Enthralled with San Francisco's cultural mix, she exults:
The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed.
As maturity and a boost in self-esteem work their magic, Maya nests in San Francisco's freedom, gradually turning it into home.
On a brief vacation in southern California, she envisions visiting Daddy Bailey at a "manor house surrounded by grounds and serviced by a liveried staff." The letdown of seeing his cramped trailer, where family squabbles penetrate frail inner walls, returns her from fantasy to reality. A day trip to Ensenada in Bailey's bulky Hudson plunges Maya into a Mexican milieu as poor as Stamps, yet blatantly festive in honor of her father's arrival. On first glimpse, she reports:
We pulled up in the dirt yard of a cantina where half-clothed children chased mean-looking chickens around and around. The noise of the car brought women to the door of the ramshackle building but didn't distract the single-minded activity of either the grubby kids or the scrawny fowls.
Later, in an escape from a confrontation with Bailey's mistress and from fear of retribution for the wound in her side by her fierce, relentless Baxter kin, she beds down in a wheelless, rimless "tall-bodied gray car" and spends a month in a junkyard on her own.
