Marguerite “Maya” Johnson
The narrator, followed from age three to seventeen — the future Maya Angelou, called Ritie by her family and Maya by her brother.
To be taken seriously as herself rather than as somebody’s grandchild or somebody’s sister, and to have a voice she is not frightened of using.
The book
At a glance
- Marguerite Johnson; called Ritie at home
- Bailey refused to call her Marguerite and said “Mya Sister,” shortened to “My,” then elaborated to “Maya”
- Three
- Stamps, Arkansas, then St. Louis, then Stamps again, then San Francisco
- The first Black conductor on the San Francisco streetcars, at fifteen
- Seventeen
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMarguerite Johnson is Maya Angelou’s own younger self, and the book is Angelou’s account of the years between three and seventeen. Marguerite and her brother, Bailey Johnson Jr., arrive in Stamps, Arkansas, with tags on their arms, sent alone by train from Long Beach, California, in the care of a porter who got off in Arizona. Their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, takes them in. They grow up behind the only Black general merchandise store in town, sweeping the dirt yard, waiting on cotton pickers, and learning the times tables under Uncle Willie’s hand by the stove.
Angelou draws the child as she remembers feeling rather than as a photograph would have caught her. Beside a brother praised for velvet-black skin and black curls, she is big, elbowy and grating, and the other children call her shit color. The book opens on an Easter morning in church, in a lavender taffeta dress that rustles every time she breathes, with the child certain that she is really white underneath — long blond hair, light-blue eyes — and has been turned into a too-big Negro girl by a jealous fairy stepmother. She forgets her verse, wets herself and runs home.
Reading is the constant. She reads Jane Eyre behind the store on the night a storm is forecast while Bailey reads Mark Twain by the stove, and in St. Louis she takes out a library card and spends her Saturdays with it.
The St. Louis year breaks the pattern. Marguerite is eight when her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, rapes her. She testifies, and in court denies that he had touched her before, which was untrue. Days later he is found dead. She decides that her words can kill and stops speaking to anyone but Bailey for nearly a year, back in Stamps, where the town reads her silence as a tender-hearted child pining for the city.
The family moves to California during the war. At fifteen she decides to work the San Francisco streetcars, is told that they do not hire colored people, and goes back to the Market Street Railway office day after day with the regularity of someone already on salary. The book ends in San Francisco when she is seventeen. The six later volumes of the autobiography take up the rest.
How the book draws them
- How she saw herselfBig, elbowy and grating next to a brother she describes as small, graceful and smooth. Playmates called her shit color while he was praised for velvet-black skin, and she describes her own hair as black steel wool. The complaint does not go away with childhood: at sixteen she is still trying to hold her voice up in the register she pitches it at, buying shoes from the old lady’s comfort section, and cataloguing the hips and breasts she does not have.
- The Easter dressThe prologue puts her in a lavender taffeta dress that rustled each time she breathed. She cannot get through her verse, and daydreams instead about waking out of what she calls her black ugly dream with long blond hair and light-blue eyes. She has already worked out how she got this way: a cruel fairy stepmother, jealous of her beauty, turned her into a too-big Negro girl. Then she runs out of the church, wetting herself, and laughs anyway for the relief of it.
- The times tables by the stoveUncle Willie sat the two children in front of the red heater and had them recite. A second mistake or a third hesitation and his good hand took the offender by the collar and swung them toward the stove. They were never burned. Once she tried to jump onto it deliberately, on the theory that facing the worst danger and surviving it would give her power over it, and he held her back by the dress.
- The StoreHer chores were the store’s chores. She raked the dirt yard into half-moon patterns with a big-toothed comb of a rake and was pleased when it looked like a flat redhead. She waited on the cotton pickers who came back at dusk owing more than they had earned, and she stole enough from the candy counter to rot two teeth to the gums.
- SilenceAfter the trial in St. Louis she spoke only to Bailey, for nearly a year. She says she believed her breath carrying her words out might poison people. In Stamps the adults put the muteness down to a reluctant return south and to her being well known as tender-hearted. Annie Henderson and Uncle Willie did not accept the explanation.
- BooksShe respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, saved her loyalty for Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and Du Bois, and fell in love with Shakespeare, whom she called her first white love and excused on the grounds that he had been dead too long for it to matter. She read Jane Eyre behind the store, took out a first library card in St. Louis, and learned from Bertha Flowers that a page is not finished until a voice has been through it.
- The Market Street RailwayAt fifteen she picked the streetcars because she liked the idea of a dark-blue uniform and a money changer at her belt. The receptionist told her the company took applicants only from agencies. She kept coming back, she says, as often as a person drawing a salary, and eventually sat blood tests, aptitude tests, physical coordination tests and Rorschachs before she was hired.
- The dentist’s back doorTwo rotten teeth took her, with her grandmother, to the back door of the only dentist in Stamps, who was white and owed Annie Henderson money. Waiting there, in pain, she notes how unfair it is to carry a toothache, a headache and the weight of being Black at the same time.
Marguerite “Maya” Johnson quotes
If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
She was one of the few gentlewomen I have ever known, and has remained throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be.
She is sixteen when she gets pregnant, and hides it for eight months and one week while finishing school. She leaves a note on her stepfather’s bed the evening she collects her summer-school diploma. Vivian Baxter, told her daughter is three weeks along, says indignantly that she is more than any three weeks, and the household goes shopping for maternity dresses.
The book ends at night, with her mother turning on the light and telling her twice to look at the baby. Her fear is strong enough that she cannot make herself look at the center of the bed. When she does, she finds she is lying on her stomach with her arm bent at a right angle, and the child asleep against her side under the tent of blanket her elbow is holding up.