Soon after her death a sarcastic historian, Mark Oppenheimer, who calls himself a “good cocktail-party bullshit artist,” set off a controversy when, in an article printed in The New Republic, he challenged the “Dr. Angelou” title. While managing to disparage Angelou for her doctoral twitters and tweets, Oppenheimer just happened to mention his Yale degree and his “earned” PhD in religion. The Rand Paul Forum immediately cited Oppenheimer’s views, agreeing with them, while (Dr.) Brittney Cooper, writing in Salon, retaliated with an angry, compelling piece: “Yes, Maya Angelou was a doctor: A lesson for the ignorant” (2014, n.p.). Cooper made the telling points that blacks, especially black women, have been historically limited in their pursuit of higher education and that Angelou, through her many major works, has proven herself a master in her field.
As I was researching this thorny topic I came across a 2011 article in the Boston Globe by Tracy Jan entitled “Degree of Difficulty: Really Almost Nil.” The article, which presents an overview of earned versus honorary doctorates, features an interview with Maya Angelou, who told Ms. Jans that “a person has a right to be called anything she or he wants to be called…. I’ve earned it.” Angelou continued, “I’m a worker…. Some people who have gotten their PhDs have sat back down on their—I’m stumbling on the anatomy—and given nothing” (n.p.)
Throughout the autobiographical series Maya Angelou refers to herself by a number of names but never by “Dr. Angelou”; a title that she may have adopted as a result of being named Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in 1981 or perhaps following her performance for the inauguration of President Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. She referred to herself by that title several times in her 2004 cookbook Hallelujah! The Welcome Table (188, 201, 202). Maya’s mother liked to call her Ritie or Baby. Her thoughtless employer, Mrs. Cullinan, called her Mary. But it was her brother Bailey who gave her the name that lasted, Maya, for “My” and “my sister” (Davis in Elliot 1989, 75).
As for her stage name, she kept Rita Johnson until her marriage to Tosh Angelos in 1952. Sometime after the three-year marriage ended in divorce she opted for a more theatrical name at the strong suggestion of her managers at the San Francisco nightclub, the Purple Onion (Shuker 1990, 70–71). Her new name captured the feel of her Calypso performances. That name, Maya Angelou, will be used consistently in this book to preserve continuity. I use the term “Dr.” in referring to Angelou only a few times, most conspicuously as the first word of the first major chapter.
Maya’s mother, Vivian Baxter, was a nurse and card dealer; her father, Bailey Johnson Sr., was a doorman and also a dietician or meal adviser for the navy. They had a difficult marriage that ended in divorce and in their subsequent inability to deal with their young children. When Maya was three and her brother Bailey four, their father deposited the children on a train from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas, home of Bailey Sr.’s mother, Annie Henderson, owner and operator of a general store.
Annie met the train to take charge of two forlorn children wearing instructions on their wrists that announced their names, their point of departure, and their destination. It was in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, an economic disaster that had its roots in the American financial system but was soon felt worldwide. Still, Annie Henderson had been able to survive because her general store sold such basic commodities as beans and flour and because she made wise and honest investments.
Angelou recounts this desolate journey and arrival in the early pages of the book that has since brought her fame, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970 when Angelou was forty-two, it covers her life from the age of three to the age of sixteen. Caged Bird is the first of six autobiographies depicting the life of this amazing African American woman of letters. The other five are Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).
The Woman in the Books
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1931–1944)
In Caged Bird (1970), Angelou reconstructs her childhood, beginning as a three-year-old child living with her older brother under the protective hand of their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. The first volume vividly recalls life in Stamps, Arkansas, with its Christian traditions and its segregated society.
When Maya was eight, her father took her and Bailey from Stamps to St. Louis to visit their mother, Vivian Baxter. It was there, in 1936, in a poorly supervised household, that Maya was seduced and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. After a brief trial Freeman was beaten to death, presumably by Maya’s three uncles. Horrified that her words had caused anyone’s death, Maya withdrew into a silence that the Baxters were incapable of handling. She and Bailey were returned to Annie Henderson and the community of Stamps, where for five years Maya remained mute. She was finally released from the burden of speechlessness in 1940, through her study of literature and guidance by a woman from Stamps named Mrs. Flowers.
After graduating from the eighth grade, Maya, along with her brother Bailey, moved back to California, where she gave an early sign of her enormous potential to succeed by becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She knew even then, from her experiences in Stamps and St. Louis, that she was black and female, someone with the cards stacked against her. “If you’re black you’re black. Whatever you do comes out of that. It’s like being a woman. No matter what age or even sexual preference, if you’re a woman you’re a woman” (“Icon” 1997).
