In gathering together the disparate episodes into a loosely rounded structure, Angelou initiates what Dolly A. McPherson calls “the pattern of a circuitous journey” (1990, 70). The journey in the second volume resembles a choppy tour through the coarser side of San Francisco and its surrounding communities. These wanderings are interrupted by two journeys outside the city: to Stamps, Arkansas, to visit Annie Henderson, and to Bakersfield, California, to rescue her kidnapped son from the babysitter known as Big Mary.
Plot Development
In an autobiography, plot usually provides a chronological overview of the actions relayed in the story. According to Meyer H. Abrams, a unified plot is one that has a “complete and ordered structure of actions” (1993, 160). Such a definition does not seem relevant to Gather Together, in that the actions seem unstructured and the narrative incomplete.
The plot of Gather Together is concerned with a young black woman who describes in detail the process of becoming an adult, emphasizing parenting, personal development, and survival. Survival, in Angelou’s case, is defined as her perseverance in dealing with the emotional, racial, economic, and relational aspects of her life. Her apprehensions about her son, coupled with her recurring sense of being an inadequate mother, create a special kind of tension, repeated and interconnected as the plot is relocated from one autobiography to the next.
The plot resembles a walk through the underworld, with Angelou’s salvation at the end hoped for but in no way guaranteed. She is still a girl, unfinished, like autobiography itself. In the process of becoming, the narrator, like the plot, is “open-ended and incomplete…always in process” (Olney 1980, 25).
Gather Together stands out from Angelou’s other autobiographies because it is the one in which the details of plot are centered almost exclusively in one geographical area, the city of San Francisco, California. Ironically, the concentrated locale produces the most disjointed of Angelou’s plots; she lacks the necessary power over events and now the plot is in control, squeezing her into the unpleasant situations that are her life. Without money, without support from friends, she has no place to run to, no way to propel herself into the sweeping spaces of her later volumes.
Another important plot distinction is that the second volume initiates the series. No longer does I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings stand alone as a single-volume autobiography. Unwilling to let this very successful first volume be her last word, Angelou deviates from the conventional plot by continuing her life story in a second volume. The ending of Caged Bird is no longer the “complete and ordered structure of actions” defined by Abrams. Rather, it is the catalyst for a new beginning.
Character Development
Angelou begins the story of Gather Together with a blunt, factual statement about her character: “I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young, with a son of two months, and I still lived with my mother and stepfather” (3). She is in conflict between being too old and too young, too responsible (she has a son) but too dependent (she lives at home). Maya’s character develops, as it does to some extent in all of the volumes, through this sort of opposition.
Like the fluctuating plot of Gather Together, the character of its narrator shifts and flickers. Maya is never firmly grounded, always changing jobs, lovers, perspectives. Her life is irritating, often painful. In an interview she remarked that in Gather Together she “wrote about the unpleasant, well not just unpleasant, but the certain parts of our lives that are very painful” (“Icon” 1997). Her pain and dislocation are, once again, alien to the spirit of more optimistic autobiographical accounts like Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) or Nikki Giovanni’s Gemini (1971) or Angelou’s own Caged Bird. What happened, readers wondered, to the sprightly, imaginative child who lived in Arkansas?
In 1974, when Random House published Gather Together in My Name, respected critics were disappointed with Angelou’s changed character. Selwyn R. Cudjoe claimed that while Caged Bird had a stable “moral center,” Gather Together was fragmented, therefore “weak.” He particularly objected to the sequel’s sense of “alienation and fragmentation” (1984, 17). Like Cudjoe, Lynn Z. Bloom found the second volume disappointing; she felt that Gather Together lacked the “maturity, honesty, and intuitive good judgment” of Caged Bird (1985, 5).
