Maya Angelou (20 page)

Womanist
is a more appropriate term than
feminist
for identifying Angelou's attitudes toward black women in
Gather Together
. Novelist Alice Walker popularized the term
womanist
in the introductory section of
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
(1967) to make explicit the racial distinctions between black feminists and white feminists. A womanist is a “black feminist or feminist of color,” wrote Walker. “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” The color purple indicates strength, power, and woman/love, what Walker calls “being grown up,” as opposed to the less forceful, lavender qualities of the white feminist movement. According to Deborah King, a “womanist is spirited and spiritual, determined and decisive, committed to struggle and convinced of victory” (quoted in Tierney 1991, 390).

Black women in America committed themselves to the struggle for civil rights well over one hundred years ago, in associations such as the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston and the more broadly based National Association of Colored Women. A year before the publication of
Caged Bird
, black poet Sonia Sanchez introduced a course, “The Black Woman,” at the University of Pittsburgh, the first college course to concentrate on the experiences of black women in the Americas (Tierney 1989, 45). If black women have not displayed a great interest in feminism as defined since the 1970s by white women, it is because of racism in the women's movement, claims Deborah King, who outlines the three major items on the womanist agenda: first, establishing positive images among black women; second, recognizing that race, class, and gender play a part in the oppression of black women; and third, becoming increasingly aware of the cultural heritage of black women (quoted in Tierney 1991, 42–44).

With her focus on positive self-image, race, gender, and black women's heritage, Maya Angelou fits the cultural definition of “womanist” far more comfortably than she fits the category of “feminist.” Although she does not ascribe to labels, she did tell one interviewer that if she was a female she
was of course a feminist. “I'd be stupid not to be on my own side” (Forma 1989, 162).

Because
Gather Together
takes place in the mid-1940s, the character known as Maya would have had no contact with the theories of either womanism or feminism. These terms did not become significant to women's thinking until 1963, when Betty Friedan published her explosive book
The Feminine Mystique
, arguing that women did not need to be tied exclusively to the roles of mother and homemaker. In many ways, Angelou's life had been a constant struggle to prove, long before Betty Friedan, that she could have a career as well as a child, although the immature eighteen-year-old protagonist of
Gather Together
was hardly thinking in such sophisticated terms. A single mother needed a job; it was that simple.

Maya's sense of being a black woman centers on economic survival. In her effort to stay afloat, she epitomizes Walker's definition of a womanist as one who often exhibits “outrageous, audacious, courageous or
willful
behavior” (1967, xi, Walker's emphasis). One example of Maya's outrageous behavior is her slick-talking proposal to Johnnie Mae and Beatrice that they set up a whorehouse with Maya as the Madam. With no prior experience, with no idea of the legal consequences, Maya acts outrageously and audaciously in manipulating the two women. At the same time, she is courageous when she interrupts L. D. Tolbrook at home, demanding that he help her retrieve her son, kidnapped by Big Mary Dalton.

According to Alice Walker, a womanist is
willful
, in the sense of indicating a positive expression of the black female self. In G
ather Together
Maya shows strong evidence of being willful. From her initial decision to leave her mother to her final decision to return to her, Maya acts in a self-determined way. At times she fantasizes about being married and protected, but she rejects these dreams as unrealistic. For the most part, she directs her own course of events. She willfully disrupts a prizefight when a friend is beaten, knowing she will lose her job. She willfully challenges the salesgirl in Stamps who blocks her way, knowing she may lose her grandmother's affection. She willfully decides to give up all thoughts of heroin after she witnesses Troubadour's undoing, knowing that if she doesn't she may lose her life. In her willfulness, Maya at eighteen is a forerunner of Walker's iconic womanist: “Responsible. In charge.
Serious
” (1967, xi, Walker's emphasis).

Chapter 5

When Angelou's second volume,
Gather Together in My Name
, reached its conclusion, Maya, luckily released from a life of drug addiction and prostitution, vowed to maintain her innocence. In the following volume,
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
, Maya, now in her early twenties, displays a sense of self-rejection that negates the more positive ending of
Gather Together
. She's too tall, too skinny. Her teeth stick out. Her hair is “kinked” (4). She is distrustful of people who show an interest in her. How similar this portrait is to the beginning of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, where she believes herself to be ugly and deplores her ruffled purple dress. The description is also reminiscent of negative self-images in other autobiographies by African American women, for example, in the early pages of Zora Neale Hurston's
Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942), or in the racial confusion experienced by bell hooks when her parents gave her white dolls when she longed for “unwanted, unloved brown dolls covered in dust” (1996, 24).

For the lonely Maya, the major escape is contemporary music. She frequently visits a record store on Fillmore Street in Los Angeles, a place with turntables and stalls for listening to the newest records. Here she is befriended by a white woman, Louise Cox, who offers the suspicious Maya a job. Here she meets her first husband, Tosh Angelos.

Throughout this troubled autobiography, Angelou's emotions are focused on her son, Guy. She marries Tosh Angelos, in part to please her son. But the marriage is not workable and ends in divorce. Maya is once again a single mother—once again the person responsible for Guy's needs, his well-being,
his survival. Her achievements and failures as a mother-identified woman conflict with her aspirations for a career. These antagonisms form a pattern of tensions in this, Angelou's most complex volume.

