Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition

Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition

Critic: Carol E. Neubauer

Source: Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond

Inge, The University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 114-42. Reproduced by

permission

Criticism about: Maya Angelou (1928-), also known as: Marguerite Johnson,

Marguerita Annie Johnson, Marguerite (Annie) Johnson

Nationality: American

[(essay date 1990) In the following essay, Neubauer provides an overview

of Angelou's life and career and discusses the principal themes in her

poetry.]

Within the last fifteen years, Maya Angelou has become one of the best-known

black writers in the United States. Her reputation rests firmly on her

prolific career as an autobiographer, poet, dancer-singer, actress, producer,

director, scriptwriter, political activist, and editor. Throughout her

life, she has identified with the South, and she calls Stamps, Arkansas,

where she spent ten years of her childhood, her home.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928 in St.

Louis to Vivian Baxter and Bailey Johnson, a civilian dietitian for the

U.S. Navy. At age three, when her parents' marriage ended in divorce, she

was sent, along with her brother, Bailey, from Long Beach to Stamps to

be cared for by their paternal grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson. During

the next ten years, a time of severe economic depression and intense racial

bigotry in the South, she spent nearly all of her time either in school,

at the daily meetings of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, or at

her grandmother's general merchandise store. In 1940, she graduated with

top honors from the LafayetteCountyTraining School and soon thereafter

returned to her mother, who lived in the San Francisco-Oakland area at

that time. There she continued her education at George Washington High

School under the direction of her beloved Miss Kirwin. At the same time,

she attended evening classes at the CaliforniaLaborSchool, where she

received a scholarship to study drama and dance. A few weeks after she

received her high school diploma, she gave birth to her son, Guy Bailey

Johnson.

Her career as a professional entertainer began on the West Coast, where

she performed as a dancer-singer at the Purple Onion in the early 1950s.

While working in this popular cabaret, she was spotted by members of the

Porgy and Bess cast and invited to audition for the chorus. Upon her return

from the play's 1954-55 tour of Europe and Africa, she continued to perform

at nightclubs throughout the United States, acquiring valuable experience

that would eventually lead her into new avenues of professional work.

In 1959, Angelou and her son moved to New York, where she soon joined

the Harlem Writers Guild at the invitation of John Killens. Together with

Godfrey Cambridge, she produced, directed, and starred in Cabaret for Freedom

to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following

the close of the highly successful show, she accepted the position of Northern

coordinator for the SCLC at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Her work in theater landed her the role of the White Queen in Genet's

The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel at St. Mark's Playhouse. For this

production, she joined a cast of starsRoscoe Lee Brown, Godfrey Cambridge,

James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson. In 1974, she adapted Sophocles' Ajax

for its premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Original screenplays

to her credit include the film version of Georgia, Georgia and the television

productions of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters. She also

authored and produced a television series on African traditions inherent

in American culture and played the role of Kunte Kinte's grandmother in

Roots. For PBS programming, she served as a guest interviewer on Assignment

America and most recently appeared in a special series on creativity hosted

by Bill Moyers, which featured a return visit to Stamps.

Among her other honors, Maya Angelou was appointed to the Commission of

International Women's Year by former President Carter. In 1975, Ladies'

Home Journal named her Woman of the Year in communications. A trustee of

the American Film Institute, she is also one of the few women members of

the Directors Guild. In recent years, she has received more than a dozen

honorary degrees, including one from the University of Arkansas located

near her childhood home. Fluent in seven languages, she has worked as the

editor of the Arab Observer in Cairo and the African Review in Ghana. In

December 1981, Angelou accepted a lifetime appointment as the first Reynolds

Professor of American Studies at WakeForestUniversity in Winston-Salem,

where she lectures on literature and popular culture. In 1983, Women in

Communications presented her with the Matrix Award in the field of books.

Her personal life has been anything but smooth. As a young mother, Angelou

had to endure painful periods of separation from her son while she worked

at more than one job to support them. Often her ventures into show business

would take her far from home, and she would put Guy in the care of her

mother or baby-sitters. When she was twenty-one years old, she married

Tosh Angelos, a sailor of Greek-American ancestry, but their marriage ended

after three years. While working in New York, she met and later married

Vusumzi Make, a black South African activist who traveled extensively raising

money to end apartheid. They divided their time between New York and Cairo,

but after a few years their marriage deteriorated. In 1973, Angelou married

Paul du Feu, a carpenter and construction worker she had met in London.

They lived together on the West Coast during most of their seven-year marriage.

Although she is rarely called a regional writer, Maya Angelou is frequently

identified with the new generation of Southern writers. She has always

called the South her home, and recently, after much deliberation, she settled

in North Carolina, ending an absence of more than thirty years. Her autobiographies

and poetry are rich with references to her childhood home in Arkansas and

to the South in general. For Angelou, as for many black American writers,

the South has become a powerfully evocative metaphor for the history of

racial bigotry and social inequality, for brutal inhumanity and final failure.

Yet the South also represents a life-affirming force energized by a somewhat

spiritual bond to the land itself. It is a region where generations of

black families have sacrificed their brightest dreams for a better future;

yet it is here that ties to forebears whose very blood has nourished the

soil are most vibrant and resilient. Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930s was

not a place where a black child could grow up freely or reach her full

intellectual and social potential, but the town was nevertheless the home

of Angelou's grandmother, who came to stand for all the courage and stability

she ever knew as a child.

Her literary reputation is based on the publication of five volumes of

autobiography (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name,

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman,

and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes) and five volumes of poetry

(Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, Oh Pray My Wings Are

Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? and Now

Sheba Sings the Song). In the twenty years of her publishing history, she

has developed a rapport with her audiences who await each new work as a

continuation of an ongoing dialogue with the author. Beginning with Caged

Bird in 1970, her works have received wide critical acclaim and have been

praised for reaching universal truths while examining the complicated life

of one individual. The broad appeal of her autobiographies and poetry is

evidenced in the numerous college anthologies that include portions of

her work and in the popularity of the television adaptation of Caged Bird.

In years to come, Angelou's voice, already recognized as one of the most

original and versatile, will be measured by the standards of great American

writers of our time.

In her first volume of autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

(1970), Maya Angelou calls displacement the most important loss in her

childhood, because she is separated from her mother and father at age three

and never fully regains a sense of security and belonging. Her displacement

from her family is not only an emotional handicap but is compounded by

an equally unsettling sense of racial and geographic displacement. Her

parents frequently move Angelou and her brother, Bailey, from St. Louis

to Arkansas to the West Coast. As young children in Stamps in the 1930s,

racial prejudice severely limits their lives. Within the first pages, she

sums up this demoralizing period of alienation: "If growing up is painful

for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust

on the razor that threatens the throat." The pain of her continual rejection

comes not only from the displacement itself, but even more poignantly,

from the child's acute understanding of prejudice. A smooth, clean razor

would be enough of a threat, but a rusty, jagged one leaves no doubt in

the victim's mind.

In Caged Bird, Angelou recounts many explosive incidents of the racial

discrimination she experienced as a child. In the 1930s, Stamps was a fully

segregated town. Marguerite and Bailey, however, are welcomed by a grandmother

who is not only devoted to them but, as owner of the Wm. Johnson General

Merchandise Store, is highly successful and independent. Momma is their

most constant source of love and strength. "I saw only her power and strength.

She was taller than any woman in my personal world, and her hands were

so large they could span my head from ear to ear." As powerful as her grandmother's

presence seems to Marguerite, Momma uses her strength solely to guide and

protect her family but not to confront the white community directly. Momma's

resilient power usually reassures Marguerite, but one of the child's most

difficult lessons teaches her that racial prejudice in Stamps can effectively

circumscribe and even defeat her grandmother's protective influence.

In fact, it is only in the autobiographical narrative that Momma's personality

begins to loom larger than life and provides Angelou's memories of childhood

with a sense of personal dignity and meaning. On one occasion, for example,

Momma takes Marguerite to the local dentist to be treated for a severe

toothache. The dentist, who is ironically named Lincoln, refuses to treat

the child, even though he is indebted to Momma for a loan she extended

to him during the depression: "`Annie, my policy is I'd rather stick my

hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's.'" As a silent witness to this

scene, Marguerite suffers not only from the pain of her two decayed teeth,

which have been reduced to tiny enamel bits by the avenging "Angel of the

candy counter," but also from the utter humiliation of the dentist's bigotry

as well: "It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache

and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness."

In an alternate version of the confrontation, which Angelou deliberately

fantasizes and then italicizes to emphasize its invention, Momma asks Marguerite

to wait for her outside the dentist's office. As the door closes, the frightened

child imagines her grandmother becoming "ten feet tall with eight-foot

arms." Without mincing words, Momma instructs Lincoln to "`leave Stamps

by sundown'" and "`never again practice dentistry'": "`When you get settled

in your next place, you will be a vegetarian caring for dogs with the mange,

cats with the cholera and cows with the epizootic. Is that clear?'" The

poetic justice in Momma's superhuman power is perfect; the racist dentist

who refused to treat her ailing granddaughter will in the future be restricted

to treating the dogs he prefers to "niggers." After a trip to the black

dentist in Texarkana, Momma and Marguerite return to Stamps, where we learn

the "real" version of the story by overhearing a conversation between Momma

and Uncle Willie. In spite of her prodigious powers, all that Momma accomplishes

in Dr. Lincoln's office is to demand ten dollars as unpaid interest on

the loan to pay for their bus trip to Texarkana.

In the child's imagined version, fantasy comes into play as the recounted

scene ventures into the unreal or the impossible. Momma becomes a sort

of superwoman of enormous proportions ("ten feet tall with eight-foot arms")

and comes to the helpless child's rescue. In this alternate vision, Angelou

switches to fantasy to suggest the depth of the child's humiliation and

the residue of pain even after her two bad teeth have been pulled. Fantasy,

finally, is used to demonstrate the undiminished strength of the character

of Momma. Summarizing the complete anecdote, Angelou attests, "I preferred,

much preferred, my version." Carefully selected elements of fiction and

fantasy in the scene involving Dr. Lincoln and her childhood hero, Momma,

partially compensate for the racial displacement that she experiences as

a child.

When Angelou is thirteen, she and Bailey leave the repressive atmosphere

of Stamps to join their mother. During these years, she continues to look

for a place in life that will dissolve her sense of displacement. By the

time she and Bailey are in their early teens, they have criss-crossed the

western half of the country traveling between their parents' separate homes

and their grandmother's in Stamps. Her sense of geographic displacement

alone would be enough to upset any child's security, since the life-styles

of her father in southern California and her mother in St. Louis and later

in San Francisco represent worlds completely different and even foreign

to the pace of life in the rural South. Each time the children move, a

different set of relatives or another of their parents' lovers greets them,

and they never feel a part of a stable family group, except when they are

in Stamps at the general store with Momma and Uncle Willie.

Once settled in San Francisco in the early 1940s, Angelou enrolls at George

WashingtonHigh School and the CaliforniaLaborSchool, where she studies

dance and drama in evening classes. She excels in both schools, and her

teachers quickly recognize her intelligence and talent. Later she breaks

the color barrier by becoming the first black female conductor on the San

Francisco streetcars. Just months before her high school graduation, she

engages in a onetime sexual encounter to prove her sexuality to herself

and becomes pregnant. Caged Bird, however, ends on a note of awakening

with the birth of her son and the beginning of a significant measure of

strength and confidence in her ability to succeed and find her place in

life. As autobiographer, Angelou uses the theme of displacement to unify

the first volume of her life story as well as to suggest her long-term

determination to create security and permanency in her life.

Between the conclusion of Caged Bird and the beginning of Angelou's second

volume of autobiography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), there is virtually

no break in the narrative. As the first ends with the birth of her son,

the second starts when Guy is only a few months old. As a whole, Gather

Together tells the story of his first three years and focuses on a young

single mother's struggle to achieve respect, love, and a sense of self-worth.

Her battle to win financial independence and the devotion of a faithful

man could hardly have been easy in the years immediately following World

War II, when racial discrimination, unemployment, and McCarthyism were

all on the rise. In spite of her initial optimism, which is, incidentally,

shared by many members of the post-war black community who fervently believed

that "race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something

to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend,"

Angelou soon realizes that her dreams for a better America are still too

fragile to survive. But worst of all is the burden of guilt that rests

on the shoulders of the seventeen-year-old mother who desperately believes

that she must assume full adult responsibility. Fortunately, her mother

encourages her to set high goals, to maintain her sense of dignity and