Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  In 2013 author James McBride won the National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird, the fictionalized story of John Brown’s raid on the militia at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. The historic John Brown was on a mission to arouse blacks to join him in an insurrection. The raid was a failure; Brown was captured, arrested, and hung. The narrative, told by a young Kansas-born slave, Henry Shackleford, is more comic than serious, full of Brown misquoting the Bible and of Henry humoring the “Old (White) Man.” McBride, quite conscious of the African American autobiographical tradition and the author of an excellent memoir, The Color of Water (1966), turns the historic John Brown into a buffoon and the nineteenth-century slave narrative into a tragi-comic travelogue, using the generally somber elements of the tradition for farcical effects. The novel does have a serious conclusion, nonetheless. As Brown is being hung in Charleston, West Virginia, in front of a crowd of “white folks,” a group of Negroes are singing Brown’s favorite spiritual, Blow ye trumpet blow, while an incarnation of Brown, in the form of a black and white bird, circles in the sky (last page, Kindle edition).

  In 2007 Canadian author Lawrence Hall wrote a historical novel, originally entitled Somebody Knows My Name, which was retitled and republished in 2015 as The Book of Negroes in conjunction with the Black Entertainment Channel’s miniseries by that name. This carefully crafted novel-into-video tells the story of Aminata Diallo, a young West African Muslim who was taken captive and branded. After she miraculously survives the Middle Passage, another slave teaches her to read and write. Aminata’s narrative stresses her intelligence, her gifts with language, and her love for her husband and their two children. Her journey, like Equiano’s and like Angelou’s, covers a vast geographical space as she moves from the American South and escapes to New York, goes to Nova Scotia, to Sierra Leone, and finally to London, where she helps the Abolitionist cause through speaking and writing her story. The six-part miniseries features Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata.

  Angelou’s autobiographical series combines two distinct characteristics of the slave narrative. It demonstrates both the narrative of movement, as represented by Olaudah Equiano, and the narrative of confinement, a theme common to all imprisoned slave narrators, but having a special significance for women, who were more threatened with the problems of sexual exploitation—rape, loss of dignity, and forsaken children—than were male slaves. Under the slave system the African family structure was discouraged or forbidden or disrupted whenever a male slave was sold. Deborah E. McDowell (1993) argues that among male slave narrators like Frederick Douglass there is a flagrant disregard for women’s issues such as rape, child care, and the stability of the family.

  Like the nineteenth-century female slave narrator, Maya Angelou charts her arduous journey toward autonomy. Abandoned by her parents, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and separated from her grandmother, the young Maya is imprisoned and unable to claim her own identity. Her journey toward self-discovery takes her from ignorance to knowledge, from silence to speech, from racial oppression to personal liberation as she travels from Stamps, Arkansas, to Accra, Ghana, and back to America. Her story thus echoes the course of the slave narrative, with its movement from Africa to America, its account of the cruelties of slavery, and its ultimate hope for emancipation.

  For Angelou, who writes a personal version of the Emancipation Proclamation, her demoralizing childhood experiences with racial bigotry and sexual assault are largely overcome as she continues her efforts to be somebody—a writer, a dancer, a free woman. In all her autobiographies, but especially in The Heart of a Woman and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, the format of the slave narrative is enhanced through the African settings and the expanse of her journeys. Angelou connects herself to the slave narrative by consciously linking herself to an African-centered tradition. Her triumph owes much to her rediscovery of her African heritage and her ability to redefine herself as mother and woman.

  Other black women writers have considered the slave narrative from a contemporary perspective. Critic Hazel V. Carby claims that women’s slave narratives “haunt the texts” of contemporary African American women writers (1987, 61), reiterating the themes of humiliation, hunger, and physical abuse. In Praisesong for the Widow (1984), Paule Marshall reinvents the story of legendary West African slaves who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of South Carolina, while in Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison reconstructs the narrative of a historic woman slave who murders her baby girl to save her from slavery. In her 1989 novel, The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker’s heroine fantasizes the ordeals of the horrendous journey in slave ships, where nursing mothers shared their milk with starving children. Like other contemporary black women writers, Maya Angelou offers parallels between her stories and the slave narratives, recognizing in her own life certain elements inherent to the genre, such as isolation, abuse, and the absence of home and community.

  The Spiritual

  Another prominent influence on Angelou’s work is the Negro spiritual, a musical form that originated during the “Great Revival” meetings of the early nineteenth century. This music grew from Protestant camp meetings that were attended by both whites and blacks. During the 1920s and 1930s people like art historian Alain Locke, singer Paul Robeson, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston were dedicated to promoting the Negro spiritual as a pure, artistic form. It was Hurston’s position that a spiritual could not be performed by a college choir: “The real Negro singer cares nothing about pitch” or other technical matters, Hurston argued. In the genuine spiritual, every singer is “fired by the same inner urge” (quoted in Hemenway 1977, 56).

  In our interview Angelou responded to a question about the title of Traveling Shoes by singing several lines from a Negro spiritual: “I’ve got shoes, you got shoes / All of God’s children got shoes” (“Icon” 1997). Angelou utilizes the spiritual for its thematic and symbolic connotations in presenting one of her major themes, her transformational journey to Africa and back.

  The Negro spiritual frequently contains the dual motifs of travel and race—of traveling to freedom and escaping the racial bondage of slavery. Angelou, who was moved by an “inner urge,” sang parts of three different spirituals during the “Icon” interview. Her attitude toward the genre is delightfully unacademic: “If they are songs about the spirit, then they are gospel songs. Some they call gospel and some spirituals. But those are just titles which help people to codify for the Dewey Decimal System or something. The people who wrote them and sang them, they thought they were all spirituals.”

  Perhaps the best illustration of her use of the spiritual occurs in Traveling Shoes, during a meeting in Cairo with William V. S. Tubman, who was the president of Liberia from 1943 to 1971. Liberia was founded in the early nineteenth century by a society wanting to provide homes for slaves who returned to the African continent after achieving their emancipation. Tubman, recalling and naming his American African heritage, requests that she sing a Negro spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The chariot heading for the Promised Land is a symbol that reinforces the travel motif and places Angelou’s text within the African American oral tradition. She employs the genre to foreshadow her cultural return from an African identity to an African American one, and to signify her connection with her Southern heritage.

  Like the slave narrative, but on a lesser scale, the Negro spiritual traces the journey from slavery to freedom. In the slave narrative, freedom is achieved within the boundaries of an autobiographical text, whereas in the spiritual, freedom is postponed until arriving in the heavenly kingdom of the New Jerusalem. The spiritual is a collective outcry in a form repeated over and over, whereas autobiography is an individual recollection, often combined with the collective or “we” point of view. Other examples of the Negro spiritual include the slaves’ journey to the biblical river in “Roll, Jordan, Roll” or to the restored kingdom of Zion in “Sabbath Has No End” (Southern 1971, 201–2).

  Ironically, a number of religious travel
hymns had a practical value, since many were encoded with directions for escape. It is no accident that James McBride ends his story about John Brown’s rebellion by referring to “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” Brown’s favorite spiritual, with its refrain “The year of jubilee is come / Return, ye ransomed sinners, home” (Townsend, The Baptist Standard Hymnal, 194). The raid on Harpers Ferry, although initially deemed a failure, marked the beginning of a journey home that is still in transit.

  Chapter 3

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)

  In 1970 a child with skinny legs and muddy skin was introduced into African American autobiography. Born Marguerite Johnson, she later became known as Maya Angelou, an actress and dancer who performed in George Gershwin’s musical, Porgy and Bess, and in Jean Genet’s satirical French play, The Blacks. In 1968 she wrote a successful series on African heritage for educational television. Angelou, well known by then as an entertainer and narrator, was urged by James Baldwin and by the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy to try her hand at writing an autobiography. After several refusals she agreed; the result was a unique series of autobiographical narratives.

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Maya Angelou’s six autobiographies. It covers her life from the age of three, when her parents send her and her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas, until the age of sixteen, when she becomes a mother. Annie Henderson is the main influence on her childhood.

  When Maya and Bailey are eight and nine, respectively, they travel to St. Louis, where their mother, Vivian Baxter, and their maternal grandmother are leading a far more sophisticated life than anything Maya had known in Arkansas. There are more parties and fewer church gatherings. In the loose atmosphere of St. Louis, Maya is raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, who warns her to be silent (mute) or he will kill her brother Bailey. After the trial Freeman dies after being violently beaten, presumably by Maya’s uncles. Maya is indeed mute. She cannot and will not speak. The silent Maya is returned to Momma Henderson, remaining speechless for five years until she recovers her voice through the patient help of her grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers.

  As Maya emerges from the traumas of childhood, she gains strength from reading literature and graduates with honors from the eighth grade. Soon after graduation, she and Bailey move to San Francisco, where their mother, Vivian, was living with her new husband, Daddy Clidell. There, Maya simultaneously attends George Washington High School and on a part-time basis a Marxist labor school. At the latter she takes courses in dance and theater that will prove invaluable in her career.

  Worried that she might be a lesbian, she engages in sex with a young man from the neighborhood to disprove her fears. The sixteen-year-old girl, supported financially and emotionally by her parents, gives birth to a son, who becomes the focus of most of the remaining autobiographies.

  Narrative Point of View

  Autobiography is generally written from the first-person point of view, the “I,” but while the “I” is the norm, it has occasionally been modified. For example, both Jamaica Kincaid, in An Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and Maxine Hong Kingston, in The Woman Warrior (1976), recount their lives from the viewpoint of their mothers. James McBride, in The Color of Water (1996), uses a double first-person point of view: his own autobiographical account is printed in Roman type and his mother’s, also first person, is printed in italics. Through this technique, McBride is able to represent the connections and antagonisms between an African American son and his Jewish mother.

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the five succeeding volumes use the first-person narrative voice, even though there are many moments that sound more like fiction than autobiography. Caged Bird is told by a child who is artfully re-created by the adult narrator. From a child’s perspective, Maya records her separation from her mother and father, and her strong religious and communal connections, shared with her paternal grandmother. Revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Southern black female who is at times a child, at times a mother, Maya Angelou introduces a unique point of view to American autobiography.

  In classic American autobiographies—those written, for example, by the inventor/statesman Benjamin Franklin (1708–1790), or by Harvard professor Henry Adams (1838–1918)—the narrative is relayed by white men with sound family backgrounds and unlimited educational opportunities. The narrator’s purpose in writing his story is to impart a model for living. The memoirs of statesmen such as Winston Churchill (1874–1965), prime minister of England during World War II, would also fit this category.

  In Angelou’s case, the story is told from the unlikely perspective of a black Southern female whose chances to be someone were dreadfully limited, due to the constraints placed on the lives of African American people. And yet she is articulate, sarcastic, upsetting—not at all the kind of narrator that a frequent reader of autobiography expects. From the first moment, she records being underprivileged, an undesirable outsider. According to Sidonie Ann Smith, any black autobiographer will reveal his or her oppression in those earliest moments: “In Black American autobiography the opening almost invariably recreates the environment of enslavement from which the black self seeks escape” (1973, 367). Maya feels ugly and awkward throughout the entire first volume, although she does have flashes of self-pride, for instance when she believes that Momma Henderson is rewarding good behavior by putting her and Bailey in the front pew of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Generally, though, she considers her “black self” to be the cage that entraps her.

  Similar negative self-perceptions are frequent in black female autobiography, for example, in the raw first line of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942): “Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me” (3). For Angelou, the negative sense of self continues into the fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, where she learns to appreciate more fully her changing character.

  As the first-person narrator, Angelou is able to tell her unique story while at the same time sharing the contributions of black writers who came before her. From the first moments of Caged Bird, she establishes communication with earlier African American art forms: with the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, with the Negro spiritual, and with the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent). In that sense, the point of view becomes a collective one, the voice not only of the single autobiographer but also of the African American literary community. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes of the “collective identity of African American women” within the Southern landscape and in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou (1990, 222).

  Structure

  Structure relates to the shape of a narrative, to its overall design or patterns. C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon define structure as “the planned framework of a piece of literature,” determined by features like language, formal divisions, and organization (1996, 459). The “planned framework” in Angelou’s autobiographies is the concept of a journey or journeys—from south to north, from west to east to west, from place to place in the United States or across the Atlantic Ocean. In Caged Bird, the journey is a triangular one, almost like having a set of three thumbtacks—a map of the United States to represent California and Arkansas and Missouri. If the tacks are moved as the character Maya moves in the book, a reader can get a solid sense of how structure operates within an autobiographical text.

  Each of Angelou’s autobiographies relies on movement as equivalent to travel; the movement from journey to journey establishes the narrative line. In recording her momentous journey Angelou, without being directly repetitive, constantly re-creates and rewinds the structure, replaying it at different speeds and at different volumes. The idea of movement is extensive in the autobiographies, beginning with the denial of movement on the first page of Caged Bird—“I didn’t come to stay”—to the word traveling, which dominates the title
of the fifth volume, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and initiates the action in A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

  In writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou chooses the train ride from California to Arkansas to represent the beginning of her autobiographical journey. Eugenia Collier notes that Angelou’s use of the journey is on one level an escape from an impossible circumstance, while “on another level, each is a further step in Maya’s journey toward awareness” (1986, 22). Of other journeys within the triad, the trip to St. Louis in her father’s car is the most terrible, for in St. Louis she is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Years later, in a journey to Mexico, this same father is present as the travel patterns again assume a sinister tone. Maya, who has never been behind the wheel of a car, maneuvers her father’s car fifty miles down the mountainside because he is too drunk to drive. After she is stabbed by her father’s girlfriend, she moves to a vacant lot and stays with a number of multiethnic teenagers who are also running away from unacceptable living situations. In that particular section of the book, the sense of movement—driving, stabbing, running, running away, bumping, yelling—becomes overwhelming.

  Following this jolting series of events, Maya returns to Vivian and, in a desperate plan to prove she is a woman, becomes pregnant by a neighborhood boy. On the day she graduates from the summer school of Mission High School, still living in San Francisco with Vivian Baxter and Daddy Clidell, Maya leaves a note on their bed informing them that she is pregnant. After her mother and stepfather assuage Maya’s fears, the mother-to-be slows down. In the quiet conclusion of Caged Bird, Maya lies in bed with her baby, her mother present, in a tableau of stillness that suggests the Nativity scene. Angelou conveys the sacredness of motherhood here and in an earlier comment that she had had an “immaculate pregnancy” (245), preparing the stage for the blessed journey into motherhood that will be the underlying theme for the next volumes.