Maya Angelou (12 page)

More than a dozen slave narratives have been reissued or reinvented in the twenty-first century, to critical acclaim. In 2014 British director Steve McQueen adapted Solomon Northup's 1853 narrative,
12 Years a Slave
, into an Academy Award–winning film which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a freeman from New York State. Northrup had to deny his name and his status in order to protect himself from brutal overseers after he was sold into slavery and taken by force to Louisiana. Much of the plot involves his efforts to communicate in writing with his Northern benefactor in an unwavering attempt to be rescued from bondage. After his release Northup published a written narrative about his captivity, an account praised by Horace Greeley and many other editors and sympathizers.

In 2013 author James McBride won the National Book Award for
The Good Lord Bird
, the fictionalized story of John Brown's raid on the militia at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. The historic John Brown was on a mission to arouse blacks to join him in an insurrection. The raid was a failure; Brown was captured, arrested, and hung. The narrative, told by a young Kansas-born slave, Henry Shackleford, is more comic than serious, full of Brown misquoting the Bible and of Henry humoring the “Old (White) Man.” McBride, quite conscious of the African American autobiographical tradition and the author of an excellent memoir,
The Color
of Water
(1966), turns the historic John Brown into a buffoon and the nineteenth-century slave narrative into a tragi-comic travelogue, using the generally somber elements of the tradition for farcical effects. The novel does have a serious conclusion, nonetheless. As Brown is being hung in Charleston, West Virginia, in front of a crowd of “white folks,” a group of Negroes are singing Brown's favorite spiritual,
Blow ye trumpet blow
, while an incarnation of Brown, in the form of a black and white bird, circles in the sky (last page, Kindle edition).

In 2007 Canadian author Lawrence Hall wrote a historical novel, originally entitled
Somebody Knows My Name
, which was retitled and republished in 2015 as
The Book of Negroes
in conjunction with the Black Entertainment Channel's miniseries by that name. This carefully crafted novel-into-video tells the story of Aminata Diallo, a young West African Muslim who was taken captive and branded. After she miraculously survives the Middle Passage, another slave teaches her to read and write. Aminata's narrative stresses her intelligence, her gifts with language, and her love for her husband and their two children. Her journey, like Equiano's and like Angelou's, covers a vast geographical space as she moves from the American South and escapes to New York, goes to Nova Scotia, to Sierra Leone, and finally to London, where she helps the Abolitionist cause through speaking and writing her story. The six-part miniseries features Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata.

Angelou's autobiographical series combines two distinct characteristics of the slave narrative. It demonstrates both the narrative of movement, as represented by Olaudah Equiano, and the narrative of confinement, a theme common to all imprisoned slave narrators, but having a special significance for women, who were more threatened with the problems of sexual exploitation—rape, loss of dignity, and forsaken children—than were male slaves. Under the slave system the African family structure was discouraged or forbidden or disrupted whenever a male slave was sold. Deborah E. McDowell (1993) argues that among male slave narrators like Frederick Douglass there is a flagrant disregard for women's issues such as rape, child care, and the stability of the family.

Like the nineteenth-century female slave narrator, Maya Angelou charts her arduous journey toward autonomy. Abandoned by her parents, raped by her mother's boyfriend, and separated from her grandmother, the young Maya is imprisoned and unable to claim her own identity. Her journey toward self-discovery takes her from ignorance to knowledge, from silence to speech, from racial oppression to personal liberation as she travels from Stamps, Arkansas, to Accra, Ghana, and back to America. Her story thus
echoes the course of the slave narrative, with its movement from Africa to America, its account of the cruelties of slavery, and its ultimate hope for emancipation.

For Angelou, who writes a personal version of the Emancipation Proclamation, her demoralizing childhood experiences with racial bigotry and sexual assault are largely overcome as she continues her efforts to be somebody—a writer, a dancer, a free woman. In all her autobiographies, but especially in
The Heart of a Woman
and
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, the format of the slave narrative is enhanced through the African settings and the expanse of her journeys. Angelou connects herself to the slave narrative by consciously linking herself to an African-centered tradition. Her triumph owes much to her rediscovery of her African heritage and her ability to redefine herself as mother and woman.

Other black women writers have considered the slave narrative from a contemporary perspective. Critic Hazel V. Carby claims that women's slave narratives “haunt the texts” of contemporary African American women writers (1987, 61), reiterating the themes of humiliation, hunger, and physical abuse. In
Praisesong for the Widow
(1984), Paule Marshall reinvents the story of legendary West African slaves who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of South Carolina, while in
Beloved
(1987), Toni Morrison reconstructs the narrative of a historic woman slave who murders her baby girl to save her from slavery. In her 1989 novel,
The Temple of My Familiar
, Alice Walker's heroine fantasizes the ordeals of the horrendous journey in slave ships, where nursing mothers shared their milk with starving children. Like other contemporary black women writers, Maya Angelou offers parallels between her stories and the slave narratives, recognizing in her own life certain elements inherent to the genre, such as isolation, abuse, and the absence of home and community.

Another prominent influence on Angelou's work is the Negro spiritual, a musical form that originated during the “Great Revival” meetings of the early nineteenth century. This music grew from Protestant camp meetings that were attended by both whites and blacks. During the 1920s and 1930s people like art historian Alain Locke, singer Paul Robeson, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston were dedicated to promoting the Negro spiritual as a pure, artistic form. It was Hurston's position that a spiritual could not be performed by a college choir: “The real Negro singer cares nothing about pitch” or other technical matters, Hurston argued. In the genuine
spiritual, every singer is “fired by the same inner urge” (quoted in Hemenway 1977, 56).

In our interview Angelou responded to a question about the title of
Traveling Shoes
by singing several lines from a Negro spiritual: “I've got shoes, you got shoes / All of God's children got shoes” (“Icon” 1997). Angelou utilizes the spiritual for its thematic and symbolic connotations in presenting one of her major themes, her transformational journey to Africa and back.

The Negro spiritual frequently contains the dual motifs of travel and race—of traveling to freedom and escaping the racial bondage of slavery. Angelou, who was moved by an “inner urge,” sang parts of three different spirituals during the “Icon” interview. Her attitude toward the genre is delightfully unacademic: “If they are songs about the spirit, then they are gospel songs. Some they call gospel and some spirituals. But those are just titles which help people to codify for the Dewey Decimal System or something. The people who wrote them and sang them, they thought they were all spirituals.”

Perhaps the best illustration of her use of the spiritual occurs in
Traveling Shoes
, during a meeting in Cairo with William V. S. Tubman, who was the president of Liberia from 1943 to 1971. Liberia was founded in the early nineteenth century by a society wanting to provide homes for slaves who returned to the African continent after achieving their emancipation. Tubman, recalling and naming his American African heritage, requests that she sing a Negro spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The chariot heading for the Promised Land is a symbol that reinforces the travel motif and places Angelou's text within the African American oral tradition. She employs the genre to foreshadow her cultural return from an African identity to an African American one, and to signify her connection with her Southern heritage.

Like the slave narrative, but on a lesser scale, the Negro spiritual traces the journey from slavery to freedom. In the slave narrative, freedom is achieved within the boundaries of an autobiographical text, whereas in the spiritual, freedom is postponed until arriving in the heavenly kingdom of the New Jerusalem. The spiritual is a collective outcry in a form repeated over and over, whereas autobiography is an individual recollection, often combined with the collective or “we” point of view. Other examples of the Negro spiritual include the slaves' journey to the biblical river in “Roll, Jordan, Roll” or to the restored kingdom of Zion in “Sabbath Has No End” (Southern 1971, 201–2).

Ironically, a number of religious travel hymns had a practical value, since many were encoded with directions for escape. It is no accident that James
McBride ends his story about John Brown's rebellion by referring to “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” Brown's favorite spiritual, with its refrain “The year of jubilee is come / Return, ye ransomed sinners, home” (Townsend, The Baptist Standard Hymnal, 194). The raid on Harpers Ferry, although initially deemed a failure, marked the beginning of a journey home that is still in transit.

Chapter 3

In 1970 a child with skinny legs and muddy skin was introduced into African American autobiography. Born Marguerite Johnson, she later became known as Maya Angelou, an actress and dancer who performed in George Gershwin's musical,
Porgy and Bess
, and in Jean Genet's satirical French play,
The Blacks
. In 1968 she wrote a successful series on African heritage for educational television. Angelou, well known by then as an entertainer and narrator, was urged by James Baldwin and by the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy to try her hand at writing an autobiography. After several refusals she agreed; the result was a unique series of autobiographical narratives.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
is the first of Maya Angelou's six autobiographies. It covers her life from the age of three, when her parents send her and her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas, until the age of sixteen, when she becomes a mother. Annie Henderson is the main influence on her childhood.

When Maya and Bailey are eight and nine, respectively, they travel to St. Louis, where their mother, Vivian Baxter, and their maternal grandmother are leading a far more sophisticated life than anything Maya had known in Arkansas. There are more parties and fewer church gatherings. In the loose atmosphere of St. Louis, Maya is raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, who warns her to be silent (mute) or he will kill her brother Bailey. After the trial Freeman dies after being violently beaten, presumably by Maya's uncles. Maya is indeed mute. She cannot and will not speak. The silent Maya is returned to Momma Henderson, remaining speechless for
five years until she recovers her voice through the patient help of her grandmother's friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers.

As Maya emerges from the traumas of childhood, she gains strength from reading literature and graduates with honors from the eighth grade. Soon after graduation, she and Bailey move to San Francisco, where their mother, Vivian, was living with her new husband, Daddy Clidell. There, Maya simultaneously attends George Washington High School and on a part-time basis a Marxist labor school. At the latter she takes courses in dance and theater that will prove invaluable in her career.