Serious problems arose for Maya in her mid-teens during a disastrous summer vacation in Southern California and Mexico with her father, Bailey Sr., and his girlfriend, Dolores Stockland. Maya and Dolores had a violent relationship that ended when Dolores stabbed Maya in the arm. Maya recovered, wandered around Southern California awhile, and lived in a junkyard. She then returned to Vivian Baxter, who began to establish a maternal closeness with her daughter. In 1944, when she was sixteen, Maya became pregnant after inviting a neighborhood boy to have sex with her. She gave birth to a son.
Gather Together in My Name (1944–1949)
The second volume, Gather Together in My Name (1974), begins in the mid-1940s, near the end of World War II, with its negative effects on black lives. It concludes several years later, after Angelou has won her own personal war against drugs, prostitution, and dependency. Angelou’s negative traits in this volume are intensified by a visit to Stamps, where she and Momma (Annie) Henderson confronted their differing attitudes toward race. These attitudes proved to be irreconcilable.
Much of Gather Together treats the issue of mothering. When Angelou became a mother, she was still a child, understandably lacking in wisdom and sophistication, without job training or advanced schooling of any sort. Nevertheless, she was able to survive through trial and error, while defining herself in terms of being a black woman.
Gather Together charts her various work experiences as she moved from job to job, trying to provide for her son and survive in a hostile economic situation. She was a Creole cook, a dancer, a dishwasher, and a barmaid. Frequently these jobs were entangled with her feelings for men who tried to take advantage of her naïveté.
Angelou’s confession that she had been a prostitute, that she had hidden stolen goods, and that she had almost lost her son was difficult to put into words. On the brighter side, however, in the confusion and turmoil that surrounded her, Maya had been learning how to perform professionally for live audiences. Her nightclub performances with R. L. Poole proved her to be a natural dancer; in 1952, at the age of twenty-four, she reportedly won a scholarship to study under Pearl Primus, the Trinidadian choreographer whose 1943 dance creation, “Strange Fruit,” was internationally acclaimed. In one of her musings she tells about her dancing partnership with Alvin Ailey (1933–1989), the African American performer and choreographer. Ailey brilliantly combined elements of modern dance, ballet, and West Af
rican tribal dancing. Angelou and Ailey dressed in skimpy homemade costumes and hired themselves out to the Elks and the Masons as the team of Al and Rita (Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now 1993, 95–98). She provides no time frame for their collaboration.
As Angelou became more in demand for her singing and dancing talents, she became more emotionally distraught in knowing that her career was in conflict with her desire to be an excellent mother. This situation, very familiar to mothers with careers, becomes the major theme of her third volume.
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1949–1957)
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, published in 1976, covers an unhappy stage in Maya’s development. Her dancing career improved, but with it came the anguish and isolation that resulted from being away from her son. She was also separated forever from Momma Henderson, whose death is movingly commemorated in Singin’ and Swingin’.
Maya, now Mrs. Tosh Angelos, was married and divorced in one short, unhappy interval. Again on her own, she committed herself to the European and African tour of Porgy and Bess, which lasted almost two years, from 1954 to 1955. She was twenty-eight years old, with a young son whom she had left with her mother, Vivian Baxter, repeating the history of her own early childhood, when she and Bailey were sent off to Momma Henderson.
Although sending one’s child to stay with his or her grandmother is not an uncommon solution for career women with children, the decision had unpleasant effects for Maya and Guy. According to Dolly McPherson, Angelou’s guilt and her intense love for Guy “overshadow her other experiences” in this troubling third volume (89). At the end, in an attempt to reconcile with her unhappy son, Angelou took him with her for an engagement in Hawaii, pledging to be with him in the future.
The Heart of a Woman (1957–1963)
The Heart of a Woman (1981) is the volume that signals Angelou’s maturity. She became more certain in her mothering, now that Guy was an adolescent—although there was one near disaster with a street gang when she was performing in Chicago. Still, she had promised herself to give up major tours and found fulfillment in her New York/Brooklyn environment—as an actress, a writer, and a political organizer.
Angelou’s career as an actress reached a high point in 1960, when she was offered the role of the White Queen in Jean Genet’s play, The Blacks, a dark satire about the reversal of racial power. During the same period she was at her most politically active. Moved by a sermon delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. at a Harlem church, she and actor Godfrey Cambridge, a cast member in The Blacks, organized a fund-raiser called “Cabaret for Freedom.” As a result of her tremendous support for Dr. King, she was appointed northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an office she held only briefly, from 1959 to 1960.
In 1961, she met a freedom fighter from South Africa, Vusumzi Make. She fell in love with his charm, intelligence, and good looks. Although she was engaged to another man, she swept it all aside and went with Vus to London for a wedding ceremony that was never made legal. A few months later, she and her son joined him in Egypt.
Unhappy in the house and bored attending afternoon parties for the wives of African revolutionaries, Angelou acted against Vus’s wishes and took a job as associate editor of the Arab Observer, from 1961 to 1962. Her job was not the only source of antagonism between them. Other problems included Vus’s failure to manage money and his affairs with other women. The couple separated in 1962, and Angelou and her son Guy moved from the east of Africa to the west, planning to go to Liberia. But after Guy was almost killed in a car accident, she was forced to situate them in Ghana, at least until he recovered.
