Maya Angelou

Adventurous Spirit

Linda Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501365591
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

A revised and updated edition of a comprehensive biographical and critical reading of the works of American poet and memoirist Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Linda Wagner-Martin covers all six of Angelou's autobiographies, as well as her essay and poetry collections, whilst also exploring Angelou's life as an African American in the United States, her career as stage and film performer, her thoughtful participation in the Civil Rights actions of the 1960s, and her travels abroad in Egypt, Africa, and Europe. In her discussion of Angelou's methods of writing her stunning autobiography, which began with the 1970 publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wagner-Martin writes about the influences of the Harlem Writers Group (led by James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and John O. Killens) as well as Angelou's significant friendships with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders from both international and African American United States cultures. Crucial concepts throughout include the role of oral traditions, of song and dance, of the spiritualism of art based on religious belief, of Angelou's voiced rhythms and her polished use of dialogue to convey more abstract "meaning." Wagner-Martin shows that, viewing herself as a global citizen, Angelou never lost her spirit of adventure and discovery as well as her ability to overcome. Named an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year by Choice in 2015, this new edition includes two new chapters on Angelou's connections to Africa and on her final years.

1

Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928

In 1970, when she was 41, Maya Angelou became one of the world’s most visible writers. What is it that brings readers to some books, readers who have perhaps looked into a book only once every few years—if then? Why do other books remain closed to even those people who are fascinated by language?

What is the synergy of story? The radiance of the word?

The attraction of recognition?

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was not a story people wanted to read. Raped when she was seven and a half by her mother’s boyfriend, the child Marguerite Johnson barely survived. The violation brought her close to death; she separated herself from everyone except her brother. She dissociated herself from her mother and her St. Louis family—the mark of that dissociation was her chosen muteness. Later, recollecting that she would sometimes speak to Bailey, she describes her silence as the mark that her voice was “eluding” her. Instead of speaking, she wrote songs and taught them to Bailey; he in turn taught her songs to the children who were their friends. For five years, Bailey became her voice (Order 148).

Maya Angelou traced her life as writer back to those silent years. She said, “We all bring almost unnameable information from childhood . . . If we are lucky, we make transitions, and don’t live in that time of pain and rejection and loneliness and desolation. But there will understandably be bits of it which adhere to us” (Con 221).

When Angelou chose the most positive stanza from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1899 poem “Sympathy” to serve as the title of her first book, she was already focused on the role of compassion in human lives.

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

when his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, . . .

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—I know why the caged bird sings!

Even in the midst of rage and pain, the writer, the singer, that allegorical bird, must create a legacy that endures, and one that comforts. Angelou often said, in various interviews, that as a writer she learned to choose to describe episodes that would give hope to readers; her intent in writing autobiography was not to maim either people or their memories:

What I have left out of Caged Bird and all the books is a lot of unkindness. I’ve never wanted to hurt anybody. So many of the people are still alive. The most difficult part for me has always been the selection of the incidents. To find one which is dramatic without being melodramatic or maudlin, and yet will give me that chance to show that aspect of personality, of life which impacted on me . . . from which I drew and grew (Order 139).

With rare insight into the way telling stories works (whether orally or in print), Angelou couched her aims as writer in relation to the theater: “I see the incident in which I was a participant, and maybe the only participant, as drama . . . And I’ve used, or tried to use, the form of the Black minister in storytelling so that each event I write about has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I have tried to make the selections graduate so that each episode is a level, whether of narration or drama . . . a level of comprehension like a staircase” (ibid. 140).

In 1970 when Random House published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (which quickly became a best-seller and was translated into many languages), Angelou’s methods were unique. There was very little autobiography or memoir being published, and there had been almost no autobiography published that was written by African Americans since the days of slave narratives. In the late 1960s, publishers were looking for fiction, a few were taking on novels by outspoken feminist writers (such as Erica Jong’s best-selling book Fear of Flying or Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room); and they were content to stay with mainstream (i.e., white) writers. There was very little interest in books about marital or domestic strife—no category yet existed for “domestic abuse” nonfiction. The term hardly existed.

