Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  The most valuable aspect of her relationship with Vus Make is its connection to her growing romance with Africa. In the fourth and fifth volumes, Africa is the site of her growth—first in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and then in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In these tightly interrelated volumes, Angelou initiates a search for her ancestral past. A developing writer, her continuing identification with language and character makes her sensitive to her African roots. She begins to articulate her connections to African slaves who had been “shackled with chains,” and made to carry the weight of their fears with the weight of their irons (257). Her racial consciousness becomes a major theme in the fifth volume, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes in which she explores her feelings of guilt about slavery and about being homeless, neither an African nor an African American. Her search cannot culminate until the struggle of her dual ancestry is resolved.

  Near the end of The Heart of a Woman, Maya meets her greatest challenge when Guy’s car is hit by a truck outside of Accra. An old couple find him on the road and bring him to the emergency ward. At the hospital, while her son lies on a stretcher Maya contemplates his “rich golden skin” turned to “ash-grey” (263). Angelou, although she rarely repeats the same episode in detail, does so in this instance, restating many of the aspects of Guy’s accident at the beginning of her next book, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.

  The deliberate repetition of her terror creates both an emotional link between the two volumes and underscores the impact of Guy’s injuries on both character and story line, since it is Guy’s car crash that keeps Angelou in Ghana. Her retelling of the car accident, first in volume 4 and again in volume 5, emphasizes the autobiographical experience and the use of the mother/ son theme as a transitional device. When asked about the repetition of the car crash, Angelou said she repeated the scene because she had to explain where she was and why, so that each book would be read in its own right (“Icon” 1997). In terms of dramatic effect, the startling repetition gives the volumes an intensity not achieved anywhere else in the series.

  As in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, so in The Heart of a Woman Angelou remains in a state of flux, continuously open to changes in her life, even when those changes involve her divorce from Vus Make or her suffering over her injured son. As she faces these problems she continues the process of redefining her self. In The Heart of a Woman Angelou’s more stable character derives from the self-assurance that comes from long years of living and mothering, her success with writing, and her engagement in theatre and politics. Angelou’s self-assurance, hinted at in earlier volumes, is heightened in The Heart of a Woman, becoming a major aspect of her character.

  Setting

  In the fourth volume the setting pivots from a Western to a distinctively Eastern environment. The volume has three primary settings—San Francisco, New York, and Egypt. These disparate settings divide the book in three parts, with New York placed in the middle or central location. In San Francisco Maya solidifies her relationship with Guy and lovingly ends her dependency on Vivian Baxter. In New York she achieves greater self-awareness as a mother and, through the Harlem Writers Guild, explores her potential as a writer. In Cairo she introduces herself to the idea of what it means to be African as she struggles to maintain her relationship with Vus Make. The primary locations in The Heart of a Woman affect Maya’s growth in terms of motherhood, the black literary scene, and her African heritage.

  Secondary settings, places visited for short durations, also have strong effects on character development and plot. In the London sequence, for example, Maya accompanies Vus to England, where they had planned to get married. Maya is intrigued by the cosmopolitan setting of London; she enjoys the contrasts—the bright costumes of African women reflected against the stony grayness of London. The city also connects her to a support group of women living in London and married to African officials. London with Vus offers another type of newness for Maya as she encounters the sensual ecstasy of making love with a dazzling, delightful male.

  Angelou’s most dramatic use of setting occurs near the end of The Heart of a Woman. In prose that creates the effect of cinemascope or Imax, she offers a panoramic view of North Africa when she flies from Cairo in the east to Ghana in the west, reversing the earlier west/east movement from San Francisco to New York. She gazes from the plane and sees the Sahara desert, then the rivers and forests where she imagines children had been hunted and “tethered” by slave traders. Her vision projects her to America, where she traces the black American slave’s unending “journey to misery” (257). Angelou registers some of the major themes of The Heart of a Woman in this secondary setting as she is propelled across the continent: compassion, the journey, the identification with slavery. The African setting continues in the volume that follows, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.

  Thematic Issues

  Motherhood, so dominant a theme in each of the autobiographies, takes on a new complexity in The Heart of a Woman, owing to the presence and absence of Maya’s mother, Vivian Baxter. The complications of the motherhood theme can be demonstrated by dividing it into several different issues: Maya mothering Guy; Vivian mothering Maya; and Maya mothering herself.

  In the opening sequences of the book, Maya defends Guy on two different occasions when he is accused of misconduct at school. She also tries to protect him against the outrageous tirades of blues singer Billie Holiday. As she gets ready to leave for New York, Angelou observes that her son is changing, that he is, at the age of fourteen, “growing into a tall aloof stranger” (22).

  Despite his aloofness, Guy and his mother remain close throughout The Heart of a Woman. On one level, she improves in her ability to care for him and solicit his opinions; on another, she continues the persistent problem of separation begun in Gather Together and Singin’ and Swingin’ when she loses touch with his life and needs.

  The best example in volume 4 of Angelou’s conflict with motherhood occurs in the episode involving the Brooklyn gang, the Savages. It is highlighted by the fact that when Guy gets in trouble with the gang Angelou is in Chicago on a singing engagement. One night, John Killens, who is watching over Guy while she is away, phones from Brooklyn to inform her that “there’s been some trouble” (75). In a moment of fear, Angelou imagines that Guy has been injured and that it has somehow been her fault. She chastises herself for being a “capricious and too-often-absent mother” (106). She has not been responsible enough.

  The motif of the responsible mother occurs frequently in the series. In Gather Together, she travels alone on a long bus ride to confront Big Mary Dalton, who had kidnapped Guy. In an early incident in The Heart of a Woman she looks three white schoolteachers in the eye when they accuse Guy of upsetting some little girls. The Brooklyn gang event is also the result of a girl accusing Guy: the gang-leader’s girlfriend claims that Guy hit her. Knowing the passions of teenagers, Angelou takes extreme measures to protect her son. When she confronts Jerry, the gang leader, she threatens to shoot his entire family if anything happens to Guy. She has a gun in her purse to prove it.

  The confrontation with Jerry reveals Angelou as a strong, aggressive, perhaps too impulsive black mother who puts aside her guilt and self-doubt in order to defend her son. She said, “I’ve always been adventurous or up to life. Even not adventurous, but when life says ‘Here you are, deal with it,’ I have dealt with it, or tried to” (“Icon” 1997). Defiant, protective of Guy and his welfare, Angelou becomes in this episode a representation of maternal power. In her dealings with the street gang, Angelou embodies a type of black woman whom Joanne M. Braxton calls the “outraged mother” (1989, 21). This type, claims Braxton, is found frequently in slave narratives by women; she represents the strength and dedication of the black mother.

  With regard to her own mother, Vivian Baxter, Maya makes a special effort to say “good bye” as she tries to end a long and complicated relationship. When she knows that she is leaving California,
Maya contacts her mother and requests a formal farewell. Vivian Baxter, always defiant, always ready for an adventure, tells her daughter to meet her for an overnight visit at the Desert Hotel in Fresno. The Desert Hotel had been integrated for only a month, so when Maya meets Vivian in the lounge she feels as though she is about to be stabbed or at least lassoed. Vivian, cool as usual, flirts with the bartender; Maya stares at her mother and repeats the observation from Caged Bird that she was “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen” (25). When they get to their room Vivian shows her the gun in her purse, the possible inspiration for Maya’s gun in her future confrontation with Jerry.

  In this scene, Angelou reveals that she is still enthralled by the beautiful woman from St. Louis, the woman “too beautiful to have children” (Caged Bird, 50). She has since come to appreciate her mother for her vibrant sexuality and her free spirit. Forty years after their rendezvous in Fresno, Vivian Baxter, no longer “beautiful,” will be at Maya’s house in North Carolina, her arms stuck with tubes, spending her last days fighting cancer in her daughter’s care. “My mother raised me, then freed me,” Angelou writes (Stars, 48). It was now time to free her mother.

  Toward the end of The Heart of a Woman a mature Maya Angelou finds herself increasingly alone. The relationship with Vus Make is over. Vivian is in California. Guy, gradually recovering from his physical injuries, moves toward greater autonomy. As the volume ends, he has moved into a university dormitory and she is alone. In the last two paragraphs, Angelou is by herself testing her independence from Guy as she had earlier in the narrative tested her independence from Vus Make. Despite Guy’s absence or perhaps because of it, she recognizes an emerging new self, a woman liberated in heart and being. The last word of The Heart of a Woman is “myself.”

  The narrator’s singular aloneness in this final scene is superficially concerned with what she is eating. No longer needing to compete with her son over who gets the best part of the chicken, she has the breast all to herself without having to share it. There is significant irony here. As Angelou has so often resorted to humor when faced with a disturbing problem, in the conclusion of the fourth volume she offers the reader the half-serious picture of a greedy mother getting what she has always wanted. Her keeping the breast represents both the nurturing aspect of the mother and a weaning herself from Guy’s demands. Life for Angelou, whether she wants it or not, is about to offer a new freedom, a new character, a new “myself.” No longer the mother saved from drugs at the close of Gather Together or the mother prone to making false promises in Singin’ and Swingin’, the character at the end of The Heart of a Woman is, as the title states, a woman. Defined as neither mother nor wife, Maya Angelou is at this moment simply her self.

  Style and Literary Devices

  Of the many stylistic techniques that recur in The Heart of a Woman, two in particular give the volume its special power: the dynamic portrait and the literary allusion. Although Angelou uses the technique of portraiture in all of the volumes, it is not until the fourth autobiography that she perfects it. This device is also called a descriptive portrait or vignette.

  The vignette in literature is a leisurely, ornamental description used to depict character, a technique especially appropriate to autobiography, which lacks the plot-driven intensity of a novel. A realistic way to introduce character is through brief descriptive portraits and the more full-blown vignette. Exciting but short descriptions of celebrities include Angelou’s references to musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, writers James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King Jr., and other prominent African Americans. These portraits strengthen the development of Angelou’s story by introducing figures of great interest who are subordinate to the main events of the narrative. Intertwined with the text, the characters mainly please readers because they are interesting people.

  The second, more complex portrait (or vignette) relies on compactness of style in offering a condensed description designed to capture the subject’s mannerisms and quirks as well as leave a lasting impression on readers. At their most successful, Angelou’s vignettes are character studies of famous African Americans who emerge as intensely realized characters, people who, because of her involvement in show business and politics, Angelou has had the chance to scrutinize. Men or women whom readers may have admired from afar—from a platform, stage, or pulpit—are drawn so near that Angelou is able to expose their wit, imperfections, nastiness, or benevolence.

  In The Heart of a Woman, the two most notable vignettes are of Billie Holiday and Malcolm X. For a period of four days, Maya Angelou entertains blues singer Billie Holiday in California. Their meeting occurs a few months before Holiday’s death in a New York hospital. Angelou harshly describes how drugs destroyed the singer’s beautiful face: her eyes were blank, her skin rubbery. In her description of their four-day friendship, Angelou captures Lady Day’s moody anger, her vivid language, her unpredictable shifts of mood.

  Guy is greatly disturbed by Billie’s presence in the house. He constantly chatters at her, as if to fill the air. Each night she sings him a bedtime song. On her last night, as she is singing “Strange Fruit,” a heartbreaking song about a lynching, Guy keeps interrupting her with questions. Enraged, Holiday tells Guy that the crackers will cut off the balls of a “little nigger” like him (14).

