Over the years Angelou had many other acting triumphs in television and film. In 1972 she wrote the screenplay for Georgia, Georgia, a Swedish-American film; the script received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1977 she was nominated for a Tony for her portrayal of Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in Alex Haley’s explosive miniseries, Roots. In 1982, when she was fifty-four, she performed the narration for Humanities through the Arts, a series sponsored by public television. In 1993 she appeared in John Singleton’s movie Poetic Justice and in 1995 in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s film, How to Make an American Quilt.
During her prolific career, Angelou also had several experiences directing for stage, television, and film. In 1974 she directed a film, All Day Long, from her original screenplay, while in 1968 she directed a play, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, written by Errol John. But it was not until 1997 that she engaged in her first major project as a director, with the film Down on the Delta, starring Wesley Snipes and her How to Make an American Quilt costar Alfre Woodard. The film is about a couple from Mississippi who head for Chicago looking for a better life.
In the early 1990s she received two Grammy Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) for achievement in the music industry, under the category “Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album.” The first was for her recording of “On the Pulse of Morning” (1994), followed a year later by her tape of “Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women.” A third Grammy was awarded in 2002 in the nonfiction category for her recording of her sixth autobiography, A Song Flung Up.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the age when most actors would have been basking in retirement, Angelou became even more active in film portrayals. She had a small role in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion (2006), where critics praised her for reciting her poem “In and Out of Time” with the actress Cicely Tyson. In 2008 she narrated a Holocaust documentary, As Seen through These Eyes, about artists in concentration camps who fought Hitler with their drawings and paintings. Directed by Hilary Helstein, the documentary received mixed reviews. In 2009 she appeared in Jeff Stilson’s hilarious film Good Hair, which featured Maya Angelou, Chris Rock, and Al Sharpton.
Special Awards
In addition to being a recognized actor and writer, Angelou received a number of special awards commemorating her service to the humanities. Again the list is partial, a mere hint at the wide range of tributes Dr. Angelou has received from civic groups across the country. Many of the unique works of art that my husband and I viewed in her sculpture garden testify to her having been honored by institutions that do not always boast international reputations.
One of her most prestigious awards occurred in 1975, when President Gerald Ford named her to the American Revolution Bicentennial Council. Angelou wore this hat gracefully, as a patriotic duty: “I am an American, as much as the Irish who live here are Americans…. There are many things I’m proud of and many things I’m disappointed in, referring to my country. It would be the same if I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England. But I am an American” (“Icon” 1997).
In 1976, a year after the appointment from President Ford, the Ladies’ Home Journal named Maya Angelou Woman of the Year in Communications. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter named her to a commission in observance of International Women’s Year. In 1993, following her Inaugural reading, she became a friend of president and Mrs. Clinton.
She has also been honored by foundations, receiving a Yale University Fellowship in 1970 and the enviable Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship in 1975. In the same year she received the Horatio Alger Award, Alger being an American novelist who wrote about poor children who eventually became successful. In 1982, at the age of fifty-four, she was named first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a lifetime appointment. Two years later, the new governor, James B. Hunt, appointed her to the board of the North Carolina Arts Council. In 1992 she received the Essence Woman of the Year Award. She also began her involvement in the creation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a London-based institution.
Nor was her political commitment limited to the Clinton and Obama administrations or to British children. She also took what could have been a considerable risk when she actively supported the rights of gay marriage in New York State in the summer of 2009 (freedomtomarryorg. Web. December 3, 2014). Because of her unflinching support of civil rights and gay rights, Angelou was vilified by the right-wing group, the Westboro Baptist Church, who had threatened to disrupt the funeral held at Wake Forest University. Their efforts were unsuccessful.
During her lifetime the activist/writer continued to earn praise from liberal and moderate institutions. In 2006 she received the John Hope Franklin Award, named for the noted black historian (1915–2009). In the same year she earned the Mother Teresa Award, given in remembrance of the Albanian nun (1910–1997) who left the convent to devote her life to the poor. Two years later she received the Lincoln Medal, an honor presented by the Ford’s Theater Society that demonstrates leadership, wisdom, eloquence, and other aspects of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. She shared this honor with the actress Ruby Dee (1924?–2014) and with the late justice Sandra Day O’Connor (1981–2002). In 2013, at the National Book Awards, she received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Her greatest civic honor occurred in 2011, when President Barack Obama bestowed on Dr. Angelou the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her achievements in literature.
Meanwhile, her work had continued to diversify. In the late 1990s Angelou reportedly communicated to her public through the Prodigy Internet service provider, and she had helped to organize churches on Public Television. She also participated in the Black Image circuit—African American women models, lawyers, and writers toured designated cities conducting workshops offering tips on clothes, poise, cosmetics, and problem solving. Women who have attended these workshops say that Angelou’s engagement with black middle-class women should not be trivialized, for through her example she was offering black women an opportunity to direct their talents toward achievable goals.