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1963–1965)
The fifth volume, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, continues its coverage of Angelou’s African journey, although it was not published until 1986, two decades after she had returned to the United States. After Guy’s car accident, stunned and despairing, Angelou settled in Accra, the capital of the West African nation of Ghana. When Guy miraculously recovered, he was able not only to attend classes at the University of Ghana but also to move toward independence from his mother. Angelou spent the early 1960s in Accra, leaving only to join a theatrical group for a tour of two European cities, Berlin and Venice.
Throughout her stay in Accra, Angelou encountered a large number of people who affected her life and her character. A few of the most influential were fellow expatriate Julian Mayfield; the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois; and black Muslim leader Malcolm X. As Angelou’s commitment to people and ideas increased, she pursued the political work so crucial to her development. With her expatriate friends she organized a solidarity demonstration in 1965 in support of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and, with the same group, arranged Malcolm X’s itinerary when he visited Ghana the same year. She did freelance writing for the Ghanaian Times and worked, with the dentist Robert Lee, as a liaison between the Ghanaian government and its African American residents.
Another matter of a political and racial nature was her quest for her African roots. She took a journey beyond the outskirts of Ghana to discover her ancestors and to find people like the Bambara, who had not abandoned their ancient customs. Angelou has received praise for her search for her origins: “Her search for roots, her involvement with the politics of her people in the United States and Africa, give her work a depth that is absent in many other such works” (Cudjoe 1990, 304).
Caught between her African ancestry and her African American nationhood, Angelou eventually decided to return to America. In 1965, in a grand celebration at the Accra airport, Angelou left for the United States, as well-wishers and Ghanaian friends witnessed her departure. She said farewell to her son, leaving him in Africa to complete his university degree. Although Angelou’s tone in these final pages projects a sense of separation, it also suggests that her return to America will result in work of political and artistic value.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven (1965–1968)
The sixth autobiography (2002) is the last of the series and also the briefest. It begins in 1965 with Maya on a Pan Am jet flying from Ghana. The volume covers the assassinations of Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and of Martin Luther King Jr. It includes Angelou’s impressions of the riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and her reactions to the 1968 uprisings in Harlem following the death of Martin Luther King Jr.
Most of the action in A Song Flung Up to Heaven involves personal relationships—with her mother, her brother, and her son; with her friends James Baldwin, Rosa Guy, and Dolly McPherson; with an unnamed lover called simply “The African”; and with her personal development as a poet and a dramatist. By the end of the sixth volume she has made a full commitment to writing. The last line of A Song Flung Up to Heaven becomes the first line of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “What you looking at me for. I didn’t come to stay.”
In 2004 the Modern Library gathered together the six serial autobiographies into an anthology entitled The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou. The text, available in Kindle and hardcover editions, is an excellent resource for scholars because of its continuous pagination. It is less accessible to the ordinary reader, however, because of its cumbersome weight and size (over 1.6 pounds and almost 1,200 pages). In Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self all parenthetical references are to the familiar individual volumes and not the Modern Library collection. All six volumes are still available from Random House in paperback.
Close Contacts
Maya Angelou once told critic Valerie Webster that she never wanted to have writing be the central topic in her autobiographies: “After that it would just be writing about writing which is something I don’t want to do” (1989, 180).
Rarely, in fact, does Angelou write about writing. She works best in describing her place within closely confined structures such as family, marriage, and motherhood. According to Dolly McPherson, the concept of family in Angelou�
��s autobiographies must take into account the manner in which she and her brother had been displaced by their parents. Thus, the family group resembles a kinship that goes beyond the nuclear family and even beyond the extended family: “trust is the key to a display of kinship concerns” (Order Out of Chaos 14). Within this kinship pattern, Angelou’s relationships with her brother, mother, and son are the most important.
Over the years, Maya has remained close to her brother Bailey, her protector and confidant in Caged Bird. However, her trust in him was jeopardized by his having been in prison. She was reluctant to discuss his situation with me because Bailey asked her not to. He told her, “Don’t use my name in books” (“Icon” 1997). Yet, in a Lifetime Television interview with Angelou conducted by Bill Moyers in 1996, Bailey was passionate about his affection for his sister, repeatedly saying that he loved her. In A Song Flung Up their reunion is central. Bailey Johnson died in Winston-Salem in 1999; he was seventy-two (Essence 2014, 109).
Evidently, there was a wonderful alliance between Bailey and Paul Du Feu, the man Maya married in 1973. At the wedding Bailey embraced Paul and called him a brother (Davis 1989, 74), although nine years later she confessed to Marney Rich, “We are not as close as we used to be” (1989, 129).
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