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American Ethnic Writers Maya Angelou (Marguerite Johnson) Born: St. Louis, Missouri; April 4, 1928 African American Through poems and autobiographical narratives, Angelou describes her life as an African American, single mother, professional, and feminist. Principal Works children's literature: Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, 1986 (illustrated by Étienne Delessert); Life Doesn't Frighten Me, 1993 (poetry; illustrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat); Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 1993; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me, 1994; Kofi and His Magic, 1996; Angelina of Italy, 2004; Izak of Lapland, 2004; Mikale of Hawaii, 2004; Renie Marie of France, 2004 drama: Cabaret for Freedom, pr. 1960 (with Godfrey Cambridge; musical); The Least of These, pr. 1966; Encounters, pr. 1973; Ajax, pr. 1974 (adaptation of Sophocles' play); And Still I Rise, pr. 1976; King, pr. 1990 (musical; lyrics with Alistair Beaton, book by Lonne Elder III; music by Richard Blackford) poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, 1971; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975; And Still I Rise, 1978; Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, 1983; Poems: Maya Angelou, 1986; Now Sheba Sings the Song, 1987 (Tom Feelings, illustrator); I Shall Not Be Moved: Poems, 1990; On the Pulse of Morning, 1993; The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, 1994; Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, 1994; A Brave and Startling Truth, 1995; Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem, 2005; Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me, 2006 screenplays: Georgia, Georgia, 1972; All Day Long, 1974 short fiction: "Steady Going Up," 1972; "The Reunion," 1983 teleplays: Black, Blues, Black, 1968 (10 epidsodes); The Inheritors, 1976; The Legacy, 1976; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1979 (with Leonora Thuna and Ralph B. Woolsey); Sister, Sister, 1982; Brewster Place, 1990 nonfiction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970 (autobiography); Gather Together in My Name, 1974 (autobiography); Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, 1976 (autobiography); The Heart of a Woman, 1981 (autobiography); All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986 (autobiography); Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, 1993 (autobiographical essays); Even the Stars Look Lonesome, 1997; A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 2002 (autobiographical essays); Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes, 2004 (memoir and cookbook) Born Marguerite Johnson, rechristened Maya, and taking the professional name Angelou (an adaptation of the name of her first husband, Tosh Angelos), Maya Angelou studied music and dance with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Ann Halprin. Her early career was as an actress and singer, to which she quickly added the roles of civil rights worker (as the northern coordinator for the SCLC, 1959-1960), editor (as associate editor for the Arab Observer, 1961-1962), educator (beginning with the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies, 1963-1966), and finally writer--first as a reporter for the Ghanaian Times (1963-1965). During the late 1960's and 1970's she taught at many colleges and universities in California and Kansas. Since joining the faculty at Wake Forest University in 1981, she has been a sought-after speaker and is in many respects regarded as America's unofficial poet laureate, although she has yet to receive that honor. Undoubtedly, Angelou's legacy will be her writings: Although the best-selling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was censored, her excellent work as an author in all genres has kept her story before the world. Angelou's early years have been burned into the minds of numerous readers. An image from this work centers on three-year-old Marguerite and four-year-old Bailey Johnson aboard a train, alone, traveling from California to their grandmother's home in Stamps, Arkansas, after the breakup of their parents' marriage. The two children wore their names and their destination attached to their clothes. This locomotive quest for family is both a factual part of and an apt metaphor for the life of the world-famous poet. Her first feeling of being truly at home, she has said, came in Africa, after she accompanied her second husband to Egypt and then traveled to Ghana. A second image from Angelou's childhood involves the seven-year-old's rape by her mother's boyfriend. When no legal punishment followed, the rapist was murdered, possibly by the victim's uncles. Guilt following this incident drove Angelou inward, and she began reading the great works of literature. Reading her way through the Stamps library, she fell in love with William Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others. The child of a fractured nuclear family came to see herself as a child of the fractured human family. By age thirteen Angelou had grown closer to her mother; at sixteen she became a mother herself. To earn a living for herself and her son Guy, she became a waitress, a singer, and a dancer. These and other occupations were followed by acting, directing, producing, and the hosting of television specials. She loved to dance, but when her knees began to suffer in her early twenties, she devoted her attention to her other love: writing. She began supporting herself through her writing in 1968. Her family came to include "sister friends" and "brother friends," as her troubled brother Bailey became lost in the worlds of substance abuse and prison. She married, but she has refused to attach a number to her marriages, as that might, she says, suggest frivolity, and she insists that she was never frivolous about marriage. To "brother friend" James Baldwin she gives much credit for her becoming an autobiographer. She assisted "brother friends" Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in their work and pursued her own work to better the entire human family. The hope that she found so significant in the 1960's is reflected in the poem she composed for Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration. The dream of King is evident in the words written and delivered by Angelou "on the pulse of [that] morning." I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Type of Work: Autobiography First Published: 1970 Angelou begins her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with reflections about growing up black and female during the Great Depression in the small, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. Following their parents' divorce, Angelou, then three years old, moved to Stamps with her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother and uncle Willie. Their home was the general store, which served as the secular center of the African American community in Stamps. Angelou's memories of this store include weary farmworkers, the euphoria of Joe Louis's successful prizefight, and a terrifying nocturnal Ku Klux Klan hunt. Angelou also recollects lively African American church services, unpleasant interracial encounters, and childhood sexual experimentation. An avid love of reading led the young Angelou to African American writers, including the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, from whose verse Angelou borrows the title for her narrative. Singing is heard in Angelou's memories of her segregated Arkansas school. At their grade-school graduation ceremony, Angelou and her classmates counter the racism of a condescending white politician with a defiant singing of James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing." For Angelou this song becomes a celebration of the resistance of African Americans to the white establishment and a key to her identity as an African American poet. Angelou spends portions of the narrative with her mother in St. Louis and in California. She has a wild visit to Mexico with her father and is even a homeless runaway for a time. As a girl in St. Louis, Angelou is sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend. Following his trial and mysterious death, Angelou suffers a period of trauma and muteness. Later, an adolescent Angelou struggles with her sexual identity, fears that she is a lesbian, and eventually initiates an unsatisfactory heterosexual encounter, from which she becomes pregnant. Angelou matures into a self-assured and proud young woman. During World War II, she overcomes racial barriers to become one of the first African American female streetcar conductors in San Francisco. Surviving the uncertainties of an unwanted pregnancy, Angelou optimistically faces her future as an unwed mother and as an African American woman. All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes Type of Work: Autobiography First Published: 1986 All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes belongs to a series of autobiographical narratives tracing Angelou's personal search for identity as an African American woman. In this powerful tale, Angelou describes her emotional journey to find identity and ancestral roots in West Africa. Angelou reveals her excitement as she emigrates to Ghana in 1962 and attempts to redefine herself as African, not American. Her loyalty to Ghana's founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, reflects hope in Africa's and her own independence. She learns the Fanti language, toys with thoughts of marrying a prosperous Malian Muslim, communes with Ghanaians in small towns and rural areas, and identifies with her enslaved forebears. Monuments such as Cape Coast Castle, where captured slaves were imprisoned before sailing to America, stand on African soil as vivid reminders of an African American slave past. In Ghana Angelou hopes to escape the lingering pains of American slavery and racism. Gradually, however, she feels displaced and uncomfortable in her African environment. Cultural differences and competition for employment result in unpleasant encounters between Ghanians and African Americans. Despite such frustrations, Angelou's network of fellow African American emigrants offers mutual support and continuing hope in the African experience. A visit by Malcolm X provides much-needed encouragement, but his presence is also a reminder of ties with the United States. Angelou and her African American friends express their solidarity with the American Civil Rights movement by demonstrating at the United States embassy in Ghana. As she