Yet if looked at carefully, it becomes obvious that Maya in Gather Together is not terribly different from the Maya in Caged Bird. The dance-obsessed mother of the second volume is merely an extension of the adventuresome heroine of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—not the preteen who quietly reads Shakespeare, but the wild child who deliberately gets herself pregnant and who, without knowing how to drive, steers a car down a mountainside in Mexico while her drunk father sleeps in the passenger seat. Critics have paid little attention to the summer vacation in Southern California with Bailey Sr. and his knife-swinging girlfriend, Dolores. Yet in that episode, which covers twenty-six pages of text, Angelou predicts the person she becomes in Gather Together: rebellious, risk-taking, reckless, audacious.
What is more, Cudjoe, Bloom, and other critics tend to overlook the strength of character that makes Gather Together so convincing an autobiography and Maya so captivating a narrator. Dolly McPherson argues that the fragmentation of character and plot in Gather Together in My Name is a merit rather than a flaw, since it artistically reflects the “alienated fragmented nature of Angelou’s life” (1990, 62–63). The word fragmentation is used in this context to convey a sense of incompleteness or disconnection.
Maya’s fragmentation can be observed in any number of her relationships: with her mother, with the prostitutes she tries to control, with her grandmother, with her lovers. Vivian Baxter, the absent mother of Caged Bird, is restored to importance in the second volume. Gather Together begins and ends with Maya’s mother. At the start, Maya and her child are living with Vivian and Daddy Clidell, Maya’s stepfather. When the book ends, Maya and Guy intend to return to the protection of Vivian Baxter following Angelou’s glimpse at the horrors of heroin addiction. In its promised reunion of mother, child, and grandmother, the concluding paragraph directly parallels the ending of Caged Bird: Vivian turns out the lights of her house as Maya and her baby fall asleep.
Fragmentation is also a component of her relationships with other women. In Caged Bird Maya has one girlfriend, Louise Kendricks. A lonely girl, Louise has the kind of imagination that appeals to Maya. They hold hands, close their eyes, and pretend to be dropping from the sky. Together Maya and Louise “challenge the unknown” (119). The semi-erotic description of Louise, along with Maya’s concern about being a lesbian, takes a much sharper focus in Gather Together. Here there is no sweet Louise. Maya becomes a madam and the women who work for her, Beatrice and Johnnie Mae, are lesbians and prostitutes. The relationship between Maya and her whores is fragmented, built on distrust, controlled by Maya’s desire for money.
Maya is quite aggressive in securing the services of Beatrice and Johnnie Mae. She promotes herself as a madam and persuades the lesbian couple to work as prostitutes in their own small home. Maya does well enough to buy a car and some clothes, but the arrangement disintegrates when Maya arrives late one night and finds the girls working after hours, in flagrant violation of Maya’s orders. Johnnie Mae threatens to turn Maya over to the police, where she will be jailed for owning an automobile purchased with money earned illegally.
Following the shakedown with Johnnie Mae and Beatrice, Maya gathers Guy and her suitcase, abandons her car at the train station, and goes by rail to Stamps, in search of the “protective embrace” of Momma Henderson (61). For a while she works at Momma’s store, although customers are constantly wondering why any woman who left for San Francisco would come back to Stamps. She gets drunk at the Dew Drop Inn with her high school friends. Guy is happy to receive the attention of Momma and Uncle Willie.
During her stay, Maya goes into the white area of town to purchase a Simplicity sewing pattern at the Stamps General Merchandise Store, only to find
that the pattern has to be special-ordered. The day she returns to pick it up is a hot, hot Southern day, so hot that Maya’s “thighs scudded like wet rubber” (75). At the store she gets into trouble for talking brazenly to a saleswoman who has blocked her entry. Maya realizes that she has become too racially liberated to accept the restrictions of the white community. In a parallel manner, Momma Henderson has remained fearful of white intolerance and continues to adhere to the unspoken rules concerning whites. In a memorable scene, Momma slaps her rebellious grandchild again and again, ordering her to leave Stamps for her own protection and the baby’s. It is the last moment of contact between them.
Although Maya’s outspoken attitudes lead to a termination of their relationship, her grandmother continues to be a reminder of morality and Christian values. In San Francisco one evening, Maya, working as a prostitute, notices a cook on the premises, a woman who so reminds her of Annie Henderson that she has to lower her gaze when the cook puts dinner on the table. The woman in the whorehouse represents Momma Henderson’s continuing spiritual influence and reminds the reader of how far Maya has strayed from the teachings of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church of Stamps, Arkansas.