Angelou's conflicts are concentrated in three basic areas: her marriage; her responsibilities as a mother, daughter, and granddaughter; and her desire to experience the joy of her
self
. Two incidents in particular contribute to the feelings of dissatisfaction that permeate the book. One is the death of Maya's beloved grandmother, Momma Henderson; the other is Angelou's characterization of herself as someone out of tune, someone whose confusion over priorities leads her to certain regrettable errors in judgment. In the final scene, set in Hawaii, these uncertainties are partially resolved.

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
marks a historical moment in the history of African American autobiography. At this time, no other well-known black female autobiographer had taken her story into a third volume. Maya Angelou's decision to keep going affects point of view, for there is now a narrator who is telling her life story in three distinct but connected segments, each linked to the other by the changing central character and by the first-person point of view. In extending her story into a third frame, Angelou deviates from the more contained autobiographical pattern, which tends to begin in a moment of revelation and to end at some decisive moment in the autobiographer's life, as in
Black Elk Speaks
(1932), which begins in boyhood and ends in the emptiness of reservation life following the 1890 massacre of the Sioux nation at Wounded Knee. Black Elk's story has a strong sense of tradition; the narrator relies on established cultural myths and dream figures, using repetition in order to affirm the importance of Native American life.
Singin' and Swingin'
lacks this kind of assured uniformity.

During our interview Angelou seemed very concerned that her serial autobiography would not result in repetition: “Somehow, if one thing tells the truth and were able to say it, then that thing is enough. You don't have to tell it again and again. If you've told it so delicious that it seeped in by osmosis, then you've done it” (“Icon” 1997). Osmosis is defined as a process in which a fluid passes through a cell wall or some other lining, leading to a spreading or diffusion of liquids. For Angelou to use that concept to explain the writing process, especially when she needs to structure multiple volumes of material, seems to indicate a lack of control. Later in the interview she did acknowledge the need to consciously repeat certain material: “Some things which are repetitive can be boring and really not serve you
well. Some things, on the other hand, which seem to make the point again, if they are extended or if another color is put in, are okay because that does drive the point” (“Icon” 1997).

Angelou's third installment reveals her good traits while also exposing her weak ones, so that what emerges is the familiar narrator who has become more dynamic, more open. Her use of flashbacks and flashforwards enables her to move up and down the narrative scale, for instance, when she recalls Momma Henderson selling meat pies to workers or Vivian Baxter making good money as she “ran businesses and men with autocratic power” (11). Both recollections extend the point of view from an individual to a collective one; it is not only Angelou's pride that is at stake, it is the family's. The Baxters and Johnsons exercised “unlimited authority” in their financial affairs (10), to the point that welfare is not a job alternative. The narrator's memories of her enterprising family members serve as connective threads, helping to create a sense of unity among the individual volumes of the series.

Throughout this work structure is defined as an arrangement of the story according to the motif of movement or travel, while setting is the number of locations where specific events unfold. The first two volumes occupy a varied American setting represented by Arkansas, Missouri, and California. In
Singin' and Swingin'
the setting breaks open, shifting from its American focus to include a European location. The expanded setting continues throughout the remaining autobiographies: volume 4,
The Heart of a Woman
, takes place in California, New York, Europe, and Egypt; volume 5,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, ends in West Africa and anticipates Angelou's return to America, volume 6 marks her return to New York, then to San Francisco, to Hawaii, to California, and back to New York.

The movement from one journey to another establishes the narrative form, both in the single volume and in the series as a whole, with interconnected routes denoting places where action occurs. Angelou's autobiographies are informed not only by her experiments in structure but also by her journey into Asian, African, and African American literature. In her view, anyone who emerges from the journey of life is an autobiographer. She thus draws all of God's children into her encompassing definition of what makes an autobiographer: “Each one is an autobiographer…. So I think we're all on journeys, according to how we're able to travel, overcome, undercome, and share what we have learned” (“Icon” 1997). The scattered adventures into song, dance, and men that give
Gather Together
in My Name
its chaotic structure are more organized and tightened up in
Singin' and Swingin'
, where the most sustained journey is Angelou's European adventure.

In 1954, Maya becomes the lead dancer with the touring company of
Porgy and Bess
. Her extensive coverage of the tour, which accounts for about 40 percent of the third volume, indicates how very important it was to her life. On the European tour, Angelou carefully details the course of travel, dividing the journey into subgroups: the plane to Milan, the bus from the Milan airport, the fast train or Blue Train from Venice to Paris, the astounded crowd preventing her movement in Yugoslavia, and so forth. In recording her momentous journey, Angelou's point of view is that of an aware and articulate black woman who does not hesitate to make racial generalizations. Angelou is quite conscious, for instance, of the white personnel in European hotels and of how they react to the lively African American cast. She listens to a wealthy white French woman, who remarks that West Africans living in Paris are hated but black Americans are not. She notices that Italians tend to approve of black Americans but not white ones (147). Her observations of race, gender, and class, along with the personality that she brings to every situation, prevent
Singin' and Swingin'
from becoming a travel narrative.