Time moves rapidly in Mom & Me & Mom, but if one is not familiar with the move-along style ofAngelou’s oeuvre, her chronology can lack context. Having a baby while I was unmarried had not been wrong. “The baby had not been planned and I would have to rethink plans about education, but to Vivian Baxter that was life being life. Later, when Maya found herself pregnant out-of-wedlock at the age of 17, again, Baxter pushed her through it: When Angelou decided to apply for and got a conductorette job on the San Francisco streetcar lines, Vivian encouraged her. In time, she proved to be a good, conscientious mother who compensated for her previous negligence and indulgence. 38 - with gaggles of allies on either side of the law. Baxter was also a nurse, a ship fitter, a barber and a not-to-be-intimidated woman who carried a. In Arkansas they had been poor and rural children, but San Francisco was to prove almost glamorous.īaxter had remarried - this time to a man they were instructed to address as “Daddy Clidell.” The house was staffed with servants and income was plentiful from the couple’s variegated holdings in pool halls, casinos and gambling establishments. The siblings were returned to their mother in San Francisco, but the transition was not easy. She called us both over and said to Bailey …‘ou been downtown showing out? Don’t you know these white folks will kill you for poking fun of them?’” “Some neighbors saw how Bailey acted … and reported to Grandmother. “Bailey would obey the unspoken order but sometimes he would sweep his arm theatrically and loudly say, ‘Yes, sir, you are the boss, boss.’ It was a time when … a white person walked down the one paved block in town, any Negro on the street had to step aside and walk in the gutter. “When my brilliant brother Bailey was fourteen he had reached a dangerous age for a black boy in the segregated South.

Not believing she was either prepared or suited for parenthood, Baxter dispatched her California-raised children to her mother-in-law in Stamps, Ark., where they remained for a decade - until Bailey was too cocksure to continue living in the segregated South. Petite-but-decisive Baxter’s marriage to Bailey Henderson broke apart when Angelou was three and her brother, Bailey, was five. This volume is about her mother, Vivian Baxter, who, in earlier accounts, was a presence.

Now that she has completed her seventh memoir, Mom & Me & Mom, Maya Angelou has, in a way, fashioned a collage of her life - in prose.

Me &mom