In the summer of 1943 a fifteen year-old girl named Maya Angelou sat reading the want ads of a San Francisco newspaper. A full year ahead in school, she had no interest in biding her time, so she decided to take a few months off to get some work experience.
She'd taken to San Francisco almost immediately when she'd moved from Arkansas a few years earlier, marveling at the cultural diversity and natural beauty of the place even as she registered its racial inequities and social fault lines.
Parsing the want ads that day, a vision of herself standing at the back of a streetcar, riding around her adopted city, struck her like “a collision.”
A streetcar had already played a part in her story out West. When she was living in Los Angeles with her father, she once ran away from home after an ugly argument with her stepmother. She found refuge in an abandoned streetcar. The month she spent living in the streetcar was profoundly displacing, but it taught her how to curse, drive, and dance.
Back in the Bay Area and all of fifteen, Angelou thrilled at possibility of working as a “conductorette”-- the freedom and flexibility of it, but also the power it promised. In San Francisco, streetcar lines latticed the city, connecting all the neighborhoods to one another. A streetcar would take her far beyond the confines of her neighborhood.
Every day for weeks she showed up at the streetcar offices near the Embarcadero. She was Black, she was female, and she was young. Again and again she was turned away. Again and again she returned.
Eventually the supervisor came out of his office and asked her why she wanted to work on the streetcars. She gave two reasons (in this order): (1) she loved their serge-blue tailored uniforms and (2) she loved people.
Whether she wore him down with her tenacity, charmed him with her gumption, or both, the job was hers.
On her first day, Angelou’s mother drove her down to the streetcar barn, out by the beach. She then followed the streetcar in the family car the entire length of the route so that Maya would feel safe. Angelou later reminisced of this time:
“My mother drove me to work as long as I kept the job, which was a few months. And she'd drive right behind the streetcar until daylight. And at daylight, she'd honk her horn and blow me a kiss.”
Dressed in a jacket and slacks, with a coin belt strapped around her waist and her mother following along behind her, Maya Angelou sailed up and down the hills of San Francisco, collecting fares and keeping customers in line.
She worked as a "conductorette" for five months, eventually returning to George Washington High School, in Richmond, to graduate. Still, she'd never forget her time working on the streetcars.
“For one whole semester the streetcars and I shimmied up and scooted down the sheer hills of San Francisco," Angelou would write in her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "I clanged and cleared my way down Market Street, with its honky-tonk homes for homeless sailors, past the quiet retreat of Golden Gate Park and along closed undwelled-in-looking dwellings of the Sunset District.”
