Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  In a powerful treatment of child loss in Gather Together in My Name, Maya goes to Big Mary’s house and finds it deserted. A neighbor tells her that Big Mary had moved away three days earlier and that she probably went to her brother’s in Bakersfield. After a desperate search and a long bus ride, Maya locates Big Mary Dalton and her angry son, whose feelings of abandonment echo her own unhappiness during childhood.

  Of the numerous references in Gather Together that address Maya’s feelings of inadequacy as a mother, the Big Mary episode is surely the most intense. Guy cries, pulls his mother’s hair, and expresses his fury at being deserted for so long a time. Maya sheds bitter tears and acknowledges her “first guilt” (163). Earlier in the autobiography Maya admits to having ignored her son to such an extent that Big Mary Dalton asked: “Ain’t you got time for him?” (147). She also leaves him alone on the night that Troubadour Martin ushers her to the drug den near the San Francisco docks. These and other instances of maternal conflict or neglect give Gather Together a special tension. The tension does not vanish in the volume’s affirmation of “innocence” but continues with lesser or greater gravity throughout the series.

  The second theme, clothing, is also of great importance in the writings of African American women. Clothing is an indicator of class and character; black women writers often use clothing symbolically, as a kind of second skin or mask. In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1984), for example, the heroine is on a cruise ship. The six suitcases filled with linen dresses and evening gowns become, on both literal and symbolic levels, the excess baggage that keeps her trapped in bourgeois values. Similarly, Jade, the light-skinned model in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), owns a sealskin coat, a rich, black fur that covers her sleek body. The coat becomes a multileveled symbol in the novel—a barricade between her and her primitive lover; a sign of capitalism, with its slaughter of innocent seals for profit; a reference to the famed tar baby of African American folklore that traps its victims and won’t let go. Morrison uses similar images in her 2015 novel God Help the Child. Her central character, Bride, is a beautiful model with dark skin who wears nothing but white clothing in order to accentuate her features and her status.

  Angelou introduces clothing as a theme on the first page of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya’s ugly purple frock made a noise “like crepe paper on the back of hearse.” A sign of her humiliation, the dress is also, as Liliane K. Arensberg (1976) observes, symbolic of the themes of death and rebirth that operate in the first autobiography. In Gather Together in My Name, however, Angelou tends to use clothing as a form of deliberate costuming that either covers up or augments her character’s body, often conveying her bad taste and inexperience. Frequently, the way she dresses is determined by the men she is involved with.

  As in Caged Bird, the theme of clothing is introduced on the first page of Gather Together, where Angelou describes Southern black women living in San Francisco during World War II. Although they knew only “maid’s uniforms and mammy-made dresses,” they changed these garments for men’s work pants and took jobs in the shipyards. Prostitutes were so busy they didn’t have time to take off their shoes, the narrator remarks in the prologue, foreshadowing Maya’s work as a dancer, a prostitute, and a madam.

  Clothes become a tool of the trade when L. D. Tolbrook begs her to “dress her age” in short skirts, ankle socks, and hair ribbons. Teenage attire becomes her identifying feature as a prostitute and her clothing an ironic statement about the theme of lost innocence that helps structure the book. Maya buys too revealing a dance costume for her first Poole and Rita performance. Troubador Martin stashes stolen clothing in her rooms until Maya’s closets are stuffed with sweaters and skirts.

  Clothing takes on special significance when she returns to Stamps wearing her city clothing: white, off-the-shoulder peasant blouses and brightly colored skirts with floral prints. Her high school friend, L. C. Smith, tells Maya the truth. Everyone is laughing at her for wearing “the very clothes everyone here wants to get rid of” (69). Maya’s reason for going to the white section of Stamps is presumably to change her manner of dress, since she orders a Simplicity sewing pattern for a design not available in Stamps. Reading the situation symbolically, “simplicity” can be associated with innocence. The pattern, too complicated for the Stamps General Merchandise Store to stock, marks the end of Maya’s simple and innocent life in Arkansas. Because of her arrogant outburst over a piece of clothing that doesn’t yet exist, Maya and Guy are finished in Stamps, ordered away for their own good by Annie Henderson.

  A third theme, work, is also connected to related ideas in each of the volumes. Recall Maya’s delight in Caged Bird at being hired as the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. In Gather Together, work is of supreme importance as the narrator persistently searches for a means of survival. Her greatest job disappointment occurs when, about to be inducted as an army recruit, Maya is suddenly rejected because the army learns that she attended the Mission Labor School for two years, a school on the list of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC, a committee created by the authority of the United States Senate, was headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957). Its business was to uncover communists among educators, entertainers, governmental employees, the army, the State Department, and anyone else suspected of sheltering “Reds” or “Commies.” The army said no, even though they had no evidence that Maya was ever a communist sympathizer.

  She is more fortunate with other job applications in the service or entertainment businesses: cafeteria worker, cook, prostitute, dancer, and so forth. Food service—short-order cook, waitress, restaurant manager—offers work that Maya feels fairly comfortable with, perhaps because of Annie Henderson’s great success in selling lunches to mill workers in Arkansas during the Depression. Although Maya’s work in a San Francisco diner is dismal, she lifts her spirits by listening to jazz: “I let the music wash away the odors and moods of the restaurant” (80). Her restaurant jobs eventually become ways to meet male friends who, like her jobs, tend to be short term and unreliable.

