This is the second volume in Angelou‘s series of six autobiographies. The novel begins three years after I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings capturing the period within her 17th to 19th birthday. Angelou is not afraid to bare her soul and admit to bad judgment;
she takes us through sometimes devastating consequences and the challenges faced by seventeen year old mother. The period is chronologically covered through different episodes, journeys from job to job, relationships with men coloured by her romantic
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fantasy and occasional brush with trouble in the process of self-discovery. The story of Maya‘s teenage struggle coincides with the years following the World War 2. She takes her first job as a cook at a San Francisco Creole restaurant. Between the steamy page and fragrant menu at the restaurant she opens up to relationships with men. She comes in contact with drug users, gamblers, con artists, pimps, and prostitutes. While living in San Diego becomes an ―absentee manager‖ for two lesbian prostitutes, when threatened with incarceration and losing her son for her illegal activities, she escapes to her grandmother‘s home in Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, she confronts two white women in a department store and her grandmother sends her back to San Francisco out of fear for her safety. Back with her mother, Angelou attempts to enlist in the Army only to be rejected during the height of the Red Scare because she had attended the California Labor School. Later, she falls in love with Tolbrook who seduces her and introduces her to a life of prostitution which he justifies as appropriate. Her mother‘s hospitalization makes her leave her young son in the hands of a caretaker, Big Mary who disappears with her son, Guy. Angelou is overwhelmed by the emotion of losing her baby and she finally traces him and reunites with her son, she understands the uniqueness of their bond better.
As the novel ends, her encounter with a drug addict helps her realise the effect of substance drug addiction and the need to make something out of her life for both herself and her son.
Angelou‘s second novel Gather Together in my Name centers on her life and her brother‘s move away from their grand-mother. This transition takes place from her later teen years through her mid-twenties, focusing on her experiences as mother, creole cook, a madam, a tap dancer, a prostitute and a chauffeur. As Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu (2006:13) puts it ―Gather Together in my Name deals with the disparity between fantasy and reality in amatory relationships‖. Maya‘s human environment is littered with troubled males: drug users, pimps, pushers, gamblers, and the despondent, the latter category being one that includes her brother. While she acknowledges the dehumanizing pressures on many of these men, she finds her relative naiveté, loyalty, and straight forwardness abused by those who profess to care for her. Her body becomes a tool for the furthering of their personal and professional goals, an often sexist breach of trust that requires healing and much positive support from her mother as well as a cluster of female friends.
The novel opens with the euphoric feeling of a post war Black American community:
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Black men from the South who had held no tools more complicated than plows had learned to use lathes and borers and welding guns, and had brought in their quotas of war-making machines. Women who had only known maid‘s uniform‘s and mammy-made dresses donned the awkward men‘s pants and steel helmets, and made the ship-fitting sheds hum some buddy. Even the children had collected paper, and at the advice of elders who remembered World War 1, balled the tin foil from cigarettes and chewing gum into balls as big as your head.
Oh, it was a time.... And at last it had paid off in spades.
We had won. Pimps got out of their polished cars and walked the streets of San Francisco only a little uneasy at the unusual exercise. Gamblers, ignoring their sensitive fingers, shook hands with shoe shine boys. Pulpits rang with the ―I told you so‖ of ministers who knew that God was on the side of right and He would not see the righteous forsaken, nor their young beg bread. Beauticians spoke to the shipyard workers, who in turn spoke to the easy ladies.
And everybody had soft little preparation-to-smile smiles on their faces. I thought if war did not include killing, I‘d like to see one every year. Something like a festival. (3-4).
Even with the excitement of after war, the milieu of the post-World War 11 was fraught with evil. Maya ends up living along the periphery of the society dinning with kings and queens of the underworld. It is an environment where the need to support herself and her son leads her to some quick and easy choices.
It appears that between the conclusion of Caged Bird and the beginning of Gather Together in My Name, there is virtually no break in the narrative. As the first ends with the birth of her son, the second starts when Guy is only a few months old. The novel tells the story of his first three years and focuses on a young single mother‘s struggle to achieve respect, love, and a sense of self-worth. Her battle to win financial independence and the devotion of a faithful man could hardly have been easy in the years immediately following World War 11, when racial discrimination and unemployment were all on the rise. In spite of her initial optimism, which is incidentally, shared by many members of the post-war black community who fervently believed that:
There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn‘t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of 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. (4).
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Angelou soon realizes that her dreams for a better America are still too fragile to survive the stark realities of black life after the war, her narrative captures the desolate environment recovering from the aftermath of war-torn America:
Those military heroes of a few months earlier, who were discharged from the Army in the city which knows how, began to be seen hanging on the ghetto corners like forgotten laundry left on a backyard fence. Their once starched khaki uniforms were gradually bastardized.