Although Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man had been published in 1952 and had quickly become the contemporary novel by a writer of color to appear in course syllabi, it was the only book by an African American that most readers had even heard of. (Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son and his own autobiography to come later, Black Boy, were considered decidedly radical—thoroughly unpleasant, dangerously and frighteningly intent on blaming mainstream white culture for whatever ailed black characters and black culture.) With the impetus that Civil Rights activity had created during the 1960s, some readers had found the plays and essays of James Baldwin, but they were in the minority. Even such a figure as Martin Luther King, Jr. was considered a speaker, a preacher, more than he was seen to be a literary figure. Only Maya Angelou’s friend Malcolm Little, the man later known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and before that as Malcolm X, had based his literary career on memoir. His collaborative autobiography—The Autobiography of Malcolm X—was published in 1965, shortly after his assassination; Alex Haley was the co-writer of this autobiography, but Haley’s friendship with Maya, and his fame from Roots, lay in the future.

Even as late as 1970, publishers had not recognized the need for book categories based on skin color, gender, or politics. Historians assumed that the Civil Rights efforts of the 1960s had changed reading habits, but they were wrong. Books were labeled “non-fiction” and “fiction” with little regard for gender or race. The evolving category of “women’s fiction” might have looked important, but it was not: when Toni Morrison—later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, it quickly went out of print. Following her second novel, Sula, in 1973, Morrison achieved some recognition; but it was not until 1977, when her third book, Song of Solomon, won a major literary prize, that she began to receive the kind of recognition that had become Maya Angelou’s with the 1970 appearance of her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

In 1970, the only other American woman writer who was publishing autobiography—and autobiography in serial fashion, itself a rarity—was playwright Lillian Hellman. Long established on the Broadway and off-Broadway stage, Hellman’s fame made her first memoir—An Unfinished Woman, published in 1969 and winner of the National Book Award in 1970—a best-seller. When Pentimento appeared in 1973, readers felt bewildered: were these episodes memoir or fiction? With the adaptation of several of these segments into Julia, a popular 1977 movie, Hellman’s career as an autobiographer started to diminish. With her third autobiography, Scoundrel Time, in 1976, readership increased because Hellman and her long-time partner, Dashiell Hammett, had been blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s and this memoir focused directly on those years. In 1980 when Hellman published her enigmatic fourth book, Maybe, she lost credibility as an autobiographer (she was testing the limits of the traditional memoir, as she had throughout her book series, but her readers were largely puzzled).

The visibility of Hellman’s successive memoirs may have intrigued Angelou’s editor at Random House, Robert Loomis. Hellman was well known, mainstream, and heterosexual, unlike some authors in the early 1970s who vaunted the legitimacy of lesbianism. (Consider the changes incipient then in US culture: sexual preference linked with issues of gender and race, but people considered all such issues “radical.” It was not until 1967 with Loving v. Virginia that interracial marriage became legal. Roe v. Wade dated from 1973. Ms Magazine began publication in 1971. In 1974 President Gerald Ford signed legislation that allowed girls to play Little League baseball.)

Maya Angelou’s appeal in her autobiographical writing was much less literary than Hellman’s. She had no celebrity status, though she had appeared on stage and in clubs: the heart of her memoir writing was, in fact, the commonality of her life. Hellman was white; Angelou was not only African American but African American from the Southern United States—and Angelou was largely uneducated in any formal sense. She also wrote, without apology, about the bleak events in the early years of her life—and she did so without blaming mainstream culture—that is, white culture—for those events. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was an unanticipated kind of book. Its politics was comparatively mild; its energy was devoted to expressing the family love that had saved Maya and her brother; its narrative patterning alternated the serious, and the chilling, with the tranquil and the exuberant. The book was structured around scenes and episodes so that it read like a story. Its readers may not have known what a “memoir” was or how it differed from an “autobiography.” What they knew was that they were eager to read Angelou’s story.

That Angelou had created a kind of unique voice in the midst of what appeared to be “autobiography” or “self-narrative” was not the subject of the reviews and appreciations. Rather, in the words of James Baldwin, Angelou had written what he termed “testimony from a black sister,” writing which “liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.” Newspaper reviewers responded to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as “simultaneously touching and comic,” “a heroic and beautiful book,” “an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.” In the words of critic Julian Mayfield, who did not fear relating to the book as an African American reader, and seeing in it the vicissitudes of African American life, it was “a work of art which eludes description because the black aesthetic—another way of saying ‘the black experience’—has too long been neglected to be formalized by weary clichés . . . Anyone who doesn’t read Maya Angelou doesn’t want to know where it was, much less where it’s at.”