Perhaps Maya’s major source of fragmentation comes from her relationships with men. She often misinterprets the behavior of men with whom she is infatuated. Because she becomes involved too quickly, she is “repeatedly hurt by men who are far more experienced than she, who are far more able to see her neediness and exploit it before she is able to see it in herself” (Ramsey 1984–1985, 149).
Angelou’s male companions are rarely constructive. While the adult males in Caged Bird are crippled, absent, or abusive, the men in Gather Together are manipulative, unfaithful, or damaged. Early in the second autobiography she meets Curly, who gives Maya her first “love party” (18). Overjoyed with the lovemaking, Maya senses maturity and pleasure for the first time. They take Guy to parks and playgrounds. Maya buys Curly an expensive ring on Daddy Clidell’s charge account. Then one night he tells her that his girlfriend has come back from San Diego where she had been working in a shipyard.
In her distress over losing Curly, Maya turns to her brother, who is again her defender, as he had been in Caged Bird. Bailey works for decent pay on an ammunition boat out of San Diego. Promising her two hundred dollars, he persuades her to leave San Francisco and make a new start in San Diego. Meanwhile, Bailey marries a high school chum named Eunice who, much to his despair, contracts tuberculosis and dies. Fragmented and incomplete after her death, Bailey has a breakdown and then turns to drugs to ease the emptiness.
Of the men who take advantage of Maya, L. D. Tolbrook is the worst offender. A married man, he lures Maya into becoming a prostitute for his sake. Professing that he owes money to some hardened criminals, Tolbrook convinces the “innocent” Maya to turn tricks. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whorehouse scenes is the dialogue. Maya’s coworkers are intelligent women who know the trade. Clara, Maya’s boss, advises further on how to talk and act when she’s with a man. Clara promises that if she’s good, L.D. will get her a “little white girl,” meaning cocaine. Maya is beginning to suspect, from the way the whores talk, that L.D. is really a pimp, someone who is hiring her out for his own profit. When Maya tells Bailey how she is earning a living, he is furious. Once again Maya’s savior, Bailey forces her to quit the whorehouse and orders her to warn Tolbrook that her brother Bailey is after him.
The climax of Gather Together in My Name occurs when an unexpectedly compassionate boyfriend, Troubador Martin, takes Maya, now smoking a lot of marijuana, on an unnerving tour of the underworld of heroin addiction. Troub makes her watch while he shoots up, makes her watch as the needle punctures a scab and “rich yellow pus” runs down his arm (180). Maya’s refusal, at Troub’s advice, to do hard drugs marks the end of her irresponsibility and the inauguration of new standards that help safeguard her and her son’s survival.
The end of Gather Together gives little indication that someday Maya will be a successful performer, wife, or mother. Deserted by her dancing partner, R. L. Poole, and betrayed by her pimp, L. D. Tolbrook, the best break she receives by the end of the narrative is to have narrowly escaped heroin addiction. The book closes with an experienced Maya preparing to return to her mother’s protection: “I had no idea what I was going to make of my life, but I had given a promise and found my innocence. I swore I’d never lose it again” (181).
Although the reader may feel jolted by the suddenness of the ending, this sort of high-speed projection into the future is a common element in Angelou’s conclusions. Sondra O’Neale comments on the “abrupt suspense” and drama with which the central character draws together her story: “In this way dramatic technique not only centralizes each work, it also makes the series narrative a collective whole” (1984, 33).
The Maya of Gather Together in My Name is a person of potential strength and moral integrity, perhaps even “innocence,” who is struggling against the temptations that the fast world of California is holding before her: sex, money, getting high. Through it all, the narrator is determined to present Maya as honestly as possible, in a way that readers will believe: “Young people feel safe with me,” she claims, “because they know I’m not going to lie and I won’t fudge. I’m not going to tell them everything I know, but I will try to make sure that what I say is the truth” (“Icon” 1997).
Setting
With the exception of a return visit to Stamps, the setting in Gather Together is confined to the state of California. The setting includes the various dwellings where Maya and her son are forced to live, sometimes separately; the job sites where she feels threatened or demeaned; the places that offer her temporary contentment, like Vivian’s house in San Francisco and Annie Henderson’s store in Stamps, Arkansas.
The narrative opens in a smooth and leisurely manner, at the San Francisco residence of Vivian Baxter and Daddy Clidell. When Maya leaves on her quest for independence, the setting changes swiftly: one day she works in a hospital cafeteria, the next as a cook in a Creole restaurant. She moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles, to San Diego then Stockton, and back, trying to provide for her son. Always in motion, always changing, Maya circles her surroundings as she looks for work, for love, for contentment.
The dizzy changes of setting culminate when Maya, fearing that Johnnie Mae will report her for having an illegal automobile, goes with Guy to Stamps on a desperate train ride that echoes the journey of the two children with name tags at the beginning of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the first volume, the small town in Arkansas represents a state of innocence, a place of refuge for two lonely and unwanted children. In Gather Together, Stamps cannot offer solace to Maya, whose knowledge of city life makes her challenge Momma Henderson’s unbending rule that you just don’t talk to white folks. When Maya, in violation of her grandmother’s wishes, leaves the black community of Stamps and crosses the dusty road into the white section of Stamps, she initiates a confrontation with two white saleswomen that Momma Henderson hears about even before Maya gets back to the general store. Maya’s violation of decorum results in a severe beating from Momma and a prompt return to California.
Thematic Issues
In creating an autobiography, the narrator depends on thematic issues to act as reflections on character and plot. A theme is a repeated motif that creates a pattern or design in the text. When it is skillfully handled, as it is in Gather Together, theme can enrich the plot, help organize the volume, and even determine how the plot begins and ends. Three major themes dominate Gather Together—motherhood, clothing, and work.
The theme of motherhood controls the plot of Gather Together. Maya makes decisions or forms relationships with the constant image of her son before her, as she tries to provide him with a stable environment or console herself when they are separated. Maya’s motherhood is what keeps her connected to the world of responsibility. However, she often falls short in her duties as mother, due to complications
in her work or the enticements of her male friends, who also want time with her. This situation highlights the duality Maya feels throughout the series between mothering and working.
Recall the mother/mother/son still life—Vivian, Maya, and the baby in repose—with which Angelou ended I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This tranquil scene is disrupted in Gather Together as the young mother roams the streets of San Francisco looking for a way to survive. In the second volume she inverts the motherhood theme of Caged Bird: the little girl who longed for Vivian’s love is now a mother herself, a teenage girl responsible for the nurturing of her son. Maya’s redemptive mother in Gather Together remains a character for the rest of the autobiographies, although Maya’s responsibility toward her son recedes as an issue.
With the theme of motherhood Angelou engages the reader in a mother/child configuration that is of vital concern for the remaining autobiographies. As Marianne Hirsch argues in another context, African American women writers during the past three decades are one of the few groups who tell the mother’s story and feature the mother in “complex and multiple ways” (1990, 414). In developing the theme of motherhood, Angelou applies the same quality of honesty to her role of mother as she does to her role of prostitute; in fact, the two tend to interconnect in their elements of pain, struggle, imperfection, and loss.
One of the problems any working mother faces is finding child care. Maya needs an adequate sitter to care for Guy while she is working, which means, at least in the case of being a prostitute, all-night assistance. She finds an excellent sitter in Mother Cleo, a fat woman who likes babies and even takes in white infants, although she charges more for them. Another sitter, acquired after the interlude in Stamps, is Big Mary Dalton, an affectionate woman who lives in Stockton, where Maya takes a job first as a fry cook and then as a prostitute. Big Mary arranges for Guy to live in her house, with Maya taking her son on her day off. After she meets L. D. Tolbrook, though, Maya occasionally forfeits her day off with Guy to be with her boyfriend.
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