An ETO jacket, plus medals, minus stripes, was worn with out-of-fashion zoot pants. The trim army pants, creases trained in symmetry, were topped by loud, color-crazed Hawaiian shirts. The shoes remained. Only the shoes. The Army had made those shoes to last. And dammit, they did.
Thus we lived through a major war. The question in the ghettos was, Can we make it through a minor peace? (5).
While the dream for a better society still falters, Angelou challenges the burden of guilt that rests on the shoulders of the seventeen year old mother who desperately believes that she must assume full adult responsibility:
I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young, with a son of two months, and I still lived with my mother and step-father. They offered me a chance to leave my baby with them and return to school. I refused. First, I reasoned with the righteous seriousness of youth, I was not Daddy Clidell Jackson‘s blood daughter and my child was his grandchild only as long as the union between Daddy and Mother held fast, and by then I had seen many weak links in their chain of marriage. Second, I considered that although I was Mother‘s child, she had left me with others until I was thirteen and why should she feel more responsibility for my child than she had felt for her own. Those were the pieces that made up the skin of my refusal, but the core was more painful, more solid, truer. A textured guilt was my familiar, my bed mate to whom I had turned my back. My daily companion whose hand I would not hold. The Christian teaching dinned into my ears in the small town in Arkansas would not be quieted by the big-city noise. My son had no father – so what did that make me?
According to the Book, bastards were not to be allowed into the congregation of the righteous. There it was. I would get a job, and a room of my own, and take my beautiful son out into the world. (5-6).
Armed with this disposition, Maya moves from home, going from city to city in search of a job and an atmosphere conducive to raise her young son in a society just recovering from the war.
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The novel‘s narrator attempts an episodic series of adventures whose fragments are reflections of the kind of chaos found in actual living. By altering the narrative structure, Mary Jane Lupton (1999:130) argues that Angelou:
Shifts the emphasis from herself as an isolated consciousness to herself as a black woman participating in diverse experiences among diverse class of peoples. As the world of experience widens, so does the canvas.
However, Angelou maintains a hopeful outlook and a determination to support and protect herself and her infant son from the insecurities she faced as a child. She understands that the hurdles she has to cross on her road to success are often higher than those set by her own expectations and standards of performance. Although she spends the first few years of her son‘s life in California, she often faces racial discrimination reminiscent of her childhood experiences in the South. At one point in the novel, when she suspects that her striving business as a madam of two prostitute house will soon be uncovered by the Police, Angelou returns to Stamps with her son.
Not long after her arrival, she comes face to face with the double standards of racial discrimination during an unpleasant confrontation with a salesclerk in the white-owned general merchandise store. Although she attempts to explain to her grandmother why she refused to accept the clerk‘s humiliating insults, Momma warns her that her
―principles‖ are all too flimsy a protection against the unrestrained contempt of bigotry:
―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 principle some of the men won‘t feel like putting their white sheets on and
riding over here to stir up trouble? You do, you‘re wrong.
Ain‘t nothing to protect you and us except the good Lord and some miles. I packed you and the baby‘s things, and Brother Wilson is coming to drive you to Louisville. (93).
Momma slaps Maya for verbally assaulting two white saleswomen in a clash that is both painful and final. While Maya argues for ―the principle of the thing‖, Momma‘s slap is well intended as she seeks to protect Maya from ―lunatic cracker boys‖. The ―new‖
Maya, who has been to the city and found a sense of independence is caught in the clash between her recently acquired ―principles‖ and Momma‘s fixed ideology. Thus the slap – and the intention behind it – will remain in Maya‘s memory long after Angelou has been separated from Annie Henderson‘s supervision.
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Although Angelou‘s narrative demands respect for the working mother, the extended family, and for other mothers, Siphokazi Koyana (2009:72) observes that
―Maya‘s struggle demonstrates the tensions inherent in belonging to a group that values these notions of family, while living in a larger society that devalues them‖. This tension is evident in Maya‘s feelings of rejection in childhood to her frustrations when faced with the responsibility of raising Guy. While pursuing self-fulfilling career ambitions and living her own life often means relying on kin to help care for Guy, in the mid-twentieth century in America, the ethical ideological norm seems to be that good mothers are unselfish, meaning they put their children‘s needs before their own. By following in the footsteps of other black mothers through determination to protect and provide for her son against all odds, Maya testifies her allegiance to the larger cultural expectations that a mother stays with her child at all times. The novel appears to project the psychological split Angelou experiences from the cultural dichotomy. Firstly, she literally follows a pattern of departure from home and return to family. These cyclical movements illustrate the place of journey as a controlling metaphor in black American autobiography. At a personal level, it reflects Maya‘s quest for self-knowledge, a move from disorder, misunderstanding, chaos towards order and reconciliation. Returning and leaving provides the enabling environment to make peace with the past and evolve a self-identity.
Secondly, Koyana (2009:73) offers that ―Angelou presents her double-consciousness, her oscillation between her intrinsic Afro-American and her imposed Euro-American cultural identities, in literary terms, by contrasting reality with fantasy‖. This juxtaposition is most evident in her portrayal of differences between her experience of marriage and its idealization in the larger American culture.
The most dramatic mother-child episode in the novel occurs while Maya is working as a prostitute. She leaves Guy with her baby sitter, Big Mary. Returning for him after several days, she learns that her son has been kidnapped. Angelou finally recovers her child unharmed; at that moment she realizes that they are both separate individuals.
With the emotional reunion with her son, she writes:
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 farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself. (192).
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Angelou‘s awareness of the inevitable separation of mother and child, expressed here for the first time, is a theme that she will continue to explore throughout the remaining autobiographical volumes.
While Maya is indeed in the process of developing an independent personality, she is nevertheless is obsessed by her yearning for ―a man, any man, to give me a June Allyson screen-role life with sunken living room, and cashmere-sweater sets, and I, for one, obviously would have done anything to get that life.‖ The second volume of Angelou‘s autobiography ends just before she decides to settle down with a man she pictures as an ―ideal husband‖, who is in fact a heroin addict and gambler. She learns on time and regains her innocence through the lessons a compassionate drug addict:
He had exposed himself to me to teach me a lesson and I learned it as I sat in the dark car inhaling the odors of the wharf. The life of the underworld was truly a rat race, and most of its inhabitants scurried like rodents in the sewers and gutters of the 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.... I had given a promise and promise and found my innocence. I swore I‘d never lose it again. (213-214).
Angelou identifies the discrepancy between her fantasy of marriage and the actual experience, noting that despite the social propaganda, marriage fails to bring normality and stability to her life.
Basically, Angelou‘s unique probing of the interior self, her distinctive use of humor and self-mockery, her linguistic sensibility, as well as her ability to balance the quest for human individuality with the general condition of black Americans distinguish her as a master of the genre. Siphokazi Koyana (2009:67) observes that Angelou uses her
―maturing understanding of family and community to project an individual‘s attempt to forge and maintain a healthy sense of self within a group that is undergoing a cultural transition‖. Relying on her experience of black culture, wherein self-reliance and motherhood are integrate, Maya rejects the option of seeking government assistance, a decision which leads to work situations that highlight how racist capitalism drives black women into poverty that is not only financial but at times also moral. Maya‘s work experiences show how the lack of skills and the racist practice of excluding blacks from meaningful employment are the real culprits for despair and drug abuse, and not just working outside the home. A clear example of the exclusion of black mothers from
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constructive economic engagement arises when a white personnel supervisor fails Maya in a simple test that would qualify her to be a trainee operator. Consequently, she ends up as the bus girl who must wait on white girls who had been.
The novel shows how an individual can be involved in many experiences and still be severely limited. Angelou as quoted in James Robert Saunders (2009:7) explains the choice of her second autobiography‘s title:
Gather Together in my Name, though it does have a biblical origin, comes from the fact I saw so many adults lying to so many young people, lying in their teeth, saying,
‗You know, when I was young, I never would have done....
Why I couldn‘t.... I shouldn‘t.... Young people know when you‘re lying; so I thought for all those parents and non- parents alike who have lied about their past, I will tell it.
And tell it she does. Recapitulating events that took place over a three-year period leading up to her nineteenth birthday, Angelou portrays what it was like having to scratch for every penny, holding jobs such as short – order cook, nightclub waitress and dancer, prostitute, and madam in charge of her own house of prostitution. We watch aghast as Angelou takes her first great slide down into the slimy world, volunteering to be a prostitute for a married man, Louis Tolbrook, who is old enough to be her father.
Tolbrook is involved in organized crime, owes money to the mob, and in desperation, helps Maya reach this rationalization:
―L.D., if a woman loves a man, there is nothing too precious for her to sacrifice and nothing too much for him to ask.‖ I had to make him know that I was as capable of doing him a favour as his aging wife. He said nothing. ―Love is blind and hides a multitude of faults. I know what you‘re talking about, and prostitution is like beauty. It is in the eye of the beholder. There are married women who are more whorish than a street prostitute because they have sold their bodies for marriage licenses, and there are some women who sleep with men for money who have great integrity because they are doing it for a purpose‖. (159-160).
In a different context from Maya‘s situation, the above statement would have been examined in the light of its feminist merit, but we detect Tolbrook‘s manipulation and at the same sort of desperation that earlier had led to her teenage pregnancy.
Angelou‘s autobiographies seem to fit the requirements of Alison Easton (2000:175) paradigm of counter-memory: