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by Maya Angelou SHE stood before me, a dolled-up, pretty yellow woman, seven inches shorter than my six-foot bony frame. Her eyes were soft and her voice was brittle. "You're determined to leave? Your mind's made up?" I was seventeen and burning with passionate rebelliousness. I was also her daughter, so whatever independent spirit I had inherited had been nurtured by living with her and observing her for the past four years. "You're leaving my house?" I collected myself inside myself and answered, "Yes. Yes, I've found a room." "And you're taking the baby?" "Yes." She gave me a smile, half proud and half pitying. "All right, you're a woman. You don't have a husband, but you've got a three-month-old baby. I just want you to remember one thing. From the moment you leave this house, don't let anybody raise you. Every time you get into a relationship you will have to make concessions, compromises, and there's nothing wrong with that. But keep in mind Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas and I have given you every law you need to live by. Follow what's right. You've been raised." More than forty years have passed since Vivian Baxter liberated me and handed me over to life. During those years I have loved and lost, I have raised my son, set up a few households and walked away from many. I have taken life as my mother gave it to me on that strange graduation day all those decades ago. In the intervening time when I have extended myself beyond my reach and come toppling Humpty-Dumpty-down on my face in full view of a scornful world, I have returned to my mother to be liberated by her one more time. To be reminded by her that although I had to compromise with life, even life had no right to beat me to the ground, to batter my teeth down my throat, to make me knuckle down and call it Uncle. My mother raised me, and then freed me. And now, after so many eventful years of trials, successes and failures, my attention is drawn to a bedroom adjoining mine where my once feisty mother lies hooked by pale blue wires to an oxygen tank fighting cancer for her life. I think of Vivian Baxter, and I remember Frederick Douglass's mother, enslaved on a plantation eleven miles from her infant son, yet who, after toiling a full day, would walk the distance to look at her child hoping that he would sense a mother's love, then return to the plantation in time to begin another day of labor. She believed that a mother's love brought freedom. Many African Americans know that the most moving song created during the centuries of slavery was and remains, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." As a mother and a daughter myself, I have chosen certain songs and poems to take to my mother's room and there we will laugh and cry together. I pray I shall have the courage to liberate my mother when the time comes. She would expect that from me. Later, I was put to the test because my mother did die. I tried to let her go gracefully but I was found wanting. Then James Baldwin's mother, who had taken me in as a daughter years earlier, came to my rescue. She telephoned, "Maya, this is Mother Baldwin. I heard that your mother passed. I was very sorry to hear that and I know no one can step into her shoes. However, let me tell you this--your birth mother is gone, but you still have a mother. I am, and will always be, your Mother Baldwin." She was and she will always be.
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