Angelou Finds Her Innocence (Gather Together In My Name - Maya Angelou)

Member Name: jusophine

Product:	Gather Together In My Name - Maya Angelou
Date:	21/08/01 (2057 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A truthful, staggeringly honest work.

Disadvantages: You'll have to run out and buy the other volumes.

This is the second of five autobiographies by the African American writer Maya Angelou, whose best selling accounts of her life began with the work; ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’. That book told of a childhood growing up fast in the south’s St Louis, Stomps Arkansas, and the west’s, California. In this book, we catch up with the author as an independent 16 year old, striving to find her way in post second world war America, a time of new beginnings and opportunities for black people, used to white domination and segregation.

The Author
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Maya Angelou life is one that personifies the old phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction’. These days, best selling author, poet, actress, (who once appeared in ‘Roots’ amongst other things), play write, civil activist, producer and director, tours the globe lecturing. Her lifetime works are studied in universities and colleges, and ‘Doctor’ Angelou is highly respected. Yet these achievements are all the more amazing when you stop to consider the life she has led.

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, in St. Louis in 1928, ‘Rita’, as she was then called, was raised in a dysfunctional family. On her parents divorce, the young Rita was sent to live with her grandmother, whom she called ‘Momma’, along with her brother, in Stomps, Arkansas. During this time, her Momma instilled in her a rich sense of pride in herself, and strong religious beliefs. The name Maya, stems from her brother’s nickname of her ‘My’, and she later adopted this as her chosen name. During this period of her life, the little girl growing up in the heavily segregated black community, longed to be white, as she saw for herself the better life the white folk led, and dreamed of waking up with long blonde hair.

Rita also spent time going between her mother’s home in California, and her father who lived with a new part
ner on a trailer site. This led to her homelessness, living in a car scrap yard with other homeless children, before finding her way home to her mother. However, her mother’s partner, who cared for her and her brother whilst her mother was out at work, began to sexually assault Rita, and eventually raped her. The result of this was a pregnancy, and a son whom she named Claude ‘Guy’ Johnson. Rita had at first interpreted this mans advances as affection, and enjoyed his warmth. Yet when these turned to sexual advances, she was left feeling guilty at having once felt this way. These are some of the events which she describes in her first book, and lead you up to the beginning of ‘Gather Together In My Name’.


The Books Contents
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It is the end of world war II, and we find Rita as a young 16 year old, full of hope in finding a future for herself and Guy, who is still a young baby. She is living at her mother’s house, yet describes carrying a feeling of guilt for the events that led up to the arrival of her son, for refusing to go back to school, ‘giving a thought to marriage’, and ‘working at nothing’. Her mother was a kind and generous women by her accounts, yet only accepted those who pulled their own weight, and Rita’s increasing sense of ill ease eventually led to her moving on to find an independent life, all be it at the age of sixteen;


“In earlier, freer days I might have simply noted and recorded her grumpiness, but now my guilt, which I carried around like a raw egg, fed my paranoia, and I became sure that I was a nuisance. When my baby cried I rushed to change him, feed him, coddle him, to in fact shut him up. My youth and shuddering self-doubt made unfair to that vital women.”(p8).

And so Rita sets out into to an adult word, with at times a kind of blatant confidence that belongs to youth. Her early years had been ful
l of books, and she read the classics avidly. Her belief in her own ability and intelligence, seemed to give her a ‘front’ that enabled her to approach potential employers for work, despite her lack of any real experience. This belief was further flamed by the end of war and chance for greater civil rights and emancipation of the black American.

“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of the concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.”(p4).

Throughout the book, you are given a real insight into the mind of this sixteen year old girl, and you feel her naivety intensely at times. She sees herself as an intellectual, and looks down upon a white women from the telephone company who has failed her in her entrance examination, and turns her away. She walks into a job as a cook at the’ Creole Café’, claiming to have experience of cooking. Something in you fears that she will be found out, lose her job, but she actually carries it off. She finds and rents a room ‘with cooking privileges’, and gets a ‘sitter’ for her son, and at this point feels she has really made it. She meets ‘Curly’ one day in the restaurant, with whom she begins a brief affair. It is her first experience of falling in love, and like all first loves, is done in no half measures. To her he is a God, and she worships him, and despite the knowledge that he has a girl he will one day marry, she is able to lock this knowledge away in the ‘inaccessible region of the mind where one puts the memory of pain and other unpleasantries’. Of course Curley ends the affair after just two short months, leaving her heart broken, yet freely admitting that the pain of losing first love is something quite ‘l
udicrous’.

Alone again, Maya sees herself as a heroine, even enjoying the role of the jilted lover. Her brother Bailey suggests to her that she leave town and go to Los Angeles, feeling she needs a new start. Although still only sixteen, her decision to go meets no opposition from her mother, who feels she is now a woman. Inside Rita doesn’t feel like a woman, she is scared and wonders where she will live, what she will do, and who will look after Guy if she manages to find work. In a way, this is the first of many leaps of faith that she will make, throwing in her job and moving on.

