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Maya Angelou recalls the excitement and frustration of her graduation from Lafayette County Training School. Maya and Bailey were notably intelligent children who were encouraged to read even though Annie distrusted books that weren’t the Bible. Annie Henderson is an archetype of those noble, barely educated black women who inspired their children with a faith in themselves against the severest odds. Angelou’s portrait of her grandmother is the finest thing in this fine memoir. Maya survived, though, thanks to the care of Momma, to whom she and Bailey were returned soon after the dreadful event. In the five years following her rape, Maya spoke to no one except her beloved brother, and that only on rare occasions. Hours later, he was found kicked to death on a lot behind a slaughterhouse. A crafty lawyer contrived to get him released on the afternoon of his sentence. When she came to, he was standing over her, renewing his threat with more conviction than ever.įreeman was put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to a year and a day. Then, one ghastly day, Mr Freeman raped her. The child enjoyed being held, although she was mystified by his threat that he would kill Bailey if she told anyone what they had been doing. Freeman started cuddling the eight-year-old Maya on these occasions, masturbating himself as he did so. He was often at home when Mother was out at nights, working in clubs and gambling houses. Mrs Johnson had a boyfriend, Mr Freeman, a foreman in the Southern Pacific yards. In the mid-30s, Maya and Bailey went to live with their mother in St Louis. “Annie,” he told her, “my policy is I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s.” The persistent Annie forced Mr Lincoln to pay her $10 – the interest she had not intended to charge him – with which money she paid the bus fare to the nearest black dentist, several miles away. Mr Lincoln refused to extract Maya’s two aching teeth. Their paternal grandmother, Annie, ran the local store, and as a consequence was shown a mite more respect by the white community than were her fellow blacks.Īnd hardly more than a mite it was, as Sister Henderson discovered when she took her suffering granddaughter to the town’s sole dentist, to whom she had loaned money. Marguerite and Bailey – who gave his sister the nickname Maya (“mine”) – spent their formative years in Stamps, a small town regularly visited by the Ku Klux Klan. The porter who was entrusted to look after them got off in Arizona, after pinning the children’s tickets to Bailey’s inside coat pocket. Marguerite and her brother, Bailey, were put on a train at Long Beach, California, with name-tags on their wrists which said they were en route to Stamps, Arkansas, where they would be collected by Mrs Annie Henderson. When she was three, her parents separated. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928.