  Maya loses one decent job as the manager of a small restaurant in Oakland because of her own compassionate personality. Appalled to discover that her boss, Mr. Cain, promotes prizefighting, she becomes hysterical when she sees a small young boxer who looks like Bailey being “whooped” to death. When Maya starts screaming “Stop them” and “Freak,” she knows her job is over (173–74).

  A second category of work in Gather Together, and one that has the greatest impact on her later years, involves the entertainment industry. As an individual or as part of a team, Maya shows promise as a dancer and cabaret singer. In a display of modesty, though, she refuses to dance nude for stag parties, telling R. L. Poole that she won’t have a “bunch of white men to gape at me” (113). Maya learns her routines quickly and incorporates the steps into the Poole and Rita performances until Poole’s girlfriend returns to replace Maya as his partner. By the time of the third volume, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), Maya’s talent and diligence will earn her a solid reputation as a performer, solid enough to be offered the opportunity to dance in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

  A third kind of work in Gather Together involves illicit sex. One night in a bar where Maya works as a B-girl, pushing watered-down drinks at inflated prices, she meets two lesbians, Beatrice and Johnnie Mae. As usual, she is suspicious of gay women. Nevertheless, she accepts an invitation to visit them at their house, where she smokes marijuana for the first time and where, maybe because she’s high, she concocts a plan to be their business manager or madam while Johnnie Mae and Beatrice turn tricks.

  While the idea of being a prostitute disgusts Maya at first, she later succumbs to the wishes of L. D. Tolbrook, who begs her to prostitute herself for him so that he can pay off his debts. Maya is the least popular of the three whores at Clara’s. As Clara warns her, men don’t want to get married; they just want to “trick”
(141). Maya dislikes the strong smell of disinfectant but enjoys the way the women talk to each other. The whorehouse scenes contain exactly the kind of material that Angelou was afraid to disclose to the public, fearing that her family would be offended if they knew she had been a prostitute. Nonetheless, the theme of sexuality in Gather Together reveals a great deal of honesty and daring on the part of the narrator.

  Style and Literary Devices

  Due to the provocative sexual nature of Gather Together, Angelou’s writing in this volume is a mixture of elegant, mature prose coupled with the language of low-life characters for whom reefer, trick, and pimp are major words in their vocabularies. At times, Angelou seems to sink along with her troubles to the very depths of the earth; she describes the “slimy world” of prostitution with a sensuousness that includes the feel of a “man’s zipper” on her thigh, the feel of Lysol irritating her throat (140–41). Even when she writes with eloquence, her topics tend to be grim, as in her description of Bailey following the death of his wife from tuberculosis, or in her presentation of her breakup with Curly.

  Only rarely is an elated Maya stretching her wings. She is most ecstatic when she is onstage, with the movement of the dance pushing her toward freedom and letting her forget the “crushing failures in my past” (100). In one splendid passage, Angelou, in an exultant style, again describes the dancing narrator: “The music was my friend, my lover, my family.” In a series of comparisons she writes that dance music is a bright day, a happy son, poetry recited in a “warm bath” (112). What Maya needs for emotional sustenance she obtains by tapping her feet to the rhythm of the music.

  Much of her style, though, reflects a negativity of moods and cadences. She describes the heights of a love affair, only to fall; she depicts the uncontrollable laughter that comes from smoking grass, only to crash. After she is fired for interfering in the boxing match, her language vividly records her depression. Guy’s smile no longer moves her. She has lost her strength and her courage. Her marijuana is all gone. She feels “defenseless” for the very first time (175). The negativity of Angelou’s style near the end of the book, immediately before she meets Troubadour Martin, suggests that Maya is looking for a way out, probably through drugs. Her style is slow, measured, in preparation for the trip to the lower depths that ends the volume.

  The descent into the underworld has been a literary device in European literature since Homer’s The Odyssey (ca. 750 BC). Odysseus, the epic hero, goes to the land of Hades and learns about the value of life from the slain Greek hero, Achilles: “Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand…than lord it over all the exhausted dead” (Homer, Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 1995, 344). Like Achilles and Odysseus, Troubadour Martin shows Maya a vision of hell that serves as an affirmation of life. By shooting up before her eyes, Troub proves to her that the drug high, which looks like paradise, is really the ultimate dead end. Realizing that “one man’s generosity pushed me safely away from the edge,” Maya regains her footing and vows to change the course of her life (181).

  Troubadour’s name has literary associations as well. During the Middle Ages (AD 1200–1400), troubadours were musician-poets from the south of France. Inspired by lyric poems from the Greeks, troubadours resided in royal courts or wandered the countryside, composing words and music. Given the idea of music as salvation in Gather Together, it seems that Troubadour Martin behaves like a soothing musician in keeping Maya away from the turmoil of drug addiction. Angelou admits that Troubadour Martin is not his real name, but that the episode was accurate: “[I]n the bathroom he made me stand there and watch as he tied himself up and then probed for a place which would accept…and he had scars so that…Oh God, it was so awful” (“Icon” 1997).

