Queen of Poetry and Wisdom...

MAYA ANGELOU [1928 - ]

“ON A CRISP WINTER DAY in January 1993, Maya Angelou-actress, dancer, teacher, poet--made HISTORY. In reciting her touching poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” at the request of President Bill Clinton, Maya became the second poet in this century to read a verse at a presidential inaugural. Not since 1961, when John F. Kennedy invited Robert Frost to read at his inauguration, had the nation heard the lyrical sounds of poetry ringing in a new administration. And though America had gone through immense changes between the early nineteen sixties and nineties, it was no less assuring to witness a strong, elegant black woman greet the dawn of a new political era.

For Maya Angelou the occasion marked a great personal triumph. After an eventful life of hardships, spiritual redemption, artistic success, and political controversy, Maya offered the nation a spectacular image of survivor. Through her poetry, her academic work and her versatile artistic explorations, Maya remained a perfect embodiment of the great impact black American women have had on this nation. And while some circumstances and situations in her life were harrowing, even devastating, Maya’s greatest lesson comes from her belief in a forgiveness and personal evolution.

“What I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself,” Maya said in a 1995 interview in the journal “In Context .” “It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself, because if you live, you will make mistakes. It is inevitable. Only the angels, the cherubim, and about three rocks don’t make mistakes. With an admirable gift for capturing the mysterious rhythms of language and human interaction, Maya has enthralled millions of readers, theatergoers, and film fans during more than thirty years in the public eye. Her autobiographical books..including the astonishing I know Why the Caged Birds Sings-continue selling hundreds of thousands of copies each year, while recordings of her many poems are popular titles in record stores around the world... Among black writers like James Baldwin, TONI MORRISON, and Alex Haley, Maya was a loyal and valuable peer. Indeed, after her debut on the Broadway stage in a revival of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, in 1953, Maya thrilled and enlightened the American public with her dynamic presence and astute outlook.

From Africa-where she lived for a time-to England, Asia and South America, millions of literary fans cherish and revered Maya Angelou, a PROUD BLACK WOMAN who spoke more than six languages fluently and possessed and uncanny ability to communicate across class, gender and racial divides. Her personal journey is inspiring for many reasons, and numerous literary critics and faithful readers have identified the university of Maya’s life story. From a shy, awkward girl who once refused to speak for five years after suffering a devastating sexual trauma, Maya always claim the right to IDENTIFY AND DEFINE the meaning of her life on her OWN TERMS. “One isn't necessary born with courage, but one is born with potential,” Maya said during a 1988 interview. “And with COURAGE, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be KIND, TRUE, MERCIFUL, GENEROUS, OR HONEST.”

Maya’s courageous life began in St. Louis. Missouri, on April 4, 1928. Her parents, Bailey and Vivian Baxter, were struggling to make ends meet in the urban surroundings of bustling St. Louis. They named their only daughter Marguerite Ann Johnson, but their son nicknamed her Maya. Early on, her parents moved west, settling in California. By the time Maya was four, with her parents’ marriage dissolving, she and her older, Bailey, were sent to live with her grandmother in rural Arkansas. For the shy, awkward little girl, the new surroundings provided a fascinating mixture of HISTORY and PROMISE. In I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings she describes learning about life, religion, and human nature at the apron strings of her beloved grandmother, Annie Henderson, whom Maya and Bailey called Momma. Annie Henderson, a prominent member of the black community in tiny Stamps, Arkansas, owned the only general store that served blacks in the segregated town. Helping her grandmother brought STRUCTURE and ADVENTURE to Maya’s days, even if she sometimes feared her grandmother’s STRICT CONSTITUTION.

To the sensitive young girl, the world of sharecroppers and cotton pickers who shopped at their grandmother’s store was strange. For a decade Maya watched as the poor black men and women of Stamps STRUGGLED to make ends meet on the paltry sums they earned from white landowners. Annie Henderson was a generous and faire storekeeper and she often extended credit to customers who desperately needed to feed their families. “No matter how much [cotton] they had picked, it wasn’t enough,” Maya recalled. “Their wages wouldn’t even get them out of debt to my grandmother, not to mention the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown.” Such dire poverty left a deep mark on Maya’s burgeoning sense of justice, and in later years she became a powerful advocate of increasing social services and economic opportunities for rural and low-income families. BUT the bittersweet years with her grandmother in sleepy Stamps ended all too soon. When her father unexpectedly turned up one day, May had no way of knowing that her time in Arkansas was, for the time being, drawing to a close. Her father was a big man with an impressive car and HILARIOUS STORIES about his life in California. As it turned out, Maya and her brother would spend the next year back in St. Louis with their mother, Vivian Baxter and the formidable maternal grandmother. It was an abrupt change in lifestyle, but Maya and her brother adjusted as best they could. Their mother’s family was socially prominent in the black St. Louis community. Their grandmother was a ward captain and the mother of several strong sons with notorious short tempers.

More important, in St. Louis, Maya and her brother were reunited with their glamorous mother. She danced and sang in local taverns. It was there that Maya first developed a love of dance and music that would SHAPE her young adult life. And, sadly, it here that the boyfriend of Maya’s mother, “Mr. Freeman,” began making sexual advances toward eight-year-old Maya. Years later, in I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings, Maya described her rape in vivid detail. When the book was first published in 1970, many CONSERVATIVE EDUCATORS and POLITICIANS complained that the book was harmful and that MAYA was irresponsible for describing what had happened to her. Yet because she was brutally honest in her exploration of innocence lost, the controversy eventually cooled down. The book remains one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. It “liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity, “ said the famous black writer James Baldwin in 1970, “I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when the people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved.”

Indeed, the young Maya was forever affected by what happened to her at the hands of Freeman. Although he was eventually arrested and tried for the rape, a lawyer succeeded in getting out of jail on bail. Weeks later, her mother’s boyfriend was found dead behind a St. Louis slaughterhouse, apparently beaten to death. The violence of the events, the rape and the death of Freeman, traumatized Maya. She stopped talking... At first, Maya’s muteness was viewed by her family as an odd but understandable response to the trauma she had endured. But over time, her silence came to infuriate her St. Louis Family and eventually Maya and Bailey were sent back to the paternal grandmother in Stamps. There, a wise local woman helped draw Maya out of her self-imposed silence by encouraging her to READ classical literature and poetry OUTLOUD...

While still an adolescent, Maya learned valuable lessons about self-reliance and the warmth of community during her second period living with her grandmother in Stamps. For a while, she worked in the home of a wealthy white woman, assisting the kitchen staff and doing minor chores. It was an enlightening experience, even if Maya sometimes was made to feel dumb and clumsy by the white matron and her exacting maid. The white woman was unreasonably demanding, and her maid-Maya’s boss-seemed content to carry out even her most outrageous requests. For Maya, it was pure drudgery, and she left the job as quickly as possible. Along the way, Maya soaked in the rich celebrations of life in segregated Arkansas. THERE WAS MUCH CAMARADERIE AMONG BLACKS and Maya recalls eagerly OBSERVING HAPPINESS her relatives expressed when the black heavyweight boxer Joe Louis fought for the world championship. It was the late thirties, decades before the civil rights movement brought the slow but sweeping changes of integration. Blacks across the nation--and especially in the Deep South-greeted with anxiousness and pride each radio broadcast of bouts between Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” and his white opponents. At the general store owned by Maya’s grandmother, dozens of local residents gathered to listen to the fights, and when Louis was declared the heavyweight champion of the world, all of black Stamps celebrated...

Eventually....Maya’s world would change again. Her beloved grandmother decided that Maya and Bailey, now in their early teens should return to live with parents...Maya was enjoying her new life and began, for the first time, feeling confident in herself. As World War II broke out, she was attending her first integrated school. Washington High in San Francisco’s fog-shrouded Richmond District. When a smart and generous English teacher recognized Maya’s talent for reading and speaking, she recommended the blossoming young girl for a scholarship to a local theater arts program. There, Maya, at last came out of her shell, learning to dance, act and sing in a special school for young adults: she was showing signs of the stately, dignified woman she would ultimately become...

As the post-World War II economic boom brought prosperity and good times to much of America, Maya found plenty of outlets for her growing creativity. She became a popular dancer in a famous North Beach nightclub in San Francisco and continued improving her acting and performing skills. She won a coveted role in a revival of Porgy and Bess and thrilled to the sights and sounds of foreign lands when the opera toured the world. On her travels, Maya met a dashing military man named Tosh Angelou, and they married.

For several years, Maya lived in exotic cities in Egypt..[as well as other cities in Africa] and edited a political magazine. Returning to America in the sixties, Maya studied dance with such luminaries as Martha Graham and Pearl Primus and appeared in numerous plays and revues. By the end of the decade her political sensibility had sharpened and Maya threw herself into the civil rights movement. She had also began writing plays and poems and some of her works became popular additions to regional theater groups in New York and California...When Martin Luther King asked Maya to head the northern office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she agreed... Over the next decade, ...she was amazingly prolific, earning nominations for a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry an autobiographical writing. She wrote a screenplay called Georgia, Georgia and became the THE FIRST BLACK AMERICAN WOMAN to see her own script transferred onto the big screen....Over the years, Maya continued traveling and lecturing around the world, especially in Africa, where she spent many months among the people of Ghana. Open-minded and generous, Maya had a knack for enveloping the customs and rituals of those around her and she became an important CULTURAL AMBASSADOR to many nations. In return, several presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, turned to Maya to serve on various humanitarian and artistic commissions. Maya was awarded honorary degrees and received dozens of commendations, including being named 1975 WOMAN OF THE YEAR by Ladies’ Home Journal.

Throughout a remarkable life of tragedy and success, Maya remained a grounded and realistic individual. Her early trauma, and the guilt which dogged her for years thereafter, enabled Maya to grow into an astonishingly sensitive and astute woman. In the eighties she accepted a professorship at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and embarked on a new life as the preeminent teacher of writing, folklore, and poetry in America. For millions of young television viewers in the nineties, Maya was probably best known as the woman Oprah Winfrey called her friend and advisor. With more than two dozen award-winning books to her credit-including I Know Why the Caged Birds sings, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and Gather Together in My Name-Maya Angelou stood as a literary icon of formidable influence and wisdom. Undeniably, her keen eyes for the complexities of life and remarkable talent for capturing the rhythms and mysteries of the human experience will provide meaningful lessons for generations to come. Her role in SHAPING AMERICA’S UNDERSTANDING OF WOMEN, people of color, and the shared humanity of all world citizens was undeniable.

As always, Maya best summed up the guiding principle that made her one of the most revered WOMEN in the United States: “I have forgiven myself....I’ll make change. Once that forgiveness has taken place you can console yourself with the knowledge that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure...Pressure can change you into something quite precious, quite wonderful, quite beautiful and extremely hard.” Amen to that.

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Excerpts from “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America”

Alexander, Amy “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America” New Jersey: Birch Lane Press, 1999:167