New Directions

Volume 13 | Issue 4 Article 5

10-1-1986 Maya Angelou: From ‘Caged Bird’ To ‘All God’s Children’ Eugenia Collier

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Recommended Citation Collier, Eugenia (1986) "Maya Angelou: From ‘Caged Bird’ To ‘All God’s Children’," New Directions: Vol. 13: Iss. 4, Article 5. Available at: http://dh.howard.edu/newdirections/vol13/iss4/5

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The sweep of Angelou’s work includes not only womanhood but, indeed, what it Maya Angelou means to be a Black person — ultimately, a Black person on a pinnacle of history. The series of autobiographies begins in From ‘Caged chaos. After a tempestuous marriage, her parents separate. Maya’s early mem­ Bird’ to ‘All God’s ory is of her three-year-old self and her brother Bailey, only a year older, alone on C hilden’ an interminable train ride to begin life anew at the home of their paternal By Eugenia Collier grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. That fearful journey characterizes much of Maya’s early life. Adrift in a chaotic n her literary contributions, Maya world, the two babies have little other Angelou speaks for us all. Her latest than their own inborn courage and their autobiography — or rather the fifth survival instinct to see them to safe haven segment of her ongoing autobiogra­ out, is intensely personal. Yet it is a — this time with Momma Henderson — Iphy — is the culmination to which thecollective experience, an ongoing collec­ only to venture forth again on a different other four have pointed. All God’s Chil­ tive history which has molded us and journey to another haven which also dren Need Traveling Shoes tells of An- which provides the context in which the dissolves. There are many journeys in the gelou’s three years in Ghana, along with a personal is couched. Therefore, Cudjoe series of autobiographies. On one level, little band of American Blacks whom she concludes, the Black autobiographer most are escapes from some situation called the Revolutionist Returnees. The emerges not as an egotistical, unique which has become unbearable. On an­ book is not only good reading, but also an individual but rather as a member of a other level, each is a further step in important statement which touches a group, speaking of and for the group. Maya’s journey toward awareness. nerve in the Black American psyche. On As we all have observed, literature has The introduction to I Know Why the some level of our being, we all want to go dealt harshly with the Black woman. Caged Bird Sings 2 pinpoints a moment “home” again. Maya Angelou actually did Seldom shown as more than a sex object of anguish. Tiny Marguerite (Maya’s birth it. or a mother-type, she has received super­ name) forgets her lines in an Easter Of all genres, autobiography is particu­ ficial and sometimes distorted treatment, program. In her nervousness and embar­ larly suited to the experience of Blacks in even in the canon of Black American rassment, she tries desperately and un­ the diaspora. Beginning with the slave nar­ literature. In the 1970s, women them­ successfully to get to the bathroom in ratives, Black folk have given eyewitness selves took the reins in creating more time, and there is yet another reason to testimony to human history’s most tragic rounded, more realistic portrayals of be spanked by her grandmother and chapter. women in their complexity. ridiculed by her peers. Disillusion and Critic Selwyn Cudjoe, in an article on Cudjoe reiterates that Angelou’s auto­ despair, self-doubt, aloneness in trouble, Angelou’s autobiographies, states, “The biography, in response to inadequate, and a sense of being somehow out of tune practice of the autobiographical state­ surface treatment of Black women in with everybody else — these were the ment, up until the contemporary era, re­ literature, presents “a powerful, authen­ colors of Marguerite’s world. Yet the mains the quintessential literary genre for tic and profound signification of the condi­ incident marks the dawn of awareness. capturing the cadences of the Afro-Amer­ tion of Afro-American womanhood in her The development of this awareness flows ican being, revealing its deepest aspira­ quest for understanding and love rather through all the subsequent autobiogra­ tions and tracing the evolution of the Afro- than from bitterness and despair. Her phies. Growth is not easy; often it is American psyche under the impact of slav­ work is a triumph in the articulation of agonizing. “If growing up is painful for the ery and modern U.S. imperialism.”1 truth in simple, forthright terms. ” Southern Black girl, ” Angelou writes, Black autobiography, as Cudjoe points (Evans, P. 11). “being aware of her displacement is the

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986 rust on the razor that threatens her Christian Leadership Conference. Even­ throat.” (CagedBird, 3). tually she meets and marries Vus Make, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an African freedom-fighter, and moves itself a remarkable statement of what it is Maya has traveled far, not with him to Cairo. The marriage fails; she like to be a Black girl-child in a hate- is unable to be the submissive wife of his ridden land, which, as Cudjoe says, is only in physical distance expectations. She and Guy move to characterized by “the violation of the but also in the spirit. Ghana. Afro-American because he is too helpless Maya has traveled far, not only in to defend himself consistently, and the physical distance but also in the spirit: further degradation of his social being as from a white commune to Cairo, to Ghana the nature of the system worked toward — to independence, to commitment, to his further diminishment.” (Evans, 8). the search for understanding. We are witnesses to the impact of The autobiographies are exciting in a racism, superimposed on the stresses number of areas. They are, first of all, a normally characteristic of growth as Mar- systematic unfolding of the life of one of guerite-now-Maya, grown, reveals the the most talented people of our times. incidents which are, ultimately, cor­ Moreover, they give us glimpses of other nerstones of becoming. Her selfhood is had no idea what I was going to make of personalities — artists, writers, enter­ assailed from within and without. The my life, but I had given a promise and tainers — whose public image we know: too-frequent uprooting and shunting back found my innocence. I swore I’d never Julian Mayfield, John 0. Killens, John and forth between grandmother and lose it again.” (Gather, 181). Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy mother, the traumatic encounters with In Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ — too many to name here. There is a both the white world and the Black, and Merry Like Christmas,4 Maya has a brief particularly moving vignette of the the ultimate outrage — rape at age eight marriage with a man of Greek extraction. doomed Billie Holiday. There are telling by a trusted adult — each occurrence is a She is immersed in the American myth of portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther wound. Yet in the tradition of the sur­ a woman’s goal — a nice man to take care King. Maya moves from the awful days of vivors, Marguerite develops the inner of her. Her lessons are painfully learned. rabid racism through the terrible/wonder- strength apparently inherited by her fore­ Then she embarks on a fantastic journey ful civil rights movement, and she takes mothers, and each wound becomes a — she joins the cast of Porgy and Bess us with her. In this journey through time source of strength and self-knowledge. and tours Europe. She emerges with a she is both unique individual and voice of Each subsequent autobiography con­ deeper self-knowledge, a wider vision of the collective Us. tinues the theme of developing aware­ the world, and a start toward becoming a Although these autobiographies have ness. In Gather Together in My N am e,3 successful artist. the sound of casual storytelling, actually Maya leaves her mother’s house, along The Heart of a Woman 5 begins in they are carefully crafted. Maya Angelou with her young son, determined to prove 1957, in the days of the Civil Rights uses the techniques of fiction. Her her worth. With her way of handling life movement. Maya sees herself and Black characters are vivid. Her relationships with courage and even daring, Maya America in the context of America. She with her family are as ambivalent and becomes a cook, a madame, a dancer, and believes in integration: She and twleve- complex as such relationships always are. a prostitute (to help a perfidious man year-old Guy live for awhile in a commune Her mother Vivian Baxter, her grand­ whom she loves). She has two serious, with white people. When she comes out mothers, her beloved and troubled unhappy love affairs, for which she sheds of the commune, she rents a house in a brother Bailey, her son Guy, and the lonely tears. Her beloved brother Bailey white neighborhood; for awhile she lives various characters whom she meets marries, but his wife dies, and he begins remote from Blacks. along the way are real because she makes his road downward, a road which even­ Later, she moves to New York, where them so and because they resemble tually leads to prison. she meets John 0. Killens and joins the people we have known all our lives. Plot, There are many journeys. The final one Harlem Writers Guild. She becomes the theme, setting — aspects of fiction which is a journey back to her mother’s place. “I Northern Coordinator for the Southern are often part of Active analysis — are

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986 developed to various degrees in the sent him off, but before I could say ward filling in the empty spaces. For us autobiographies. anything, he reached in his pocket and who were robbed of our past, there is a Throughout, Angelou is beautifully pro­ pulled out a knife. You know he’s got great void in the racial psyche, a groping ficient in her exploitation of the imag­ something wrong with the fingers on his for unknown, unremembered things. inative use of language with which Black left hand, so he bent his head over and Maya’s pilgrimage to the ancestral land, people are peculiarly blessed. “I write for was trying to open the knife with his painful and joyful and perplexing as it was, the Black voice and any ear which can teeth. Now, you can see by that, that he’s filled that void for her. And because she hear it, ” she says. “I write because I am a a fool. Instead of moving away from him speaks from a collective as well as a Black woman listening intently to her I just stepped over to the mantel. I put personal experience, we, reading her talking people. ” [Evans, 3, 4] Bladie Mae in my pocket before I went up book, are also rendered whole. Nommo — the Word — is of profound, to the room. When he came up with his Her entry into Ghana is a baptism of even mystic importance to those who knife half open, I slapped him cross the pain. Two years in Cairo trying vainly to emanate from Africa. The Word is magic, face with old Bladie. live up to her husband’s expectation of an performs miracles. Read Hughes’ Simple “He jumped faster than the blood. African wife resulted in a ruined mar­ sketches or Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Screamed, ‘God-dammit, Bibbie, you cut riage, separation, divorce. But those you will hear the Word. Read/listen to the me!’ were years of preparation, a seasoning poets and story-tellers (Sonya Sanchez time for the Ghana experience. Maya “I said, ‘You goddam right, and you says, “We be word sorcerers”). Ride the intends to settle her son Guy in the lucky I don’t shoot you on top of it. ’ bus up Seventh Street in Washington, University of Ghana and then travel alone [Gather, p. 107] D. C. and listen to the talkers, you will to Liberia to work. But on the third day in hear the Word. Stroll through the Punch- A pervasive theme, naturally devel­ Ghana, Guy is seriously injured in an Out cafeteria at Howard University’s oped in all the autobiographies, is the automobile accident, and Maya stays in Blackburn Center and eavesdrop on the strength of the Black woman, her ability Ghana to be near him. students who just flunked your freshman to prevail despite the awful hurting put Many things happened to Maya in English course, and you will hear the upon her by the world, even by her own Ghana, but the book is not a mere most imaginative, complex, metaphorical Black man, who all too often assuages his narration of events. The telling is a language this side of the Harbrace own hurt by further oppressing her. Yet coalescence of the present and the distant Handbook. there is no blatant preaching, no anti-male past, of Africa and the diaspora, of the Hannah Nelson6 knew the value of the rhetoric. There are too many men for personal and the collective, the physical spoken word. “In speaking of great mat­ whom she has profound love — her and the psychic. Questions are answered ters, ” she said, “Your personal experi­ brother Bailey, for example, and her son and other questions raised. ence is considered evidence. With us, Guy. Many of the “brothers” appear in the These were the exciting years of the distant statistics are certainly not as dedications to the works. In any case, the mid-sixties — years of heroes and of important as the actual speech of a sober story is told with humor and compassion. heroism. The world became smaller as person.”7 And if you are a Black woman, you see Black people increasingly looked to Africa Angelou partakes of the same magic yourself coming and going. And you are for identity and sought to reestablish word-making. Throughout the auto­ proud. bonds broken generations past. The sage biographies there sounds the voice of the All God’s Children Need Traveling W. E. B. Du Bois, ninety-five and dying, Black folk, dealing with the is-ness of life. Shoes is the apex toward which the other had led the way by leaving the United The picture is not always pretty, because autobiographies have pointed. Those States entirely and becoming a citizen of life is not always pretty. But the truth is three years in Ghana provided the liberat­ Ghana. Julian Mayfield, a Black American told succinctly and vibrantly. Take, for ing experience which set the direction of writer, actor, and rebel, and his wife Ana example, Vivian Baxter’s description of her subsequent life, freed her to do the Livia were the center of a group of what happened when her boy friend kind of soul-searching necessary for auto­ American Blacks who had moved to Good-Doing found her eating fried biographers, let flow the poetry. Ghana in an effort to find their roots. chicken with a male friend: There is in each of us a longing for They were writers, artists, teachers, “Baby, I swear to you, I don’t know what completion, an instinctual movement to­ plumbers, whatever. They were strang­