  Later that evening, Maya is singing at a club and realizes that Billie is in the audience. After Maya announces her presence, Holiday takes an unsmiling bow from her table. Then, as Maya starts singing a blues song, Lady Day screams: “Stop that bitch. She sounds just like my goddam Momma” (15). Holiday’s actions, so disturbing to Maya and her son, are discussed further in the Psychological/Feminist Reading section at the end of this chapter.

  The other vignette that stands out in The Heart of a Woman is the portrait of Malcolm X, whose brief but intense characterization tells us a great deal about Angelou’s eroticism. She describes this remote Muslim leader in the language of desire. Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy have made an appointment with Malcolm X to request Muslim support for the CAWAH rally at the United Nations. When he enters the meeting place it feels to Maya as if a “hot desert storm” is rushing at her. His “masculine force” overwhelms her; he was “a great arch through which one could pass to eternity” (167). Angelou’s breathless seizure is almost like being physically invaded, and by a man whose political control and personal dignity do nothing to encourage her fantasies of burning hair and blazing eyes.

  Angelou handles the remainder of the vignette in a cooler manner. Malcolm X describes at some length the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad on the need to separate from white men and their false Christianity, for they have enslaved the African. He promises to offer the people of Harlem the Muslim religion. And he promises to make a statement to the press saying that the protest at the UN building was a sign of the anger of black people. Angelou’s dramatic use of the vignette as a way of characterizing Malcolm X works well in this case, for it is both a portrait and a sermon, a lesson from the great Muslim leader that helps teach her something about self-respect and self-control. Her use of Malcolm X’s portrait as a stylistic device continues into the fifth and sixth volumes, where he is again singled out in a vignette.

  The second distinctive stylistic technique in The Heart of a Woman is the literary allusion, which Meyer H. Abrams explains as a “reference, without explicit identification, to a person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage” (8). Angelou enriches her text by connecting it to significant people and places within African American traditions. This discussion focuses on one specific literary allusion—to the Georgia Douglas Johnson poem for which The Heart of a Woman is named.

  At the heart of Johnson’s poem, “Heart of a Woman” (1918), there is a continuing metaphor that spans several volumes in the autobiographies: it is the comparison between the first-person narrator and the caged bird. The bird/ poet comparison begins when Angelou borrowed the title, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, fro
m Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy.” Dunbar’s caged bird is generally associated with the condition of black people in America who are imprisoned by whites when they desire to be free. In her sketches of Uncle Willie, Bailey, and other characters, Angelou occasionally uses images of imprisonment, suggesting, like Dunbar, that blacks survive being caged by turning to their culture for strength.

  Johnson’s “The Heart of a Woman” is an eight-line lyric poem in which a woman’s heart is compared to a caged bird crashing against its bars. Johnson’s use of the symbol of the bird, however, is quite different from Dunbar’s, for her bird is a caged woman whose isolation seems to suggest sexual as well as racial confinement. Like a bird, the heart of a woman flies away from home during the day, returning at night to its cage.

  Because both Georgia Douglas Johnson and Maya Angelou deal with the theme of isolation and because both use the metaphor of the caged bird in their writings, it is tempting to view Angelou’s allusion to Johnson’s trapped bird as a negative reference to Maya’s character in The Heart of a Woman. James Robert Saunders (1991), for example, states that the “alien cage” of Johnson’s poem represents Angelou’s return to a place of torment following her failed marriage to Vus Make. It seems that Angelou, with her awareness of black history and literature, would have regarded Johnson’s lonely bird in flight as only a stage in a woman’s life cycle and in her history. The Johnson poem was written two years before the passing of the Nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution (August 26, 1920), which finally granted women the right to vote. Angelou, while facing barriers of race and gender, has flown beyond them, thanks to the very protest movements described in the fourth autobiography. The broken creature of Johnson’s 1918 poem is an image from the past, too forlorn to symbolize Angelou’s failed marriage. Although she may indeed sympathize with the sad prisoner of Johnson’s lyric, the Maya Angelou of The Heart of a Woman is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage.