Maya Angelou Read online

  Although both of these wise books make use of the travel motif, that theme is more central to Even the Stars Look Lonesome than to its earlier, journey-titled companion piece. Angelou gives the reader some priceless glimpses of her iconic self in each of the collections, although the frequent citations of poetry seem out of proportion if what the reader anticipates is an updated array of insights from the woman whose autobiographies have set the standard for length, breadth, and historical relevance.

  In assessing Angelou’s two early books of reflections, one must be cautious in not confusing genres. The reader should be continually aware that both Journey and Stars contain a great deal of quoted secondary material. Above all, the reader should know that they are not autobiographies. Journalist Sandra Crockett, in a September 1997 article in the Baltimore Sun, identifies Even the Stars Look Lonesome as part of Angelou’s “continuing series of autobiographical books” (E1, 8). Although both texts clearly have autobiographical moments, they are in no way a continuation of the solid, book-length journeys into the self that Angelou has been conducting since the 1970 appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Neither Journey nor Stars, collections of short, informal essays, should be mistaken for autobiography.

  Two later publications, Letter to My Daughter (2008) and Mom & Me & Mom (2013), can also be classified as musings. The first of these is not actually a “letter” but rather a collection of short chapters about “growing up, unexpected emergencies, a few poems, some light stories to make you laugh and some to make you meditate” (xi). The hypothetical “daughter” of the title refers to the long list of women to whom the book is dedicated, women who mothered her or allowed themselves to be mothered: Vivian Baxter, Berdis Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, Gayle B. King, Annie Henderson, and thirteen other women. Implied in this list of daughters is an imagined second person, the reader.

  Letter to My Daughter is a pastiche of stories, aphorisms, recollections, revelations, and vignettes. Here one finds a number of tributes to women, among them Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party; Coretta Scott King (1927–2006), Angelou’s close friend, civil rights activist, and the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Cuban singer Celia Cruz (1925–2003). The slim volume contains as well a commencement address; an essay on vulgarity; a remembrance of being beaten by a ferocious lover named Two Fingers Mark; an essay on poetry; an essay on violence; an essay on the national spirit; a poem, “Surviving”; a concluding essay on Momma Henderson.

  Perhaps the single most disappointing essay is “Poetry” (153–57), in which Angelou quotes fragments of poems by black writers—from Langston Hughes to Mari Evans, from Sterling A. Brown to Aime¯´ Ce¯´saire—praising their “negritude” but making almost no comment on their importance as poets. The essay, a fairly sophomoric appreciation of black poetry, does not convey the perspective of a woman who had been greatly admired for her achievements in that genre. Given that Angelou by 2008 was an established poet, her omission of a critical viewpoint is disconcerting.

  Letter to My Daughter ends with the book’s most touching portrait, a recollection about her paternal grandmother called “Keep the Faith.” The two-page musing reintroduces the Momma of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with her soft voice, her colossal presence, and her Christian devotion. In a brilliant periodic sentence near the end of the vignette, Angelou describes Annie Henderson in terms of gospel music: “Whenever I began to question whether God exists, I looked up to the sky, and surely there, right there, between the sun and moon, stands my grandmother, singing a long meter hymn, a song somewhere between a moan and a lullaby and I know faith is the evidence of things unseen” (166).

  Mom & Me & Mom, an autobiographical account of her relationship with her mother, was published the year before Angelou’s death. The musing begins with Vivian Baxter’s birth in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Trinidadian father and to a mother of Irish descent. It ends with the dedication of the Vivian B. Baxter State Park in Stockton, California, in 1995, four years after her mother’s death from lung cancer. The memoir presents a different view of Vivian Baxter than the one the reader encounters in the six-book autobiographical series. It is more critical, more severe, and more ambivalent. While it extolls “Lady B” for being founder and president of the Stockton Black Women of Humanity and a board member for United Way and several other civic organizations, it presents a more violent side, probably provoked by Vivian’s being raised in a rough family known as the “Bad Baxters” (4).

