Maya Angelou Page 20
The fourth autobiography also contains other literary allusions. The opening reference to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road connects Angelou’s theme of the journey to Kerouac’s restlessness. Angelou makes reference to the black folk figure, Brer Rabbit, in a story she recalls to herself in Cairo as she gathers courage for her new job on the Arab Observer. Her use of Brer Rabbit connects her to the oral traditions of Africa and America. But it is in the allusion to Johnson’s title, to the repeated “WOMAN” of both poem and autobiography, where one discovers a more woman-centered Maya Angelou—more centered in her literary ambitions, more centered in her racial identity.
A Psychological/Feminist Reading
Psychological criticism is the application of the beliefs of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, and other psychological theorists to works of literature, in the hopes of getting closer to their meaning. In a standard psychological reading of The Heart of a Woman, theorists begin by investigating Guy’s relationship to his mother or to a mother substitute. A number of incidents reveal Guy’s sexual desire for women his mother’s age or older, the most prominent of whom is Billie Holiday. The great blues singer, who seems to disgust Guy, also arouses him. During her visit, Holiday sings intimately to Guy each night, giving Maya the impression that Holiday was “starved for sex and only the boy, looking at her out of bored young eyes, could give her satisfaction” (13).
A Freudian analyst would argue that in order to free himself from his Oedipus complex—the desire to dispose of the father and have sex with the mother—Guy needed to deflect Holiday’s affections away from himself and his mother, just as he needed to discourage Maya’s affair with Vus Make. Not until Guy experienced and recovered from his car accident could he begin to sever himself from his desirable mother, who, according to his friends, had “a prettier shape than Marilyn Monroe” (130). Some far-fetched analyst might even suggest that the accident was “intentional,” that Guy desired it so he could be saved from his sexual desires for his mother.
In a psychological/feminist reading, it is not the boy’s or the man’s perspective that one starts with but the woman’s. Many feminists find the “Oedipus complex,” the so-called cornerstone of Freudian thinking, to be utterly wrong-headed, since the theory assumes that the mother is of no consequence and that she is subordinate to the father or the father substitute (Stanton in Wright 1992, 296). In the 1970s a number of feminist analysts, including Nancy Chodorov, Carol Gilligan, and Jean Baker Miller, challenged this male way of thinking. In their revision of psychological theory they proposed a woman-oriented perspective, focusing on the ideas that the mother is central to human development; that mother/daughter relationships are at the core of development; and that female friendships can be extensions of the mother/daughter dynamic to the extent that they are nurturing, supportive, and maternal.
The Heart of a Woman offers a wealth of woman-centered insights. As a woman who loves men, Angelou is very open about her sexual feelings, making almost no effort to conceal her inclinations. She craves sex, but she likes being satisfied. She is neither passive nor timid in approaching men. She is in her words a “healthy woman with a healthy appetite” (101).
Angelou also appears to be a woman who is enticed by women, although she tends to deny this possibility, both in the autobiographies and in interviews. In the crucial Billie Holiday sequence in The Heart of a Woman, Maya protests against the possibility of Holiday’s lesbianism, working out a careful negative response so that if Billie wants to go to bed with her, Maya can say no without hurting her feelings. A psychological feminist would help Angelou deal with her conflicting attitudes toward lesbianism, suggesting a greater openness toward the likelihood that she consciously or unconsciously desires women more than she is willing to admit.
Moving to safer but surely related grounds, it was in the 1970s that psychological feminists began to suggest that lesbianism was most likely connected to the relationship between mother and daughter. The positive treatment of the mother/daughter relationship was another area of analysis that had been almost completely overlooked until the coming of the New Women’s Movement. Looking to her childhood, it is likely that Angelou’s complex range of feelings toward women was based on the absence of her mother at the age of three, the age that so-called Oedipal feelings are considered to be most critical. When at age eight Maya is again reunited with Vivian Baxter, she is raped by her mother’s boyfriend, a rather obvious father figure. Unable to deal with the sexual life of her daughter, Vivian sends her back to her grandmother, not becoming close to Maya until the child/woman is sixteen. All of these circumstances generate conflicting attitudes toward being a woman.
In The Heart of a Woman the most passionate parts of the book have to do with Billie Holiday and Vivian Baxter. These relationships, as well as a number of others involving both men and women, depend on Maya’s early experiences with her mother, which include abandonment; feelings of rejection; feelings of being ugly when compared to the beautiful Vivian; exposure to a rapist. Each of these areas is open to feminist discourse. A committed and knowledgeable psychological feminist reading could continue to expand on Angelou’s feelings about being a woman, analyzing them in The Heart of a Woman and in the entire autobiographical series.
Chapter 7
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)
The fifth volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, tells the story of Angelou’s four-year residency in Ghana from 1963 to 1966. When the narrative was published twenty years later, it was greeted with praise and disappointment. Eugenia Collier, on the one hand, proclaimed the book to be “the apex toward which the other autobiographies have pointed” (1986, 24), while Russell Harris, in an interview in Zelo, claimed that the book was too “pedantic,” too academic. Except for the quest idea, there was not much of a story line. Angelou replied: “I think you might need another reading, because there are other stories in the book” (1989, 168).
One major story found in Traveling Shoes, one that most critics overlook, is Angelou’s unconditional love for her son. The volume begins with a reiteration of Guy’s car accident, the episode that concluded The Heart of a Woman. In Traveling Shoes Guy recovers from his injuries and continues to mature. A student at the University of Ghana, he seeks independence from his mother as he attempts to define his own separate goals.
Another major story is Angelou’s investigation of her African and African American identities. She explores this conflict as it exists for the American expatriates living in Accra as well as for the groups of people—Bambara, Keta, Ahanta—who still observe the traditions of their ancestors. At the end of Traveling Shoes these issues are seemingly resolved when Angelou decides to return to the ways and culture of the United States. Surrounded by friends at the Accra airport, she leaves Guy in Africa to finish his education. At the same time she forsakes her newly embraced alliance with Mother Africa, claiming she is “not sad” to be leaving Ghana (209).
Narrative Point of View and Structure
The narrative point of view in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes is again sustained through the first-person autobiographer in motion. She moves from journey to journey, propelling the story from one place to another. It is not accidental that the word traveling appears in the title. The autobiography begins with Maya’s and Guy’s travel to Ghana and ends with her anticipated departure to America in the concluding lines of the autobiography. Told from the first-person point of view, the fifth volume, like the others, is subjective. Owing perhaps to the dominance of the travel motif, it is at the same time more tightly controlled.
In All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, the African narrative is interrupted by a journey within a journey. Angelou accepts the offer to join a theatrical company in a revival of French writer Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. Three years earlier The Blacks shocked its off-Broadway audiences with the force of its racial commentary. In that performance, described in The Heart of a
Woman, Angelou triumphed in the sinister role of the White Queen. Now the play was being revived, and Angelou was asked to repeat the role on a limited tour, with performances in Berlin and Venice. The consequences of the Berlin journey are analyzed later in this chapter, in the sections on setting and character. In terms of point of view, the German sequence offers a glimpse of Angelou as traveler in an alien land with a history of racial prejudice quite different from what she experienced in America.
As in all her volumes, the title contributes to the plot and to the thematic impact. Angelou states that the title of the fifth volume comes from a spiritual about walking in heaven: “I’ve got shoes / you got shoes / All of God’s children got shoes” (“Icon” 1997). The traveling shoes that belong to the narrator and to all children of African descent restate the journey motif. As she told George Plimpton, the book is about “trying to get home,” which for Jews would mean Israel and for black Americans would mean Africa (1990, rpt. 1994, 20).
On a much lighter note, the traveling shoes might also refer to the pair of feet made famous by writer Langston Hughes in his Best of Simple: “These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored” (1989, 100). In his amusing way, in this story about Simple’s weary feet, Hughes suggests the long stretch of unwanted travel taken by African Americans in the last century of so-called freedom. Angelou speaks passionately of Hughes in Caged Bird as an example of the “wit and humor” that he shares with Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay (and with Angelou herself) (“Icon” 1997).
Setting
Setting or place, always an important element in Angelou’s writing, assumes perhaps its greatest prominence in the fifth volume. Most of the action is set in Accra, the capital of the West African nation of Ghana. The minute details of contemporary African life, contrasted against ancient customs, lend the volume an exotic backdrop from which to view personal events like Guy’s recovery from the car crash or Maya’s feelings of dislocation. The African setting plays an important, almost inseparable part in her character development.
Additionally, in presenting the African setting as a major component of the fifth autobiography, Angelou, like other writers before her, describes to an American readership her impressions of what white explorers once called the Dark Continent, dark suggesting to them Africa’s quality of mystery as well as the dark complexion of most of her people. In the first sentence of Traveling Shoes she describes the secret night breezes and how they vanish into the “utter blackness.” Angelou is often intrigued by blackness, and in one of the most passionate moments of a February 1996, interview on television, she begins to praise the dark skin of Mrs. Flowers, her mentor in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, simultaneously stroking her own face in recognition of black pride. As described in Traveling Shoes, the dark skin colors of the Ghanaians remind her of peanut butter, caramel, and other treats from childhood. She admires Sheikhali, her suitor from Mali, for the purple hues of his skin; her beautician, Comfort Adday, for being the color of “ancient bricks” (37); and her roommate Alice Windom for her “dark, mahogany color” (30). The interaction of skin tones with clothing and landscape contributes significantly to the unfolding of character and setting.
