Maya is self-conscious round her thickset ugliness compared to Bailey's physical beauty, which the old ladies in Momma's church ser guilt circle persistently lament in casual discourse (17). She is also conscious of being "other," although she remembers "never believing that whites were authentic tout ensembley real. . . . People were those who lived on my side of townsfolk. I didn't like them all, or, in fact, any of them very much, but they were pack. These others, the strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were whitefolks" (21). Despite this, Maya becomes conscious of a kind of self-contempt. For as unreal as whitefolks seem, in rural Stamps even the final of whites, the rural "powhitetrash" whose landlady is Momma and whose children go bulge of their way to offend Momma and are typical of the "unembarrassed and unapologetic" manner of whites talking to blacks (49). In Stamps, Maya absorbs the overt and covert lessons of 1930s sequestration in the rural American South:
She also becomes much conscious of the realities of grown-up life as she sees the relationship between her mother and Bailey deteriorate and when she spends an eye-opening summer with her return and his girl friend Dolores in their trailer in Los Angeles during what turns out to have been a low period in her forefather's life. Dolores "had all the poses of the Black bourgeoisie without the material basis to support the postures. instead of owning a manor house and servants, Daddy lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of a town that was itself the outskirts of town" (192).
A weekend excursion to Mexico transforms itself into a binge for Maya's father and a fight between Maya and Dolores, then into Maya's runaway passage to a month-long adventure among other homeless young people in a greater Los Angeles, during which Mother thinks Maya is with her father and vice versa. It is this dissociation from all familiar surroundings, in the starkest urban environment, that Maya very becomes a part of something, which is her own selfhood:
Los Angeles is as foreign as St. Louis had been, though Maya is impressed by Momma's ability to "deal with white landlords, Mexican neighbors and Negro strangers. She shopped in supermarkets larger than the town she came from" (171). When Momma returns to Stamps, Maya's mother takes her and Bailey to Oakland, and after World War II begins they move again, with Mother Dear's new husband Clidell to San Francisco. Despite the fact that Maya's mother's family is palliate of the demimonde, Maya continues to excel in school and begins to feel, though not genuinely a part of others, nevertheless a "part of the time and the city" rather than apart from everything: "The air of collective displacement, the impermanency of life in wartime and the gauche personalities of them ore recent arrivals tended to dissipate my own sense of not belonging" (179).
Maya's understanding of black-white racism becomes more coherent in this period: "Southern white i
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