  Angelou reveals that when she was two years old, Vivian hit her child with such violence that she fell off the porch. In another recollection Vivian confesses to having struck her then teenage daughter with a heavy ring of keys because Maya had come home late one night. The facial swelling was so severe that Bailey, usually overwhelmingly fond of his mother, threatens to leave the house: “Nobody, but nobody, beats up my baby sister” (57). In yet another episode Bailey, convinced that his mother is cheating on her husband, is so appalled that he joins the merchant marines.

  The reader also learns that Vivian Baxter packs a pistol. When she and her daughter reserve a room in a recently integrated Fresno, California, hotel, Maya sees her mother’s .38 revolver in the suitcase. Vivian remarks: “If they were not ready for integration, I was ready to show it to them. Baby, you try to be ready for every situation you run into” (141).

  Angelou frequently contrasts Vivian’s delicate stature to her own awkward size, Vivian’s beautiful face to her own solemn countenance, Vivian’s bravado to her own reticence. As Guy had been the center of Angelou’s early autobiographies, so is Vivian Baxter the focus in Mom & Me & Mom. Much of the story of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is retold—the abandonment, the train trip to Arkansas, the muteness, the rape. But the mother-daughter narrative essentially begins when Maya is thirteen. In a reversal of the earlier train trip, Maya and Momma Henderson travel from Arkansas to the Baxter boardinghouse in California. Maya’s initial refusal to call Vivian “Mother” is further traumatized after Bailey’s arrival. Her brother, enamored by his long-lost mother, comes close to rejecting his sister.

  The musing moves back and forth in time as Angelou recalls her teenage pregnancy, her European tour, her brother Bailey’s addiction to heroin, and her California visit with her father and his wife, Loretta. The most bizarre recollection involves being severely beaten by a lover, Two Fingers Mark. Maya is saved from near death by Vivian, who comes to Mark’s room with “three huge men” (87). These strong-armed rescuers clearly recall and most likely are Vivian Baxter’s brothers, who intervened in Maya’s childhood rape by kicking Mr. Freeman to death.

  A later episode covers Angelou’s tenure in Sweden, where a screenplay she had written was being filmed. After several clashes with the leading actors, Maya is banned from the movie set except to dress the female star’s hair. Distraught, she calls her “smart, glamorous, sophisticated mother” (167), who flies immediately to Stockholm to smooth things over. Throughout these and other recollections Maya places her mother at her side, in the center of the action. She praises her mother for her spunk. Simultaneously, Vivian applauds her daughter, claiming that Maya Angelou will someday be famous.

  This open and ambivalent portrait of Vivian Baxter is not without its flaws. One is that the structure, since it focusses on a single basic relationship, lacks a clearly developed plot line. Its main weakness, however, is Angelou’s tendency to repeat whole segments of previously published material, especially from the 2008 musing, Letter to My Daughter but also at times from the autobiographies. Chapter 22 of Mom & Me & Mom (133–37) is a slight revision of her unsuccessful visit to a psychiatric clinic, followed by a helpful session with her friend Frederick Wilkerson (cf. Letter, 64–67). The riffs on philanthropy (16) and on her landlady Mrs. Jefferson’s mysterious spaghetti (77) are repeated from the 2008 musing as well (Letter, 11–12; 51). The episode involving Two Fingers Mark is laboriously retold.

  The problem in these instances is most likely a la
ck of careful editing. It is also possible that Angelou, so accustomed to telling stories, was by this stage in her life running out of fresh material or had become careless with her notes. In any event, she was well aware of the tendency toward repetition when she writes about Two Fingers Mark: “It is a story indelibly seared into my mind, and I’ve told part of it before” (Mom & Me & Mom, 83).

  Maya’s description of the death of her mother had also appeared in other texts but never so eloquently as in Mom & Me & Mom. Vivian, diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema, was given only three months to live. Thinking that only she could give her mother the best care, Maya initiated another train ride, from San Francisco to North Carolina, from the west to the south. Under the care of Maya and Bailey’s daughter Rosa, Vivian began to improve. When Angelou was offered a three-week visiting professorship at England’s University of Exeter, she at first declined but then accepted when Vivian insisted that she go. On her return she found Vivian in a coma. Maya’s parting words to her were an expression of ambivalence: “You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult” (197). The final line of the musing is a tribute to both mother and daughter, to love and to memory: “I knew she deserved a daughter who loved her and had a good memory, and she got one.” (197)

  After Angelou’s death in 2014, Random House released Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou. Like Amazing Peace and Mom & Me & Mom, this collection of sayings and aphorisms is a short book—a compilation of many of its author’s well-known and lesser-known comments on parenting, childhood, diversity, God, black identity, laughter, independence, and other matters. Customer reviews on Amazon.com, Google.com, and goodreads.com tend to praise the content of this posthumous musing rather than to offer critical evaluation. Monique, for example, wrote on the Amazon website: “Words of wisdom worth reading and meditating on from a lifetime of experiences, good and bad. Life is like that, isn’t it?” While the collection may appeal to the casual reader, its literary value is negligible.

  Children’s Books

  Angelou’s children’s books, although listed in the Bibliography, belong outside this survey, with the exception of Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993), an illustrated version of a poem from her most popular volume, And Still I Rise (1978). Life Doesn’t Frighten Me was done in collaboration with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988). Its fear of the outside world is related thematically to Maya’s fear of crosses and white invaders, eloquently depicted in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The short text offers a series of negative images—barking dogs, ghosts, and so forth—all softened with the repeated line: “Life doesn’t frighten me at all.” Thus Angelou relegates fear to the dream world.

  Her message is an effort to combat the dreadful reality she experienced as a black child in Arkansas. It also speaks to the fears of many of today’s African American children: the AIDS and Ebola threats; guns in the streets and the schools; the high risk of poverty; gratuitous rape of the kind that Maya herself had endured as a child. The poetic images are brilliantly complemented by Basquiat’s illustrations of masked stick figures and black-faced grizzlies, testaments to urban violence that predict his own early death. Basquiat, friend of Andy Warhol and other famed New York artists, died at the age of 27 of an overdose of heroin-cocaine.

  Cookbooks

  Preparing food for friends and guests was a favorite pastime for Maya Angelou. She formalized this interest by publishing two cookbooks, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (Random, 2004) and Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart (Random, 2010).

  Hallelujah! is a sumptuous treat—a combination of interesting recipes; great photographs of Angelou’s favorite dishes provided by Sockeye Studios; and marvelous autobiographical recollections, the best of them being about Stamps, Arkansas, and the cooking of Annie Henderson. In a section that includes a recipe for her grandmother’s famous fried meat pies (2004, 59), Angelou tells a story of how her grandfather left home one day, deserted his wife, and married a preacher’s daughter. In order to provide for her two sons, Annie began to make meat pies for two local factories, a cotton gin and a lumber mill. Eventually she was able to build a hut between the factories so that she didn’t have to haul a coal pot and the pies back and forth from site to site. This hut eventually became the general store where Maya and Bailey grew up.

  Many of the recipes are accompanied by anecdotes about friends visiting her in North Carolina, among them Rosa Guy, Dolly McPherson, Oprah Winfrey, and Nick Ashford, of the songwriting team Ashford and Simpson. In order to please Nick Ashford, a vegetarian, she offered him a meatless Moroccan stew, a tomato soufflé, and a mixed salad of romaine, dressing, tomato, and cucumber that was so successful that she named it “Ashford salad ’96” (211). When Ken and I dined at her home on the evening of June 16, 1997, Angelou served a flavorful bean casserole and a take-out order of Mr. Bojangle’s Southern Fried Chicken. Dolly McPherson was also there for dinner and drinks.

  Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart was published in 2010, when the author was in her early eighties and at an age when she had to watch her diet. Doctors had warned about the possibility of high blood pressure and diabetes. The solution to Angelou’s weight problem was simple: eat what you want, but eat in moderation. By following her own advice and not sacrificing flavor, Angelou was able to lose thirty-five pounds.

  The first section, on cooking leftovers with her mother, begins with a recipe for an eight-pound crown roast of pork. Cup by cup, piece by piece, and day by day, the roast dwindles, to become pork hash, pork fried rice, and pork tacos. Angelou wisely suggests eating only one pork taco for lunch, then having a second one three hours later. The marvelous dishes, which include braised lamb with white beans, chicken Tetrazzini, cornbread, and a selection of desserts, can be eaten any time, all day long.

  Although less rich in personal recollections than the earlier cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long is superior in the variety of recipes and in the intelligence of Angelou’s approach to food. Her new interest in sensible eating was clearly related to her having in 2010 written the Foreword to The Jean Nidetch Story: An Autobiography. Nidetch (1923–2015) was the Brooklyn homemaker who founded Weight Watcher’s, probably the most successful corporation of its kind and one that still honors the basic principles advocated by its founder.

  Theater and Television Work

  It would be foolhardy for any biographer to try to include every accomplishment from so prolific a performer. I have been highly selective in listing Maya Angelou’s achievements and awards since the first edition appeared in 1998. In updating that information I have relied primarily on the list compiled by Jacqueline S. Thursby (2011, 412–13); on the research on Angelou conducted by Celia C. Daniel of the Howard University Library System; on Oliver Gettell’s essay on Angelou’s movie career, published in the New York Times four days after her death; on the posthumous tribute to Angelou in Essence magazine; on the search engine Google; on the Angelou archives at the Schomberg Center; and on the information about Angelou’s publications in Amazon.com.

  After Angelou decided to return from Ghana to the United States in the mid-1960s, she immersed herself in a different America, where blackness was becoming a matter of pride, where a creative racial identity was emerging in the cities. In 1966, she finished a short play, The Least of These, which was staged in Los Angeles. In 1968, at the age of forty, she wrote a ten-part series on African influences, Black, Blues, Black, which was aired on educational television and was followed by an impressive array of achievements in television and on screen. In 1972, she wrote both the screenplay and the music for the television special, Georgia, Georgia, about two African American women visiting Switzerland, thus becoming “the first Black woman to have a screenplay produced” (Current Biography 1994, 28). Four years later, her play, And Still I Rise, was performed in California, and she wrote two specials
for television, “The Legacy” and “The Inheritors.” These television triumphs were followed, in 1977, by a prize-winning documentary television series on African Americans and the arts. In 2009 she narrated The Black Candle, a documentary about the celebration of the African American holiday of Kwansaa. The video is still being shown in public libraries during the Christmas season.

  In 1982 she wrote another television screenplay, Sister, Sister and in 1985, a play, The Southern Journey. Angelou also did the screenplay and the music for the 1979 film version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, directed by Fielder Cook and starring Diahann Carroll as Vivian Baxter and Esther Rolle as Annie Henderson. The video, available on the Internet (Web. November 16, 2014), is an excellent resource for teachers of any grade level, from late elementary school to college. The film lends itself to a comparison/contrast with the book, especially in terms of what it omits, since it ends at the eighth-grade graduation, thus avoiding Maya’s troubled adolescence, her fears about being a lesbian, and her teen pregnancy.

  Angelou’s informal dancing career in the Al and Rita team was projected onstage in 1957, when she performed in Calypso Heatwave, an off-Broadway production. In 1960 she and Godfrey Cambridge wrote, directed, and performed in Cabaret for Freedom, a fund-raiser for Martin Luther King Jr. She was also the premier dancer for the touring production of Porgy and Bess, a role that demanded performing as well as dancing skills. Her greatest stage role, though, was in 1961, as the White Queen in Jean Genet’s award-winning play The Blacks. Her participation in both the original off-Broadway play and in its European revival is described in The Heart of a Woman and in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. In 1966, after she had returned from Ghana, she acted in a modern version of Medea, as the faithful servant of the Greek woman who had murdered her children. In 1973, at the age of forty-five, she was nominated for a Tony for her performance as Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker in the Broadway production, Look Away.