More ‘career’ changes follow, and we see her go through jobs as a waitress, a dancer, a chauffeurette, a restaurant manager, and a ladies clothing seller, and even a ‘madam’. Throughout it all, Rita believes she is capable of doing what ever she needs to do to provide for her son, yet holds on to the dream of finding a good man to care for her, and whom her son will one day be able to call’ daddy’. At her lowest point, her naivety yet again leads her into another dodgy relationship, which sees her working as a prostitute to earn money to pay off her dubious boyfriend’s gambling debts before the ‘mob’ get him. ‘Lou’, who is really a pimp, takes his time courting and deceiving her into his web of lies, yet the reader can see a mile off that he is merely playing a role, that includes Rita dressing as a little girl and calling him ‘Daddy’. Yet she believes, that sleeping with men to raise some money, will all be worth it in the end when his debts are paid, and he is able to marry her and be a father to Guy. This is just one example in the book where ‘Rita’ is the last one to know what everyone else could see coming a mile off.

Through out the book, there is written proof that Rita loves Guy, yet you can’t help but feel her lack of maturity as a mother, as he
is left with one sitter after another. You feel Guy’s aguish as she describes the screaming as he is left with yet another new sitter, whether it be the ‘leathered old white women’ who her mother finds for her, ‘Mother Cleo’, or ‘Big Mary’, the large-boned, rough woman from Oaklahoma, the neighborhood’s surrogate mother, who eventually kidnaps Guy. You feel a growing concern for her child, which peaks to almost distress at his being taken by Big Mary without warning. Somehow Rita had been unable to see Guy as a little human being separate from herself, with his own emotional needs. The kidnapping incident changes this, and forces her to reconsider Guys needs;

“I had loved him and never considered that he was an entire person. Separate from my boundaries, I had not known before that he had and would have a life beyond being my son, my pretty baby, my cute doll, my charge. In the plowed farm yard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was there and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself.”(p192).

An almost unbelievable episode in the book occurs when as working as a waitress in a bar called the ‘Hi Hat Club’, she is ‘befriended’, by Beatrice and Johnie Mae, lesbians who frequent the club. Why should Rita go along with them to their house, what is her motivation? She divulges that she was once anxious about the ‘plight’ of lesbians, but at a time when she was consumed with a fear that she was herself an incipient one. Perhaps however there was still some need to understand their persuasion, yet when Rita realises that she is to be the subject of their play and sexual fun, her sympathies turn to anger;

“I hated their stupidity, but more than that I hated being underestimated. If only they knew, they could strip buck naked and do the Sassy Sue wiggle and I woul
d continue to sit, with my legs crossed, sipping the Dubonnet.”

What follows is a situation where Rita outsmarts the couple, promising to help them make money and live a better life. What she actually does, is organise their occasional prostitution into a full time business that makes not just them, but her money also. It is so successful in fact, that she is able to buy a new car, pay a local taxi driver a ‘share’ to recommend the house to men looking for fun, and never once have to undress and partake in the prostituting herself. Beatrice and Johnie Mae introduce her to ‘pot’, which she continues to use throughout the book. In some ways, the soft and hard drugs that are talked of throughout the book represent her need for escape from reality, yet eventually what she sees will cause her to drastically come to terms with the gritty reality of their use.

The whole episode of being a ‘madam’, which she describes as a time of ‘melodrama, intrigue and deceit’, comes to a sudden halt, when things back fire, and she is forced to flee San Francisco for fear that the police will find out what she has been doing and take away Guy. She returns to Stamps, Arkansas, and Grandma Henderson, whom she calls ‘Momma’. Momma had taken her on at the age of three, following her parents divorce, and had raised her in ‘Gods way’. This should have been a great home coming, back to the safety and warmth of Momma’s home, but Rita is not the girl that once lived there anymore. She sees that age and travel have made her more sophisticated than the folk that remained behind, she pities the white owner of the General Merchandise Store, for their narrow aisles and limited stock, she patronises the young white girl who serves her with niceties, after all she reasons, she could afford to be courteous, she was sophisticated. The trouble is that Stomps is still a highly segregated community between
whites and blacks, and the more tolerant attitudes of the West are something unheard of. Her haughty performances at the store, lead to confrontation with the women their, who take great offence to her thinking she is superior, and an outburst of insults from Rita, leads to great disapproval from Momma.

When Momma hears that Rita has been downtown ‘showing out’, her reaction is not to back her granddaughter, but to beat her with a barrage of backhand blows to the cheek. Why should the women that loves her so do this to her?

“You think ‘cause you’ve been to California these crazy people won’t kill you? You think them lunatic cracker boys won’t try to catch you in the road and violate you? You think because of your all-fired up principle some of the men won’t feel like putting their white sheets on and riding over here to stir up trouble?”(p93).

So here we are again, Rita and baby, fleeing once more, leaving behind a crying Momma, with no other choice but to leave and find safety. She describes her parting yet again from the south as causing her a rage over the white stupidity that would seem to dictate her movements, refusing to come to terms with the way she has been treated as a young black woman. Wanting more for herself.

More work follows, as a short order cook, yet Rita’s next idea is to try and become a recruit of the USA Army, as a means of providing her with money, food and a profession, but to do this she must lie about having a child, even undergoing gynaecological examinations in order to rule out sexually transmitted diseases. With the fear of her motherhood being found out, Rita treads a fine line of deceit, yet it is her earlier dance training at a school with connections to the Communist Party, that finally sees her being dismissed, narrowly avoiding charges of falsification.

Later in the book, we see Rita fall in love again with Lou, a gambler wh
o promises her a better life. Still desperate to find security for herself and Guy, she becomes victim to Lou’s perverse plan. He calls her his ‘Bobby Sock Girl’, and she is to call him ‘Daddy’. Again, you can see from a mile what she is walking into, but whatever naivety she has left, prevents her seeing it for herself. Rita is tall and flat chested, Lou makes her dress down as a youngster and he takes away her ‘pot’. Rita sees this as Lou’s looking out for her, yet she later gets told by Bailey, her brother, that this was merely a forerunner to getting her hooked on Cocaine, and thus dependent on Lou for money to fund her habit. Lou tells Rita he has gambling debts with the mob, and asks her if she would do the most unthinkable thing for him in order to help him financially, become a prostitute, just for a couple of months. Why shouldn’t she believe that at the end of it all, she will be rewarded love and marriage?

Lou is eventually uncovered for what he is when she visits his home needing his help(during the crisis when Guy is kidnapped), only to find that his wife answers the door. When he comes to the door himself, his true nature and cruelness are revealed to her.

Towards the end of the book, we find Rita with yet another job, this time selling clothing from her apartment, stolen clothing, but she is able to ignore this fact. Her employer is Troubadour Martin, ‘extremely tall and dangerously thin’. But unlike those who have come before, ‘Troub’ is kind and gentle, and they begin a warm and caring, yet fleeting relationship, in which Rita’s Pot habit is out of place, and scorned upon. Somehow though, Troub is reluctant to commit to her, and she feels he is keeping secrets from her, even perhaps another women. Yet the other woman in his life is no ‘lady’. When Troub takes her to a run down hotel, she fears what he will do to her. Instead, he takes
her into a room that is nothing more than a ‘hit joint’ for drug addicts, where he forces her to witness his ‘shooting up’.

The whole experience is a shocking one in which she describes his mutilated arms, scarred and infected veins, and eventual success in finding a vein in which to get a hit, followed by the external signs of the narcotic reaching his vein. Her terror turns to sadness. She sees that Troub, the one man who has really loved her, cared for her like no other, had exposed himself to her to teach her a lesson that would move her life along from the dark paths it had been riding on. It was a time to take stock of the dangerous and crazy last three crazy years.

“The life of the underworld was truly a rat race, and most of it’s inhabitants scurried like rodents in the sewers and gutters of this world. I had walked the precipice and seen it all; and at the critical moment, one man’s generosity pushed me safely away from the edge.”(p213).




Maya Angelou’s resilience, at such a young age is astounding. Yet what I like about her account of this stage of her life, is her intentions of truth and total honesty, which exist within the text. At times I found her exploits almost unbelievable, when I stopped to consider that this was part of her actual life. At other times I found myself disliking the person she was at that time. But I think that that’s all right, because she wants you to understand who she was back then, in order to understand the journey she has taken, and all that has happened in order to make her the person she is today. In all it’s a story about how the human soul, can learn and grow through what ever life has to throw at it. What do they say? ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good autobiography, that has nothing to do with a short spell of being a celeb
rity, or a means to making a celebrity more money. It may seem that I have told you too much about the book, but here is far more to it that I could have covered in this opinion. I am looking forward to popping down to the library tomorrow and seeing if they have any of the other books in her series of autobiographies, or perhaps I’ll just scoot over to Amazon and buy the lot.

The works of Maya Angelou are considered classics in the States, and are studied widely. You may feel that this relatively short book of 214 pages, has too simplistic a style to hold such merits, but it’s quality lies in its honesty, and her total refusal to candy coat the drastic, humiliating, and down right seedy, realities of her former life. Maya lay’s herself before the reader, ‘warts and all’.


‘Gather Together In My Name’ By Maya Angelou.
First Published by Virago press, 1985.
ISBN 0-86068-685-x

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