  Other critics have noticed parallels between Gather Together and Greek literature, especially to the Persephone-Demeter myth of Greek mythology. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1990) remarks that Gather Together in My Name is a reimaging of the Persephone myth in which a daughter, Persephone, is raped and kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld. Her mother, Demeter, goddess of agriculture, grieves so deeply that all of nature becomes barren. To save the world from complete starvation, Hades permits his bride to visit Demeter for half of the year. For the other half Persephone must return to Hades. This profound attachment between mother and daughter, one of the very few woman-oriented myths in Greek legend, explains the power of mother love and accounts for the change of the seasons. Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulous (1980) develops the parallel more fully in her study of symbols of the mother in four American autobiographies.

  Angelou may have the Demeter-Persephone myth in mind in her treatment of the mother/daughter theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name. Maya’s rape in Caged Bird initiates a five-year separation between mother and daughter and thrusts Maya into a hell of silence that is alleviated by another mother figure, Mrs. Flowers, whose name indicates springtime and fertility. Reunited at last with her mother, Vivian Baxter, Maya nonetheless leaves her at the beginning of the second volume. She descends into a world of prostitution, visits the underworld with Troubadour Martin as her guide, and finally emerges with the promise to return to her mother. While the Persephone story is to some degree relevant to Maya’s situation, the mythological reading fails to take into account Vivian Baxter’s remoteness in both volumes. Nor does it address Maya’s primary emotional commitment, which is not to Vivian, the mother, but to her son, Guy.

  A Womanist Reading

  Maya Angelou has been more than eloquent in writing about the conditions of black women in America. Near the end of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she presents several moving paragraphs on the subject, from the point of view of a high school student who has stopped attending classes but who continues to learn and observe. Angelou argues that the black woman is entangled by her own nature as well as by three powerful enemies: “masculine prejudice, white illogical hate, and Black lack of power” (231).

  Angelou published these comments in 1970. Almost three decades later she wrote in a similar vein that the “heartbreaking tenderness of black women and their majestic strength” are responsible for black women’s survival (Stars 44). Each of these passages speaks to the “womanist” issues raised in Gather Together in My Name: masculine bias; white racism; women’s lack of power; and women’s tenderness, strength, and survival.

  Womanist is a more appropriate term than feminist for identifying Angelou’s attitudes toward black women in Gather Together. Novelist Alice Walker popularized the term womanist in the introductory section of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1967) to make explicit the racial distinctions between black feminists and white feminists. A womanist is a “black feminist or feminist of color,” wrote Walker. “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” The color purple indicates strength, power, and woman/love, what Walker calls “being grown up,” as opposed to the less forceful, lavender qualities of the white feminist movement. According to Deborah King, a “womanist is spirited and spiritual, determined and decisive, committed to struggle and convinced of victory” (quoted in Tierney 1991, 390).

  Black women in America committed themselves to the struggle for civil rights well over one hundred years ago, in associations such as the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston and the more broadly based National Association of Colored Women. A year before the publication of Caged Bird, black poet Sonia Sanchez introduced a course, “The Black Woman,” at the University of Pittsburgh, the first college course to concentrate on the experiences of black women in the Americas (Tierney 1989, 45). If black women have not displayed a great interest in feminism as defined since the 1970s by white women, it is because of racism in the women’s movement, claims Deborah King, who outlines the three major items on the womanist agenda: first, establishing positive images among black women; second, recognizing that race, class, and gender play a part in the oppression of black women; and third, becoming increasingly aware of the cultural heritag
e of black women (quoted in Tierney 1991, 42–44).

  With her focus on positive self-image, race, gender, and black women’s heritage, Maya Angelou fits the cultural definition of “womanist” far more comfortably than she fits the category of “feminist.” Although she does not ascribe to labels, she did tell one interviewer that if she was a female she was of course a feminist. “I’d be stupid not to be on my own side” (Forma 1989, 162).

  Because Gather Together takes place in the mid-1940s, the character known as Maya would have had no contact with the theories of either womanism or feminism. These terms did not become significant to women’s thinking until 1963, when Betty Friedan published her explosive book The Feminine Mystique, arguing that women did not need to be tied exclusively to the roles of mother and homemaker. In many ways, Angelou’s life had been a constant struggle to prove, long before Betty Friedan, that she could have a career as well as a child, although the immature eighteen-year-old protagonist of Gather Together was hardly thinking in such sophisticated terms. A single mother needed a job; it was that simple.

  Maya’s sense of being a black woman centers on economic survival. In her effort to stay afloat, she epitomizes Walker’s definition of a womanist as one who often exhibits “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior” (1967, xi, Walker’s emphasis). One example of Maya’s outrageous behavior is her slick-talking proposal to Johnnie Mae and Beatrice that they set up a whorehouse with Maya as the Madam. With no prior experience, with no idea of the legal consequences, Maya acts outrageously and audaciously in manipulating the two women. At the same time, she is courageous when she interrupts L. D. Tolbrook at home, demanding that he help her retrieve her son, kidnapped by Big Mary Dalton.