The variety of locales emphasizes Maya's ability to thrive, whether in the rural, Depression-era South, St. Louis, San Francisco, southern California, or Mexico.
Thrust into the threadbare black ghetto of Stamps in 1931, she empathizes with the black substrata, where laborers, fearful of intrusive whites and clinging to Bible-based promises, struggle for survival wages:
Brought back to the Store, the pickers would step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground. No matter how much they had picked, it wasn't enough.
In St. Louis, far from Stamps' backwardness and religiosity, young Maya, bombarded by a titillating, racy newness, studies the contrasts:
The Negro section of St. Louis in the mid-thirties had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law.
The change, which lasts only a year, ends abruptly. One day — without explanation — the traumatized eight-year-old Maya and her brother Bailey are on the train going back to Stamps, where the "barrenness was exactly what I wanted, without will or consciousness."
After achieving partial reprieve from the guilt of Mr. Freeman's death, Maya, threatened by violence, as depicted in Bailey's bug-eyed viewing of a bloated corpse pulled from a pond and lodged in the local jail, is taken to California by Momma, moved from Los Angeles to Oakland and finally to San Francisco's Fillmore district.
