Maya Angelou (4 page)

It seems, though, that Maya's greatest love within her family has been for her son, Guy Johnson. In the second and third volumes Maya generally calls her son by the name of Clyde. At the end of
Singin' and Swingin'
, having recovered from his sense of abandonment, Clyde announces, “My name is Guy” (237). Guy insists on this new name and trains his friends and family to accept it. As for his surname, he kept the name Johnson, his mother's maiden name. “He had always had that name. It's a very big and important name for us, my family” (“Icon” 1997). For the sake of clarity, Maya's son will be called “Guy” throughout
The Iconic Self
.

Guy's presence permeates most of the books following
Caged Bird
. He was the source of her problems and the source of her joy. She is his father, his mother, his sister, his teacher, and his inspiration. He was the child she deserted when she was a professional dancer in Europe and the young man who disappointed her terribly when he had an affair with a woman in Ghana older than she was. As McPherson has observed, “Angelou becomes all the forms of family for her child and thus provides him with the security she has craved” (1990, 15).

Guy was also, like his famous mother, a writer. On his page in the African American website
aalbc.com
, he notes that he had been writing since he was eighteen and had tried out his skills in a variety of disciplines: painting, sketching, photography, playing in a band. “The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time” (1). Judging from a sonnet that he read at his mother's funeral, he was also a poet.

Guy Johnson's two novels, published by Random House, were favorably reviewed and are available on
Amazon.com
. The first,
Standing at the Scratch Line
(1998), is a “fast-paced, intelligent, and extremely violent first novel,” which traces the actions of hero LeRoi Tremain after he murders two white lawmen at the beginning of World War I. The second,
Echoes
of a Distant Summer
(2002), concerns the relationship between Jackson St. Clair Tremain and his estranged grandfather. The author has a following at the
Guy Johnson Forum
, where readers are anxiously waiting for more books.

In
A Song Flung Up
Angelou writes that Guy had been “Western Airline's first black junior executive” (176). Guy's status thus recalls his mother's being the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. In our “Icon” interview Angelou mentioned that Guy is now married for the second time. She also implied, without being specific, that he is not in good health: “My son Guy feels that he is losing quite a bit of his mobility. He sits in a wheelchair. So I am designing a large bed-sit so he won't have to come up the steps or down the steps to go to the bedroom” (“Icon” 1997).

Guy's health was a painful issue throughout the autobiographies, from his skin disease in
Singin' and Swingin'
to his broken limbs in
Traveling Shoes
to yet another car accident in
A Song Flung Up
. Angelou's respectful silence concerning Guy is understandable, for his well-being is a matter close to his mother's heart. When asked about her love for her son, she said, “I'll always be a mother. That's really it. If you are really a mother you can let go…. Because love liberates. That's what it does. It says, I love you. Wherever you go, I love you” (“Icon” 1997).

One striking aspect of Angelou's character was her unabashed honesty in describing her ability to love. In her interviews and books, from
Caged Bird
, where she deliberately approached a young man to prove her femininity, to
A Song Flung Up
, where she and Dolly McPherson unwittingly share a handsome African lover, Angelou is open about her sexual relationships. She was married at least three times—first in 1951 or 1952, to a Greek sailor; then, unofficially in 1961, to a South African militant; third, in 1973, to an English builder and writer. Marriage, Angelou told Tricia Crane in 1987, is a serious personal commitment, trivialized by our shallow, soap opera culture. “So I no longer say I've been married X amount of times because I know it will not be understood” (Crane in Elliot 1989, 177).

Angelou discusses her first two marriages in
Singin' and Swingin'
and
The Heart of a Woman
, respectively. The third marriage, to Paul Du Feu, took place in 1973, about seven years after Angelou had returned from Ghana. This relationship occurred too late to have been treated within the framework of the existing autobiographies, although she gives it considerable attention in the book of short essays,
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
(1997).

Du Feu seems to have been the most satisfying and the most supportive man in her life. A celebrity in his own right, he had formerly been married to Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of
The Female Eunuch
,
published in 1970, the same year as
Caged Bird
. Greer, a controversial debater of women's issues, contested the views of television's prime intellectual William F. Buckley, of American novelist Norman Mailer, and of other stouthearted challengers. Angelou claims that she had no prior knowledge of Du Feu's earlier marriage to Greer (Crane 1989, 177).

Du Feu was the author of
Let's Hear It for the Long-Legged Women
, a tantalizing title that I have tried repeatedly to order through
Amazon.com
without success. He had also done a centerfold, almost nude, for the English edition of
Cosmopolitan
, in which his body was sprayed in gold. According to Stephanie Caruana, Du Feu was “the English equivalent of Burt Reynolds” (1989, 30).

When I asked about this amazing husband, Angelou painted him in a more professional light: “I was married to a builder, and he told me and told me that building had nothing to do with strength, physical strength. Nor did it have anything to do with sexuality. Instead, it was a matter of being able to look past a wall to the other side” (“Icon” 1997). He had urged Angelou to tell the truth as a writer and not to let her writings be determined by what her readers would think when, in her second autobiography,
Gather Together
, she revealed that she had been a prostitute. Paul's advice was to be honest about it, to just “say it” (“Icon” 1997).

One of the loveliest segments of
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
is her reminiscence of their marriage. She writes of their life together: “We were a rather eccentric, loving, unusual couple determined to live life with flair and laughter” (1997, 5). But the marriage gradually disintegrated. Looking back at the relationship, Angelou speculates that she and Paul were victims of the houses they bought. In the first house there were so many modern appliances that Paul, an architect, had nothing to fix. In the other, with its view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Maya felt jinxed. Whenever she tried to fry chicken or bake bread, her efforts failed, as if the house hated her. After their separation, Maya moved to North Carolina in order to avoid the pain of running into her or his “replacement” (
Stars
1997, 8). In summarizing her relationship with Paul, she told Tricia Crane, “It was a great marriage, though we wore it out, we just used it up” (1989, 178).

Angelou in no way abandoned her affections for men after she and Du Feu divorced in 1980. She told a reporter: “I really enjoy men,” then added, “I really enjoy women, too, but not sexually” (Crockett 1997, E1, 8). One of the short essays in
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
is “A Song to Sensuality,” in which she describes her love for color, sound, and taste: “I want the crunch of hazelnuts between my teeth and ice cream melting on my tongue” (
Stars
38). Angelou keeps her senses alive, open to sexual experiences but
not dependent on them. As her autobiographies and personal essays reveal, she did not permit any of her sexual relationships to dominate her being.

During the early days of her first marriage to Tosh Angelos, Maya wanted nothing more than to cook and keep house. Her floors were shiny; her meals “well balanced”; and her life a tribute to
Good Housekeeping
, a popular magazine for housewives (
Singin' and Swingin'
26). This attitude did not prevail, nor did the marriage. And when in the late 1960s she began seriously to write, she set up a work schedule as rigorous as any housewife's list of daily chores.

Angelou's schedule is described in a number of interviews. Carol Sarler reported that Angelou got up at five in the morning and drove to a hotel room, where the staff had been instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. “There's me, the Bible,
Roget's Thesaurus
and some good, dry sherry and I'm at work by 6:30” (Angelou, quoted by Sarler, 1989, 216–17). She wrote on legal pads while lying on the bed. Later, at home, she would edit the material, reducing ten or more pages down to four or so. One intriguing aspect of visiting the Maya Angelou Archives at the Schomburg Center is being able to see her actual handwriting on the legal pads and then being able to compare it to her whittled-down, typed or inked revisions.

Given this routine, one might surmise that a good deal of Angelou's success during the years since Accra was based on her self-determination. Following a schedule enabled her to allocate sufficient time and energy for her many projects. The writing ritual, one that she had used for years, indicates a firmness of purpose and a responsible use of time.

Nor should Angelou's writing routine be viewed as some dreadful ordeal that must be over by lunchtime. It was rather a part of the process of living, a time to focus on the adventures of her life, give them form, and make them into art: “Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art” (
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
66).

In Stamps, Arkansas, with Mrs. Flowers and on her own, Maya developed a love for the works of Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Weldon Johnson. At the same time, she was also reading black women writers such as Frances Harper, Georgia Douglas Johnson,
Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset (“Icon” 1997). These writers served as role models and inspirations on Angelou's path toward self-enlightenment.

A well-read individual even as a child, thoroughly committed to words and ideas as a young woman, Marguerite Annie Johnson was graduated with honors in the eighth grade from the Lafayette County Training School in Stamps. Soon after, in 1941, the thirteen-year-old Maya and her brother left the familiarity of their grandmother's store for their mother's boardinghouse in San Francisco, where Vivian Baxter lived with her new husband, a gambler named Daddy Clidell. She attended George Washington High School where she was befriended by Miss Kirwin, a teacher who, like Mrs. Flowers from Stamps, took a special interest in Maya's education. She also received a scholarship to study dance and theater at the California Labor (Mission) School. She graduated from George Washington High School in 1945, at the end World War II, more than eight months into her pregnancy with Guy.

The autobiographies, especially
Caged Bird
and
Gather Together
, are very much concerned with what Maya knew and how she learned it. As the reader is quick to discover, her most intense learning resulted from personal relationships: family, travel, and growing up as a black woman in white America.

When
A Song Flung Up
was published in 2002, Maya Angelou was seventy-four years of age. By then her life was rich in achievements of a personal, political, and artistic nature, enough to make one breathless. This section provides a representative list of Angelou's accomplishments in a number of art forms—poetry; children's books; musings; writing for theater, television, and film; directing; acting; cookbooks; and oral presentation.

Many followers of Maya Angelou have identified her as poet first, an autobiographer second. Angelou reportedly wrote her first poem when she was fifteen (Hagen 1997, 19). She was still writing major poetry until 2013, one year before her death. Speech, writing, and song were in her mind-interwoven disciplines. In my 1997 “Icon” interview, her answers to the questions I asked about the art of autobiography were constantly disrupted by spontaneous recitations or by switching the topic; often she illustrated her comments with song.

As a child, Angelou was affected by the ideas and rhythms of lyric poetry. In
Caged Bird
she is quite specific in acknowledging her debt to William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Weldon Johnson. In the interview of June 16, 1997, Angelou insisted that black women poets also affected her; she mentioned in particular Georgia Douglas Johnson, a poet who wrote with emotion about gender and from whom she took the title of her fourth autobiography,
The Heart of a Woman
. Other black women poets the young Angelou admired were Frances Harper and Anne Spencer: “Frances Harper meant a lot to me. Georgia Douglas Johnson. Anne Spencer. And Jessie Fauset” (“Icon” 1997). In one of the reflections that appeared in
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
(42) Angelou quoted from Frances Harper's poem, “The Slave Auction.” Anne Spencer (1882–1975) appealed to Angelou for her poignant ballad, “Lady, Lady” (1925), about a servant whose hands had been bleached white from detergent, and for other ballads illustrating the oppression of black women. Jessie Fauset (1884–1961) was a poet known for being the literary editor of
The Crisis
, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, a renowned black intellectual. Fauset was the most prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, which roughly covered the years 1919 to 1929, and one of its most educated spokespersons. It is possible that from Fauset Angelou obtained models for plot construction, character development, and the centrality of the mother/child motif.