Maya Angelou (6 page)

Although the title suggests that the book will develop the theme of the journey that dominates her autobiographies, the journeys that occur between its pages are more contemplative than narrative, reminiscent of traditional Asian poetry or of the kind of short meditations dating back to the
Analects
of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC). Whereas the Confucian reflections were told by a male to males, Angelou alters the traditional gender expectations in both books of musings, rendering her advice from a woman's perspective.

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
is a tiny book, consisting of a mere 139 pages. Nonetheless, Angelou manages to say a lot within the
scope of the text, on topics that range from instructions on how to be creative with fabrics to profound issues dealing with death, racism, Christianity, and West African religious beliefs. There are also solid representations of Angelou's quoted sayings, including the well-known statement: “Human beings are more alike than unalike” (11).

The book is at its best when it is autobiographical—when it recounts episodes involving Maya's brother or son or mother or grandmother, or when it presents a separate episode consistent with the Maya character of the autobiographies. The section, “New Directions,” for instance, further relates the heroic story from
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
about how Annie Henderson saved her family during the Great Depression by selling homemade meat pies to area factory workers. Other segments involving Annie Henderson include a fantasy in which Maya sees her grandmother standing “thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible” (74). This exaggerated description of Annie's physical and spiritual power is reminiscent of similar scenes in
Caged Bird
, although the mystery of Annie's faith seems less convincing here because it is treated briefly and outside the broader autobiographical framework.

In a comparable sketch, Angelou creates an engaging portrait of her Aunt Tee from Los Angeles, an old woman who had spent almost sixty years working for white families and observing the sadness of their lives. As her employers began to age and no longer need her services, Aunt Tee started to throw parties every Saturday night, with fried chicken, dancing, and card playing. One night she discovers her elderly employers peeking in at the party, begging to be allowed to just sit and watch. The Aunt Tee vignette is effective, although Angelou uses it not as a narrative in itself but as a springboard to reflect on life and art and money and power, a typical technique in constructing an essay. This kind of sketch, interesting as it might be, demands the structural cohesion of the longer, autobiographical work to make it part of a larger pattern and not a mere snippet.

Of the various autobiographical moments in
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
, the one that seems to sustain itself most effectively is “Extending the Boundaries.” The seven-page story is sufficiently developed to convey a narrative sense; it also gives us a Maya with the three-dimensional sophistication of character that we find in
The Heart of a Woman
, in
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, and in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
; she is a woman admired for her achievements but pitied for her inappropriate behavior and faulty conclusions.

In “Extending the Boundaries,” Angelou describes being honored in the late 1960s at Terry's Pub, a bar for “the black and hip in New York City” (107), after having been named the
New York Post
's Person of the
Week. The regulars toast and cheer her and then eventually go back to their accustomed patterns. Having drunk at least five martinis and desperately in search of a partner, she interrupts a group of African American journalists and begins a litany of her skills in housekeeping, cooking, languages, and lovemaking. She demands to know why, with all of those qualities, she isn't acceptable to them. In a painful moment of self-awareness, Angelou realizes that she had “overstepped the written rules which I knew I should have respected. Instead, I had brazenly and boldly come to their table and spoken out on, of all things, loneliness” (111). She starts to cry.

Later she is escorted home by a sympathetic but critical male friend, who leaves her at the door. After she sobers up, she begins to reflect on her marriage to Tosh Angelos and on her sexuality in general. Because the marriage to Tosh had failed, she has been determined not to look for love except among African Americans. Her experience with the black men in the bar, though, had somehow changed her opinion. If a man came along, whatever his race, she would “not struggle too hard” as long as he was sincere and could make her laugh (113).

This mini-episode, seemingly detached from the autobiographies, is nonetheless related to them by way of her needs, her aggressiveness, her lack of control. Similar in tone to the embarrassing quarrel with her husband's mistress in
The Heart of a Woman
and to the angry exchange with a man who tries to pick her up in a bar in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
, “Exceeding the Boundaries” reveals a narrator more distraught and misguided than would be expected in a more conventional self-portrait. The pervading autobiographical content saves
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
from its tendency to sermonize on proper conduct or virtue, as in the sermon on death (“Death and the Legacy”) or the several paragraphs on the morality of planting and cultivation (“At Harvestime”).

Even the Stars Look Lonesome
was published in 1997, four years after
Journey
. It is similar in emphasis and layout, although the text is six pages longer. At the time of our interview, Angelou was proofing the final copy and confidently anticipating the release of
Stars
: “I think it's the best writing I've ever done” (“Icon” 1997).The book of reflections candidly discusses her mother Vivian Baxter, her husband Vusumsi Make, her son Guy, and other people prominent in the autobiographies. It also contains excellent discussions about African history, West African art, and aging.

Two of the most enjoyable essays are, first, “Art for the Sake of the Soul,” which begins with Lucille Clifton's “Miss Rosie” and recollects, among other things, an impromptu concert in Morocco that occurred during the original
Porgy and Bess
tour in the mid-1950s. A dancer and not a singer,
Angelou was called on to perform. Unable to offer an operatic rendition, she sang Momma Henderson's favorite spiritual, “I'm a poor pilgrim of sorrow,” to the shouting and clapping of the almost five thousand people in the audience. The essay moves from her autobiographical experience to a statement on the universality of art, ending with a strong plea for governmental funding of projects in the arts.

In a provocative 1955 interview with Ken Kelley of
Mother Jones
magazine, she spoke out against conservatives in the government who want to stop funding for the arts: “The conservative right has decided that artists are apart from the people. That's
ridiculous!
I mean, at our best the writer, painter, architect, actor, dancer, folk singer—we
are
the people” (1995, n.p.). She advises artists to sing, dance, and perform in public places so that the young do not have to surrender their dreams.

The second recollection in
Stars
that has tremendous vitality is “Rural Museums—Southern Romance.” Also concerned with art and the preservation of culture, “Rural Museums” is a grim recounting of Angelou's journey to a slave museum in Louisiana, not far from Baton Rouge. The artifacts included a depressing statue of a bent figure, “Uncle Jack,” the exemplary Negro slave; an overseer's house; a slave collar; nineteenth-century carriages being buffed by an African American male; and some still-standing slave cabins, very neatly furnished. In Angelou's view, the museum captured in its orderly presentations “the romance of slavery” while eliminating any real sense of the brutality, the beatings, the cramped hovels, the exhaustion, the hunger. Missing from the reconstructed scene was “our historical truth” (94), truth being just what a museum should uphold. Having visited this same historical site in 2012, I strongly agree with her conclusions.

Although both of these wise books make use of the travel motif, that theme is more central to
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
than to its earlier, journey-titled companion piece. Angelou gives the reader some priceless glimpses of her iconic self in each of the collections, although the frequent citations of poetry seem out of proportion if what the reader anticipates is an updated array of insights from the woman whose autobiographies have set the standard for length, breadth, and historical relevance.

In assessing Angelou's two early books of reflections, one must be cautious in not confusing genres. The reader should be continually aware that both
Journey
and
Stars
contain a great deal of quoted secondary material. Above all, the reader should know that they are not autobiographies. Journalist Sandra Crockett, in a September 1997 article in the
Baltimore Sun
, identifies
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
as part of Angelou's “continuing series of autobiographical books” (E1, 8). Although both texts clearly have
autobiographical moments, they are in no way a continuation of the solid, book-length journeys into the self that Angelou has been conducting since the 1970 appearance of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. Neither
Journey
nor
Stars
, collections of short, informal essays, should be mistaken for autobiography.

Two later publications,
Letter to My Daughter
(2008) and
Mom & Me & Mom
(2013), can also be classified as musings. The first of these is not actually a “letter” but rather a collection of short chapters about “growing up, unexpected emergencies, a few poems, some light stories to make you laugh and some to make you meditate” (xi). The hypothetical “daughter” of the title refers to the long list of women to whom the book is dedicated, women who mothered her or allowed themselves to be mothered: Vivian Baxter, Berdis Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle B. King, Annie Henderson, and thirteen other women. Implied in this list of daughters is an imagined second person, the reader.

Letter to My Daughter
is a pastiche of stories, aphorisms, recollections, revelations, and vignettes. Here one finds a number of tributes to women, among them Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party; Coretta Scott King (1927–2006), Angelou's close friend, civil rights activist, and the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Cuban singer Celia Cruz (1925–2003). The slim volume contains as well a commencement address; an essay on vulgarity; a remembrance of being beaten by a ferocious lover named Two Fingers Mark; an essay on poetry; an essay on violence; an essay on the national spirit; a poem, “Surviving”; a concluding essay on Momma Henderson.

Perhaps the single most disappointing essay is “Poetry” (153–57), in which Angelou quotes fragments of poems by black writers—from Langston Hughes to Mari Evans, from Sterling A. Brown to Aime¯´ Ce¯´saire—praising their “negritude” but making almost no comment on their importance as poets. The essay, a fairly sophomoric appreciation of black poetry, does not convey the perspective of a woman who had been greatly admired for her achievements in that genre. Given that Angelou by 2008 was an established poet, her omission of a critical viewpoint is disconcerting.

Letter to My Daughter
ends with the book's most touching portrait, a recollection about her paternal grandmother called “Keep the Faith.” The two-page musing reintroduces the Momma of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, with her soft voice, her colossal presence, and her Christian devotion. In a brilliant periodic sentence near the end of the vignette, Angelou describes Annie Henderson in terms of gospel music: “Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky, and surely there, right
there, between the sun and moon, stands my grandmother, singing a long meter hymn, a song somewhere between a moan and a lullaby and I know faith is the evidence of things unseen” (166).

Mom & Me & Mom
, an autobiographical account of her relationship with her mother, was published the year before Angelou's death. The musing begins with Vivian Baxter's birth in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Trinidadian father and to a mother of Irish descent. It ends with the dedication of the Vivian B. Baxter State Park in Stockton, California, in 1995, four years after her mother's death from lung cancer. The memoir presents a different view of Vivian Baxter than the one the reader encounters in the six-book autobiographical series. It is more critical, more severe, and more ambivalent. While it extolls “Lady B” for being founder and president of the Stockton Black Women of Humanity and a board member for United Way and several other civic organizations, it presents a more violent side, probably provoked by Vivian's being raised in a rough family known as the “Bad Baxters” (4).

Angelou reveals that when she was two years old, Vivian hit her child with such violence that she fell off the porch. In another recollection Vivian confesses to having struck her then teenage daughter with a heavy ring of keys because Maya had come home late one night. The facial swelling was so severe that Bailey, usually overwhelmingly fond of his mother, threatens to leave the house: “Nobody, but nobody, beats up my baby sister” (57). In yet another episode Bailey, convinced that his mother is cheating on her husband, is so appalled that he joins the merchant marines.

The reader also learns that Vivian Baxter packs a pistol. When she and her daughter reserve a room in a recently integrated Fresno, California, hotel, Maya sees her mother's .38 revolver in the suitcase. Vivian remarks: “If they were not ready for integration, I was ready to show it to them. Baby, you try to be ready for every situation you run into” (141).