This story tells about a black girl named Marguerite Johnson who lived in a broken family, divorced parents. She had a handsome brother whom she loved very much named Bailey Johnson whose age was one year older than her. Having divorced parents, she and her brother had to move from California to live with her grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, whom they called Momma, in Stamp, a little town in Arkansas.
For her, Arkansas was a strange place where there are a large number of black persons who worked as cotton picker. She lived there with her momma, Bailey, and his imperfection uncle, Willie. During his life in Arkansas, she and her brother had to help their momma in her Store, where was always crowded with the labors in the lunch time. In store, she learned many things because she found the real fact of social life among the negro.
She had to face such a difficult social condition in Arkansas since that place was dominated with many Negro labors and some white men and their white children who always teased them as negro people. She also had to realize that the bad economical and social condition around her, which there were many people who had to struggle their lives difficultly because they only earned a little money, forced her to live her life trivially. To maintain the store, momma had to decrease the price so that the people still could reach the price.
At first, she hated to live with her momma and she didn’t like her. However, day by day she lived there, she found that her momma was a great strong woman. She didn’t have any trouble or looked angry when some white children teased her. She also a caring and religious women who always sing in the church on Sunday. She was like a mom figure for her.
One day, on a Christmas, their mom sent them the Christmas presents. It drove them mad because it hurt them when they could forget their mom, she appeared again and tore their heart.
A year later their dad came to Arkansas to pick them up to their mother in St. Louis. At first, she hated to leave her momma and was scared to see her mom in St. Louis. They lived with their mom’s family until they had to move again to their mom’s own home. They lived not only with his mother but also with her boyfriend, Mr. Freeman.
Her life in the new home was fine and going well until one day, when she slept in her mom’s bedroom, her mom had to leave to work early while she was still sleeping with Mr. Freeman. Her life changed drastically on that day when he was raped by Mr. Freeman. Yet, she was not realized that she was raped, she felt like in the heaven instead. Mr. Freeman threaten her that he would kill Bailey if she told all they have done to anyone.
Several days later, when she got sick after being raped, Mr. Freeman confronted with her mom and he left home then. Finally, Bailey and her mom knew what happened when they found the stained pants under the mattress.
Analysis
This is an interesting story for me because there were many good quotations, and also the cultures and social life among the black American during that time. I want to make an analysis of the main character and about the cultures as the setting.
According to Encarta, Maya Angelou was an American writer and an advocate of the civil rights who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1928. Maya Angelou was adopted as her penname in 1953. Her actual name was Marguerite Johnson. After I read this, I’ve just realized that it was autobiographical novel. Wikipedia has the same argument that this story tells about the early years of Maya Angelou.
In this essay I just analyzed the main characters in this story, Marguerite Johnson. She was Maya Angelou itself, the ‘I’ who told the whole story. She was an innocent little girl who had to fight the difficult situation in her early childhood. She also had to face the fact that her parents had divorced, being separated with her mom and dad, and that she had been raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Marguerite was not too religious and pious Christian as her momma. In chapter 4 she told that the only reason she chose to be Christian was because she was grateful of having beloved brother like Bailey who always covered him from everyone who tried to insulted her of being ugly. However, in the later chapter he cited some parts of the bible and mention which part was her favorite.
Marguerite was an imaginative child who always compare someone to something, even to animals. She also personified or made the description of God in her own way. Everything she saw, she always think about the other thing which could be compared.
She was inconsistent since she showed different feeling, for example when she had to move from her momma’s house in Arkansas to St. Louis. At first, she hated momma, then, she found that momma was such a great woman that she learned many things from her. She said that it was difficult for her to leave her momma and had to live with her mom whom she hated, but when she moved again to her mom’s house she said the argument which contradict with the previous one, “moving from the house where the family was centered meant absolutely nothing to me. It was a small pattern in the grand design of our lives.” (Angelou, 1970, p. 68)
Besides that, Marguerite was also inconsistent with her views about how should we live in such difficult situation because when she lived with momma, she found the fact that many people suffered around her. When she lived with her mom, she got different life and she enjoyed of being lavish in the metropolitan city like St. Louis.
Another interesting things was the cultures behind it. The story was happen during the difficult situation for the black American because of the race discrimination by the whites. The black was isolated in many aspects of life. It was the reason why Marguerite said that the real ‘people’ for her were only the black people around her, not the white folks. May be the white folks like the unusual ‘things for them.
Besides that, the issues about the cultures was also exciting to me, although it was simple problem about nicknaming someone with or without Mrs. and calling the respected persons by their first name or by their last name. In that moment, it was not common for the whites calling the blacks with Mrs. or Ms. Before their names. It was shown in the last paragraph of chapter 7, “The judge had really made a gaffe calling a negro woman Mrs.” (Angelou, 1970, p. 48) or in chapter 5 “they called my uncle by his first name and ordered him around the store. He, to my crying shame, obeyed them in his limping dip-straight-dip fashion” (Angelou, 1970, p. 28) and in the end of chapter five, “how could momma call them Miz?” (Angelou, 1970, p. 32). It was such an important thing because it was related to the someone’s respectabilities.
The setting of this story was in Arkansas, the South part of the US. Based on the history that I’ve read in Encarta, America was divided into two big parts, the Sothern and Northern America. Those were so different that the Southern was the agriculture-based while the Northern was Industry-based. The Southern need the black people to be the slaves in developing the farm especially in producing cotton but the northern disagreed about the slavery until both of those parts made a war, the Civil War. However, after the war, the black still couldn’t get the equal rights with the whites. This is the reason why Arkansas was dense with the negro who worked as the labors in the cotton fields. It was very different with St. Louis, which was one of the border states, had been developed to be a metropolis city. It was very different with Arkansas which was still isolated.
Marguerite, as a little child had to encounter several different societies every time she moved to another places. It changed her personalities and how she appraised something. The way she tell the story, how she observed everything around her, and how she described someone, built her character in this story so that we could recognize what a kind of people she was. From her description and imagination of everyone around her, we also could know how the characteristics of them.
