The Success Narrative
A number of black professionals have written different kinds of autobiographies that may be called first-person success narratives. This genre, meant to offer helpful models for young black men and women, is important to the black tradition because it encourages a positive response from a community where drugs and easy money are often more highly rewarded than hard work. In Along This Way (1933), James Weldon Johnson, one of Angelou’s major influences as a child, traces his development from birth, when he was nursed by a white mammy in Jacksonville, Florida, to varied successes as lawyer, songwriter, statesman, novelist, lecturer, and occupant of the chair of Creative Literature at Fisk University, a historic black institution.
Many African American success autobiographies have been written not by creative artists but by doctors, scholars, ministers, or other professionals. Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, has influenced many people with his six books, the most famous being his autobiography Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1996), which became a television movie in 2009, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Carson began his career as a poor and failing student in Detroit, but he eventually earned an undergraduate degree from Yale and a medical degree from the University of Michigan. In addition to his conservative writings, Carson gives inspirational talks on education, marriage, and politics. He is one of the announced Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential elections.
Also included in the success narrative category is Colored People, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1995 autobiography. Gates, America’s foremost African American theorist, describes his coming of age in Piedmont, a small black town in West Virginia. Although there are hardships, he relates closely to his own supportive community and to his family. At the end of the autobiography, Gates has come home for vacation from Yale University—Yale being a symbol of success and superior future performance. Ironically, the autobiography ends at the annual mill picnic, an honored black tradition about to end because of integration. But integration is too late. The narrator’s aunt has the last word: “By the time those crackers made us join them, she added, we didn’t want to go” (211).
Gates’s witty and vivid descriptions of the folks in Piedmont, West Virginia, have a texture similar to Angelou’s portrayal of the black community of Stamps, with their rural ways and countrified speech. What biographer Robert E. Hemenway says of Zora Neale Hurston seems sadly true of Gates, and Carson, and Angelou as well: to attain success in an autobiography, the black narrator must see himself or herself as having risen above the associations of class and culture symbolized by the very rural black people who inspired the work (1977, 281).
Angelou’s last three autobiographies have strong traces of the success narrative. Her acting career, described in The Heart of a Woman, peaked when she portrayed the White Queen in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. Her fund-raising revue Cabaret for Freedom, which she coauthored with actor Godfrey Cambridge, won her the respect of Martin Luther King Jr. and a leadership position in his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou was associate editor of the Arab Observer and did freelance writing for the Ghanaian Times. She also successfully organized a solidarity demonstration in Ghana in support of Martin Luther King’s 1965 march on Washington. In A Song Flung Up to Heaven Angelou emerged from her grief over the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to become an accomplished poet and party-giver. Her close friend, writer James Baldwin, urged her to begin writing an autobiography which, when completed, would be nominated for the National Book Award. These achievements alone would support the claim that the majority of Angelou’s autobiographies belong to the category of the success narrative.
Literary Autobiography
Angelou’s writings appear to fall into yet a third category, literary autobiography or, by extension, the autobiography of a writer, artist, dancer, or other art/professional. As a rule, writers in this genre are already established authors or performers; in their autobiographies they attempt to document their struggles but also to acknowledge the positive forces that enabled them to become recognized writers or artists. This class of autobiographer is concerned with language and tends to be conscious of style and technique. Angelou’s forerunners in black literary autobiography include Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940); W. E. B. Du Bois, What the Negro Wants (1944, in Logan 2001); and James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1953).
Although the reader tends to think of Angelou as primarily a singer and entertainer, some of her earliest interests were in language and literature—in the novels of Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset, in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and in the plays of Shakespeare. Her passion for poetry, art, and dance follows her through her autobiographies. It is not until the fourth volume, though, that Angelou starts to describe herself as a writer and that she begins to write performable theatrical pieces.
Travel Narratives: Dreaming of Africa
Like other autobiographical works, Angelou’s autobiographies are a mixture of several genres. In her case, autobiography is interlaced, especially in the fourth and fifth volumes, with travel narrative, a classification that is popular among black writers, many of whom went to Africa and recorded their quest for identity or their achievement of self-enlightenment. Of the twentieth-century black writers who recorded their travels in Africa, Langston Hughes provides the prototype in The Big Sea (1940). Hughes, who grew up in Kansas, longed for the faraway place of Africa. He traveled to the land of his desires in 1923, sailing there as a merchant seaman. Seeing Africa, Hughes salutes her as the “Motherland of the Negro Peoples” and “the great Africa of my Dreams!” terms similar to some of Angelou’s praises of Ghana in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.
