Maya Angelou (31 page)

Finally, Angelou links racial matters to her relationship with Africa and to her desire to be rooted. The Dark Continent calls so loudly that it becomes a desired presence, embodied in the figures of a dancer, a chief, a laughing ancestor. Lyman B. Hagen, in his 1997 book on Angelou, compares her quest for identity to the one Alex Haley describes in
Roots
(1976), a book that heavily influenced African American attitudes toward Africa. However,
becoming African is an unattainable goal that falls outside of her desire for assimilation: “Whether she likes it or not, she begins to discover that she is a Black American, and that in Africa she is a Black American in exile” (McPherson 1990, 113).

Woven into her self-discovery are her feelings of guilt as a citizen of the United States of America, a country instrumental in maintaining a slave trade for almost 250 years. By extension, the theme of racial identity encompasses a variety of other motifs: ancestry, cultural differences, suffering, inequality, and homecoming. These thematic issues function simultaneously with plot to lend a dynamic configuration to Angelou's autobiographical statements.

In
Traveling Shoes
Angelou makes superb use of language in recording moments of emotional intensity. At the beginning of the narrative she describes going back and forth from the hospital, emerging from the cool interior into the bright sunlight as she herself drifts in and out of her son's pain, which is also her pain. During the summer of 1962 she feels “gobbled” down. The days remind her of “fat men yawning after a sumptuous dinner” (4).

Later, she records the horrors of slavery as she travels through western Ghana, known for Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle, former holding forts for slaves. Angelou imaginatively captures the agony of being a slave. She observes the now-quiet forts and envisions bloodied people, silently enduring their chains: “They lived in a mute territory, dead to feeling and protest” (97). The potency of the passage is reinforced through simple language and repeated images of silence, an image Angelou has used in other volumes but most significantly in
Caged Bird
. Her use of the word
mute
emphasizes the silent misery of the slaves and Angelou's personal connection to them and their agony. Her written words in this eulogy attempt to break the silence of that “mute territory” inhabited by the enslaved Africans, who were never free to respond to their assailants or to narrate the grim story of their captivity.

Angelou's language in capturing the final separation from the Africa of her ancestors has an awesome potency, a feeling of loss. But she does not allow the book to end on a desolate note, choosing instead to create, in the last full paragraph, a praise song that stands apart from her softer, more subtle style. In an extremely condensed history of slavery in America, she evokes the blues, the dance, the gospel, as they were carried through the streets of Massachusetts and Alabama, changed but still African; for Africa
is still in the body and in the hips, in a “wide open laughter” (209). This passage, which represents the author at her most jubilant, is followed by one simple concluding statement: “I could nearly hear the old ones chuckling” (209). In a book that constantly alternates between African and African American voices, Angelou gives the last words to the “old ones,” to her Ghanaian ancestors, but filtered through her own experiences and the rich traditions of the spiritual and cultural forms that are part of the oral folk tradition. Yet her identification with the oral tradition of West Africa is not a permanent choice. For Angelou recognizes, at the end of
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, that if she is to become a contemporary writer, she must put on her traveling shoes for the long journey home.

In 1984 the influential critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. published an essay, “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign of the Signifying Monkey.” This essay, which became the foundation for Gates's 1988 book,
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
, is a crucial text in the development of black thought. His essay helped transform black studies into a sophisticated procedure for examining and categorizing African American literature.

Gates applies the term signifying or “signifyin(g),” to the functions of black speech patterns as well as to the process of echoing earlier African American traditions, motifs, or figures of speech within a particular text. The trickster, the Signifying Monkey, is a descendent of Esu-Elegbara, the West African figure who “dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language” (1984, 286). Signifying is a message system, a strategy of communication. As its emissary, the Signifying Monkey is the conveyer of multiple meanings and interpretations in the literature of the African diaspora—areas populated by black Africans as a result of the slave trade.

Angelou, who is familiar with the term signifying, uses it to describe the way in which older black women—much like Gates's African-born trickster monkey—use words and speech patterns to assert their verbal power: “The process is called signifying, and has an African origin” (
Stars
137–38). One might attribute Angelou's abundant verbal punning in the autobiographies to her signifying self: to her verbal strength as she portrays the power and duality of her relationships.

Gates's sensitivity to signifying in African American literature allows him to unveil the repeated black verbal patterns in Zora Neale Hurston's
Their
Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), a book whose forerunners, he claims, are Frederick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(1845) and W.E.B. Du Bois's novel,
The Quest of the Silver Fleece
(1911). Gates, who convincingly demonstrates the signifying connection between Alice Walker's
The Color Purple
(1982) and Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), believes that critics of African American literature must read modern texts against earlier ones. He argues: “Our literary tradition exists, because of these precisely chartable formal literary relationships, relationships of signifying” (1984, 290).

