Maya Angelou (2 page)

Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self
examines the six autobiographical volumes of noted African American writer Maya Angelou. Although all of these volumes are distinct in style and narration, they are unified through a number of repeated themes and through the developing character of the narrator. In their scope they stretch over time and place, from Arkansas to Africa to California to New York City, from confused child to accomplished adult. With so expansive a project, Angelou is required to de-emphasize the standard autobiographical concern for the individual and to focus on her interaction with others: with the jazz singer Billie Holiday; with the actor Godfrey Cambridge; with the African American community in Ghana; with the writer James Baldwin; with the world leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Maya Angelou, in having created these six autobiographies, has assured herself a prominent place in American literature. She has expanded the scope of the typical one-volume book about the self, creating a slightly fictionalized saga that covers the years 1931 to 1968—from the years of the Great Depression to the days following the death of Martin Luther King. She guides the reader through almost 40 years of American and African American history, revealed through the point of view of a strong and affectionate black woman. By opening up the edges of her narrative, Maya Angelou, like no one before her, transcends the autobiographical tradition, enriching it with contemporary experience and female sensibility.

Information about Angelou's abundant life has been recorded in numerous interviews, journals, yearbooks, prefaces, and appendices. At times there are errors or inconsistencies among these sources—the date of her
first marriage, the names of awards received, the titles of plays directed, and other details. These inconsistencies arise possibly because Angelou, in her interviews, speaks eloquently but informally about her past, with no time chart in front of her, and possibly because her interviewers are so taken by her presence that they lose sight of the smaller details. The bulk of the facts presented in this chapter derive from the sources listed in the bibliography, under the category Biographical Sources. The remaining material is taken either from Angelou's published writings or from my interview with her in June 1997.

When I agreed to write
Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion
, I knew the project would benefit from a personal interview, itself an autobiographical form. I was privileged to have met Angelou before, very briefly, in a rather dramatic limousine encounter after a lecture she gave at Towson State University in Baltimore in 1995. A return invitation, where we might really talk, seemed improbable. Nonetheless, I began writing to her press agent. After several false starts, and with the invaluable intervention of my friend Dolly A. McPherson of Wake Forest University, I was eventually granted an overnight interview that began at 4 p.m. on June 16, 1997, and ended the next morning.

My husband, Kenneth Baldwin, drove us to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We arrived at Maya Angelou's gated property and were greeted by Rose Johnson, who I later learned was the daughter of Maya's brother Bailey. Ms. Johnson escorted us to an enormous living room and asked us to wait.

Across the room, a forty- or fifty-foot expanse, I saw a portrait of Maya Angelou as a young woman, done on a vibrant quilt, with the center panel surrounded on all sides by what appeared to be lettering. This focal piece of art was almost as tall as the space it occupied, I would guess around twelve feet. Coming closer, I read the inscription: Maya's Quilt of Life, 1989/Faith Ringgold. Faith Ringgold (1930–) is an African American artist and performer, well known for her woman-oriented sculptures such as the “Family of Women” series, done in the 1970s. Her astounding Quilt of Life was commissioned by Maya Angelou's close friend, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey (1954–) on the occasion of Angelou's sixtieth birthday.

The multitude of words framing the portrait were taken from “Phenomenal Woman,” probably Angelou's most admired poem, and from “Willie,” a poem about the crippled uncle immortalized in
I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings
. In addition there were excerpts from two of her autobiographies,
The Heart of a Woman
and
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
.

Soon after we sat down, Angelou entered the room in a rush of floor-length electric blue, with a matching blue turban decorated with gold spangles. She graciously invited Ken to stay for the interview session, which he did—but without participating. Although the investigation of form and structure in the autobiographies was at the heart of the interview, there were numerous personal moments involving husbands, cigarettes, houses, health food, aging, and family. At times she broke into song. I did not perceive Maya Angelou to be a stranger. Having read her autobiographies made me feel as if she were a high school classmate or a friend from church.

It became clear, as the interview progressed, that Dr. Angelou was worried, distracted. Ominously in the background as we talked was the tragic, inexplicable burning of Betty Shabazz, prominent civil rights worker and the widow of Malcolm X, whose apartment was set on fire by her troubled grandson. On the day of the interview Maya Angelou made arrangements to fly to New York City, where she, Coretta Scott King, and other friends were planning to visit Betty Shabazz in the hospital. Sadly, Shabazz died seven days later, on Monday, June 23, 1997.

Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self
has been immeasurably enhanced by the interview of June 16, 1997. The figures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X described in the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the autobiography became personalized, intensified. Angelou's approach to her unique serial genre was clarified. Thanks to her direct and thoughtful responses, the text of our recorded interview serves as a major source for this work, indicated parenthetically by “Icon.” An icon is a sacred image or representation, something of special value within a culture. In 1998 the “Icon” interview was published separately, in a shortened and modified form, in
2twice
, a journal for the arts, under the title “Autobiography Maya Angelou.”

I refer to my interview as “Icon” because of an amusing event that occurred when Angelou was acting in the film
How to Make an American Quilt
(1995). Members of the cast—Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Jean Simmons, Kate Nelligan, Lois Smith, Alfre Woodard, Winona Ryder, and Maya Angelou—were all sitting around when the two young actresses, Winona Ryder and Alfre Woodard, said that their friends had asked them, “What does it feel like to work with icons?”

“We laughed so hard. So I named them the iconettes,” Angelou said to me, barely able to suppress her laughter.

For me, it was sacred to have talked with an icon and to have luxuriated in her voice, if only for a day.