sorts through her ambivalent feelings about Africa, Angelou also rethinks her role as mother. At the beginning of All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou's son Guy almost dies in an automobile accident. Later in the narrative he develops a relationship with an older woman and struggles to gain admittance to the University of Ghana. In dealing with all these events, Angelou learns to balance her maternal feelings with her son's need for independence and self-expression. Finally recognizing the powerful ties binding her to American soil, Angelou concludes her narrative with a joyful journey home from Ghana and a renewed sense of identity as an African American. I Shall Not Be Moved Type of Work: Poetry First Published: 1990 Maya Angelou's poetry draws on the rhythms of jazz, blues, and spirituals; despite its tough look at the hard facts of black life, it is ultimately forgiving and celebratory. Angelou's long poem "Our Grandmothers," perhaps her best, is emblematic of the entire work. It features the refrain, "I shall not be moved," epitomizing the love and determination of black women. The first woman who appears in this poem is significantly nameless, a slave mother running away with her children because the master is going to sell her and divide the family. Other women also appear as Angelou moves from the days of the slave trade to the modern-day black woman standing in the welfare line. Each of these women, however, has enormous resistance and resilience. Angelou sympathizes as well with other struggling members of society. Her poems about the working poor are especially poignant--the girl who asserts, "Even minimal people/ can't survive on minimum wage," and Coleridge Jackson, a warehouse worker who is berated and diminished daily by his "little/ white bag of bones" boss. Yet Angelou has the largeness of spirit to forgive even the former slave state of Virginia. She uses its natural beauty to signify the change, writing that dogwood blossoms form "round my/ head ringlets/ of forgiveness." Indeed, although Angelou presents a harshly realistic picture of black life, she also sees the humor, joy, and triumph of it. The final poem is a dirge for dead friends. She first mourns their loss, then looks at the larger picture, finding that "after a period peace blooms." Finally, because they were, "We can be. Be and be/ better. . . ." The entire volume is a triumph of overcoming. Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now Type of Work: Essays First Published: 1993 Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now is a collection of twenty-four meditations, many of special interest to women, expressing Maya Angelou's views on subjects ranging from fashion and entertainment to sensuality and pregnancy, racism, and death. Two of the essays contain new poems, one for Angelou's mother, "Mrs. V. B.," and the other, untitled, on the similarities among all people despite racial diversity. Among the best pieces here are those that begin with some autobiographical incident from which Angelou draws an insight or lesson. The most interesting include "Power of the Word," focusing on the power of faith, particularly as illustrated in Angelou's own experience and in her grandmother, "Mamma," in Stamps, Arkansas, during the Great Depression; "Getups," demonstrating not only Angelou's love of richly colorful clothing but also a painful event from her years as a single mother of a small boy; and "Extending Boundaries," recounting an embarrassing experience from Angelou's early days as a writer in New York City. Angelou uses each incident to draw some point, though generally she offers her moral or advice with a light hand, often with humor, despite the seriousness of some of her subject matter. Her recurrent themes include self-knowledge and the necessity of honesty, prudence, and respect in the treatment of oneself and others. Written in the simple, direct style that also characterizes Maya Angelou's poetry, these essays are particularly suitable for morning or evening reflection. They range in length from several pages to one paragraph, and each is an independent piece. They offer insight into the experience and philosophy of one of America's most celebrated women writers and practical advice for responsible yet pleasurable living. Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Elliott, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Hagen, Lynn B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. King, Sarah E. Maya Angelou: Greeting the Morning. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1994. Lisandrelli, Elaine Slivinski. Maya Angelou: More than a Poet. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. McPherson, Dolly A. Order out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou. New York: P. Lang, 1990. Pettit, Jayne. Maya Angelou: Journey of the Heart. New York: Lodestar Books, 1996. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Shapiro, Miles. Maya Angelou. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. A biography describing the life and work of the celebrated writer. Williams, Mary E., ed. Readings on Maya Angelou. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Thomas J. Sienkewicz, Judith K. Taylor, and David Peck |
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