In the search for illustrations of signifying in the African American literary tradition, the slave narrative is a particularly fertile source. Although Gates does not refer to Maya Angelou in either “The Blackness of Blackness” or
The Signifying Monkey
, other critics discuss her echoing of the slave narrative. Dolly McPherson, for example, argues that the similarities between Angelou's autobiographies and slave narratives result from their sharing “a quest that will encourage the development of an authentic self” (1990, 121). Selwyn R. Cudjoe stresses this connection by citing a quote from a slave narrative to introduce his 1984 essay on Angelou and autobiography. It is also relevant that Angelou confirmed these opinions when she told interviewer George Plimpton (1990; rpt. 1994) that she was “following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative” (16).
Chapter 2
discusses Angelou's use of this form in relationship to slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, whose pen name was Linda Brent. My alternative reading focuses on Brent's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861), in an attempt to illustrate the process of signifying.

In
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, Angelou reiterates certain familiar patterns of the African American slave narrative—the journey; the quest for freedom; empathy for the horrors suffered by slaves. Angelou's outrage against slavery, expressed in the Cape Coast Castle passage and elsewhere, repeats the condemnation of the slave system recorded by articulate slave narrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. The condemnation of slavery is central to Brent's plot. In her chapter on local slaveholders she describes the kinds of punishment to which slaves were submitted: they were burned by being hung in the air over a fire; clubbed or starved or mauled to death; tied to a tree in the freezing wind. A woman slave had no value other than to reproduce. If she refused she was whipped or shot. Women, reports Brent, “are on a par with animals” (1861, 380).

Brent's focus, like Angelou's a century later, is on motherhood—on the need to preserve one's offspring. Despite escaping, Brent is unable to desert her children. For seven years in her journey to freedom Linda Brent is
immobile, concealed in a windowless garret, unable to touch the children who play below her gaze. Brent's greatest source of anguish, greater than the threat of being raped and beaten by her master, Dr. Flint, is her fear of losing her children.

The slave mother's misery throughout the garret narrative is mental and physical. Mentally, she doubts that she will be reunited with her family; physically, her cramped body, pinned in the attic and exposed to wind and rain, duplicates her constricted mental state—as it duplicates the anguish of any African bound by the shackles of the slave system. In a section titled “The Children Sold” Brent depicts the torment of separation: “I bit my lips till the blood came to keep from crying out. Were my children with their grandmother, or had the speculator carried them off? The suspense was dreadful” (111). She compares this moment to “the darkest cloud that hung over my life” (112).

In
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, Maya Angelou, like Linda Brent before her, occupies a restricted geographical space. Confined to Ghana because of Guy's car accident, her solitary visits to his hospital room echo Brent's lonely contemplation over the loss of her daughter, Ellen, sold as a child to another master. Admittedly, Angelou is more privileged than the slave women who endured the atrocities of the plantation system. But her roots in that system, rediscovered during her journey through eastern Ghana, are vivid reminders of being descended from slavery.

Other critics have touched on the similarities and differences between Linda Brent and Maya Angelou, particularly in the related themes of rape, separation, confinement, and black womanhood. Mary Vermillion, for example, argues that both autobiographers challenge the racial stereotypes inherent in white literature by celebrating the black female and transforming personal suffering into a symbol for the confinement of African Americans in general (1992, 250).

It is also important, in a discussion of signifying, to mention Angelou's debt to Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, a novel filled with dramatic episodes and dominated by the themes of travel, female strength, male/female relationships, and the quest for a home. In a panoramic sweep, Hurston had created a unique vision of black life in Florida; like Hurston, but especially in
Heart of a Woman
and
Traveling Shoes
, Angelou offers a wide-lens view of Africa and central Europe, recorded by an African American woman. At the end of
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, Janie Crawford, the central character, uses the metaphor of the fish-net to illustrate how she must gather together the memories of her world: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist
of the world and draped it over her shoulder” (184). Maya Angelou, at the edge of the airport in West Africa, on the eastern shore of the Great Atlantic, waits, like her foremother, to drape her memories over her writer's shoulder and bear them home.

In the last several pages of
Traveling Shoes
, Maya Angelou signifies the slave within herself as she narrates her effect on certain Africans, descended from a plundered people, who recognized her as a relative. At the same time, she praises the African American culture born of that history and senses that as an artist and writer, she has a designated place within it, that she “signifies” it.

Angelou's journey from Africa back to America is in certain ways a restatement of the historical phase known as mid-passage, when slaves were brutally transported in ships from West Africa to the so-called New World. Angelou shows a deep identification with the victims of mid-passage. Remnants of that journey burn in her memory, shaping her identity with her ancestors and the structure of the autobiography itself.

Part of her narrative mission is to take the stories of Africans back with her to the United States, to those whose ancestors survived the horrendous transportation of slaves from West Africa to the Americas. In returning from Accra, as Malcolm X had advised, Angelou is able to bring to her country a firsthand account of a continent that most African Americans have deeply felt but rarely visited. Her memorable search for roots has reverberated in her countless interviews on television, in periodicals, and in the popular press. As one of the best known of all contemporary autobiographers, Maya Angelou extended a tradition initiated by slaves and continually reimagined by popular writers of African descent.

Chapter 8