Dr. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 24, 2014, at the age of eighty-six. Like many of the great African American writers who predeceased her—Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin—Angelou never earned a college degree. Instead, her advanced education was achieved through what she described as the “direct instruction” of African American cultural forms: “If you've grown up in an environment where the lore is passed on by insinuation, direct instruction, music, dance, and all other forms of instruction, then that is still the thing out of which you have to move” (“Icon” 1997).

It is part of her genius that she was virtually self-educated, although she did do some work in writing groups where self-criticism was an essential form of the learning process. Because of her accomplishments in writing, theater, and the arts, and because of her known strengths as a commencement speaker, academic institutions have granted her honorary doctorates. In 1975, Smith College and Mills College conferred on Angelou her first two honorary degrees; reportedly more than fifty were conferred during her career, including one in 1997 from Wake Forest University, where she held a lifetime appointment as First Reynolds Professor from 1981 to her death. Many of her admirers still call her by her honorary title, Dr. Angelou, a distinction with which she had seemed happy.

Soon after her death a sarcastic historian, Mark Oppenheimer, who calls himself a “good cocktail-party bullshit artist,” set off a controversy when, in an article printed in
The New Republic
, he challenged the “Dr. Angelou” title. While managing to disparage Angelou for her doctoral twitters and tweets, Oppenheimer just happened to mention his Yale degree and his “earned” PhD in religion.
The Rand Paul Forum
immediately cited Oppenheimer's views, agreeing with them, while (Dr.) Brittney Cooper, writing in
Salon
, retaliated with an angry, compelling piece: “Yes, Maya Angelou was a doctor: A lesson for the ignorant” (2014, n.p.). Cooper made the telling points that blacks, especially black women, have been historically limited in their pursuit of higher education and that Angelou, through her many major works, has proven herself a master in her field.

As I was researching this thorny topic I came across a 2011 article in the
Boston Globe
by Tracy Jan entitled “Degree of Difficulty: Really Almost Nil.” The article, which presents an overview of earned versus honorary doctorates, features an interview with Maya Angelou, who told Ms. Jans that “a person has a right to be called anything she or he wants to be
called…. I've earned it.” Angelou continued, “I'm a worker…. Some people who have gotten their PhDs have sat back down on their—I'm stumbling on the anatomy—and given nothing” (n.p.)

Throughout the autobiographical series Maya Angelou refers to herself by a number of names but never by “Dr. Angelou”; a title that she may have adopted as a result of being named Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in 1981 or perhaps following her performance for the inauguration of President Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. She referred to herself by that title several times in her 2004 cookbook
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
(188, 201, 202). Maya's mother liked to call her Ritie or Baby. Her thoughtless employer, Mrs. Cullinan, called her Mary. But it was her brother Bailey who gave her the name that lasted, Maya, for “My” and “my sister” (Davis in Elliot 1989, 75).

As for her stage name, she kept Rita Johnson until her marriage to Tosh Angelos in 1952. Sometime after the three-year marriage ended in divorce she opted for a more theatrical name at the strong suggestion of her managers at the San Francisco nightclub, the Purple Onion (Shuker 1990, 70–71). Her new name captured the feel of her Calypso performances. That name,
Maya Angelou
, will be used consistently in this book to preserve continuity. I use the term “Dr.” in referring to Angelou only a few times, most conspicuously as the first word of the first major chapter.

Maya's mother, Vivian Baxter, was a nurse and card dealer; her father, Bailey Johnson Sr., was a doorman and also a dietician or meal adviser for the navy. They had a difficult marriage that ended in divorce and in their subsequent inability to deal with their young children. When Maya was three and her brother Bailey four, their father deposited the children on a train from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas, home of Bailey Sr.'s mother, Annie Henderson, owner and operator of a general store.

Annie met the train to take charge of two forlorn children wearing instructions on their wrists that announced their names, their point of departure, and their destination. It was in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, an economic disaster that had its roots in the American financial system but was soon felt worldwide. Still, Annie Henderson had been able to survive because her general store sold such basic commodities as beans and flour and because she made wise and honest investments.

Angelou recounts this desolate journey and arrival in the early pages of the book that has since brought her fame,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. Published in 1970 when Angelou was forty-two, it covers her life from the age of three to the age of sixteen.
Caged Bird
is the first of six autobiographies depicting the life of this amazing African American woman of
letters. The other five are
Gather Together in My Name
(1974),
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
(1976),
The Heart of a Woman
(1981),
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
(1986), and
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
(2002).

In
Caged Bird
(1970), Angelou reconstructs her childhood, beginning as a three-year-old child living with her older brother under the protective hand of their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. The first volume vividly recalls life in Stamps, Arkansas, with its Christian traditions and its segregated society.

When Maya was eight, her father took her and Bailey from Stamps to St. Louis to visit their mother, Vivian Baxter. It was there, in 1936, in a poorly supervised household, that Maya was seduced and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. After a brief trial Freeman was beaten to death, presumably by Maya's three uncles. Horrified that her words had caused anyone's death, Maya withdrew into a silence that the Baxters were incapable of handling. She and Bailey were returned to Annie Henderson and the community of Stamps, where for five years Maya remained mute. She was finally released from the burden of speechlessness in 1940, through her study of literature and guidance by a woman from Stamps named Mrs. Flowers.

After graduating from the eighth grade, Maya, along with her brother Bailey, moved back to California, where she gave an early sign of her enormous potential to succeed by becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She knew even then, from her experiences in Stamps and St. Louis, that she was black and female, someone with the cards stacked against her. “If you're black you're black. Whatever you do comes out of that. It's like being a woman. No matter what age or even sexual preference, if you're a woman you're a woman” (“Icon” 1997).