In a comprehensive essay on travel narrative, Mary G. Mason documents the journeys of Nancy Prince, Ida B. Wells, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and other black women writers who took the long African journey or the shorter one in the Caribbean. Mason contends that the historic journey taken by previous black women has become, for modern writers like Angelou, a pilgrimage that reveals their African heritage. Angelou’s 1986 travel narrative, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, is part of a genre that “adds a unique theme to women’s autobiographical traditions” (1990, 355).
John C. Gruesser, in his 1990 study of travel narrative, provides a negative overview of how certain African American writers have disparaged the image of Africa, showing the continent as blank, empty, and formless, as “a swamp, a question mark” (7). Gruesser discusses the image of Africa in Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954), Gwendolyn Brooks’s Report from Part One (1972), and Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), claiming that each of these African American writers portrays Africa “either as a dream or a nightmare” (9). They are disappointed when the Africa of their travels fails to equal the Africa of their imaginations. Gruesser contends that Angelou, although she searches for an African connection in Ghana, fails to achieve the goal. Instead, she forms her primary relationships among African American expatriates who share romanticized views of Africa as mother. Like many Americans in Africa, they base their experience on distorted images rather than reality.
Using the narrative structure of the black American who goes to Africa, Angelou and other writers reverse the order of history. Where black Africans were once brought in bondage to America, so black Americans retrace the journey back to Africa. Their travel books become reflections of the impact that African captivity and African nationhood have had on their own lives.
One final narrative that needs to be mentioned in this context is Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart (1983), a love story written in the first person. Golden’s title, with its telltale heart, is enough to prove, at least in her case, Gruesser’s point that black American women who first encounter Africa are living out fantasies based on romantic images. A New Yorker, Golden migrates to
Africa to be with Femi, the Nigerian lover she met in Manhattan at a social event. Like Angelou’s initial relationship with Vusumzi Make, Golden’s romance with Femi, the handsome Nigerian, is based primarily on being fulfilled by a man. After one miscarriage, Marita gives birth to Tunde, the valued firstborn son. But she is unhappy, especially when Femi starts to beat her. Unable to adapt to Nigerian life, to the bonding among brothers, and to the economic obligations demanded from the extended family, Golden returns to America, taking her son with her.
Golden’s Migrations of the Heart was published in 1983, three years before the publication of Angelou’s fifth volume, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. Although there are some similarities, such as the loss of community that pervades both narratives, Golden’s Nigeria is presented strictly from a woman’s perspective, with the emphasis on miscarriage, childbirth, and marriage. These autobiographical themes, while focusing on West African society, might have occurred in any urban setting that had inadequate housing and medical care. Angelou, on the other hand, is extremely specific about the people, rituals, and customs of her adopted nation, Ghana.
Slave Narratives
Historical Roots
Autobiographies written before the Civil War have taken numerous forms, among them traveler’s narratives, diaries, success stories, Indian narratives, and religious confessions (Sayre 1980, 146–47). African American autobiography has its historical roots in still another genre, the slave narrative. Through this method of speaking and writing, slaves recalled the harrowing journey from Africa to America and the atrocities of plantation life. It is a genre that Stephen Butterfield (1974) and many other critics believe to be the foundation of African American autobiographical tradition and a genre that many contemporary writers, Angelou among them, have incorporated into their fiction, their autobiographies, their drama, and their poetry.
The slave narrative is structured in the form of a journey, from Africa to America or to some other unchosen location in the African diaspora—a term used to describe the scattering of black people during the slave trade. The concept of the journey is as old as song, as old as literature. Homer used the journey of the Greek hero, Odysseus, to establish a sequence of events in his classical epic The Odyssey, recorded around 750 BC. The journey is an integral structure in the West African epic Son-Jara (ca. 1300) and in various Indian epics such as the Ramayana (ca. 550 BC) and the Mahabharata (ca. 400 BC).
In its earliest expression, the slave narrative was the recollection by a former slave of his or her struggle in crossing the Atlantic from Africa to America. Some critics claim the first printed narrative was Briton Hammon’s account of his suffering and deliverance, published in Boston in 1760; others give credit to James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw for writing the first slave narrative, An African Prince, in 1770 (Preface, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1997). Traditionally, the slave narrative traced the journey of a slave or former slave of African descent in his or her quest for freedom. Freedom for many narrators meant more than release from the imprisoning system of slavery; it also meant the opportunity to write or print their stories and at the same time denounce the institution that had bound them.
Of the written narratives, many celebrated the achievement of literacy—of being able to read and write—as a major theme. Literacy was equated in the slave’s mind with liberation, whereas illiteracy was a form of bondage enforced by slave owners and overseers. William L. Andrews stresses the connection between freedom and literacy: “In the slave narrative the quest is toward freedom from physical bondage and the enlightenment that literacy can offer to the restricted self- and social consciousness of the slave” (1986, 7).
The themes of reading, writing, and freedom are prominent in what many critics consider to be the classic slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Like so many others, Frederick Douglass was writing for a literate white audience in behalf of his fellow black brothers. He uses the “power of language and persuasion to tell his own story and use it in the liberation of other men and women” (Sayre 1980, 116). In his narrative, Douglas describes being separated from his mother and being constantly mistreated by a host of masters and their hirelings. Frequently, Douglass associates the inhuman conditions of plantation life with his thwarted desire to write: “My feet had been so cracked by the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (1845, 271). In presenting this harsh metaphor for life under slavery, Douglass is using his pen, his literacy, as an instrument for the liberation of others.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe (1984) has observed that Angelou, who was consciously writing within an African American autobiographical tradition, often uses the “we” instead of the “I” point of view, moving from the perspective of the single person to that of the group. He contends that, like the slave narrative, her books are more public than private, more concerned with collective experience than with subjective concerns. Angelou, who is aware of her collective point of view, told one interviewer that she is always trying to convert the first-person singular into the first-person plural (Plimpton 1994, 77).
The emphasis on collectivity is especially relevant to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with its church gatherings and its communal bonding. This form of identification within the group is a major aspect of black survival. Angelou has frequently admitted Frederick Douglass’s influence on her writings, most significantly in her essay “Mother and Freedom,” which alludes to Douglass’s mother “enslaved on the plantation eleven miles from her infant son.” She would walk to him over this vast distance and then return to her own quarters, trying to convey her love (Stars 47–49).
Editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1987) is convinced that Douglass’s great narrative of 1845 was influenced by an even earlier text, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), the story of an African also known as Gustavas Vassa whose enslaved condition began in Guinea, the country of his birth. The strong style and vivid verbal patterns make Equiano’s account similar both to the Douglass narrative and to the Angelou series. Frederick Douglass’s more-limited journey begins in Maryland and ends in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a seaport on the same Atlantic Ocean but several hundred miles farther north. Douglass notes that there are no signs of slavery and that the workers of New Bedford have not been beaten. Here he is able to enjoy the great pleasures of freedom and employment. When he has enough money he subscribes to the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Thus, a slave narrative begun in bondage ends in the double reward of freedom and literacy. It is reading that takes him to the meeting halls and eventually to a publisher to recount his story about being a slave.
Whereas Douglass’s adventures are geographically restricted, Angelou’s adventures occupy an enlarged, almost boundless space. Her tale begins in Stamps, Arkansas, but extends from St. Louis to California, from Africa to Europe, from Cairo to Berlin, to Ghana, to New York, and back to California. In a sense, Angelou’s voyage reiterates the enormous sweep of Equiano’s journey; her sixth volume begins as she leaves West Africa and boards a plane for the United States.
At the beginning of his narrative Equiano is captured while playing with his beloved sister. Their only consolation was in “being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with tears” (1789, 26). The children are temporarily confined in Africa. But when the slave boats arrive, Equiano and his sister are forever separated. The intensity of their friendship is not unlike the relationship between Maya and her brother Bailey. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and Bailey gathered strength from each other during their childhood in Stamps.
Equiano describes the horror and stench of the ship, the “loathsome smells” from sickness and filth. Because of his youth and agility, he is spared the lower deck, where slaves are chained together and die together. Equiano’s captivity carries him from Guinea, to Canada, to the Mediterranean, the Arctic, Central America, the West Indies, the East Coast of America, and numerous other locations.
The voyage culminates in London with his conversion to Christianity, much as Angelou’s concludes in America with her acceptance of a dual heritage and a desire to tell her story.
In an emotional sense, though, Angelou’s narrative is more circumscribed than either Douglass’s or Equiano’s, more maternal and more internalized. In its female preoccupations it has much in common with the slave narrative known as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Brent’s title and her anonymity indicate the absence of a “serious” narrative; her woman-oriented title does not introduce the adventures of a specific man—Frederick Douglass or Briton Hammon or Olaudah Equiano—but of “a Slave Girl.” Her story does not tell “the life of” or “the interesting narrative of” but only “incidents in.” Most of these incidents involve her desire to protect her children. This powerful narrative is perhaps the paramount example of how the historical African American slave narrative relates to Angelou’s autobiographical series.
Contemporary Applications
More than a dozen slave narratives have been reissued or reinvented in the twenty-first century, to critical acclaim. In 2014 British director Steve McQueen adapted Solomon Northup’s 1853 narrative, 12 Years a Slave, into an Academy Award–winning film which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a freeman from New York State. Northrup had to deny his name and his status in order to protect himself from brutal overseers after he was sold into slavery and taken by force to Louisiana. Much of the plot involves his efforts to communicate in writing with his Northern benefactor in an unwavering attempt to be rescued from bondage. After his release Northup published a written narrative about his captivity, an account praised by Horace Greeley and many other editors and sympathizers.
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