Her service to major institutions, along with her remarkable self-confidence as a speaker, opened many doors for Maya Angelou, especially in the area of public policy. She had long worn the cloak of wise woman and stateswoman—sometimes on daytime television with her close friend Oprah Winfrey; sometimes for organizations such as the Women’s Foundation, which sold more than two thousand tickets when she spoke in San Francisco during the spring of 1997; and most often in college lecture halls, where seating was sold out long before the actual event. When Hilary Clinton was seeking the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2008, Angelou was a loyal supporter and spokesperson.
Her writing, above all I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has also been well received by an adolescent readership. A sample of the biographies about Angelou aimed at young audience is listed in the bibliography, under the heading “Biographies for Young Readers.” Because The Iconic Muse is primarily concerned with more scholarly viewpoints, these children’s books do not enter the discussion. They are important, however, in assessing the scope of Angelou’s appeal.
Maya Angelou occasionally indulged in unexpected flights of whimsy, aimed not at an academic or political audience but at a trendy clientele. She was notorious for having written the text for Hallmark greeting cards, many of which are in a file at the Schomburg Center. She also presumably endorsed other popular items that bore her face and her signature. In its toys and games division, Amazon.com offered during November of 2014 a Maya Angelou Portrait Jigsaw Puzzle. The 100-piece puzzle shows four different “scenes” from Angelou’s career. Another product sold by Amazon in 2014 was a series of tile wall hangings, ranging in price from $8.45 to $18.49, with a choice of some of Angelou’s famous quotes, for example, “I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.” For sale at the
same venue were a “Still I Rise’ black tee-shirt and an “I’ve learned” cell phone case for the Apple iPhone. I once walked out of a New York Barnes and Noble with my book purchases piled in a yellow plastic bag graced with her image, clearly a Random House promotion. But I saw no listing in my Amazon search for my favorite piece of Maya/anna: a set of Maya Angelou wind chimes that my friend Carolyn Maun once gave me as a Christmas present.
In celebrating Maya Angelou’s various achievements, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in April 2015.The stamp featured a popular quotation that had frequently been attributed to Angelou: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” Unfortunately, the Postal Service had failed to ascertain the authenticity of the quotation, which was actually from A Cup of Sun, a 1967 book by Joan Walsh Anglund. According to an article printed in the New York Times on April 9, 2015, the Postal Service will not be reissuing the stamp. It will remain in the hands of those faithful fans who pre-ordered it; and it will very likely be filed in the Maya Angelou Archives as a sad reminder of governmental blunder.
The Archives
When I was in North Carolina in 1977, I had the opportunity to meet briefly with Sharon E. Snow, Curator of Rare Books at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. Ms. Snow had already been making progress in providing access to Angelou’s letters and manuscripts, as well as to the mountain of writings and video clips bearing her name.
Over the years a number of curators at Wake Forest have continued to compile Angelou’s work in the performing arts. According to a document e-mailed to me on April 17, 2015, by Steven Fullwood of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, The Maya Angelou Film and Theater Collection in North Carolina consists of “30.61 feet 60 letter boxes, 10 oversized letter boxes, 1 half-letter box, 1 oversize folder.” The collection contains such treasures as the manuscript and notes for Angelou’s 1974 play Ajax; a copy of the first feature film directed by Angelou, Down on the Delta (1998); and the program notes for a production of Macbeth directed by Angelou at Wake Forest in 1985. In 2014 the material was updated by Curator Kristin Weisse.
In 2010 a separate collection, the Maya Angelou Papers, was purchased by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library System. The Center houses an estimated total of 199 boxes consisting of “original manuscripts, computer generated typescripts, galleys and proofs” of Angelou’s autobiographies and poetry as well as a huge file on her Inaugural poem and a file devoted to her correspondence with Rosa Guy, James Baldwin, Malcom X, and others (“Guide to the Maya Angelou papers,” The New York Public Library Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division,” n.d.). Soon after her death the Schomberg Center sponsored a public exhibit in her memory.
According to the staff, a substantial portion of the Angelou Papers is devoted to her fan mail; this file is unavailable to the public. In Maya Angelou: The Iconic Muse there are several references to the holdings of the Schomburg Center. The entire collection, except for the fan mail, awaits the scrutiny of critics with specialized skills in reading and collating the massive assortment of documents, letters, and original drafts available to them.
Chapter 2
The Genre of Autobiography
Autobiography and Genre
The French word genre means a classification of literary works according to type—lyric, narrative, dramatic—which are further divided into novel, short story, epic poem, tragedy, and so forth. According to Meyer H. Abrams, genre is of use to the reader because it creates a set of “expectations that alter the way that a reader will interpret and respond to a particular work” (2005, 117). In other words, if the reader knows for a fact that Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography, then the reader also expects the sequel, Gather Together in My Name, to have understandable characteristics of the genre, such as first-person narration, a chronological order, and an emphasis on the self.
Autobiography is a major literary genre, the form that Maya Angelou uses in her long prose works. Broken down, the word auto/bio/graphy means self/life/story, the narrative of the events in a person’s life. It is also known as life writing or the literature of self-revelation. According to Alfred Kazin, autobiography “uses fact as a strategy [It is a] history of a self, [and exhibits a] concern for the self as a character” (1964, 213).
A number of critics have classified Angelou’s six volumes as autobiographical fiction and not as autobiographies, for the apparent reason that Angelou amplifies the autobiographical tone by using dialogue—by having another character or characters speak to the narrator. According to Eugenia Collier, the writing techniques Angelou uses in her autobiographies are the same as the devices used in writing fiction: vividly conceived characters and careful development of theme, setting, plot, and language (1986).
At first glance, it is useful to view Caged Bird as a Bildungsroman, a German word that means a “novel of education” or a “coming-of-age” story. Because Caged Bird begins in childhood and ends in young adulthood, with Maya giving birth to a baby boy, Caged Bird has been considered a Bildungsroman. Looking at the British Bildungsroman, Mill on the Floss (1860), there are many similarities between George Eliot’s novel and Maya Angelou’s first autobiography. Both are about the coming-of-age of strong-willed young women; both focus on the heroine’s close relationship to her brother; both examine the effects of literature on character; both center strongly around family and community life. But while Mill on the Floss is a developed work of fiction, a story that ends, according to Eliot’s deliberate plan, with her heroine’s death in a flood, Angelou’s autobiography is an unfinished narrative, told in the first person by the adult who recollects it years later. Angelou insists on calling her works autobiographies, not novels. For her, autobiography is a special form, consciously chosen as her most effective genre. In an interview, she told Jackie Kay, “I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form as the main form to carry my work, my expression” (1989, 195).
Most readers of autobiographies have clear expectations about the characteristics of the genre. First, it should be written rather than spoken. Second, it must have a first-person narrator. Third, it should be of manageable length, one or two volumes. Fourth, it should be arranged chronologically, in an order that roughly corresponds to the significant events of the narrator’s life.
Exceptions to these standards are of course numerous; one of the most extreme is Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Although autobiographies are typically written from the first-person point of view, Stein pretends to use the first-person perspective of her partner, the Alice B. Toklas of the title. Stein’s autobiography thus approaches fiction in its playful invention of a first-person narrator who is actually a third person. James Weldon Johnson, a favorite writer of Angelou’s and an autobiographer in his own right, wrote a unique book that combined the perspectives of both the novel and the autobiography. He called it The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and in the first printing it had an anonymous author, which made readers puzzle about the author’s race. Johnson’s point of view in this now-famous book was as inventive in its way as Gertrude Stein’s was in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like Stein’s contrived Alice, so Johnson’s narrator is not actually James Weldon Johnson but a pretend white man, the fictionalized self-portrait of a light-skinned black who passes as white in order to be esteemed and rewarded by others.
The popular Lakota Sioux narrative, Black Elk Speaks, is also an exception to the standard autobiography, not in its structure but in its presentation. The very title, Black Elk Speaks, indicates an oral or spoken autobiography, told by Black Elk over the course of many years but put into writing by a European transcriber, John G. Neihardt. In his effort to shape Black Elk’s story into an artistic whole, Neihardt wrote parts of the beginning and final chapters, thus defining the narrator’s identity. Th
is superlative collaboration between Black Elk and his transcriber resulted in the “first Indian autobiography” (Holly 1979, 121).
One critic of the genre, William L. Howarth (1980), has isolated certain elements common to all standard autobiographies. First is “character,” which designates the narrator, the one who tells the story and acts within it, as opposed to the more distanced “author.” The second element, “technique,” includes stylistic concerns such as metaphors, structure, and verb tense. Howarth’s third element is “theme,” which addresses not only personal issues like love and death but also political, cultural, and historical matters affecting the autobiographer, in Angelou’s case, the Great Depression of the early 1930s; the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s; the liberation movements in Africa in the same decade; and the riots in America following the assassinations of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.
In addition, autobiographical theme is affected by literary tradition. If a writer reads or thinks about a favorite book, he or she is likely to echo its structure or its ideas, either knowingly or unknowingly. The writer is thus “influenced.” A literary influence occurs when a piece of literature or a specific creative form, existing in the near or distant past, affects the language, metaphors, style, structure, and/or philosophy of any given work. To determine the influence of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson on Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, for instance, one needs some knowledge of genres, of titles, of dates of composition, of mutual metaphors, of existing attitudes toward black women, and so on.
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