Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  Plot Development

  Unlike fictional forms such as the novel or the short story, the plot in autobiographies focuses on the revelation of character rather than on the development of a line of action. Further, the narrator of most autobiographies is more intent on exploring personal relationships than in plunging his or her characters into actions or escapades. Add these complications to the unusual, multilayered form of serial autobiography, with its mass of allusions to past situations, characters, and locations, and the non-plot thickens.

  The incidents in The Heart of a Woman have fewer emotional disruptions than in the three earlier autobiographies. As an actress in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks and as a political organizer in Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she achieves a level of competence not evident in the earlier volumes. She becomes more certain in her mothering, now that Guy is an adolescent. She promises herself to give up major tours, and finds fulfillment in her New York/Brooklyn environment. Angelou’s professional activities are suddenly interrupted when in 1961 she meets a South African, Vusumzi Make. At Vus’s insistence they pretend they are married (133). The new husband goes to Cairo; Maya and Guy soon join him. The so-called marriage goes poorly, mainly because of money problems and Vus’s promiscuity. The fourth volume ends with Angelou and Vus divorced and with mother and son en route to Liberia when Guy is seriously injured in a car accident.

  Character Development

  Like all of the autobiographies in the series, The Heart of a Woman begins by creating a mood or an atmosphere into which the changing narrator is reintroduced. The fourth volume immediately places the story within a racial framework, with references to the military protection of Little Rock schoolchildren, to the blocking of a civil rights bill by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and to other pertinent examples of the racist climate to which Angelou returns after a year in Europe performing in Porgy and Bess. As the story opens, she and Guy have moved from the security of Vivian Baxter’s home to a houseboat near San Francisco that they share with four whites. Usually distrustful of white people, she is now, during the loose and free 1960s, part of an experimental gathering that she calls the “beatnik brigade.” Her connection to her white roommates parallels her affinities with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other liberated white writers of the 1950s.

  However, Angelou is still somewhat distrustful, and it shows through in indirect ways. She does not describe either her character or the characters of her roommates in a positive way; in fact, she barely describes them at all. In her remembrance of those “beatnik” days she provides the professions of her roommates—“an ichthyologist [a scientist who studies fish], a musician, a wife, and an inventor” (4)—and their race. But she never names or characterizes the people with whom she lives for almost a year, even though “naming” has been an important process in Angelou’s upbringing, ever since Mrs. Cullinan so angers Maya by calling her Mary in Caged Bird that “Mary” deliberately breaks the nasty white woman’s favorite casserole. As autobiographer, Angelou hastily bypasses the year on the houseboat, giving the impression that it was either too unpleasant, or too embarrassing, or too trivial to recollect; it was, however, a necessary rite of passage in an era when the relationship between blacks and whites became looser, especially in large, “hip” areas like San Francisco.

  While Angelou is not altogether satisfied with the integrated living situation and the communal structure of the houseboat, she is a long way from the experience of estrangement depicted at the beginning of her earlier volumes. On the houseboat she relaxes and becomes imaginative with her hairstyle and clothing. She particularly enjoys the experiment because her roommates neither ignore Maya’s and Guy’s skin color nor do they romanticize it. Angelou’s brief stay in a commune reveals her capacity for cooperation and anticipates her later group involvements with writers, actors, professors, expatriates, and civil rights workers.

  Within a year, Angelou, tired of sharing space, craves privacy. She attempts, without initial success, to rent a small house in a segregated white neighborhood. The house, insists the landlord, is “taken.” Angelou seeks the help of some white friends, who pretend that the house is for them. Although the landlord finally concedes, the theme of racial discrimination is in the forefront during the early part of the book. At times Angelou cheerfully coexists with white people, but at other times, as in the case of the landlord, she encounters prejudice similar to the episodes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, when the brazen children taunted Momma Henderson, or in Gather Together in My Name, when the saleswoman in Stamps insults Maya.

  Similarly, Guy experiences racial discrimination from the staff of the white school he is attending. He is accused of using foul language in front of some girls on the school bus. When Angelou questions him, she learns that Guy rather tactlessly told them where babies come from. When he informed the innocent girls about their parents’ role in making babies, they started to cry. Maya, who visits the school to discuss the problem, is once again confronted with racist attitudes; she is told that “we do not allow Negro boys to use foul language in front of our girls” (19). The teachers’ attitudes were having a negative impact on her son.

  Soon afterward mother and son move to a mixed neighborhood. Guy is overjoyed to see black children playing in the street. Maya becomes more relaxed in these circumstances. She begins to write sketches, songs, and stories. Luckily, she meets African American novelist John Killens, who is in California writing a screenplay from one of his novels, Youngblood. Killens reads through her material, urging her to come to New York, where she will get feedback from other aspiring black writers.

  The first dramatic change in Maya’s character in The Heart of a Woman occurs when mother and son move to New York, where she and Guy live with John and Grace Killens and their family in Brooklyn until they find an apartment of their own. Guy is at first skeptical and disapproving, but they soon settle in—attending school, meeting neighbors, grappling with the differences they discover in leaving the West for the East. Angelou now seems confident in her lifestyle, her self-assurance deriving in part from the close relationships she is able to form with black singers, actors, and writers. It is not until this volume that Angelou, for the first time in the autobiographical series, begins to identify herself as a writer. Readers can actually envision the distinguished artist who will become Dr. Maya Angelou of Wake Forest University.

  Early in the volume she mentions that she has begun to write poetry and short fiction. In a marvelous episode, Angelou describes attending a workshop of the Harlem Writers Guild where she engages in a difficult procedure: a first reading of her play, “One Love, One Life,” followed by a not very flattering critique by the authors who attended. John Killens, trying to soften the blow to her writer’s ego, tells her that the next time will be easier.

  Determined to succeed, Angelou turned writing into an act of mental discipline. She forced herself to concentrate on details and to understand the technical aspects of the craft. Through the eventual encouragement that she received from the Harlem Writer’s Guild, she grew as a writer and as a person. Angelou meshed her character with this group of African American and Caribbean writers more experienced than she, people who, like her, would someday make meaningful contributions to literature. John Killens, the member of the group most connected to Angelou’s personal life, had at the time of their first meeting written Youngblood (1954). Sarah Wright was the author of the acclaimed novel This Child’s Gonna Live (1969), a potent testimony to black female survival. Rosa Guy, who protected Maya during stormy premarital clashes with Vus Make, became her close friend in A Song Flung Up to Heaven; Rosa Guy was the author of A Measure in Time (1983) and other works of fiction. The Caribbean writer Paule Marshall—one of the most successful at the Harlem Writers Guild and now considered a major American novelist—was delighted to learn that her novel Brown Girl, Brown Stones (1959) was being made into a movie for television.

  From I Know Why the Caged Bi
rd Sings, readers know about Angelou’s devotion to writers since childhood. Her earliest literary idols were men. Although she admired women writers—Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston—she does not mention them in Caged Bird (“Icon” 1997). It is not until The Heart of a Woman that Angelou fully identifies herself with a woman writer. By taking that title from a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, she is including herself among a distinct tradition of women poets and novelists. Her allusion in the title to a caged black woman poet of the past is an acknowledgment to her legacy as a black woman writer, a legacy shared with Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and other sisters of African American and Caribbean ancestry.

  These affiliations are indicative of Angelou’s emerging feminism, which can be defined as a social and political response to the fact that women and men are treated unequally in society and that women are underrepresented in the arts, the sciences, the economy, and elsewhere. Angelou, in the acknowledgments to The Heart of a Woman, gives “Special thanks to a few of the many sister/friends whose love encourages me to spell my name: WOMAN.” She then lists the names of twelve women whose friendships affected her sense of female identity, among them her friend of thirty years, Dolly McPherson; Ghanaian folklorist Efuah Sutherland; and novelists Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Louise Merriwether.

  Asked whether The Heart of a Woman is the book in which she started to become strongly identified as a woman writer rather than as someone whose connections are with male writers like Shakespeare or Poe, Angelou responded with a chuckle, “That’s possible.” “You can say that [in your book]. You can say anything you want,” she said, again with a chuckle, displaying her wit and her strength of character (“Icon” 1997).

  In Harlem, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, Angelou took advantage of opportunities for artistic improvement. Besides her apprenticeship with the Harlem Writers Guild, she joined other African American organizations that sought the words and methods for creating a responsive, black-identified community. Like her work with the Writers Guild, Angelou’s work in theater increased her potential for knowledge and friendship. She had good feelings from singing solo at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater and in other arenas attracting mainly black audiences. Her powerful renditions of Calypso music overjoyed many of her listeners for whom Calypso and other types of folk songs were a neglected West Indian art form.

  She was also successful in front of mixed or mainly white audiences, especially in her off-Broadway performance as the White Queen in the 1961 production of Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. Genet’s infamous play is a vicious satire about the absurdity of white racism. In the play, the black/white roles are reversed so that the formerly oppressed blacks become the aggressors and the formerly affluent whites become their pawns. Angelou loved playing the leading role, even though the idea of reversal of power did not appeal to her sense of democracy. She was particularly fond of one of the actors in the cast, Godfrey Cambridge, who in 1970, the year Caged Bird was published, performed his memorable role as Watermelon Man, directed by Melvin Van Peebles. Like The Blacks, The Watermelon Man is a drama based on role reversal.

  A far more public person than she was in the earlier volumes, Angelou began to identify in the late 1950s with the civil rights movement. Eventually she became Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She was also committed to a women’s organization, the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH). Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge, convinced by the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., collaborated on a fund-raising project at the Village Gate, a popular nightclub in Greenwich Village, to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Called Cabaret for Freedom, the fund-raiser was created, directed, and performed by Angelou and Cambridge, with help from comics, dancers, and other theater people. Yet despite the cabaret project and a developing personal friendship, Angelou and Cambridge never became lovers. Between them, Angelou says, they “ignited no passionate fires” (Heart of a Woman, 53).

  Soon after meeting South African hero Vusumzi Make in 1961, Angelou and the women of CAWAH almost halted the operations of the UN General Assembly when they conducted a sit-in at the United Nations Building after the prime Minister of Zaire, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1961. To assist their cause, Angelou and her friend Rosa Guy sought the support of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X. She and Rosa hoped that he and his organization would affirm the actions of CAWAH and make use of the energy incited by the protest gathering. To the contrary, Malcolm X disapproved of the protest strategy: “Muslims do not demonstrate,” he responded (168). Although he predicted that conservative African American leaders, wanting to be loved by the white man, would quickly turn against the organizers, he did not offer to tell the press that the protest meant that black people were angry. Angelou, although she was disappointed with Malcolm X’s response, was nonetheless entranced by his good looks and by his fire, traits that had also attracted her to South African rebel Vusumzi Make.

  Angelou’s engagements with writing and with politics had a significant effect on what she chose to reveal about herself in The Heart of a Woman. But there is a second major change in her character and in the outcome of her journey when she meets Vusumzi Make, a freedom fighter recently released from a South African prison. They met at a party given by John Killens and his wife to protest apartheid in South Africa, the systematic and total segregation of South African people into two groups: the privileged whites and the disenfranchised blacks. In her book of reflective essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997), Angelou describes Vus Make as one of the most brilliant people she had ever met.

  A handsome, dazzling intellectual, Vusumzi Make appears to be the perfect choice for a husband, given Maya’s desire to be loved and her growing concern for African liberation movements. Angelou is already engaged to a bailbondsman, Thomas Allen, a smooth man of “reddish-tan color” who gives her “lavish satisfaction” (100). But Vus is electrifying, exciting, beautiful; if she marries Thomas, she tells herself, she would always regret her decision. Vus and Maya go through the motions of marrying in England. Vus suggests as a formality that in America they claim to have married in England, while in London they say their marriage took place in New York: “We never mentioned the word marriage again” (133).

  In London the couple soon begins to spend less time together. Through her husband, Maya starts to associate with a community of middle-class African women who warn her that marriage to an African freedom fighter can often lead to desertion. As Maya listens to her sisters’ stories about their struggles under colonialism, she enthralls them with heroic tales about African American women. With great pride Angelou tells of Harriet Tubman, who, though free, returned to the South to bring slaves out of bondage, and of Sojourner Truth, who had the courage to speak for the rights of enslaved blacks even though white leaders denied that she was a woman and a human being.

  As Vus continues to neglect her, Angelou again proves herself vulnerable to male authority, as she was with Curly, L. D. Tolbrook, Tosh Angelos, and other men in her past. In her role as Vus’s wife, she is confronted for the second time with the struggle between being a homemaker and being a professional, as she had struggled in earlier autobiographies between being a mother and being a professional. As an African who had been trained only to see women as subservient, Vus Make is culturally insensitive to Angelou’s needs as a working woman.

  In one hilarious sequence that occurs before they are a couple, Angelou accompanies Vus to a cocktail party in the Manhattan suite of a West African ambassador. Although she is wearing her most flattering dress and can speak fluently about international politics in several languages, the guests ignore her because she is an American woman. Maya’s way out of this embarrassment is to sit in the kitchen drinking gin with the black female cook. When Vus discovers her, he is humiliated and furious: “No African lady would bring such disgrace on her husband” (203). He chases the now-drunken Maya around the lobby of the classy building where she eludes h
im, grabs a cab out from under the nose of a waiting woman, and spends the night with her friend, Rosa Guy.

  If Vus could be so uncompromising in New York, readers can imagine his attitude when they move to Cairo. He expects Angelou to honor the Egyptian custom of the husband providing for the wife. Nonetheless, Angelou accepts a position as associate editor with the Arab Observer without getting Vus’s permission. In a torrent of fury, he reproaches her, suggesting that she is a man. All is chaos until a mutual friend and American journalist, David DuBois, persuades Vus that her salary will help them serve the revolutionary cause.

  Nor is the conflict between wife and freedom worker the only trouble in the union. Years later, Angelou confided that her formerly passionate lover had a “startling intellect and an impressive accumulation of information, but was shy a mile from romance” (Stars 55). She begins to realize—as she knew very well from his behavior while they were in America—that Vus Make is too friendly with other women and too irresponsible with money. Their irreconcilable positions toward fidelity and financial commitment require that they be examined in a palaver, an Egyptian debate conducted among peers from six countries and intended to clarify the opposing positions with regard to separation. The tribunal decides in Maya’s favor but asks her to stay with Vus for six more months. She agrees, but when there is a job offer from Liberia in West Africa, she accepts it.

  Angelou’s disastrous relationship with Vusumzi Make evokes certain comparisons and contrasts to her marriage to Tosh Angelos in Singin’ and Swingin’. Further retracing Angelou’s steps, the first pages of Caged Bird recall the failed marriage between Bailey Johnson Sr. and Vivian Baxter, with its negative impact on Angelou’s life as a child and a woman. In the course of her life, Angelou introduces problems or conditions that echo other volumes, giving them unity or offering points of contrast. This technique can be called connective repetition, a term Angelou seems to distrust, insisting that each book must stand alone (“Icon”1997). Yet while each book in a serial autobiography must be read independently, the reading process is greatly enriched by recognizing subtle references in and among the texts. The modifications in plot, character, and setting that are bound to occur in serial autobiographies benefit from being examined for their interrelated moments, and in Angelou’s case, from the emphasis on her diverging attitudes toward her autobiographical self.