Maya Angelou Read online

  A few years later, following the divorce and the invitation to perform in Porgy and Bess, Maya relies on Vivian to take care of Guy while she is on tour. At this point Maya becomes aware of the comparison between Vivian, who left her children with their grandmother in Stamps, and Maya, who left her child with his grandmother in San Francisco. She is in effect echoing her own unhealthy child/mother experience, not because she wants to but because, despite the pain, she has to work. In a promise to herself that does not quite ring true, she claims: “I would make it up to my son and one day would take him to all the places I was going to see” (129).

  In a further imitation of her mother, the absent Maya sends money to Vivian from Paris, asking her to buy Guy a present but to tell him his mother had sent it: “Then perhaps he would forgive my absence” (157). Maya thus copies her mother’s actions when in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Vivian sends her daughter the hateful blonde doll that she subsequently destroys. While she is very much indebted to her mother for being willing to care for Guy while she is in Europe, the downside of such well-meaning child care is that Maya starts feeling guilty. She confesses that she sends home most of her pay to support her son and to “assuage my guilt at being away from him” (153).

  A third confrontation, this one with her grandmother, Annie Henderson, is discreetly presented. The conflict occurs outside of the narrative, after Tosh informs Maya of Annie’s death, to which she reacts in a dazzling passage three paragraphs long. Momma, the foremost influence in Maya’s development, vanishes from her autobiographies—no longer able to comfort Maya or introduce Guy to the church; no longer able to caution her about racism. Momma Henderson’s death is a major source for the feelings of futility in Singin’ and Swingin’. The death of Maya’s grandmother underscores a problem that Angelou never seems fully to come to terms with in the autobiographical series: her ambivalent feelings toward those she loves.

  In writing about her grandmother’s death, Angelou shifts from her generally more conversational tone and becomes passionate, religious, emotional: “Ah, Momma,” she cries, lamenting that even if she were as “pure” as the Virgin Mary, she would never feel Momma Henderson’s hands touch her face again (41). This moving farewell is not typical of Angelou’s writing. Her words here betray a conflict, as if she is trying too hard, as if her guilt at having forgotten Momma is causing excessive emotions. The three-paragraph passage is a funeral elegy, a prose poem, a gem cemented within the narrative. As a poem, it relies on gospel tradition, on the language of Bible stories, and on certain African American literary texts, especially James Weldon Johnson’s “Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon” (1966).

  Angelou’s farewell to her black grandmother in this passage contains other refrains from the past. She longs to have Momma’s “rough slow hands pat my cheek” (41). In terms of conflict, these hands are the ones that slapped Maya on the face for having sassed two white saleswomen in Gather Together. That slap, the bad slap that ended Maya’s relationship with Momma, is changed in the funeral elegy to a good slap, a soft tap on the cheek. The two different slaps are a perfect example of what has been described as the conflict of opposites, frequently stated in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas—the good/bad mother. Angelou’s lament throughout these paragraphs softens, as she expresses the wish to be “as good as God’s angels” and as “pure as the Mother of Christ.” Both metaphors are aspects of the good/bad conflict, in which Angelou attempts to deal with her guilt toward her grandmother and seek a loving reconciliation, if not here, then in the Hereafter.

  In Singin’ and Swingin’ Angelou is extremely quiet not only about her grandmother’s death but also about the fate of her brother, Bailey Johnson. In both cases she delegates a major autobiographical relationship to a private, unreachable place. As if to emphasize her distance from Bailey, Maya mentions the letters he sends her from prison while she is in Europe, which Maya shares with her mother on her return to America. Maya remarks coldly that his touching stories about life in prison “left me unmoved” (233). That she is “unmoved” is at least one solution to the problem of the conflict of opposites, for if one feels nothing there is no conflict. One imagines that Angelou, after her shocking collision with drugs and drug addicts at the end of Gather Together, would like to put those experiences behind her. But Angelou says that the minimal information regarding Bailey is protective. She is doing what he asked: “Don’t use my name in books.” She added, “I am also silent for his protection” (“Icon” 1997).

  Bailey is again mentioned near the end of Singin’ and Swingin’, where Angelou confesses that he is in Sing Sing prison for “fencing stolen goods” (234). She does not communicate with him directly but mentions to Martin Luther King Jr. that her brother is in jail. Dr. King advises her to keep on loving her brother, reminding her that Bailey has more freedom of spirit than those who imprisoned him. Bailey is resurrected in the sixth autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, where he plays a major role in comforting Maya, much as he had done in childhood.

  One final area of conflict for Angelou—and in many ways the primary one—is her interior struggle as she attempts to identify her life and desires and defend them against demands from the outside. It has been a hard struggle getting recognition as a dancer, something she has been trying to do since she was part of the dancing team of Poole and Rita. Aware that she has talent, Maya has been unlucky at finding a job in the entertainment business that will offer decent pay and some respectability. She had been dancing in bars and strip joints as artistic backup for the more exotic showgirls. She had put in time as a B-girl—a woman who entices men to buy her watered-down bar drinks or cheap champagne at high prices. As in Gather Together, these scenes of the low life provide glimpses of a seedy underworld as Angelou wears sequined G-strings and the text approaches pornography, so stimulating is Angelou’s language and descriptive power.

  Maya is performing an assortment of dances and ballads in local cafes, including the calypso, a popular kind of rhythmic music that originated in Trinidad in the West Indies. Her big break comes when, at the intervention of some friends, she is invited to perform calypso music at the Purple Onion, a cabaret in the North Beach section of San Francisco, where at one point she shares the show with comedian Phyllis Diller. Following the successful stint at the Purple Onion, she receives other offers, including the tempting proposal to replace Eartha Kitt in the 1954 musical, New Faces. She accepts instead the primary dancing role in Porgy and Bess for its European engagement of 1954–1955. This is a true victory, the foundation for her later performances in dance, theater, and song.

  The strain of the Porgy and Bess tour takes away from Maya emotionally almost as much as it gives her professionally. Dolly A. McPherson writes that Porgy and Bess is like an “antagonist that enthralls Angelou, beckoning and seducing her away from her responsibilities” (1990, 85). McPherson’s use of the word antagonist captures the oppositional aspect of the European tour and its strain on Angelou’s loyalties. Sometimes an antagonist is not a person but instead an internal conflict that exists within an individual. This distinction is applicable to Angelou’s internal, at-war personality.

  The European travel sequence has a great effect on both plot and character as Maya’s absence generates a tug-of-war between Guy at home and his mother in Europe. Travel is a magnet that contributes to the overall tension of the narrative, a tension that momentarily ends with Maya’s return to her son. When she arrives home after an exhausting boat and train trip, she learns that Guy is suffering from a skin disease that appears to have emotional causes. Promising never to leave him again, she takes him with her to Hawaii, where she has a singing engagement. In the last pages of Singin’ and Swingin’, Angelou vows to Guy that she will never leave him, using words that are both simple and oppositional: “If I go, you’ll go with me or I won’t go” (232).

  This volume closes in a sentence that highlights, through three nouns, the opposing tensions of Angelou’s tem
perament: “Although I was not a great singer I was his mother, and he was my wonderful, dependently independent son” (242). Again, the dialectical construct is apparent: I/you; singer/mother; dependent/independent; mother/son. This sentence effectively concludes the first three books in its thumbnail summary of the major contradictions in Angelou’s character. At the same time, it alludes to similar mother/son patterns in future volumes.

  Angelou’s writing in the third volume is brilliant, its strength deriving in part from the way in which she duplicates the actual conflicts underlying the plot, characters, and thought patterns. This kind of development is also found in Hunger of Memory (1982), an autobiography by Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez, who examines the opposition between his Catholic-Mexican family and his alienated, Anglo-centered education. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) also looks deeply into class and familial conflicts in the clash between her Chinese and American upbringing. Not many other contemporary autobiographers have been able to capture, either in a single volume or in a series, the opposition of desires that is found in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas and, to a far lesser extent, in Angelou’s other volumes.

  Thematic Issues

  The theme of maturing motherhood evolves in the second volume, Gather Together, and continues in Singin’ and Swingin’. The thematic issues of both volumes remain similar as Maya faces comparable problems of parenting, relationships, and survival. All are pertinent to her role as a single black mother determined to make a life for herself and her son against a stacked deck—against the obstacles of race and gender that for women in the 1950s were in some cases insurmountable. Much of Maya’s struggle in this, the most tangled of the autobiographies, concerns her private role as a single mother versus her public role as a committed actress, one whose career makes it necessary to leave Guy for long stretches of time.

  Chosen to perform in the European tour of Porgy and Bess, she faces the realization that in leaving Guy with his grandmother, she will repeat the hateful pattern established by her parents when they left her and Bailey in the hands of Momma Henderson. Her feelings are compounded by the fact that, as a young, black, single mother, she bears the ultimate responsibility for her son, whom she wants and needs to support. By identifying the most fundamental conflict between working and mothering, Angelou presents a rare kind of literary model, the working mother. This kind of model is becoming more and more essential as women insist on both roles.

  The mother/son behavior pattern in Singin’ and Swingin’ shows Guy as the son seeking affection and Maya as the mother in conflict over the need to love versus the need to be a fully realized person. This conflict, as we saw earlier in the chapter, causes stress and indecision. One expects Maya, lead dance performer of the Porgy and Bess tour of Europe and North Africa, to enjoy what her labor has earned. Instead, on almost every page of description about Milan, Paris, or Venice, there appears a lament about Guy that shuts off her positive experiences. On seeing French children playing outside the train window, she writes: “The longing for my own son threatened to engulf me” (191). When she comes home to discover Guy’s skin scaling from disease she says, “I had ruined my beautiful son by neglect, and neither of us would ever forgive me” (233).

  It is not until she takes Guy to Hawaii that mother and son get a clearer perspective. She is his mother and she is a celebrity. He is her son and he needs her nurturing. Although Angelou avoids a fairytale-perfect ending, she gives readers, at this middle stage of her autobiographical series, a glimmer of the Maya Angelou to come and a tangible sense of the personal price she has paid for the opportunity. Although at the end of Singin’ and Swingin’ her exploration of the rewards and pains of motherhood appears to have been temporarily resolved, Angelou continues to unfold the tensions between career and motherhood in the remaining volumes.

  Directly and indirectly related to the motherhood issue is the theme of music. Music is the first word: “Music was my refuge” (1). As the word music opens the narrative, the idea of song (singin’) and dance (swingin’) dominates the title. Then, as if to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind about the importance of music, Angelou introduces the volume with an epigraph, as she had introduced I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with the line: “What you looking at me for?” An epigraph is a short poem or prose piece which sets the tone of the work that follows, usually by making a connection to the theme.

  In Singin’ and Swingin’, the epigraph is a quotation from an unidentified three-line stanza in classic blues form. For the first two lines, the blues singer asks if the moon is lonesome. The third line asks: “Don’t your house look lonesome when your baby / pack up to leave?” In conventional blues, the word baby means lover. In this case however, Angelou changes the usual meaning to refer to her leaving Guy for a job in Europe, and to leaving her mother for an independent life. The poignant words and rhythms are related to at least three of the major themes of the third autobiography—motherhood, separation, and music. In terms of genre, it is important to note that music, not poetry or fiction, introduces the reader to the narrative.

  The lonely Maya, who initially finds solace in the cool notes of black music, later in the same volume discovers that music offers her economic opportunity and the chance to be married. Her first daytime job is in a music store. She meets Tosh Angelos while selling records, falling for him when she discovers that his love for Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, and other jazz musicians is genuine. Later Maya excels in her singing and dancing performances, winning engagements in quality clubs because of her accomplishments in music.

  The structure of Singin’ and Swingin’ is related to musical composition. By looking at the doubling of plot lines (Maya the mother/Maya the B-girl) as being associated with Angelou’s use of opposition—pitting one force (good mother) against another, contrasting force (bad mother)—it is possible to see that Angelou uses certain kinds of music, especially jazz, that are based on similar oppositions. Such music is “polyphonic,” where more than one line works in opposition to another. In Singin’ and Swingin’ certain perplexing issues touch each other and disconnect, so that the overall effect resembles a jazz composition. Angelou’s narrative is constantly playing certain discordant or polyphonic notes. Thus, Vivian Baxter’s dominant tones are pitted against her daughter’s more tentative ones, or Tosh’s loud cursing contends against Maya’s silent rage.

  The use of music is also effective in the funeral sermon for Momma Henderson. Angelou’s sad notes are heard as she struggles to record the death of her now silent grandmother. To produce the desired effect, she uses the tones of the Negro spiritual to reach into eternity for her grandmother. At the end of the sermon Angelou cries that death is real “only in song” (42). Although such attention to music is observable in each of the volumes, it is only in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gather Together that the musical theme affects the development of plot, structure, and character.

  Style and Literary Devices

  Angelou achieves her powerful effects in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas through a number of literary devices. First is her use of repetition. Angelou uses the current time period, the 1950s, to reflect on earlier events, repeating certain details in order to enhance the style. The most dramatic use of repetition is Angelou’s leaving her son with Vivian Baxter, repeating the incident from her childhood when Vivian left Maya and Bailey with Momma Henderson. Another example is Maya’s turning to an older man in the bar for sympathy during a crisis, as she had turned to her older lover, Troubadour Martin, in Gather Together. From a psychological perspective, she may be repeating her need for Bailey Johnson Sr., the father who once abandoned her. Her technique is reinforced through repeating certain words such as “confront” (43), “the past” (129), and “absence” (156).

  Another stylistic technique that Angelou puts to excellent use is the simile, a comparison between two objects that is directly expressed through the presence of the words l
ike or as. Although there are a number of similes in Singin’ and Swingin’, several deserve special attention. First is the explosion of images surrounding her religious conversion where, in a further reference to the theme of music, she describes the Negro spirituals as “sweeter than sugar.” Angelou further expands this straightforward simile into an elaborate image of her connections to the oral tradition of black culture. In other words, much of African American tradition derives from slave narratives and gospels (see Chapter 2). In this image of sugar, Angelou’s connection to her oral heritage is through her mouth—what she speaks, what she sings, and what she tastes. She praises the spirituals she heard during her conversion: “I wanted to keep my mouth full of them” (28). This image of fullness contrasts with Vivian Baxter’s empty mouth in Caged Bird—Maya’s fantasy of a dead Vivian, her face a vast empty O, and Maya’s tears “like warm milk” (43) in the absence of a milk-giving mother.

  When Angelou returns to San Francisco near the end of the autobiography, she expresses her confusion through the use of simile: “Disorientation hung in my mind like a dense fog” (232). The fog is antithetical to her occasional moments of clarity: “clear as the clink of good crystal” (233). Through these two comparisons Angelou is exposing a mental confusion strong enough to make her hastily consult and then reject a prosperous-looking white psychiatrist.