Maya Angelou (30 page)

Another short-lived friendship is with Grace Nuamah. Ghana's most esteemed folk dancer, Nuamah had the responsibility of performing at major state functions. She also taught dance at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, where Angelou held her job of administrative assistant. One day Nuamah announced that her faculty pay was missing. Maya later recovers Grace's missing money, which she discovers in a brown envelope on the desk. In thanks, Nuamah generously introduces Maya to an eligible male friend, Mr. Abatanu.

Unfortunately, Abatanu dislikes Maya's directness and she his pretensions. After the failed matchmaking, Grace expresses disappointment with Maya's behavior, for she had offered the valuable male friend as a favor. A woman trained in African traditions, insists Grace, would have accepted the kind offer. Angelou's insensitivity to African customs signals the end of their closeness. She mentions Grace Nuamah only one more time in the text, listing her among the group of colleagues bidding her farewell at the Accra airport.

Angelou is not always so discouraging when approached by African men. Recalling her affectionate portrayals of dancing partner R. L. Poole
in
Gather Together in My Name
and of fiancé Thomas Allen and Allen's rival Vus Make in
The Heart of a Woman
, it is apparent that she enjoyed her physical intimacy with black men. The most romantically depicted male in
Traveling Shoes
is Sheikhali, a wealthy importer from Mali, a country southwest of Ghana. She describes him as “sublimely handsome,” very tall, with dark skin and elegant robes (66). She agrees to go to his apartment and soon afterward Sheikhali proposes marriage, but there is a hitch. As is customary among Muslim men in West Africa, he already has eight children from two women, only one of them his wife. He wants Maya to be his second wife, willing to adapt to the marriage customs of Mali and reject her “White woman way” of being impatient (94). As a strong and independent woman, Maya finds his proposition unacceptable.

Many of the African men whom she admires are prominent in Ghanaian politics. She is an ardent supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian president who helped found the Pan-African movement in the 1940s and 1950s and the Organization of African Unity in 1963. His leadership was overthrown in 1966, a few years after Angelou's departure. After he was deposed, Angelou stated that her presence there would be unstable and that she would not return (Caruana 1989, 33).

The legendary tribal chief Nana Nketsia satisfied Angelou's yearning for a place within both cultures. He held impressive British degrees and was the first African vice chancellor of the University of Ghana; at the same time he was a Ghanaian leader, paramount chief of the Ahanta people. One evening Nana Nketsia sends his chauffeur to Maya's bungalow with instructions that she come to his palace. She is impressed with the elegant sofas and spacious surroundings. He introduces her to nationally recognized poet Kwesi Brew. During the conversation, Nana reveals his booming voice and his fierce pride at being an African, what Angelou ironically calls “the passion of self-appreciation” (110). Kwesi Brew, more even-tempered, explains Ghanaian traditions and proposes a toast in honor of the African character. Kwesi Brew becomes her special friend, someone who protects her when they travel together. Angelou repeated to an interviewer what Brew said about her to a foreign authority: “She may not be a Ghanaian, but she is a sister” (Randall-Tsuruta 1989, 106). The powerful “Nana” or chief appears frequently in
Traveling Shoes
and, as I have argued, may have played an important role in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
(Lupton 2003, 1–6). Both the Nana and Brew participate in her sendoff at the Accra airport.

Most of Angelou's encounters with African women and men are positive ones that contribute to her growing intoxication with Africa as she tries to learn about her heritage. Angelou's identification with the Mother Continent is personal and patriotic. Her stature and skin color indicate her
African ancestry, but so do the cultural contributions of American/African people, whose blues songs, shouts, and gospels echo the rhythms of West Africa. Le Roi Jones affirmed the connection between African and American Negro music in his book
Blues People
(1963), when he wrote that the blues and other black forms “could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives” (17).

Maya Angelou, as both narrator and central character in her iconic story, is concerned with capturing the rhythms of Africa as they affect her reinvigorated ties with her ancestors. In her travels through West Africa she discovers certain connections between her American traditions and those of her ancestors. She considers herself almost home when an African woman, Foriwa, identifies her as one of the Bambara group on the basis of similarities in height, hair, and skin color. She connects with a number of African mother figures, among them Patience Aduah, who, like Momma Henderson, is generous in giving away food to the people of her village.

When she first comes to Accra Angelou wants to nestle into Ghana “as a baby nuzzles in a mother's arms” (19). This fantasy subsides as she realizes that the Ghanaians are not always interested in extending the embrace. She notices that the black Americans in her group share similar delusions of being loved by the Ghanaians. The Revolutionist Returnees come to Africa full of desire, and hate being ignored or misunderstood in their new home. Always in search of home, Angelou realizes that she must remain a while longer in Ghana if she is to uncover the fullness of spirit and depth of character toward which she strives. Her ambivalent attitude toward living in Ghana provides
Traveling Shoes
with its richness of texture and depth of analysis. Angelou invariably tries to make connections to decrease the differences between the culture of the ancestors and the culture of the slaves.

When Angelou listens to one of Nana Nketsia's speeches, for instance, she notices that the chief's majestic voice captures the rhythms of black preachers and that the African experience is similar to her own background. She is caught between identifying with things African and using African culture as a way to acknowledge the abandoned country of her birth. Her need, here and elsewhere, to underline Ghanaian associations with African American parallels demonstrates what Dolly A. McPherson, echoing W.E.B. DuBois, calls Maya's “double-consciousness”—a vision of her “self” that contains both African and American components (1990, 113). Through her identification with Africa, Angelou finds the context in which to explore her selfhood and to reaffirm the meaning of motherhood.

Angelou's self-discovery is augmented when she temporarily leaves the African continent in the mid-1960s to tour Berlin and Venice in a limited number of performances of Genet's
The Blacks
with the original cast.
Her view of Berlin involves a meticulously drawn account of the German mentality, which is balanced against the warm reunion with the original off-Broadway cast, among them such familiar names as Cicely Tyson, the star of
Sounder
(1972) and a co-star in the 2011 film,
The Help
; Lou Gossett Jr., who has had numerous supporting or leading film roles, including
The Deep
(1977),
An Officer and a Gentleman
(1982), and the BET television series
The Book of Negroes
(2015); and the beloved actor James Earl Jones, recognized for being the voice of Darth Vadar in the
Star Wars
series (1977–1983) and for his outstanding performances in film and theater, including
The Great White Hope
(1970), M
atewan
(1987), and
The Best Man
(2012).

In the foreign, theatrical setting of Berlin, Angelou revives her passion for African American culture and values, putting them into perspective as she weighs them against Germany's history of military aggression. In 1914, in World War I, Germany, in alliance with Austria-Hungary and several other nations, declared war on France and Russia. Twenty-five years later, in 1939, Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and then Poland. In World War II, more than six million Jews were exterminated because the leader of the Nazi party, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), deemed Jews, as well as Negroes and Gypsies, to be racially inferior.

Angelou and the other actors angrily recalled the story of U.S. athlete Jesse Owens, the track star who won four gold medals in the Olympic games of 1936, which were held in Berlin. Owens set several Olympic records during these games, as well as a world record with the United States 400-meter relay team. But Hitler, then chancellor of Germany, refused to recognize Owens's triumphs because they invalidated his theory of a master race—a race of Aryans genetically superior to other ethnic groups. On the argument that Jesse Owens was racially inferior, Hitler denied the athlete his rightful claim to the medals.

One morning, fortified by the presence of an uninvited Israeli actor named Torvash, Maya accepts a breakfast invitation with a well-to-do German family whom she suspects shares similar notions of racial inferiority. At the gathering, family members and guests take turns telling stories about race. Angelou relates the Brer Rabbit story in which the threatened animal outwits the oppressor. The German tells a parable in which a bird, symbolizing a Jew, is trampled in dung. The verbal violence of the narratives escalates to such a point that Angelou becomes sick in the garden. Her disgust is by no means lessened when she learns that the host, a collector of African art, has only invited her to his home because he hopes that she will get him some good buys in Ghanaian folk art.

Angelou says little about the performances in Venice, other than to mention the disturbing fact that angry protesters picketed
The Blacks
for its sexual content, calling Genet's play “filth” (175). Despite the potential for confrontation, the cast manages to go onstage without major incident. The theater sequence ends and Angelou retraces her steps, reentering Africa by way of Egypt. Although her character growth is primarily nurtured in a West African setting, her encounters in Italy and especially in Germany help shape and broaden her constantly changing vision. The mixture of fascist surroundings, black performances, and Jewish survival sharpens her perceptions of African Americans at home and abroad. These perceptions contribute to her reclaiming herself and to her evolution as a citizen of the world. The universality of experience in
Traveling Shoes
anticipates, to some degree, the acclaimed poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” read three decades later at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In this powerful ode, Angelou addresses all the people of the world, including the Germans. The evocative poem has a worldly wise maturity to it, a wisdom that must be attributed in part to her knowledge of the countless places she has been.

As a character, Maya clearly demonstrates her maturity in
Traveling Shoes
. She matures as a mother who, concerned for the well-being of her son, is apparently willing to let him go his own way, both in terms of his sexual options and in his determination to reside in Ghana. She matures as a woman, no longer the victim of good-looking men but one who can assess mutual motives and feelings. She matures as an African American, able to perceive the roots of her identity and capable of cultivating those roots into a consciousness that affects her whole personality.

The themes that Angelou develops most fully in her fifth volume are motherhood, race, and the search for an African identity. As we have seen throughout this work, motherhood is Angelou's most uniform theme and in
Traveling Shoes
it is consistently presented, from its beginning, where Maya awaits reports of her son's injuries, to its close, where she ends her conflict with her son, bidding him farewell. The theme of motherhood does not, however, consume the text, as it does in
Gather Together in My Name
or
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
.

In
Traveling Shoes
, perhaps because she is a seasoned mother or perhaps because she is looking for a positive way to close the autobiography, Angelou develops a theme of motherhood which suggests liberation. Her
initial response to Guy's announced independence is to retreat quietly into the corners of his life, knowing that she can no longer keep him under her wing. These feelings are complicated by a mutual recognition that part of motherhood is letting go: they both need to be free of one another. The narrator keeps confrontation at a minimum, with the mother/child opposition dramatized only twice; first, when she challenges Guy with the news that he is having an affair; and second, when he announces, following her return from the Genet tour, that Maya's mothering is finished and that his life “belongs to me” (186).

It seems that by the time the fifth book ends, Guy has reached that stage of development where, as one of God's children, he has earned the right to wear traveling shoes. While these shoes will carry him away from his mother, they simultaneously confirm his autonomy, his independence. Yet it is not the end, for as Angelou insists, motherhood is never over. From her account of Guy's car accident, to her affectionate remarks about her own mother and grandmother, to placing her son in an Africa from which she herself felt excluded, Angelou infuses her autobiographies with maternal consciousness. What is more, the theme of motherhood is reflected in numerous subthemes: Angelou's affection for Kojo, the Ghanaian houseboy; her delight in being called by the African title “Auntie” by Nana Nketsia's charming children and by other children from Cairo or from the outskirts of Accra. The phrase has a maternal connotation that pleases her.

In
Traveling Shoes
, the theme of motherhood parallels the theme of race, indicated on one level by Angelou's quest for acceptance by Mother Africa. The paradoxical term Mother Africa, which she uses occasionally, is a popular one that has been articulated by numerous West African and American writers of the twentieth century. The Senegalese poet David Diop, for example, uses the phrase as both title and subject in “Africa (to my Mother)” (1961). From a more critical perspective, race is a theme through which Angelou illustrates connections and confrontations. She extends her awareness of racial antagonisms to include not only the struggles between Africans and Americans but also between Germans and Jews. The racial components of these cultures, interwoven and inseparable, provide Angelou with rich opportunities for thematic development.