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986 ers in a strange land. They had left home Often Maya is discomfited by the to find home. The concept of “home” to thought that Africans participated in the them had taken on new and multi-leveled enslavement of their brothers. The an­ definitions. cestral past and the present moment have Angelou is beautifully pro­ a curious way of blending, and she finds Angelou pinpoints the dilemma of the ficient in her exploitation within her a kernal of resentment toward diasporan Black in the ambivalence of those who stayed, wondering whether these expatriates and in her own ambiva­ of the imaginative use of this one’s or that one’s ancestors had sold lence. The apex of this duality is seen in language with which Black hers into slavery. Part of that resentment their response to the March on Washing­ is envy. After witnessing a beautiful ton in August of 1963. The American people are peculiarly example of African family solidarity, she Blacks, together with a crowd of blessed. ponders: Ghanaians, support the D. C. march with “I.. . admitted to a boundless envy of a demonstration at the American Em­ those who remained on the continent, out bassy in Accra. News of Dr. Du Bois’ of fortune or perfidy. Their countries had boy seems the alter ego of her brother death gives to the event a poignancy and been exploited and their cultures had Bailey, or as some African ritual evokes an aura of renewed commitment. Having been discredited by colonialism. Nonethe­ memories of home. begun their march at midnight (to coin­ less, they could reflect through their Yet as an American Black she retains a cide with the seven a.m. start in Washing­ priests and chiefs on centuries of con­ sense of unease. The years of slavery and ton), the demonstrators jeer when the tinuity. The lowliest could call the name oppression have given the Americans a two American soldiers — one Black— of ancestors who lived centuries earlier. different orientation in vital ways. A raise the flag at dawn. But they are torn The land upon which they lived had been steward in the faculty lounge, for exam­ within themselves. Maya remembers this in their people’s possession beyond re­ ple, reacts differently from Maya when, moment in a moving passage: membered time. Despite political bondage upon overhearing a conversation among “ . . . Many of us had only begun to and economic exploitation, they had re­ arrogant, racist Europeans, she becomes realize in Africa that the Stars and tained an ineradicable innocence. Stripes was our flag and our only flag, enraged, tells them off, threatens to slap the water out of them all, and retreats. “I doubted if I, or any Black from the and that knowledge was almost too pain­ The steward follows her and offers diaspora, could really return to Africa. ful to bear. We could physically return to wisdom. We wore skeletons of old despair like Africa, find jobs, learn languages, even necklaces, heralding our arrival, and we “This is not their place. In time they will marry and remain on African soil all our were branded with cynicism. In America pass. Ghana was here when they came. lives, but we were born in the United we danced, laughed, procreated; we be­ When they go. Ghana will be here. They States and it was the United States which came lawyers, judges, legislators, teach­ are like mice on an elephant’s back. They had rejected, enslaved, exploited, then ers, doctors, and preachers, but as will pass.” [52] denied us. It was the United States which always, under our glorious costumes we held the graves of our grandmothers and Maya responds: carried the badge of a barbarous history grandfathers. . .”[127] “In that second I was wounded. My sewn to our dark skins. ” [76] Increasingly Maya is drawn into Africa, mind struck a truth as an elbow can It is this tension between African-ness to an extent impossible for her during the strike a table edge. A poor, uneducated and American-ness which informs the Cairo years of trying to be a submissive servant in Africa was so secure he could book, and this tension, I believe, is the wife. Wearing African attire and speaking ignore established white rudeness. No basis of our confusion over who we are. in Ghanaian ethnic languages, she is often Black American I had ever known knew As Maya wrestles with her complex mistaken for a native-born African. Con­ that security. Our tenure in the United feelings about Africa, other things are stantly she observes links between Af­ States, though long and very hard- happening to her. Malcolm X visits Accra rican and Afro-American cultures as the earned, was always so shaky, we had and deepens her insights into the Black wisdom of her mother and grandmother developed patience as a defense, but never situation. She has a romance with a bubbles up from the past, or as a young as aggression. ” [52] dashing Muslim. She travels to Germany

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986 to appear in Genet’s The Blacks. She Black people. I love the shades and sings for a President. She meets many slashes of light. Its rumblings and pas­ people and partakes of many events. sages of magical lyricism. I accept the Always the Revolutionist Returnees are The world became smaller glory of stridencies and purrings, trum- her family. petings and sombre sonorities. ” [Evans, One of the most moving themes in the as Black people increas­ 3-4] book is her relationship with her son Guy. ingly looked to Africa for It is clear that Angelou is reaching for The mother-son bond is perhaps the most this use of language. Sometimes she painful of all human relationships. It is identity and sought to achieves it in an obvious fashion, as seldom explored. Especially, it seems to reestablish bonds broken when, in an argument with Julian May- me, is there agony in the separation field, she demands angrily, “How do you process when the mother has reared her generations past. The know my business so well? Was that my son alone. Single Black mothers in partic­ sage W E. B. Du Bois had daddy visiting your mother all those times ular go through hell because they have he left our home?” (11). At other times endured so much and become, by neces­ led the way. her conscious search for clarity and sity, so strong that their sons attain beauty in language appears in quick little manhood not by destroying the father, figures of speech: “I made bitterness into who is already gone, but by destroying whose pathetic death is so engrained in a wad and swallowed i t . . .” (7) or “From the mother. In any case, sons struggling traditional African beliefs. The informal the airplane window sunlight on the Sa­ to be men do not know how much they portrait of Malcolm X is an important hara made the sandscape look like a hurt the one left behind. segment. lumpy butterscotch ocean.” [176] We watch with empathy the crucial Among the people whom Angelou de­ Eventually Maya decides to leave Af­ process of separation of Maya and Guy. In scribes is Julian Mayfield, who left the rica. She needs to leave Guy to continue the other autobiographies we have United States to escape government har­ his entry into manhood. Besides, she has watched his growth, his centrality to her assment and around whom the Revolu­ gotten from Africa all that she can, and life from the time when sixteen-year-old tionist Returnees gather. More than a has given all that she has. It is time to go Marguerite becomes pregnant. We have decade later, Mayfield became writer-in- home. “If the heart of Africa still re­ watched the joy and travail of his rearing; residence at Howard University, where mained elusive, my search for it had we have noted that in all her journeys, he he was my colleague and treasured brought me closer to understanding my­ is her stability. We see the necessity of friend. Because of those years in Ghana, self and other human beings. The ache for separation. And we hear her anguished Mayfield was able to bring to students a home lives in all of us, the safe place cry: special insight, a special sense of Black- where we can go as we are and not be “He’s gone. My lovely little boy is gone self which is, unfortunately, rare and not questioned.” [196] always appropriately valued. Julian May- and will never return. That big confident But she has one more river to cross. field died in the fall of 1984. It is good to strange man has done away with my little She still has not made her peace with Af­ read of him, to see him alive again at a boy, and he has the gall to say he loves rica. high point of his life in Angelou’s account. me. How can he love me? He doesn’t If this book were a novel, I would find In this latest autobiography, Angelou know me, and I sure as hell don’t know the last occurrence unbelievable and con­ continues the tradition of Nommo — the him .” [186] trived. But autobiography is, presumably, Word — as in the previous narratives. The Throughout the book, the Active tech­ truth; and I have seen enough of miracles language is spare, rhythmic, authentic in niques which we observed in the earlier to know that they really do happen. sound. autobiographies render the work effec­ On her last days in Ghana, Maya has a tive. Angelou introduces us to a bevy of “As a composer writes for musical in­ mystic experience which yields a profound characters who assume varying degrees struments and a choreographer creates psychic acceptance of the Africa in her and of roundness. Particularly vibrant are for the body, I search for sound, tempos, the Self in Africa. It is this experience Kojo, the “small boy” of the household, and rhythms to ride through the vocal which restores her, which sets her free. and her laughing hairdresser Comfort, cord over the tongue and out of the lips of A few days before her departure, riding

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986 with friends to eastern Ghana, Maya has a her throat, is now the instrument of her feeling of inexplicable terror when their wholeness. car approaches a bridge. She insists upon Maya Angelou knows — and tells us in a walking across. She learns later that gen­ Angelou introduces us to series of brilliant autobiographies — why erations ago the bridges in that site were the caged bird sings. □ so poorly constructed that they would the bevy of characters crumble under the weight of vehicles, and who assume varying de­ only those on foot were likely to cross Eugenia Collier is an associate professor of Eng­ lish at Howard University. safely. grees of roundness. Still shaken, she enters a marketplace N otes in the little town. She is startled and then 1. “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical gratified to find that she bears a strong Statement,” in Black Women Writers: A Critical physical resemblance to the people there. Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans (New York: And they refuse to believe that she is an Doubleday, 1984), pp. 6-24. This quote is on p. 6. 2. New York: Random House, 1970. American; they insist that she is one of 3. New York: Random House, 1974. them. Her friend tells her the village’s his­ 4. New York: Random House, 1976. tory, how years ago only the children es­ 5. New York: Random House, 1981. 6. One of the informants in John Langston caped being killed or taken into slavery. Gwaltney’s Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black The descendants of those children know ative, because we faced down death by dar­ America (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 6. their terrible history and still mourn. The ing to hope. ” [207] 7. Quoted in Cudjoe’s article, Evans, p. 9. people weep and offer her gifts. And for The empty space is filled for Maya and Maya the empty space in her selfhood is for me, the American Black reader. Be­ filled. cause somewhere in Africa there is a vil­ lage where someone of mine was taken. “The women wept and I wept. I too cried What I could not do, Maya Angelou did for for the lost people, their ancestors and me, and I, too, feel fulfilled. Again the mine. B ut I was also weeping with a curi­ Black autobiographer speaks for her peo­ ous joy. Despite the murders, rapes and ple, and we are all affected. suicides, we had survived. The middle Maya leaves Africa knowing who she is passage and the auction block had not and who we are. erased us. Not humiliations nor lynch- “Many years earlier I, or rather someone ings, individual cruelties nor collective very like me and certainly related to me, oppression had been able to eradicate us had been taken from Africa by force. This from the earth. We had come through de­ second leave-taking would not be so spite our own ignorance and gullibility, onerous, for now I knew my people had and the ignorance and rapacious greed of never completely left Africa. We had sung our assailants. it in our blues, shouted it in our gospel “There was much to cry for, much to and danced the continent in our break­ mourn, but in my heart I felt exalted downs. As we carried it to Philadelphia, knowing there was much to celebrate. A l­ Boston, and Birmingham we had though separated from our languages, our changed its color, modified its rhythms, yet families and customs, we had dared to it was Africa which rode in the bulges of continue to live. We had crossed the un­ our high calves, shook in our protruding knowable oceans in chains and had writ­ behinds and crackled in our wide open ten its mystery in “Deep River, my home is laughter.” [208] over fordan. ” Through the centuries of de­ The awareness which was, in her spair and dislocation, we had been cre- Arkansas girlhood, the rust on the razor at

NEW DIRECTIONS OCT 1986