creating scenarios: it was working from the panorama of killings Mr. Freeman had warned her about. It was the first time in her life she had even heard such words.
To watchful eyes, Marguerite seemed to be living normally. The visiting nurse pronounced her healed. Back in Grandmother Baxter’s house, she gave in to her fearful need to be silent. At no time in her later autobiographies does she describe her behavior then from any external perspective. People cajoled her to speak, to talk to them. Nobody seemed to understand that her silence was a strategy of recovery. She herself was not sure she was recovering. What she knew was that she did not want to kill anyone, not even Mr. Freeman.
According to Angelou’s narrative about the rape, the trial, and the death of Mr. Freeman, the unkindest behavior of all came from Grandmother Baxter. The day after the trial, when the immense white sheriff brought the news of Mr. Freeman’s murder to the house, Grandmother Baxter murmured through the story “Poor man.” Sympathizing with the fate that had befallen him, she kept a tight rein on her emotions, knowing well that Bailey and Ritzie could hear the conversation. After the door closed, she announced to them that they should go to their rooms, saying “You didn’t hear a thing. I never want to hear this situation or that evil man’s name mentioned in my house again. I mean that.”2
So much for working through trauma. So much for finding the words to reconstruct a story. So much for understanding that trauma was never a single debilitating act. As Marguerite lived her silent life in St. Louis, the Baxter family grew more and more upset with her behavior: they told her to be “normal.” They threatened her. Finally, their patience shredded with the town’s attention, the Baxters began physically punishing her. Angelou writes only one sentence about the various “thrashings” she is given by numerous family members. She does not elaborate further on what her life in Grandmother Baxter’s house has become.
Whether or not Annie Henderson suggested that the children come back to Stamps, or whether Grandmother Baxter thought the two were just plain difficult and not worth her attention, Bailey, Jr. and Ritzie found themselves on a train headed to Arkansas. This time they were less fearful, though Bailey cried surreptitiously for the loss of his beloved “Mother Dear.” They were generally pleased to be returning to what now seemed an entirely safe place – both geographically and emotionally – and a useful harbor for their lives as they grew through elementary and middle school. As it all turned out, they would not leave Stamps again until Marguerite had graduated from the eighth grade.
Notes
1 1 Angelou, Collected Autobiographies, p. 70.
2 2 Angelou, Collected Autobiographies, p. 70.
3 Recovery in Arkansas
Being silent in Stamps was nobody’s business. Momma saw to it that whatever Ritzie did was acceptable. The girl spoke occasionally through Bailey; she sometimes sang in church; she “taught” her friends new songs she had written through Bailey’s helping them; she found ways to communicate non-verbally. But by and large Ritzie was a different child than she had been the year before.
She remained dutiful. She slept each night with Momma. Then she got up and ate breakfast. She dressed neatly. Then, with Bailey, she walked up the path to school. For the first time, she and Bailey were in the same room, since one teacher taught three grades simultaneously. The rivalry that had always bound the brother and sister still existed, but Ritzie was surprised how often she could beat her brother.
People came by the store to see the “travelers.” They asked about paved streets, elevators, and the tall buildings in St. Louis. Bailey told stories about indoor toilets, Frigidaires, and snow ice cream. Annie Henderson’s “California grandchildren” had become relatively famous during the year of their absence. With Bailey holding court as he often did, the fact that Ritzie seldom said anything bothered nobody. Some people may have thought she was just having a disappointing year after the high life she had learned to know in St. Louis.
Marguerite was more Annie Henderson’s shadow than she had ever been. While Bailey hung out after school, she came directly home and tried to help Momma. Frying apples became her regular kitchen chore. So too were slicing and frying the cornmeal mush – a quick breakfast when people woke late; it could be eaten cold. She became adept at doing dishes and organizing the small kitchen. She learned to bake sugar cookies that were crispier than Momma’s: they became Uncle Willie’s favorites. When Annie found an issue of the local paper, she and Ritzie would read through the recipe section together. (Annie subscribed only to the Chicago Defender, for its African American news. It had few household pages.) One of the recipes they found together was for mincemeat. Ritzie begged Momma that they try it, but Annie was not enthusiastic: the two pounds of roast beef would be dear, and the pint of brandy (something she did not allow in either her store or her home) would be out of the question. She gave in when her granddaughter explained that the cider would substitute for the brandy. She did have plenty of cider, apples, currants, suet, sweet potatoes, and spices. So they made a plan and invited some of the quilting friends over – one brought peach juice, another pulverized cherries, a third nutmeg. The “boil” seemed successful. A day after the ingredients had been cooked, they divided the spicy mincemeat and got out their rolling pins to make the pie crusts for the baking that would ensue. It was a memorable day in Stamps.
Annie didn’t cotton to the mincemeat idea because she was already well known for both her pineapple upside-down cake and her holiday fruitcakes, almost black with their rich stuffing of fruit in the base of pineapple juice. Of all the grocery treats that Marguerite and Bailey craved, it was pineapple: Angelou later wrote about the way she could make one slice of the fruit last all afternoon as she ate it shred by shred.
Much as Ritzie liked being included in the women’s activities, even the sewing and tatting, it was clear to everyone that she would rather read than play. She systematically brought home every book housed on the school library shelves. Some she had read before. Others had never seemed interesting, but now she devoured whatever the shelves provided. She found W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks that way. She found a collection of Shakespeare’s history plays that were not written down for younger readers. She found Poems by Negroes. She read over and over a smallish collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She found a tattered book of American Poems and learned to love the quatrains of Emily Dickinson. (In her mind she called Dickinson’s poems “miniatures.”) She found scraps of paper and shiny envelopes that she wrote lines of her poems on, as if to inscribe them for future reading. Every night she read from the Bible. Later, she read that good book straight through, from Genesis through Revelations. And still later, she repeated that endeavor.
When she wasn’t in the kitchen or finding a place to read – inside or out – Ritzie stayed in the store. She loved being there, and she loved it even more since having been away in St. Louis. In a later interview, she still expressed the magic that it seemed to create:
It was a glorious place. I remember the wonderful smells; the aroma of the pickle barrel, the bulging sacks of corn, the luscious, ripe fruit. You could pick up a can of snuff from North Carolina, a box of matches from Ohio, a yard of ribbon from New York. All of those places seemed terribly exotic to me.
She would still 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
