Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  Angelou’s language in capturing the final separation from the Africa of her ancestors has an awesome potency, a feeling of loss. But she does not allow the book to end on a desolate note, choosing instead to create, in the last full paragraph, a praise song that stands apart from her softer, more subtle style. In an extremely condensed history of slavery in America, she evokes the blues, the dance, the gospel, as they were carried through the streets of Massachusetts and Alabama, changed but still African; for Africa is still in the body and in the hips, in a “wide open laughter” (209). This passage, which represents the author at her most jubilant, is followed by one simple concluding statement: “I could nearly hear the old ones chuckling” (209). In a book that constantly alternates between African and African American voices, Angelou gives the last words to the “old ones,” to her Ghanaian ancestors, but filtered through her own experiences and the rich traditions of the spiritual and cultural forms that are part of the oral folk tradition. Yet her identification with the oral tradition of West Africa is not a permanent choice. For Angelou recognizes, at the end of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, that if she is to become a contemporary writer, she must put on her traveling shoes for the long journey home.

  Alternative Reading: Signifying and the Black Tradition

  In 1984 the influential critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. published an essay, “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign of the Signifying Monkey.” This essay, which became the foundation for Gates’s 1988 book, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, is a crucial text in the development of black thought. His essay helped transform black studies into a sophisticated procedure for examining and categorizing African American literature.

  Gates applies the term signifying or “signifyin(g),” to the functions of black speech patterns as well as to the process of echoing earlier African American traditions, motifs, or figures of speech within a particular text. The trickster, the Signifying Monkey, is a descendent of Esu-Elegbara, the West African figure who “dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language” (1984, 286). Signifying is a message system, a strategy of communication. As its emissary, the Signifying Monkey is the conveyer of multiple meanings and interpretations in the literature of the African diaspora—areas populated by black Africans as a result of the slave trade.

  Angelou, who is familiar with the term signifying, uses it to describe the way in which older black women—much like Gates’s African-born trickster monkey—use words and speech patterns to assert their verbal power: “The process is called signifying, and has an African origin” (Stars 137–38). One might attribute Angelou’s abundant verbal punning in the autobiographies to her signifying self: to her verbal strength as she portrays the power and duality of her relationships.

  Gates’s sensitivity to signifying in African American literature allows him to unveil the repeated black verbal patterns in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a book whose forerunners, he claims, are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Gates, who convincingly demonstrates the signifying connection between Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), believes that critics of African American literature must read modern texts against earlier ones. He argues: “Our literary tradition exists, because of these precisely chartable formal literary relationships, relationships of signifying” (1984, 290).

  In the search for illustrations of signifying in the African American literary tradition, the slave narrative is a particularly fertile source. Although Gates does not refer to Maya Angelou in either “The Blackness of Blackness” or The Signifying Monkey, other critics discuss her echoing of the slave narrative. Dolly McPherson, for example, argues that the similarities between Angelou’s autobiographies and slave narratives result from their sharing “a quest that will encourage the development of an authentic self” (1990, 121). Selwyn R. Cudjoe stresses this connection by citing a quote from a slave narrative to introduce his 1984 essay on Angelou and autobiography. It is also relevant that Angelou confirmed these opinions when she told interviewer George Plimpton (1990; rpt. 1994) that she was “following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative” (16). Chapter 2 discusses Angelou’s use of this form in relationship to slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, whose pen name was Linda Brent. My alternative reading focuses on Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), in an attempt to illustrate the process of signifying.

  In All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou reiterates certain familiar patterns of the African American slave narrative—the journey; the quest for freedom; empathy for the horrors suffered by slaves. Angelou’s outrage against slavery, expressed in the Cape Coast Castle passage and elsewhere, repeats the condemnation of the slave system recorded by articulate slave narrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. The condemnation of slavery is central to Brent’s plot. In her chapter on local slaveholders she describes the kinds of punishment to which slaves were submitted: they were burned by being hung in the air over a fire; clubbed or starved or mauled to death; tied to a tree in the freezing wind. A woman slave had no value other than to reproduce. If she refused she was whipped or shot. Women, reports Brent, “are on a par with animals” (1861, 380).

  Brent’s focus, like Angelou’s a century later, is on motherhood—on the need to preserve one’s offspring. Despite escaping, Brent is unable to desert her children. For seven years in her journey to freedom Linda Brent is immobile, concealed in a windowless garret, unable to touch the children who play below her gaze. Brent’s greatest source of anguish, greater than the threat of being raped and beaten by her master, Dr. Flint, is her fear of losing her children.

