals – and they all brought their children. They also brought food, more food than Bailey and Marguerite remembered ever seeing. Deep covered pans of fried chicken and washtubs of yellow potato salad, ribs and other meat for barbecuing, juicy hams with pineapple and brown sugar, greens, greens, greens … and every dessert that was somebody’s specialty. And of course the fish that people caught in the pond nearby, properly cleaned and fried, were the centerpiece of the meal.

      Hiding away as she often did, Marguerite found a friend beside the pond and they played together in the grotto hidden from most people’s eyes. Music played, people sang, Annie worked: she felt responsible since much of the food came from her store, or she contributed it.

      Church revival meetings were similar events, though they were planned for summer evenings. Marguerite loved that fact that all kinds of people came – “the Holy Rollers, CME’s, everybody’s poor.” All denominational barriers are down. “The people who having worked all day would still get up to go to church, and then on the way home their dissatisfaction, their questioning about life … how long will we be on the bottom and in the church itself … not in the church but in that tent. You see in this tent where the minister uses the sermon to talk against all Whites and the congregation is a mixture of cotton pickers, housemaids, handymen, farmers, unemployed, and everybody agrees that the Whites have no charity and will not go to heaven… And everybody is there. Everybody agrees – people get happy with the