The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
I asked Mother.
Daddy Clidell was at the club one evening, so I sat down on the side of Mother’s bed. As usual she woke completely and at once. (There is never any yawning or stretching with Vivian Baxter. She’s either awake or asleep.)
“Mother, I’ve got to talk to you …” It was going to kill me to have to ask her, for in the asking wouldn’t it be possible that suspicion would fall on my own normality? I knew her well enough to know that if I committed almost any crime and told her the truth about it she not only wouldn’t disown me but would give me her protection. But just suppose I was developing into a lesbian, how would she react? And then there was Bailey to worry about too.
“Ask me, and pass me a cigarette.” Her calmness didn’t fool me for a minute. She used to say that her secret to life was that she “hoped for the best, was prepared for the worst, so anything in between didn’t come as a surprise.” That was all well and good for most things but if her only daughter was developing into a …
She moved over and patted the bed, “Come on, baby, get in the bed. You’ll freeze before you get your question out.”
It was better to remain where I was for the time being.
“Mother … my pocketbook …”
“Ritie, do you mean your vagina? Don’t use those Southern terms. There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘vagina.’ It’s a clinical description. Now, what’s wrong with it?”
The smoke collected under the bed lamp, then floated out to be free in the room. I was deathly sorry that I had begun to ask her anything.
“Well?… Well? Have you got crabs?”
Since I didn’t know what they were, that puzzled me. I thought I might have them and it wouldn’t go well for my side if I said I didn’t. On the other hand, I just might not have them, and suppose I lied and said I did?
“I don’t know, Mother.”
“Do you itch? Does your vagina itch?” She leaned on one elbow and jabbed out her cigarette.
“No, Mother.”
“Then you don’t have crabs. If you had them, you’d tell the world.”
I wasn’t sorry or glad not to have them, but made a mental note to look up “crabs” in the library on my next trip.
She looked at me closely, and only a person who knew her face well could have perceived the muscles relaxing and interpreted this as an indication of concern.
“You don’t have a venereal disease, do you?”
The question wasn’t asked seriously, but knowing Mother I was shocked at the idea. “Why, Mother, of course not. That’s a terrible question.” I was ready to go back to my room and wrestle alone with my worries.
“Sit down, Ritie. Pass me another cigarette.” For a second it looked as if she was thinking about laughing. That would really do it. If she laughed, I’d never tell her anything else. Her laughter would make it easier to accept my social isolation and human freakishness. But she wasn’t even smiling. Just slowly pulling in the smoke and holding it in puffed cheeks before blowing it out.
“Mother, something is growing on my vagina.”
There, it was out. I’d soon know whether I was to be her ex-daughter or if she’d put me in hospital for an operation.
“Where on your vagina, Marguerite?”
Uh-huh. It was bad all right. Not “Ritie” or “Maya” or “Baby.” “Marguerite.”
“On both sides. Inside.” I couldn’t add that they were fleshy skin flaps that had been growing for months down there. She’d have to pull that out of me.
“Ritie, go get me that big Webster’s and then bring me a bottle of beer.”
Suddenly, it wasn’t all that serious. I was “Ritie” again, and she just asked for beer. If it had been as awful as I anticipated, she’d have ordered Scotch and water. I took her the huge dictionary that she had bought as a birthday gift for Daddy Clidell and laid it on the bed. The weight forced a side of the mattress down and Mother twisted her bed lamp to beam down on the book.
When I returned from the kitchen and poured her beer, as she had taught Bailey and me beer should be poured, she patted the bed.
“Sit down, baby. Read this.” Her fingers guided my eyes to VULVA. I began to read. She said, “Read it out loud.”
It was all very clear and normal-sounding. She drank the beer as I read, and when I had finished she explained it in every-day terms. My relief melted the fears and they liquidly stole down my face.
Mother shot up and put her arms around me.
“There’s nothing to worry about, baby. It happens to every woman. It’s just human nature.”
It was all right then to unburden my heavy, heavy heart. I cried into the crook of my arm. “I thought maybe I was turning into a lesbian.”
Her patting of my shoulder slowed to a still and she leaned away from me.
“A lesbian? Where the hell did you get that idea?”
“Those things growing on my … vagina, and my voice is too deep and my feet are big, and I have no hips or breasts or anything. And my legs are so skinny.”
Then she did laugh. I knew immediately that she wasn’t laughing at me. Or rather that she was laughing at me, but it was something about me that pleased her. The laugh choked a little on the smoke in its way, but finally broke through cleanly. I had to give a small laugh too, although I wasn’t tickled at all. But it’s mean to watch someone enjoy something and not show your understanding of their enjoyment.
When she finished with the laughter, she laid it down a peal at a time and turned to me, wiping her eyes.
“I made arrangements, a long time ago, to have a boy and a girl. Bailey is my boy and you are my girl. The Man upstairs, He don’t make mistakes. He gave you to me to be my girl and that’s just what you are. Now, go wash your face, have a glass of milk and go back to bed.”
I did as she said but I soon discovered my new assurance wasn’t large enough to fill the gap left by my old uneasiness. It rattled around in my mind like a dime in a tin cup. I hoarded it preciously, but less than two weeks later it became totally worthless.
A classmate of mine, whose mother had rooms for herself and her daughter in a ladies’ residence, had stayed out beyond closing time. She telephoned me to ask if she could sleep at my house. Mother gave her permission, providing my friend telephoned her mother from our house.
When she arrived, I got out of bed and we went to the upstairs kitchen to make hot chocolate. In my room we shared mean gossip about our friends, giggled over boys and whined about school and the tedium of life. The unusualness of having someone sleep in my bed (I’d never slept with anyone except my grandmothers) and the frivolous laughter in the middle of the night made me forget simple courtesies. My friend had to remind me that she had nothing to sleep in. I gave her one of my gowns, and without curiosity or interest I watched her pull off her clothes. At none of the early stages of undressing was I in the least conscious of her body. And then suddenly, for the briefest eye span, I saw her breasts. I was stunned.
They were shaped like light-brown falsies in the five-and-ten-cent store, but they were real. They made all the nude paintings I had seen in museums come to life. In a word they were beautiful. A universe divided what she had from what I had. She was a woman.
My gown was too snug for her and much too long, and when she wanted to laugh at her ridiculous image I found that humor had left me without a promise to return.
Had I been older I might have thought that I was moved by both an esthetic sense of beauty and the pure emotion of envy. But those possibilities did not occur to me when I needed them. All I knew was that I had been moved by looking at a woman’s breasts. So all the calm and casual words of Mother’s explanation a few weeks earlier and the clinical terms of Noah Webster did not alter the fact that in a fundamental way there was something queer about me.
I somersaulted deeper into my snuggery of misery. After a thorough self-examination, in the light of all I had read and heard about dykes and bulldaggers, I reasoned that I had none of the obvious traits—
What I needed was a boyfriend. A boyfriend would clarify my position to the world and, even more important, to myself. A boyfriend’s acceptance of me would guide me into that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity.
Among my associates, there were no takers. Understandably the boys of my age and social group were captivated by the yellow- or light-brown-skinned girls, with hairy legs and smooth little lips, and whose hair “hung down like horses’ manes.” And even those sought-after girls were asked to “give it up or tell where it is.” They were reminded in a popular song of the times, “If you can’t smile and say yes, please don’t cry and say no.” If the pretties were expected to make the supreme sacrifice in order to “belong,” what could the unattractive female do? She who had been skimming along on life’s turning but never-changing periphery had to be ready to be a “buddy” by day and maybe by night. She was called upon to be generous only if the pretty girls were unavailable.
I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. They shield themselves with an aura of un-availableness (for which after a time they begin to take credit) largely as a defense tactic.
In my particular case, I could not hide behind the curtain of voluntary goodness. I was being crushed by two unrelenting forces: the uneasy suspicion that I might not be a normal female and my newly awakening sexual appetite.
I decided to take matters into my own hands. (An unfortunate but apt phrase.)
Up the hill from our house, and on the same side of the street, lived two handsome brothers. They were easily the most eligible young men in the neighborhood. If I was going to venture into sex, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t make my experiment with the best of the lot. I didn’t really expect to capture either brother on a permanent basis, but I thought if I could hook one temporarily I might be able to work the relationship into something more lasting.
I planned a chart for seduction with surprise as my opening ploy. One evening as I walked up the hill suffering from youth’s vague malaise (there was simply nothing to do), the brother I had chosen came walking directly into my trap.
“Hello, Marguerite.” He nearly passed me.
I put the plan into action. “Hey.” I plunged, “Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?” Things were going according to the chart. His mouth hung open like a garden gate. I had the advantage and so I pressed it.
“Take me somewhere.”
His response lacked dignity, but in fairness to him I admit that I had left him little chance to be suave.
He asked, “You mean, you’re going to give me some trim?”
I assured him that that was exactly what I was about to give him. Even as the scene was being enacted I realized the imbalance in his values. He thought I was giving him something, and the fact of the matter was that it was my intention to take something from him. His good looks and popularity had made him so inordinately conceited that they blinded him to that possibility.
We went to a furnished room occupied by one of his friends, who understood the situation immediately and got his coat and left us alone. The seductee quickly turned off the lights. I would have preferred them left on, but didn’t want to appear more aggressive than I had been already. If that was possible.
I was excited rather than nervous, and hopeful instead of frightened. I had not considered how physical an act of seduction would be. I had anticipated long soulful tongued kisses and gentle caresses. But there was no romance in the knee which forced my legs, nor in the rub of hairy skin on my chest.
Unredeemed by shared tenderness, the time was spent in laborious gropings, pullings, yankings and jerkings.
Not one word was spoken.
My partner showed that our experience had reached its climax by getting up abruptly, and my main concern was how to get home quickly. He may have sensed that he had been used, or his disinterest may have been an indication that I was less than gratifying. Neither possibility bothered me.
Outside on the street we left each other with little more than “Okay, see you around.”
Thanks to Mr. Freeman nine years before, I had had no pain of entry to endure, and because of the absence of romantic involvement neither of us felt much had happened.
At home I reviewed the failure and tried to evaluate my new position. I had had a man. I had been had. I not only didn’t enjoy it, but my normalcy was still a question.
What happened to the moonlight-on-the-prairie feeling? Was there something so wrong with me that I couldn’t share a sensation that made poets gush out rhyme after rhyme, that made Richard Arlen brave the Arctic wastes and Veronica Lake betray the entire free world?
There seemed to be no explanation for my private infirmity, but being a product (is “victim” a better word?) of the Southern Negro upbringing, I decided that I “would understand it all better by-and-by.” I went to sleep.
Three weeks later, having thought very little of the strange and strangely empty night, I found myself pregnant.
CHAPTER 36
The world had ended, and I was the only person who knew it. People walked along the streets as if the pavements hadn’t all crumbled beneath their feet. They pretended to breathe in and out while all the time I knew the air had been sucked away in a monstrous inhalation from God Himself. I alone was suffocating in the nightmare.
The little pleasure I was able to take from the fact that if I could have a baby I obviously wasn’t a lesbian was crowded into my mind’s tiniest corner by the massive pushing in of fear, guilt, and self-revulsion.
For eons, it seemed, I had accepted my plight as the hapless, put-upon victim of fate and the Furies, but this time I had to face the fact that I had brought my new catastrophe upon myself. How was I to blame the innocent man whom I had lured into making love to me? In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric. He must believe that for his ends to be served all things and people can justifiably be shifted about, or that he is the center not only of his own world but of the worlds which others inhabit. I had neither element in my personality, so I hefted the burden of pregnancy at sixteen onto my own shoulders where it belonged. Admittedly, I staggered under the weight.
I finally sent a letter to Bailey, who was at sea with the merchant marine. He wrote back, and he cautioned me against telling Mother of my condition. We both knew her to be violently opposed to abortions, and she would very likely order me to quit school. Bailey suggested that if I quit school before getting my high school diploma I’d find it nearly impossible to return.
The first three months, while I was adapting myself to the fact of pregnancy (I didn’t really link pregnancy to the possibility of my having a baby until weeks before my confinement), were a hazy period in which days seemed to lie just below the water level, never emerging fully.
Fortunately, Mother was tied up tighter than Dick’s hatband in the weave of her own life. She noticed me, as usual, out of the corner of her existence. As long as I was healthy, clothed and smiling she felt no need to focus her attention on me. As always, her major concern was to live the life given to her, and her children were expected to do the same. And to do it without too much brouhaha.
Under her loose scrutiny I grew more buxom, and my brown skin smoothed and tight-pored, like pancakes fried on an unoiled skillet. And still she didn’t suspect. Some years before, I had established a code which never varied. I didn’t lie. It was understood that I didn’t lie because I was too proud to be caught and forced to admit that I was capable of a less than Olympian action. Mother must have concluded that since I was above out-and-out lying I was also beyond deceit. She was deceived.
All my motions focalized on pretending to be that guil
Mornings, I never knew if I would have to jump off the streetcar one step ahead of the warm sea of nausea that threatened to sweep me away. On solid ground, away from the ship-motioned vehicle and the smell of hands coated with recent breakfasts, I regained my balance and waited for the next trolley.
School recovered its lost magic. For the first time since Stamps, information was exciting for itself alone. I burrowed myself into caves of facts, and found delight in the logical resolutions of mathematics.
I credit my new reactions (although I didn’t know at the time that I had learned anything from them) to the fact that during what surely must have been a critical period I was not dragged down by hopelessness. Life had a conveyor-belt quality. It went on unpursued and un-pursuing, and my only thought was to remain erect, and keep my secret along with my balance.
Midway along to delivery, Bailey came home and brought me a spun-silver bracelet from South America, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and a slew of new dirty jokes.
As my sixth month approached, Mother left San Francisco for Alaska. She was to open a night club and planned to stay three or four months until it got on its feet. Daddy Clidell was to look after me but I was more or less left on my own recognizance and under the unsteady gaze of our lady roomers.
Mother left the city amid a happy and cheerful send-off party (after all how many Negroes were in Alaska?), and I felt treacherous allowing her to go without informing her that she was soon to be a grandmother.
—
Two days after V-Day, I stood with the San Francisco Summer School class at Mission High School and received my diploma. That evening, in the bosom of the now-dear family home I uncoiled my fearful secret and in a brave gesture left a note on Daddy Clidell’s bed. It read: Dear Parents, I am sorry to bring this disgrace on the family, but I am pregnant. Marguerite.