Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  Vivian Baxter, Maya’s and Bailey’s mother, remained outside the family structure in Caged Bird. She had willfully chosen to surrender her parental rights to the children by sending them to Arkansas. When Bailey Sr. took his children to St. Louis, his former wife had little to offer her abused daughter. Maya’s often-absent mother made her feel abandoned and victimized. It was not until Maya moved to California at the age of sixteen that she and her mother formed an enduring bond that lasted through Maya’s tour of Europe in 1954 and beyond. Their changed relationship is recorded in Gather Together, a volume that ends with Maya’s return to Vivian Baxter after she realizes how close to the edge she has come, as a woman and as a mother. It is strongest in A Song Flung Up, although there are initial conflicts because Vivian does not sympathize with Maya’s feelings about the assassination of Malcolm X.

  Maya’s enduring love for her mother is movingly presented in “Mother and Freedom,” a prose piece from her 1997 book Even the Stars Look Lonesome. At the end of our formal interview, Angelou took Ken and me to another room where an array of galley sheets lay on the table. In her deep and captivating voice she began to read about her love for Vivian Baxter, the mother who had let Maya go: “She stood before me, a dolled-up pretty yellow woman, seven inches shorter than my six-foot bony frame” (Stars 47). The piece goes back and forth, from mother to daughter to mother, ending in a chilling account of her mother’s dying; this once-vibrant woman “lies hooked by pale blue wires to an oxygen tank, fighting cancer for her life” (Stars 48). It is clear that Vivian Baxter, who once existed outside of Maya’s “family,” had returned to her daughter to be freed. Angelou’s touching memoir Mom & Me & Mom, written in 2013, ends poignantly with the passing of Vivian Baxter, who died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1991 at the age of seventy-nine (Essence 2014, 106).

  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 di
sintegrated. 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.

  The Work Schedule

  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).

  Education

  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.

  Further Achievements

  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.

  Poetry

  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.

  When she was young, Angelou was intrigued by several white women poets. She appreciated the romantic and lyrical qualities of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886); echoes of Dickinson’s familiar ballad form can be heard in some of Angelou’s poems. She also enjoyed the passion of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) and the caustic humor of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967): “They are funny and wry,” she remarked in appreciation of Millay and Parker. “I’m rarely wry. I think I’m funny. I love to be funny” (“Icon” 1997).

  When asked about the influence of African and Asian poets on her work she clearly acknowledged Kwesi Brew, the Ghanaian poet to whom she refers in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes and in A Song Flung Up. “Oh yes,” she told me, “Kwesi influenced me and still does. But the early influences, I had no idea African poets even existed early on.” She explained that African poets were not published in the United States while she was growing up. One of the first African poets who came to her attention was Senegalese statesman Leopold Senghor, and that was not until she was an adult. She was more familiar with Chinese and Ja
panese poets than with African poets because they were available (“Icon” 1997).

  Following her first volume with Random House in 1971, Angelou published at least eight separate volumes and a number of separately published ceremonial poems. Her best-loved poems—“Phenomenal Woman,” “And Still I Rise,” and “Willie”—were included in The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House, 1994). In 2015 Random House released an updated volume of the poetry, entitled Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry. Poems discussed in this chapter are from the 2015 edition and are indicated parenthetically in the text by the initials CP. She also published many other poems, either separately or in special collections.

  The dual nature of Angelou’s talent is underscored by the fact that within several years of each other, her work earned two major nominations. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, received the National Book Award nomination in 1970. One year later a collection of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She could have achieved a distinguished writing career pursuing either one of these genres. Astonishingly, she did both, so that in the prolific 1970s and 1980s a new book of poetry emerged shortly before or after a new autobiography.

  According to Lyman B. Hagen, “Angelou’s poems are dramatic and lyrical. Her style is open, direct, unambiguous, and conversational. The diction is plain but sometimes the metaphors are quite striking” (1997, 130). Of the various topics treated in her poetry, the most frequent seem to be love, black men, black women, drugs, religion, and slavery. Often these inter-related themes are held together by references to song, as in the 1983 collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing.