Maya Angelou (17 page)

Angelou's deviation from proper conduct was a violation of autobiographical tradition. A black woman who deals with lesbians, hookers, and drug addicts is bound to rock the standards used for centuries in evaluating American and European autobiography. Traditionally, the genre has been subdivided into professions occupied by men: statesmen, educators, soldiers, financiers, church fathers, and the like. Not until the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s did a significant number of writers challenge this elitist notion of life-telling. Like Ann Moody's
Coming of Age in Mississippi
(1968) and Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice
(1968),
Gather Together in My Name
is one of several contemporary black texts that reinvent the very notion of autobiographical decorum. They tell
it like it is, without obeying the strictures of language and behavior found in mainstream works.

When she first tried to tell her story, Angelou confessed to her difficulty with point of view. She felt that she was fragmented, that to convey her personality she would have to split herself into two women, one respectable and the other improper, one the autobiographer and the other her seamier self. “I wanted this fictional girl to do all the bad things and I was Miss Goodie Two Shoes,” she explained in our interview. She thought she needed to have “a fictional character go along side, I guess in the margins.” She told her editor, Bob Loomis, about her plan and he said, “Try it.” But it didn't work. So her husband Paul encouraged her to reject this split point of view, believing that the truth of her experience was real and whole: “Tell it. Because if it happened to black girls it happened to black boys, happened to white girls it happened to white boys. This is true” (“Icon” 1997).

Angelou told this writer that before
Gather Together
was published, she became increasingly worried about the adverse effect her autobiographical truth saying might have on her family. Thus, she gathered them together—Bailey, Vivian Baxter, her husband Paul Du Feu, and her son—and read to them the sections on prostitution and drugs. And she said, “I want to read you this. If it hurts you, I won't put it in.” Each accepted what she had written about her life—Vivian with a joke, Bailey with absolute trust. “My brother said, ‘I love you. One thing about you, you don't lie. I love that.'” As for Guy, Angelou continued, “He came between me and my husband and just took me and said, ‘You are the great one'” (“Icon” 1997). Her family's encouragement made it possible for her to represent a young black woman's struggle to tell the truth, even when the truth could possibly cause harm to herself and others.

Like the literary titles of the other five autobiographies, the title
Gather Together in My Name
is elusive, perplexing. It seems to relate, as Sondra O'Neale argues, to a New Testament passage that calls the “travailing soul to pray and commune” (1984, 33). Although Angelou does not discourage a religious reading, she offers a more specific interpretation, explaining that too many parents lie to their children about the past. She says: “Somebody needs to tell young people, listen, I did this and I did that. I thought, all those parents who lie, and fudge, and evade and avoid, could gather together in my name and I would say it” (“Icon” 1997).

Angelou wanted the title,
Gather Together in My Name
, to convey the same point of view inherent in the autobiography—the narrator wanted her gathering of readers to know what had happened to her so that other young people in similar straits could avoid the same pitfalls. It seems, then, that the narrator of Angelou's most controversial book is gathering a double
audience: young people who need direction and older people who need to give it. In her name the tarnished past will come forth. The truth will be told.

What the narrator achieves in the second volume is a remarkable sense of authenticity. As a straightforward recorder of life, she replaces the smooth chronology of
Caged Bird
for an episodic series of fragments that mirror the kind of discord found in actual life.
Gather Together
has an expanded consciousness that enables the reader to identify with an African American woman experiencing life among a diverse class of people, including prostitutes. Sondra O'Neale writes that Angelou “so painstakingly details the girl's descent into the brothel that Black women, all women, have enough vicarious example to avoid the trap” (1984, 32).

At least one black woman experienced the kind of salvation that O'Neale is describing. A young woman came to a book signing in Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after
Gather Together
was published. It was a large crowd, and Angelou tried to speak to everyone in turn: “Suddenly there was this girl, black girl, with false nails, badly put on, and I looked up, and she had fake hair hanging down, false eyelashes, and it was 10:30, 11:00 in the morning. In a micro-miniskirt. I said, ‘Hello. And your name?' She leaned over and she said, ‘I saw you on television. You even give me hope.'” Angelou paused. “If she's the only person I wrote the book for, it's all right, because I talked to her” (“Icon” 1997).

As it turns out, the girl in the miniskirt is not the only person Angelou wrote the book for. Despite some negative reviews, and despite some rather unflattering remarks from one television commentator, the Maya of
Gather Together in My Name
is an inspiring woman primarily because of what she dares to reveal about herself. Her point of view in this second volume can best be described as open or naked—a first-person perspective so honest that autobiography becomes personal contact.

Each of Angelou's autobiographies is structured through the use of a journey, either an extensive one such as from America to Europe in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
(1976), or a condensed one, as in the San Francisco-Stamps-St. Louis triad in
Caged Bird
. In contrast, the movement in
Gather Together
consists of far smaller segments or episodes, almost like bus rides or, to use a more artistic comparison, like dance movements. Thus, Angelou recounts her work and sexual experiences in a rhythm familiar to the many young black people who, like her, have been excluded from high-paying careers or elegant housing. She circles in place, at the edge of the dance floor, whereas in the following four volumes she is
in the air, like a bird or a jet, soaring to Europe, Africa, Germany, back to Africa, and finally landing in America.

Like certain kinds of twentieth-century African American music, especially jazz,
Gather Together in My Name
has a musical structure in which several melodies are played simultaneously by different instruments. These melodies intertwine or cross each other. For example, the piano and the saxophone play against each other in John Coltrane's monumental album
My Favorite Things
, recorded in the early 1960s around the time when Angelou was in Ghana. This crossing of sounds, called “polyphony,” rarely results in harmony.

Like the masters of modern jazz, Angelou structures
Gather Together
by recalling a series of discordant episodes or chords, scenes so dissimilar in texture that they give the autobiography a chaotic or fragmented quality. For example, when Maya finally gets to dance, she feels eternally anchored to the spot, as if a “stake had been driven down through my head and body” (102). In the next episode, without a transition, Maya visits her mother, who is cooking dinner for a male friend. Maya agrees to run to the neighborhood grocery store, only to discover on her return that Vivian has stabbed David, one of her lovers, who had attacked Vivian for inviting a rival for dinner. The layering of images—dancing and eating, the stake and the knife, lover A, lover B—creates the impression of upheaval. The two episodes immediately follow one another, like a double exposure or two pieces of cellophane stuck together. Although Maya is the ordering element—the glue throughout the text—she experiences such a variety of disjointed incidents that at first there seems to be little connection among them. This layering of narrative elements resembles polyphony and creates the kind of ordered chaos that characterizes Angelou's style and themes.

In gathering together the disparate episodes into a loosely rounded structure, Angelou initiates what Dolly A. McPherson calls “the pattern of a circuitous journey” (1990, 70). The journey in the second volume resembles a choppy tour through the coarser side of San Francisco and its surrounding communities. These wanderings are interrupted by two journeys outside the city: to Stamps, Arkansas, to visit Annie Henderson, and to Bakersfield, California, to rescue her kidnapped son from the babysitter known as Big Mary.

In an autobiography, plot usually provides a chronological overview of the actions relayed in the story. According to Meyer H. Abrams, a unified plot is one that has a “complete and ordered structure of actions” (1993, 160). Such a definition does not seem relevant to
Gather Together
, in that the actions seem unstructured and the narrative incomplete.

The plot of
Gather Together
is concerned with a young black woman who describes in detail the process of becoming an adult, emphasizing parenting, personal development, and survival. Survival, in Angelou's case, is defined as her perseverance in dealing with the emotional, racial, economic, and relational aspects of her life. Her apprehensions about her son, coupled with her recurring sense of being an inadequate mother, create a special kind of tension, repeated and interconnected as the plot is relocated from one autobiography to the next.

The plot resembles a walk through the underworld, with Angelou's salvation at the end hoped for but in no way guaranteed. She is still a girl, unfinished, like autobiography itself. In the process of becoming, the narrator, like the plot, is “open-ended and incomplete…always in process” (Olney 1980, 25).

Gather Together
stands out from Angelou's other autobiographies because it is the one in which the details of plot are centered almost exclusively in one geographical area, the city of San Francisco, California. Ironically, the concentrated locale produces the most disjointed of Angelou's plots; she lacks the necessary power over events and now the plot is in control, squeezing her into the unpleasant situations that are her life. Without money, without support from friends, she has no place to run to, no way to propel herself into the sweeping spaces of her later volumes.

Another important plot distinction is that the second volume initiates the series. No longer does
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
stand alone as a single-volume autobiography. Unwilling to let this very successful first volume be her last word, Angelou deviates from the conventional plot by continuing her life story in a second volume. The ending of
Caged Bird
is no longer the “complete and ordered structure of actions” defined by Abrams. Rather, it is the catalyst for a new beginning.

Angelou begins the story of
Gather Together
with a blunt, factual statement about her character: “I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young, with a son of two months, and I still lived with my mother and stepfather” (3). She is in conflict between being too old and too young, too responsible (she has a son) but too dependent (she lives at home). Maya's character develops, as it does to some extent in all of the volumes, through this sort of opposition.

Like the fluctuating plot of
Gather Together
, the character of its narrator shifts and flickers. Maya is never firmly grounded, always changing jobs, lovers, perspectives. Her life is irritating, often painful. In an interview she
remarked that in
Gather Together
she “wrote about the unpleasant, well not just unpleasant, but the certain parts of our lives that are very painful” (“Icon” 1997). Her pain and dislocation are, once again, alien to the spirit of more optimistic autobiographical accounts like Zora Neale Hurston's
Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942) or Nikki Giovanni's
Gemini
(1971) or Angelou's own
Caged Bird
. What happened, readers wondered, to the sprightly, imaginative child who lived in Arkansas?

In 1974, when Random House published
Gather Together in My Name
, respected critics were disappointed with Angelou's changed character. Selwyn R. Cudjoe claimed that while
Caged Bird
had a stable “moral center,”
Gather Together
was fragmented, therefore “weak.” He particularly objected to the sequel's sense of “alienation and fragmentation” (1984, 17). Like Cudjoe, Lynn Z. Bloom found the second volume disappointing; she felt that
Gather Together
lacked the “maturity, honesty, and intuitive good judgment” of
Caged Bird
(1985, 5).

Yet if looked at carefully, it becomes obvious that Maya in
Gather Together
is not terribly different from the Maya in
Caged Bird
. The dance-obsessed mother of the second volume is merely an extension of the adventuresome heroine of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
—not the preteen who quietly reads Shakespeare, but the wild child who deliberately gets herself pregnant and who, without knowing how to drive, steers a car down a mountainside in Mexico while her drunk father sleeps in the passenger seat. Critics have paid little attention to the summer vacation in Southern California with Bailey Sr. and his knife-swinging girlfriend, Dolores. Yet in that episode, which covers twenty-six pages of text, Angelou predicts the person she becomes in
Gather Together
: rebellious, risk-taking, reckless, audacious.

What is more, Cudjoe, Bloom, and other critics tend to overlook the strength of character that makes
Gather Together
so convincing an autobiography and Maya so captivating a narrator. Dolly McPherson argues that the fragmentation of character and plot in
Gather Together in My Name
is a merit rather than a flaw, since it artistically reflects the “alienated fragmented nature of Angelou's life” (1990, 62–63). The word
fragmentation
is used in this context to convey a sense of incompleteness or disconnection.