  The slave mother’s misery throughout the garret narrative is mental and physical. Mentally, she doubts that she will be reunited with her family; physically, her cramped body, pinned in the attic and exposed to wind and rain, duplicates her constricted mental state—as it duplicates the anguish of any African bound by the shackles of the slave system. In a section titled “The Children Sold” Brent depicts the torment of separation: “I bit my lips till the blood came to keep from crying out. Were my children with their grandmother, or had the speculator carried them off? The suspense was dreadful” (111). She compares this moment to “the darkest cloud that hung over my life” (112).

  In All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou, like Linda Brent before her, occupies a restricted geographical space. Confined to Ghana because of Guy’s car accident, her solitary visits to his hospital room echo Brent’s lonely contemplation over the loss of her daughter, Ellen, sold as a child to another master. Admittedly, Angelou is more privileged than the slave women who endured the atrocities of the plantation system. But her roots in that system, rediscovered during her journey through eastern Ghana, are vivid reminders of being descended from slavery.

  Other critics have touched on the similarities and differences between Linda Brent and Maya Angelou, particularly in the related themes of rape, separation, confinement, and black womanhood. Mary Vermillion, for example, argues that both autobiographers challenge the racial stereotypes inherent in white literature by celebrating the black female and transforming personal suffering into a symbol for the confinement of African Americans in general (1992, 250).

  It is also important, in a discussion of signifying, to mention Angelou’s debt to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel filled with dramatic episodes and dominated by the themes of travel, female strength, male/female relationships, and the quest for a home. In a panoramic sweep, Hurston had created a unique vision of black life in Florida; like Hurston, but especially in Heart of a Woman and Traveling Shoes, Angelou offers a wide-lens view of Africa and central Europe, recorded
by an African American woman. At the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, the central character, uses the metaphor of the fish-net to illustrate how she must gather together the memories of her world: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder” (184). Maya Angelou, at the edge of the airport in West Africa, on the eastern shore of the Great Atlantic, waits, like her foremother, to drape her memories over her writer’s shoulder and bear them home.

  In the last several pages of Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou signifies the slave within herself as she narrates her effect on certain Africans, descended from a plundered people, who recognized her as a relative. At the same time, she praises the African American culture born of that history and senses that as an artist and writer, she has a designated place within it, that she “signifies” it.

  Angelou’s journey from Africa back to America is in certain ways a restatement of the historical phase known as mid-passage, when slaves were brutally transported in ships from West Africa to the so-called New World. Angelou shows a deep identification with the victims of mid-passage. Remnants of that journey burn in her memory, shaping her identity with her ancestors and the structure of the autobiography itself.

  Part of her narrative mission is to take the stories of Africans back with her to the United States, to those whose ancestors survived the horrendous transportation of slaves from West Africa to the Americas. In returning from Accra, as Malcolm X had advised, Angelou is able to bring to her country a firsthand account of a continent that most African Americans have deeply felt but rarely visited. Her memorable search for roots has reverberated in her countless interviews on television, in periodicals, and in the popular press. As one of the best known of all contemporary autobiographers, Maya Angelou extended a tradition initiated by slaves and continually reimagined by popular writers of African descent.

  Chapter 8

  A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002)

  Narrative Point of View

  A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the end of the story—the end of the journey; the end of the line. The sixth book of the autobiographical series is the briefest. It begins in 1965 with Maya on a Pan Am jet flying from Ghana to New York City. On her arrival in New York she phones her friend El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). Shabazz relays a dreadful experience in the Lincoln Tunnel, where, fearing that he was the target of a gunman, he had been rescued by a sympathetic white man. He asks Angelou to stay over, but she is anxious to return to California. As in past experiences, for instance, when John Killens had called her in Chicago to tell her that Guy was in danger (Heart of a Woman, 75), the narrative is conveyed through the useful device of a phone call.

  There are other momentous phone calls in Song. Shortly after her arrival in San Francisco, in February 1965, Maya was visiting an aunt when she got a call from a friend telling her that Malcolm X had been assassinated. Three years later, on her fortieth birthday, April 4, 1968, she was cooking party food when her close friend Dolly McPherson telephoned with terrible news, so awful that she insisted on delivering it in person: Martin Luther King had been murdered in Memphis. When a lover known as the “African” telephoned from Ghana, asking Maya to give him and his entourage a party before he began a guest lectureship at Yale, she wrote: “His voice was so loud, he hardly needed a telephone” (159). A final phone call is from Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, who asked her if she was interested in writing an autobiography.

  Such phone calls transmit essential information and generate painful or pleasant reactions. Through this traditional way of providing details, the autobiographer is able to bring tension to a situation as he or she enlarges the perspective of the absent “I.” The use of phone messages and other devices—letters, personal recollections, thoughts—enables her to narrate events that occurred in America during her long tenure in West Africa. The phone call from Ghana to Manhattan reveals her dissatisfaction with her African lover. The call from Robert Loomis indicates a major shift in her prospects and announces her career as a writer.

  In the sixth and final autobiography, home at last, she also offers her impressions of the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and of the 1968 uprisings in Harlem following the death of Martin Luther King. A witness to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles during six hellish days in August 1965, Angelou narrates the political events in Song with the objectivity of a news reporter: “Three police vans were filled and driven away as I stood at the corner of 125th and Vermont. I headed back to my car with an equal mixture of disappointment and relief” (77). One notices the passivity of the narrator (“she stood”). The major verb is rendered in passive voice: (“police vans were filled”). Her general detachment as a narrator is inconsistent with the reality of Watts—with its raging fires and its looting, with curfews enforced by the National Guard, with thousands of black people being arrested and dragged through the streets.

  Maya is only slightly more impassioned in describing the riots in Harlem following the assassination of Martin Luther King. She generalizes that in Watts there had been rage but in Harlem there was lamentation. As in the Watts episode, she is a reluctant observer, expressing shock when she sees a shirtless man leave a building with a conga drum, “shouting, not singing, unintelligible words” (190). Her distressing experience in Harlem leads to a lengthy discourse on “the death of a beloved” (192–93) in which she commemorates the widows of Martin Luther King and of John F. Kennedy. Overcome by depression, she goes to Dolly McPherson’s apartment to recuperate. Jimmy Baldwin rescues her, taking her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy. The conversation is light. Maya tells stories about Stamps, Arkansas, indications that she may be contemplating a recollection of her childhood.

  The bulk of Song is low-key. It concerns Angelou’s continued contact with her mother, her brother, and her son: her friendship with novelists James Baldwin and Rosa Guy; her growing attachment to Dolly McPherson; her ambivalent relationship with an unnamed lover called simply the “African;” and her personal development as a poet. By the end of the sixth volume she has made a full commitment to writing. The last line of A Song Flung Up to Heaven becomes the first line of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. “What you looking at me for. I didn’t come to stay.”

  Although both the first and the last texts are conjoined, it is important to notice the huge time gap between them. Caged Bird was published in 1970, when its author was forty-two years old; A Song Flung Up to Heaven was published in 2002, when Angelou was seventy-four and writing about a forty-year-old woman. Thirty-two years had passed between the publication of the first and the sixth autobiographies, years in which the author had aged and her economic prospects had radically changed. As a serial autobiographer, Angelou was trying to re-create the mature adult who recorded her post-Ghanaian life in 2002 and, through recollection and memories, call up the same persona who had suffered from five years of muteness when she was a little girl. Angelou was gifted, not only with a remarkable memory but with the imagination to re-invent a very distant past.

  Structure

  Throughout Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self, structure has been defined as an arrangement of the story based on the motif of travel, featuring the movement from one geographical location to another. Maya Angelou’s story began on a train with her brother, Bailey, to Stamps, Arkansas; it ends in Stockton, California, at her mother’s house, as she prepares to return to New York City. Despite Angelou’s travels throughout Europe and West Africa, hers is an American chronicle, the saga of a black woman born in the United States who grew out of poverty to become a writer.

  A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the final installment in Angelou’s fictionalized life story. Its movement is limited. There are no dramatic train rides, no uncharted destinations. She depends on airplanes to transport her from Ghana to places in America—from New York to San Francisco to Hawaii to Los Angeles to Stockton and finally to
the anticipated return to New York City, with its publishers, its writers, and its celebrities, so many of them her friends. The reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly objected to the name-dropping in Song: “At times the name-dropping overwhelms (‘Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach had moved from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West ‘” (PW.com). I see Angelou’s observations not so much as name-dropping (she really did know those people) but as a sad comment on the general ennui of the sixth autobiography. After the initial return from Ghana, movement is less of an adventure from continent to continent as it is a shifting from one party or one bar or one apartment to another.

  One effective structural device in Song, as the earlier volumes, is Angelou’s use of repetition. Although she emphasizes her close African connections in the final three autobiographies, the reader familiar with all six of the books will be impressed by the way she weaves in so many of the earlier events: her journey with Bailey to Stamps, Arkansas; her being raped by her mother’s boyfriend; her struggles as a single mother; her role as the White Queen in Genet’s The Blacks. By mentioning these and other key narrative moments in the series, she is able to connect the major dots, from beginning to end, a technique that helps Song to stand on its own as a separate volume yet remain very much related to the others.