Angelou, Maya

By: Carolyn Wedin

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Angelou, Maya

Sex:  Female

Born:  St. Louis, Missouri, United States
4 April 1928

Activity/Profession:  Autobiographer / Memoirist, Poet, Civil Rights Activist, Educator

(b. 4 April 1928),

author and performer. Born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey Johnson and Vivian Baxter Johnson, Angelou was given her shortened first name, Maya, by her brother Bailey. She later modified the name of her first husband, Tosh Angelos, to whom she was married from 1952 to 1955, to form her last name. Her parents divorced soon after her birth, and in 1930 she and her brother were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, where they were raised for most of the next ten years by their paternal grandmother, Anne Henderson (or “Momma”). After Angelou's graduation with honors in 1940 from Lafayette County Training School, she and her brother were put on a train for San Francisco, where they were to live with their recently remarried mother. In 1944 the unmarried sixteen-year-old Angelou gave birth to her only child, Clyde Johnson, later Guy Johnson, three weeks after her high school graduation.

Autobiographies.

Angelou's life to this point became the subject of her first publication, the superbly written and honest I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), its title taken from the poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The book is dedicated to “My Son, Guy Johnson, and all the Strong Black Birds of Promise Who Defy the Odds and Gods and Sing Their Songs” and in it she thanks her mother and brother, the Harlem Writers’ Guild, and many individuals. The honesty of Angelou's narration, especially of her seduction and rape by her mother's boyfriend and her decision as a teenager to have sex for the experience, which resulted in her pregnancy, has frequently put the book on censorship lists but also repeatedly on lists of best books for young adults and best of the best books for young adults. Valérie Baisnée, in Gendered Resistance (1997), looking at four women's autobiographies, praises Angelou's “ability to use the writer's voice to speak for social injustice mixed with a resistance to the class, gender, and race ideologies that restrict the writer's autonomy” (p. 90).

Conference Speaker. Maya Angelou at the National Women's Conference, 1977. Photograph by Bettye Lane.

© Bettye Lane

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In the years after Guy's birth, Angelou tried out many jobs and men, worked as the first black woman on a cable car and in a house of prostitution, and was tempted by narcotics. These events are narrated in the second volume of her autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, published in 1974. This book she dedicated to Bailey Johnson and other “real brothers” including James Baldwin. In the following volume, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas (1976), she has married Angelos and begun performing at the Purple Onion nightclub. The center of the book is the 1954 tour of Europe and Africa with a traveling theater company performing Porgy and Bess (in which Angelou played Ruby), under the auspices of the U.S. State Department.

In 1955 Angelou and her son moved to New York City, where she had no trouble meeting artists and writers, many through the Harlem Writer's Guild, and finding work, performing off-Broadway in Calypso Heat Wave and Jean Genet's The Blacks. She produced Cabaret for Freedom with Godfrey Cambridge and, at the request of Martin Luther King Jr., became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). These events form the core of Heart of a Woman, published in 1981. This book is dedicated to her grandson Colin Ashanti Murphy-Johnson with “special thanks to a few of the many sister/friends whose love encourages me to spell my name: WOMAN,” followed by a list of fourteen, including the author Paule Marshall.

Within the space of two years, 1960–1962, Angelou met the South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make, and she and her son moved to Cairo, Egypt, with him, then Angelou left Make (sources differ on whether they were officially married or not, though Angelou says they were) and moved with Guy to Ghana, where again she had no trouble marketing her talents and skills. She became a feature editor for the African Review, wrote articles for the Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company, and worked as an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana. The Ghana experience became the center of the fifth volume of her autobiography, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, serialized in Essence magazine then published in book form in 1986. This book is dedicated to “Julian and Malcolm and all the fallen ones who were passionately and earnestly looking for a home.” The title page is followed by “swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.”

The sixth volume of Angelou's autobiography did not appear until 2002. It covers the years 1964–1968, when she returned to the United States, and the intensities of the civil rights movement, including the assassinations of Malcolm X (whom Angelou first met in Ghana) in 1965 and of Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed on her birthday) in 1968. This book, A Song Flung up to Heaven, is dedicated to her great-grandchildren Caylin Nicole Johnson and Brandon Bailey Johnson and “my entire family wherever and whoever you are.” Angelou thanks “seven of my living teachers,” including Andrew Young. In this relatively short volume, Angelou writes right before the end: “I thought about black women and wondered how we got to be the way we were. … We had come so far from where we started. … I thought if I wrote a book, I would have to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Angelou, Collected Autobiographies, p. 1166).

One can also consider Angelou's delightful Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004) an autobiography. She intersperses life stories with recipes and photographs from her very social home and heart, such as the chapters “Assurance of Caramel Cake,” “Momma's Grandbabies Love Cracklin’ Cracklin’,” “Potato Salad Towers Over Difficulties,” and “Recipes from Another County.”

Other Writings.

Angelou's vast writing and publishing production beyond the six or seven autobiographies is all the more amazing because she says she does not write in her spacious redbrick colonial home or on a computer, but instead rents a hotel room, where she has a thesaurus, a Bible, a dictionary, a pack of cards, and yellow legal pads (on which she composes with a pen). She has published collections of essays, including Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997); children's books, including Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993), My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), Kofi and His Magic (1996), and four volumes of Maya's World (2004) on children in Lapland, Italy, France, and Hawaii; plays and screenplays; short stories; recordings; and spoken word albums.

But most popular with readers and audiences, if not with literary critics, are her poems, published in six collections between Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ᾽Fore I Diiie (1971), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990); a volume of her collected poems was issued in 1994. Most people are at least aware of Angelou as the poet of “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993), written and read at the request of the forty-second president of the United States Bill Clinton at his inauguration on 20 January 1993. After that event Angelou became a popular presenter of poems for special occasions, including “A Brave and Startling Truth” at the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations on 26 June 1995; “From a Black Woman to a Black Man” at the Million Man March on 16 October 1995; and “Amazing Peace” at the National Christmas Tree Ceremony at the White House on 1 December 2005.

Other Work and Honors.

Angelou also continued to perform in as well as write and direct a large number of television programs and films, including documentaries and feature films, and she performed in classic plays, such as Bertold Brecht's Mother Courage and Jean Anouilh's Medea. She received an Emmy nomination for her depiction of Nyo Boto, or Grandmother, in the 1977 miniseries of Alex Haley's Roots; her poems were featured, and she made a short appearance, in the 1993 Janet Jackson and John Singleton movie Poetic Justice; she appeared as Anna in How to Make an American Quilt (1995); and she directed Down in the Delta (1998).

It is not possible to list here even a fraction of the honorary degrees, woman of the year, and other awards Angelou accumulated, the many commissions and councils and boards she served on, or the distinguished visiting professor posts and writer in residence positions she held. In 1981 she became the first Reynold's Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a lifetime appointment. She is an admired performer on the lecture circuit, giving of herself unstintingly in these presentations. Joanne Braxton, in Modern American Women Writers (1993), describes Angelou's lectures and readings as almost “hypnotic”—she “performs, lectures, scolds, and teaches” (p. 7). Angelou is an exceptionally talented, skilled, and accessible author, speaker, and performer.

[See also Actors and Actresses; Literature; Roots; and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.]

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