Further settings on the periphery of the African locale are Berlin and Venice, the two cities she visits as the White Queen in the revival of The Blacks. Although Angelou’s inclusion of the Berlin-Venice tour might be viewed as a digression that detracts from the African-based setting, the theater sequence helps contribute to her character development and, through use of contrast, to the profound exploration of her feelings for a homeland. The Berlin setting offers Angelou an unusual perspective. She is remote enough from Africa to gain new insights into the behavior of black Americans and the nature of white racism, both reflected against the German terrain. She gains a new respect for African Americans, missing them now because they seem more spirited than the Africans she has encountered in Ghana. These interruptions in the Ghanaian setting are effective in giving Traveling Shoes a universal quality as the autobiographer reaches beyond her private life into a conflicting world.
Plot Development
In terms of plot development, Traveling Shoes is consistent with the earlier volumes. Each is designed to be a continuing journey of the self. The plot of Traveling Shoes begins in Ghana and terminates with Angelou’s decision to return to America. She decides to leave for conscious reasons involving her heritage, her craft, and her private life, especially as it relates to her son.
Angelou’s autobiographies receive their shape from personal and cultural referents rather than from the necessities of plot, as in mystery novels or spy fiction. Whereas a novel is a kind of narrative that must be concluded, an autobiography is an unfinished narrative, told in the first person by the adult who recollects it years later. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes cannot conclude the series because there is yet another autobiography to be written, from images and actions that remain in the repository of memories that connect her to the people around her.
Soon after volume 5 opens, the narrator, now thirty-three, relates the horrifying event of Guy’s car accident that results in a broken arm, leg, and neck. When asked why she repeated the accident scene, which also ends The Heart of a Woman, Angelou gave two reasons: first, each book must stand alone; and, second, it was necessary that she explain who she was and what she was doing in Africa (“Icon” 1997).
In order to infuse the African setting with a credible plot, Angelou needed to detail the causes for her lengthy stay. She intensifies the early pages by dramatizing her long wait for medical reports from a hospital totally foreign to her. Many parents’ greatest fear is the death of a child; this is the most unspeakable of all catastrophes. Angelou universalizes this fear in Traveling Shoes, taking readers close to death but then reversing the expectation. Readers raised on popular melodrama expect Guy to die and Angelou to fall apart. But true to her point of view, Angelou elucidates the slow pain of Guy’s recovery. There is no catastrophe. As time passes, he gradually moves out of danger and regains his strength. Simultaneously, Maya demonstrates her increased maturity. Like most people whose children grow up, she starts to appreciate her freedom now that the burdens and responsibilities of motherhood are lessened. Aware that she must respect Guy’s choices, she consciously ceases to make him the center of her activities. She forms new friendships—with her roommates, with African poets and political leaders, with African American writers and artists living in Ghana.
At the same time, Angelou strengthens her ties with Mother Africa. In traveling through eastern Ghana, she forms allegiances with people she meets and also becomes spiritually attached to her venerated ancestors. These intimate racial, political, and sacred connections with Africans allow Angelou to recognize but not to resolve the dual nature of her heritage. By the end of Traveling Shoes she has explored her roots, has come to terms with much of her past, and has decided to return to America to begin a new phase of her life, one that assimilates the African and American elements of her character: “I think in All God’s Children I have written about some of the complexity of returning, at one, and being unable to return [to Africa] and yet being so grateful that I had made the attempt” (“Icon” 1997).
The mother/son plot, like the African/African American plot, is dual in nature. To develop the plot is to create a series of active/counteractive rhythms. The confrontations between love and desertion, between knowledge and misunderstanding, are two examples of the shifting stories that shape the series.
For Angelou, though, the termination of plot seems less successful here than in her other volumes, possibly because she forces her narrator/self to present too sharp a separation between herself and Africa. Four years earlier, African American novelist Alice Walker attempted in The Color Purple (1982) to unify similar geographical (Africa/America) and familial (Sister Celie/Sister Nettie) themes. At the end of the novel, Nettie arrives from Africa with
her husband, Samuel, their two children, Olivia and Adam, and a young African woman, Tashi, who is Adam’s wife. Everyone has come, united at last in one colossal family reunion. But Walker’s finale is too perfect, too out of place in a novel that so consistently raised the troubling questions of race and gender in America. Director Steven Spielberg, in his 1985 film version of The Color Purple, ignored many of the book’s socioeconomic issues but retained Walker’s joyous resolution, visually amplified through the use of dazzling African costumes and children’s clapping games.
Like Walker, Maya Angelou attempts to tie together the divergent strands that inform the fifth autobiography. Thus, the final scene at the Accra airport is crowded with a farewell contingent of sages, poets, expatriates, dancers, dignitaries, college students, professors, and children. But as John C. Gruesser points out, the end of Angelou’s journey is not convincing. The conflicts inherent in the book remain unresolved and the ending is “too easily manufactured at the last minute to resolve the problem of the book” (1990, 18). Similarly, Deborah E. McDowell (1986) finds the resolution of the plot to be stereotyped and unconvincing.