Maya Angelou Essay Research Paper Finishing SchoolMaya

Maya Angelou Essay, Research Paper

Finishing School

/Maya Angelou/

Maya Angelou (b. 1928) has had careers as dancer, poet, television writer and producer, ac-tress, and writer. She has served as coordinator of the Martin Luther King Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Her books include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), from which this selection is taken, and a memoir, The Heart of a Woman (1981). The irony of the title is immediately apparent to the reader of this graphic portrait of Angelou’s racist employer.

Recently a white woman from Texas, who would quickly describe herself as a liberal, asked me about my hometown. When I told her that in Stamps my grandmother had owned the only Negro general merchandise store since the turn of the century, she exclaimed, “Why, you were a debutante.” Ridiculous and even ludicrous. But Negro girls in small Southern towns, whether pov-erty-stricken or just munching along on a few of life’s necessities, were given as extensive and ir-relevant preparations for adulthood as rich white girls shown in magazines. Admittedly the training was not the same. While white girls learned to waltz and sit gracefully with a tea cup balanced on their knees, we were lagging behind, learning the mid-Victorian values with very little money to in-dulge them . . .

We were required to embroider and I had trunkfuls of colorful dishtowels, pillowcases, runners and handkerchiefs to my credit. I mastered the art of crocheting and tatting, and there was a life-time’s supply of dainty doilies that would never be used in sacheted dresser drawers. It went with-out saying that all girls could iron and wash, but the finer touches around the home, like setting a table with real silver, baking roasts, and cooking vegetables without meat, had to be learned else-where. Usually at the source of those habits. During my tenth year, a white woman’s kitchen be-came my finishing school.

Mrs. Viola Cullinan was a plump woman who lived in a three-bedroom house somewhere be-hind the post office. She was singularly unattractive until she smiled, and then the lines around her eyes and mouth which made her look perpetually dirty disappeared, and her face looked like the mask of an impish elf. She usually rested her smile until late afternoon when her women friends dropped in and Miss Glory, the cook, served them cold drinks on the closed-in porch.

The exactness of her house was inhuman. This glass went here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion to place it anywhere else. At twelve o’clock the table was set. At 12:15 Mrs. Cullinan sat down to dinner (whether her husband had arrived or not). At 12:16 Miss Glory brought out the food.

It took me a week to learn the difference between a salad plate, a bread plate, and a dessert plate.

Mrs. Cullinan kept up the tradition of her wealthy parents. She was from Virginia. Miss Glory, who was a descendant of slaves that had worked for the Cullinans, told me her history. She had married beneath her (according to Miss Glory). Her husband’s family hadn’t had their money very long and what they had “didn’t ‘mount to much.”

As ugly as she was, I thought privately, she was lucky to get a husband above or beneath her station. But Miss Glory wouldn’t let me say a thing against her mistress. She was very patient with me, however, over the housework. She explained the dishware, silverware, and servants’ bells. The large round bowl in which soup was served wasn’t a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were gob-lets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water glasses. I had a glass to drink from, and it sat with Miss Glory’s on a separate shelf from the others. Soup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks, and carving platter were additions to my vocabulary and in fact almost represented a new language. I was fascinated with the novelty, with the fluttering Mrs. Cullinan and her Alice-in-Wonderland house.

Her husband remains, in my memory, undefined. I lumped him with all the other white men that I had ever seen and tried not to see. On our way home one evening, Miss Glory told me that Mrs. Cullinan couldn’t have children. She said that she was too delicate-boned. It was hard to imagine bones at all under those layers of fat. Miss Glory went on to say that the doctor had taken out all her lady organs. I reasoned that a pig’s organs included the lungs, heart and liver, so if Mrs. Cullinan was walking around without those essentials, it explained why she drank alcohol out of unmarked bottles. She was keeping herself embalmed.

When I spoke to Bailey about it, he agreed that I was right, but he also informed me that Mr. Cullinan had two daughters by a colored lady and that I knew them very well. He added that the girls were the spitting image of their father. I was unable to remember what he looked like, al-though I had just left him a few hours before, but I thought of the Coleman girls. They were very light-skinned and certainly didn’t look very much like their mother (no one ever mentioned Mr. Coleman).

My pity for Mrs. Cullinan preceded me the next morning like the Cheshire cat’s smile. Those girls, who could have been her daughters, were beautiful. They didn’t have to straighten their hair. Even when they were caught in the rain, the