Appearing in 1970, when such important African American poets as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez were publishing their first poem collections, Angelou’s memoir served as a preface to her own first book of poems, which would appear in 1971. Angelou’s Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, appeared from Random House—whereas works by many African American poets were being published by Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press. (Broadside published Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Randall himself, as well as Alice Walker, June Jordan, LeRoi Jones—later Amiri Baraka; African American critics expected black poets and playwrights to appear from African American venues.) In Angelou’s poems, as in her memoir, she created a voice and a form that was idiosyncratic, using both the traditional poem forms of James Weldon Johnson and individually appropriate stanzas drawing from song rhythms, jazz, hymns, and spoken emphases. In both her poetry and her memoir, then, Angelou forged her own directions—and as a result her aesthetic achievements were sometimes unappreciated or overlooked.

To read Maya Angelou’s works—from these early 1970s books as well as the later—demands that the reader know her autobiography, her essays, her recipes (for her recipes are often embedded in family stories), and her poems. One of her favorite topics is the generosity of her tough paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, to whom her mother had sent her, along with her brother, after the rape and the subsequent trial—and then the murder of the rapist. The reader comes to know this beloved grandmother figure in vignettes about Annie Henderson’s earning the money to build the shack-like store: she made and fried meat pies every day at noon for men who worked at the two factories in Stamps, Arkansas—rotating the fresh pies day by day, charging five cents for the first-made pies and three cents for the left-overs—walking miles from her kitchen to the first factory, carrying all her equipment. Then she walked to the second site and sold pies there.

Years passed.

When she had saved enough money, divorced mother of two boys that she was, she built a cooking shack midway between the factories. At that point, her customers came to her. That shed eventually became the store that supported her, her grandchildren and her disabled son. Angelou creates the ambience of the loving and yet relentless grandmother, whether she writes in autobiography or in poetry.

Because Bailey and Marguerite had lived with Annie Henderson years before, when their parents were in the process of getting a divorce, they were accustomed to calling her “Momma,” and they considered living in the back of the store a place of privilege. Almost from the beginning of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Annie Henderson dominates its narrative. Waking up at 4:00 a.m., with no alarm clock, she is there to sell breakfast to her customers during picking season. We hear her sleep-filled voice as she goes to her knees in thanks, “Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day” (Caged 11). Next she issues orders to her grandchildren, and then Angelou as writer brings the reader directly into the store itself: “The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe. The odors of onions and oranges and kerosene had been mixing all night and wouldn’t be disturbed until the wooded slat was removed from the door and the early morning air forced its way in with the bodies of people who had walked miles to reach the pickup place.” Immediately, Angelou uses characters’ voices to create the scene:

“Sister, I’ll have two cans of sardines.”

“I’m gonna work so fast today I’m gonna make you look like you standing still.”

“Lemme have a hunk uh cheese and some sody crackers.”

The reader feels the peace. There are no locks, only the wooden slab that holds the doors shut. There is no fear among people who all work as hard as possible to secure some kind of living, and whose religion spreads throughout the town, offering support as well as joy. When Maya Angelou recalls the weekly church service, she compares it to ecstasy—her silent grandmother cares well for her but expressiveness is not Annie Henderson’s strong suite: it is the black preacher who extols the love of God. “I decided when I was very young to read the whole Bible and I did so twice. I loved its cadence. And in church when the minister would make the Bible come alive . . . when he would elaborate on the story—whether it was the story of the Prodigal Son or of Dry Bones in the Valley—it would go through the top of my head. I could see it. And the tonality, and the music, and the old people . . . all that. For me, it was going to the opera” (in Order 10).

Language as performance was an energy that accrued from both reading the King James Bible, filled as it is with metaphor after metaphor, and listening to the empowering music of both l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1  Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928
• 2  Ambivalence is not so easy
• 3  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• 4  Gather Together in My Name
• 5  Music, poetry, and being alive
• 6  Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
• 7  The Heart of a Woman
• 8  Africa
• 9  A Song Flung Up to Heaven
• 10  Poems and the public spotlight
• 11  From autobiography to the essay
• 12  Maya Angelou as spirit leader
• 13  “Given to grace notes”: Words as music in Maya Angelou’s writing
• 14  The last years
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright